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GAMES
think about the machines and their sort of
relationship with the world. There’s that
whole background, which then allows us
to build Aloy’s story into it. You start off
playing Aloy as a child, you discover she is
an outcast from her tribe, and pretty early
on you discover why that is. Early sections
of the game is her trying to work out why
she’s an outcast and what the politics of
the tribe are, and her trying to prove that
she isn’t an outcast, that she’s worthy to
explore. In the beginning, it’s really about
Aloy trying to discover and work out who
she is, and then once the game opens
up a little and you get to explore this big
open world. There’s a kind of parallel of
Aloy discovering her capabilities and what
she can do in the world, while there’s the
player discovering what they can do and
how they fit onto the world, and I think we
did a really good job at creating the same
sense of discovery of story that the player
will have alongside Aloy.
What are some of the biggest
challenges in creating a new IP?
Internally the first big challenge is
getting buy in from the team; for a
game in development for so long, it’s
risky for a studio to take on a new IP,
and to take on something so much
bigger than the first IP. The first step
was kind of convincing everyone in
the studio that it’s worth spending
the next six years of your life on this.
It was pretty easy with the original
vision of Aloy, the machines, and the
world. Everyone was really excited to
take on the world, some of the first
challenges were the technological ones,
so one was going from a linear world to
an open world meaning we had to expand
the engine capabilities. There was a really
big drive to show nature taking over the
world 1000 years in the future - rendering
organic models like trees and foliage and
everything is a lot more difficult than
buildings and things like that. We had
to come up with technology that could
procedurally generate stuff like that, we
came up with some really clever ways like
climates where it would intelligently look
at stuff like what would the climate of the
world be like/what would the height be
like/what kind of animals would live here/
what kind of plants would grow here/what
would the water flow be like? All those
kinds of things were taken into account,
and that allowed us to build a game that
was huge without having to have actual
hands touching every corner of the map.
The third one was for programmers -
we had to hire a whole new team of
writers to build this open world and to
make it interesting, and we had a whole
new questing system; with first person
shooters or more linear games you can
predict where the player will go and you
know that when a player goes around this
corner there’s got to be this explosion, but
with Horizon, players can go everywhere,
you can do anything, you can decide to go
down this particular skill tree with Aloy,
we really had to try to think outside of the
box, we had to make sure no matter which
path they chose to go down with Aloy that
it was fun and that the robots interact with
the right things in the right locations. Even
with all those kinds of new challenges, the
team really knuckled down.
What were the other ideas that were
pitched alongside HZD?
There were a whole bunch of different
ideas. A lot of the team had been working
on fairly similar style games; the Killzone
games were fairly similar, and a lot of
people were looking to branch out and
try something different. We wanted to
challenge ourselves - HZD was the most
difficult pitch, but it was the one that
resonated most. There was this fascination
with a lot of members of the team and a
lot of people in general I guess at the time
with the whole ‘what if?’ scenario; what
if there was this apocalypse, at a base
level everyone is really excited about
thinking about what would happen if
this happens, the artists wanted to
create a beautiful world that was kind
of broken. It was cool of Sony to sign
up to us choosing the most difficult
pitch that we could come up with.
Was there any one game that you
drew inspiration from or a collection
of stuff?
There was definitely a common
thread throughout development - a lot
of people grew up loving RPGs, and
they all had a real desire to build RPGs.
There’s inspiration going through from
Super Nintendo games all the way up
until games that have been released in
the last few years. In particular in the last
five years there have been a lot of games
with crafting and scavenging; we play
every single game and see what people
are playing, how we can incorporate stuff
and improve stuff, it’s hard to pick one in
particular.
Do you have big plans for the future?
Internally, a lot of people are taking time
off now that it’s gone gold, and working on
patches. A lot of effort went into the world
building and the concept art for Horizon
that didn’t even make it into the game,
especially for the tribes and stories that
just didn’t make sense once we put the
game together and we didn’t really know
how to put it into the game. We really
hope this resonates with people because
I think there are a lot of stories we can tell
within this world. Everyone’s really excited
to keep exploring with this world, but I
think that everyone is just waiting to see
how these next few months go.
In the beginning it's
really about Aloy trying
to discover who she is
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