(typing) (tranquil music) - Hello, good morning,
and welcome to Amsterdam, here in the Netherlands,
home of Guerrilla Games, Sony's first party studio responsible for the Killzone franchise,
and one of 2017's most wonderful surprises,
Horizon: Zero Dawn. Guerrilla are based in
the heart of Amsterdam, a city they've called
home for 17 years now, but until quite recently, the studio was only ever associated with
a single franchise, a series of sci-fi first person shooters
exclusive to Sony consoles. But after years of developing battles between the ISA and
Helghast, Guerrilla embarked on a new challenge, to create a game several times the scale of Killzone. An open-world game set in a
new type of post-apocalypse, a game with a meaningful
story, memorable characters, and a lush naturalistic world. We know how this story
ends, Horizon: Zero Dawn has been a massive success for Guerrilla, critically praised and
commercially successful. But as I completed the
game earlier this year, I couldn't help but think
how, how did they get here, how did they pull it off? How does a studio that cut their teeth making linear first person shooters scale up and retool to make an
open world role-playing game, what were the many challenges
they faced in doing so, and what were the creative decisions that led them to create
the universe and gameplay of Horizon: Zero Dawn? We have a lot of questions. I better finish this coffee soon. (calm instrumental music) Our story starts in the year 2000. Guerrilla Games was created
from the amalgamation of three Dutch companies,
Digital Infinity, Lost Boys, and Orange Games. At the time, the studio was
only about 30 people strong, and many of those people are
leads at the studio today. Back then, Lost Boys had been working on a first person shooter concept
known simply as Marines. But during this era of games development, self-publishing wasn't so
accessible to small studios. So the first thing Guerrilla needed was somebody to help them make it. They noticed that, for all
of the success that Sony was enjoying in the console market, they didn't have a strong
first person shooter in their exclusive portfolio,
unlike say Microsoft who were seeling consoles based on the word of mouth of mouth around Halo. So they pitched Marines
to Sony and got themselves the deal of a lifetime. - Signing a deal with Sony
was, that was the ultimate, that was the ideal for
an independent developer. I think Sony had, what,
70, 72% market share in that PlayStation 2 era. So for us, as a tiny, tiny
studio in the Netherlands where there was no games industry to sign a deal with
PlayStation to get your title published by Sony, that was exactly what everybody wanted at the time. And then our relationship
evolved very gradually. So we did one of our many games
and we focused on Killzone or Marines, that became Killzone. We decided to basically
put all of our eggs in one basket and do one thing very well and not be distracted by
other genres and other things. And then that project became
increasingly important to PlayStation and they
wanted to make it bigger, 'cause originally, and not
very many people know that, Killzone was set out to be a budget title. It was, it had a very small budget, it had very narrow scope. And because it's, you
know, it was interesting, it looked good, particularly
graphically, it was very strong in the eyes of our
producers at PlayStation. Now, we're talking 2002, 2003. It became a full-fledged triple A game. - [Danny] After four years in development, the studio's first game was released. Killzone had a mixed reception
from the game playing public. Many critics noted that
it contained the seeds of a great game, but
technical issues in graphics, gameplay, and sound design
made it hard to enjoy it. In truth, the game had
barely come together in time, and its multiplayer mode had
been crammed in last minute. It was pretty ambitious
and had fallen short of both the market and
Guerrilla's expectations, but that didn't stop the Guerrillas from setting even loftier ambitions. The team learned from the
mistakes of the first game by employing dedicated game designers and installing game directors to help keep the new project on track. Executive producer Angie Smets
remembers that time well. - Also, we shipped Killzone
1 and we knew that we had a lot to improve just on
our development process. For a while, we worked on
an internal vision video about what a first person
shooter game could look like for the next generation, and it was meant for internal use only, to be like, you know, a visionary piece. 'Cause when we started, it was gonna be, Killzone 2 was originally
a PlayStation 2 game. - [Danny] If this
visionary piece is starting to sound familiar, it's because
you've probably watched it. What was meant to be a target video for the team to aim
towards somehow made it onto Sony's stage at E3 2005. - When we were in the planning
stages for this event, we asked many of our development partners, including several teams within
our own internal studios, to submit content to be shown today. We expected to see a few bright lights and a couple of diamonds in the rough, as it is early in the development process. Our partners have prepared a glimpse into this future to share with you today, so let's take a look at what
fans have to look forward to. Near the end of the press
conference, Kaz Hirai introduced a demo reel of existing franchises that would see games on
the upcoming PlayStation 3. And it was there, right
after what we now know was the first tease of
Red Dead Redemption, that we caught our first
glimpse of the second Killzone. - Which we thought was
very cool, you know, we worked very hard on
this visionary piece, our vision for the future of gaming. And then somebody from, I believe
it was the marketing group in the state said yeah,
and this is running real time on the PlayStation 3. And we were watching this
back home going like no, what did he just say, 'cause
he knows that's not true. But then we figured like yeah, you know, nobody will believe that
because it's obvious that it's all rendered. And then we went online and lots of people actually did believe it,
and then we were like oh, this is not good. 'Cause in reality we, I think we just, I think the first kit had
just arrived for R&D purposes. I'm not sure if we had the first triangle rendering demo ready, or maybe that even took
like two more months before we were up to that point. But the sheer enthusiasm that came out of us showing the trailer did, I think, play a big role in us then being asked to make it a PlayStation 3 title. And that's also when we realized we really had to scale up the team. Because the PlayStation 3,
compared to the PlayStation 2, was so much more powerful, we could show so much more detail. - What Killzone 1 was, it did well, it gave us a reputation
for technology, for art. But then in terms of gameplay, that very visceral combat
experience, that was Killzone 2. - [Danny] Killzone 2 was a
huge success for the studio and cemented Guerrilla as one of Sony's most important first party studios. Over the next few years,
the team would continue to work on the franchise,
utilizing whatever new technology Sony had come up with. Killzone Liberation was a flagship title for Sony's first handheld, the PSP. Killzone 3 came out for
the PlayStation 3 in 2011, supporting both PlayStation
Move and 3D technology. And Killzone Mercenary was released for the PlayStation Vita in 2013. But after a decade of working on dark, dystopian futures, the team recognized that they couldn't do space Nazis forever. - If people work on
something for too long, there is this notion of
fatigue, creative fatigue. And they can no longer do their best work. (calm music) Doesn't mean that we'll never do anything to Killzone series, 'cause we
really love that franchise, we love the universe that we created. But it's just healthy for
