Horizon: Steel Frontiers is A Sony's Full MMO On PC And Mobile

Guerrilla Games and NCSoft have taken the Horizon series in a direction it has never gone before. Horizon: Steel Frontiers, announced through a new trailer and developer statements, reframes the post-apocalyptic world of towering machine creatures as a full-scale MMO for PC, Android, and iOS. The studio describes it as a project built from the ground up for mobile hardware, though it will launch simultaneously on desktop. It is the first Horizon game not headed to PlayStation hardware, an omission that instantly reshapes expectations around its design and audience.

Steel Frontiers is separate from the Horizon Online Project currently in development at Guerrilla, and it bears the hallmarks of NCSoft’s long experience with persistent online worlds. The footage shows a broad landscape modeled after the American Southwest, mixing eroded plateaus with overgrown remnants of human settlement. Players take on the role of customizable “machine hunters,” using familiar tools from the mainline games while navigating a world populated by large numbers of other players.

Jan-Bart van Beek of Guerrilla notes in the reveal video that the game was “built specifically for mobile,” a decision that hints at the scale NCSoft intends to reach. The partnership evokes the studio’s history with Guild Wars 2 and the Lineage series, both long-running online worlds with large, stable communities. Steel Frontiers adopts that lineage but layers it with Horizon’s signature fiction and elaborate creature design, which remains intact despite the shift to smaller devices. The trailer suggests only minor visual concessions, maintaining the lush decay and intricate mechanical silhouettes that define the series.

Van Beek describes the setting as the Deathlands, a frontier shared with thousands of players. The world is structured around cooperation and rivalry: groups working together to bring down massive machines, tribes competing for terrain, and individuals hunting for resources scattered across hostile terrain. This framing positions Steel Frontiers as a social space as much as a combat game, leaning into the tension and coordination that large creature fights demand.

Executive producer Sung-Gu Lee states the project’s central aim plainly.

"The core concept of Horizon Steel Frontiers can be summed up in one phrase: the thrill of taking down colossal machines." — Sung-Gu Lee

He outlines changes to combat designed specifically for an MMO structure, focusing on mobility, timing, and coordinated pressure on machine weak points. Players can climb damaged parts with the Pullcaster, set traps directly on exposed components, and carry dropped machine weapons onto mounts for future encounters. These mechanics echo the improvisation of the mainline series but are reconfigured for group play, where several players might specialize in different parts of the machine-breaking process.

The footage also shows several forms of movement, including flying mounts, ground mounts, and direct interaction with iconic machines like Tallnecks. The ability to leap from a mount onto a towering creature suggests a system built to showcase vertical combat and traversal, an approach NCSoft has explored before but rarely with creatures of this scale.

The broader Horizon franchise has grown steadily since its debut in 2017, reaching 38 million copies sold worldwide and expanding into VR and upcoming television adaptations. The scale of Steel Frontiers shows how far Sony’s ecosystem of studios intends to push the brand. NCSoft’s recent track record is mixed—its brawler Battle Crush shut down within months of release—but it remains one of the few companies consistently building large, persistent online games. Bringing Horizon into that framework is a signal of long-term commitment rather than a one-off experiment.

No release window or business model has been announced. Whether Steel Frontiers arrives as a premium purchase or a free-to-play MMO will shape its trajectory, particularly given its mobile-first structure. For now, NCSoft and Guerrilla appear focused on establishing the world, the scale of its player interactions, and a combat system adapted to thousands of simultaneous participants.

Read also, Tencent has pushed back against Sony’s lawsuit over Light of Motiram, filing a motion to dismiss claims that the game unlawfully copies Horizon Zero Dawn. The company argues that Sony overstates the originality of its 2017 hit, citing decades of games that built the foundation long before the dispute reached court.