Horizon Zero Dawn director Mathijs de Jonge has shed light on the reasons behind the decision to delay the PlayStation 4-exclusive action-RPG into early 2017.
Speaking during an interview with GameSpot, de Jonge revealed that it’s primarily down to polishing up a few of the game’s crucial aspects, such as the mechanical behemoths that players will battle against.
"It’s all polish," he said. "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."
"[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."
De Jonge added that Horizon is currently in the pre-alpha phase, which affords developer Guerrilla Games plenty of time to “raise the quality.”
Guerrilla reveals why it settled on a female protagnoist for Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4
"When we started with a concept we felt like we had a pretty fresh mix of ingredients; the BBC nature documentary kind of feel, and then the sci-fi elements with the robots," said de Jonge. "We also felt like we need a fresh main character. We’ve been making Killzone games; we’ve done male protagonists for quite a while. Now, we wanted to do something else.
"We’re switching from first-person shooter to open-world action RPG. Everything is shifting, so this was another thing we wanted to try. And we felt like a female character like Aloy would fit in really well."
Horizon Zero Dawn was originally announced at E3 2015, and is scheduled to hit PS4 in the U.S. on February 28 and in the U.K. on March 3. Read our E3 impressions here.