(electronic beeping)
(keyboard clacking) - My name is John Gonzalez. I'm Narrative Director
here at Guerrilla Games. I joined the studio about four years ago. I was brought on board
specifically for this project. Guerrilla reached out to
me because of my background in open-world role-playing
game development, and when they did that, they kind of showed me
the pitch for the project and I was pretty stunned. I mean first of all, I was kind
of flabbergasted to see that a studio that had been working on linear first-person shooters
had decided to create this huge open-world
action role-playing game. I was like, seriously? But it was also really clear that the concept that they were
working on had a world that was unlike anything I had ever seen. It was clear that they were
really excited about it and it was clear that they knew that this was gonna be a
whole new level of challenge. So there was no cockiness
that the studio had. It was sort of like an
appropriate level of fear for taking on something
so immensely ambitious. - [Interviewer] And you're no
stranger to post-apocalyptic open-world role-playing games. - Right, yeah. So I was Lead Writer on Fallout New Vegas, but this world of course was
something completely different, whereas the entire Fallout
series is the post-apocalypse, it's this kind of junk
heap that's left behind as a result of all this human savagery. This was something that was
striking these notes of grace and beauty and majesty, what we often called post
post-apocalyptic nature, that took a lot of inspiration
from BBC documentaries. With some of the early footage
that they were showing me from prototypes, you
could immediately imagine David Attenborough just
starting to narrate what was on screen, and so
it felt like it was something that was very distinctive, unlike anything I'd worked on before. - [Interviewer] Can I bring
it back to those Obsidian days for a little bit? Because I want to talk to you about the challenges of making open-world games, or writing open-world games, that you would have sort of
learned all those years back that essentially, this team
is probably going to learn all over again. What's one of the most
challenging things about writing a game which has
just so much writing in it? - That's exactly right. I mean, I think actually
your question already holds the answer, right? Which is just the amount, the
kind of encyclopedic nature of an open-world role-playing game. The script, for one, is in and of itself an immense challenge. In the case of a game
like Fallout New Vegas, where there was so much of a
focus on branching narrative, on player choices that just
led to completely different climaxes, that also meant
that the number of facts that you needed to cross-reference, and the range of, the range of kind of conditional dialogue, incredibly challenging to account for. In the case of Horizon, that still ended up
being a massive script, and so that's a challenge
in and of itself. But we were also doing
something very different with this game I think
because we were trying to create a hybrid between what's
most exciting about playing a massive open-world role-playing game, in terms of the scope of the world and also the depth of the lore, and a lot of the pleasures
of interactive dialogue and there's some choice, but we were really
trying to blend that with what's most exciting and cool
about an action-adventure that has an authored character, that has a defined arc, and the cinematic storytelling
that's used to convey that. - [Interviewer] Right. You probably have a lot
more situations to bestow, like lore onto the player when you have, I guess it's kind of like
an active protagonist as opposed to a passive protagonist in the Fallout games
world, or no protagonist, as the case may be. - I think it's actually that
what's so different about it is that in the case of
something like a Fallout game, you're essentially stepping
into a player-shaped hole. You get to create any kind of
character that you want to be. This was actually one
of the huge challenges on Fallout New Vegas. We literally had to account
for the possibility that the player was a sociopathic
walking flamethrower, who would immediately murder
anyone that they encountered, or someone who was like Mahatma
Gandhi in the wasteland, someone who literally would
not even harm a Cazador, right? And both of those playthroughs
had to be possible. And that was very
difficult to account for. I mean that's, if you've played the game, that was the origin of
the character of Yes Man. It was like, "Ooh,
let's create a character "who's essentially immortal,
you can destroy it, "but then it comes back
in a new instantiation "and is apologizing, it's obsequious, "it wasn't you, it was me",
all this kind of stuff, right? But the relationship that
you have to the world when you're playing that type of game is very different, right? I mean, you're sort of figuring out what are all the different levers of power and what you want to do
with the various factions, and you're uncovering a lot of
lore that can be really cool but is basically impersonal to you. It's about the world. The world itself poses
kind of a big mystery, but it's not your story
