STACK #149 Mar 2017

STACK

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GAMES

We caught up with Guerrilla Games’ Joel Eschler to chat about everything Horizon Zero Dawn in the lead-up to release. Words Alesha Kolbe

How long has the game been in development for? JOEL ESCHLER: The full development of the game was six years, but back at the beginning it was just a small team, initially around 6-30

Then there was Aloy - she was less of a conscious effort or a focus-tested decision, than that she existed for as

Joel Eschler

long as Horizon existed. Everyone in the studio just kind of latched on to those early visions of her. Internally, everyone’s been really happy, and we’re happy with the response so far.

people during the production. It wasn’t until around after we really finished with Killzone Shadowfall that the whole team really jumped on HZD. Can you tell us what the title means? I definitely can’t. It’s something that you’ll discover when you play the game - if I gave that away now I would have some very angry writers. Was Aloy a female from the beginning? From the very beginning, when the pitches were being made, for Horizon in particular there were these three pillars. One was this kind of natural, lush environment that has taken over the world, and of course the machines.

going on just had really positive things to say about her; she really helped bring Aloy to life. How did the story come to life? There’s two stories in the game, in the sense that our lead writer joined a little bit after the main game started development; there’s the background lore of this world, what happened, who these tribes are, and we built up those backstories so we could build the concept art, to try and

What was it like working with Ash Burch? Unfortunately, I didn’t actually directly work with her. I’ve worked with her in the past on the Borderlands games, and she’s such a pro. She has this great kind of range that she can just deploy willingly. Some of the writers that were in the recording room when the sessions were

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