STACK NZ Mar #82

GAMES

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think about the machines and their sort of relationship with the world. There’s that whole background, which then allows us to build Aloy’s story into it. You start off playing Aloy as a child, you discover she is an outcast from her tribe, and pretty early on you discover why that is. Early sections of the game is her trying to work out why she’s an outcast and what the politics of the tribe are, and her trying to prove that she isn’t an outcast, that she’s worthy to explore. In the beginning, it’s really about Aloy trying to discover and work out who she is, and then once the game opens up a little and you get to explore this big open world. There’s a kind of parallel of Aloy discovering her capabilities and what she can do in the world, while there’s the player discovering what they can do and how they fit onto the world, and I think we did a really good job at creating the same sense of discovery of story that the player will have alongside Aloy. What are some of the biggest challenges in creating a new IP? Internally the first big challenge is getting buy in from the team; for a game in development for so long, it’s risky for a studio to take on a new IP, and to take on something so much bigger than the first IP. The first step was kind of convincing everyone in the studio that it’s worth spending the next six years of your life on this. It was pretty easy with the original vision of Aloy, the machines, and the world. Everyone was really excited to take on the world, some of the first challenges were the technological ones, so one was going from a linear world to an open world meaning we had to expand the engine capabilities. There was a really big drive to show nature taking over the world 1000 years in the future - rendering organic models like trees and foliage and everything is a lot more difficult than buildings and things like that. We had to come up with technology that could procedurally generate stuff like that, we came up with some really clever ways like climates where it would intelligently look at stuff like what would the climate of the world be like/what would the height be like/what kind of animals would live here/ what kind of plants would grow here/what would the water flow be like? All those kinds of things were taken into account, and that allowed us to build a game that was huge without having to have actual hands touching every corner of the map. The third one was for programmers - we had to hire a whole new team of writers to build this open world and to make it interesting, and we had a whole new questing system; with first person

shooters or more linear games you can predict where the player will go and you know that when a player goes around this corner there’s got to be this explosion, but with Horizon, players can go everywhere, you can do anything, you can decide to go

difficult pitch, but it was the one that resonated most. There was this fascination with a lot of members of the team and a lot of people in general I guess at the time with the whole ‘what if?’ scenario; what if there was this apocalypse, at a base level everyone is really excited about thinking about what would happen if this happens, the artists wanted to create a beautiful world that was kind of broken. It was cool of Sony to sign up to us choosing the most difficult pitch that we could come up with. Was there any one game that you drew inspiration from or a collection of stuff? There was definitely a common thread throughout development - a lot of people grew up loving RPGs, and they all had a real desire to build RPGs. There’s inspiration going through from Super Nintendo games all the way up until games that have been released in the last few years. In particular in the last five years there have been a lot of games with crafting and scavenging; we play every single game and see what people are playing, how we can incorporate stuff and improve stuff, it’s hard to pick one in particular. Do you have big plans for the future? Internally, a lot of people are taking time off now that it’s gone gold, and working on patches. A lot of effort went into the world building and the concept art for Horizon that didn’t even make it into the game, especially for the tribes and stories that just didn’t make sense once we put the game together and we didn’t really know how to put it into the game. We really hope this resonates with people because I think there are a lot of stories we can tell within this world. Everyone’s really excited to keep exploring with this world, but I think that everyone is just waiting to see how these next few months go.

In the beginning it's really about Aloy trying to discover who she is

down this particular skill tree with Aloy, we really had to try to think outside of the box, we had to make sure no matter which path they chose to go down with Aloy that it was fun and that the robots interact with the right things in the right locations. Even with all those kinds of new challenges, the team really knuckled down. What were the other ideas that were pitched alongside HZD? There were a whole bunch of different ideas. A lot of the team had been working on fairly similar style games; the Killzone games were fairly similar, and a lot of people were looking to branch out and try something different. We wanted to challenge ourselves - HZD was the most

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