Horizon Zero Dawn’s Lead Writer Says it was “Hands down the biggest challenge”, Hundreds of Hours Rewriting

John Gonzalez, lead writer for Horizon: Zero Dawn talked to Kotaku about his time crafting the game as the lead writer. He said that it was "hands down the biggest challenge" of his career.

Reflecting on his time as a writer for Fallout: New Vegas, Gonzales said, "[Writing] 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. 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.”

When Gonzalez joined up, the team knew the setting they wanted. "Female protagonist fighting machines on a lush Earth far in the future."

"The very elements that made its high-level concept enthralling (low-tech humans vs. high-tech robot dinosaurs!) contradicted each other in a way that demanded explanation: why would humans forget technology if technology was all around them?”

Unlike Fallout, they needed to imagine an entire history for this parallel world, create a compelling protagonist, give her a reason for questing, and make her quest coincide with the world at large. Meanwhile, all of this needed to "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."

An ambitious idea with a completely alien setting took hundreds of hours as Guerrilla Games reportedly imagined and re-imagined "every detail before even one word of dialogue was written."

His favorite writing in the game is actually the side-story of vantages, cached messages recorded from the old world. Collecting them tells a story and shows images of a locale before nature retook the Earth.

“Looking beyond the main story, the narrative told by the Vantages also meant a lot to me. My mother has been in poor health for some time, and nearly died last fall. 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."

“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. I’m fairly certain that she’s Horizon Zero Dawn’s #1 fan among the over-70, non-PS4-owning demographic.”

This leaves us wondering what's next for Gonzalez and Horizon: Zero Dawn as DLC is planned for the title. Read more news on the PS4 exclusive first on GameZone.