The multiple award-winning and best-selling game Horizon Zero Dawn by Guerilla Games is collaborating with Nixxes to make a remastered version seven years after its launch. Nixxess in a blog post gave details on the update of the game on Thursday, October 7 after the exciting announcement of the launch of the remastered version on Sony State of Play last month. The characters, graphics, and visuals are improved with various other technological advancements.
The major highlights mentioned in the blog post are diverse and denser foliage, more NPCs in villages, outposts, and cities, rock and floor texture in certain regions, improved conversations with new motion capture recordings and detailed expressions on characters, and better lighting effects.
The game came into the spotlight due to its highly detailed landscape and the remastered version improves this with newer technological advancements like procedural generation. The blog post details how the technicians have reviewed all the existing landscapes and increased details even with respect to plants and mosses.
They have added details that make nature look rich and dense just like the concept art. To improve realism and immersion, they added details to places that looked kind of empty by reviewing every village, city, and outpost in the game.
The game developers have made maximum usage out of the memory gained after creating the game for PS5 by increasing the number of non-player characters (NPCs). New places are also added for the non-player characters to fit into the storyline or to simply sit or work.
Each NPC has varied schedules to increase their movements and liveliness in various places. The creators also claim to make creative use of the existing animations. “There is now a woman feeding geese at the well in Meridian, reusing an existing sowing animation,” says the senior technical game designer Brian van Nunen.
The long blog post with the direct conversations of the technical personas of the game details each and every update they have made on the game like improving the terrain and the building blocks, incorporating the features with the new Horizon Forbidden West counterpart, deformation of sand and snow, remaking some of the areas like floors to achieve the desired output. The tests and failures they have done like increasing texture resolution and adding parallax mapping to areas like brick floors are also mentioned.
The blog in detail says the incorporation of lively conversations to the characters. They have added over 10 hours of additional motion-capture data to make the conversations livelier and be in line with those in Horizon Forbidden West. The conversations are directed and captured by Guerrilla and the implementation is done by Nixxes. The senior technical artist Mark Bazelmans explains the process of adding almost 300 conversations and over 3100 dialog options to the game.
The game developers also state different tools they have created to make this new updation hyperrealistic. They have used Maya and DECIMA engines to visualize the movements of characters and their interaction in the game environment. Each character was unique and needed to be checked like “ characters looking up or down too much, shoulders not matching the rest of the pose, arms clipping through clothing and fingers that are too static” says the animator at Nixxes Alexander Georgiev, and the processes they have done to fix the problems.
The characters also have detailed skin tones, hair quality, outfits, and their reaction to lighting. The senior environment artist Patrick Blankenzee says “We gave Aloy’s model – both adult and child – the full cinematic treatment, including peach fuzz, upgrades to hair, eyes, and materials.”
The remastered version is available for preorders and will be launched on October 31 on PS5 and PC.
Related: Five Day-One Launches Of Xbox Game Pass For 2025 Release Including Control Multiplayer Spin-Off