as the player necessarily, whereas in this game, everything
about the ancient world, especially everything
that you're gonna find on the main quest,
that's directly relevant to Aloy's own story. She's trying to solve
the riddle of her birth. It turns out the riddle of
her birth and her origins is essentially the riddle
of how this entire world came to be, and so that, our hope was that that would
infuse all of these data points and bits of lore that you were uncovering with a kind of emotion
that you don't usually get in that other type of
open-world experience. When Guerrilla first reached out to me, they had the concept for the
world that was already in place so this was a world that combined three really interesting
elements that at first glance, didn't necessarily seem to fit together. You had this gorgeous post
post-apocalyptic BBC nature that we were talking about,
and then you had this, the wildlife of this world
are these robotic dinosaurs and other machines, and
then you have people who are living in tribes
who have this kind of pre-industrial level of development. They don't really have
knowledge of the science and technology even of our world. Well, that seemed to immediately
pose a really big question, and I mean it's like, if there
was some kind of apocalypse especially a robo-apocalypse. It seems like everybody
would really want to remember that stuff. It's kind of like a
key to survival, right? So there was just a huge mystery there. And it was one of the
things that intrigued me and was a big part of my coming onboard. I really wanted to sink
my teeth into that. And then Aloy was there,
but Aloy was kind of there in nascent form. She was already this tough,
quick-witted, machine hunter. She was obviously already
somebody that was gonna be cool to inhabit in the game
just in terms of the way that she embodied the
wealth of tactical options that a hunter would need
to be able to survive. She was obviously somebody
who had already been hardened by the challenges of living in this world. Other than that, things
were still very undefined. There was, so when I was coming onboard, I was talking about the
studio kind of turning to face what they knew was an immense challenge. When I was brought onboard, it was really part of
a studio-wide objective to raise the bar on the storytelling, and this was the moment that
Guerrilla decided to form an internal writing team. And so, that was great. Not only got a chance to
come in and to recruit some very talented writers to work with, but the other thing that
was amazing about it was, it was never necessary to fight
for the importance of story. Instead, that was something
that had already been decided across every single
department at the studio. Everybody really wanted
to tell an amazing story, and knew that it was
gonna be a big challenge. So that's a rare situation
I think to find yourself in as a storyteller within the medium, is something where you don't have to fight any of those battles. You don't have to convince people that this actually is gonna matter. Everybody was already pre-convinced. - [Interviewer] Can you
speak to the culture of this studio a little bit? As an outsider, at least that I see, or culturally perhaps, and I'm
sure there's quite a lot of nationalities working here,
but there does seem to be something very Dutch about this studio, very creatively in tune, but also penned up, crossing
their Ts, dotting their Is. Is this a particularly well-run studio or a particularly creative
studio or daring studio? Or does it stand out
in any way from places you've worked in the past? Is there anything about this place that feels a little bit different? - Guerrilla is absolutely the
greatest creative environment that I've ever worked in. I mean, it has no parallel in my career. And I don't really know
what's the precise mixture of elements that makes it so. I don't know to what degree
its cultural elements. I do think that there is
a kind of concern about the people who work here
from management on down that is not like a lot
of places that I worked in the United States. I'm not trying to say
that all of those places didn't care about employees,
some of them did very much, but I've also seen the kind
of callous kind of regard to the workplace that sometimes
is part of the States. That's really not the case here. There is I think, a true, sincere concern about the experience for every employee. That may very well be
part of Dutch culture. Dutch culture in general
tends to have a more egalitarian kind of ethos. Beyond that, there's just no
limit to the ambition here, and I don't know if that's
something that's tied to any one particular culture, or if it's just the mix of people, but everyone here has
soaring levels of ambition and it's devoted, or directed rather, not to something like
we want to sell a lot. Obviously, we want to
sell, but it's directed towards something that transcends that. It's towards the idea
of creating something that's actually beautiful, something that's beautiful
in every dimension, something that's beautiful
to look at on the screen, which obviously, I think
Horizon has succeeded at, but also beautiful to play
