“There was a push on technology, but it’s also design
work,” continues van der Leeuw. “Yeah, can you make it work, but can you make it fun? Because the game design gets so much more complex. Flight adds a layer of freedom, but you have to confine yourself at some point. I think Horizon Zero Dawn as our first open world game was pretty good. It was confined but it was not small. It was definitely not tiny. With Forbidden West we tried to make a lot of the dreams that people had come true.” Once the ideas for a sequel were in place, was it
important to make sure it still felt a follow up to what came before? “When developing, we do loads and loads of repeating
and tweaking,” says van der Leeuw. “There are so many things that you didn’t see in the final game that we scrapped because it didn’t feel right.” “We go back to the game pillars a lot,” adds Smets.
“The feeling of being a robot hunter is something that we fall back on. We don’t want you to feel like you’re a soldier here. You are a hunter and with that comes very distinct, different behaviours.” With that said, some design aspects to open world
games just make sense, and there’s not really much need to rethink them. “I think initially when we started the first Horizon,
we didn’t really know that much about making open world games,” reveals van Beek. “So we got a lot of designers and engineers in from other companies to talk about their experiences and maybe what they expected from an open world editor, for example. So maybe you automatically get that mix of that industry DNA into these things. Maybe there are sort of idioms within open world design that people have gotten acquainted with, so you’re almost bound to need to copy certain things so that people understand vaguely what they’re looking at.
“I think that the character has a lot of appeal,” says
van Beek. “Aloy feels relevant to a lot of people. They can understand her and relate to her and that in itself is a great thing. I also think the core combat is simply quite good. It’s fun to go out there and just hunt the robots, even if that’s the only thing they do. It’s something that is very enjoyable to keep doing over and over. “I like the world. I think that it’s a very beautiful
world to be in and explore,” adds Smets. “It stands on its own. There isn’t anything like it,
really,” agrees van Beek. “You have Assassin’s Creed and it focuses mainly on recreating historic places. You have Red Dead that has the very particular feel of GTA. It also has a very particular theme. The sort of world that we’re creating, this sort of green apocalypse, really hasn’t really been explored to that extent yet.”
July 2023 MCV/DEVELOP | 21
You do get some influences there regardless.” The Horizon series has without a doubt been a
success story for PlayStation and Guerrilla Games, even though each of the main releases in the series so far has launched near to a critical darling of the open world genre, like Breath of the Wild, or Elden Ring. A lot of games would simply not have made it against those juggernauts, but it’s clear that the series has draws of its own that the leadership behind the game are always keen to celebrate.
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