In Horizon Zero Dawn, Aloy’s character model is disguised as a bird.
Fans of Horizon Zero Dawn have uncovered an unused character model that swaps Aloy with an anthropomorphic duck, some five years after the game’s release on PlayStation 4 and about a year after its PC version.
The character resembles a dummy from an early version of the game because of the way he is dressed. It’s a basic black human figure, but for the enormous duck head protruding from its neck. This is a legacy character, please replace me, reads the character’s sandwich board, and anybody with queries may reach him by email at [email protected]games.com.
Redditor PortPort_ discovered Duckman using a cheat menu hack on the PC version of the game, despite the character’s sandwich board suggesting his name is Duck. Horizon Zero Dawn’s aesthetics can be tweaked, gameplay aspects can be altered, NPCs can be spawned, and the game’s data may be accessed.
To replace Aloy’s character model with a walking duck, PortPort used the cheat menu; another Redditor used a file manager patch to splice the game together and found the model there.
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Devs just want to have a good time
It’s unclear why this anthropomorphic duck was ever featured in Horizon Zero Dawn; he’s probably just a joke character model. Guerrilla Games (or at least a member of its development team) may have wished to locate the “legacy character” on his sandwich board, even if he requested that it be destroyed.
If you’ve ever played a video game, you’ve probably encountered a few “Easter eggs.” God of War’s camera was hacked in 2020, allowing a data miner to roam the globe at will and halt time. After Baldur is thrown into a ravine by Kratos in the beginning of the game, he turns around and flips the bird.
Duckman seems to be a joke left behind by a developer who was having a good time with the game. However, the length of time that the character has been kept waiting is astonishing. Even though the game has been out for over five years, players are continually finding new things to do with it. Other human-animal hybrids may be lurking in the shadows somewhere.