The Horizon series and Aloy, from pitch to polish

“What if they make something exuberantly beautiful?” van Beek said, summarizing a recurring message of these critiques. “That inspired the studio to stretch our creative muscle, to extend our thinking in new ways again.”

In 2010, van Beek began developing a concept for a beautiful but recovering post-apocalyptic Earth, in which the ferocity of nature was made manifest in the form of large robotic beasts, hunted by a scarlet-haired woman. That idea was thrown into a studio-wide pitch process for Guerrilla’s next game — finally, a break from the Killzone series. This pitch process included game concepts in a wide variety of genres, including linear adventure games, puzzle games and even a football game.

Guerrilla Games Director Mathijs de Jonge said the studio began to unite around van Beek’s idea. But confidence in the concept was shaken a bit when “Enslaved: Odyssey to the West” released in October 2010. That title, by British developer Ninja Theory, featured a similar aesthetic and world concept, and also starred a redheaded, female protagonist.

“That’s our whole list of ingredients,” van Beek said. “If they were going to hit it out of the ballpark, we shouldn’t follow them and maybe we should start looking at something else.”

The studio went back to another pitch process, only for Hermen Hulst, the studio’s co-founder and now head of PlayStation Studios, to suggest they return to the Horizon concept. They found that the whole studio had a lot of affection for Aloy, the scarlet-haired hunter, and her journey. Moreover, Guerrilla staff believed they could build a fantastic open-world game — the kind of experience they would be excited to play.

“There was quite a big draw toward Horizon because of all the challenges that it brought,” de Jonge said. “Let’s do an action role-playing game! We love to play those kind of games.”

Settling on van Beek’s concept meant staffing up with a narrative director, programmers and other talent skilled in the open-world and action role-playing genres. Released in 2017, “Horizon Zero Dawn” became the studio’s first attempt at a game telling a narrative over a large map, where there was a chance players could miss substantial parts of the world — or, even worse, get bored during exploration.

“One of the initial things we discovered was pacing,” de Jonge said. “By building prototypes, we discovered we wanted something to happen every 50 meters or every 100 meters or so. … We designed ‘Horizon [Zero Dawn]’ on paper basically with that pacing in mind, and it’s something we are still using today.”

The game was always envisioned to take place in a wild, overgrown and lush American landscape, even though the team briefly discussed staying in Europe or the Netherlands. North America’s geographic diversity and iconic locations (such as San Francisco and other cities in the 2022 sequel, “Horizon Forbidden West”) make for easy-to-recognize landmarks in gameplay, as well as a compelling stage for a science-fiction future where humanity lacks any knowledge of human achievement from most of their history.

Aloy was also always meant to be a woman. Like with the series’s themes of restorative beauty, centering femininity in its heroism was an element of the studio recoiling from the loud masculinity of the Killzone games, de Jonge said.

“One thing we were also a little bit frustrated during the Killzone days was on our box cover, we had the enemy. We had the Helghast,” de Jonge said, referring to the iconic, red-eyed Nazi-like soldiers of Killzone. “We didn’t have a hero character. So this was a counter reaction. Let’s do a female protagonist, and put her on the box cover.”

The striking red hair, too, was planned from the beginning, said van Beek; it was meant to catch the eye, like the hair of a Disney princess. While various different concepts of Aloy were focus tested, the scarlet design always won out.

“We had all sorts of Aloys there … we already knew which one we gravitated toward, and that was the same one as the focus tests,” de Jonge said.

But while the Horizon story features a diverse cast with many different ethnicities represented, Aloy as a character does evoke the narrative trope of the “white savior,” in which a white character rescues non-White people from their misfortunes. The franchise’s costume design and aesthetic is inspired by Native American imagery and the image of the classic American frontiersman; van Beek described Aloy’s story as “sort of like a Western story, with a girl riding on horseback traveling over the Great Plains.”

The first game’s script generated controversy by using certain words to describe warriors that was seen as insensitive to Native Americans. The game’s narrative director, John Gonzales, said the studio didn’t mean to offend, and that the art was inspired by cultures from all over the world. Sure enough, prominent characters like Aloy’s friend Erend seem inspired by the Vikings.

Because the burden of saving humanity’s chance for a future lies on Aloy, it was important to the team that she and the characters around her seemed believable and relatable, reacting how actual people might when they discover San Francisco as ancient ruins of their ancestors, whom players can imagine as our near future selves, destroyed by their own technology. Aloy and humanity’s relationship with their past and present is further elevated in “Forbidden West.” It’s a result of the studio doubling down on what made the first game’s story so memorable to its fans: the idea of “futurist archaeology.” In “Forbidden West,” for example, the recipe and cooking method for pizza is a new and intensely intriguing concept for humans a thousand years in the future who have lost touch with their history.

While the franchise’s first chapter answered many questions about how Aloy’s world came to be, the studio was challenged to sustain that mystery through a sequel. Judging from largely positive reviews of the latest game — including our own — it seems the studio met that objective.

“You don’t ever want to get to the stage where we have no more surprises, no more mysteries to speak of,” van Beek said. “People now know the universe, so it’s one of those things we keep looking for, what else can we pull out of the rabbit’s hat.”