Why did Guerrilla’s roughly one-year-old game leave this function behind?

Mathijs De Jonge, who was the director of Horizon: Zero Dawn, was interviewed by NoClip, a YouTuber, but WCCFTech caught the most impressive part of this roughly fifty-minute interview: the game had co-op, but it got cut.

„There have been early concepts. At the beginning we were thinking about two players in co-op, our very early prototype was with two players. We had the game running back then in co-op, and that was quite nice to see. But we haven’t got that [in the final version] because the programmers said that if we wanted to have co-op, we would also have 50% of the features we had been asking for and not 100%. With Horizon: Zero Dawn being the first game [in the franchise], we wanted 100%, so we dropped co-op in favor of that. The NPCs fighting along… that is very complicated to get that right, and we didn’t want to go there for this game because it’s so much work to do that well,” De Jonge said.

He also revealed that in the early parts of the development, the game’s map was fifty (yes, 50!) times bigger than in the final version, but the art team believed that they wouldn’t be capable of filling it up with enough content. He added that Sony was gratuitous with the development time, which helped them nail the combat system. The game’s biggest portion took roughly two years to be completed, as the entire Guerrilla dev team began development in late 2014, shortly after a smaller group finalized the game’s combat system.

And yes, De Jonge said „first game.” There will be a sequel then. Will it be announced at E3?

Source: WCCFTech