Guerrilla Games’ co-founder, Herman Hulst, recently spoke with the Official Playstation Magazine UK to talk about the challenges faced by the studio while creating the open-world of Horizon: Zero Dawn and how developing Killzone: Shadow Fall helped in developing the upcoming game.
Speaking of the two games, Hulst said that the studio began working on the Horizon: Zero Dawn much before Killzone: Shadow Fall. Hulst also added that working on the Killzone: Shadow Fall proved to be a huge benefit for the studio:
It’s been a huge, huge benefit for the studio when starting… Although, well…we actually commenced on the Horizon Zero Dawn project before we commenced on Killzone Shadow Fall. So I was going to say it’s been a huge benefit that we started with a mature engine, but the mature engine came into existence whilst the development of Horizon was ongoing!
Speaking of the challenges faced during the development; Hulst said that these primarily include open-world nature of Horizon: Zero Dawn and the visual fidelity that fans expect from Guerrilla Games:
But nevertheless, because we were working on Shadow Fall, of course, to obviously have an engine ready at launch of PlayStation 4 was a boon to us. That said, I recently had a conversation with Michael van der Leeuw our technical director about the challenges on this project, and I believe that the challenges that we have on Horizon Zero Dawn—specifically the open world nature of this game, but also the artistic and graphical fidelity that we’re after and that people expect from us off the back of our past games in the Killzone series—getting all that to work has probably been…
No, not probably! It has been a much bigger challenge to the team and to the studio than getting a PlayStation 4 engine ready at launch of PlayStation 4.
Guerrilla Games also recently explained how combat and player progression works in Horizon: Zero Dawn and shared a bunch of amazing concept arts which are indeed a treat to view. To find out more, head over to the posts!
Promised to run at 1080p and 30 frames per second; Horizon: Zero Dawn is in development for the Playstation 4 and is scheduled to arrive in 2016.
