Horizon Zero Dawn

Setting

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic Western United States in the 31st century. Humans live in scattered, primitive tribes with varying levels of technological development. Their technologically-advanced predecessors are remembered as the "Old Ones". Large robotic machines dominate the Earth. For the most part, they coexist peacefully with humans, who occasionally hunt them for parts. However, a phenomenon known as the "Derangement" caused machines to become more aggressive toward humans, and caused larger and deadlier machines to appear. The surviving humans are divided into distinct cultures, ranging from the mountain-dwelling, matriarchal Nora hunter-gatherers to the Carja, an empire of desert-dwelling city builders.

Plot

Aloy is cast out from the Nora tribe at birth and raised by a fellow outcast, Rost. As a child, she obtains a "Focus", an augmented reality device that gives her special perceptive abilities. Curious about her origins, Aloy undergoes years of training to win the "Proving", a tournament that will compel the Nora tribe's matriarchs to reveal her past. Aloy wins the competition, but masked cultists suddenly attack. Rost sacrifices himself to save Aloy from the cult leader, Helis. When Aloy awakens, the matriarchs explain she was found as an infant before a sealed door within the Nora's sacred mountain. They allow Aloy to leave their lands to pursue the cultists. Aloy learns the cultists are a splinter faction called the Eclipse and that she was targeted for her resemblance to an ancient scientist named Elisabet Sobeck. Exploring the ruins of Faro Automated Solutions, Aloy discovers that the past civilisation was destroyed a thousand years ago when Faro lost control of its self-replicating, biomass-consuming military machines. Sobeck spearheaded "Zero Dawn", a project to create an automated terraforming system to eventually deactivate the machines and restore life to Earth.

Aloy is contacted by Sylens, a secretive figure interested in uncovering the fate of the ancients. He guides her to a decommissioned military base beneath the Citadel, the centre of Eclipse power. Aloy learns that Zero Dawn was an underground network of cloning facilities and databases controlled by a single artificial intelligence, GAIA. After the extinction of life, GAIA successfully deactivated the Faro machines and built her own animalistic machines to restore the biosphere. She then reseeded life on Earth using stored DNA, intending to teach the new humans not to repeat past mistakes. However, Ted Faro sabotaged the subsystem containing humanity's history, reducing the new generation to a tribal society. Aloy also discovers that the Eclipse are secretly controlled by HADES, another of GAIA's subsystems originally designed to enact a controlled extinction if the terraforming process failed.

After obtaining a registry to open the door in the Nora mountain, Aloy is captured by Helis but escapes with Sylens's help. She returns to the Nora, helps them defeat the Eclipse, and finally unlocks the mountain's door. Inside, a recording from GAIA reveals that a transmission of unknown origin caused HADES to go rogue. GAIA attempted to stop HADES by self-destructing but failed and lost control of her terraforming network, causing the machines to become aggressive. As a contingency, GAIA created a clone of Sobeck in the form of Aloy to one day destroy HADES and restore her functions. Aloy retrieves the master override needed to destroy HADES. Sylens admits he originally founded the Eclipse, tempted by HADES's promises of knowledge, but now realises the AI intends to reactivate the Faro machines and extinguish all life again. Aloy assaults the Citadel, kills Helis, and fights off the corrupted machines. She stabs HADES with the master override, ending the war. Aloy journeys to Sobeck's childhood home to mourn her predecessor. In a post-credits scene, Sylens captures the fleeing entity of HADES, intending to interrogate it to find out who sent the signal that awakened it.

Gameplay design

Unlike many role-playing games that emphasise player choice, Horizon prioritised a more curated, personal story, borrowing the scope and interactive dialogue of RPGs while embracing cinematic storytelling commonly found in action-adventure games.^{[32]: 33:27} To strengthen its RPG credentials, Guerrilla recruited talent from franchises like The Elder Scrolls and The Witcher.^[40] Horizon was designed to be an accessible experience, and the team avoided adding deep role-playing systems to the game. Traditional character stats for Aloy were removed, and the team adopted a simple user interface design.^[41] The team was inspired by Fallout 3 (2008), an RPG emphasising emergent gameplay that gives the player agency and freedom to perform actions beyond the developers' original intent.^[42] Gameplay was designed to be challenging, especially when the player ventures off the beaten path, and combat was divided into three stages: "prepare", "engage" and "escape".^[43][44] Original designs had the protagonist using a rifle, but this was changed to tribal weaponry because high-tech gunfire felt conceptually wrong for the setting.^[29]: 7:18

