“Our primary thing on Horizon Forbidden West was to really communicate the emotion of Aloy,” Oleksa Lozowchuk, one of the composers for Horizon Forbidden West tells me. “Where she was in the world, in her narrative, or what she was potentially feeling, we communicated that. Sometimes that would be taking a single instrument and literally bowing it or plucking it, but doing it in a textured way, where you couldn't really make out what [the sound was]. In my case, I used a couple of different harps. But I didn't play them like the traditional harp, whether folklore, folk harp, or classical harp, I ended up using a bunch of different mallets from indigenous drums or taking horsehair from a violin string and then bowing it, but it was using it in a way where it was creating something that would connect emotionally in a scene. ‘Would [you] be intrigued by it?’ - that was the rule of thumb. Get it to make the hair on the back of your neck rise. Did it intrigue you?”
Lozowchuk joins the Horizon composing team for Forbidden West, with Joris de Man, Niels van de Leest, and composing duo The Flight all returning from Horizon Zero Dawn. Lozowchuk brings with him experience from the Dead Rising series, Puzzle Fighter, and FIFA 20/21, amongst others. While the original set of composers made for a great team in Zero Dawn, Lozowchuk says he was able to integrate himself into the ensemble well. “I spent a lot of time listening to the Horizon Zero Dawn soundtrack when I was asked to do my audition,” Lozowchuk explains. “I really did a deep dive into the original soundtrack, looking at what gamers liked, looking at the comments and the feedback. I really got a sense of the palette, the instrumentation, the melodic language, the harmonic and rhythmic language. That's how I work, I usually funnel everything in. And then when I did write the audition pieces, Lucas shared it with the music team, and it resonated with all of them. The most important thing for me was just making sure that all the other composers in the Guerilla team felt that there was a fit. From there, it is just a matter of always checking in with the new pieces that are raised, cross checking with Lucas [van Tol, music supervisor for Horizon] and the Guerilla team to make sure it still feels ‘Horizon’.”
A huge part of this ‘Horizon’ feel is the fact that Aloy spends a lot of her time wandering through an open world on her own, which is more challenging to score for because the player doesn’t always do what is expected of them. “I have worked on open world games before, so I'm very aware that you have players that will just do a drop in play for an hour, and then you have players that will go in and spend literally 40 hours a week playing that open world,” he says. “[Those 40 hour players] could literally be playing in the same area over and over and over again. I've always been very aware of that when I write a cue, especially an ambience or an exploration queue, we add a bunch of different layers. Because we know at runtime, I'll give maybe 20 to 30 different stereo stems to Lucas, that put together are a composite that you hear as just a track. But at runtime, they're split out so that you'll never hear the same thing twice.”
While Horizon is technically set in the future, because the cycle of civilization has been reset somewhat, it feels more like it’s set in the past. For that reason, Lozowchuk and the rest of the team favoured some more unusual instruments when assembling Forbidden West’s unique sound. “One instrument which I used is a trembita,” Lozowchuk tells me. “It’s a Ukrainian horn, it's like a seven or eight foot alpine horn. I wasn't conscious of necessarily using throat gains or things for the Nora, but it definitely informed me, because on a couple of different tracks, I would do similar breathing, blowing through this trembita. It's a different texture. There's a pulse to it, and there's breath, but it's coming from my chest cavity and going through a wooden alpine horn, basically. That's being used as a rhythm which would propel Aloy in some of the cues.”
This trembita was not the only less predictable instrument Lozowchuk used. Others included the hurdy-gurdy - every Sea of Thieves player’s favourite - the viola d’amore, the Nordic hardanger fiddle, the tsymbaly, the guitalele, and various “percussion instruments from around the world.”
The world of Horizon is not a world of nations, at least not in the way of the global, clearly defined countries of our world. It’s far more tribal, with cultural identities developing as society rebuilds itself. Lozowchuk grew up in the Canadian prairies, in a similar environment to Aloy’s open world, and he suspects this informed some of his writing for the game. “I would say that it wasn't a conscious thing,” he admits. “I think it probably came out through the different types of layers that you'd hear in my writing. I grew up in the prairies, the cold prairies with the wide 180 degrees sunsets and open skies, and thunder showers and hailstorms and stuff, and then ended up living in Montreal for about a decade, and then now I'm on the west coast. So seeing the Northern Lights, experiencing all the different rocky mountains and hills and valleys in different terrains, I would say I was exposed to tonnes of nature and different terrains that Aloy would have probably traversed in different contexts. I worked for almost a decade with various Inuit filmmakers as a curious pundit on different projects, and they have a completely different way of approaching the future, the past, even just creation and how they address light and time. In many respects, that kind of interaction with the wilderness and at the same time having to deal with tribes, and deal with how to traverse land, and deal with all things that we deal with as humans was interesting as well. I think that definitely informed some of the battle music that I was writing.”