If you like to break your best impression of David Attenborough and tell the strange life of all mechanical beasts Horizon zero dawn When you explore Aloy’s hometown area, you’ll like to be in Horizon Forbidden West.
In a new PlayStation blog post, Guerrilla’s main machine designer Blake Politeski explained the process of designing machine creatures for games and clarified that some new creatures will join the 25 familiar mechanical faces of the PS4 and PS5 sequel.
Let’s start with the new machine Sunwing. Obviously, this time the studio wants bigger bird creatures, and this new enemy aims to fill this gap. “We knew we wanted a slightly larger aircraft than Glinthawk, which led to the Sunwing-but it needed a place and a role in the world,” Politeski explained.
“We studied the inspiration of various flying reptiles and primitive birds and came up with the concept of collecting solar energy on their wings on sunny days. This in turn created an interesting game dynamic: the solar wing would be very useful when collecting solar energy. Fragile, but when they are idle, they are also more alert to potential predators.”
There is also a huge new Tremortusk, whose design “pays homage to the history and film examples of the great war elephant”. Can Aloi and her bow knock them down like Legolas did in the third Lord of the Rings movie? We will have to wait and see.
In terms of actual gameplay, the designer pointed out that each machine has multiple ways to beat in the new game. According to Maxim Fleury, head of asset art:
“We try to make the player clearly understand through the machine design, and add textures to show weaknesses or interactive components. You need to study each machine carefully to find different ways to approach it.”
In order to achieve this goal, the team has been studying how to make Aloy better investigate and plan the encounter before she intervenes to deal with the enemies tracked in the environment. You can use the coverage mechanism returned from the first game to switch the machine between offensive and defensive states. These machines are also equipped with more sounds to provide you with audio prompts for idleness, reminding others and launching attacks (3D audio through PS5 will be even more impressive).
This is after the delay of the recent horizon zero dawn. Sony Interactive Entertainment and developer Guerrilla Games postpone Horizon Forbidden West February 18, 2022
However, the delay is not surprising. As early as June, Herman Hulst, the head of PlayStation Studios, stated that although the game is “expected” to be released around this year’s holiday, “it is not yet certain.”
Horizon Forbidden West will land on PS4 and PS5 on February 18, 2022.