Horizon was Guerrilla's first open world game. Van Beek said they had to change their design philosophy from "designing rollercoaster rides" with Killzone to creating full "theme parks" with Horizon. Guerrilla studied the gameplay structure of other open world games, such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), to determine the density of the game's world.^[42] The team wanted to give the player more options for how they approached objectives.^[45] Guerrilla designed the game's stealth mechanics to evoke the sensation of a hunt rather than a traditional stealth experience. To achieve this, the artificial intelligence (AI) controlling the enemies was programmed to be lenient during the player's initial detection, but deliberately made it difficult for Aloy to fade back into hiding once fully discovered. This design choice was intended to encourage the player to commit to combat encounters rather than repeatedly fleeing to reset enemy aggravation.^[46] Machines were initially the only enemy type in the game, and human enemies were added to introduce more combat variety and show different tribal cultures. The team had to significantly scale back the size of the game world after they realised they could not fill the entire map with content. A plan to support cooperative multiplayer was scrapped.^{[32]: 25:49}

World design

Initial work focused on how different human tribes would interact with the machines of the world, which in turn dictated the style of their clothing, architecture, and tools. A major goal for the team was to treat the machines as a natural part of the ecosystem, and show that the tribes viewed them as a standard part of their daily lives and environment.^[47] The game's concept explores the juxtaposition between the danger and beauty of the world, particularly analysing the concept of humanity not being the dominant species. It also explores the integration of nature and technology, depicting a world where nature itself has become technological.^[48][49] The game's weapons were designed to reflect the primitive and technologically regressed nature of the surviving civilisation.^[33] The developers created distinct cultures like the matriarchal Nora and the patriarchal, technology-embracing Carja to represent diverse worldviews.^[48] In extrapolating the game world, Guerrilla collaborated with anthropologists and researched the formation of tribal cultures.^[31] Jared Diamond's books, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) were the team's main sources of inspiration. Despite being set centuries into the future, characters in the game mostly speak plain English, and the team avoided jargon to retain accessibility.^[50]

As the game is set in the ruins of an advanced civilisation, the team faced challenges in creating sci-fi imagery that also looked prehistoric. They manually sculpted each ancient structure to ensure it appeared broken and lopsided. These ruins were designed to look frail, to evoke compassion for the people who once lived comfortably there.^[33] Despite the game's premise, the world was depicted with vibrant colours.^{[32]: 10:08} Described as a "post-post-apocalyptic" game,^[51][44] it was designed to evoke a sense of adventure and hope.^[42] The team once considered setting the game in Europe and Guerrilla's home country of the Netherlands, though North America was ultimately chosen due to its diverse landscape and recognisable landmarks.^[34] The game features two types of underground structures: abandoned military strongholds designed to provide story beats and establish an emotional connection to the people of the past, and AI-controlled assembly lines where machines are built.^[33][52] As the machine factories were built by AI rather than humans, the design directive for these spaces was to be bold and treat the environment like a giant sculpture.^[52]

Technology

Guerrilla had difficulty altering the Decima game engine used with Killzone Shadow Fall^[59][60] for Horizon, as the new game had different priorities with respect to draw distance and loading. The goal was to create an open world with the visual resolution and detail typically reserved for linear first-person shooters.^{[29]: 8:48 [30]} While the rendering core existed, they built new systems for streaming, level editing, and asset placement to support an open-world workflow. The environment was built through a mix of procedural generation and hand-crafting. While vegetation and rivers used procedural placement, rock formations and mountains were hand-made. To maintain performance, the team used optimised rendering techniques for distant rock formations while maintaining visual quality, which saved memory while looking better. "World Data Maps" were used to inform shaders and placement systems about environmental conditions, such as humidity and temperature, allowing for details like fireflies appearing only near bushes at night. The team used a mix of dynamic and pre-calculated lighting solutions. "Irradiance volumes" allowed for high-quality indirect lighting that could still update with the time-of-day cycle. To handle the large amount of foliage, the team used a "placement system" based on texture lookups rather than storing individual object data. Rendering was optimised by using a cheap depth-only pass first to handle expensive alpha testing.^[52]

