“By the way, my mother has not just read every Vantage but has watched at least one complete playthrough of the entire game on youtube. Taken literally, the mother-son relationship described in the Vantages story bears no resemblance at all to our relationship, but my aim was to portray a more universal bond of love. “My mother has been in poor health for some time, and nearly died last fall. “Looking beyond the main story, the narrative told by the Vantages also meant a lot to me,” Gonzalez said.
Once activated, the player can hear a story that is appended with a photograph that shows what a locale used to look like, before it was overtaken by nature. Throughout the Horizon map, the player can discover something called “Vantages,” which are cached messages recorded in the old world. But it’s an optional side-story that Gonzalez holds closest to his heart. So it’s probably not a surprise to hear that those moments, along with other key Aloy scenes, were some of Gonzalez’ favorite things to write, too. “I still get a lump in my throat every time I see her pick up her bow and declare to Rost that she’s going to win the Proving, every time I watch her leap (literally) from girlhood to womanhood.” “Writing (and re-writing, and re-writing) Aloy’s childhood scenes was hard work, but it seems to have paid off, because I find it impossible to watch and play those scenes without getting behind her 100%,” Gonzalez said.
Getting something plausible yet exciting took hundreds of hours, Gonzalez told Kotaku, as Guerilla Games imagined and re-imagined “every detail before even one word of dialogue was written.”Īccording to Gonzalez, some of the tougher scenes to write were the early segments of the game, when Horizon has to convince the player to care about Aloy. “All told, that meant we needed to a) imagine an entire history for this strange new world, b) create a character who’d be compelling to play, c) give her a deeply personal reason to go questing across the world, d) make sure her personal quest put her on a collision course with the biggest mysteries of the world, and e) pace out the (quite intricate) answers to those mysteries so each revelation left players wanting more, driving them on to the end of the game,” Gonzales continued. high-tech robot dinosaurs!) contradicted each other in a way that demanded explanation: why would humans forget technology if technology was all around them?” Gonzalez said. “The very elements that made its high-level concept enthralling (low-tech humans vs. Horizon was in some ways trickier, he explained, because the story seems paradoxical. “Plus it didn’t hurt that I was working with Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer, stellar talents whose knowledge of the Fallout universe was unmatched.” “ Fallout: New Vegas was no walk in the park, but the themes and tone of the universe had already been well-established in previous installments, and the world could be explained in a single sentence: the Bomb dropped, this is what’s left,” Gonzalez said. The developers knew that they wanted a “female protagonist fighting machines on a lush Earth far in the future,” de Jonge said, but working out the details turned out to be surprisingly difficult. Here’s why.Īccording to game director Mathijs de Jonge, the idea for Horizon began as a pitch from Guerilla Games’ studio art Director, Jan-Bart. John Gonzalez might have cut his teeth on the beloved Fallout: New Vegas, but the game writer told Kotaku that helping craft the story for Horizon: Zero Dawn was “hands down the biggest challenge” of his career.
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