The announcement that Horizon: Zero Dawn had been delayed until 2017 shortly before the beginning of E3 this year came as little surprise to anyone. Developer Guerrilla Games had revealed a scare amount of new details since unveiling the gorgeous-looking RPG last year, and the original release date of late 2016 was looking increasingly less likely as each day passed without the confirmation of a firm launch window.
Obviously, that speculation has now become fact, but why exactly did Guerrilla opt to push the game back several months? According to director Mathijs de Jonge, the delay came about for multiple reasons, chief among them being that the title is simply “a big game” that requires considerable testing.
Speaking to GameSpot (via VideoGamer), Jonge said:
We have this open world. It’s very big. We have a lot of quests; we have a lot of different regions as well. We have a lot of different Machines. Just playtesting this, it’s very, very time-consuming. We have so many components. We just want to raise the quality on the different areas.
[The delay was] mainly because it’s such a big game. We are a team of 200 people now, but there’s just a lot of content we need to look at and evaluate and keep improving.
Those looking forward to exploring Horizon: Zero Dawn‘s intriguing world this year may be a little disappointed by the slight setback, but Jonge says that the extra time will afford the development team more time to “polish” the overall experience in time for when it hits PlayStation 4 on the new date of February 28.