When building Horizon Forbidden West, a massive focus for the team at Guerrilla was making the world feel alive and authentic. To create the feeling of a living world, we offered more ways than ever for the player to interact with it. This meant going beyond just offering breathtaking action and adventure, also including smaller moments that flesh out the culture of the tribes dwelling within the Forbidden West, adding an extra layer of realism.
Please note this article contains some spoilers for Horizon Forbidden West.
As Aloy explores this new frontier, she discovers many exciting things to do: Melee Pits in settlements, Salvage Contracts in the wilds, Outposts and Camps teeming with rebels, Cauldrons, Ancient Ruins, and of course: Machine Strike.
A tactical approach
Machine Strike is a piece-based board game that Aloy can play against characters across the Forbidden West. In this tactical game, players move miniature pieces representing iconic Horizon machines around the board, ‘battling’ them against one another. Invented by the battle-minded Tenakth, the aim of Machine Strike is to clear the board of your enemy’s machines. To claim victory, the player must not only hold the strongest pieces but also execute a strong strategy. And the further west you go, the more challenging your opponents become.
Bart van Oosten, World Design Lead at Guerrilla, is one of the masterminds behind this mini-game that is new to the sequel. “We started prototyping right after the Frozen Wilds! Many open world RPGs use these types of activities to create immersion into the world, which always speaks to a group of players, so we decided to flesh out the concept from there.’
‘Initially, it was just random cubes with random rules, but we wanted to incorporate individual machine statistics, meaning the board had to be scalable to accommodate those ideas. That’s how we arrived at the tile system. Each tile has an assigned value that influences the stats of any machine piece that lands on them, for example, increased attack from the Grassland tile. Next, we created a paper prototype of the game, which we played a lot! This helped us figure out the ruleset and reasoning. It took us almost a year to finalize the entire mini-game.”
“We stripped back the design to be as minimal as possible. This kept the board overview clear and allowed players to create their own strategy,” says Bart. “Readability was important, so with the art direction, we tried everything from simple discs to ornate designs and landed somewhere in the middle: the game feels like it was