Tweet
A conversation about video gaming's greatest gunsmiths wouldn't be complete without mention of Guerrilla Games. The Amsterdam studio's Killzone series has always been anchored by the intense physicality of its weapons: their solid handling, their booming audio, the deliberate smack with which every bullet lands. They are true craftsmen, no doubt, though perhaps not the artists and inventors you find elsewhere in this subset of game design - the minds who cooked up the gravity and portal guns, the BFG and railgun, Titanfall's smart pistol, or the eccentric, asymmetric balance of the first Halo's weapon set. Those were guns that could change the world around you, or the way you interacted with it, or both.Guerrilla may finally be ready to enter that company, however. Its next PS4 game, Horizon: Zero Dawn, features a wonderful thing called the Ropecaster. It's not the game's signature weapon; that honour goes to the bow wielded by our heroine Aloy, which with its tribal style and high-tech components encapsulates Horizon's theme of pitting the primitive against the futuristic (or, to put it another way, cavemen against robot dinosaurs). But at the hands-off E3 demo I attended last month, it was the Ropecaster that really fired the imagination.
You caught a glimpse of it in the stage demo during Sony's conference: a sort of harpoon gun that fires twice, securing two ends of a rope to creatures or the environment. On stage, Aloy was shown using repeated quick shots to pin down a giant laser-spitting robotic T-Rex called a Thunderjaw, holding it still so she could shoot off some armour plating with her bow. In our private demo of the same scene, Aloy only managed to secure its head, keeping its swiping melee attacks at bay but still allowing the machine to pivot and target her with its lasers.
Read more…
More...