Horizon Zero Dawn will be releasing for PS5 and PC in enhanced form later this month with remaster developed by Nixxes Software, and with its release edging closer, in a PlayStation Blog post, the studio has offered more details on how it has enhanced and updated Guerrilla’s acclaimed 2017 open world action RPG.
There is, of course, a lot to get into, with everything from foliage density and NPC behaviour to terrain and more having seen notable improvements. One area in particular that fans of the original will likely notice significant improvements with, however, is going to be the conversations that protagonist Aloy has with other characters.
As previously confirmed, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is set to feature motion capture animations for its conversations, as opposed to the original release, and Nixxes Software and Sony have now confirmed that there are over 10 hours of new motion captured data featured in the remaster, all directed and captured by Guerrilla at its studio in Amsterdam.
“Horizon Zero Dawn has almost 300 conversations and well over 3100 dialog options, so we needed to find a way to easily integrate this huge number of updated animations into the conversations,” said senior technical artist Mark Bazelmans. “We created a tool with Python to process the almost 2500 mocap files that Guerrilla provided to replace the original animation in the conversations, removing deprecated events and replacing those with the mocap and setup.”
Conversations with NPCs will see other enhancements as well, with Nixxes Software have also made adjustments to the lighting and camera work.
“Next to updating the animations in conversations, we did a pass on the camera and lighting setup for both conversations and cinematics,” said Bazelmans. “For the cameras, we batch updated the camera setup and values. In most conversations, the automated pass didn’t quite give the desired result because the contrast between the original movement and the new mocap was too big. The new body animations allow broader movements, often leading to characters stepping out of frame or being completely offscreen. Therefore, a manual pass was done by our Camera Layout Artists, aided by our custom DECIMA tools to easily edit cameras and settings.
“We updated the lighting toolset to be closer to that in Horizon Forbidden West, which allows for editing settings of character and environment lighting across similar shots using a visual representation of shots. Lighting was controlled by a single setup for each character in a conversation that would apply to all dialog options in a conversation. Then our lighting artists could do their magic on a particular shot type and all similar shots of that character would be lit the same, with of course room to edit individual shots if needed. This way lighting had maximum control with as little tweaks as possible.”
Lighting has seen enhancements and changes outside of conversations as well, with lighting in cutscenes in particular being redone from scratch in order to bring the experience more in line with Horizon Forbidden West.
Nixxes Software said, “With lighting in cinematics and conversations, we wanted to match the art direction and visual quality of Horizon Forbidden West. This, combined with all updated animations, motion-capture and camera shots, meant we built all the cinematic lighting in the remaster from scratch. We used a lot of new technology and workflow that was created for the cinematic lighting in Horizon Forbidden West.”
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered launches on October 31 for PS5 and PC.