in terms of the fluidity and the tightness of the controls, the balance of the gameplay, and also beautiful in terms of the story that it's something that
when you're experiencing it, there are huge mysteries,
it hooks your curiosity, hooks your empathy for the character and for other characters
and that it has these, we were hoping to have
like these big payoffs both as revelations of what had
happened in the ancient past and who Aloy is, but also
that those are things that are matters of the heart as well,
that there's emotional payoff. - [Interviewer] Let's talk
about some of that ambition that I guess when you first
came on to the studio. What comes first? Is it Aloy? Is it building the lore of the worlds? Your responsibility as Lead Writer, what do you tackle first? Because there's so much it seems like, a fair amount of things
you could you could go for first of all. - Well, as you might imagine, the work of developing the
story kind of ends up embracing all of those concerns, and
there are inter-dependencies between all of them. So a huge thrust of the
creative work early on was to grapple with what had
happened to the ancient world and how did the world become
what it is in the time that you're playing Horizon? And then the other
parallel track was Aloy, and who exactly is she
and what is her story and what's the goal that's driving her? And then what we were looking to do was to make sure that those
two things were woven together, that they really became as much
as possible the same story. The ambition was to create an experience that was both highly
personal and hugely epic, something where you're
playing a character who has a driving need to solve a mystery. In this case, the mystery of her origins. But that driving need is going to lay bare the deepest secrets of this new world. And I thought that that
was especially important to make sure that this didn't, that the mystery of the
world wasn't something that ended up feeling like a cerebral, just point of curiosity. At best, that would have given
us a good detective tale, but the best detective
tales are the ones where the detective really needs
to solve this mystery, right? And so that's what we were looking for, we were looking for a way of
making the mystery of the earth something that was the
mystery of her own being. On the one hand, the emotional core of the opening of that game, of establishing the relationship
between Rost and Aloy was present in the very
first story document. We had kind of four major story drafts, and these were documents that reach about usually about 80 pages long. They were pretty pretty big. And so that relationship
and elements of what you see in the game was actually
present in the very first version of that, but that
was repeatedly revised and reimagined and it was
something that absolutely was honed over time, every single word was
revised countless times. We do a lot of reworking and revision in order to make sure that what we, what we have is something that we're actually satisfied with. You take a look at any of
the big moments in the game, for example the moment where Aloy is, this is a spoiler, but the
moment where Aloy reemerges from the mountian after
discovering why she was created. That had endless numbers of revisions. I mean, I was bashing my brains
out sometimes with a brick it felt like to try to find
a version of that scene that really paid off on who she was, was really a statement of her character. Yeah, it's a lot of work. - [Interviewer] Was the idea
of you playing her as a child always in there? Because it seems like
a important part of it. - It was. It was, and it was something
that really worried us. I mean, to be frank,
we were wondering like, "Is this gonna work for people? "Is this something where
we can start off the game "and you're not really
yet in the core gameplay, "you're not yet experiencing
this character as an adult? "Is this something where people are "going to disengage from the game?" It was a calculated risk
though because what we found in the writing and then
also in the realization was that this seemed to create
an incredibly strong bond between the player and the character. So that when you have that
moment where little Aloy finally makes the leap and
tumbles and comes rolling up as adult Aloy, you just feel like, "I know exactly who this is, "I know exactly what she's
about and what she's after "and damn it, I'm gonna
make sure she gets there." And so it seemed to pay
off and be worth it. So it was one of the risks,
but no regrets there. I feel like that really worked out. - [Interviewer] And the idea
of her finding her Focus, was that always in there as well? That it was a tool that she found? Because it creates such an interesting, it's one of the most fascinating parts of that opening part of the game because she basically
stumbles upon her superpower. And granted, there are narrative
reasons why perhaps her, with that piece of technology is the combination that's required, but she kind of, she's Peter
Parker who gets bit by a spider in a way, you know? It could have been anyone, right? - Well, that's true. Yeah, I haven't thought
about in those terms, but that's actually a