people to do something else, so we were already, I guess
back in the Killzone 3 days when we, that was our fifth Killzone game, we were open to exploring something new. - So it's 2010, around March or April. We've got about nine
months left on Killzone 3. And so we were thinking like okay, well, this is the third one, are
we gonna continue with this? There was, of course, this question. It was like, Killzone was
successful, but never sort of, you know, big successful. Is this really what we wanna
be doing for another 10 years, is this the best way that we can spend all the time and effort
and talent of the team? - Then there was I guess also the idea that people were
interested in something else. There was a craving for,
I guess a very positive, very colorful kind of, you
know, the color palette but also the tone of voice. Whereas Killzone always was very gritty, we always wanted to make
a world that, you know, very dystopian, you want
to get the hell out of it. We really wanted to make a game that you wanna spend time
in, that's beautiful, that's comfortable. Maybe that has to do
with people, you know, having kids in school, and
it's nice to talk about it at the schoolyard, but there certainly was that hunger for
something very positive and colorful and meaningful. - I was working on it
from like, let's say 99, so it was quite some time. I think for the whole
studio, everybody was ready for something new, something fresh. Although I think we
were quite afraid of it at the same time, but yeah, we definitely were all looking for something new. I think that's what we got. - When the studio was planning what their future
identity was going to be, the games they were going to make in the next 5-10 years, they did so in a typically Dutch egalitarian manner, by inviting the Guerrillas
to pitch their own ideas. (calm music) - Back in 2010, so that
was towards the end of the Killzone 3 development track, we put together a brief. Very detailed, probably
an eight, nine page brief discussing everything
from commercial rationales to Guerrilla's core competencies, we had a lot of constraints and conditions that we wanted the pitches to adhere to. Everybody that worked at
Guerrilla was invited to pitch. - We're a pretty flat company. So it's very Dutch not to
be too higher key focused. So we see everybody as equal, equality is a really important value
also in Dutch society. - And I believe we got
almost 40 pitches back. Really interesting to me
is that there, I believe there was only one straight
shooter that came back. I mean, there was gun
gameplay in many of them, but a straight solid
FPS, that was only one, maybe two of them. - [Danny] And then that
tells you something about the studio. - That tells you, and I think
that illustrates that hunger, that craving for something new. I might've said no puzzle
games, no racing games 'cause other people are way
better at that than we are. So don't do that. But within that, everything was possible. We also went over Sony's
portfolio at the time, Sony had no Western RPG in
their exclusive portfolio, and you saw a lot of people
actually taking that on board, 'cause I think when you,
as a development studio and a part of Worldwide Studios, you get that creative freedom. You have also, at the same time, a huge responsibility to contribute. - And so the whole studio
got invited to do pitches. We got I think about 30-40, quite a bunch. Took us weeks to review them all. So everybody had to do
a standard presentation of about 20-30 minutes
in front of the group of directors and managers of the company. - [Danny] The studio was awash with ideas, some were full blown game concepts, others were just ideas for mechanics. There were several role-playing games. Some were set on fantastical worlds, others in alternative pasts,
some in the far-flung future. One of them had a robot companion. Guerrilla were a little
cagey about telling us about these pitches, it's a creative wild that they still pull from today. But they did tell us about
the two most important ones. The first came from JB,
the studio's art director. It was an open world game
featuring a young girl, a girl who was fascinated
with her world's lost past. - A lot of the elements
were already there. It adds the machines, it
had a post-apocalyptic world that was completely overgrown 1,000 years after the fall of mankind. Aloy was already there, the
tribes were already there. What we didn't have yet was
a completely cohesive story about what happened to the world. I was sort of cheating in the pitch because I said like, it's a mystery. It was also by far the most risky one, because sort of even from a point of design philosophy and production, it's sort of like a 180
compared to what we did before. - It wasn't clear what the
gameplay would be in a game. So that was hard for me to see, yeah. I knew that was gonna be a lot
of work to figure that out. But it had such cool elements in it, like the machines and the far future, the sci-fi setting, sense of danger in it. There were so many nice things in there. And it being an open world action RPG, that was also a part of the pitch. That to me personally
also had huge appeal. - [Danny] The studio loved the pitch, but there was a snag. At around the time they
were talking about Horizon, a similar looking game was announced just across the North Sea in England. A post-apocalyptic re-imagining of the Ming Dynasty novel,
Journey to the West. (calm music) - [Trip] There must've been thousands of people living here. - [Monkey] More. - [Trip] Tens of thousands? - [Monkey] Maybe. - At the same time,
Ninja Theory was working on a game called Enslaved. And Enslaved basically featured
a post-apocalyptic world, a female protagonist,
machines that were slumbering that would be awakened. So I myself went to
Hermen and I said like, I don't think we should
do this, it touches too much of these other points. And Hermen, he sort of was very reluctant. He said like okay, well,
I think it's a bad idea to do this, but you know,
we'll can it for now and maybe we'll look at it later. And so the company went to
work on another project, which also people felt maybe
was a little bit more safe and secure, it was more in our line. It was a gritty sci-fi universe,
but still very imaginative. - [Danny] Guerrilla
put Horizon to the side and started working on another game. In terms of gameplay, it
was something a lot closer to the work they had done with
Killzone, but less linear, more open, and totally
different in terms of setting. A sort of alternate
universe monster mashup with a striking visual style. - Yeah, that was Roy Postma's pitch. Yeah, that was a game, very
steampunky, that was his thing. - Yeah, it was like
alternate history in the additional revolution, and
it would throw together all like the historical
figures from the time to get like the Jekyll and Hydes
and all that kind of stuff. So it like, was it (mumbles),
extraordinary gentleman. Sort of that angle. - Gunplay in there. But if you look at the concept art that he produced for that,
that was very very reminiscent of The Order, and we weren't aware of that project at the time. So when that was
internally shown, that was, wait, I thought we were doing
that, or we're not doing that. How great that they were doing it? - [Danny] The studio worked
on the unannounced game for over six months, but when it came time to pitch it to Sony,
they couldn't get Horizon out of their minds. - I think it was some point when we were already pitching the other one, that I went to Hermen
and said like, you know, why exactly did we shelve Horizon, because there were some market conditions, other games had come out. And I was like, we should try again. And Hermen was exactly on the same page, he was thinking the same
thing around that time. - We actually went quite extreme with this idea of openness and getting, and inviting people's opinions. Like many publishers do,
