With Horizon Forbidden West, Guerrilla is planning to greatly improve the melee combat featured in Zero Dawn so that it’s on par with its ranged counterpart.
As part of a larger blog post focused on the upcoming sequel’s combat design, a few developers explained the key enhanced features.
Horizon Forbidden West also features many new human enemy archetypes, each of them coming with its own strengths and weaknesses.
Charles Perain, Combat Designer: The resonator blast rewards players for using spear combos: whenever Aloy attacks with melee, the resonator in her spear stacks up some energy. This energy can be blasted at the enemy and will stick to them for a short duration. Shooting it with an arrow before it dissipates will deal a huge amount of damage! This mechanic creates a powerful synergy between close combat and ranged combat, encouraging players to transition smoothly between both.
Richard Oud said:
Horizon Forbidden West, originally scheduled to launch in late 2021, is now due to launch on February 18th, 2022, almost exactly five years after the previous title. It’ll be available on both PS4 and PS5.
The Rebel Soldier enemy behaves a lot like a hyena, which resulted in a rowdy and versatile personality with a lot of uncontrolled and ungraceful motion. The posture is hunched over and from a behavior point of view we think of them as being aggressive in groups, but at the same time hesitant in small numbers. They don’t always exactly behave like this from a combat and AI perspective, but it gave the team a better understanding of the character and helped us define choices in poses, combat attacks and personality.
