The Explosive Creativity in Horizon's Video Games
When Horizon Zero Dawn launched in 2017, industry critics raved about the visual spectacle offered by the vast open-world world created by Guerrilla Games, but they weren’t the only ones.
On an artistic and creative level, the video game immediately conquered not only the Gamers. Horizon’s large, colorful and bright views were something to be admired and explored continuously, and the Sony studio exploited the full potential of its PlayStation 4, pushing technical boundaries to the fullest and offering a world full of details.
Fiction, characters, nature, sounds… all elements that have led to the production and creativity rarely seen in the field of video games. The world of Aloy is a starting point for the field of video games and a masterpiece for what we now call Creativity.
The technical results of Guerrilla have improved the general narrative and visual identity of the game to the point of wanting to want to find and stay inside the game to admire the evolution of nature itself, in this case, associated with a robotic metallic nature: the element that in my opinion has greatly affected the creativity factor.
Just look for some images online, even if you have never played it, to enrich your mind with something truly unique.
Personally, I would have loved to be part of the development team to follow the creative flow that led to this result.
Because it is precisely in the creatures that dominate this world that we see the maximum expression of creativity. Machine, robots, behave like animals, living creatures in wild and prehistoric nature.
And these machines are constantly evolving and producing, there is also genius in giving a naturalness to “iron machines”. A list of these amazing machines can be found on Fandom.
For this aspect, Horizon Zero Dawn is to be considered an absolute masterpiece of what human genius can produce.
And that’s not enough! Soon the second chapter of this fantastic video game will also be released! Rightly, the prospect of a sequel can be daunting.
How do you improve the graphics of a game, when those images already push the limits of what is possible? Guerrilla replies that all this can be achieved by improving and expanding what was already great.
Judging by the first gameplay videos shared by Guerrilla, Horizon Forbidden West will bring us the same visual spectacle, but also improve in detail, in addition to the creation of new robotic creatures that the female protagonist Aloy, will meet during this new adventure.
The list of flashing villains is greatly expanded, introducing new threats such as Tremortusk or Shellsnapper, huge mechanical nightmares.
Horizon Zero Dawn had a great art style, but it’s the technology that makes pop art in-game: things like the detailed time of day system, a dynamic weather system, or volumetric light wells (discussed at length in the Digital Foundry video, below) work wonders in the way we perceive the game world in the new chapter as well.
You come across a machine and come across a gesamtkunstwerk of creative expression, 3D modeling, animation techniques, audio and visual effects, and a lighting system that calculates in real-time how light plays on metal objects.
And so the creativity and graphics of the new Horizon Forbidden West are more or less the same, but even more explosive.
The world of Horizon is a pure creative art, but in this case, enclosed in a video game. Do you want to look out at a unique museum? Play these two titles by Guerilla Games.
I am sure it will satisfy and surprise every creative taste. And if you want to know more, I leave you this video created by Digital Foundry: