Horizon Zero Dawn is a 2017 action role-playing game developed by Guerrilla Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The first instalment in the Horizon video game series, it is set in a post-apocalyptic United States where large robotic machines dominate the Earth while humans live in primitive tribes with varying levels of technological development. The game follows Aloy, a young huntress who sets out to uncover her past. The player uses ranged weapons, a spear, and stealth to combat mechanical creatures and other enemy forces. A skill tree provides the player with new abilities and bonuses. The player can explore the open world to discover locations and take on side quests.
Horizon Zero Dawn was Guerrilla Games' first new intellectual property since Killzone in 2004 and its first open-world and role-playing game. Director Mathijs de Jonge considered it the riskiest idea among those pitched. Development began in 2011 after the completion of Killzone 3. The game engine, Decima, was developed for Killzone: Shadow Fall and modified for Zero Dawn. The game uses vibrant colours and was designed to evoke a sense of adventure and hope despite its post-apocalyptic setting. Anthropologists were consulted to inform the world's decay, while experts in robotics were consulted to develop realistic machine designs. Non-fiction books by Jared Diamond, and futuristic fiction such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Princess Mononoke (1997), influenced the design of the game's setting and narrative. The game's cast included Ashly Burch and Lance Reddick, while the soundtrack was composed by Joris de Man, featuring contributions from The Flight.
Released for the PlayStation 4 in February 2017, the game was ported to Windows in 2020 as the first in a series of PlayStation-exclusive video games arriving on personal computers. A remastered version of the game, developed by Nixxes Software, was released in October 2024. Zero Dawn received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised its setting, story, visuals, and combat; however, its role-playing mechanics and unoriginal gameplay received some criticism. The game won numerous awards including one British Academy Games Awards and two D.I.C.E. Awards, and has sold over 24 million units. An expansion, The Frozen Wilds, was released in November 2017. A sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, was released in February 2022. Events in the game are reinterpreted comically in Lego Horizon Adventures. A film adaptation is in the works by PlayStation Productions and Columbia Pictures.
Gameplay
Horizon Zero Dawn is an action role-playing game played from a third-person view. The player controls Aloy, a huntress who ventures through a post-apocalyptic land ruled by machine creatures. These machines and human enemies, like bandits and cultists, are the game's main types of enemies. Aloy can dodge, sprint, slide, or roll to evade her enemies. Armed with a spear for melee combat, Aloy can also shoot enemies with bows and arrows, set traps such as tripwires, harpoon them to the ground to restrict their movement, or slingshot explosives at them. Different ammunition types offer specialised utility. For example, some arrows help the player dismantle a machine's offensive capabilities by tearing off specific components and disabling weapons, while others can burn or stun enemies. Weapons can also be modified to enhance their qualities such as increasing their damage output or improving their handling. The player can also hide in foliage to ambush nearby enemies, and distract enemies by throwing rocks or whistling. Aloy wears a Focus, a small earpiece that scans machines to identify their location, susceptibilities, level, and the nature of loot they will drop. Information about these machines is then stored in an in-game journal. Machines are categorised into different classes, including Acquisition, Combat, Recon, and Transport, each of which determines their behaviour and response to the player.
Horizon Zero Dawn features an open world that can be freely explored by players. The player uses campfires to save their progress and travel quickly to other locations across the map. Aloy can hack a selection of machines with her spear, some of which can be turned into makeshift mounts. Scaling and hacking large giraffe-like machines known as Tallnecks reveal locations of interest around the map. Exploring underground ruins unlocks additional machines to hack. The main questline handles the major mysteries regarding Aloy's origins and side quests flesh out the world's culture and answer smaller questions. Players can choose from several responses when communicating with non-player characters (NPC), allowing them to shape Aloy's personality during social interactions. The player can also complete optional activities, such as raiding bandit camps, completing hunting challenges, and clearing combat trials in areas of heightened difficulty. The player can find a variety of collectables throughout the game, such as vantages that offer visual information of a past civilisation, metal flowers that contain poetry, and old relics, such as ancient mugs and tribal artefacts.
During exploration, players collect natural resources and machine parts to craft ammo, traps, and potions. Hunting animals also provides materials to craft upgrades that allow Aloy to carry more arrows and consumables. The player can visit merchants to sell unwanted scraps, and purchase additional weapons and outfits. Aloy earns experience points (XP) by completing quests and activities. While individual kills provide a baseline amount of XP, the game rewards skilful play, such as stealth takedowns or headshots, with bonus XP. Once enough XP is accumulated, the player earns Skill Points for upgrading Aloy's abilities. Skills are divided into three categories, allowing players to separately upgrade Aloy's stealth abilities, enhance her combat effectiveness, and improve her healing and gathering capabilities. Through upgrades, Aloy can perform additional feats such as aiming a bow in slow motion, shooting multiple arrows at once, or collecting more resources from each defeated enemy. The player receives rarer variants of the same weapon as they progress the game, allowing access to more ammo types and providing more modification slots.
