This week at CES, Sony revealed it was adding even more video games to its already sizable roster of adaptations, including Guerrilla Games’ Horizon franchise. After the intended Netflix series collapsed following abuse allegations against showrunner Steve Blackman, Sony’s decided to pivot it into a full-on film.
Among PlayStation’s first-party lineup, Horizon occupies a weird space. While its two mainline games seemingly sold well, the series has gained a bit of an online reputation as an “industry plant” boosted by PlayStation Studios CEO Hermen Hulst, who previously ran Guerrilla as it was making Horizon Zero Dawn. There’s also just been a general pushback against Sony’s efforts to grow out whatever it can into a franchise, and Horizon sure has been making moves to expand. Along with a third single-player game in development, there’s been the Call of the Mountain VR game, at least two rumored multiplayer spinoffs—one co-op, the other an MMO—and last year’s double whammy of a spinoff Lego game and a PlayStation 5 re-release of the first game. Next to Naughty Dog’s Last of Us, this might be the most persistent PlayStation franchise in terms of frequently reminding you it exists, and if you know how people feel about that franchise’s tendency to not go away, you’ll know that’s far from a compliment.
Horizon has always been an odd duck, much of which can be owed to when it exists. Previous first-party PS titles like God of War Ragnarök or Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 came out amid busy periods, but they at least had the potential to carve their own niche. Seeing promos of Kratos and Atreus facing down a wolf, or the two Spideys doing the same with Venom, made you want to set time aside for them. PlayStation makes blockbuster games and those two titles, plus the Last of Us, command your attention like blockbuster movies often do, whether they hit in the summer or Christmastime. To Guerrilla’s credit, both of the core Horizon games have tried to command similar attention, it’s just that their momentum was completely, hilariously undercut.
Zero Dawn released in February 2017, just three days before the Nintendo Switch launched alongside Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That game’s impact could only be described as meteoric, both for Nintendo and the industry as a whole. Breath of the Wild changed how critics and players viewed games from that particular franchise and open-world titles overall, and dominated much of the 2017 conversation. Come 2022, Guerrilla released Horizon Forbidden West, which released just a full week ahead of Elden Ring. Like Breath, FromSoftware’s gothic roguelike was a gamechanger that folks couldn’t stop talking about, in turn sucking all the oxygen out of the room. It helped that things From’s profile had grown throughout the 2010s thanks to its Dark Souls games, 2019’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and a little PS4 game by the name of Bloodborne.
So yes, things haven’t always been in Horizon’s immediate favor, and it can sometimes feel like it’s one or three steps behind fellow open-world or RPG contemporaries. But the games are good in their own right. Zero Dawn and Forbidden West were both regarded fairly well critically and commercially, and if anything, their ability to endure despite being overwhelmed by bigger competition may have further endeared them to players. This series isn’t really an underdog amongst the PlayStation pantheon—that honor, depending on who you ask, might go to Days Gone—but it’s managed to feel like one in part because of how different it is to its first-party peers. In 2017, the then-recent Uncharted 4 and upcomers like God of War or Marvel’s Spider-Man had a built-in audience who all had some idea of what to expect. Horizon was a noted departure for Guerrilla, which had spent late 00s and early 2010s on its series of Killzone shooters, so the pivot from military sci-fi to a lush post-apocalypse was an attention-grabber.
There’s always been something compelling about Horizon that’s clearly resonated with audiences, even as the series has kept stepping into Native and Indigenous appropriation. Maybe it was the look of the robot animals or the fun of sniping off their points, or it was the games throwing out more bonkers (but still pretty logical) twists to their stories. It could also just be series lead Aloy, who debuted right as triple-A developers were beginning a new, ongoing (and increasingly more diverse) wave of major women-led games. That it took nearly an entire decade and public criticism against E3 2014 for studios to make games with more women is… extremely depressing, but whatever, this is how things shook out. Guerrilla gave PlayStation a first-party franchise driven primarily by Aloy’s relationships, both platonic and romantic, with women of different stripes, and that approach has since become part of the triple-A game playbook.
With the solid amount of general goodwill Horizon’s managed to build up, cashing in on that makes sense. But there are challenges ahead for these various projects, namely the increasing risk of ongoing multiplayer games and Sony’s tendency to get in the way of their own movies. Thus far, the series has withstood two big gaming competitors, but those are different beasts compared to an entire genre slowly closing in on itself or a parent company scaling back plans it previously (and loudly) set in stone. However things shake out, can we at least not get Guerrilla caught in a loop where it’s remastering and remaking the games for half a decade? Please?
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