Horizon Forbidden West – Evolving the Machine Creatures

Horizon Forbidden West launched a few months back, featuring an impressive bestiary of new and returning robotic creatures. And if you’d like to know what makes these robot dinosaurs tick, you might be interested in this Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra) article featuring quotes from Guerrilla Games’ lead combat designer Dennis Zopfi and lead asset artist Maxim Fleury.

A couple of sample paragraphs:

Zopfi kicked off our chat by breaking down Guerrilla’s key goals for the machines of Horizon Forbidden West. For returning machines, he explained that the studio wanted to avoid overlap on some machine designs while iterating on existing enemies.

For instance, he called out that the “Watcher” machines from the first game (scouting entities that warn other machines about player movement) was re-designed as the “Burrower,” a small, ferret-like machine that shares many of the Watcher’s core mechanics, but also tunnels underground.

“It was important to keep the new machines fresh and exciting while not making the recurring machines obsolete,” he explained. New machines also had to feel like they naturally existed in the world of Horizon.

All of Forbidden West’s new machines were built on the back of two basic design goals: first, they would need to have unique visual movements. Second, they’d need new combat mechanics to “ensure a fresh gameplay experience.”