As promised, Playstation has released a few more videos giving more details about what went into creating Horizon Zero Dawn in their “Countdown to Launch” Youtube series. In the two new videos posted, some of the key members of the team speak about the combat in the game as well as how they decided to create the world that Aloy finds herself in.
Within the first trailer, the developers highlight some of the combat mechanics that went into the game, revealing information about some of the weaponry being created in Horizon Zero Dawn was somewhat expanded on from the Killzone.
Aloy herself will have plenty of different types of ammunition for her bows; fire, explosive, and stun. She will also have the ability to scan her targets before engaging them, enabling her to find out whether or not they have any weaknesses. Once you know how to properly take down the enemy, you can set up your weapons accordingly so that they have the maximum effectiveness.
The second trailer, while lacking serious combat action, had an abundance of highly detailed scenic content to show off a beautifully built post apocalyptic world. When creating the world, Hermen Hulst, the Managing Director, revealed that they envisioned the game as a sort of “Planet Earth, BBC Nature documentary style game”. Shortly after this Mathijs de Jonge, the games Director, revealed that they created this massive scale environment where players can go anywhere and not be hit with a loading screen.
When creating their world they wanted it to stand out compared to other RPG games in the past, coming up with the idea to make facial animations throughout the game more detailed and aesthetically accurate. Instead of going the usual procedurally animated route that many games do, the developers here chose to do over 15 hours of mo-cap for dialogue animations. What this means is that instead of having a computer guessing what the mouth should be doing for certain words, they recorded the movements of the voice actors themselves to make it match better while having more natural mouth movements.
Horizon Zero Dawn will be set to release in just 5 days.