really good comparison. I know that in some of the
early versions of the story, I had her discovering this Focus device when she was an adult, and
there was a lot of pushback from design saying like,
"Look, that's basically saying "that you want to not
have our user interface "until like hour three or
something like that", I would say, and I really resisted it. And it's just one of these
examples of how wrong I can be. Really, the importance of collaboration across the disciplines,
they really push really hard to say like, "This needs to be
something that she's getting "at the beginning of the game." And it was just the right choice. It's also something that, what
I love about that sequence is that we experience
in a really vivid way her being cast out, her
having nothing, in a way. And then when she discovers this, we found a way of making that feel like it's a partial answer in kind of like, in kind of at that moment, where she sees the happy birthday message from this long dead man to his son, Isaac, the way she responds to that, that she's kind of sensing
some of this familial love that she wants so much, I just
thought that turned out great because it paints the entire, the whole promise of
the ancient world again with an emotional brush. There's something that
she's going to find out here that's not just a matter of curiosity, it's a matter of emotion
and what she needs. - [Interviewer] She repeats
the words, doesn't she? She's sort of says this phrase
back in her mouth, right? - Yeah, she does. But I mean, there are also moments of that in going back to collaboration, the script for that moment is essentially what's realized there, but
the giggle that she has, that's something that
was added by the person who is realizing that. There are things, I mean also, there are just some moments in
the game where the animators were able to have her face,
like the emotion on her face, the emotion on some of the
characters be realized in the way that I found to be pretty, I was really it's kind of
stunned because the amount of empathic imagination
that's necessary to get micro-expressions like
that, yeah, I was like, "Wow, that really requires
imagination of a sort, "I wouldn't even know where
to, how to start doing that "if you gave me a whole
bunch of training about "how to animate a human face, "I would still have no idea of how to do "what they were doing." I was really, I was really amazed. - [Interviewer] And it seems like, that seems very important
in that entire opening sort of area with the Nora and that like, she's beat upon emotionally
non-stop throughout that entire, everyone keeps saying she's an
outcast or putting her down. And one of the things that I
found fascinating about it, I'm wondering how much of this
you were involved in is that the ways in which she
responds to her criticism isn't so much that she has a quick-witted response for things,
but she kind of does it with her actions. A lot of the time, they're saying like, "Oh, you're never going to", what was the name of the
trial again that she does? - The Proving. - [Interviewer] The Proving,
it's very much like she does it and then more tragedy happens again and she has to overcome
that and overcome that, and it's not until you go
back to Mother's Embrace after quite a while that you
finally get the catharsis from some of the matriarchs, but it seems like a lot
of it is about the doing. Is that the case, or am I
reading that a little bit wrong? - No, I think you're absolutely right. Because I think this is something that is I think actually surprisingly
little understood by both practitioners, like
the people who create media, and then also the people who experience it which is that story craft
is really largely not about what gets said. Dialogue is hugely important, and it's one of the main
pleasures of experiencing a story, but dialogue, whether it's good or bad, isn't usually based on the cleverness or the freshness of the words, it's how appropriate
it is to the situation. It's the action that a character is taking with what they're saying. Dialogue is action. And story craft is entirely about action. Now, that action can
sometimes be internal, but that sometimes that
action is some kind of huge physical challenge, sometimes it's a social challenge
just between two people, but it's how the action plays out at all of those different levels. So the opening sequence
that you're talking about where we experience Aloy's childhood, what we see again and again is that there are these obstacles that
are being thrown in her way. And then one of the things
that I think hooks us it's not just our empathy
with the underdog, the person who's being mistreated. Thankfully, most of us respond to that by having sympathy for the
person who's being mistreated, but it's also the fact
that she will not stop. She has this kind of will that you can see from the very start. Every time that she has an
obstacle thrown in her way, she is driven to find some
kind of way of surmounting it or bypassing it, and that's
something that I think really hooks us because when
it really comes down to it, that's what we all need
in our daily lives too. I mean, our challenges
