Guerrilla Games has confirmed that they are working on a Horizon multiplayer project with a dynamic open world offering a compelling narrative.
The confirmation comes through their job openings website with a variety of positions open including for a narrative designer on an online project. Based on the job descriptions, it appears to be a rather ambitious project that will offer a dynamic open world and features multiple playable characters (multiplayer) with new machines and unique abilities to use in the game.
Some of the key job openings related to this project are a Lead World Designer, Senior Machine Combat Designer, Lead Combat Designer, and Narrative Designer.
In the job opening for their Lead World Designer, they mention expanding the world of Horizon with a new multiplayer project.
“Guerrilla is looking for a Lead World Designer to bring the expanding Horizon universe to a multiplayer audience. As the successful candidate, you will head up the World Design team on one of our ambitious, unannounced projects, and work with multi-disciplinary teams to create a game of the highest possible quality.”
Similarly, their Lead Combat Designer recruitment page confirms that this game will be a cooperative experience.
“As a successful candidate, you will work closely with combat designers, animators, gameplay programmers and multi-disciplinary teams to create playable characters and a variety of enemies (Machines & Humanoids) that focus on exciting combat with cooperative elements.”
Senior Machine Combat Designer is required to “design multiple machine enemies that provide variety of challenges against multiple players” suggesting this new Horizon is strictly focused on an online co-op experience.
As for the dynamic open world and story, it is referenced in the job description of Narrative Designer which states that “our writers and narrative designers are driven to push the boundaries of dramatic storytelling in open-world games.”
Meanwhile, the Senior Character Combat Designer job description makes reference to “unique abilities that are exciting to execute, offer tactical choices, and create cooperative opportunities, for multiple player characters.”
This sounds like an ambitious project from Guerrilla Games so it will be interesting to see how it turns out. As it stands, Guerrilla Games is working on an expansion for Horizon Forbidden West. It is called the Burning Shores and will be released exclusively on PS5 on April 19, 2023.
