Horizon Zero Dawn

• 1. Introduction

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  In Horizon Zero Dawn, a 2017 game from Guerrilla Games and Sony, an infant is found before a sealed door inside a sacred mountain. She grows up as Aloy, an outcast of the Nora tribe, raised by a fellow outcast named Rost. Her world is a future version of the western United States, where giant robotic machines dominate the land and people live in scattered tribes. Her designers wanted her to begin as the "least important person in the world" and become the most important. What waits behind that sealed door? Why do some of these machines turn violent toward the people who share their world? And how did a studio that had spent years on the Killzone series end up building a bright, hopeful vision of the end of civilisation? The answers run through a mountain, a buried past, and a pitch that nearly never reached the public.

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• 2. A Risky Pitch

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  In late 2010, Guerrilla Games asked every person in the studio to pitch an idea for its next game. The only rules were no puzzle games and no racing games. Around 40 pitches came back. Art director Jan-Bart van Beek proposed Horizon Zero Dawn, and game director Mathijs de Jonge considered it "the most risky" of them all.

  Managing director Hermen Hulst, a co-founder of the studio, said part of the appeal was escape. The team wanted to leave behind the dystopian, gritty tone of the Killzone franchise for something more beautiful and vibrant. Sony, the parent company, also had no western role-playing game in its portfolio at the time. Three pillars defined the concept: a lush nature setting in the manner of a documentary, robotic dinosaurs, and a red-headed lead character.

  The release of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West in 2010 briefly stalled the idea, because that game also had a post-apocalyptic world and a red-headed hero. For six months, the team prototyped a different project. Hulst said the urge to make something "radically different" brought them back to pitch Horizon to Sony again.

  Development began in 2011, once Killzone 3 was finished. It was Guerrilla's first new intellectual property since Killzone in 2004, and its first open-world and role-playing game. A small team of 10 to 20 people built the early prototypes. The rest of the studio joined after Killzone Shadow Fall was completed in late 2013. Lambert Wolterbeek Muller served as lead producer, Michiel van der Leeuw oversaw technical direction, and Misja Baas oversaw art.

  Roughly 270 Guerrilla employees worked on the game, alongside 18 outsourcing companies around the world. Virtuos, based in Singapore, assigned 65 people for over two years to build machine types and bandit settlements. 3Lateral in Serbia handled facial animation, Territory Studios in New York designed the interface, and Audiomotion in London handled motion capture. Kokku in Brazil and XPEC Art Center in Taipei supplied environmental assets and robotic models. The estimated budget topped 45 million. To keep so many hands consistent, Guerrilla gave every outside team a large library of reference photos.

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• 3. Hunting The Machines

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  The Thunderjaw, a machine shaped like a T. rex, was the first creature Guerrilla built, and it served as the project's proof of concept. Taking it from an early sketch to a working in-game enemy required 18 months. Earlier technical experiments included a machine called the "Predator", which appeared as a holographic Easter egg in Killzone Shadow Fall.

  Those early machines borrowed the militaristic, industrial look of Killzone. The developers soon realised that look made players feel like soldiers rather than hunters. They moved it onto the ancient military machines and turned to real animals for everything else. Tallnecks echo giraffes, Stalkers echo maned wolves, Longlegs echo terror birds, and Watchers echo meerkats and small bipedal dinosaurs. Familiar movement lets a player read a creature's behaviour at a glance.

  The team consulted the robotics department of the Delft University of Technology and settled on exoskeletons, which created exposed soft spots for arrows. Designers avoided covering machines in blinking lights and colours, so their status stayed easy to read during a fight. Engineers were told to design each machine as though it could really be built. Artists then shaped details such as hydraulic joints and armour plates in ZBrush. The team took courses in animal and creature animation and consulted Dr. Stuart Sumida, a professor who had advised on anatomy for film and theme park projects. Most machines have between 200 and 300 unique sounds, plus another 150 shared among them.

