NCSoftFor years, there’s been talk of a multiplayer game based on Horizon Zero Dawn in the works, and now such a game has finally been revealed — but not the one you may have expected. Announced with a surprise trailer, Horizon Steel Frontiers is an online Horizon spinoff, but one that’s mysteriously absent from one major platform and not being made by series developer Guerilla Games. The first look at the game is interesting if nothing else, with a mix of elements that are sometimes exciting and sometimes baffling.Horizon Steel Frontiers is being developed by NCSoft, a long-time publisher of MMORPGs like Lineage and Guild Wars, in collaboration with Guerrilla Games, which is still reportedly working on a different multiplayer Horizon game itself. What sets Horizon Steel Frontiers apart most is that it’s a full MMORPG and that it’s only hitting PC and mobile platforms, rather than heading to PlayStation like the rest of the Horizon franchise.A lot of Horizon Steel Frontiers looks familiar. It’s set in the same world as the rest of the franchise, with scattered tribes of humans eking out a living in a world overrun with robots modeled after dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Some of the series’ most iconic creatures, like the towering Tallneck, appear in the trailer. Combat even looks broadly similar, with players using traps and specialized elemental weapons to hack parts off of robots before bringing them down.But the biggest difference here is the most obvious — players won’t be going after their targets alone. According to Guerrilla Games studio director Jan-Bart van Beek, “thousands” of players will share servers together as they hunt machines. Players can team up to hunt together or attempt to swoop in and steal each other’s quarry for themselves, with van Beek making mention of “rival tribes” of players competing with each other. Players will select a tribe at character creation, which function as the competing player factions often found in MMORPGs.NCSoft says cooperating to take down giant machines will be a big part of Horizon Steel Frontiers. | NCSoftIt’s not clear yet whether that means there will be full player-versus-player combat in the game, or whether Horizon Steel Frontiers will allow players to stumble upon each other within the world or require queuing into robot hunts beforehand. Either way, there appears to be a major focus on cooperation, and hunting down larger machines alone could be extremely dangerous. And from what’s been shown off in the trailer, combat and exploration look quite similar to how they work in the singleplayer Horizon games, albeit with a faster pace and seemingly simplified mechanics.Still, parts of the game remain a little perplexing. A hub area clearly cribbing from Monster Hunter is shown off in the trailer, but what you’ll be doing there or out in the world between machine hunts is still a mystery. The fact that Horizon Steel Frontiers is built for mobile devices could also be a red flag for players who plan to play on PC, as it could limit the game’s complexity compared to PC-only MMORPGs. Then there’s the character creation portion of the trailer, which shows a horde of rather generically sexy player creations, bearing more resemblance to the character designs in Stellar Blade than in the Horizon series.Horizon Steel Frontiers brings the combat of the Horizon series into multiplayer for the first time. | NCSoftThe announcement of Horizon Steel Frontiers comes just the day after another PlayStation series took an even more bizarre leap into the multiplayer mobile space. Ratchet & Clank: Ranger Rumble is a multiplayer mix of platformer and arena shooter, which is also being created by a third-party studio rather than the series’ originator. PlayStation has already been keen to move its games to PC and push multiplayer iterations of its popular franchises recently, and it seems now that it’s extending that online push to mobile platforms as well.There’s no release date set for Horizon Steel Frontiers yet, so we’ll likely see quite a bit more of it before it’s playable. The trailer itself notes that it’s made up of pre-alpha footage. It may not be the sequel (or even the spinoff) that Horizon players were expecting, but Horizon Steel Frontiers is, if nothing else, an interesting and unexpected step for one of PlayStation’s biggest recent series.