Horizon Steel Frontiers: Monster Hunter-Inspired Co-Op MMORPG Explained

Horizon Steel Frontiers is shaping up to be one of the most ambitious evolutions of Guerrilla’s post-apocalyptic universe, transforming the once strictly single-player Horizon experience into a fully online co-op hunting MMORPG.

Announced for PC and mobile with a target window of late 2026 to early 2027, the project immediately sparked one big question among fans: how do you take a story-driven, Aloy-centric adventure and reforge it into a social game about hunting machines with friends?

Executive Producer Sunggu Lee shed light on that vision in a recent interview, explaining that the team looked to one of the most successful cooperative action franchises in the world for inspiration: Capcom’s Monster Hunter series. According to Lee, Monster Hunter’s signature loop of tracking, preparing for, and then surviving gigantic boss-like encounters became a natural reference point when NCSOFT and Guerrilla began exploring what a multiplayer Horizon could look like.

“Monster Hunter was definitely one of the key inspirations for Steel Frontiers,” Lee explained. “As we expanded Horizon’s core concept of hunting massive machines into a multiplayer setting, that cooperative hunting structure just clicked.” In other words, instead of simply tacking online features onto a traditional open-world formula, Steel Frontiers is being built from the ground up as a co-op hunting game set inside Horizon’s lush but deadly world.

A New Kind of Horizon MMORPG

Horizon Steel Frontiers is described as a full-fledged MMORPG, but not one that chases the enormous, chaotic raids seen in genre giants. Rather than filling the screen with dozens of players and a storm of spell effects, the developers are prioritizing clarity and readability in combat. Parties will range from small groups up to mid-sized raids, enough to feel epic without turning every fight into visual noise.

This design choice ties directly into another major shift: the combat focus. While Guerrilla’s mainline Horizon titles lean heavily on precise ranged attacks with bows and traps, early gameplay from Steel Frontiers already highlights a more aggressive, melee-oriented style. Players will need to manage spacing carefully, timing dodges, blocks, and counterattacks while circling hulking machines that can crush an unprepared hunter in seconds. The familiar part-breaking mechanics return, rewarding coordinated focus on weak points to disarm or disable key weapons before the final takedown.

Because of this intimate, animation-driven combat, Lee notes that truly massive raids simply wouldn’t work; too many players on the field would make it hard to read enemy telegraphs and coordinate roles. Instead, Steel Frontiers aims for parties that feel personal and tactical, where each player’s build and decisions matter in the flow of a hunt.

Towns, Guilds, and Community

Every good online RPG needs a place for its community to live, and Steel Frontiers is no exception. Lee describes towns as the beating heart of the experience, central hubs where players return between expeditions. Here, hunters can craft and upgrade gear, pick up contracts, socialize, or simply show off the armor they fashioned from their latest Machine kill.

Guilds tie directly into this social fantasy. These longer-term groups give players a persistent identity beyond their individual character, allowing them to organize regular hunts, share resources, and build reputations across the game’s different regions. Whether you prefer teaming up with a tight-knit squad of friends or drifting between ad-hoc groups you meet in the field, the goal is to make cooperation feel natural rather than forced.

Out in the wilds, match-made or spontaneous team-ups will be a core part of the game. You might bump into another group stalking the same massive machine and decide to join forces, or deliberately assemble a carefully tuned party to tackle a particularly dangerous hunt. Standard MMORPG social tools – friends lists, chat channels, party systems – are all present to make forming and maintaining those connections as seamless as possible.

Primarily a PvE Hunting Experience

The announcement trailer hinted at tribal rivalries and competition between factions, leading some fans to assume Steel Frontiers would lean heavily into player-versus-player combat. Lee, however, emphasizes that the backbone of the game remains PvE. The main content is built around cooperating to bring down machines, mastering the ecosystem, and progressing your character and guild, not griefing other players in open-world skirmishes.

That doesn’t mean there will be no sense of competition at all – leaderboards, race-to-kill challenges, or asynchronous tribal rankings could still play a role – but the core fantasy is hunting together, not fighting each other. For players who fell in love with Horizon’s narrative and worldbuilding, that PvE focus should come as a relief.

Built on Unreal Engine 5, Coming to Multiple Platforms

One of the more surprising confirmations from Lee is that Horizon Steel Frontiers is being developed on Unreal Engine 5 rather than Guerrilla’s in-house Decima engine. The switch suggests NCSOFT and Guerrilla are aiming for a technology stack that is already proven for large-scale online games and flexible enough to handle both PC and mobile platforms from day one.

Steel Frontiers is currently targeting a late 2026 or early 2027 launch on PC and mobile. NCSOFT has also made it clear that it would like to bring the game to PlayStation 5, though that will ultimately depend on agreements with Guerrilla and Sony. As for series heroine Aloy and other familiar characters, the team is staying quiet for now, leaving fans to speculate whether this new online adventure will intersect directly with the mainline saga or carve out its own cast entirely.

What is clear already is that Horizon Steel Frontiers is not just “Horizon with co-op,” but a deliberate attempt to fuse Monster Hunter-style cooperative hunting with the machine-ruled world that Guerrilla created. If NCSOFT and Guerrilla can balance tight melee combat, meaningful progression, and a vibrant social ecosystem of towns, guilds, and raids, Steel Frontiers could emerge as one of the most intriguing new MMORPGs on the horizon – literally and figuratively.