are not at the same level as fighting a Thunderjaw. But we all have different
challenges every single day right? And we're always having
to try to call upon some kind of inner reserve of
will or ingenuity or whatever, and so that's what I think, that's really what hooks
us about great stories is seeing people put
in extreme situations, which drive them to call
upon resources and come up with some way to try to
surmount those challenges and it drives them all the
way to the most extreme tests, and then at that point,
we see whether they fail or they succeed, you know? And so yeah, it really does
all play out through action. It's a matter of orchestrating
I guess the obstacle course that the character will have to cross. There was already kind of
a really great foundation for the tribes that was in place, even at the moment that
I was coming in where I had been exploring these tribes, exploring their culture,
sort of in relationship to the environment, a lot
of the kind of factors that you were just talking about. Also, the kind of the unique
aesthetic of each tribe, the pageantry of the Carja, for example, the grandness of their architecture, obviously incredibly different
from the more rustic Nora. And so they were already
I think on the right track in making each one of these groups feel incredibly distinctive. And then that really
inspired us as storytellers to try to imagine okay, well, what are the different sorts of myths that these groups would have? What sort of like each unique, each unique environment, the
challenges of that environment, what are the machines
that they're dealing with, and what kind of stories would they tell about this world to understand it? And this was of course, I
mean in the case of the Nora, one of the things that we
were really interested in was this idea that they
live close to a facility from which new generation humans emerged, let's say 750, 800 years ago. So they had, they worshiped this goddess they call All-Mother. And a lot of that is now
shrouded in the past, but it's basically true. I mean, it's not quite
true, but it's kind of true. And so the idea also that
that would inform that tribe centuries later so that it is
still a functioning matriarchy and that the role of women
would be prized in that way was really, it seemed to make
sense and it just seemed cool. It was a way of kind of hinting that there is something more you're
going to be discovering here. And we wanted to do that again and again with all of those tribes. We want to try to imagine what was unique about their circumstances, and then how that informed their culture and their fables and their myths. Yeah, another thing that
interested us was the challenge of creating a world
that didn't feel static, that didn't feel like, as you might be, you won't be surprised to find out I played a lot of Dungeons and
Dragons when I was a teenager and so it's kind of like every teenage kid who plays Dungeons and
Dragons at some point draws the big map of all of the countries and gives them names and
all this kind of stuff, but they don't have any kind of history, it's just like you're
creating it at that moment, and it's a static world where, "Well, this civilization's like that "and this civilization's like that." And instead what we wanted
to do was to try to imagine what were the histories of
each one of these tribes really from that moment
at about 750 years ago when people are first
reemerging on the planet and don't understand at all what it is that they're doing there, and they're trying to
make sense of everything. And we also wanted to
make sure that there were a lot of conflicts, a lot of, well, just that there had
been these huge events that had occurred in the recent past, which I also think is something that, what's really great about
working on Shadow of Mordor and reacquainting myself with the lore of world builder par
excellence, J.R.R. Tolkien, one of the things that I
had never really understood until I was revisiting this, it's like, he's not setting the "Lord of the Rings" during the grandest stage,
that stuff's all in the past. This is sort of in the
Dark Ages so to speak of what's left behind. So really imagining all of this, the history and using that to, it just gives you so much
more that you can use to inform the dialogue
and the understanding that characters have of the world, it just makes it so much richer. So pretty early on, when I
was beginning work on the game and looking at that curious
juxtaposition of elements, something very high-tech
like the machines, something low-tech like
the people who are living at this time, the lush,
verdant, majestic nature, trying to understand, "Okay, how do those things come together?" This is really what ended up
I think inspiring the thinking that led to this connection between Aloy and Elisabet Sobeck, the route to get there
was a bit circuitous. So the first thing was,
really wanted to make sure that the apocalypse was
something that wasn't just what you would expect. For this reason, I didn't
like scenarios where there had been nations that
went to war with robots and it leveled human civilization. I didn't like it for two reasons. The first reason was,
