Horizon Zero Dawn: A Game Design Postmortem

Name: Horizon Zero Dawn: A Game Design Postmortem
Uploaded: 2018-04-11T15:04:50.000Z
Duration: 1 h 58 min 13 s

Introduction and Setting the Stage

In this section, the speaker expresses gratitude for the audience's presence and introduces the topic of game development. They share a personal experience of receiving negative feedback during playtesting.

The Importance of Feedback

Playtesters' feedback during a crucial phase of game development revealed significant issues with balance, difficulty, bugs, and core mechanics.

Negative feedback can be disheartening after years of development and close to the release date.

Game designers have a challenging job as they need to convince others of their ideas and constantly face doubts throughout the development process.

Staying Upright - Analyzing Feedback

The speaker discusses how game designers should handle feedback and shares their approach in tackling problems faced during the development of Horizon Zero Dawn.

Journey through Game Design Phases

The speaker takes the audience through each phase of game design at Guerrilla Games while creating Horizon Zero Dawn.

They highlight intentions, goals, challenges faced, and interesting problems encountered during different phases.

Due to time constraints, only selected problems are discussed in detail.

Reflecting on Problem Solving

The speaker reflects on how they approached problem-solving during development.

They also discuss what they would have done differently if given another chance.

The aim is to inspire fellow game developers to persevere through challenges and learn from past mistakes.

Background and Early Concepts

The speaker provides background information about themselves and Guerilla Games. They mention an early concept pitch for Horizon Zero Dawn that set four major game design goals.

Speaker's Background at Guerilla Games

The speaker has been with Guerilla Games for almost 15 years as a lead game designer.

They have worked on various games, starting as a single-player level designer and progressing to multiplayer and online gameplay.

Early Concept Pitch

In 2001, Guerilla Games received an early concept pitch for Horizon Zero Dawn.

The pitch consisted of approximately 70 PowerPoint slides, outlining the game's vision and goals.

Four major game design goals were established based on this concept pitch.

Summary

The speaker begins by expressing gratitude for the audience's presence and shares their experience of receiving negative feedback during playtesting. They emphasize the importance of feedback in game development and the challenges faced by game designers. The speaker then discusses their approach to analyzing feedback and problem-solving during the development of Horizon Zero Dawn. They reflect on their journey through different phases of game design, highlighting intentions, goals, challenges faced, and selected problems encountered. Finally, they provide background information about themselves and Guerilla Games, along with an overview of an early concept pitch for Horizon Zero Dawn that set four major game design goals.

Creating a World Worth Staying In

The developers wanted to create a game that would make players want to stay in the world rather than just rushing through it. They aimed to build an immersive world filled with awe-inspiring machines, unique cultures, and an open-world experience.

Goals of the Game

The team wanted to create something unique and never done before - fighting against gigantic robot dinosaurs.

They aimed to populate the world with exotic tribes and interesting cultures, imagining how these cultures would evolve after humanity's extinction.

One of their biggest challenges was creating an open-world game for the first time, offering potentially endless amounts of content compared to their previous linear games like Killzone.

Despite having a small multidisciplinary team initially, they spent two and a half years in the concept phase, experimenting and iterating on ideas.

Prototyping and Concept Development

With only Killzone content and tools at their disposal, the team formed an autonomous group of designers, artists, coders, and animators to build prototypes.

They focused on answering high-level questions about combat mechanics against machines, defining what makes Horizon an open-world game, determining player abilities needed for traversal, and shaping the overall story.

The core process involved going wide by quickly creating prototypes to test ideas rather than just designing them on paper.

Combat prototypes involved tackling complex robots with vulnerabilities such as shooting off armor plates or using their own weaponry against them.

Settlement prototypes were built to test density, size, atmosphere, interactions with NPCs, architecture design choices, and player traversal within settlements.

Early Concepts Showcase

The Misfit City prototype showcased different elements coming together, exploring settlement architecture, NPC interactions, and player traversal.

This summary provides an overview of the transcript, highlighting key points related to the game's development goals and prototyping process.

Understanding the Concept Phase

In this section, the speaker discusses the concept phase of game development and highlights three key questions that were explored during this phase.

Exploring Settlements and Player Abilities

The team focused on understanding how settlements would play a part in the game.

Different player abilities and types of weaponry were experimented with.

Prototyping Mounted Traversal

The team worked on a prototype to tackle the challenge of mounted traversal in the game.

They aimed to ensure that riding a mount was not too taxing for players, allowing them to focus on other tasks like shooting or interacting with NPCs.

