Trivia / Horizon Zero Dawn

• Assist Character: Nil, the odd side character with a deadly hatred of bandits, was intended to help balance the difficulty of the bandit camps. How much Nil will participate in a bandit camp raid depends on Aloy’s level. If Aloy has advanced sufficiently beyond the difficulty level of the camp, Nil will sit back and watch, or simply won’t appear. It is possible to be introduced to Nil and then not see him again until after completing the last camp.
• Dawson Casting: Aloy is 18 years old for most of the game. Ashly Burch (Aloy's voice actress) and Hannah Hoekstra (Aloy's visual model) were, respectively, in their mid and late twenties when they worked on the game.
• Dueling Works:
  • To an extent, with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Both are open world games with the advertising focusing on an archer character fighting giant mechanical enemies in a post-apocalyptic world, and their respective release dates were less than a week apart, leading to inevitable comparisons and arguments over whether one would eclipse the other. However, the fact that both games are exclusives for different consoles mitigates the rivalry somewhat.
  • Hollow Knight faced some competition when it was released just days before other fellow "exploration-heavy" games - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn (two games that already had a duel for being also released days apart).
  • With NieR: Automata as well. Both are open world action/adventure games that take place After the End fighting robotic enemies with a strong sense of mystery surrounding the setting, strong-willed Action Girl protagonists and plot twists galore, and their release dates were within a week of each other as well.
  • And yet again with Mass Effect: Andromeda, which like this game had a strong emphasis on open-world gameplay, exploring automated underground installations, and battling against robotic enemies. The backstories of both games involved an Assimilation Plot for that matter, as well. Unlike the two aforementioned duels, however, the result of this one was pretty clear-cut, with Andromeda earning unimpressive reviews and sales, and a downright hostile reaction from gamers.
• Fake American: John Hopkins (Erend) and Adjoa Andoh (Sona) are British. While Erend’s voice occasionally has an edge to it, the accent doesn’t sound too off.
• Follow the Leader: While the studio was first seriously considering and working on Horizon Zero Dawn, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was announced, a game also involving an overgrown postapocalyptic world, a female protagonist, and slumbering predatory machines being awakened. Not wanting to look like they were following the leader the studio tried putting Horizon aside to work on a different pitch, a steampunky alternate history monster mashup. Then it turned out that looked similar to something else that was being produced by another studio, this time one of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s big exclusives. But they loved the idea of Horizon too much and ultimately just went with it.
• Killer App: For the PlayStation 4. The console was already enjoying a significant success over its competitors, but Horizon solidified the PS4 as a platform for high-quality blockbuster titles. It quickly became one of the platform's most recognized and successful titles, selling over 2.5 million copies within two weeks, over 10 million by the time it was released to personal computers three years later, and over 20 million copies for both platforms combined as of November 28, 2021. It remained Sony's largest PS4 for three years until it was surpassed by Ghost of Tsushima on July 2020.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor: Ashly Burch, who is pansexual, plays both Aloy and Elisabet, both of whom are, at the very least, romantically interested in women.
• Underage Casting:
  • Also in effect, as Ashly Burch also voices Elisabet Sobeck, who was in her forties.
  • Necar Zadegan (who was born in 1982) portrays Ourea, the Deuteragonist of The Frozen Wilds, who is an Old Soldier pushing to her old age (at least in her 50s to 60s). Zadegan was only 35 when she portrayed her.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A Noclip documentary reveals numerous early ideas. At one point it was intended to be a co-op game, and the earliest machines designed were all in the vein of the Deathbringer, before it was decided that fighting those felt too much like being a soldier and they preferred the sense of playing a hunter.
  • Before Guerilla Games hired John Gonzalez to be the main story writer, Aloy rode a flesh-and-blood horse. Gonzalez nixed this and decided that there were no large nonhuman animals in this world, because if there were horses then anyone could be riding them. Aloy's ability to take a mount had to stand out.
  • The game map was originally planned to include the Oseram's homeland, known as the Claim, including their capital at Mainspring. This was cut, but the gate to the Claim is visible north of the Oseram settlement at Pitchcliff.

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