The game uses hierarchical task network planning, which generates sequences of behaviour rather than single actions. It allows for different reactions based on a machine's class: Acquisition machines might flee, while Combat and Recon machines coordinate to hunt the player. To prevent the player from being overwhelmed, the AI decides which machine attacks next based on how interesting or varied the combat will feel. While one machine attacks, others in the group are programmed to circle the player and wait their turn, creating strategic windows for the player to counter-attack or escape.^[15] Information is attached to objects like the player, arrows, or rocks in "packets". This allows machines to distinguish between a dead body, an arrow whizzing past their head, or a player hiding in tall grass. Each machine type interprets sensory data differently and, depending on the "strength" of a machine's sensors, the AI might only receive a portion of the available data, creating unique and emergent behaviours for different species. Guerrilla developed two distinct systems to handle the game's varied terrain and machine types: land navigation and aerial navigation. Land navigation uses a navigation mesh that allows ground-based machines of various sizes to move through complex geometry. It is designed to recognise and adapt to changes in local terrain. Aerial navigation uses a completely separate system based on a runtime-generated heightmap of the flyable air space. This allows for hierarchical path planning and specialised behaviours like transitioning from air to ground or performing guided crash-landings.^[61]

Narrative

The meaning of "Horizon" in the title represents "a boundless new world, and also the passage of time (where the Sun rises and sets)" according to the developers.^[62] Approximately 20 different stories were written, exploring various concepts, such as different player characters. John Gonzalez, who previously acted as lead writer for Fallout: New Vegas (2010), was hired to write the story as narrative director.^[30] Horizon was envisioned as a science fiction title, with all lore firmly grounded in plausible science and realistic extrapolation.^[63] Futuristic fiction including Princess Mononoke (1997) and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) served as major touchstones early in the game's development.^[50][64] The narrative also shared a similar structure to the Western genre, as Aloy ventures into new, frontier settlements as a loner and becomes entangled in its conflicts.^[50] Major quest lines were inspired by biblical epics like Ben-Hur (1959) and The Ten Commandments (1956).^[65]

Aloy remained a core part of the game throughout development.^[31] She was originally designed to be younger and more expressive, but the team ultimately decided that a more mature version offered greater narrative opportunities.^[33] The writing team initially drew inspiration from female leads like Ellen Ripley from Alien, Sarah Connor from Terminator, and San from Princess Mononoke. The team established her as an outcast of the Nora tribe, allowing the player to empathise with her perspective as an outsider entering a strange new world.^[48] The team aimed for Aloy to start as the "least important person in the world" and become the most important. Aloy was designed to be compassionate due to her upbringing. Every side quest began as a narrative concept designed to answer why she, specifically, would want to get involved. While Gonzalez described the core story as an "epic tragedy", side quests allowed the team to explore stories that are lighter, sarcastic, or comedic.^[48] Dialogue spoken by NPCs subtly shifts based on the order the player completes main and side quests to maintain narrative consistency.^[56]

Ashly Burch voices Aloy,^[66] whose likeness is portrayed by Hannah Hoekstra,^[67] and motion capture was performed by Amanda Piery.^[36] Following an auditioning process in 2014, Burch was called in to do the E3 2015 trailer and proceeded to work on the game for two years in Los Angeles, providing facial motion capture as well.^[68] Burch's performance heavily influenced the writing of narrative director John Gonzales. The two of them collaborated closely regarding how she delivered her lines and what he would write for her to say next.^{[29]: 13:05} They spent considerable time refining her hairstyle to ensure she remained instantly recognisable among the game's cast, regardless of the armour she wore.^[33][34] Sony conducted focus testing to see if a female character was marketable.^[69]

Music

The game's soundtrack was composed by Joris de Man, The Flight, Niels van der Leest, and Jonathan Williams, with vocalist Julie Elven serving as the primary performer.^[70][71] To handle the open world, the workload was split: De Man concentrated on memorable themes and leitmotifs, The Flight handled textures and soundscapes, van der Leest focused on percussion, and Williams handled various tribal songs in the game.^[72] Rather than writing fixed tracks, the composers provided music in "kit form" or stems. This allowed the game engine to layer and rearrange elements dynamically, providing variation and preventing repetition during long gameplay sessions. The composers also did the motion capture for diegetic music vignettes, portraying in-game tribal musicians.^[73][74]