  Aloy reads these creatures through the Focus, a small earpiece that scans a machine for its location, susceptibilities, level and the loot it will drop. Machines fall into classes called Acquisition, Combat, Recon and Transport, and each class shapes how a machine behaves. Special arrows can tear off components, disable weapons, burn or stun. Her spear can hack certain machines, and some become mounts. Early encounters with a new type show exposed weak points to teach a lesson. Armoured variants later demand that the plating come off first.

  Behind the fights sits hierarchical task network planning, which produces sequences of behaviour rather than single actions. Acquisition machines might flee, while Combat and Recon machines coordinate to hunt the player. While one machine attacks, the others circle and wait their turn, and the AI picks the next attacker based on how varied the fight will feel. Information travels in "packets" attached to objects such as the player, arrows and rocks. That lets a machine tell a corpse from a passing arrow or a player hiding in tall grass. A weak sensor receives only part of the data, so different species behave differently. Land machines cross a navigation mesh, while flyers use a separate system built on a heightmap of the air space.

  Machines were at first the only enemies, and human foes arrived later to add variety and show off different tribal cultures. The stealth design aims for the feeling of a hunt. Enemies are lenient when they first notice the player, but make it hard to hide again once fully discovered. That pushes players to commit to a fight instead of fleeing again and again. Combat was divided into three stages named "prepare", "engage" and "escape". An early design armed Aloy with a rifle, but high-tech gunfire felt wrong for the setting. She received a spear, bows, tripwires, a harpoon and slingshot explosives instead. Even a thrown rock or a whistle can draw an enemy away from its post.

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• 4. Tribes And Ruins

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  Two books by Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), were the team's main sources of inspiration for the world. Guerrilla also worked with anthropologists and researched how tribal cultures form. The team began by asking how each tribe would live alongside the machines, because the answer decided its clothing, architecture and tools. The machines were treated as a natural part of the ecosystem, and the tribes saw them as ordinary parts of daily life. Weapons were designed to look primitive, matching a civilisation that had lost its technology.

  In the 31st century of the story, two peoples anchor the map. The Nora are matriarchal hunter-gatherers who live in the mountains. The Carja are a patriarchal empire of desert city builders who embrace technology. The developers created them to represent different worldviews. Their technologically advanced predecessors are remembered only as the "Old Ones". Even though the story sits centuries ahead, characters mostly speak plain English, because the team wanted to avoid jargon.

  Creating science-fiction imagery that also looked prehistoric was a challenge. The team sculpted each ancient structure by hand so it looked broken and lopsided. The ruins were made to look frail, so players would feel compassion for the people who once lived there in comfort. The colours stayed vibrant, and the team called the game "post-post-apocalyptic", aiming for adventure and hope. At one point they considered setting it in Europe and in the Netherlands, Guerrilla's home country. North America won because of its diverse landscape and recognisable landmarks.

  Underground, the game has two kinds of space. Abandoned military strongholds deliver story beats and an emotional bond with the people of the past. AI-run assembly lines are where machines are built. Because those factories were designed by an AI rather than by humans, the directive was to be bold and treat each one like a giant sculpture.

  Van Beek said the open world meant trading the "designing rollercoaster rides" of Killzone for building full "theme parks". The team studied The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) to judge how dense the world should be. Later they realised they could not fill the whole map, and they cut the world down significantly. A plan for cooperative multiplayer was scrapped. Traditional character stats for Aloy were removed and the interface kept simple, in favour of a curated, personal story. Fallout 3 (2008) inspired the freedom to act beyond what the developers intended, and Guerrilla recruited people from The Elder Scrolls and The Witcher.

  The Decima engine had been built for Killzone Shadow Fall, and bending it toward an open world was hard because draw distance and loading mattered in new ways. The goal was the visual detail usually reserved for linear first-person shooters. The rendering core existed, but the team wrote new systems for streaming, level editing and asset placement. Vegetation and rivers were placed procedurally, while rock formations and mountains were made by hand. "World Data Maps" told shaders about humidity and temperature, so fireflies could appear only near bushes at night. "Irradiance volumes" kept indirect lighting rich while still following the time-of-day cycle. A cheap depth-only pass handled the expensive alpha testing for all that foliage.