Successful Prototypes and Takeaways

The AI system for horse navigation through dense objects was successfully prototyped.

Full-speed traversal through forests became easier due to auto-adjustment by the horse.

Prototyping various elements helped shape the final version of the game, but it required significant time and effort.

Shifting Focus: Creating a Complete Combat Loop

This section explores how the team shifted their focus during the concepting phase to create a complete combat loop in order to make progress towards building an actual game.

Lack of Cohesion in Individual Islands

While interesting prototypes and islands existed, they did not form a cohesive experience.

The absence of a complete game was concerning for the team.

Shifting Focus to Combat Loop

The team decided to create a proof of concept (POC) by developing a complete combat loop.

The loop involved exploring, interacting with NPCs or hunting robots, gathering resources, and progressing through upgrades.

Boosting Confidence Through POC

Developing the POC boosted the team's confidence as they could now see what the game would be like.

Reflecting back, they questioned if they should have started on the combat loop earlier.

Finding the Game and Answering Questions

This section discusses how focusing on individual islands first allowed the team to discover what their game was, while building the full loop helped them understand what their game was not. It also highlights that some questions were answered during this phase, while new ones emerged.

Discovering the Game

Focusing on individual islands initially helped identify what the game was about.

Building the full loop allowed them to determine what aspects did not align with their vision.

Transition to Pre-production Phase

The concept phase concluded with a shift in focus towards pre-production.

The team expanded as members from Killzone: Shadowfall joined, allowing for more specialization in design teams.

Focus on World Systems and Narrative

With additional team members, focus shifted to world systems like quests and activities.

Storytelling and narrative development became more prominent during this phase.

Expanding Design Teams and Focusing on World Design

This section highlights how the expansion of design teams allowed for a deeper focus on player systems, world encounters, art assets, characters, and narrative development.

Core Design Team

The core design team focuses on player systems such as traversal, combat, user interface, and economy.

World Design Team

The world design team is responsible for setting up robots in the world, placing activities like hunting grounds and bandit camps, and creating overall world encounters.

Narrative Development

With more designers joining the team, there was an increased emphasis on storytelling and narrative elements.

Art assets related to characters, foliage, and other environmental features were also developed during this phase.

The Importance of Context in Narrative Development

This section discusses the importance of having context during the concepting phase and how it influenced the development of the narrative in Horizon. It highlights the need for a dedicated writing team to provide consistency and set context for the story.

Formation of a Writing Team

During the concepting phase, there were many story ideas but no full outline or dedicated writers.

A narrative team was formed to provide context and create a cohesive story.

The team started from scratch, which initially felt like a setback but ultimately allowed for better storytelling.

Impact on Character and World Design

The narrative team focused on making the player character, Aloy, more special within the world.

They removed big animals that hindered gameplay goals and replaced them with more interactions with robots.

Details were added to Aloy's character, allowing for better definition of her actions and personality.

Defining the reason why robots exist in the world helped shape their appearance, behavior, and purpose.

Enhancing Gameplay Elements

Contextualizing the world allowed for unique spins on existing gameplay elements.

Challenges that unlocked parts of the map became "Tallnecks," while underground dungeons became "Cauldrons."

Having context made everything feel like it had a place in the game's world.

Balancing Context and Exploration

This section emphasizes that while context is crucial for enhancing mechanics and defining a unique world, allowing experimentation without immediate context is equally important. It also mentions that pre-production answered more questions about story, mechanics, and building Horizon.

Importance of Context

Context helps identify which mechanics work effectively and define a unique game world.

It allows for better focus on gameplay elements that align with the narrative and overall experience.

Balancing Context and Experimentation

Trying out ideas without immediate context allows for the birth of cool and innovative concepts.

Timing is crucial in adding context to prevent hindering the emergence of creative ideas.

Progress in Pre-production

More questions were answered during pre-production, including story development and narrative building.

The groundwork for Horizon was established, with core mechanics and a defined world to fill with narrative.

Challenges in Building an Open World Game

This section highlights the challenges faced by the team when transitioning from linear game design to open-world game design. It discusses the difficulties in starting at the beginning of the game, tutorializing core mechanics, and managing narrative quality within an open-world structure.

Starting at the Beginning

The team aimed to make the beginning of the game amazing since it would be seen by all players.

Tutorializing core mechanics within a narrative structure required significant effort.

Narrative Quality vs. Linear Set Pieces

In previous games like Killzone, linear set pieces allowed for structured storytelling.

Open-world design required knowing which mechanics would be needed for tutorialization, leading to guesswork.

