Jan-Bart van Beek, Art and Animation Director at Guerrilla Games as well as the creator of Horizon: Zero Dawn's internal pitch within the team, was interviewed by GamesIndustry on how the Dutch studio managed to create this brand new world.
van Beek mentioned that games have unique possibilities to deliver fresh and imaginative worlds, unlike mainstream movies these days.
We wanted something that had a sense of relevance, that people could understand, but at the same time is unfamiliar and fresh.
You could do it in a comic book, but video games are the medium that really allows you to do these really crazy things. It used to be '80s and '90s Saturday morning cartoons, with their crazy exurberant worlds, but we can still do them in games.
That's what we find exciting about games, that there's still this levity to it, where you can go crazy and come up with combinations that people don't necessarily expect. Gamers are generally more open to accepting new ideas, so it's an ideal market.
Horizon: Zero Dawn turned out to be a great success for Guerrilla Games and Sony, both critically and financially. The game recently received its first and only story DLC, The Frozen Wilds, praised by Francesco in his fresh review.
With a new focused story, a harshly beautiful new area, new weapons, enemies and skills, Horizon Zero Dawn The Frozen Wilds is a worthy expansion of the open world game developed by Guerrilla Games. Ultimately, it's more of the same, as the expansion lacks any major new gameplay mechanics, but when so much love is put into a product, is it really an issue? Highly recommended to all Horizon Zero Dawn owners.
After The Frozen Wilds, it's practically guaranteed that Guerrilla will pour its entire workforce on a sequel. Whether they'll be able to release Horizon 2 (or whatever it will be called) before the end of the generation is another matter entirely, with Sony believed to be gearing to launch PlayStation 5 between 2019 and 2020; this means there's a chance it could be a launch title for the new console, or possibly a cross-generation game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.