Sony Worldwide Studios gather after E3 when everybody is in LA. We had this meeting of about 150 devs and senior execs as well. - Right to the point where we
were gonna pitch it to Sony, Hermen literally came at
sort of like the 11th hour and said like, get the other pictures up, get Horizon and we'll do
both at the same time. And so like, well, that's unfair, here's a highly polished
pitch with lots of, you know, interesting animations and game
mechanics that already work. And this is sort of like
a really rough sketch. - I pitched both of them and
I literally just asked people, raise your hand. And it wasn't so much by
vote, but I went to see the people that had very strong opinions. What I really picked up on was that people that loved Horizon, they
loved it with a passion. They really liked so many things about it, including the character,
the story, that crazy world of that nature, and
then the machines in it. So the quality of the likes that we got were really really strong,
and we built on that. (radio chatter) - [Danny] The Guerrillas
decided to take the risk and follow their passion. Their next franchise would be
set in the world of Horizon. But there were dozens of
things that could go wrong. First, Guerrilla had never
made an open world game before, they didn't have that expertise. Plus, this was coming out
on a whole new generation of console, there were
too many unknowables and too many things that could
negatively impact the project. So Angie and the leadership team devised a plan to mitigate that risk. They'd work on two games,
the first, a launch title for the PlayStation 4 in
the Killzone franchise. This would help the team
build the necessary tools and jump over many of
the technical hurdles of working on a new platform. - When we were making Shadow Fall, we already were making
Horizon in parallel. So some of the things in
Shadow Fall were like, that's for Horizon as well. We were like stretching
our coordinate space because we knew we had
to do an open world, so everything had to be wider and larger and we were starting to
do those experiments. So some of the code in
Shadow Fall actually dealt with like large open worlds,
but like was not actually used. Into very late in the day,
we couldn't really afford to have two different engines. So it's exactly the same engine. What we did at some
point, just like the code to run Horizon and Shadow
Fall was pretty much exactly the same code until the day
that Shadow Fall shipped. Like, you just put different content, like a different mod pack,
basically, and it became Horizon. - [Danny] But while most
of the studio was working on Shadow Fall, a smaller
team would focus on Horizon in what they called an ideation process. This is effectively a long
iterative brainstorming process where the team would try out new ideas, build prototypes, and iterate on the game in a small skunkworks project. Horizon could've ended up looking like a completely different game, but the decisions made
during this ideation process would steer it towards the game
it would eventually become. (calm music) - How it works over here
is that we don't have a sort of like single creative director that controls everything. A group of three people, game
director, the art director, and the narrative director that together sort of create the creative board. One of the things that we
established quite early on is this design process, and it sounds a little bit pretentious, but it's called intrinsic ideation and
it's quite a mouthful. But the whole idea is basically
that's within this sort of design flow, so you
can't just do something because it's cool. It's a way of avoiding what
people call the rule of cool, like if you have an idea and you just add another cool idea on top
of it, another cool idea, basically that idea must be cooler. But then you end up with, you know, dinosaurs riding sharks with lasers. So the idea was really basically like, everything has to come from things that we have already established
as truth to the world. - So with Horizon, when we started, we created small experiences,
small playable experiences. And that allowed us to kind
of create these moments, these encounters with machines
through a bit of nature with a female character,
and everything didn't look like it looks today when the game shipped. At least you could see the
potential and you could get a feel for it, and by
playing this over and over and by adjusting things, you also get, you learn quite a lot. You learn about the density,
you learn about the pacing, you learn about positioning, landscaping, many many things you can
learn from just playing your own prototypes,
and that's an approach that I personally really like. - Rather than having a
brainstorm at the start and then do implementation, it's a process where you implement and you analyze, you evaluate, you have some conclusions that you then brainstorm about, and then you implement
those again, you evaluate, have some conclusions and
you go through this cycle. And with this cycle, you
try to bring something to a better standard. And to give you an example,
the robots, the machines. So we started designing those with a bit of a Killzone mindset. In Killzone, we always
had some like flying or more like war machines. If you look back at the designs, they have this sort of military style. And we've played around with the idea that they could be sort of like these maybe broken war machines. I think the bigger problem with it was that it didn't work from
an emotional perspective. Like the emotional core
was just completely off. - We came from Killzone. Basically, all our designs for
military industrial machines. And that sort of also, sort of the first avenue that we took. And we built a whole
bunch of these things, sort of like alien creepy
machines, quite inhuman, quite monster-esque, grotesque
even to sort of points. And then we put it in game
and it didn't really work. The whole idea was really
that you felt like a hunter, and the moment basically
that you put a player against something that
looks like, you know, a tank from Terminator, you start feeling more like a soldier in a war. - And what the team did then is they went back to a period in time where humans were not the dominant
life form, the stone ages. And then I don't remember who,
somebody suggested like yeah, maybe we should make
like a dinosaur machine. And then lots of people
got really worried, they were like robo dinosaurs, you know, that's, are you crazy? - [Danny] It's absurd. - That's, nah, that's never gonna work. But at the same time, yeah,
we were sort of stuck. And I think this is great,
when you have an ideation, you just, you can try things out, right, it's all about keeping it moving. Then you see the very early
concept art that was created. That already shows you like hey, you know, this idea kind of works. We had some really rough models in 3D and yeah, yeah, it kept working. So even though you could
say that intellectually, it didn't make any sense. Like from an intellectual perspective, it doesn't make any sense. But emotionally, this
completely started to click. - So the concept art
team paints out basically what this could look like,
and then suddenly basically we got these pictures of, you know, sort of primitive men basically hunting large robo brachiosaurus, and
basically everybody (mumbles) goes like, this looks awesome, I know it's silly, but I wanna play this. And so like well, I guess we're making a robo dinosaur hunting game. You felt much more like a hunter because you could study them and read them and get a mental picture of this thing instead of it was really
alien and strange, it would be really hard
to develop very much. - [Danny] Players of games
see everything in reverse, we see the final product
and then we dive backwards. But there's obviously like you've got this wide cone and you try