Challenges of Open World Design

Inexperience with open-world game development became apparent during this stage.

Balancing gameplay mechanics, narrative quality, and open exploration posed challenges.

Conclusion

The transcript provides insights into how context played a vital role in shaping Horizon's narrative and gameplay elements. It emphasizes the importance of having a dedicated writing team to provide consistency and set context. Additionally, it highlights the need for balancing experimentation without immediate context while ensuring that context is added at appropriate stages. The challenges faced during open-world game development are also discussed.

Iterating on Narrative and Encounter Space

In this section, the speaker discusses the challenges faced during the development of the game's narrative and encounter space.

Designing the World and Stealth Grass

The encounter space turned out to be larger than initially anticipated, making it easier for players to avoid robot encounters using stealth grass.

Throwing rocks and other distractions became less important as players could easily avoid combat.

Reflecting on Narrative Iteration

Iterating on narrative is challenging when aiming for high quality. Starting at the beginning may not always be the best approach.

Starting later in development allowed for a better understanding of the entire game and improved narrative iteration.

Balancing Multiple Solutions in Robot Combat

This section focuses on balancing multiple solutions in robot combat and addressing difficulties faced during playtesting.

Horizon's Approach to Problem Solving

Horizon aims to provide players with multiple solutions to tackle specific problems, such as robot encounters.

The goal is to let players choose their preferred solution rather than providing a single perfect solution.

Difficulty Spikes and Engagement Levels

Players with lesser skill or engagement started facing difficulties due to basic arrows being effective against robots.

Encouraging players to explore more complex solutions without forcing them was a challenge during playtesting.

Showing Options through Focus Tool

Introducing the focus tool (Aloy Gets) allowed players to see interactive objects, plan encounters, and explore options before or during combat.

However, this introduced new problems such as blocking parts of the beautiful world with HUD overlays.

Encouraging Player Choice and Humanoid Combat

This section discusses the challenges faced in encouraging player choice and balancing humanoid combat.

Enticing Players to Engage with Options

Finding ways to entice players to engage with different options without compromising the core pillar of multiple solutions was a challenge.

Making specific solutions mandatory for destroying specific robots was considered but went against the game's core pillar.

The Role of Humanoid Combat

Initially, humanoid combat was intended as a side activity, but it became more prominent during development due to storytelling needs.

Humanoid combat lacked the tactical depth and options compared to robot combat, creating a disparity between the two types of encounters.

Balancing Encounter Design for Humanoid Combat

To address the lack of tactical depth in humanoid combat, encounter design focused on adding cover, different approaches, and environmental advantages for players.

Describing the Challenges of Open World Game Development

In this section, the speaker discusses the challenges faced during the development of an open-world game and reflects on some key aspects that were underestimated.

Underestimating Player Freedom and Tactical Depth

The impact of player freedom from different directions was underestimated in creating an open world.

The speaker believes they should have focused more on making a single human character as tactical and deep as the robots.

By adding weak spots, changing behavior, and considering weapons and armor, similar levels of tactical gameplay could be achieved with humans.

Importance of Systemic Gameplay

Systemic gameplay allows for interesting combat encounters without relying heavily on encounter designers.

Questions regarding humanoid combat, storytelling pacing, and game accessibility versus complex robot combat were not asked early enough.

Despite these challenges, the entire game was playable from start to finish by the end of production.

Uncovering Issues through Playtesting

Playtesting revealed "neta issues" that were difficult to spot during production due to not being able to play the entire game before.

Economy stress testing became possible through extended playtesting sessions, revealing difficulties in resource understanding and acquisition.

The abstraction between world language and play language added to confusion about resource values.

Mitigating Problems Instead of Overhauling Economy

Realizing economy complexity too late in production made it challenging to change entirely.

Tools like trader jobs were added but didn't effectively address core problems due to their placement within the interface hierarchy.

The speaker admits that the economy issue was not fully resolved and should have been recognized earlier.

Lessons Learned and Conclusion

Accessibility is crucial, especially in an open-world game where there should be something for everyone.

Regularly reviewing goals, intentions, and development progress helps identify issues early on.

Being honest with oneself and adapting to problems is essential for success.

Despite the challenges faced, the game launched successfully in February 2017.

The speaker encourages game designers to constantly review, reflect, and adapt throughout development.

Implementing Lessons Learned in DLC Expansion

The speaker discusses the challenges of applying lessons learned from robot complexity in a DLC expansion. They mention that if they create another Horizon game, it would be easier to implement those lessons.

Importance of Switching Armor Based on Elements

In the game, players need to switch their armor based on the elements they are fighting against.

