Guerrilla Games’ Horizon: Zero Dawn looks incredible. Freed from the burden of making mediocre Killzone games over and over again, the open world action RPG looks like the kind of game the studio has always wanted to make.
Of course, open world games are dime a dozen these days- more importantly, good ones are not. The trouble is that open worlds are often used to add bloat and filler to the game, compensating for a lack of content and depth in gameplay mechanics, rather than being used to add true non linear gameplay. This is something that Guerrilla is working to avoid with Horizon, the studio said in a recent interview.
“I think it’s always interesting when we talk about an open world, many wonder how big the map is. I think one of the things you should ask is how dense the population of that map is, what activities will be like or if it will be a map where you have to run where there is absolutely nothing,” Guerrilla Games Executive Producer Mark Norris told IGNLATAM.
“We are really seeing the quality of the content that will be on the map, the number of secondary missions, how we want to shape the main story over the world map and feel full. We do not have a size that we can give, but I can say that we have done an analysis of other games and I think we have achieved something that will be good for Horizon.”
That sounds encouraging- bigger, after all, is not always better. Sometimes, smaller but denser can do the trick.
Horizon is due out on the PS4 later this year.