to get everyone basically to the same like creative point. Is that like, is that's a struggle, trying to get your art department and-- - Absolutely, absolutely,
and the way I always see that is that you're kind of like
in some sort of a sinus wave, you're going left and right in this cone, which you're trying to slowly go to that end point where
everything comes together. But it's, on one end, it's
good that you left and right and go quite wide, that you
explore different options. So in the beginning, I think that's, yeah, it's only for the better to explore lots of options and ideas and just see if something works and sticks or not. But at some point, you have to narrow down and cut the things that really don't fit. - [Danny] Over the course of this process, the design team was
beginning to find its form. The team started to understand how large the world needed to be. It turned out 50 times smaller than what they had originally envisaged. They wanted a denser world
packed with flora and fauna, but this had its own consequences. You may have already
noticed the second player in this footage we showed earlier. Yes, Horizon was originally
going to have coop, but to do this, they'd have to drop the level of detail in the game by half. Through ideation, they knew
that that wasn't the game they were trying to make. As the project picked up
speed, the team realized that they were lacking in two departments, two areas that they had
never had to dedicate much time to in the past,
narrative and quest design. It's fair to say that
narrative took a backseat to gameplay in Guerrilla's earlier work. The stories in Killzone
were done by contractors, so they never had an
internal writing team. On top of that, linear
first person shooters don't really require a quest department. So to fill in the gaps,
Guerrilla would target two key hires, a narrative director and a quest director. (calm instrumental music) - So there are really two things, one is we acknowledged that
there's a lot in Horizon that truly builds on
our core competence and what we're good at that
needed to be shown in Horizon. So the combat, we were making
an open world action RPG, we wanted to make sure
that the core combat was better than the
competition, that was a goal. 'Cause, you know, that's
what we knew how to do. And then there were
elements that we had zero to hardly any experience
with quest design, storytelling in an open world setting. So that was a recruitment process. We went after some hand picked key hires on the writing team, on
the quest design team. But also, we understood that we required a real overhaul of the
technology to be able to make that, sort of the
tool chain that you need to build these quests, to facilitate great looking graphics in an open world to the expectations that people have of a Guerrilla title that
typically was more linear and therefore easier to build. So we had very well defined project goals, and then we went after the right people to supplement the talent
that we already had. - 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. - [Danny] 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 you know, 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, you know, 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. - [Danny] When John came on board, the story and the game
were quite different. The story still revolved
around Aloy, it had the world, the idea of the machines, her as a hunter. But it centered around a towering city in the center of the game's world. Back then, it was known as Mesa City. It still exists in Horizon: Zero Dawn, but at around a quarter of the size, and you don't reach it until
much later in the game. Maybe you'll remember it, it's the game's largest city, Meridian. But of course, it wasn't just large things that were cut by the writing team, lots of smaller things
did too, including horses. - I remember when John came in, he did a complete overhaul of the story, and we're very happy he did. And one of the things
that needed for the story was that the world did not
have large animals anymore. So for the first couple of years, we have all the prototypes, you
see Aloy riding on a horse. And then sort of John comes
in, overhauls the story and says all horses are out. So naturally, the other
creatives who were like, what do you say? Like, they were completely
used to Aloy riding on a horse. It's ridiculous, she has a horse. Like you know, look at all the cool stuff, look at all the prototypes that we have. And John said no, this
is really important. Like you know, I want Aloy
to be special in this world, so she gets the Focus device
and she can hack machines, so therefore, she's the only person. You know, if she can ride
a horse, everybody can ride a horse in this world, right? Looking back at it, it made
a huge amount of sense, what John was saying, but
it was not necessarily clear when that point was brought to the table. And of course, there
was lots of resistance. - Yeah, he made immediately
such a big impact on, yeah, just the inventory of what
we already came up with. A lot of it he threw out of the window, and he basically wrote a new story. And we went through a number of iterations on that story as well,
to really fine tune it. I think that took about half a year to get the story from when he joined to when we thought okay, this story, we like this story, this
is what we're gonna make. - 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 wanna 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, you know. Someone who literally would not even harm, you know, a cazador, right. And both of those play-throughs
had to be possible. 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, you know, figuring out what are all the
different levers of powers and what you wanna do
with the various factions. And you're uncovering a lot of
lore that can be really cool, but it's basically impersonal
to you, it's about the world. You know, 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 story, she's, you know, trying to
solve the riddle of her birth. 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, you know, 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, you know, a defined arc. And the cinematic storytelling
that's used to convey that. - [Danny] Story in video games is action, and so for a story to
work, you need actions that help the player feel connected to it. John was hired to write the story, develop the lore and
create the characters, but the actions those
characters would take was the work of another
department, quest design. This is where Guerrilla
targeted another key hire, another American too, David Ford who, like John, had quite the resume. I originally started working on EverQuest for Sony Online Entertainment. I did that for about three years. And then I worked on DC Universe
Online in Austin, Texas. Next up, I worked at ZeniMax Online, working on the Elder Scrolls
MMO that was recently released. And I continued my eastward journey and landed here in Amsterdam. - [Danny] So Moscow next. - Or Singapore, who knows. The intro is actually
really really interesting, because it went through a lot of changes compared to where we were
in that initial document. For a long time, Aloy was not gonna get the Focus until The Proving. And she was gonna take,
in The Proving now, you take the Focus off
of the Eclipse leader that's dead on the ground. But we realized that we
were gonna be tying so much into the Focus in terms of
UI and gameplay elements, that it would be very difficult for us to have the first several
chapters of the game without that, so the part at the beginning
where you actually fall into the old world ruin and you
find the Focus in there, that was actually a later addition because we went back to the writing team and we said guys, we have to have a way to get the Focus into her hands earlier. I know that in 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 wanna not have our user interface,
