Guerrilla Game's Horizon Zero Dawn is a hot topic when it comes to discussing the best open-world games of all time. Considering this, it's crazy to think that the developer behind the game had no prior experience with open-world games at all. Yet, their very first outing to the genre ended up becoming one of the most well-loved games that the industry has seen to date.
The development behind the title was interesting, to say the least. A team with a lot of passion, striving to fulfill an ambition that seemed unreachable at the time, is bound to have more than a few good stories regarding their journey.
10 The Transition From Killzone To Horizon
Prior to the creation of Horizon Zero Dawn, Guerrilla Games, the studio behind the game, was known for a completely different franchise: Killzone. Killzone and Horizon couldn't be further from one another. One is a first-person shooter with a linear narrative, while the other is a third-person open-world adventure game.
The studio specifically wanted to expand their horizon, so to speak. They wanted to work on something they were completely unfamiliar with and something very different from their previous title. They wanted to do it right. Horizon Zero Dawn was the result of this vision.
9 Coming Up With A New IP
On the studio's quest to create something new, they had their team send in their own pitches as to what they believe the new game should be like. By the end, the studio had about 40 different ideas, all of them unique. Interestingly, though the studio was known for FPS games, they only had about one or two pitches that involved an FPS title.
The studio had a plethora of ideas they could have worked with. One of these ideas was about a young woman with a robot companion. This idea ended up being Horizon Zero Dawn.
8 The Riskiest Pitch
The idea to create something like Horizon Zero Dawn initially came from the studio's art director Jan-Bart Van Beek. A lot of the aspects the game ended up actualizing were already present on this pitch. Van Beek thought of creating an open-world game set in the distant future, featuring a young girl who's curious about her personal (and the overall world's) past. The studio already had an idea as to what the world would seem like. The environmental setting, the machines, and the tribes — the only thing they didn't know yet was how the world came to be as it is.
The studio considered this pitch to be the "riskiest" one, but they ended up going for it because it was an open-world title with a lot of cool elements.
7 The Studio Planned On Pitching A Different Idea To Sony
Just as the studio was about to finally create what would become Horizon Zero Dawn, a different studio went on to publish a game that was very similar to what Guerrilla Games had in mind. This game was Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. This prompted the studio to table their Horizon idea temporarily, and they opted for a much "safer" game to create.
The other game the studio was considering was a little closer to Killzone, which means making it would have been much easier. It was still going to be an open-world title, this time set in an alternate timeline where recognizable figures from history would be pitted against monsters in a very cyberpunk-like world. This idea seemed really cool too, and they almost pitched it to Sony. Almost. Ultimately, they turned back and went with Horizon instead.
6 Shadowfall and Horizon Zero Dawn
When Guerrilla Games started working on Horizon Zero Dawn, they were also in the process of making a different title: Killzone Shadow Fall. The development for both games ran in parallel with one another, with most of the studio's staff working on Shadow Fall, and a small number of people working on Horizon.
5 The Scrapped Ideas
During the process of Horizon Zero Dawn's creation, the team had a form of brainstorming process where tons of ideas, mechanics, and story beats would be passed around. This process is something they call the "ideation process" and this is where a lot of things Horizon ended up being can be traced from. Naturally, a lot of things that came up during this process were also trashed instead.
One idea Guerrilla Games played around with was making Horizon a co-op game, which they ended up scrapping. Another idea that got floating around was to have a sort of courier system where Aloy could call on assistance whenever heavier scraps needed to be looted, but this proved too massive an undertaking to incorporate into an already massive undertaking of a game.
4 How The Machines Were Created
The very first machine the team was able to make, amazingly, is one of their most massive ones. The team wanted to create a hybrid between a robot and a dinosaur. At first, when this idea was pitched, many of them believed that this would be a ludicrous idea and that it was never going to work until a concept art for it was made. This ended up being the Thunderjaw, one of the most impressively designed enemies in the game, and one of the most compelling to battle.
The team wanted the machines to not only be cool-looking but also make sense to the overall story. This is why each of the machines players find in the game has a story that makes it sensible for them to be in that world.
3 Expanding The Team
Guerrilla Games were pretty aware and accepting of the fact that creating something like Horizon Zero Dawn was something too big for them to handle. They knew they were going to fail if they were going to do this game by themselves. This is why they hired key people who had expertise in massive open-world games just to bear this idea to fruition.
Their first hire was John Gonzalez. John was the lead writer for Fallout: New Vegas, which means he already had an experience making a massive and lore-extensive open-world game that's set in a post-apocalyptic world. He was hired to be the game's narrative director. The studio's second hire was David Ford, who formerly worked on games such as EverQuest, Elder Scrolls, and DC Universe Online. He was hired to be the game's quest and world design director.
2 A Female Protagonist
Despite undergoing a lot of changes, bringing in new people who then brought new ideas, and scrapping old ideas, one of the key things that pretty much remained intact from the beginning to end was the idea of a young, female protagonist. Aloy has always been there since the beginning, and even her character design remained very similar, save for a couple of minor changes.
When the studio proposed the idea of having a female protagonist at the forefront of this game to Sony, the company was initially skeptical of the idea. To ease their minds on the matter, Guerrilla and Sony did a couple of focus testing to gather the public's opinion of female leads. As it turns out, fans could not care less about this aspect, so long as the protagonist is written well, which Aloy thankfully is.
1 The Music and Sound Design
The sound design of the game, especially the sounds of the machines, were done with high consideration. The studio wanted the players to know which machine they were going to face even before they laid their eyes on it by making their sound unique. What they did was incorporate a machine to an animal and create sound designs that will make that machine replicate how a certain animal would sound like—if they were made of steel.
The game's soundtrack is attributed to a few artists. One of them is Joris de Man. Joris already had a history working with the studio prior to Horizon, having composed tracks for Killzone 1, 2, and 3. For this game, he worked alongside The Flight, Niels van der Leest, and Jonathan William.