Guerrilla Games‘ new IP has finally been unveiled during Sony’s E3 2015 Press Conference last night. The early rumors by Shinobi turned out to be true: Horizon is an open world action RPG with lush forests and “robot dinos”, starring a red-headed female character named Aloy; it’s now targeting 2016 though, so it slipped a bit from the previous fall 2015 target mentioned by the insider.
Hermen Hulst, Managing Director of the Dutch studio, spoke with Geoff Keighley in a
that sheds some more light on the game. For starters, Horizon was chosen amidst a sea of pitches:
After we wrapped up Killzone 3, we did the full rounds and talked to everybody at the studio. We got 40-50 pitches in and this is built on one pitch, with lots of elements from other pitches.
You play as Aloy: she’s our lead character and part of a relatively primitive tribe, obviously you’re outgunned against these machines and you’re going to have to prepare, to be smart before, during and after combat. There’s stealth, you can set up traps, you’re going to be very agile (dodge/roll), you’re going to do everything in your power to take on these massive machines.
We’ll talk about the RPG elements later – you saw today that there’s obviously a loot based system, so you can harvest these resources from the machines that you can then use to craft new ammo, weaponry and other things.
Hulst also explained that the game isn’t post-apocalyptic in the traditional sense:
The setting of this game is kind of post-post-apocalyptic, there’s been an apocalypse but we’ve moved on about a thousand years. Here’s the twist, humans are no longer the dominant species, the machines now roam this land. Initially, as Aloy, you do not understand why you’re here, what these machines are, what they’re doing and how you relate to them, so we’re taking you on a journey to uncover these massive mysteries.