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• 5. Beneath The Mountain

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  The Proving was a tournament that promised Aloy answers. If she won, the Nora matriarchs would be compelled to reveal her past. She spent years training, and she won. Masked cultists then attacked, and Rost gave his life to save her from their leader, Helis. When Aloy woke, the matriarchs told her what they knew and allowed her to leave Nora lands to pursue the attackers.

  The cultists were the Eclipse, a splinter faction, and they had targeted her because she resembled an ancient scientist named Elisabet Sobeck. In the ruins of Faro Automated Solutions, Aloy learned that the old civilisation ended a thousand years ago. Faro had lost control of self-replicating military machines that consumed biomass. Sobeck had led a project called Zero Dawn, an automated terraforming system meant to deactivate the machines and restore life to Earth.

  Sylens, a secretive figure interested in the fate of the ancients, contacted Aloy. He guided her to a decommissioned military base beneath the Citadel, the centre of Eclipse power. There she learned that Zero Dawn was an underground network of cloning facilities and databases run by a single artificial intelligence, GAIA. After life went extinct, GAIA deactivated the Faro machines and built animalistic machines of her own to restore the biosphere. She then reseeded Earth from stored DNA, hoping to teach the new humans not to repeat old mistakes. Ted Faro sabotaged the subsystem holding humanity's history, which left the new generation living in tribes. Aloy also found that the Eclipse were secretly controlled by HADES, another GAIA subsystem, built to carry out a controlled extinction if terraforming failed.

  After Aloy obtained a registry to open the door in the Nora mountain, Helis captured her. She escaped with Sylens's help, returned to the Nora, and helped them defeat the Eclipse. At last, she opened the door. Inside, a recording from GAIA explained that a transmission of unknown origin had made HADES go rogue. GAIA tried to stop it by destroying herself, but she failed and lost control of her terraforming network. That loss caused the aggression known as the Derangement. As a contingency, GAIA had created a clone of Sobeck, and that clone was Aloy, meant to destroy HADES one day and restore her functions.

  Aloy retrieved the master override needed to destroy HADES. Sylens confessed that he had originally founded the Eclipse, tempted by HADES's promises of knowledge. He now understood that the AI meant to reactivate the Faro machines and end all life again. Aloy assaulted the Citadel, killed Helis, fought off corrupted machines, and stabbed HADES with the override, ending the war. She then travelled to Sobeck's childhood home to mourn her predecessor. In a post-credits scene, Sylens captures the fleeing entity of HADES, planning to interrogate it about who sent the signal that woke it.

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• 6. Aloy And Her Sound

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  John Gonzalez, who had been lead writer on Fallout: New Vegas (2010), was hired as narrative director to write the story. Around 20 different stories were drafted, including ones built around other player characters. All of the lore was meant to rest on plausible science. The developers said the title's "Horizon" stands for "a boundless new world, and also the passage of time (where the Sun rises and sets)". Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Princess Mononoke (1997) were early touchstones. The structure also resembles a Western, with a loner entering frontier settlements and getting tangled in their conflicts. Major quest lines drew on biblical epics such as Ben-Hur (1959) and The Ten Commandments (1956).

  Aloy remained constant through all the drafts. Early on she was younger and more expressive, but the team decided an older version offered more story. The writers looked to Ellen Ripley from Alien, Sarah Connor from Terminator and San from Princess Mononoke. Making her a Nora outcast let players share the view of a newcomer in a strange world, and her upbringing made her compassionate. Every side quest began as an idea for why she, specifically, would get involved. Gonzalez described the core story as an "epic tragedy", while side quests could be lighter, sarcastic or comic. Dialogue from non-player characters shifts subtly depending on the order in which the player finishes quests.

  Ashly Burch voices Aloy. After auditions in 2014, she was called in to record the E3 2015 trailer, then spent two years on the game in Los Angeles, including facial motion capture. Hannah Hoekstra's likeness appears on screen, and Amanda Piery performed the body motion capture. Burch's delivery influenced what Gonzalez wrote next, and the two collaborated closely. The team spent considerable time on Aloy's hairstyle so she stayed recognisable in any armour. Sony ran focus testing to find out whether a female lead was marketable.

