technically a little bit less. We wanted to show that you can make a game that’s open world which delivers the same sort of quality level and technical expertise as what you would expect from a shooter game. We got pretty close.”
GAMES ARE ABANDONED When creating a sequel to a big open world action adventure game like Horizon Zero Dawn, deciding what needs to be improved and what should mostly be left alone is difficult. Does it come down to examining feedback, implementing ideas that didn’t make it to the finish line last time, and then throwing in some extra cool ideas for good measure? “We really wanted to go forward in terms of the
throw anything away, from the Killzone engine to the Killzone Shadow Fall engine, everything was evolved,” explains van der Leeuw. ”At some point we rebranded it Decima. We wanted to have a cool name when Hideo Kojima was announcing that he was using our engine for Death Stranding. When we went on to Horizon Forbidden West, we had this idea that to make something so ambitious, we needed to really invest in tools and technology and workflow much more because for this amount of content, if we want to be on par, or better than the rest, we need to make sure that we’re the best of the best. “We also just didn’t want to look like a game that
everyone could make. We wanted to make something where we were not limited by the technology that everybody else had. Also by the way we work, we’ve managed to attract so many people who are really inventive, and who can make new stuff that is as good as or better than something else. So it only made sense to just go ahead and make something of equal quality or better.” “I think the beauty of having our own engine in this
case is also that it really allows us to invest exactly in those elements that we want to make important for our next game,” says Smets. “When we released Horizon Zero Dawn, a lot of
people looked at open world games and said ‘Oh, it doesn’t look pretty’,” continues van der Leeuw. “That’s because it’s an open world game. Players had an expectation that open world games would not look as good, or did not have a good framerate, or did not have the technical expertise of first person shooter games, and they were often sort of forgiving the fact that it was
20 | MCV/DEVELOP December 2022
experience from Zero Dawn. We were never really that charmed by how our conversations worked,” says van Beek. “They were very sort of generated and stilted. That was one area where we wanted to bring in a lot more drama and personality. We felt like we could do better storytelling if we improved that. Another aspect of the first game where we took it and made it much bigger was mounts. We took things into the sea as well as into the air just to get a broader range of gameplay features in there.” “At some point you run out of time when you make
a game. Games are never finished. They’re abandoned,” adds van der Leeuw. “Everybody always has more wishes and more dreams. We look at the intersection of our own dreams and at the audience’s response and then put stuff into the mix, including some cool things that you would never ask for.” “… and sometimes you just need another game to
make it work. The flying, for instance, was in very early prototypes of Horizon Zero Dawn. We experimented with flying but it was just too much. It was too much, too soon,” explains Smets.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
