Horizon: Zero Dawn Actually Had Working Co-Op At One Point

Horizon: Zero Dawn still stands as one of 2017’s most triumphant games, a moving single player [...]

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon: Zero Dawn still stands as one of 2017's most triumphant games, a moving single player adventure with a bold heroine and a ton of memorable encounters with large, behemoth-like robotic beasts. But, believe it or not, at one point in time, Guerrilla Games was actually planning to have someone help lend a hand.

That's because, during the game's development cycle, it actually had co-op. Yep, two players working together to bring down the mechanical threats in the land, as well as other enemies. But it eventually didn't pan out, mainly because the developer was saving room for other things.

Recently, Mathijs De Jonge, who serves as game director for Horizon: Zero Dawn (as well as other Guerrilla releases, like games in the Killzone series), recently chatted with YouTube channel NoClip about the feature in the game – and it's a very interesting one, as it could've led to an entirely different product.

"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," explained De Jonge.

"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."

Some other developmental tidbits came up during the interview, including how the game's map was actually about fifty times bigger (!) in original planning, but was scaled down because the art team didn't want to fill that much space. Take a listen at the link above, as it's definitely an informative interview.

Horizon: Zero Dawn and its respective The Frozen Wilds downloadable content are available now for PlayStation 4.

(Thanks to WCCFTech for the scoop!)

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