  Four composers shared the score: Joris de Man, The Flight, Niels van der Leest and Jonathan Williams, with Julie Elven as the primary vocalist. De Man concentrated on memorable themes and The Flight on textures and soundscapes. Van der Leest focused on percussion, and Williams wrote the tribal songs. They delivered music in "kit form", as stems, so the engine could layer and rearrange parts and avoid repetition across long sessions.

  Music supervisor and senior sound designer Lucas van Tol rejected the heavily compressed, blockbuster orchestral sound common in modern games. Composers were encouraged to play instruments "naïvely", as if a survivor had found a guitar or harmonica and was guessing how to play it. The score rested on three themes: machines, tribes and nature. Tribal sounds came from bows on piano wire, resonator guitars layered with harmonicas, and cellos played with plectrums or the back of a bow. De Man added a contrabass flute and made synth pads by blowing on a Thai bamboo flute. For the machines, circuit-bent synthesizers and percussive loops were run through impulse responses of metal and iron being beaten. The team also built physical instruments for the game world, including the Braumdrum, the KunaBass and the Iron Pendulin. The composers even performed the motion capture for the in-game tribal musicians.

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• 7. Critics And Crowds

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  The game launched on the PlayStation 4 in North America on the 28th of February 2017. Europe, Australia and New Zealand followed on the 1st of March, and Asia on the 2nd. Concept art and the codename Horizon had leaked in September 2014, and Sony officially announced the game at its E3 2015 press conference. A 2016 release was pushed to February 2017 for more polish. At E3 2016, a life-sized cosplay of one of the machines greeted attendees. The Collector's Edition included an Aloy statue, an artbook and a steelbook case, and a Thunderjaw edition came with a Thunderjaw statue.

  Metacritic described the reception as "generally favourable", and 94% of critics on OpenCritic recommended the game. Critics generally agreed that it was visually impressive but familiar in design. Dan Silver of The Guardian called the combat "endurably exhilarating" and liked that each machine demanded a different tactic. Peter Brown of GameSpot found the machine design creative and enjoyed how complex variants arrived as skill grew. Phillip Kollar of Polygon compared the loop of crafting, combat and gathering to Monster Hunter, and found Horizon more approachable. Melee fights and clashes with human enemies drew the most complaints.

  The world won warm praise. Andrew Webster of The Verge noted that each tribe has a unique visual identity in its architecture and clothing. Jeff Marchiafava of Game Informer wrote that the world gave "a remarkable sense of discovery". Justin Clark of Slant Magazine called it among the "most vibrant and beautifully envisioned open worlds in a video game to date". Yet many reviewers felt the game stayed close to other open-world designs of its day. Webster called it a "greatest hits" collection of mechanics. Silver felt it fell short of being "seminal", and he called its role-playing systems "lip service to genre expectations". Silver and Sammy Barker of Push Square also noted that the fixed path leaves players little agency.

  The story was a stronger draw. Webster said the central mystery held him through the slower opening hours and was both "personal" and "epic". Brown found the mystery "fascinating" and praised Aloy's growth, though he thought the side quests were weaker. Silver found the story compelling but disliked its reliance on "extraneous exposition" delivered through audio and text files. Barker compared Aloy to Katniss Everdeen, Hermione Granger and Lara Croft. Sam Machkovech of Ars Technica called Burch's performance "emotionally well-rounded".

  Dia Lacina, a Native American writer, argued that the tribes resemble Native Americans while the lead is a white woman, and that some of the game's terminology was disrespectful. Gonzales replied that the terminology was discussed during development to keep the team sensitive to cultural concerns. He added that the tribes were not based on one group, since the team looked at people from around the world and across time.

