Horizon: Zero Dawn is such a shock coming from Guerrilla Games- here is a studio that until now, has only worked on linear first person shooters, and now, it’s put out an open world action RPG. And not just that- by all indications, it has hit a home run on its first try, and genuinely and meaningfully managed to contribute to the genre and advance it.
How did this actually happen? How did Guerrilla approach the marketing for this game? Speaking to VG247, Senior Producer Joel Eschler discussed how this game was Guerrilla’s attempt to demonstrate that it could do open worlds just as well as anybody else.
“It was pretty huge but at the same time the programmers and engineers – they signed up to do this,” he said. “They got really excited to do it themselves, to challenge themselves. They saw what other companies were doing with open world games. Any open world games from the last ten years. Assassin’s Creed. Far Cry. Watch Dogs. All these ones that have these seamless open worlds. Grand Theft Auto…. I think they wanted to say, you guys have done it, and we can do it as well. And we can do it better.”
And to a very large degree, it appears that Guerrilla have achieved and accomplished just that with Horizon. Horizon: Zero Dawn launches tomorrow on PlayStation 4.