Horizon: Zero Dawn – „Next-gen Jurassic Park”

Previews 10/27/2015

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PREVIEW – The brand new and original IP of Guerrilla Games is set to be released next year, and its title is Horizon: Zero Dawn. The team that is mostly responsible for the Killzone series a (a linear Scifi FPS series), decided to take a bit of rest from the space Nazis, and create an open world RPG. Whether this is a good or bad move, still remains to be seen, but based on what we saw from E3, Guerrilla is on the right track for another triple AAA title.

Guerilla Games besides Shellshock Nam ’67 and Killzone has produced nothing else but pure FPS games since 2004. It is no wonder that they decided to try something drastically new. After releasing Killzone 3 about forty concepts were developed for a brand new IP. Out of these forty Horizon: Zero Dawn became the winner. The project had a small team at first, however once Killzone Shadow Fall was released back in 2013, the entire company has moved on to the project.

New World

The story is a bit foggy, although no wonder since not much was revealed probably to avoid spoilers. Currently all we know that human civilization has collapsed a thousand years ago, the once great cities are now covered with plant life, and decay. Also Humanity is no longer considered the apex predator, instead this role has been taken over by a weird race of Cyborg animals. A lot of questions were raised: Why did Humanity fall? How were some able to survive? Where did the cyborg animals come from?

“The big cities fell, and new life took over”

The story is told from the perspective of a young hunter girl, Aloy. Our heroine has been exiled from her tribe due to unknown reasons, and she must fight alone against the giant robots to survive. The creatures will have different types, threatening and non-threatening. The non-threatening ones include such robots as the deers, or similar animals. The threatening ones include such robots as a giant T-rex, or the Watcher which when sees us raises the alarm immediately and summons a lot of enemies against us.

Safety without a weapon?

You can forget that! Of course we will not be running around without weapons. Our weapons are a mix of old medieval weaponry, and high tech gadgets. Our basic arsenal will be the bow and arrow, to which we can add different arrows that are exploding, emp or armor piercing. We will also have a spear, and an item that binds together anything with a wire. There will be also moments where we can use the enemies’ guns against them, and do massive damage against them. However we cannot go around and shoot at everything like a cowboy.

As for a swift victory we will need precise aiming, proper weapon selection, and great tactics, as most of our enemies will have heavy armor, which we will have to destroy methodically. If we survive the encounter then comes the second part of the gameplay, which is searching for equipment, and parts so that later we can craft weapons and maybe even sell/buy new ones in the game.

I think Killzone was a great game in its day, when the concept was fresh, but it is high time for some new blood, and to put away the FPS titles. Let’s wait for more information, and hopefully by 2016 we will get the final version.

– Dazo911 –