The Guerrilla team focuses on every aspect of the upcoming Horizon Forbidden West, resulting in a more prosperous world and deadlier battles.
It seems that Guerrilla Games is working hard to make Horizon Forbidden West even more exciting than its highly successful predecessor, Horizon Zero Dawn. In this spirit, they have recently unveiled some improvements to Aloy, the adventure protagonist, and even the most critical aspects of the combat system. But all of this is worthless if the player isn’t immersed in the experience, so the developers have detailed what they will be doing to complete the experience.
“Our aim was to show that Aloy is more comfortable traversing her environment – without losing sight of the fact that she’s human, of course, so things don’t always go perfectly for her,” explains Richard Out, the game’s animation director at Guerrilla. But it’s not just the huntress who will see these kinds of improvements; they will also be reflected in the behaviour of enemies, who promise to be deadlier than ever.
According to Guerrilla, each enemy will have unique patterns and specific behaviours to help the user develop their strategy: “First, we wanted to create clarity for players. Each human class or machine is designed around a clear gameplay function, which the animation team communicates to the player through actions, posture, and motion. We rely on readable silhouettes and behaviors that the player can recognize, so you can anticipate or react to an enemy move. We play around with the timing of those movements to not only create windows of opportunities for the player to strike, block, or run, but also to show some personality traits in the animations themselves.”
Ultimately, enemy AI will be a challenge in Horizon Forbidden West, as the AI will be able to choose different paths to escape, and if pursued, will have several new options and abilities. Sinking into the water or hiding in the depths of the forest will no longer help you against the constantly lurking enemies.
As the developers at Guerrilla have explained, machines won’t be the only threat in the Forbidden West, as we’ll also have to contend with humans, new tribes who will fight our hunter in different ways. With this in mind, we will need to pay attention to patterns and learn the techniques of each civilisation and the risks posed by each human character class to avoid getting lost in the adventure.
Finally, Guerrilla wants to make Horizon Forbidden West a complete experience by significantly improving the game’s soundscape. Enemies will have a more expansive repertoire of sounds, movements will seem more realistic than ever, and you’ll even encounter objects that make gurgling and squeaking sounds that are really hard to imitate in real life.
In short, Forbidden West will be Aloy’s biggest challenge yet, and one that we, as players of the franchise, will experience. The rich world of the new Horizon game will be revealed on 18 February 2022, exclusively on PlayStation consoles for now.
Source: PlayStation.blog
