Horizon: Zero Dawn‘s open-world design has proven a much bigger challenge for developer Guerrilla Games in comparison to the studio’s previous PlayStation 4 title, Killzone: Shadow Fall, its co-founder has said.
Speaking with Official PlayStation Magazine UK, Hermen Hulst was quizzed on how much more juice the team is having to squeeze out of PS4 for Horizon, and how the team’s previous experience with the console on Shadow Fall has helped its development.
"It’s been a huge, huge benefit for the studio when starting…Although, well…we actually commenced on the Horizon Zero Dawn project before we commenced on Killzone Shadow Fall. So I was going to say it’s been a huge benefit that we started with a mature engine, but the mature engine came into existence whilst the development of Horizon was ongoing!
"But nevertheless, because we were working on Shadow Fall, of course, to obviously have an engine ready at launch of PlayStation 4 was a boon to us. That said, I recently had a conversation with Michael van der Leeuw our technical director about the challenges on this project, and I believe that the challenges that we have on Horizon Zero Dawn—specifically the open world nature of this game, but also the artistic and graphical fidelity that we’re after and that people expect from us off the back of our past games in the Killzone series—getting all that to work has probably been…
"No, not probably! It has been a much bigger challenge to the team and to the studio than getting a PlayStation 4 engine ready at launch of PlayStation 4."
Horizon is due out on PS4 in 2016, and has been confirmed to run at 1080p/30fps, though multiplayer is unlikely at this point. Guerrilla Games recently explained as to why there are no guns in the game. Check out the latest concept art here and read our E3 2015 preview to see how it’s shaping up.
Source: OPM UK Issue 113 (September 2015)