Horizon: Zero Dawn Had a Working Co-op Feature That Was Cut During Development
Horizon: Zero Dawn was one of the best offerings of the year in 2017, winning a few awards alongside The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Now, if you’ve been wondering what the process of making such a masterpiece looked like, you don’t need to wait anymore. In a recent interview Mathijs De Jonge, Game Director of Horizon: Zero Dawn, discussed the game in detail, dropping some interesting details about the development process.
In an interview with Youtube channel Noclip, Guerrilla Games’ Mathijs De Jonge talked about the making of the highly acclaimed, and extremely popular title Horizon: Zero Dawn. Though the interview is quite long, clocking in around 50 minutes, if you’re a fan of the game, it’s worth taking a look. After all, De Jonge drops quite a few interesting tidbits of information about the game development including the fact that there might have been a two player co-op!
Yes, you were almost able to play HZD with a friend! Unfortunately, in order to keep more features in the game, Guerrilla Games decided to cut this. “There have been early concepts. At the beginning we were thinking about two players in co-op, our very early prototype was with two players. We had the game running back then in co-op and that was quite nice to see. But we haven’t got that [in the final version] because the programmers basically said that if we wanted to have co-op, we would also have 50% of the features we had been asking for and not 100%. With Horizon: Zero Dawn being the first game [in the franchise], we wanted 100%, so we dropped co-op in favor of that. The NPCs fighting along, that is very complicated to get that right and we didn’t want to go there for this game because it’s so much work to do that well.”
De Jonge also shared a few other details about the development of Horizon: Zero Dawn. He said that at the beginning of development, the game’s map was about 50 times larger! The team decided it would be impossible to fill a map of that size with enough content, and therefore they cut it down. You can find the full interview below.
Though it would have been awesome to play co-op with a friend, it’s hard to imagine Horizon: Zero Dawn feeling incomplete, and for that we should all be thankful they made the decision they did. What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and keep it locked for updates!