First-ever Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores expansion – Building up to a massive Horus battle – PlayStation.Blog

Hi everybody! It’s been over a year since we released Burning Shores, the expansion to Horizon Forbidden West on PS5, and with it we challenged you with one of our most complex boss fights to date. ! We spoke with our developers at Guerrilla to learn about the conception and conception of this epic battle.

SPOILER WARNING: Please note that this behind-the-scenes feature contains major spoilers about the story and gameplay elements of Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores. To get the most out of this in-depth article, we strongly recommend that you complete the ‘His Last Act’ quest before reading.

Threat from the Old World

Horus can be seen throughout our journey with Aloy, both in Horizon Zero Dawn as well as Horizon Forbidden West, albeit initially in a dormant state – and the continuation of Aloy’s story in Burning Shores it seemed like the perfect time to make it happen, said Misja Baas, Senior Art Director at Guerrilla.

During the concept phase, it became clear that Horus’ design needed to serve two purposes: First, to tell the story of the end of the world in the universe of the Horizon series.

“For something as grand as that, you need something appropriate, something grand that goes with that theme,” Baas said. “Imagine these giant machines crawling across the landscape, drilling holes in tunnels and wiping entire cities off the face of the earth. They also serve as mobile factories that produce Corruptors and Deathbringers for platforms. Together, they will form a swarm that will destroy the world as we know it. Second, we also wanted something that looked impressive and great in the landscape. For the final design, we decided to use these giant, almost insect-shaped machines. It allowed us to really overlay the camera onto the scene and make it look very lifelike, as if you were seeing the last moments of life on earth.”

Leaving Forbidden West, Los Angeles is the obvious next destination with the Hollywood sign providing the perfect stage for an epic machine showdown with this giant.

force of nature

When Lead Game Designer Arne Oehme is tasked with designing the penultimate battle that Aloy and Seyka face in their attempt to put an end to Londra’s devious plans, he knows he has an important mission before your eyes.

“We had to complete the storyline of Horizon Forbidden West, as this was the final mission of the expansion and therefore we had to deliver a level worthy of its finale,” Oehme said. “When we are fighting a machine responsible for the destruction of civilization, it seems not so easy to take down with just your bow and arrow. We want to test all of Aloy’s abilities in this decisive battle: the ability to sneak in undetected and hide, her agility, her ability to climb and swim, and her ability to cooperate with you her raft.”

Oehme points out that the mission is built into several parts. “The goal of the first part of the level is primarily to establish Horus as an overwhelming force of nature, but we also want to pace ourselves and give us the ability to escalate the intensity throughout the fight, ” I said. “Starting with the stealth section, I felt it appropriate to set the tone: Horus is high on the hill, it sits in a majestic position looming over you as you approach the area and this section gave Our potential conveys the story and allows to build a plan of attack.”

In this section, you sneak past Horus’s giant tentacles, which are being used as search lights, while you’re surrounded by Corruptors that Londra has created using an active Horus. As you sneak past these machines (or choose to destroy them), you’ll advance to sabotage the pumps used to cool Horus with your companion, Seyka.

“This episode was also the perfect time for us to help build Aloy and Seyka’s relationship,” Oehme points out, “Before things get heated!”

Near and far

Up close, you move from the hills to the beach with a cinematic quality throughout the gameplay.

“To create structure in combat and provide the right pace and rhythm, we tried to separate the player and Horus throughout the encounter,” said Baas. “If we only fight at close range with Horus, we can be said to be ‘cutting its toenails’. You’ll always be very close and you won’t see much of it, and we wanted to make sure that players had a chance to see the machine and observe its capabilities. We also wanted players to witness the ability to move around and notice the destruction it causes to the landscape in its path. It was really important for us to give Horus this moment of presentation for players to show off its power.

“To make this part of the fight more spectacular and dramatic, we had to do the exact opposite of what we always do,” Baas recalls, referring to the lush and vibrant nature that The famous Horizon series. “Our environments and settings are often places you actually want to go and spend time. But here, because we are facing this final moment and we are showing what could be described as an apocalyptic flashback, we decided to turn 180 degrees and go for grays and darks. . A very different mood than what we usually aim for at Horizon.

