Horizon: Zero Dawn's Building the World Trailer
By Kyle Sledge 25 February 2017
Developer Guerrilla Games releases a brand new trailer for Horizon: Zero Dawn, which offers details regarding the studio’s process behind building the game’s world.
Now that the release date for Horizon: Zero Dawn is less than a week away, fans of the PlayStation 4 exclusive are undoubtedly counting down the remaining hours, minutes, and seconds until Guerrilla Games’ action-RPG makes its way onto store shelves next Tuesday. Of course, since fans still have to wait for Horizon: Zero Dawn‘s impending launch, the studio behind the project has decided to put out a new trailer that offers up details about how the game’s developers built the environments and settings for its full and sprawling open world map.
As seen below in the video courtesy of PlayStation’s official YouTube Channel, Horizon: Zero Dawn fans are given brief, albeit concise idea behind the creation of the game’s naturalistic and pastoral settings, with Guerrilla Games’ Managing Director Herman Hulst explaining that he and his team wanted to build a gorgeous game from the outset, which required them to pay closer attention to the environments surrounding the protagonist Aloy on her journeys. To be specific, Hulst said that “one of the visions for [the] game was to do, kind of a Planet Earth BBC documentary style game.”
As far as having Horizon: Zero Dawn run smoothly without compromising its incredibly lush visuals, game director Mathijs de Jonge asserted that Guerrilla Games was required to “improve” the engine supporting the title – the Decima Engine, that is – so as to have it render the action-RPG’s huge, open landscapes without being hindered. As a matter of fact, de Jonge went on to confirm that the graphics are going to be so consistent that fans shouldn’t encounter load screens when traversing across different terrains, with the game director saying, “If you’re just exploring the world, running around, sprinting, going into underground places, there’s never a loading screen. It’s all seamless.”
Furthermore, beyond Horizon: Zero Dawn‘s settings, Guerrilla Games also confirms in the above trailer that it recorded “nearly 15 hours of dialogue” with motion capture in order to make Aloy and the game’s non-playable characters look as realistic as possible. With this being the case, fans ought to anticipate taking loads of stellar in-game shots and screen captures of Aloy and NPCs living in the game’s world while using Horizon: Zero Dawn‘s photo mode.
Taking all of this into consideration, it seems as if Horizon: Zero Dawn might be the PS4’s best-looking title yet in terms of performance. However, with the action-RPG not being officially available to the public at the moment, fans will simply have to trust in the game’s plethora of positive reviews and also take the developers at their word in regards to Horizon: Zero Dawn performing near-flawlessly at launch.
Horizon: Zero Dawn is set to release on February 28, 2017 for PlayStation 4.
