The recent gameplay reveal for Horizon Forbidden West says a lot about Guerrilla Games' approach to Horizon Zero Dawn's sequel. Everyone expected the game to play similarly to its predecessor, of course, but it looks like Guerrilla has found a ton of great ways to expand on the combat while still preserving the general sense of the original game. Aloy has new weapon types that she can collect and some great gadgets that enhance her mobility and fighting skills. Pairing that with a wealth of new machines exclusive to the Forbidden West means that combat will probably feel totally new in Horizon Forbidden West.
There's one more facet of combat that Guerrilla Games may have changed for the better. Horizon Zero Dawn fans are well aware of Aloy's ability to tear off a machine's armor piece by piece, making it far more vulnerable. It looks like Guerrilla might be applying that idea to humans in Horizon Forbidden West. Lots of fans of Horizon Zero Dawn agreed that fighting other humans was the most lackluster part of the game, and so they hoped Guerrilla would make changes to human combat in the sequel. Guerrilla has apparently listened to that feedback, and the path its taking to solving that problem opens the door for even more improvements that it might not have revealed yet.
Suiting Up Horizon Forbidden West's Humans
Combat with humans in Horizon Zero Dawn was pretty straightforward: headshots and sneak attacks were the name of the game. Even though there was a fairly broad range of enemy types with different weapons, their one big weak spot was always the same. Even in the case of armored humans, it was really just a matter of pelting them with arrows until they went down. The fairly repetitive human combat was a start contrast to the machine combat, which featured very diverse enemies that asked Aloy to adapt to every situation. Horizon Zero Dawn's combat was good overall, but there was clearly room for improvement.
That's where Horizon Forbidden West comes in. Aloy's fight sequence with the humans in the Horizon Forbidden West gameplay reveal is brief, but enlightening too. While Aloy fights these raiders, she strikes their armor several times, and they flash very similarly to how machine armor parts flash when she's damaging them. The suggestion, then, is that Horizon Forbidden West's human combat won't focus on either exposed humans or fully armored humans. Instead, human armor will be dynamic like machine armor.
This is a huge potential improvement over Horizon Zero Dawn's combat. While stealth kills are still an option, Aloy now has more options when fighting enemies face-to-face as well. She can either opt for the more difficult option of chipping away armor to expose weak spots, or she can stick to hitting whatever skin is exposed on an enemy to take them down. There's no doubt that special armor types will appear on enemies throughout the game if Guerrilla Games is focusing on this aspect, too. There might be equipment similar to Blaze canisters that Aloy is encouraged to shoot off to debilitate or disadvantage her opponents.
Horizon Forbidden West's Advanced Combat
Giving Aloy the option to tear armor off humans has much bigger implications about Guerrilla Games' approach to human combat than it seems to. It suggests a new philosophy that the studio could be taking in terms of developing human combat. This new vulnerable combat makes fighting humans in Horizon Forbidden West much more like fighting machines. Since the machine combat is already great, it'd make sense to try to make fighting humans as much like fighting small, fast machines as possible. If Guerrilla is looking at Horizon's machines to inspire humans, then it means there might be many more great combat improvements in store.
For instance, one possibility is that Aloy will be facing a way more diverse roster of human enemies than before. In the Forbidden West, her enemies could be more technologically advanced, wielding weapons cobbled from machines that deal wide-ranging damage types and ask her to respond in much more creative ways than in Horizon Zero Dawn. The more tactically human enemies ask players to think, the more rewarding it'll be to fight them and overcome droves of bandits and marauders.
Another big potential improvement in Horizon Forbidden West's combat is the possibility of new weapon types that are particularly useful against humans. The gameplay reveal very briefly teased new attacks and weapons that Aloy can use in Horizon Forbidden West, and it's possible that some of these weapons will be specifically designed to fight other humans. In Horizon Zero Dawn, there wasn't much point in using elemental damage types aside from fire against humans, but maybe the sequel will ramp up the usefulness of the elements thanks to increasingly specialized humans. Aloy could get a lot more use out of her whole arsenal that way.
Horizon Forbidden West Has More Potential
The bottom line of Horizon Forbidden West's gameplay reveal is that the game promises to be full of surprises. There's lots of new aspects to the combat that fans didn't have much reason to expect before. Aloy has a grappling hook and smoke bombs now, it seems, plus she has to contend with more destructible terrain than ever before when fighting more formidable machines. Guerrilla Games seems determined to make Horizon Forbidden West much more than a sequel, and a fresher experience than fans thought to expect.
Flashy new additions like the grappling hook at great, and there's probably more around the corner, but they wouldn't shine as bright if Horizon Forbidden West didn't improve on the areas where Horizon Zero Dawn fell a little flat. In fact, going without polishing Zero Dawn's flaws would make Forbidden West's additions feel like an apology more than anything. That's why it's great to see that Guerrilla Games is seemingly paying attention to where it can improve the game, and not just thinking about what it can add that's totally new. Now that fans have had a taste, there's plenty of enthusiasm to hear more about Horizon Forbidden West soon, so hopefully summer will be peppered with more announcements.
Horizon Forbidden West will release in 2021 for PS4 and PS5.