There are no guns in Horizon Zero Dawn for a good reason

In the latest issue of Edge, game director Mathijs De Jonge explains the decision was one vital to retaining Horizon's unique personality: "What we saw with these prototypes was that as soon as you give someone a machine gun, it’s just spray and pray," he says. "It just becomes a cover shooter. We wanted the player to feel primitive, so we decided that the tribes would have very limited knowledge of technology. They don’t understand what’s going on with these machines, or how they work."