Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered was finally unveiled at PlayStation's State of Play after months of rumors and internet grumbles about how we don't need to re-release games that still look brand spanking new, but one developer has explained exactly what's changed in the upcoming remaster.
Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered's announcement trailer promised that the 2017 robo-dinosaur romp would be brought up to the same visual quality as its more recent sequel, Horizon: Forbidden West, with over ten hours of new motion capture performance added to scenes where the camera really zooms right up into character's faces. Plus, improved textures and proper DualSense support.
Otherwise, the trailer kind of struggled to properly emphasize how dramatic the Remastered changes might be because, well, Horizon: Zero Dawn was already a lush video game at release and its free PS5 update only solidified that further. Most people were also probably watching a subpar version of the trailer on social media, making those comparisons even murkier.
Guerrilla Games' co-studio director and art director Jan-Bart van Beek then chimed in on social media to delve into the nuts and bolts of what's actually new, and it turns out the team actually transplanted Aloy's entire model from Forbidden West into Zero Dawn. A nice bit of added continuity between the two games since they're only set six months apart.
We brought over Aloy’s model fromForbidden west. We also reworked the character lighting to match the look of HFW and improve skin tones. Hair shaders are also improved. The slight blurring you see between ps4 and ps5 is because the PS4 image here has motion blur turned off https://t.co/F0ijlydZBTSeptember 25, 2024
"We also reworked the character lighting to match the look of [Horizon: Forbidden West] and improve skin tones," Beek tweeted. "Hair shaders are also improved. The slight blurring you see between PS4 and PS5 is because the PS4 image here has motion blur turned off," he says of the side-by-side comparison above.
Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered comes out as a $10 upgrade for existing owners on October 31, continuing the series' cursed streak of releasing in the shadow of an even bigger franchise, this time with Dragon Age. Discussions around whether this remaster was really necessary are still up in the air, especially since The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered added an entirely new mode and was still leashed to this same discourse, but we'll see how it shakes up for ourselves on Halloween.
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