How Horizon: Zero Dawn Blends Old and New
Members of the press recently spent extended time with a near final build of Horizon: Zero Dawn and they’ve confirmed that while Horizon represents a curious combination of existing ideas, it brings them together in a way that’s totally unique.
Horizon’s Curious Combinations
Horizon: Zero Dawn can be compared to many other popular games:
The traversal is reminiscent of the stellar traversal systems in Uncharted.
The Bandit Camps in Horizon, replace Far Cry’s Outposts in name only.
Stalking massive mechanical beasts using bows, spears, traps and gadgets can feel much like Capcom’s hit franchise Monster Hunter.
Using Aloy’s Focus ability to scan surroundings in order to plan attacks evokes thoughts of Batman’s Detective vision meets Geralt’s Witcher Sense.
The Tallnecks, massively tall, slow roaming creatures in the game, function similar to “Ubisoft towers.” Those are towers within popular Ubisoft games like, Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, that once climbed, remove fog of war from the player’s map - revealing new gameplay opportunities.
Comparisons to some of the best games of the past few years is not a bad thing. Especially when these elements have been proven effective within their respective games, and have been iterated on to fit within Horizon’s bold new world.
A Unique Voice
Greg Miller with Kinda Funny Games, after spending time with Horizon: Zero Dawn at Guerilla’s L.A. media event, said:
“Horizon: Zero Dawn is fucking awesome. Totally awesome. What spoke to me about it was the fact that it is so many of my favorite kind of games combined. You see Uncharted, this is an RPG like the Witcher. I feel like it has The Last of Us influences. There is sci-fi to it, it’s also Fallout…”
This shouldn’t be surprising, considering Guerilla Games recruited talent from Bethesda and CD Projekt Red to help develop Horizon’s open-world structure, quest design and narrative.
Polygon mentions how “Guerrilla seems to have nailed the type of gameplay that will draw in fans of Far Cry, The Witcher, The Elder Scrolls and Watch Dogs on its first stab at the genre.” They go on to mention, in their Quality Control podcast, the similarities between Horizon and open world action games like GTA, Red Dead Redemption. In Guerrilla’s first attempt at open-world action RPG’s, they’ve found themselves among the ranks of games who’ve stood atop the genre.
Eurogamer reveals that "on paper there's nothing hugely new here; fragments of games like Mass Effect, the rebooted Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed, The Witcher 3 and Far Cry Primal spring to mind. But Horizon does seem to deliver them in a voice that is uniquely its own."
A Mental Kaleidoscope
Since its initial creative pitch in 2010 Horizon: Zero Dawn’s core has remained intact: a strong female lead, a lush post-post apocalyptic world and a dominant machine lifeform. Since then, the team at Guerilla has borrowed elements from proven open-world, action, adventure and rpg games and combined them to create something fresh.
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” - Mark Twain
Horizon: Zero Dawn has placed all these pieces into a mental kaleidoscope, and created an experience that has the potential to crack my top 10 favorite games of all time. Based on what I’ve seen, heard and played at E3 2016, it also has the potential to rank among the most compelling new IP of this generation (alongside Sunset Overdrive and Titanfall).
Look for Horizon on PS4 February 28th.
