Horizon Forbidden West NPCs Will Have Personality With New “Attitude System”

Apparently, Horizon Forbidden West NPCs will have more personality with the game's new attitude system that Guerrilla has implemented.

NPCs, despite populating most of the world in every open-world video game and RPG, aren’t known for being the liveliest bunch. Guerrilla Games, however, is aiming to change that with Horizon Forbidden West NPCs. They claim to be able to do this through a new “attitude system” developed for the game.

This new system will affect how NPCs behave in the game’s world, ranging from different movement paths, to the sorts of items that they’ll be carrying. All told, this new system will help to vary up the different tribes that players will be encountering as Aloy crosses the Rocky Mountains and enters the West Coast area of the post-apocalyptic United States.

Some tribes, for instance, will be more social. Players will be able to see members doing high-fives or other such energetic gestures. Other tribes may be more serious, saving certain gestures for areas where they feel safe, rather than outside of their villages in the overworld. These can also help to let players know where they are in a world better than tribes that are only visually different.

Horizon Forbidden West NPCs wouldn’t be the first ones to have personalities, as other open-world games like Assassin’s Creed and Cyberpunk 2077 have previously attempted to portray every NPC as unique, though with differing degrees of success. Horizon Forbidden West’s attitude system may be the closest we’ve gotten.

Since the game is only a few months away from release, we won’t have long to wait until we actually see just how lively and unique each NPC in the game world is, whether through released gameplay or a preview video. Hopefully, after how groundbreaking Zero Dawn was, Horizon Forbidden West NPCs turn out to be similarly polished.

Regardless of how the NPCs turn out, Horizon Forbidden West will be launching on Playstation 4 and Playstation 5 on February 18 of 2022.

Hunter is senior news writer at SegmentNext.com. He is a long time fan of strategy, RPG, and tabletop games. When he is not playing games, he likes to write about them.