Horizon Zero Dawn modder turns a nameless NPC into the star of a new quest line
Horizon Zero Dawn modder Maqsimous wrote, built, and filmed a custom quest line for a nameless NPC from the Banuk tribe.
The prologue for the original quest The Song of Kotakali is six minutes on its own, and the whole series is enormous. It stars Kotakali, previously known as "Banuk_Hunter_F_09" in the game's files before Maqsimous turned them into an original character.
"I thought she looked fascinating and I wanted to give her a name that sounded cold and Banuk, which is the tribe she is from," Maqsimous tells GamesRadar+. "I had been doing that with certain NPCs long before mods came out, and when the powerful mod that allows me to tweak the game was published, the idea was born to combine this concept and use the power of the mod to create a full narrative for her to make this backstory she has come to life."
Maqsimous got into modding Horizon Zero Dawn by pitting machines against each other – you may know them for siccing 50 Watchers on a Thunderjaw. As the mod scene evolved, new tools were released, and they became more experienced, the scope of their projects started to expand. The Song of Kotakali is an ambitious, ground-up story that has some overlap with the canon events of Horizon Zero Dawn and its Frozen Wilds DLC, but it also explores environments and scenes not seen in the base game.
"You can change the time of day and pause it, you can change the weather, you can even speed up or slow down the rate at which the game actually plays," they explain. "There is a ton of content to explore with it here, and my personal most favorite aspect of it is being able to explore outside the regular game map. There is a massive expanse of fully developed wilderness outside of the regular map and I use a lot of it for
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