you know, until like hour three or something
like that, are you insane? And I really resisted it. And it's just one of these examples of how wrong I can be, you know? Really, the importance of
collaboration, you know, across the disciplines. They really pushed
really hard to say like, this needs to be something
that she's getting at the beginning of the game. It was just the right choice. It's also something that, you know, what I love about that
sequence is that we experience, in a really vivid way, her being cast out. You know, like 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. Kind of like, that moment where she sees the happy birthday message from this long dead man to his son, Isaac. The way she responds to
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 down here that's not just a matter of curiosity, it's a matter of emotion
and what she needs. - And then that kind of had ripples, because the next quest
where you play with Ross and he's teaching you things
to become one with the Focus. - Then they have that
conflict about, you know, the things of the metal world,
things of the ancient world, that it's not okay to
have, and she is like not gonna let it go. And Ross, to his credit,
realizes yeah, I can't take that away from her, she doesn't
have anything else. - [Danny] Right. (mumbles) It's almost like
her playing with her iPhone and he's like, stop
playing with that thing, I gotta show you how to hunt. (laughter) - Enough screen time. - [Danny] Exactly. David's responsibilities
worked in two directions. First, he set up a pipeline to ensure that quest quality was always
kept to a high standard. He created what he
called an inverse pyramid where the main quests got
the bulk of the attention, side quests a little bit less, and Aaron's were given a lot less time and worked on relatively
late in the process. The idea behind this
was to avoid a scenario where the game world was crammed
full of low stakes quests, a common issue in many open world games. But David was also responsible
in helping the studio build the tools that
would allow for quests to be designed. On Killzone, levels were linear and isolated from one another. But on Horizon, the team
would require complex tools that would allow designers
to develop quests with way points,
dialogues, win conditions, spawn triggers, effects, and so much more. All in a world that was
constantly being iterated on by the level and world design teams. - I interviewed in August,
and I was actually invited to come out for a couple
of days in September, so I officially started in early October and I came out for a
short visit to meet with most of the engineering
team, with Michiel, the tech director, and
a bunch of his leads. Where I kind of laid out my vision for how quest tools would work, you know. I'd seen a bunch of
different ways of doing tools in other games, ways things
have gone poorly, you know, common locations for
bugs or common missteps that I had seen up to that point. So we talked about how we
could kind of encapsulate the scripting in layers that it made sense for it to be in and make sure
that you're not duplicating a lot of scripting in multiple places and just making it easier to untie and untangle what you're creating. But when I got here, the tools were, they were all focused around
making Killzone levels. - Everybody knew that streaming would be a big one, memory management. Because something like
Killzone, splice it into like 100 different shards and everybody plays the same game from A to B. Basically, you know,
maybe there's a couple of paths and twists and
you can take a tour. But that's about it. So it was very predictable, you can test to see like does this part
of the game fit in memory, does it load in time if
you load the next part, and there's like, you can
put it into an Excel table. And something like Horizon
is like, you can go in any direction and just
leave half a quest behind with all of those people
with their plans and purpose because you just like engaged
with them, and we had no clue what sort of effect it
would have on memory. - The tools originally were pretty good for creating bespoke things but not for this broader implementation that we have. It was about a year and
a half into development that the tools that we have now really started to come online. - Yeah, that's actually something that came from JB, our art director, he was very clear from the start, like you know, we have
to do a lot of stuff with procedural placement,
because we cannot populate a very rich world or do like
artistic strokes or like, we can iterate on a world
that they're getting there. He was very adamant, as
art directors can be, on a procedural approach, and
we made a placement system where the artists define rule sets and let them place like meshes
and stuff that they made, but also sounds and entities. So they could, for example,
say like okay, if the distance to the nearest river is
within like eight meters and the height is lower than
200 meters or something, we spawn randomly these entities, like fireflies or
something, like buzzing bees around creeks, and it's like
when the distance to a river is zero meters, so basically
you're in the river, and the current depth
is more than two meters, we spawn like all those stuff
that you find in rivers, all those plants and everything, so like all the cosmetic stuff inside. (calm music) - [Male Speaker] So this
is our world data map. - [Danny] All right. - [Male Speaker] Let's just
zoom into where we are. So we have, we have a type of water, this tells us where the rivers are. We have one for roads, and as you see, these have, they're not
just black and white maps, they have a full (mumbles). So I can tell it's the value
here for, well, for example, in the river, the white
part is where the water is. And at 50 thing gray,
that's the age of the water. And as it fades out, we can say okay, this plant is next to the river. So we're gonna use a different tree here because it knows that that
area is next to the river. - So that's all procedurally generated because it's nature and there's no point in hand placing those
things, it's not really, it doesn't have much, that's
just the way it works. But of course like, we
don't procedurally generate anything manmade or
villages and settlements and everything, it's all just like-- - [Danny] What about creature placement? - That's all hand placed. - [Danny] Hand placed, including animals? - No, wildlife is procedurally based. But it is, again, context dependent, so you'll find different types of, depending on the type of forest
or the elevation or stuff, you will find different types of wildlife. We decided like that, of course, we were going to make an open world engine and everything's gonna be like, you know, different streaming system and stuff, and then they decided to
put like things the size of our Killzone levels
underneath the ground. That took a long time to get right. It was also, it was, I mean,
in retrospect, it's funny because it's a good stress
test for your engine. But you have, all the sort
of problems that we had in the first person game, we also had. But then in our open world
game, underneath the ground, and it had to seamlessly stream. And it also made these ridiculous things where you have like a cauldron
underneath the ground, and then right on top of it, there's like the hunters' gathering or something. And we have to really, it was really easy for the cauldron to be streamed in, so you were standing there like, you know, talking with the campfire
and the scene starts, and then somebody disables
some streaming triggers because you're in a small conversation. And you see everybody's face going to like five triangles and all
the textures disappearing. And you're like, what