This decision was made based on the types of robots and their attacks.

Different outfits were created for different types of encounters and robots.

Challenges with Outfit Switching

Switching outfits for each encounter can be complex and requires player engagement.

This aspect was focused on more in the DLC, where specific robots had elemental damage.

The Shield Weaver outfit was particularly powerful but difficult to obtain, affecting game economy.

Playtesting and Iterative Process

The speaker discusses the playtesting process and how it contributed to improving the game over time.

Issues Identified through Playtesting

Balance issues with hardcore robots doing excessive damage.

Mechanics like focus information and tutorialization needed improvement.

Players struggled to understand core mechanics initially.

Iterative Process and Feedback Relevance

Over 15 major playtests were conducted with significant changes made every few weeks.

Playtesting involved 20 people playing through the entire game in five days.

Not all feedback received during playtesting was relevant once the game was released to a wider audience.

Concept Phase: Generating Ideas for Horizon Game

The speaker explains how ideas for Horizon were generated during the concept phase.

Company-Wide Involvement in Idea Generation

Gorilla asked everyone in the company to come up with new concepts within certain guidelines.

Around 80 different pitches were submitted internally, ranging from brief descriptions to detailed presentations.

The pitches were narrowed down based on feedback from the company until Horizon was chosen as the concept.

The transcript is already in English, so no language conversion is needed.

Technical Difficulties with Memory Streaming

The speaker discusses the technical difficulties related to memory streaming in the game. Due to limited memory capacity, streaming large amounts of data can lead to memory constraints and potential issues when players move between different areas or tiles.

Challenges with Memory Streaming

Limited memory capacity poses challenges for streaming data.

Robots in the game require significant memory resources.

Moving from one tile to another with robots can cause memory overload.

Balancing Graphical Fidelity and Freedom

The speaker explains the balance between graphical fidelity and player freedom in the game. They discuss how certain design choices were made to maintain a balance between visual appeal and gameplay mechanics.

Balancing Graphical Fidelity and Freedom

The placement of encounter spaces is tied to graphical limitations.

Design choices were made to strike a balance between visual appeal and player freedom.

The team aimed for a balance where players could enjoy both visually pleasing graphics and gameplay mechanics.

Choice of Protagonist

The speaker addresses the choice of having a red-headed woman as the protagonist throughout the game. They explain that it was an initial idea that resonated well with the team, without much iteration or discussion.

Choosing the Protagonist

The decision to have a red-headed woman as the protagonist was an early idea that stuck.

There wasn't much iteration or discussion about changing the protagonist's appearance.

While positive feedback was received for having a female protagonist, it wasn't a deliberate choice but rather something that naturally evolved during development.

Iterating on Protagonist Design

The speaker elaborates on why there wasn't much iteration on the protagonist's design. They mention that while positive feedback was received for having a female protagonist, it wasn't a deliberate choice but rather something that naturally evolved during development.

Evolution of the Protagonist

The team didn't extensively iterate on the protagonist's design.

Positive feedback was received for having a female protagonist, but it wasn't a deliberate decision.

The initial idea of a red-headed woman as the protagonist stuck and developed over time.

Communicating Complex Features to Players

The speaker discusses the challenges of communicating complex features, specifically the crafting job system, to players. They mention that there were marketing messages about this system but acknowledge that there may have been misinterpretations or incorrect information conveyed.

Challenges in Player Communication

Marketing messages about the crafting job system may have led to misinterpretations.

There were attempts to communicate intricate features to players.

Learning from this experience, they aim to improve player messaging and explaining complex systems in future projects.

Choosing Bows and Arrows Over Guns

The speaker explains why bows and arrows were chosen as weapons instead of guns. They highlight the contrast between using basic arrows against high-tech machines as an interesting gameplay mechanic and visual juxtaposition.

Choosing Bows and Arrows

High explosives or guns would have made combat too quick and powerful.

Using bows and arrows created a contrast between basic weaponry and high-tech machines.

It allowed for more technical depth in gameplay mechanics and provided visually appealing David versus Goliath moments.

Tutorial Design Considerations

The speaker reflects on the tutorial design process. They mention that due to not fully understanding how gameplay would change later in the game, some abilities introduced in the tutorial were not utilized by players.

Tutorial Design Considerations

Understanding core mechanics is crucial for designing an effective tutorial.

The team didn't anticipate how gameplay would change in later stages, leading to underutilized abilities introduced in the tutorial.

It is recommended to thoroughly understand core mechanics before designing the tutorial.

The transcript provided does not have enough content for additional sections.