Horizon Zero Dawn Announced, Open-world Action-RPG Exclusive to PS4

While I admit I didn’t see anything that made me think Horizon Zero Dawn was an action-RPG when it was first shown at Sony’s E3 press conference, the announcement post at the company’s official blog swears it belongs to the genre. The title is in production at Guerrilla Games (the developers of the Killzone franchise) and it’s set in an open post-apocalyptic world that has apparently been overrun by robot dinosaurs.

I’m not joking, see the trailer for yourselves:

Here’s a snippet from the announcement blog post, confirming that the game will have a single, set female protagonist, called Aloy, and that the game is slated for a 2016 release, exclusively on PlayStation 4 (no surprise, given Guerrilla is a first-party dev for Sony):

Horizon Zero Dawn is set in a lush, beautiful open world where nature has reclaimed the ruins of a forgotten civilization. It is a world where mankind is not the dominant species, and highly advanced machines sit at the top of the food chain. You play as Aloy, a young outcast from a tribal society, who has learned to hunt the machines. Intent on unraveling the many mysteries that surround her, Aloy embarks on a quest that will lead her to discover her own destiny.

Along the way, Aloy will face off against an entire menagerie of machines some traveling in herds, others roaming in solitude, all of them presenting a formidable danger. You will need to learn their behaviors, attack patterns and weak points in order to survive. You must use the beautiful environments to your advantage, and employ stealth, agility, and cunning to approach your prey unseen.

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Horizon Zero Dawn is scheduled for a 2016 release, and we’ll have additional details for you in the coming months.

Guerrilla reportedly hired the lead writer of Fallout: New Vegas and a number of CD Projekt RED employees in the past, so this title might be more interesting than one might initially assume. I’ll certainly keep my eye on it.