it felt kind of like a, "Yeah, okay, like you
showed me this world, "that's the first thing
I would think happened, "and you're telling me
now, that happened." That's gonna be disappointing,
didn't want to disappoint. The second thing is it didn't
do anything to help explain why people would have lost scientific and technological knowledge, right? They would have wanted to
hold on to that desperately. So that really inspired the
idea that the apocalypse was something where it
was an existential threat that came true. It wasn't just the end of civilization, it wasn't even just the end of humanity, it was the end of life on earth. It was that drastic. It was the world being
reduced to a barren rock, floating in space, as
lifeless as the moon. And that seemed really, I shouldn't say it seems really cool. It's terrifying and therefore a great idea because it gives us the
suitable kind of drama and shock of a revelation, right? Like, "Whoa!" Okay, but if that's the case,
then the other part of that has to be there's some kind
of force that reconstituted life on earth, and so what would that be? Played around with ideas that
there was some kind of colony that had returned to
earth and had done this, but this also didn't at all
help to explain why people have lost knowledge. So the concept that I seized on that seemed really
interesting was this notion that there had been a terraforming system that had been created, an automated, artificially
intelligent terraforming system that had reconstituted life on earth. This seemed really interesting
in part because it gives us sort of the drama of Project Zero Dawn, these heroic scientists are
racing the Doomsday Clock to create the infrastructure
that will allow this, this machine to do what it
needs to do to bring back life, but the other thing was
it immediately suggested the role of machines, it connected very strongly
to the role of machines. The machines are the
servitors of the system. They are the kind of
distributed network of agents that are doing the work of
this terraforming system. Okay, that's great, this
is becoming more cohesive. It also gives us an explanation
for how this knowledge isn't transmitted, something goes wrong. So at this point of course,
in story development, don't know what that is,
but something has gone wrong where people have not
received this kind of trove of knowledge that would
have been prepared for them. And then finally, as we
were in investigating this project and this idea that there are these heroic scientists, well,
what if there's one scientist who's leading this? And she's sort of the
the main hero of this? Elisabet Sobeck, so she's the creator of this terraforming system. Well, what if the
terraforming system later on undergoes a crisis that's so extreme, that the only way that
it can repair itself is by recreating its creator? What if it has, oh okay, wait a minute, this all of a sudden gives
us a way of connecting our main character to
the ancient past in a way that gives her a completely
unique relationship, right? I mean, this makes her
exactly the character that you need to play. This makes her a person
who has a kind of role of mythic level importance in the events that are going to unfold. And so then it was a matter
of then looking at that and thinking okay, well how do
you tell a story about that? Well, if you have somebody
who doesn't know her origins and if she's searching to
discover where she came from and if the particular pain
that she has, the most, the deepest pain is that she
doesn't know who her mother was and she's searching for that,
that's gonna line up for that in a way that has the
potential to be very powerful. Because in the end, the mystery
that Aloy is trying to solve throughout that entire game is she's trying to solve
the mystery of herself. And the answer of that is
this woman in the ancient past who fought heroically to preserve life, to give life a future. So as those things started
to come into focus, that seemed to think like, okay, this isn't gonna be easy
to pull off by any means, but those are elements of
this story that feel like they have the potential
to be something special. I think that Aloy's superpower
is actually something that she has even during
the opening cinematic. The real superpower that
she has is that she, she has the same genetic
signature as Elisabet Sobeck. And this is also why she's
been made an outcast, you know? It's because her birth is from
the perspective of the Nora something that can't have happened, and they've really struggled,
the matriarchs have struggled to try and understand
whether or not she is a blessing made flesh, or a curse. And so their not so great compromise is to make her an outcast
and place her with this character of Rost for safekeeping. And sort of take a
wait-and-see approach, right? So I think at the beginning, we sort of introduced that mystery. I think that the moment
where she finds the Focus, something that's not really clear to, it's not really clear in the game, it's not made clear in the game, it was part of our thinking, I think we could have made it clearer is that the reason why that
