New doc sheds light on how Guerrilla built the world of Horizon: Zero Dawn

Over the weekend, Dutch broadcaster VPRO published a 45-minute documentary to YouTube about Dutch studio Guerrilla Games and its work on the remarkably successful open-world game Horizon: Zero Dawn.

What's interesting about this is the (admittedly limited) perspective it affords devs into the production of Horizon, which was Guerrilla's very first attempt at an open-world game.

As Kotaku points out, there's a really good bit in the middle about how Horizon's dynamic rendering system works -- you can see a staffer spin the player's viewpoint around from a third-person omniscient perspective (see below) and watch the game world disappear or reappear as the view cone swings back and forth. There's also a good bit near the end about the facial and motion capture tech Horizon devs used to render characters in the game.

You can find the whole thing embedded above, or over on VPRO's YouTube channel. It might go well paired with this video, captured at GDC 2017, of Guerrilla Games' Leszek Szczepanski deconstructing the design of Horizon's non-linear narrative.