written by Jih Wei Peng
Everybody always knew there was going to be a sequel for Horizon: Zero Dawn. Being one of the most successful titles ever released for the Playstation was reason enough to create a sequel, but the ending of Zero Dawn left plenty of unanswered questions to be developed in future games, and a good deal of room for further world-building in a setting already dripping with lore.
We now know that the Horizon games are intended to be a trilogy, and thus much will be left unexplained to give us a reason to buy a PS6, but the trailer for Horizon: Forbidden West already begins that good work by answering a lot of questions – and raising new ones.
For starters, the setting. The Forbidden West is a place mentioned now and then in Zero Dawn, but with very little hard information. A vaguely defined region encompassing everything to the west of Sunfall, It’s said to have deserts of white, orange, and blue sands, vast prairies full of tall, sharp grass, howling winds whistling through copious ruins of the Old Ones, and many more strange, hostile machines. It is a place of danger and mystery, where kings and armies vanish into nothingness and from which return only broken, raving men and women barely capable of describing the wonders and horrors they found in the West.
That’s one way to describe San Francisco, I suppose.
Yes, San Francisco is featured prominently in the trailer, with famous San Franciscan landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Transamerica Pyramid, the Palace of Fine Arts, the Ferry Building, and even City Hall making their appearances in a brief couple of minutes. As one of the most iconic cities on the West Coast, there’s no doubt that there will be plenty of Old World secrets for Aloy to dig up for the edification of the New.
But if you’re hoping to find those secrets, better get your scuba gear ready. A good half of San Francisco is underwater, and Aloy is shown full-on diving into the water to explore the ruins of the City. That’s an exciting development, as previously Aloy never really went diving except to hide temporarily from nearby machines, but apparently, that’s unlikely to work quite as well anymore as Aloy is shown swimming beneath crocodilian Snapmaws in their native habitat – how exactly she’ll defend herself from underwater predators is going to be interesting to work out. If Subnautica taught us anything it’s that the sea can and will murder you at the drop of a hat, and unfortunately bows and arrows aren’t effective underwater.
The sea’s not the only place that Aloy will be going, however – she’s also shown at one point uncovering a Chinese sign from a place of sand and weathered rock, and the sign itself features a set of playing cards and reads “Entertainment place” – which, given the context, strongly suggests “Casino” and given the location, suggests Las Vegas. If that’s the case, then the game world seems set to cover a pretty vast range of terrain between the two locations, giving us plenty of diversity of both land and mechafauna to look into – which the trailer backs up, with mountain ranges, plains, and deserts to traverse. The use of Chinese is interesting as well – although Zero Dawn only touched on it lightly, it’s known that many Americans before the Faro Plague were immigrating to China for work, and it’d be interesting to see what they brought back with them to the West Coast.
But let’s back up a bit – new mechafauna? Oh my, yes. Between the trailer and the Guerrilla Games dev diary, we’ve not only seen but have the names of several new machines for Aloy to render into spare parts. There’s an enormous Shellsnapper, a giant turtle beast that sits in place long enough to grow trees and moss on its back, great big hog-like Bristlebacks with Blaze lines running underneath them, Pterosaur-like Sunwings with what appear to be solar panels on their wings, and great big metal mammoth Tremortusks, which appear deadly enough on their own but are apparently harnessed by the local tribes for warfare.
Or at least, one local tribe. The ruthlessly rational Sylens is shown making a return from the first game, overseeing the overriding of a Bristleback by one of the local tribes whose method of overriding appears a good bit more violent and intrusive than Aloy’s method. They’re also shown mounting and preparing the aforementioned Tremortusks for warfare, and given that Aloy is a videogame protagonist they’re probably not going to turn out to be on her side.
That’s not the only tribe in the West, however – there’s also another, possibly more pacific tribe that appears to farm for a living and are more than a little disturbed by current events, and the previous game hinted at tribes that drank machine blood with metal teeth (possibly the hostile machine-tamers we saw earlier), “youths as pale as ash, all wearing the same faces, who hunt silently and tirelessly in the night,” another tribe that sails “thin dark boats,” and yet another that “digs deep pits in the sand only to fill them in again.” What that all means is, hopefully, something we’ll get to learn.
But while going on a grand tour of the West Coast sounds like a fun time in and of itself, Aloy’s a pretty driven woman and usually has more on her mind than plain tourism. Forbidden West is no exception – at least two major disasters can be seen in play in the trailer – massive supercell storms ripping up the landscape, and some kind of mysterious red frond choking the life out of the biosphere. Although HADES was defeated in the first game, GAIA still hasn’t been reconstituted and her Subordinate Functions are still out there acting on their own, and as HEPHAESTUS proved in the Frozen Wild, their directives aren’t necessarily compatible with human well- being.
With storms and plants going mad, might we be meeting more of the Subordinate Functions in action – AETHER and DEMETER, perhaps, in their roles as guardians of the atmosphere and flora? And HADES, as we know, wasn’t actually killed in the final battle, but was instead trapped by Sylens for interrogation – what role will they play in these new disasters? Might there, perhaps, be the possibility of restoring not only GAIA but also APOLLO, the missing link between the Old World and the New? And perhaps the greatest question of all – what, exactly, was the source of the mysterious signal that caused everything to go haywire to begin with? Did Ted Faro manage to screw things up from his private bunker beyond the grave yet AGAIN?
It’s unlikely that all these questions will be answered in Forbidden West – got to save something for the last game in the trilogy, after all. But whatever DOES get answered, it’s liable to be gorgeous. The Forbidden West trailer showcased not only narrative hints but the graphical capabilities of the PS5 as well. Asset details are crisper and sharper than they ever were in Zero Dawn, and one can see swaying foliage out to an incredible distance, as well as fast-moving, complex cloud formations, and realistic wave and water interaction. How much of that is pre-rendered cutscene graphics and how much was made using the in-game engine is hard to say, but one thing is clear – Guerrilla Games intends to use the full power of the PS5 to the hilt, and graphics have always been one of the strong points of the studio even before Zero Dawn.
Overall, there’s a lot to be excited about in the Forbidden West trailer, and fortunately or unfortunately the devs will have plenty of time to tease more details and hints at gameplay and plot, as the game is expected to be released in 2021 for the PS5. It will be a hard wait, but if the trailer is any indication, it will probably be worth it.