Music supervisor and senior sound designer Lucas van Tol steered away from the heavily compressed, blockbuster orchestral sound common in modern games, opting instead for an intimate, organic feel. Composers were encouraged to play instruments "naïvely"—as if a post-apocalyptic survivor had found a guitar or harmonica and was guessing how to play it. The score was built around three themes: machines, tribes, and nature.^[73] For the tribal theme, they experimented with bows on piano wire and resonator guitars (with layered tracks of harmonicas on top of the latter) and playing cellos with plectrums or the back of a bow; de Man also used a contrabass flute and made synth pads from blowing on a Thai bamboo flute. Circuit-bent synthesizers and percussive loops, run through impulse responses of metal and iron being beaten, were devoted to making a thematic identifier for the machines based on technology and metal. They also designed unique physical instruments for the game world, such as the Braumdrum, KunaBass, and Iron Pendulin.^{[72][73][74][75]}

Remaster

Rumours of a remaster being in development began in 2022 and speculation increased after Zero Dawn was removed from PlayStation Plus in May 2024.^[107][108] Co-developed by Nixxes, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered was announced for Windows and PlayStation 5 on 24 September 2024 and released on 31 October. Remastered includes the previously released downloadable content, including The Frozen Wilds.^[3] Its existence received mixed reactions as some journalists and players felt it was too soon to remaster the game because it was already playable on the PlayStation 5 in 4K and 60 frames per second (FPS) following an update in 2021.^[b] The Steam and Epic Games Store versions of the Complete Edition were delisted with the release of the remaster and initially it was required for PC users to use a PlayStation Network (PSN) account to play.^[113] This prevented anyone living in the more than one hundred countries where PSN is unavailable, primarily in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia, from playing the remaster.^[114] Sony removed the PSN account requirement in February 2025.^[115]

Remastered brought over the gameplay, HUD, and accessibility and performance options from the game's sequel Horizon Forbidden West (2022).^[105] The terrain system and foliage were graphically updated along with an increase in the number of unique plants. Nixxes looked at the biomes in the original game and used the game's concept art to closely match the types of foliage expected for each biome.^[105][106] The increased amount of memory of the PS5 allowed Nixxes to increase the number of NPCs and introduce more dynamic NPC behaviours.^[106] Deforming snow that was introduced in The Frozen Wilds is now used across the whole game for snow and sand.^[105][106] Aloy's character model received the most improvements as her face model from Forbidden West was brought over, which included changes like the addition of peach fuzz, and upgrades to her hair, eyes, and outfits.^{[105][106][116]} Remastered features more than 10 hours of re-recorded dialogue and uses new motion capture data for conversations. Nixxes built a new system to integrate the animation data into the game, which made the character movement and facial animations look and feel more natural. New camera angles were also added to these scenes. The audio mix was reworked, which includes better support for surround and 3D audio.^[105][106] The remaster also integrates features of the PS5's DualSense controller including adaptive triggers and haptic feedback, providing specific tactile sensations for different actions. A new optional setting was added that uses both sound and haptic pulses to notify the player of interactable elements in the world, which were previously only marked visually.^[117]

Critical response

Horizon Zero Dawn received "generally favourable" reception according to the review aggregator website Metacritic,^[130] and according to OpenCritic, 94% of critics recommended the game.^[122] Critics generally agreed that it was visually impressive with a familiar gameplay design.^[131]

The combat received generally positive reviews. Dan Silver from The Guardian described combat as "endurably exhilarating", and liked how each machine required different tactical approaches.^[129] Peter Brown from GameSpot found the machine design to be creative and liked how the game gradually introduced more complex variants as the player became more proficient in combat.^[126] Their distinct attack patterns were also praised for contributing to combat variety.^[5][125] Several critics wrote that these machine combat encounters created a lot of emergent yet memorable moments, and fighting against larger machines was considered to be a satisfying experience as they tend to push the player to use all gadgets available to them.^[c] Several reviewers also noted that combat in the game can be demanding.^{[125][132][134]} Phillip Kollar from Polygon compared the cadence of gameplay alternating between crafting, combat and collecting materials to Monster Hunter, and found Horizon to be more approachable.^[127] Melee combat^[21][126] and combat encounters with human enemies,^{[5][127][135]} however, were singled out as weaker parts of the game.

