When we spoke to Arne Meyer of Naughty Dog before Uncharted 4 he was telling us how first-party developers under the PlayStation umbrella share tech and tips. He specifically told a story where Guerrilla helped fixed an ongoing issue in one of the Uncharted games. Did Guerrilla ever call on any other developers for help with Horizon Zero Dawn?

There’s definitely knowledge sharing within Sony, which is awesome. It’s happening more and more, which everyone loves because no one wants to be the only one to play with their toys. Our tech guys that are building the engine are so over the moon to be working with Kojima Productions on our engine. Because the more smart people you put in a room together, the more experience, the better it’s going to get. Every year before GDC, Sony has its own employee-exclusive GDC where they share the technology and findings. So there wasn’t any direct tech improvements or injections of code or anything like that but there’s always knowledge sharing. Our tech director Michiel is in communication with the tech directors from other studios, so they’re always talking to each other and geeking out on cool new rendering techniques. I’m sure they’re helping each other out in ways we don’t even know about.

With Guerrilla, and yourself, moving from a series of first-person games, was there any inspiration or advice from developers like Naughty Dog who have a rich history of third-person games?

I guess there’s lessons learned always that we all share. There’s avenues others have been down that don’t necessarily work out, those kinds of stories which have helped us to know to go that approach. Just advice in general. Talking about animation speeds, hit reactions, things like that. There was a lot of research for this game. The technology from Killzone was shared. It’s the same engine. It’s just expanded. Some of the tactical combat from Shadowfall has been expanded in how your fight machines, like their armour weaknesses. Outside of Sony, we hired a lot of experts who had worked on different types of games. It was a big learning journey for everyone. Scary, but exciting at the same time.

I suppose that goes back to what you were saying about knowledge sharing.

Yeah, we’ve all tried and failed stuff and course-corrected. That’s why we do GDC each year in San Francisco, to share these experiences. At the end of the day, we want to play really awesome games. We want every studio to have their best chance at making really cool stuff.

A lot of video games these days are tackling huge cross-media projects with tie-in movies and comic books I expand and explain the universe’s lore. Activision's Skylanders Academy on Netflix, Uncharted comic books, that sort of stuff. To me, a brand new universe like Horizon Zero Dawn begs for this treatment. An opportunity to give some background to the intriguing new universe and Aloy’s story. Was that ever part of the plan?

I think that would be a bit arrogant of us to plan from the beginning. It’s actually really awesome to be asked questions like this because it means people are buying into this universe. I mean, our writers would be super stoked if we decided to create something like a comic book or something like that. Who knows what the future holds but this definitely wasn’t built with the intention of making a tie-in. I’ve been down the road of making a movie with Bioshock. You know, we’ve got this director, then this director and then this guy pulls out. But at the moment, we’re just super excited video game developers. If people really do buy into the story, and we think that they will, that will make us really happy.

Sony UK’s Jon Edwards said that Aloy would become a future Sony icon alongside the likes of Sackboy and Nathan Drake. It seems Sony has a lot of confidence in this IP. Have you guys already starting thinking about the future?