technology works for her is because she has that genetic focus, I mean, genetic signature. But the other thing that we found is that that risked making things too complicated. And we found that players, when they were going through
that part of the game, they seemed to accept that discovery and starting to use the discovery and were doing so without going like, "Hey, come on, this doesn't make sense." It seemed to flow very well. And I think part of the reason it flows is some of things we talked about before, it is something that, it's a discovery that's not
just a gameplay feature, it has this kind of
immediate emotional effect for the character. It gives her something that helps to begin to fill the hole inside
her, so that she can, it's in some way a replacement. "I don't have the kind
of social connections "that other people have, "the kind of connections of care and love "that other people have in
their life, but I have this", because there's something to grasp onto. It's also part of what's the, that scene where Rost helps
lift her out of the ruin where she's found the Focus. And there's a moment where
she's kind of looking over her shoulder like, "I don't know, "is this sort of like, "do I actually belong down here more?" And then they have that conflict about the things of a metal world,
things of the ancient world that's it's not okay to have, and she is like, not gonna let it go. and Rost, to his credit realizes, "Yeah, I can't take that away from her, "she doesn't have anything else." - [Interviewer] Right. To help develop the power, it's almost like her playing
with her iPhone and he's like, "Stop playing with that
thing", you understand? (laughing) - "Enough screen time!" - [Interviewer] Exactly. I want to talk to you
about the Apocashitstorm, and that whole wonderful
story that plays out. I feel like one of the most powerful parts of the narrative of this game is just how somber and
sad the apocalypse is. It's a world full of hope, but it's embedded in the
death of our entire society so it's like, in a way that for
instance Fallout was as well but Fallout does it in this sort of, I don't know, a more
tongue-in-cheek kind of way, and this is kind of a lot
more personal or something, and that whole story of Zero Dawn and everyone coming to realize
what was actually going on, that it was for the greater good, "But essentially, we're tricking people "and not telling them that
the world was going to end", was that whole, was that
always part of the story, or how difficult was it
to craft that part of it? Because to me, that's like
one of the most affecting video game story parts I've had in years. - Mm-hmm, oh, thank you for saying that. Well, Fallout is the apocalypse
as dark satire, right? It's really the darkest satire. So it's, yeah, it's
funny, but it's really not because it is, again,
about just human savagery and the irrationality of it, that this is what you end up doing, you just wreck everything. And it takes the bleakest
possible view of human nature which is that that is, we're just doomed to repeat
that again and again and again. And then I think as you
touch on about Horizon, it's very different, there
is a more hopeful note. It's not I think a naively hopeful note because there's still
atrocity in this world, there's still tremendous
violence in this world, but it does give the, what happened in the ancient past with the exception of
some of mirthful data logs you can find that reflect the silliness of that particular brand
of consumer culture and technology at that time, but when you take a look at
the story of Enduring Victory, the story of Project Zero Dawn, the Apocashitstorm that's
mentioned and the Vantages story that you can follow, it does strike these notes
of sorrow and regret. And I think that that's, I just think that that's
important in terms of giving the horror of that apocalypse
the kind of resonance that it needs to have. Again, it's really important
that that's not abstract. There's a famous quote
from one of the monsters of the 20th century, Joseph Stalin, where he said something about, "The death of a man's a tragedy, "the death of millions is a statistic", would be more forgivable if he was saying, if he wasn't responsible for the deaths of so many millions. But the basic idea of
what he's saying is true which is that we feel deeply the tragedies of persons with whom we empathize. We actually understand the immensity of the most atrocious events in history through the figures of
individuals, individual stories. So we wanted to make
sure that that was there so you really felt it. At the same time, we wanted to make sure that we weren't just
hammering this one note of feel sad, you know? This is why that cast of characters, they all have little
niggling sort of conflicts with one another and they have their own kind of inside jokes, and they have different
views of the project. This is something I really
enjoy about even the crew of the Alphas who worked on it. One of them, the Travis
Tate guy points out like, "Extinction's natural. "This, it's not." He actually has this very contrary view even of the supposedly heroic project that he's taking part in. And so we wanted to make it, we wanted to make them feel like people. We wanted to give them multiple
