As a new intellectual property and budding franchise-starter, Horizon Zero Dawn isn’t short of potential, and is perhaps the textbook example of a creative risk in the video game space.
Hailing from Guerrilla Games, this is the developer that has forged a legacy for intense corridor shooters via the Killzone franchise. But following the release of Shadow Fall on PS4, Guerrilla is changing gears rather dramatically to foster a post-post-apocalypse, and that’s a change of direction that Managing Director Hermen Hulst touched on while chatting to Game Informer.
“We’re known for our first-person shooters series, Killzone. Storytelling in an open world in an RPG is not something that we hadn’t done before. But I think all of us, we really welcome it as a wonderful opportunity to create something that’s so fresh, so new–it’s a wonderful challenge for us.”
Hulst’s comments come hand-in-hand with an all-new featurette for Horizon Zero Dawn, one which places an emphasis on lush, dynamic open world. Whereas previous snippets have chronicled the rise of those sky-scraping machines, Art Director Jan-Bart Van Beek outlines some of the RPG’s “eco-topes,” specific areas peppered across Horizon‘s world that range from jungles, forests, snow-covered mountains, deserts, and ruins. Each present their own challenges for Aloy, the game’s protagonist, as she searches to uncover the mystery behind Earth’s new apex predators.
Horizon Zero Dawn launches exclusively for PlayStation 4 on February 28, 2017.
