New documents have provided insight into the production process of Horizon and revealed the complex and costly aspects of development. There are seven tribes in the game.
According to Guerrilla Games Art Director Jan-Bart van Beek, creating the tribes was one of the most challenging parts of development. Each tribe was developed with great attention to detail, which required significant time and financial investment, and this is evident in the visual decisions of all games in the series.
Van Beek stated in a written document for Sony's lawsuit against Tencent that the tribes were built with the help of anthropologists who helped understand the formation of real cultures. Style guides of 60 to 200 pages were created for each tribe, considering physical traits, clothing, accessories, and dwellings.
Each tribe received a unique design reflecting its material culture and biome. Color palettes were chosen to emphasize the identity of the biome and the cultural uniqueness of the inhabitants. For example, the Nora tribe wears clothing made of animal hides, leather, linen, and metal plates, adorned with feathers, embroidery, wooden beads, metal details, and old cables.
All of this took a huge amount of research hours before the start of the visual and narrative design of the Horizon world.