the hell is happening, it's like yeah, it's starting
to stream in a bunker that you happen to be
standing right on top of. - [Danny] Streaming the world
was critical to ensuring the game had no loading
screens and so didn't lose any of its immersive qualities. But another important
aspect of memory management is drawing what the engine spends time rendering for the player. Earlier this year, a Dutch
documentary on the studio showed off its frustum culling, much to the wonder of
the game playing public. I asked Michiel to give us some insight into how that system works. - At first I was like,
the frustum culling thing, it was really funny to see that explained, but I think it was a
really good visualization of something that is like super normal in the graphics industry. I mean, of course, you don't draw stuff that's out of screen. This is not even about
streaming, this is about drawing. You basically, of course, like, you have a person somewhere in the world, through a person, you have a camera and it's somewhere above probably looking into the world,
which is defined by something that ends up being square,
so there's a point in space from which sort of like a
square, a thing called a frustum. Everything that's outside of the frustum, you don't have to draw. And then even the stuff
that's inside the frustum, what you try to do is like
draw the things that are close, quite close to you first, and
then stuff that's behind it. Because you don't wanna
like draw a mountain and a bunch of trees on
it and then, you know, five characters in front
of it and then do a house, like you know, one
centimeter in front of you, because you're wasting
all the time first drawing a beautiful mountain
while you're drawing like a door in front of it. So you try to first draw the door, and then when you sent
the mountain to the GPU, it goes like ah, all those
pixels are behind the door, like toss it out. It happened to be in the
documentary and people saw that. And then people were
like, oh, somebody got it, like you know, that's
what's really happening. Like yeah, when that
bunny hops off screen, immediately it's not gone, but of course, we're not rendering it anymore. - [Danny] The tools the
team built were critical to the success of Horizon,
but they worked so well that another team is now started
using them, a team working on one of the most anticipated
games in recent memory. - When Kojima was around,
we did a bold move and I think JB, our art
director, and myself made like a a 340 page
PowerPoint presentation with all the cool stuff
that our engine did, and then at the end of it, we offered them a wooden box with a memory stick, and it was like here, have
our engine's source code. And they do a very deep investigation that I've later seen the results of. Like Excel sheet, like
hundreds and hundreds of lines of like investigation, it's like one of the most thorough and like battle-hardened
teams you've ever seen. And in the end, they were
looking very specifically, I can't say too much,
but they knew which games they wanted to make, Hideo Kojima has a really good idea
about what he wants. They were looking for
something, for the perfect fit, and one of the things that's
really important to them is like making sure they get
the best out of the platform to give the best experience for
the people playing the game. They're really adamant,
they want to make sure that, they will do anything to make sure that the game is the
best thing they can do on the platform that
they're releasing it on. So they were really impressed
by the performance figures, by also the tool set around it. And we've been working
with them ever since. So I mean, of course, I think they need a slightly different direction,
they have a different game, a different focus, different
aspects of the tools. A lot of staff, they
have a lot of experience in a lot of different
areas, and they come up with questions and suggestions
and they help us design better versions of our tools as well. I mean, it definitely works both ways. - It's actually really great to be able to help Hideo on Death Stranding. That is such an amazing
team, they are so experienced and they are so talented. So it kind of was almost obvious that hey, why don't we just offer what we have. How could that possibly hurt us? And we'll help them out with that. And they have been super grateful, they've been bouncing
some really good feedback, so it's actually evolved
into a collaboration. It's really great as a developer, just for the sake of making games, if you can help a great team like that. - Yeah, I joked with our
tech director Michiel, it was like, just as the
3D editor were starting to come online, I was like,
you know, the goal is, you want to, at the end, be
doing some sort of documentary where we're like, look
at our amazing tools. And you know, here we are today. - [Danny] We spent four days
at the studio talking to people working on the game, and when
we interview these developers, we walk away with dozens
of anecdotes about ideas they had that didn't
make the final product. So seeing as we're talking
about a Hideo Kojima game right now, perhaps this is a good moment to drop this one in. - So this was in the
beginning when we started our first prototyping, just to get a feel for what the world would be and how hunting machines would work. We thought like okay, if
you kill a big machine, what do you do with the components? And we thought okay,
you need, you can't just let the machine be there
on the ground, you need all the components, you wanna
salvage everything it has. But it was too much for Aloy
to carry the entire machine, like a Thunderjaw or something. So we thought okay, maybe
she can shoot flairs and when she shoots a flair up, then a tribe that's nearby comes flying in with this giant flying wheel machine, that's what we created. Almost like a flying wheel pirate ship. And they, with ropes, they climb down, they tie it to the machine,
lift it, bring it to the city. And then you can collect
your resources there or the guy from the ship
drops some coins down and you can catch it. But that was also complicated, we had this in a cinematic at some point. But having to do this every
time you kill a big machine didn't make much sense. So we had a number of
these kind of moments where things would just become too big and kind of almost ridiculous. And it also didn't look plausible as well. - [Danny] It sounds like
a post-apocalyptic Fulton, like it Metal Gear Solid 5. - It was that, yeah. (soldier speaks in Russian language) (screaming) - [Danny] The various teams
at Guerrilla were hard at work on their slices of the pie. Narrative was crafting
believable characters and an emotive story, quest design was making sure the missions in the game were diverse and engaging,
art was designing thousands of assets,
production was trying to ensure that everyone hit their milestones and that the game was coming together. Tech was trying to ensure
that the whole game loaded in on time. But there's one critical piece we have to go back to, the idea that started this whole
project off, the machines. The more military style machines the team had originally envisaged
are still in the game. They became part of the story
as old world weapons of war. But the animalistic machines
we now know and love went through a dramatic
evolution of their very own. (tense music) - So the first machine
that we ever finished was the Thunderjaw. Everybody was like, is this a good idea? This is the most complex one. That is our designer says like,
that's why we need to do it. Because basically, if you
can make this one work, we can make the whole game work. - And we saw that, because
it was, like I said, the most complex. So we wanted to try all
the different things you could do with the
machines, like taking the weapons off or slowing them down if you shoot at a certain
part or freezing them or stuff like that. So we had all kind of like
