Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to 2017’s open world action RPG hit game Horizon Zero Dawn, ranked fourth among our community’s most anticipated games due in 2021, beating even CAPCOM’s Resident Evil Village.
Protagonist Aloy will be once again the star, of course, especially after winning the hearts of millions of fans in the previous game. Aloy was voiced by Ashly Burch (also featured as Chloe Price in the Life is Strange series), who recently talked about Horizon Forbidden West in an interview with Gamesradar, promising that the sequel will be ‘more and better’.
There was a lot of wrapping my head around the lore and history – the sort of scope of the game at the beginning. Guerrilla Games gave me a rundown of what the game was about, but there were certain things in the first game that I didn’t discover until I was recording them.
I was discovering Aloy’s story alongside her in some cases. But what’s great is that, with enough time with that character, and settling into her, you get to really know their world. So if Aloy’s going into this conversation, it’s like okay, this person is from this type of tribe. ‘What is this person like? How would Aloy feel about them?’ And then kind of go from there.
What’s great now about working on Horizon Forbidden West is that I have all of that stuff in my back pocket. So it’s really great to be able to be like, ‘Oh, Ted Faro, yeah, I remember him!’ There’s stuff like that I get to do now because I know her and this world so well. It’s like building on this already very solid foundation – it’s exciting.
I have a record for Horizon Forbidden West later this week. It’s going – it’s still happening! I can’t say a lot… But I will say that I really do think that all of the things that people loved about Zero Dawn – the gorgeous world, the immersive story, the awesome gameplay – Forbidden West is just more and better.
The new areas that Alloy is traveling to, the tribes that she’s meeting, and the story that unfolds… I got a primer on it all before recording for the game, where the writing team took me through the arc of the story and it was like being a kid at a campfire. I’m just so excited for it! I’m also a fan, so I’ll be in recording sessions and we’ll be recording a scene and I’m like, ‘I can’t wait to do this fight or I can’t wait to explore this area!’ So, yeah, I really think that people are going to enjoy it.
Horizon Forbidden West doesn’t have a firm release date yet, but Sony did say we can expect it at some point in the second half of the year. It’ll be out on both PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, just like Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Sackboy: A Big Adventure.
