It’s always a challenge to make something new, especially when you’re used to making a certain kind of thing. Video game development is full of decisions like this. Do you stick to what you know and hope people still want to play it? Or, do you strike out and try and make something special? For the team at Guerrilla Games, they were famous for their Killzone series, but when they decided to go big in another direction, they admitted they were scared, but that fear led to Horizon Zero Dawn.
In an interview with Edge Magazine, the team talked about the fears they had while making the game:
“We were pretty scared,” technical director Michiel van der Leeuw admitted, “but it was even more scary to do a generation switch and a genre switch at the same time.”
It was more than just the technical side of things that had them worried. From a gameplay and world standpoint, Horizon Zero Dawn was much grander and more open than anything Killzone had done before.
“Open world streaming was much more challenging than the linear things we were used to, even though we experimented with non-linearity in Shadow Fall. We had no idea how to script an open world. In non linear worlds, you can pick up a quest and wander off and do something else, and we had no idea how the scripting would deal with the complexities of the logic that required.”
Despite their fear, the Guerrilla Games team killed it, and Horizon Zero Dawn became one of the biggest hits of 2017, even earning a lot of gaming awards for its visual and technical aspects. What’s more, it’s actually the second-best-selling game on the PS4, not bad for a new IP that the developer wasn’t sure was going to work.
