Horizon: Zero Dawn Video Showcases Open-World Monster Hunting

A new video of Guerrilla Games' Horizon: Zero Dawn has been posted online, showing some of the first live gameplay of the upcoming PS4 exclusive.

The gameplay demonstration in the video below was recorded from a live Nico Nico stream at Tokyo Game Show, which explains why the quality is low and also the Japanese voices.

The section shown involves the player character, called Aloy, hunting Grazers in order to recover resources needed for a local tribe to survive. A developer from Guerrilla takes the tame to emphasise that the world of Horizon is open-world and fully-explorable. Stealth is also highlighted as a key component of Horizon, and Aloy is shown sneaking through large patches of grass while sneaking up on Grazers and avoiding the larger Thunderjaws.

Sony revealed Horizon: Zero Dawn during its E3 2015 press conference and said it will launch in 2016 exclusively for PlayStation 4. It puts players in the shoes of a female archer who hunts strange robot-animal hybrids for an as of yet unexplained reason.

Guerrilla Games has said it always wanted the lead in Horizon: Zero Dawn to be a woman, but noted there was a lot of discussion internally about this decision.

PlayStation Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida added that Sony wondered if it would be "risky" to launch such a major project with a female protagonist. Its developer, however, was able to show people would respond well to the game's central protagonist, as well as the open-world RPG, and the set up of machine versus primitive weapons,

Horizon: Zero Dawn will not feature a traditional competitive multiplayer experience. Art director Jan Bart Van Beek and lead producer Lambert Wolterbeek Muller previously said "the core of the game is a single player experience," but added that there will be "certain social features in there" too.

Horizon launches in 2016 exclusively for PlayStation 4.