My name is Samullum Ahern, and recently I had the chance to chat to senior producer at Guerilla Games and of course on Horizon Zero Dawn Samrat Sharma because of the PS4 exclusive's forthcoming release.

I started off, a lovely chat with Sam, but I started off by asking him.

I had noticed that throughout my time in the game, that there were certain things that

seemed like they'd maybe cherry-picked from other games or taken inspiration from other games like, say, the Tallnecks, which are the big giraffes, if you've seen them in kind of trailers and things like that.

They're very similar to the towers in Assassin's Creed, or there's a kind of sort of conversation, kind of dialogue option wheel type thing, which

could be equated to Mass Effect.

So I started off by asking Sam, what series, if any, did the studio take inspiration from?

We've got, the benefit of having a really diverse team at the studio is that we've got so many people playing different kinds of games,

they play different kinds of things, they bring different ideas to the table.

But we didn't consciously derive inspiration from any game.

We just decided to make the game in the genre with sort of the genre staples that come with it.

You mentioned the dialogue system, for example.

For us, we wanted to keep the dialogue system the way it is,

because that allowed you to express Eloy's emotions or see Eloy's emotions at any given point. And that sort of allowed us to explore

what that means in a narrative structure. And I can't speak for Master Effect, but they have

certain different goals for their dialogue wheel. So it's not a superficial similarity. We sort of

try to make systems that worked within the world of the game.

And, you know, there are some certain sort of genre tropes that come with it,

but we didn't consciously derive inspiration from any one game, I don't think.

Was there ever a decision to kind of flesh out that dialogue option

and kind of go down that rabbit hole of making the player have a huge

effect on Aloy's personality where if you answered everything kind of aggressively to everyone

...