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Eight years have elapsed since the studio, based in Amsterdam, laid the first stone of the adventure of Aloy. Angie Smets, executive director of the company, outlines the challenges and difficulties of bringing the company to fruition

Iker Cortés

After a lifetime building the foundations of 'Killzone' , the saga of first-person action that has been running across all Sony platforms from PlayStation 2, should give vertigo raise a new franchise from scratch. "I think it was in the middle of the development of 'Killzone 3' - recalls Angie Smets , executive director of the Guerrilla Games, during his speech on Gamelab, the International Congress of the Videogame that was held last week in Barcelona.

We were thinking in the long term and we asked ourselves if we were taking advantage of all the talent of the team and how many ideas we could extract more ideas from this universe ».

Makes sense. After all, companies like Electronic Arts and Activision can serve a 'First Person Shooter' a year -'Battlefield 'and' Call of Duty 'are the most famous-, so the competition in the genre has always been very high . Changing gender was a viable option and, of course, the team "got excited" with the idea even though taking that direction implied "more risks".

Thus, while a team of 150 people began to develop 'Killzone: Shadow Fall', another began to raise ideas about the development of a new franchise. Up to 32 ideas were launched, although finally two were successful.

On the one hand, there was 'Dark Science', a title that, as they have reported on occasion, had aesthetic 'Steampunk' and put us in the skin of a monster hunter. On the other, what finally ended up being 'Horizon Zero Dawn' , an action adventure in the third person starring Aloy and with certain doses of role play, developed in an open world.

Smets says that the company was looking for "something epic, with narrative possibilities" and, above all, "with a more positive and hopeful message" than its previous adventures. That is why, instead of being placed in a post-apocalyptic scenario, he did it a bit later, when nature has once again gained ground to the chaos caused by man.

The robots that dominate all the juice also arrived in the early stages of game design with the 'Watchers', small sentinels for whom stealth and strategy are necessary. The prototypes began to take shape.

It was time to present the two ideas to Sony Worldwide Studios. Undoubtedly, 'Horizon Zero Dawn' took the cat to the water, although not without problems. «When we returned to the studio, we decided to take a test among our staff.

We asked them to put a note in different sections: which of the two projects fit better with our technology, which has more power in terms of history ... And the thing opted for 'Dark Science'. But in the last question, 'which one do you want to work on?', Everyone answered that in 'Horizon Zero Dawn'.


Despite the general interest in the project, it was not without challenges. «We underestimate the open world. We did not know that it was going to be so big and it got a bit out of hand, " confesses Smets, who says that in reality it was never meant to be huge but rather that" the player did not get bored and always had things to do " . So many that to conclude the main story of the game is only 32% of everything that the title can offer.

Heroin

Another of the elements that make 'Horizon Zero Dawn' unmistakable is its main character. "To tell the truth, the question of gender was never a topic of discussion, we just wanted a good character, who was powerful," says Smets about Aloy. "We only changed her age, because at the beginning she was too young, like a Disney princess and that was not very realistic," she admits.

The icing on the cake was put by the new narrative director. The study realized that something was not working well when, after preparing a demo for Sony, the negative comments were important enough to shake confidence in the project. "The new director was in charge of achieving cohesion in a plot mechanics that, while working by themselves, failed to engage the player," he concludes.

After eight years of preproduction and development, 'Horizon Zero Dawn' has turned out to be a breath of fresh air and has opened a new path for Guerrilla Games. And sometimes risk is necessary.