Hermen Hulst Joked To Horizon MMO Maker That It Felt Like Marrying Off His Daughter

Guild Wars publisher NCSoft revealed Horizon Steel Frontiers late last year as a new MMO spin-off that would see players group up together on PC and mobile to hunt the sci-fi franchise’s iconic prehistoric robots. Thanks to a new interview with one of the company’s executives we now have some new details about the upcoming game and a funny anecdote about Guerrilla Games handing off control of Horizon to an outside developer.

Speaking with the Korean publication Inven, chief business officer Lee Seong-gu shared more information about how the MMORPG will be structured, timing for its first beta test, and insight into NCSoft’s relationship with the PlayStation studio that originally created Horizon. He said Hermen Hulst, former Guerrilla Games studio head and current CEO of the PlayStation studio business group, told him that there were two special requests for licensing the Horizon IP.

“Hermen Hulst, head of SIE, joked that ‘Please do not kill [a] Tallneck (a giraffe-shaped machine),’ and insisted ‘Please take good care of Aloy. It feels like I am sending off my daughter at the aisle,'” Lee Seong-gu told Inven, based on a translation by Kotaku. Aloy seemingly won’t be playable in the game but it’s possible she could still appear in cutscenes.

The executive explained that he made several trips to the studio’s Dutch officer to pitch Horizon Steel Frontiers and had to prove he was a fan of the franchise. He also said that it was Sony’s idea to reveal the MMO at Gamescom 2025 but he convinced the company to let NCSoft reveal it to a Korean audience first at G-Star 2025 instead.

Big raids, no pay-to-win

Lee Seong-gu goes on to confirm that Horizon’s body part targeting and destruction will be a core part of the combat in Horizon Steel Frontiers and that players will be able to take part in boss raids with either 16 players or 32. Instead of fixed classes, players will be able to customize their own roles for combat, and there won’t be any auto attacks either. Fights will require manual inputs instead.

The executive tried to assuage fears that the new game would just be a Horizon-style reskin of NCSoft’s existing MMO series Lineage, and said the monetization will focus on monthly subscriptions, battle passes, and cosmetics rather than pay-to-win mechanics or other gameplay-impacting microtransactions common to mobile games.

As for when Horizon Steel Frontiers will actually become playable, we still don’t have any firm release date. Lee Seong-gu said the current plan is to let players try it at a demo at Gamescom 2026 with the game’s first beta test following after that, potentially in the first half of 2027. It’s still pretty far off, in other words. Hopefully, Guerrilla’s own upcoming Horizon multiplayer game, Horizon Hunters Gathering, launches sooner. As we reported last week, a new single-player open-world Horizon sequel isn’t coming anytime soon.