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7/6/2025, 4:51:09 AM
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>When you’re asking your fans to give up their hero spot and switch from first- to third-person, you’d better be absolutely sure you’re giving them a hero they will have no problem handing off the reins to. In another creative pivot, Horizon Zero Dawn’s action hinges not on a hulking soldier, but on the crafty and nimble Aloy. To work, she had to offer more than just Lara Croft-esque titillation and fantasy fodder.
>“We kind of joked that she showed up in the concept art and then stepped out of the art and said to us, ‘Hey, I’m going to be your lead character,’” says Gonzalez. “Our approach to writing a great, or hopefully great, female protagonist was to just put all of our effort into writing someone who felt human and multifaceted.”
>Hulst concurs with Gonzalez’s assessment of Aloy’s inevitability. “We didn’t ‘opt’ for a female character. The game concept asked for her. We never considered Horizon Zero Dawn without her.” To that end, the designers made sure to do her justice at every turn. “We didn’t want to overly sexualize her—to me that would be really distracting to the bigger premise of the game. You need to use every bit of creativity and feedback from your teams, and we have very diverse teams–men, women, people from 30 different nationalities. John has female writers on his team. We took feedback from everywhere.”
>When you’re asking your fans to give up their hero spot and switch from first- to third-person, you’d better be absolutely sure you’re giving them a hero they will have no problem handing off the reins to. In another creative pivot, Horizon Zero Dawn’s action hinges not on a hulking soldier, but on the crafty and nimble Aloy. To work, she had to offer more than just Lara Croft-esque titillation and fantasy fodder.
>“We kind of joked that she showed up in the concept art and then stepped out of the art and said to us, ‘Hey, I’m going to be your lead character,’” says Gonzalez. “Our approach to writing a great, or hopefully great, female protagonist was to just put all of our effort into writing someone who felt human and multifaceted.”
>Hulst concurs with Gonzalez’s assessment of Aloy’s inevitability. “We didn’t ‘opt’ for a female character. The game concept asked for her. We never considered Horizon Zero Dawn without her.” To that end, the designers made sure to do her justice at every turn. “We didn’t want to overly sexualize her—to me that would be really distracting to the bigger premise of the game. You need to use every bit of creativity and feedback from your teams, and we have very diverse teams–men, women, people from 30 different nationalities. John has female writers on his team. We took feedback from everywhere.”
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