Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Sounds Like a Ridiculously Good PS5 Upgrade | Push Square
Nixxes didn’t need to go this hard, but it did anyway. The team – renowned for its PC conversions – is now a PlayStation first-party, and it’s been quietly collaborating with Guerrilla on Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered for some time. The results, when you consider this a $10 upgrade for existing owners, sound extraordinary.
How the turn tables
Life saver
We’ll direct your attention to the PS Blog for the full overview, which goes into Digital Foundry depths of detail. But you’re looking at visuals which closer match the original concept art, all-new motion capture, redone textures and terrain, and much more. The end result is a release that feels more consistent with sequel Horizon Forbidden West.
It’s actually wild how much work has gone into this. For example, the developer’s attempted to increase the density of settlements by adding more NPCs. But in order to achieve this, it needed to include places for them to go and things for them to do.
Senior Technical Game Director Brian van Nunen explains: “We gave NPCs more varied schedules to increase movement and liveliness in different areas. We also tried to make creative use of existing animations. For example, there is now a woman feeding geese at the well in Meridian, reusing an existing sowing animation. Additionally, on the bridge to Meridian, we’ve made significant strides in improving the atmosphere and sense of activity.”
Elsewhere, new technology from the Decima engine, like Horizon Forbidden West’s atmospheric Nubis cloud system, has been incorporated into the original game. “The cherry on the cake was the creation of the set piece volcano cloud in the Frozen Wilds expansion, using a combination of the latest innovations in voxel cloud rendering, first pioneered in the Burning Shores expansion for Horizon Forbidden West, and traditional particle VFX,” says Communications Manager Julian Huijbregts.
All in all, this looks and sounds really impressive. It’s extraordinary how quickly the sentiment regarding this
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