Horizon Zero Dawn has already been hailed as one of the best games of 2017, and with all of the work Guerrilla Games put in, it’s easy to see why. Even with the gameplay, the environment, the characters, and everything else, the Horizon Zero Dawn story was one of the biggest bits of work.
According to the writers on the game, they spent hundreds of hours re-writing the story in order to make it fit the setting.
Horizon Zero Dawn, with its juxtaposition between Bronze Age civilizations and futuristic robot animals, was definitely a far cry from Fallout: New Vegas for John Gonzalez.
While both stories take place in the post-apocalypse (though granted Horizon’s was, while less merciful to humanity, more merciful to the Earth), they’re very different in terms of plot.
Fallout: New Vegas is a more conventional story of post-apocalyptic warfare between two societies, while Horizon Zero Dawn refers to the fate of the whole human race.
According to Gonzalez, the reason for the difficulty in writing between Horizon and Fallout is mainly due to Fallout having a more established universe (along with Gonzalez working with veteran Fallout writers like Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer).
Horizon Zero Dawn, being a new property (especially when Guerrilla Games has previously only made the Killzone series) had fewer established rules.
Thus, Gonzalez and the other writers of the Horizon Zero Dawn story had to do things like create a whole history for the world, figure out how humans couldn’t understand technology if “living” examples were all around them, a reason for Aloy to quest across the world, and everything else that happens with Horizon.
If you want to play the game yourself and take in all of Gonzalez’s hard work, Horizon Zero Dawn is available on the Playstation 4 and Playstation 4 Pro right now.