  Sales matched the praise. Horizon Zero Dawn topped the weekly charts in the United Kingdom and Australia. It surpassed No Man's Sky (2016) as the biggest launch of a new intellectual property on the PlayStation 4, and it was Guerrilla's biggest debut. In Japan it sold close to 117,000 units in its first week. Within two weeks it had sold 2.6 million units, and by its second anniversary the total passed 10 million. The Windows version moved over 700,000 digital units at launch. By May 2022, it had sold over 2.4 million units on PC, generating more than $60 million in revenue. By the 16th of April 2023, the total reached around 24.3 million units.

  The awards followed. At the 14th British Academy Games Awards, the game was nominated eight times and won Original Property. It won two of its 10 nominations at the 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, for story and for technical achievement. The Golden Joystick Awards named it Best Storytelling and Best PlayStation Game in 2017. The Writers Guild of America honoured its writing, and the music won at the Game Audio Network Guild Awards and the Ivor Novello Awards. By July 2025, the combined sales of the Horizon franchise had reached 38 million units.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  A patch in July 2017 added New Game Plus, an Ultra Hard difficulty mode, extra trophies and aesthetic features. The expansion The Frozen Wilds was announced at E3 in June 2017 and released on the 7th of November. It added a new region reachable whether or not the base game was finished. The level cap rose from 50 to 60, and a new skill branch called "Traveler" focused on movement while riding overridden machines. It introduced "daemonic machines", which have more health and hit harder, and "control towers" that keep healing nearby enemies until destroyed. The Complete Edition, bundling everything, followed on the 5th of December 2017.

  In 2020, Sony decided to port its first-party titles to PC to increase profitability, and Horizon was one of the first. The Windows version arrived on Steam and the Epic Games Store on the 7th of August, and on GOG on the 24th of November. Virtuos ported it, with additional work by Nixxes Software. It added graphical options, benchmarking tools, an unlocked frame rate and ultrawide support.

  Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered was announced on the 24th of September 2024, after rumours since 2022 and the game's removal from PlayStation Plus in May 2024. Nixxes co-developed it, and it launched on the 31st of October for Windows and PlayStation 5. Reactions were mixed at first, since some felt a remaster came too soon for a game already playable in 4K and 60 frames per second. PC players were initially required to use a PlayStation Network account, which excluded people in more than one hundred countries. Sony dropped that requirement in February 2025. The remaster brought over gameplay, interface and accessibility options from Horizon Forbidden West and gave Aloy's face the model from that sequel. It added more than 10 hours of re-recorded dialogue, new motion capture and adaptive trigger support on the DualSense controller. OpenCritic showed 89% of critics recommending it.

  Horizon Forbidden West was announced in June 2020 at the PlayStation 5 reveal event. It was released on the 18th of February 2022 for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and reached Windows on the 21st of March 2024. Its story begins six months after Zero Dawn ends, as Aloy travels to the Forbidden West to find where the extinction signal that woke HADES came from. Burch returns, joined by new cast members Carrie-Anne Moss and Angela Bassett.

  Studio Gobo, based in the United Kingdom, joined Guerrilla as a co-development partner in January 2023. The result, Lego Horizon Adventures, was announced on the 7th of June 2024 and released on the 14th of November for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Windows. It retells the story in an upbeat, family-friendly way and downplays the apocalypse. Lance Reddick died in March 2023, so the role of Sylens was recast, with Tim Russ taking over.

  The world also spread to other formats. Steamforged Games announced a board game in August 2018, and its Kickstarter was funded in under two hours. Shipping began in November 2020, and an expansion called "The Sacred Land" followed on the 14th of September 2021. Titan Comics published The Sunhawk, a four-issue miniseries set after the game, from August to November 2020. A second miniseries, Liberation, ran from July 2021 to January 2022 and takes place during the game's events. Anne Toole, one of the game's writers, co-created and wrote the comics. A Netflix series was announced in May 2022 with Steve Blackman writing and producing, but by June 2024 it was no longer moving forward after a workplace complaint about its showrunner became public.

  In January 2025, Sony announced a film adaptation at PlayStation Productions and Columbia Pictures. PlayStation Productions president Asad Qizilbash said the company had a working script and was searching for a director. The plan was to start shooting in 2026 for a 2027 release.

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