HORIZON ZERO DAWN: THE FROZEN WILDS

Developer Guerrilla Games Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release 2017

There can be few greater signs of how things have changed chez Sony this generation than the debut trailer for Horizon

Zero Dawn’s first DLC expansion. In years past, the sight of the Guerrilla Games logo on Sony’s E3 stage would have resulted in a polite ripple of apathy for the announcement of a new

Killzone and, in 18 months or so, another Edge 7. Yet Horizon was the firstparty standard bearer in what was a remarkable first few months of 2017 on PS4. And in the absence of much else to get excited about on Sony’s console for the rest of this year, an excuse to dive back in to one of the finest open worlds around is not to be sniffed at.

Moving Horizon’s action to the frozen north is, in fairness, quite the elevator pitch: who can resist the notion of a 4K

Skyrim with robot dinosaurs? Details are, in accordance with Sony’s E3 house style, somewhat thin on the ground: Guerrilla boss Hermen Hulst assures us the DLC will be both “beefy” and “chunky”; it will take Aloy beyond the mountains that block off the base game’s northern border; it will introduce a new tribe, the Banuk, a hardy people well equipped to live in the bitter, brutal cold. That may hint at a greater emphasis on survival mechanics than the vanilla game, though it’s likely the new setting will be used less as an excuse for Guerrilla to expand the mechanical template, and more as a way of nodding even more overtly to the likes of Skyrim and Game Of Thrones. If there’s not a fight against a robotic dragon, for instance, we’ll be surprised – and a little disappointed.