‘Horizon Zero Dawn’ was going to have cooperative and a map 50 times larger

Curious, very curious was the interview with Mathijs De Jonge, head of Guerrilla Games and director of Horizon Zero Dawna game that according to his statements could be very different.

The first thing that stands out has been the fact of considering a cooperative gamean option that included the first prototype that allowed two players to collaborate together to hunt beasts.

De Jonge acknowledges that it was something that was on the table because it was “nice to see”but it was finally discarded to enhance the single player experience and his story.

We didn’t get it in the final version because the developers basically said that if we wanted co-op we would get 50% of the features we asked for. Being Horizon Zero Dawn the first of the saga we wanted 100%, so we eliminated the cooperative.

Fast travel and a bigger map

Another revelation from the director to NoClip was that they were thinking about transition screens during fast travel, where we could see Aloy move around the map in the form of an icon in the style of the Indiana Jones movies, but it was finally discarded in the testing phase because many players found it too slow.

People in the tests thought it took too long to travel. It was a trip, but not a fast trip. We removed it and put helpful hint screens in its place. We tuned it to dynamically adapt based on what’s going to kill you.

In addition De Jonge recognized that initially in Horizon Zero Dawn map it was going to be about 50 times bigger that the end, but in art team saw a problem when filling so much empty spaceso a more concentrated extension was finally chosen so that the amount of detail would be greater.

Horizon Zero Dawn is exclusive to PlayStation 4 and has one edition, the Complete Edition, which includes its first and last expansion The Frozen Wilds. We invite you to read the analysis of the original, as well as the analysis of the expansion.