With Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered set to launch later this month, with an update on the PlayStation Blog, developer Nixxes Software has revealed new technical details on some of the way ways it has attempted to enhance and update the 2017 title.
For starters, the studio says players can expect much denser vegetation and foliage throughout the game’s world. That, of course, was a key characteristic of Horizon Zero Dawn’s map to begin with, but it seems like Nixxes Software has attempted to bring the game up to the same level of quality in this area as its 2022 sequel, Horizon Forbidden West.
“To bring the foliage in the remaster up to the same level of quality as in Horizon Forbidden West, we enhanced the shaders, textures, geometry and foliage interaction,” said senior environment artist Patrick Blankenzee. “We assessed all the foliage assets in Horizon Zero Dawn and upgraded them with all these new features. We did this for hundreds of plants, bushes, flowers and trees.
“We looked at the biomes in the original game and compared them to the concept art. We found places that we could enhance and bring closer to the original intent, with the rainforest biome being a good example of this. With powerful procedural technology, we injected new foliage and raised the quality and density to new heights. The riverbanks have also been upgraded with more biodiversity to bring them closer to the original intention as seen in the concept art.”
Environment artist Julian Hofman added, “Working with the original team over at Guerrilla, we were able to ask questions, and directly compare their latest work on Horizon Forbidden West to the work we were doing for the remaster. This gave us some very specific goals to work towards, like the fresh generation of moss that you can now see Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.
“For me, the foliage changes make the game feel more alive and make it live up to the incredibly high standards of the Horizon games. The result is a coherent world to replay or experience for the first time.”
Another area where Nixxes Software has done a fair amount of work is with NPCs and the way they behave. In a nutshell, players can expect towns, cities, and settlements to look and feel more densely packed, while NPCs will now behave in more natural and varied ways, making the world feel more alive.
“We reviewed all villages, outposts and cities, identifying areas that felt empty or where we could improve realism and immersion,” said senior technical game designer Brian van Nunen. “Building the game for PS5 allowed us to leverage the increased amount of memory available, enabling us to significantly boost the number of non-player characters. We added many more places for NPCs to stand, sit, work and fulfil their needs. We gave them more varied schedules to increase movement and liveliness in different areas. We also tried to make creative use of existing animations.”
Similar to the foliage and vegetation, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered has also looked to bring itself up to the same level of quality as Forbidden West with the assets it uses for terrain, objects, buildings, and the like.
“We began by replacing all the Horizon Zero Dawn terrain materials with their new Horizon Forbidden West counterparts,” said senior technical artist Sander Bronkhorst. “This was only the first step, as the sequel’s terrain materials didn’t always align with the original aesthetics. To address this, we carefully tweaked and polished each individual terrain material to closely match the look and feel of the original game, while maintaining the visual fidelity of the terrain materials in Horizon Forbidden West.
“In addition to updating all the terrain textures and materials, we incorporated features like deformable snow and sand. Snow deformation was first introduced in the Frozen Wilds expansion, but in the remaster, you will find this feature outside that area as well.”
Bronkhorst added, “We performed a separate pass on all the man-made Building Blocks, creating new high-resolution geometry for assets that would benefit from this. We found that buildings greatly benefited from having more detailed geometry, as most were using brick-like textures on the walls without the shape of the bricks being reflected in the geometry.
“To address this, we developed custom tools for generating more detailed geometry for these buildings. The artists used these tools to create new geometry, then manually tweaked and adjusted each individual building for the best visual result.”
On top of that, the remaster will also feature over 10 hours of new motion capture animations for its conversations, in addition to enhanced lighting. Read more on that through here.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered launches for PS5 and PC on October 31.
