Guerrilla Games Discusses The Creation Of Horizon's Machine Strike
Making any open world feel alive and real is a Herculean task for developers. Besides creating the physical space itself, it needs to be full of creatures, foliage, and people, all of which made to look like they’re going about their everyday tasks. In the case of foliage that's a pretty easy problem to solve, but for people that can get complicated fast.
People don't just do work even in a post apocalyptic society like Horizon Forbidden West--they also play. To add an extra layer of immersion to Forbidden West, Guerilla Games created Machine Strike, a tactical tabletop game that Aloy can play at various stops in her journey West.
Related: Aloy Talks Too Much, And So Do Most Open World Protagonists
In an interview on the PlayStation Blog, lead world designer Bart van Oosten talked about the origins of Machine Strike and how Guerrilla believes that any open-world RPG could use a casual minigame to give players a break from the world-ending story.
"Initially, it was just random cubes with random rules, but we wanted to incorporate individual machine statistics, meaning the board had to be scalable to accommodate those ideas," revealed van Oosten. "That’s how we arrived at the tile system. Each tile has an assigned value that influences the stats of any machine piece that lands on them, for example, increased attack from the Grassland tile. Next, we created a paper prototype of the game, which we played a lot! This helped us figure out the ruleset and reasoning. It took us almost a year to finalize the entire mini-game."
Machine Strike is fairly simple. The playing field is a square board of eight tiles per side, with players fielding a team of machines with a maximum point value of 10. Each piece has statistics for
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