This game gets more and more interesting the more I read about it!
The similarities to games like The Witcher and Shadow of Mordor or even Fallout: New Vegas are probably because John Gonzalez, the narrative designer and general writer for all of those titles has been working at Guerrilla Games since September 2013 as the lead Writer, so he joined the studio around when the big Team of developers.
Apparently in a behind closed doors session reporters were shown a market area, with dog like machines being kept as pets.
I'm hoping there are horse machine, so that you can tame them and use them to traverse the fields a bit faster.
I imagine there's a tonne of scope for different machine life, maybe with Mammoths, Bears and even Sabertooth Tigers.
I think the kind of beast will depend on the needs of the machines and each one's purpose within the ecosystem.
I don't think The Machines should be seen as an enemy, more like they're just another life form, like any bird, fish.
Mostly they're probably quite skittish and will run away if they see a person.
Of course something like a Lion will attack you as it would prey, if it was hungry, otherwise it would probably try to avoid you, which is why I think Aloy approaches the herd the way she does in the demo, because she's trying to make sure they don't get away.
This game should have a very deep move set, with evolving options for players.
I can't wait to see more.
Guerrilla seem to be going into force on the marketing of this game already, I think it will come in the 1st half of 2016, their last 2 games were announced only 9 months before they came out, so I wouldn't be shocked if this actually released in May and Uncharted got brought forward to Feb.
Both games are running really well and much better than Bloodborne was when shown behind closed doors and also better than The Order 1886 was at this point last year.