"But with a bow, you feel like you're controlling every single tiny detail about it, because
it's all coming from your body, and you're directly connected to it."
Horizon Zero Dawn's bow makes me feel powerful.
I always described it as having a "meaty thunk,"
but no one liked hearing me say that.
So I reached out to Guerrilla Games to find out how exactly they made Aloy's bow feel
so good.
This is principle sound designer Anton Woldhek.
We asked him about the philosophy behind that bow's sound.
"How can I translate the experience of firing a bow into something in the game?"
"Which might not sound really like how a bow sounds, but more gives the emotional response
that you would have firing a real bow."
They made it so that if you quickly fire one arrow after another...
it just doesn't sound as powerful.
But if you really stretch that string...
*meaty thunk*
"There's obviously no real energy
taken for the player to draw an arrow."
"You can do it endlessly and you can hold it for however long, but we wanted to give a
sense of that, that there is really an effort needed to do that."
"Because that is the actual power of the weapon."
There's actually a sweet spot.
"The whole bow starts to rattle and you feel a big 'thunk' from the subwoofer if you have that."
"You want it to feel good when you fire the bow, and so you push the player into the right
direction by giving the right feel at the right time."
"You will naturally already draw it until the sound is good."
And of course when you actually hit something with an arrow, it also needs to be satisfying.
"If you are hitting parts of the machine where your arrow gets deflected, then you won't
get that sound."
"And if you're hitting a part where you're doing more damage, then you'll hear a longer
story of the sound."
"Because the sound will then be longer, there's more time to hear that story and to know,
'Okay, I'm actually doing something here.'"
Of course, it's also important what you see.
Guerrilla Games emphasized the trail left in the air by each arrow so that you could
easily track your shot.
Game designers have a whole bag of tricks to make sure that impacts leave an impression.
From hit pauses
to animations.
In Horizon Zero Dawn, the machines were given detachable plates.
"Ripping a plate off just feels really satisfying, I think.
And it gives good feedback to the player as well, because you're shooting a relatively
small arrow onto a big surface."
"How are you gonna see that the arrow actually lands there?"
"Well, if a plate flies off, and there's also sparks and other effects that are triggered
and sounds, then you kind of emphasize and magnify it, and then it becomes very clear
to the player what's happening."
Game director Mathijs de Jonge told us that the guiding principle behind Horizon is that
the player should always feel like they're in control.
Part of that was minimizing the time that the player spends stuck in animations.
"In the Killzone games, back then, animation was always kind of leading over the gameplay,
and that's a system we changed for Horizon."
"For example, you can shoot faster than what the animation
actually displays when you fire a bow."
Uh, hang on, can we look at that?
So compare these fast shots to a more measured draw of the bow.
You can actually see the parts of the animation that are skipped so that the players can fire
as fast as they want.
"So this is where gameplay is now leading.
The button press is actually faster than the animation."
To make sure that the gameplay was prioritized, the animators put tags in Aloy's movement
animations, which basically means that almost every action can be interrupted within a certain
window of time.
For example, here's Aloy starting a light weapon attack and moving directly into a dodge roll.
"Without that capability, you felt a lot more, kinda, almost like, locked in with the bow."
"So that sense of freedom you have when you hold it, and you can move in any direction
and you can switch to other actions, and that greatly helps as well with the responsiveness."
So the bow doesn't just feel good because it makes pretty explosions and it sounds nice.
It feels good because you can whip it out at any time and pull a total boss move.
Like this.
If you liked this video and want to know more about the tricks that game developers pull
to make things feel good, you should watch our video about the hit pause in God of War,
which totally works, but maybe not the way that you're expecting it to!