basic mechanical capabilities of the machine already present on there. But also, that first initial
design, it even became more complex, because
that first simplistic one was just blocks, you
couldn't shoot, for example, armor plates off. So it was an additional
layer that we wanted. So that made it even more complex and more and more things. - I think basically we had something like 27 different weak points that all had different functionality,
so you would shoot this particular part and make it (mumbles) it acts in a different
way, that particular part and it acts in a certain way. And everything also needed
to stay visually readable. A large portion of our
feedback is like, you know, sure, you can add more
and more different colors to these things, but ultimately, a Christmas tree isn't really readable. - I think originally like,
every resource canister had to be unique resource. These kind of things. I cannot make that
understandable or readable. So you know, we brought
it down to like three, three or four. But we probably started off with like 12 different unique
resources that you can shoot off the machines, so it was like ah. - At some point, with the
combat, we had so many hidden meters inside the machines. And all the different
machines had different meters. They had stamina and they
had, I don't know what, they got tired from running
at some point and they, there were so many systems at play that we didn't know ourselves exactly how to fight these machines. So that was kind of a
moment where we said okay, let's dial it back and let's
look at the bigger things, what is the most interesting
and what is simpler for players to understand
and what is fun to do? And that it's shooting
things off machines, like shooting the plates,
taking away armor, that's something players
can intuitively understand. And it's nice to break things,
that's always nice feedback, when you shoot something,
something breaks off. So then we thought, okay, we have these, let's put a bigger
emphasis on the components, let's do more with those. - Which is also the reason
why we basically picked the Thunderjaw as like
the prototype robot, just because we knew if we could hit all the things that would
be fun on the robots on this one particular
robot, we could just break it down into smaller pieces and integrate those on the smaller robots like the Watchers and stuff like that. That was more the exercise, okay, what is like the total package and then sort of like break it down into the smaller sections to the other robot. - It took us 18 months to develop it. At E3 in 2015, where we announced it, this was also pretty much basically the only fully functional
machine that we had. And even then, basically, it required a lot of scripting to
keep this thing working. So like, it was this race, it was okay, we're gonna show the
world that we have a game where you can hunt all the
dinosaurs, so make sure this works and that it works really well. - Here we go. Oh, someone's angry! (explosions) (groaning) (heavy breathing) Gotta get under it. (screeching) Got it! (calm music) - Older design implementation of robots were like 50 or 60 pages per robot before we eventually started making them. 'Cause everything had
to be thought out first. Describing everything
from, yeah, the tech ranges to what they're able to do idle and in stealth and group behavior. All the weak points,
where the armor would be. All those kinds of things, hit reactions. Everything was defined. - For example, with the Ravager, right, the Ravager was I think actually the one that we started like a
full new production on after we did all the prototyping. And then, looking at it from
a game design point of view and also from a ratio point of view, that thing was just a predator just like hunting its prey, right? So that's one thing that I really wanted to emphasize in animation. And that's where all this, so like, as soon as we started
to look for reference for like panthers, hyenas, et cetera, that are chasing their prey. It's all like, especially a
cheetah, for example, like, they're at such high speed that, as soon as they sort of like
try to change direction, there's all this sort of
like out of control motion on their legs trying to
keep up with the speed, and that's something that I really wanted to emphasize on the motion on those. - To build a machine based
on an animal, with muscles, again, you get all these
nice like organic lines. You know, you get all
these nice power lines, power curves and all these
kinds of things in it. And then we started building
our framework over it, and instead of like doing
the hexagonal, you know, machine stuff, we started
like following the lines, and everything became nice and organic. And on top of that, you
put like the plating. And of course, they follow
these lines as well, and then you put in the
detailing, so instead of like this sort of super angular
hard surface kind of machine, you know, from the inside
out, we actually built out this new machine that
has all these, you know, retain all these nice curves
and became really, yeah, organic and actually became alive. - [Danny] One of the strongest aspects of the machines' design
is their sound design. The machines in Horizon
sound terrifically unique while giving the player
critical audio cues for them to react to. As I discovered, much like
the design and animations of these machines, a
lot of the inspiration for the sounds came from animals. - It's something that we wanted like for the attacks to have a
very specific audio cue. So that even offscreen, you would know an attack would be coming next to the visual kind of things that we do. And we wanted to have that character that we were describing also
kind of presented in the audio, I think we also used like
a chihuahua for the scout in one of his attacks. So that kind of like
jittery dog kind of feeling. Like the (imitates dog barking). (laughs) - Okay, so the Longlegs I
think had the chicken sound, but also, I don't want to say this, but yeah, I'll say it, whatever. It was a lot of me, actually, yeah. - [Danny] Mimicking a chicken? - Yeah. People will hear it after this,
I'm ruining it, I hate this. (laughs) So actually, when I got robot designs, there wasn't any instructions as to they were gonna have a vocalization. The term vocalization came probably from, actually, my idea that I need them to create a character. My goal was to have, especially
for the machines types that are sort of in a group
structure or in a herd, and if they're clearly
exhibiting animalistic behaviors, I thought okay, they would
talk to each other, I guess, you can just observe them and have this chatter-chitter going on. But they had to be
balanced against the cue that we really needed to communicate. Say, when they see you first time or when they get alerted to
something or when they are in between a combat situation
occasion or they taunt you. All these animations
that actually are there, they are there to create their, sort of communicate their
character, but also function. So to create this sort of iconic relatively easy to
recognize kind of sound, but still keep them attached to the size or the character of the robot. - Our goal was that, by
not looking at the enemy, you could tell what it was
doing and where it was. Just by hearing. So you would hear if it was searching, if it's found something, if
it was going into combat, it was about to attack. So all of these stages,
all of these behaviors that are important for the player, we wanted the player to, only by audio to be able to know what was going on. So that helps if, once we
got that sort of working, that helped enormously
with some of these enemies that might not be in your view. You could still hear what they're doing. And I think players,
maybe not consciously, but I think they, at some point, will learn what specific
