One of the biggest announcements at this year’s Sony conference at E3 was the new IP from Guerrilla Games: Horizon Zero Dawn. Not only did it come out of nowhere, it featured a world unlike any other I’d see and I could feel my curiosity peaking. I had so many questions about this environment, the robots, the characters, this post-post-apocalyptic future...

A few days ago I finally got the chance to speak with the Managing Director of the studio Hermen Hulst and I picked his brain on what kind of stories can we expect to see and how the world came together. Read on to see what he had to say.

IGN: The world of Horizon Zero Dawn is very fascinating. It tells a story of its own about the fall and subsequent rise of civilization. Then at the same time there’s the running story of our heroine and what she’s going through and her adventure. How will these two stories feed into each other and what kind of storytelling mechanisms can we expect to see from the game?

Hulst: Wow so you’re asking me to give up the punchline right off the bat! Wow you’re good, that is really good. So clearly Horizon is all about unravelling the mysteries that make up this world and Eloi, she’s our lead character, she’s our heroine, she’s this incredibly intelligent, agile woman. She’s also very curious and very empathetic and you follow her on a fantastic journey where I think everybody will be able to relate to that journey of hers.

And it’s very interwoven. With the question you’re asking, how does the world become the way it is currently, that is actually the game, you’re gonna have to play it to find it out. It would be unfair of me to tell you exactly how it could pan out.

Well, I had to ask…

Yeah you did. And you did ask!

So we’re talking about the world and it’s at once futuristic and ancient. How did you manage to strike that balance without either of these two elements coming out at awkward?

Well you know what, going into E3, and that’s the first time we unveiled the footage, the premise stuff that was part of our trailer, we were seriously worried about... are people going to find this crazy or odd? Are people gonna laugh at us? We knew we had something good but at the same time it’s relatively far out. I think the strength of Horizon is that everything that’s in the game is there for a purpose, everything is coherent. There’s a lot of cohesion between the tribes, how Eloi relates to the tribes, the machines, the robotic creatures in the game, what their function is, how they interrelate, how Eloi relates to them. So actually if you think it through, it’s one big plan. But yeah if you zoom in on one individual element it can be strange.

So basically the way that you’ve kind of managed to make them harmonious is that they have a purpose. There’s a reason that they’re there.

Completely yeah. The tribes are very different and you’re gonna explore in this game why the tribes look so different from each other, why they treat Eloi so differently. There is a purpose for that.

How big is the world? If you can give us a scale…

Oh you mean in terms of square miles or square kilometers?

In terms of how far we can go and how much we can discover!

It’s a big world. It’s never been our ambition to make the biggest possible world, cause it’s not really about that, it’s about the quality of the journey, and the quality of the tactical combat against these machines. But it’s a vast world that’s hours and hours of exploration in this post-post-apocalyptic playground.

I like that you call it post-post-apocalyptic. I’m really excited to play the game. I’m super interested in it. I’m just curious, while I watching, it kind of reminded me of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Was that an inspiration or what were other sources of inspiration for this world?

Funnily enough, H.G. Wells and The Time Machine, that was one of the pitches. We told that story, I’m not sure if you heard about that, but we had everybody in the company pitch for new ideas. One of them turned out to be Horizon, but another one was actually an H.G. Wells based game.

Ha! I thought of it first!

Yes so even though we ultimately didn’t pick it I suppose you can see some elements translated into Horizon.

What are your thoughts on the world of Horizon Zero Dawn? Sound off in the comments below.