Sony was worried about a female protagonist in Killzone dev's new IP
By Brian Crecente on Jun 18, 2015 at 9:00a @crecenteb
"Personally, The Last Guardian was very emotionally important, a great reveal, but for me the announcement of Horizon from Guerrilla Games is actually the biggest project for me for this E3 to announce because it's a big project and a new IP.
"I was nervous to see the reaction from people."
There was a third reason that Yoshida was nervous to see how people would react to the game: Horizon's protagonist is a young woman.
"She's a female lead character," he said. "That has always been the vision by the team, but we had a discussion. Is it risky to do a female character?"
In fact, once development was underway, so many questions were asked about the protagonist internally, that the company brought in a marketing team to do some focus testing.
"The concern came after the game was in development," he said. "We started to show it to many more people internally and they had questions about it. So we worked with our marketing groups to do this focus testing.
"We wanted to see how people would react to some of the things: open world RPG, the set up of machine versus primitive weapons and the female protagonist. All of those things."
While the reaction was positive, Yoshida was still a bit nervous about the game's first broad unveiling.
"The focus testing reaction was positive and that made us feel good, but you know it's a limited number of people that we were able to test."
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