Early Horizon: Zero Dawn Had Working Co-Op, But Less Features

Horizon: Zero Dawn took the world by surprise in 2017, and even more recently released a DLC called The Frozen Wilds. While its year of fame has ended, the love for their game has not, as Guerilla Games shares some concepts that began in the early development of the game.

In an interview with YouTube channel Noclip, Mathijs De Jonge, Game Director for Horizon Zero Dawn, spoke with hosts for roughly an hour. While the interview is long, we’ve pulled out what we believe to be the most interesting tidbit, although the entire video is worth the watch if you have the time. That morsel we found to be particularly interesting was the inclusion of co-op in the prototype.

“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.”

Two-player co-op in one of PlayStation’s greatest hits of 2017 sounds enticing to be sure, but its exclusion to make room for more features was likely a good move. Although, the personal narrative of Aloy may not have played out as well as it did if the game was centered on two players. Having the first of a series (if Horizon does become a series) set the tone as a narrative-focused adventure ultimately sounds like the better play.

De Jonge also talked about the original game’s map being fifty times bigger. What is this, Daggerfall? Apparently, it would have been similar, in the sense that the map would be sparsely filled with actual content, which was the biggest issue with the early Elder Scrolls title.

It was also implied that the development time they were given is what made the huge map concept exist in the first place, but they instead took the time to perfect combat in the game, which ended up feeling very rewarding. The game was actually more or less done at the end of 2014, which is when they went on to perfect the combat system and other polishing efforts.

If you haven’t had the chance to play Horizon: Zero Dawn, there is a complete edition including The Frozen Wilds available now exclusively on PS4.