Horizon Zero Dawn: Guerrilla Games Finally Spills The Beans: Open World, Combat, And More

Guerrilla has spilled the beans on Horizon Zero Dawn the game, on how it is as a game. In short, it’s an action oriented open world RPG.

Horizon is fully open world, so no loading or division across any of its areas. You will be able to explore every part of it, including every valley, mountaintop, and river. Of course, Aloy gets a corresponding climbing and traversal system to access these areas. It’s not Assassin’s Creed parkour, but it is utilitarian.

Combat is highly tactical, so that you will want to plan out strikes by surveying the environment, learning enemy weak points and setting traps. There are actually three fighting styles, based on stealth, setting traps, and pure firepower. You can make Aloy a specialist in one of these styles, or make her good in all three.

Aloy’s weapons include the composite bow and a rope caster. The rope caster can trip robosaurs, but can also be used to set tripwire traps. Aloy can also make explosive arrows from robosaur shells.

 You can do more than just hunt down the robots, although Guerrilla says they will reveal more later. They were also asked about getting to climb on a robot head, and said the same thing.

As an RPG, there is of course a progression system, but in Horizon it’s based on perks. The perks let you choose fighting style specific abilities, such as stealth kills or bullet time aiming mode. These perks will come up in the course of natural progression, so as you harvest more materials from robots, to craft new items like weapons, armor, ammo, those will allow you to level up Aloy.

Horizon Zero Dawn will be released exclusively on PlayStation 4 in 2016.