While it’s true that many titles over recent years have focused on open-world exploration and having “plenty of things for players to do,” the great titles of those genres have incredible hooks to keep you interested as you go forward. Some titles focused on incredible gameplay that would have you hooked from the beginning and want you to keep pushing yourself until you “git gud” and beat that boss you’re struggling with. Then, for titles like Horizon Forbidden West, they focused plenty on the story and characters so you could feel a connection to the world and want to see things through for them.
Horizon Forbidden West is getting ready to have a collector’s edition that’ll bring together the main campaign and the “burning” DLC expansion. But on the PlayStation Blog, the Guerrilla Games team highlighted how the characters were truly everything for them and thus shared their process for developing them. For example, Annie Kitain, the game’s lead writer, said that where they start was knowing the “wants” of the character:
“We always start with conflict. Once we have a pretty good idea about this, we are able to figure out the rest of their character and how we can experience this conflict in the story.”
Then there’s the fact that these are “real people,” and they must have interactions and feelings about certain other characters. Aloy is the best example of this, as many people have to react to her arrival and actions throughout the game as she tries to save the world:
“For the writing team, a fun task was accounting for a character’s evolving attitude towards Aloy throughout the main story. A character could have two (or more) different sets of dialogue depending on how well-known Aloy is due to her actions. We see characters as a reflection of their tribe’s beliefs, customs, and conflicts, and to better understand them, we need to spend more time with them. You’ll notice that characters will come with Aloy on a quest more often than before. This allows us to get to know them better than if they were only present in cutscenes.”
The team also praised the voice acting talent that they got for the title. They said that the casting process was crucial and that once they had the right voice actor, they would plug them in and really work the scenes to give maximum effect.
And given that the title was nominated for numerous Game of the Year awards? We think they succeeded.