sounds of machines, what's going on and if they need to run or dodge or do something else. - [Danny] Over the course of years, these machines evolved
from concept drawings to prototypes to the
machines we see today. They were iterated on, given new looks, personalities, new combat rules, audio cues and so much more. They look and feel like real, believable, animalistic machines. And so perhaps the biggest testament to the quality of work that was done to animalize these
robots was how that work impacted the wildlife in this game. Is there any AI or anything that's shared, or animations that's shared between the machines and the fauna,
like just the animals? - Yes. We did reuse some animations
for the fox, I think? - I think basically all the wildlife, as we call it in game,
is basically a variant on one of the like machine
animations that we did. It was like one of the
time constraint things when in the end, it actually worked out just because they're so animalistic, so we actually transferred over to them. And as soon as we had that,
we just polished them up a little bit, of course, but a lot of sort of like the beta animation
for those wildlife things come actually, they come
from the machines, yeah. - They evolved into real creatures. - Yes, exactly. - [Danny] All right. (calm music) The game was chopped at
and added to for years, it didn't originally have
human on human combat, but through play testing, they realized they needed some for
variety and to help show the various types of tribal cultures. The Tallnecks, known
internally as Comm giraffes, were originally huntable. You may remember them walking in herds in the original E3 2015 reveal. But some of the team didn't think murdering these elegant
non-aggressive creatures worked with Aloy's character. There was years of work done
to create believable tribes with distinct beliefs,
superstitions and cultures. We're going to publish extended interviews containing a lot more of this
deep spoiler-rich insight at a later date. As the project barrels towards
their 2017 release window, so much more had to be completed. A game at this scale
requires so many elements working well and well together. The team all agreed that had it not been for these final months, Horizon: Zero Dawn may not have come together at all. - I think we were fortunate
to have this much time mostly. Figuring out kind of lots of
important things like Aloy, who is Aloy, what is her
personality, what is her story? How old is she, what does she look like? All this stuff just took a
lot of time to figure out. But also, yeah, the same
thing is for the combat. How does, the unique
component of this concept was, of course, these machines
in terms of gameplay. But we didn't know how we
would fight with these. Looking at the Horizon, we might feel like we already knew exactly that combat would be like this
because that's what it is, but that wasn't a straightforward thing that we just ended up there. It was a lot of
experimentation and cutting and adding and changing and simplifying in a lot of cases as well. A year and a half before
we shipped is when we first saw okay, this combat
is gonna be pretty cool. - We were immensely fortunate to find Ashly Burch to play Aloy. We actually had, we
heard a lot of auditions. We even had, for some of
the prototypes we did, we had sort of placeholder dialogue that was put in place by other actors. And none of that ever felt right. And the moment that we
heard Ashly perform Aloy, it was like oh, there's Aloy. It was that feeling of discovery. - I think I'm most proud on how everybody worked together on it. Like, it's the beautiful nature, we get a lot of praise
from our beautiful nature. It's really so many different teams who had to collaborate
on making that work. I mean, there's the huge
let's say performance side of things to get it to stream
and to run on performance and the procedural content
generation aspect of it. Up to the sound team
who, believe it or not, every ecotope, as we call them,
have different bird sounds. So they actually went to do the research and have that all work together. It's really hard to
explain, but if you look at the game three months
before it was done, it was nowhere near the end results. And then even when you
think, you know, seven years, that's such a long time,
how can three months, more or less, does it
really make a difference, but it does, it totally does. - The technology enables,
so you can do a lot more, you can show a lot more
detail, detail in everything, in your assets, in your animations. But also, the consumers, they expect a lot more scope, gameplay duration. I'm actually really proud of the fact of the fact that we have been
able to create a character that people embrace and wanna follow, and I've gotten a lot
of mail and from people who have daughters that, you know, they go training like Aloy did with Ross and they go practice, and
we're literally talking people with, you know, with daughters that are three, four years
old, and they're on the couch and they're practicing and they're doing dodge rolls and they're
buying bow and arrow. So it seems that Aloy, to many people, was an important character. And I don't think we've
had a lead character before that really inspired so many people, including young girls,
that's just really wonderful, that we have been able to create that. - [Danny] Do you have kids yourself? - I have a 13 year old son. And he was not allowed to play
the Frozen Wilds yesterday, and he had not wanted to come
into the studio to play it 'cause he wanted to play it in one go, but he finishes his test today. And I think starting at three today, he will be well into the Frozen Wilds. - [Danny] Do you make your
13 year old son sign NDAs? - I'll let mister PR here answer that one. (laughter) - It's the same thing I think
happened with Killzone 2. Also what we achieved
there, it took a while before that actually sunk
in and before I realized what we built and how much
people were liking it. But it's incredibly motivating, of course, to see this response, and
it gives a lot of energy to start on a new adventure. - [Danny] Are you sick of
making open world games or? - Oh, no, no. (footsteps) (birds chirping) - [Aloy] These look good. (ominous music) (whooshing) (rustling) (explosion) (clanking) I can't spare the weight. (explosion) (typing)
Ooh never watched one of these before though heard plenty of good things about these guys. I'll go through their previous vids after this one.
My Irish cream! I'm excited to watch.
As always. This is aces.
I thought it was super interesting that they passed all of their engine source code over to Kojima Productions. I wonder if the guerrilla engine and tools will spread throughout the Sony first-party studios and become something of a standard for open-world development. Also, with the success of HZD, will there be more emphasis of large open world games in the Sony First Party family?
I swear, every time I see something for Horizon, I absolutely re-fall in love with this game. I'm only like ~30 minutes in, but I really like being able to see so much of what went into developing it. I'm not trying to fangirl over it, but I've honestly not felt this way for a game since maybe Uncharted 2 (MGS4, FF7, MGS1 and Ocarina of Time before it). And Aloy is easily one of my favorite game characters now.
I can't wait until Horizon 2 comes out. Give me pls.
Do these contains spoilers? Haven't gotten around to playing HZD yet unfortunately.
I love Noclip documents, for me one of the best content on youtube. For those who never heared of noclip, go chech their documents about Witcher 3 or Rocket League, they are really worth it.
This beautiful art you see on the thumbnail is done by Jeff Delgado. Everyone should go check him out he's an awesome dude.
Great video! Shows the intricacies of what can happen during development of a game to get it to market.