“During last month’s Burning Shores celebration, many players in the Horizon community pointed to this moment as one of their highlights of playing the expansion. Senior creature animator David Vince was responsible for establishing the look of Horus’s movements on the way to the beach.

“When we had to come up with the moving theme for Horus, we wanted it to feel like we were bringing it back from the dead,” says Vince. “This machine has been around for thousands of years and now it’s being revived and controlled by something other than itself, so it’s basically a zombie! That became our theme for Horus and you see this in this transition when it crawls down the beach: It doesn’t have enough power to get through, it’s trying to get there as it’s scraping with tentacles and pulls itself along. It was actually staggering and lunging forward uncoordinated, like a lumbering zombie. So that was our goal, to make sure it didn’t look like a fully sentient titan but one that had been hijacked and was doing someone else’s bidding.”

You follow Horus down the beach, passing the cliffs and ruins of Los Angeles along the way. Oehme further explains that this was a very intentional choice when designing the mission: “The idea behind moving to different locations during that fight comes from the fact that the mission almost always wants becomes a journey.”

As both Oehme and Baas mentioned before, it’s important to show players how the machine impacts its environment.

“It wouldn’t be nice if we were tied to just one location in the world,” Oehme said. We felt the need to move around to really show you this devastation.” “The beach also gave us a fairly flat space to continue the fight, enough room for Horus to stomp and splash in the water.”

Baas points out that expanding the main game means we can focus all our efforts on a single encounter and make it as awesome and epic as possible. To bring all of this together, Oehme worked with multiple disciplines during development.

“This was very different content than what we were used to building, so it required a new approach,” Oehme said. “We worked together with a fantastic team of specialist developers from Game Tech, Art, VFX, Animation and Sound Design to tackle the unique challenges that arose during the development of this mission.”

One of these challenges involves climbing Horus’ moving legs to expose and destroy its heatsinks. “We wanted Seyka to distract Horus’ main weapons to give Aloy a chance to rush in and attack,” Oehme said. “As a player, being under Horus already gives you the desire to climb it, so we want to make sure you can actually do it. But of course, something on that scale, moving around and shooting at you, it’s something completely different from anything we’ve done before – but we felt we had to do it. .”

Senior technical designer Marcin Matuszczyk recalls solving this particular challenge. “We already have support for climbing objects and machines like the Tallneck, but we had to improve it quite a bit to make it look better given the scale and size of Horus,” he said. “We had to create some new technology to make sure Aloy’s arms and legs looked good against the mechanical climbing points placed on the legs. Horus turned out to be the most complex machine we have ever built in terms of design, scale and collaboration between teams.”

Vince expands the giant boss animation. “For animation, some of the complications that come with Horus are not necessarily the model itself but more the integration within it,” he said. “All of our machines have directional joints or joints that allow us to animate them. By comparison, Slitherfang used to be our highest joint count machine with around 240 joints. Horus has over a thousand more joints than that! Horus has legs and tentacles, and spinning it would take a lot of time. It takes about 50 seconds to do a complete rotation with about 1400 frames of animation, which is one animation out of the 200 it has.”

“The Horus is huge! It takes up a lot of real estate on your screen,” Vince added. “During the encounter on the beach, Seyka flew around avoiding tentacles and missile fire. Players are not always looking for it because it is competing with Horus himself. Quite a few of Seyka’s actions tie into what Horus is doing which often goes unnoticed. One of the biggest animations we got was when Seyka made Horus stumble. She flew underneath the titan, causing the tentacles to hit its legs and it became entangled – which was extremely difficult to operate. Most players probably missed it when they were busy dodging attacks, but Seyka will help Aloy in every part of the fight, even if you don’t see it.”

Oehme points out that some of the battle’s most memorable moments are too good to risk revealing here and invites players to participate.

“There’s actually another part of this fight that we haven’t talked about,” he said. “But for those who haven’t played yet, maybe it’s better to experience it yourself!”

The complete version of Horizon Forbidden West is available on PS5 And computer.