New Horizon Zero Dawn details: full open world, ‘social’ multiplayer
Even in an E3 press conference that contained some of the biggest fan-favorite announcements of the decade, Guerrilla Games, the studio behind Killzone, still managed to make quite the splash with their new PS4 exclusive game, Horizon Zero Dawn. Putting you in the role of one of the last surviving humans in a world ruled by robot dinosaurs, Horizon is certainly unique.While the initial demo and dev breakdown, which you can find below, showed off a lot, some of the first solid details about the game as a whole have started to come out. Speaking with Gamesrader, studio art director, Jan Bart Van Beek, opened up about some of the systems that make up Horizon. Starting off, the game takes place in a single open world, with no loading screens. "The whole world is explorable. Every mountaintop is accessible, every river you can go through, every valley, and this is basically one of many valleys,” Van Beek said of the demo. As for how players will get around, there’s a “full climbing and traversal system… you can climb up mountains, climb into trees, swim through rivers,” alluding to the fact you can actually run away from enemies instead of fight them.
Even in an E3 press conference that contained some of the biggest fan-favorite announcements of the decade, Guerrilla Games, the studio behind Killzone, still managed to make quite the splash with their new PS4 exclusive game, Horizon Zero Dawn. Putting you in the role of one of the last surviving humans in a world ruled by robot dinosaurs, Horizon is certainly unique.
While the initial demo and dev breakdown, which you can find below, showed off a lot, some of the first solid details about the game as a whole have started to come out. Speaking with Gamesrader, studio art director, Jan Bart Van Beek, opened up about some of the systems that make up Horizon. Starting off, the game takes place in a single open world, with no loading screens. “The whole world is explorable. Every mountaintop is accessible, every river you can go through, every valley, and this is basically one of many valleys,” Van Beek said of the demo. As for how players will get around, there’s a “full climbing and traversal system… you can climb up mountains, climb into trees, swim through rivers,” alluding to the fact you can actually run away from enemies instead of fight them.
Speaking about the larger gameplay, Van Beek explained, Horizon, more than anything, is an RPG. As for what that means, the XP and perk systems are “focused on the more natural progression of harvesting stuff from robots, materials, learning how to craft new weapons, new armor, new weapons types, new ammo types. That’s really where the core of the character progression system is.”
Perks also allow you to specialize in three different types of combat. “There’s one that’s very much focused on stealth, one that’s focused on firepower, one that’s focused on setting traps and hunting. So there are ways where you get to customize your character and tune her more towards your play style, or develop them all to make her more into a Jack of all trades.”
And finally, when asked about any type of multiplayer, Van Beek stated, “The core of the game is a single player experience, but there are certain social features in there.” While clearly ruling out any sort of competitive multiplayer, we will just have to wait and see what sort of social features Guerrilla has in mind.
Until then, what do you think about Horizon Zero Dawn being a customizable RPG with no loading screens? Getting excited yet? Let us know in the comments.