Horizon Forbidden West
There are plenty of things to admire about Horizon Forbidden West, including the amount of detail and nuance developer Guerrilla Games managed to transpose onto the virtual faces that give each character a distinct persona.
During a recent GDC 2022 talk, Horizon Forbidden West lead character artist Arno Schmitz explained the team created 168 high-quality heads in three years, which was nothing short of a seismic undertaking.
After shipping Horizon Zero Dawn, Guerrilla wanted to deliver something bigger and better, and that meant creating more faces with more detail in a similar amount of time. Because the bar for quality was going to be much higher, Schmitz said the team couldn't rehash their work on Zero Dawn.
"The biggest challenge was that we needed to believably populate the entire world again. This required enough variation and faces of all ages, ethnicities, and genders," said the veteran developer, who's spent close to a decade at Guerrilla.
Schmitz noted how in a story-driven games faces are absolutely fundamental to the experience because emotive characters deliver immersion.
To help create a platter of hyper-realistic faces, Guerrilla invested in a selection of high-quality rigs and tools that could be used to generate and tweak facial features. The company also enlisted tech specialist 3lateral to help with assets and technical challenges. Notably, 3lateral also created a custom tool called the "Gene Splicer" that allowed new faces to be created by mixing pre-existing assets, letting Schmitz's team support the story department with unique faces for named characters and an array of NPCs.
Once those resplendent mugs had been pulled together, Guerrilla had to start integrating them into the wider game world.
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