Guerilla Games delivered one of the best open-world games of the recent generation with Horizon: Zero Dawn which thrust players into a rather unique world with contrasting elements of the past and future. Despite having minimal experience of working with open-worlds, Guerilla was able to create not only a world that was gorgeous to look at but also functional with plenty of sightseeing and activities available for players to indulge in.
Originally released in 2017, it has been over 7 years since the game came out – but it still holds surprisingly well to this date. As such, the thought of a remastered version might sound like a cheap attempt at grabbing some quick cash from gullible consumers but Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is a lot more than this initial preconception. With this technical analysis, we will be taking a look at both versions of the game to try to understand exactly what has changed.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is essentially an attempt to bring the original up to spec with the visual splendor of the sequel Forbidden West, and the brains behind this operation are Nixxes Software. The team has solid experience of working on PlayStation ports and remasters, and the fact that the transition is happening across the same engine makes compatibility a whole lot easier.
Fans might remember that Horizon Forbidden West was also a cross-gen game, so the engine was already built to be scalable across both generation machines which would probably have helped the developer’s cause by a significant margin. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered brings both iterative changes and radical overhauls to the image quality which we will be discussing in detail in further sections.
Character Models
The original Horizon Zero Dawn had some pretty good-looking character models for its time, complete with a high polycount and brimming with detail. Physically based materials had been used for clothing, and hair physics was pretty rudimentary – but they were definitely an integral part of the presentation itself. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered doesn’t rewrite the story, but it does bring several improvements over the original in key areas.
Character models look much sharper with an even higher polycount budget, and skin meshes look a lot more detailed and realistic than before. These changes aren’t really visible during exploration, but when the camera juts in close during cinematics – you can easily see the differences. In a similar vein, one can also notice a bump in the quality of cloth materials which exude more detail than before.
Having that bump in material quality also gives the machines a fresh new look. Machines have more complex geometry, and it’s markedly easier to make out the individual parts that coalesce to create these goliaths of destruction. Having these higher-quality materials also helps with enhancing reflections on their bodies, which gives a more premium look to the machines this time around.
Moving on to the hair physics, they are quite a bit more sophisticated than before – and Aloy’s hair will appropriately sway to the tune of the winds and fly around as she waltzes through these environments. Hair textures are also finer this time around, and reflect light in a much more accurate fashion.
What’s Changed In The World?
Switching gears over to the world, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered brings plenty of changes that long-time fans will appreciate. Starting things with the textures, Nixxess has updated texture quality across the entire board of assets – no matter how big or small. Of course, these changes might not be instantly visible on a macro level – but if you stop and stare at the finer details, it all starts to make sense. Different kinds of plants and ferns now flaunt finer details than before, and it is almost on par with what Horizon Forbidden West offers. Another noticeable change occurs in how dense bushes of plants react to Aloy’s movements. Notice how blades of grass and edges of leaves can awkwardly cut through the character model while in the remaster – Aloy gracefully swerves without much of this clipping issue.
Another change in the environment is with regards to how clouds function. In the original, we had fairly static meshes that served the purpose but didn’t really stand out in terms of the quality itself. Forbidden West brought significant improvements with the Nubis system, delivering realistic cloud volumes that stand tall as one of the best in its class. That very Nubis system has been brought into the Remastered version, and the results are definitely noticeable for one. Clouds look more realistic than before with denser meshes and realistic movements that help elevate the look of the environment in the remaster.
Moving over to the lighting, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered has updated the lighting system which results in a lot more accurate reflections this time around. The original majorly relied on precalculated lighting for different times of day, and while the implementation hasn’t changed, the extra processing power has been utilized for better and more accurate results this time. The settlements provide a great point of comparison for this change, notice how areas that should have been under the shadow are corrected this time around while the original had a lot of lighting data mistakes stemming from the rudimentary calculations.
These improvements also extend to the shadows department, where we get to see a more robust implementation this time around. Shadows are cast by a lot more light sources and are cast at further distances than before, so characters and enemies blend in well with the surrounding environment rather than awkwardly jutting out from the ground as seen in the original – giving the world a more uniform look this time around.
One should also check out the changes in the reflections departments. The original used a cube map implementation which worked for its time but suffered from poor accuracy and low-resolution artifacts, but the remastered version changes that up to the screen space reflections that are used in Forbidden West. What once seemed like muddy reflections have now been replaced by fairly accurate, high-resolution reflections which also update with the change in player perspective.
This is most notable in the water reflections, and on that topic – also notice how the water textures and meshes have been updated with the remaster. Caustics both look and behave a lot more realistically than before, and water looks quite a bit better as a result.
Then there’s the world streaming. Despite having a lot of micro-level detail, the Decima Engine didn’t really compromise much when it came to streaming all of these assets without showing signs of artifacting. Clever use of distant fog volumes and blocking geometry like huge mountains helped to ensure a smooth world streaming solution, and it works just as well as the original with little to no difference between the two versions.
Finally, there’s the post processing pipeline. Light shafts look a lot better than before, and beams of light emanating from machines and surroundings have better bloom effects. Other elements of the presentation such as anisotropic filtering, depth of field, and motion blur have also seen incremental upgrades – though not as pronounced as the previously discussed changes.
Performance
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered on PC offers a plethora of graphical options to choose from ranging from texture quality to clouds quality and FOV sliders and much more. It’s a robust experience this time around, largely owing to the increased maturity of the team after handling so many projects of this ilk. Apart from the buffet of options that fans can choose from, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered also does away with the shader compilation issue that plagued the original PC release.
We tested the game on a PC consisting of AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, Nvidia RTX 3080Ti, 32 GB of RAM, and a PCI 3 4.0 SSD which is well over what the game recommends. We set the resolution to 4K with DLSS 3.0 turned on and maxed out the game. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered performed fairly well during our tests, constantly hovering between 60fps and 70fps with little to no major drops.
Loading times have also been improved in the Remastered version with fast-travel and loading from a fresh save being faster this time around. While it definitely helps that we are loading off of a PCI e 4.0 SSD, it’s also possible that Nixxess might be using Windows DirectStorage options to help speed up the process even further.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is a great attempt to breathe new life into one of the biggest games of the recent generation. It sits very comfortably between a by-the-numbers remaster and a full-fledged remake, and it makes for a great way to experience this classic in a new light.