The game's world design received praise. Writing for The Verge, Andrew Webster praised Guerrilla's attempts at worldbuilding, noticing that each tribe has a unique visual identity reflected in their architecture and clothing design.^[135] Kollar observed that Horizon was the result of a team being allowed to do something new, adding that it had more personality when compared with Guerrilla's past works.^[127] Jeff Marchiafava from Game Informer noted that the world provided "a remarkable sense of discovery", praising its diverse biomes, machine types and human settlements,^[125] while Justin Clark from Slant Magazine wrote that the game had the "most vibrant and beautifully envisioned open worlds in a video game to date".^[134] The game's wealth of content and the variety of its activities were also praised.^[5][21] Despite noting the novelty of the game's setting and finding it to be graphically impressive, many reviewers wrote that Zero Dawn did not deviate from the design established by other contemporary open-world games. Webster described it as a "greatest hits" collection of mechanics, while Silver felt the game fell short of being "seminal" due to a lack of innovation.^[d] Its implementation of RPG elements, such as predictable side quests, a rudimentary crafting system, and an often-cluttered inventory, was also criticised for being unrefined.^[125][126] Silver from The Guardian and Sammy Barker from Push Square wrote that the game did not actually allow the player to have much agency in the role they play because it follows a very fixed, predetermined path, with Silver suggesting that the RPG mechanics were "lip service to genre expectations".^[128][129]

The game's story received praise by critics. Webster wrote that the game's central mystery kept him engaged despite the slower opening hours, and added that the story was both "personal" and "epic".^[135] Kollar was frequently surprised by its narrative, and liked how the game set up future adventures while being self-contained on its own.^[127] Several reviewers praised how the game integrated modern-day tribal conflicts and politics in a story about the mysteries of the past.^[e] Brown praised Aloy's character development and the story's exploration of themes about nature and technology. He described the central mystery to be "fascinating", though he found the quality of the side content to be inferior in comparison.^[126] Silver found the story to be compelling, but disliked the game's reliance on "extraneous exposition" as well as audio and text files to convey the narrative.^[129] Aloy was observed to be perfectly coupled with the story in that she offered the curiosity to seek out its many mysteries.^{[128][127][132]} Barker described her as a determined yet vulnerable character, comparing her to Katniss Everdeen, Hermione Granger, and Lara Croft.^[128] Burch's performance was also praised, with Sam Machkovech from Ars Technica calling her performance "emotionally well-rounded".^[5][133]

The game received some criticism for the similarities between the tribes and Native Americans, but having Aloy, a white female, as the lead protagonist. Dia Lacina, a Native American writer, argued that some of the terminologies used within the game were also considered to be disrespectful.^[136] Gonzales said the terminology was discussed during the creative process to make sure that the team was being sensitive to the cultural concerns of the audience. He added that the team did not base the tribes on one group; instead, they looked at people from all around the world and different time periods.^[136]

Accolades

Prior to its release, Horizon Zero Dawn was nominated for "Most Anticipated Game" at The Game Awards in 2015 and 2016,^[148][149] and "Most Wanted Game" at the Golden Joystick Awards 2016.^[150] Several publications listed it as one of the most anticipated games of 2017, including Den of Geek,^[151] Entertainment Weekly,^[152] The Guardian,^[153] Polygon,^[154] and Wired.^[155] The game also received numerous awards and nominations for its previews at E3 and Gamescom.^[l]

Zero Dawn received 8 nominations at the 14th British Academy Games Awards, winning the award for "Original Property".^[164][165] The game won awards for two of its 10 nominations at the 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards; "Outstanding Achievement in Story" and "Outstanding Technical Achievement".^[166][167] At the 2017 Golden Joystick Awards, the game won "Best Storytelling" and "Best PlayStation Game".^[150][168] The game won for "Outstanding Achievement in Videogame Writing" at the 70th Writers Guild of America Awards.^[169] The game's music won multiple awards as well, including at the 2018 Game Audio Network Guild Awards where it won awards for "Best Original Instrumental" and Best "Original Choral Composition",^[170] and "Best Original Video Game Score" at the Ivor Novello Awards.^[171] A number of publications, including Ars Technica, CNET, Game Informer, GameSpot, GamesRadar+, Polygon, Push Square, Shacknews, Slant Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, The Verge, and VentureBeat recognised Horizon Zero Dawn as one of the best games of 2017.^[m]

