Horizon: Zero Dawn Had Cooperative Play and The Map Was 50 Times Bigger

Guerrilla Games’ Mathijs De Jonge, Game Director on Horizon: Zero Dawn was interviewed by YouTube channel Noclip on the making of the highly acclaimed post-apocalyptic PlayStation 4 game. While talking about the De Jonge explained that the prototype included cooperative play but was cut.

According to De Jonge:

There have been early concepts. At the beginning we were thinking about two players in co-op, our very early prototype was with two players. We had the game running back then in co-op and that was quite nice to see. But we haven’t got that [in the final version] because the programmers basically said that if we wanted to have co-op, we would also have 50% of the features we had been asking for and not 100%. With Horizon: Zero Dawn being the first game [in the franchise], we wanted 100%, so we dropped co-op in favor of that. The NPCs fighting along, that is very complicated to get that right and we didn’t want to go there for this game because it’s so much work to do that well.

De Jonge went on to explain that the original map was 50x bigger than the final one. Filling all that space with content. Another interesting tidbit was that combat took up a bulk of development time, with work on the game starting in 2014 after the combat system was somewhat finalized.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is now available for PS4.

Adam Siddiqui, NoobFeed
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