Releasing in 2016 on PlayStation 4, and hopefully getting more details at Paris Games Week or PlayStation Experience, Horizon Zero Dawn from Guerrilla Games is expected to have an “incredibly rich story,” according to Senior Producer Mark Norris.
Keeping specific details under wraps, Norris was asked by Dualshockers about the story. The way he sees it, open-world games fall into one of two camps: Narrative-driven and character-driven titles like The Witcher 3 where there’s a strong central character, and games like Fallout 3 or Skyrim where the “the story is really the story of the world, and it’s less the story of this main character.”
With Horizon Zero Dawn, you’ll see both:
The main story revolves around Aloy. She’s one of the reasons why we’re a single-player only game. We want to tell the story of Aloy. But we also want to tell the story of the machines, the story of the world, the story of these tribes, and you’ll get those inside of quests, in open world activities, collectibles and other things.
He later added, “So we need to strike a balance, between telling a story that is rich, immersive and very deep, with a story that does have a level of accessibility, but I think we’re gonna find that point. I think right now we’re balancing it.”
Again shying away from specifics, Norris says open world games of a certain size “I think demands a mount, right?” When it comes to Horizon, “We’re not ready to talk about the different ways that Aloy moves around the world, but what I can guarantee is, it’s not just walking and running. Certainly, she gets around the world in a couple of different ways.”
Briefly touching on the machines, the Thunderjaw is 24 meters long by 10 meters high, but isn’t the biggest. In fact, “There are two or three machines that are even larger than the Thunderjaw.”
With more than 150 people working on it right now, most of whom transitioned over from Killzone Shadow Fall in late 2013/early 2014, Horizon “is ultimately a game about exploration.”
[Source: Dualshockers]