Sales

Horizon Zero Dawn was the best-selling game during its release week in the United Kingdom and Australia.^[196][197] It surpassed No Man's Sky (2016) as the biggest launch of a new intellectual property on the PlayStation 4 and was the most successful launch of any kind on the platform since Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (2016),^[198] as well as Guerrilla Games' biggest debut to date.^[199] The game sold close to 117,000 units in its first week in Japan, becoming the second best-selling game that week.^[200] Horizon Zero Dawn was the second most downloaded game on the North American PlayStation Store for February.^[201] In March 2017, it was the second best-selling game in the UK and the fourth best-selling game in the US.^[202][203]

Within two weeks it sold 2.6 million units.^[199] By the game's second anniversary, it had sold over 10 million units, making it one of the best-selling PlayStation 4 games.^[57] The Windows version had a successful launch, moving over 700,000 digital units.^[204] By May 2022, it had sold over 2.4 million units on PC, generating more than $60 million in revenue.^[205] By 16 April 2023, the game had sold around 24.3 million units.^[206] The combined sales of the Horizon franchise reached 38 million units by July 2025, making it one of Sony's most successful properties.^[207]

Sequel

Guerrilla announced a sequel titled Horizon Forbidden West in June 2020 at the PlayStation 5 reveal event. The game was released on 18 February 2022 for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and was ported to Windows on 21 March 2024^{[208][209][210]} The story takes place six months after the conclusion of Zero Dawn.^[211] In the game, Aloy ventures into the Forbidden West and uncovers the origin of the extinction signal that triggers the activation of HADES.^[212] Ashly Burch reprises her role as Aloy, while Carrie-Anne Moss and Angela Bassett are among the new cast members.^[213]

Lego reimagining

Guerilla enlisted UK-based Studio Gobo as a co-development partner in January 2023 to expand the Horizon universe.^[214] Lego Horizon Adventures was announced on 7 June 2024 and released on 14 November for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Windows.^[215][216] Key cast members from Zero Dawn return to reprise their roles, but the role of Sylens was recast following the death of Lance Reddick in March 2023, with Tim Russ playing the character in the game.^[217][218] Lego Horizon Adventures reshapes the story of Zero Dawn in an upbeat and family-friendly way, with the team significantly downplaying the apocalyptic story.^[219]

Film adaptation

In January 2025, Sony announced that a film adaptation of the game was in the works at PlayStation Productions and Columbia Pictures.^[220] PlayStation Productions president Asad Qizilbash stated that the company had a working script and were searching for a director, and that the company was planning to start shooting the film in 2026 for release in 2027.^[221]

Other media

A tabletop game, Horizon Zero Dawn: The Board Game, was announced as being in development in August 2018 by Steamforged Games.^[222] The game was funded on Kickstarter in less than two hours and began shipping out in November 2020.^[223] An expansion named "The Sacred Land" was released on 14 September 2021.^[224] In March 2020, it was announced that Titan Comics would release a comic book series, including a prequel issue for Free Comic Book Day. The story takes place after the events of the game.^[225] The four-issue comic book miniseries called Horizon Zero Dawn: The Sunhawk was supposed to release its first issue in July, but was slightly delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and released monthly between August and November.^{[225][226][227]} A second four-issue miniseries called Horizon Zero Dawn: Liberation was released starting with the first issue in July 2021 and concluded in January 2022. Its story takes place during the events of the game.^[227][228] The comics were co-created and written by Anne Toole, one of the writers for the game.^[226]

In May 2022, it was announced that a live action television series adaptation was in development at PlayStation Productions and Sony Pictures Television for Netflix, with Steve Blackman writing and producing the series under his Irish Cowboy production banner.^[229] Aloy was expected to be the main character.^[230] By January 2024, writing was underway on the series.^[231] The series was no longer moving forward by that June after a January 2023 HR complaint was made public, in which twelve former Umbrella Academy (2019–2024) writers and support staffers accused Blackman of "toxic, bullying, manipulative, and retaliatory behavior".^[232]