Synopsis Setting The story is set in a post-apocalyptic Western United States in the 31st century. Humans live in scattered, primitive tribes with varying levels of technological development. Their technologically-advanced predecessors are remembered as the "Old Ones". Large robotic machines dominate the Earth. For the most part, they coexist peacefully with humans, who occasionally hunt them for parts. However, a phenomenon known as the "Derangement" caused machines to become more aggressive toward humans, and caused larger and deadlier machines to appear. The surviving humans are divided into distinct cultures, ranging from the mountain-dwelling, matriarchal Nora hunter-gatherers to the Carja, an empire of desert-dwelling city builders.
Plot Aloy is cast out from the Nora tribe at birth and raised by a fellow outcast, Rost. As a child, she obtains a "Focus", an augmented reality device that gives her special perceptive abilities. Curious about her origins, Aloy undergoes years of training to win the "Proving", a tournament that will compel the Nora tribe's matriarchs to reveal her past. Aloy wins the competition, but masked cultists suddenly attack. Rost sacrifices himself to save Aloy from the cult leader, Helis. When Aloy awakens, the matriarchs explain she was found as an infant before a sealed door within the Nora's sacred mountain. They allow Aloy to leave their lands to pursue the cultists. Aloy learns the cultists are a splinter faction called the Eclipse and that she was targeted for her resemblance to an ancient scientist named Elisabet Sobeck. Exploring the ruins of Faro Automated Solutions, Aloy discovers that the past civilisation was destroyed a thousand years ago when Faro lost control of its self-replicating, biomass-consuming military machines. Sobeck spearheaded "Zero Dawn", a project to create an automated terraforming system to eventually deactivate the machines and restore life to Earth.
Aloy is contacted by Sylens, a secretive figure interested in uncovering the fate of the ancients. He guides her to a decommissioned military base beneath the Citadel, the centre of Eclipse power. Aloy learns that Zero Dawn was an underground network of cloning facilities and databases controlled by a single artificial intelligence, GAIA. After the extinction of life, GAIA successfully deactivated the Faro machines and built her own animalistic machines to restore the biosphere. She then reseeded life on Earth using stored DNA, intending to teach the new humans not to repeat past mistakes. However, Ted Faro sabotaged the subsystem containing humanity's history, reducing the new generation to a tribal society. Aloy also discovers that the Eclipse are secretly controlled by HADES, another of GAIA's subsystems originally designed to enact a controlled extinction if the terraforming process failed.
After obtaining a registry to open the door in the Nora mountain, Aloy is captured by Helis but escapes with Sylens's help. She returns to the Nora, helps them defeat the Eclipse, and finally unlocks the mountain's door. Inside, a recording from GAIA reveals that a transmission of unknown origin caused HADES to go rogue. GAIA attempted to stop HADES by self-destructing, but failed and lost control of her terraforming network, causing the machines to become aggressive. As a contingency, GAIA created a clone of Sobeck in the form of Aloy to one day destroy HADES and restore her functions. Aloy retrieves the master override needed to destroy HADES. Sylens admits he originally founded the Eclipse, tempted by HADES's promises of knowledge, but now realises the AI intends to reactivate the Faro machines and extinguish all life again.
Aloy, aided by her allies, defends Meridian against an Eclipse siege using awakened Faro machines. She kills Helis, and fights off the corrupted machines. She stabs HADES with the master override, ending the war. Aloy journeys to Sobeck's childhood home to mourn her predecessor. In a post-credits scene, Sylens captures the fleeing entity of HADES, intending to interrogate it to find out who sent the signal that awakened it.
Development
Guerrilla Games began developing Horizon following the release of Killzone 3 in 2011. In late 2010, Guerrilla solicited ideas from everyone in the studio as to what their next game would be. There were few guidelines other than no puzzle or racing games. Around 40 pitches were made, and among these was Horizon Zero Dawn, pitched by art director Jan-Bart van Beek, which game director Mathijs de Jonge considered "the most risky" of the concepts. Guerrilla co-founder and managing director Hermen Hulst said a big part of the decision was to move away from the dystopian, gritty tone of the Killzone franchise to a game that was more beautiful and vibrant. Horizon was also chosen because their parent company Sony did not have a western role-playing video game (RPG) in its portfolio at the time. The concept was defined by three pillars: a lush, documentary-style nature setting, robotic dinosaurs, and a red-headed lead character. Development was put on hold briefly when the game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (2010) released, as it featured a similar post-apocalyptic setting and red-headed protagonist. According to Hulst, the team began prototyping a different project for six months before deciding to pitch Horizon to Sony again, driven by their desire to produce something that was "radically different". Lambert Wolterbeek Muller served as Lead Producer, while Michiel van der Leeuw and Misja Baas oversaw the technical and art directions, respectively.