Perhaps the saddest part of playing an open world game is getting to the very edge. Unfortunately, there is generally only a certain amount of the world that developer can make room for in a game. On the bright side, sometimes that means that a developer can save unexplored areas for follow up games where players can meet new people, explore new places, and fight new areas. Those are all things that Horizon: Forbidden West has going for it. The follow-up to the acclaimed action RPG Horizon Zero Dawn will take players into a hazardous and unknown frontier teased by the first game.
However, while that’s exciting from a lore and character development standpoint, it’s a little intimidating from a design standpoint. The Forbidden West is emphasized as an incredibly harsh and dangerous land. Aloy will supposedly be going up against even more dangerous machines out there than she ever encountered in the first game. That’s an exciting idea, but even though it’s a sequel, it’s still a brand new game. There’s no way that Aloy starts off just as strong as she is by the end of Horizon Zero Dawn. With that in mind, how is Guerilla Games going to make Horizon: Forbidden West live up to the rumors?
It’s a pretty big promise that the West will be more dangerous than anything players have seen so far. Aloy has already been up against machines of all shapes and sizes, as well as bandits and malicious cultists. The West has to introduce some really intimidating machines to live up to what the first game had to offer, while still being playable, since Aloy probably won’t have all the equipment and skills from her previous adventures at Forbidden West‘s outset. It’s a hard balance to strike: the new region has to be difficult to navigate, but easy enough to be approachable as its own game.
However, there’s one possibility that’s worth keeping in mind: maybe the West isn’t quite as dangerous as everyone expects. It could be that over the years the societies of Horizon Zero Dawn have made stories about the West without actually going there to verify it. After all, story and mythos are often important to the people of this post-apocalyptic world, and life is hard enough there that it wouldn’t be hard to believe that nobody has actually journeyed very deeply into the West before. As usual, it’s likely that Aloy is going to spearhead discoveries that will reshape peoples’ perceptions of the world.
It could be that Guerilla Games explains a weaker Aloy at the start of Horizon: Forbidden West through the new machines themselves out there. Aloy might be clever and adaptable, but new threats are new threats. The equipment that she relies on throughout Horizon Zero Dawn might just not be enough to handle the threats of the West, forcing her to learn new techniques and strategies in order to take down new models of machines. A lot of the game could revolve around learning on the fly, since the resourceful protagonist is likely to be a little short on allies who can teach her, at least at the start of the game.
That’s what could communicate the difficulty of surviving in the Forbidden West: a gap in knowledge, not just the ferocity of the enemies. Those who played through the first game won’t be strangers to the process of constant survival and adaptation in this setting. That’s what the world of Horizon asks of Aloy at all fronts, after all. The Forbidden West will only be a new place for her to learn in the same exciting, dangerous ways she’s used to. With that in mind, hopefully Guerilla can strike a good balance between the promised hazards of this mysterious region and making the game approachable. There might be a step up in difficulty, but Aloy always loves a challenge.
Horizon: Forbidden West releases in 2021 for PS4 and PS5.
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