This is the bit people often miss when they compare him with Indiana Jones: yes, both men run around the world punching bad guys and uncovering ancient evils, but that’s not their modus operandi. Nathan Drake doesn’t want to save the world, he wants to find stuff out – being a hero is a side-product. But really, Drake is motivated by a keen curiosity about the world, about history, culture and – most importantly – his own role in that universe (symbolised by his belief that he’s a direct descendent of Sir Francis Drake, tying in his globe-trotting antics with a personal story of family and belonging). Of course, his adventures always involve baddies and artefacts of great power that could do terrible damage in the wrong hands. We care enough about the protagonist to put them, rather than some vast cosmic good/evil struggle, at the centre of the experience.

And when you have characters and environments that the player can understand and recognise as authentic, the need for vast heroic narratives is lessened. The arrival of high-definition visuals, the development of intensely accurate facial motion capture, and the recruitment of Triple A acting and writing talent has led to the creation of characters who are recognisable, relatable and intrinsically human. Photograph: Nic Delves-Broughtonīut in the modern era, the capacity of mainstream games to tell more complex, emotional stories has grown enormously. Modern motion capture technology can accurately depict facial expressions as well as physical mannerisms increasing the visual authenticity of human characters. Hence, a lot of games about lone heroes triumphing against the odds – rendering Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces into interactive life. But also, a lot of early video games drew their story-telling approach directly from mythic sources – the great legends, folk and fairy tales – because with limited visual and narrative story-telling tools available, these primal tales were the easiest to communicate.

Partly, there’s the huge influence that fantasy and science-fiction masterworks have had on game developers – the overbearing presence of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars in the collective imaginative canon. There were many intermingled reasons for this. In short, she acts like a human being.įor a very long time, a huge percentage of action-adventure games were about saving the planet – sometimes even the entire universe – from some monstrous invading evil. Her interactions with the world, the characters and the wider narrative within it, are all personal rather than heroic. She is fascinated by the mechanised monsters roaming the landscape and the ruins of an ancient technological culture that she first discovers as a child, and she wants to learn more. But what dawned on me much more slowly was the fact that its wonderful lead protagonist, Aloy, is not so much motivated by some grand mission to save humanity (though that sort of comes into it), she is motivated by intellectual curiosity. Also obvious is the fact that it borrows a lot of mechanics from the Far Cry series, and that it lacks the sheer depth and scope of role-playing adventures like Witcher 3 and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The PlayStation 4 action adventure game, set in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by robotic dinosaurs, is thrilling and beautiful – that much is obvious right from the start. S omething has only just occurred to me about Horizon Zero Dawn.

Saving humanity last horizon