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Guerrilla Games has long been known for pushing the limits of console technology, but with Horizon Zero Dawn, the Dutch studio reaches new heights. After spending more than ten years immersed in the world of Killzone, Guerrilla has shifted gear with a deep, complex action RPG with perhaps the most impressive visuals yet seen in an open world title. It's a massive shift in focus and a big gamble on the part of the developer. So what works and what doesn't in Horizon Zero Dawn?At its core, Horizon is built on the Decima engine - the in-house technology Guerrilla has crafted to power its games. The name "Decima" was only revealed when Kojima Productions selected the engine for its upcoming Death Stranding, but the tools and technology have been evolving for years now. Until now, Guerrilla has always focused on building linear action games but the move to an open world required the team to expand the capabilities of the engine to support this new type of design.
It's a profound shift to a more ambitious game model, but the good news is that Decima's visual feature set has expanded since Killzone Shadow Fall - with few compromises. The technology supports a wide range of features including physically-based rendering, an impressive suite of post-processing effects, support for rich animation and an advanced audio sub-system. The presentations given by Guerrilla over the years also paint a picture of a user-friendly development environment, complete with a full node-graph system enabling designers to create advanced behaviours and gameplay concepts with minimal programming experience. As things stand, Decima appears to be one of the most flexible and capable engines in the industry today.
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