When Sony and Guerrilla Games announced that they would be delaying the eagerly anticipated Horizon: Zero Dawn into next year (the game was originally slated to launch later this year), it came as the latest in a long line of delays for flagship first party games from Sony. And yet, according to what director Mathijs de Jonge has to say, there was a very real reason, related to the game’s development, that led the team to make what cannot ultimately have been an easy decision for them to make.
“It’s all polish,” he said to Gamespot. “We have this open world. It’s very big. We have a lot of quests; we have a lot of different regions as well. We have a lot of different Machines. Just playtesting this, it’s very, very time-consuming. We have so many components. We just want to raise the quality on the different areas.”
He added that the game is currently in a pre-alpha state, which gives the team a lot of wiggle room to make any improvements they see fit- de Jonge mentioned story, dialog, and animations as areas which need work.
“[The delay was] mainly because it’s such a big game,” de Jonge said. “We are a team of 200 people now, but there’s just a lot of content we need to look at and evaluate and keep improving.”
Horizon: Zero Dawn is due out exclusively on the PlayStation 4 in February 2017.