dimensions so that the, so that yeah, that you feel it. I mean, another example, and sorry if I'm going on
too long, would be the, when you go on to the
United States Robot Command. There's this little story that
an article called out about one of the soldiers who's
dead in that first chamber that you come through, you can hear the data logs
that he's been sending to his wife, and then you get
the edited censored versions. And there is a kind of immense
sorrow in understanding that, just like seeing the way
that this crisis has just, and the manipulation of the forces that are trying to stop the
crisis are just crushing this connection between these two people. Those kinds of moments I
think make that really feel, I don't know, you feel
it much more deeply. There are some things that
members of the team also created that I thought were wonderful. I mean this moment, well there's a quest in the first game called Peaceful Grove, where it's one of your
introductions to the bow nuke. And this is where for some reason, the machines in this one
particular area aren't hostile. And this to them seems
like a kind of a return to the way that the world used to be. And I think that all of
that is really interesting. And I think that there are
a couple of characters that also highlight really unique
aspects of some of the tribes with really idiosyncratic ways. I think that Nil, the character of Nil, who seems to have become
kind of a fan favorite, the kind of way that he
has this kind of unique, sociopathic kind of approach to killing, but the way that that's connected
to the lore of the Carja, the way that the Carja were
preying on other tribes, and the way, the Red
Raids and all of that, the thing that's really
interesting about it is this is a guy who's sort of a monster but knows that he was a monster, and to the best of his ability. kind of regrets it and has tried to atone. And then also there's a
character that a lot of people have run across, his name is Brin, I believe I'm remembering correctly, who has these sort of shamanic visions when he drinks the blood of machines, these kind of hallucinations
that he'll describe to you, really beautifully performed
by the voice actor. That I think is also just
another one of these moments, like, "Wow, where did that come from? "I thought I was playing
Horizon Zero Dawn, "now all of a sudden, I'm
in a Ken Russell movie. "I'm like between altered
states or something like that." - [Interviewer] So it's
like drinking gasoline as if it's ayahuasca, or something like that.
- Yeah, yeah, exactly. Perfectly put, yeah. (light gentle music) (electronic beeping)
(keyboard clacking)
I found the writing to be fantastic. Each main mission drip fed you a look into the past and it was enthralling to slowly learn what happened and how the world went to hell.
At the same time was a powerful character journey with Aloy and finding out about her past and her place in the world.
All in all I thought it was fantastic writing and plot.
I played this after my first ME:A play through and the difference in pacing, dialogue and characters was eye opening.
Avoiding due to spoilers, but this is a big element in my interest of the game. If every other system is typical open world, and the writing and setting click nicely together, I'll be happy.
The only characters I enjoyed in Horizon were Aloy, Rost, and Silens. Granted, they were three of the most prominent characters and received a significant amount of character development, but the characters weren't what drove Horizon's world. I mostly played the game for the mystery behind what happened to the Old ones. I wasn't very invested in the conflict between the different tribes. I think that plot line was mostly created to drive the plot forward, whereas the old ones plotline actually "wanted to be told" so to speak.
With Andromeda, however, I thought the narrative was largely uninteresting but the characters and world-development were fantastic. I didn't really care what mission I was going on with Andromeda, I just wanted to get to the next cutscene with my squadmates.
Gonzalez did an incredible job writing the story of Horizon. It's no small feat to take a setup like robot dinosaurs and turn it into a thought provoking and intriguing sci-fi story that makes sense. I also loved that they didn't pull any punches with the big reveals. A lot of other developers would have drip fed explanations about the world, but they both presented interesting questions and answered them in one game.
My biggest letdown though is so much of the ancillary plot being told primarily through poorly paced audio and text logs. Walking into one of the vaults and being bombarded with 3+ different types of logs was a clumsy way to dole out the game's great lore. My other big criticism is the last of memorable characters outside of Aloy and Sylens. I really don't recall any characters, side or main quest that left an impression on me. It ended up feeling that Aloy was very solitary in her world, with no characters of similar knowledge to really play off of, and no connections that make you feel nostalgic.