Sony’s remaster strategy remains a little baffling for ardent gamers, now that we’re firmly in an age of backward compatibility. You could argue that there’s clearly diminishing returns in graphical advancements, but they wouldn’t be sticking with this plan if it wasn’t showing some benefits. From Spider-Man Remastered to The Last of Us Part I, Until Dawn and now Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, there’s a layered reasoning for each release. They bring the games back to the forefront of discussion and release schedules, nudge sticker prices back up a notch, tie in with TV and movie projects, and more. And with games now taking longer than ever to make, they’re good projects to let developers gain experience, try out new techniques, push the envelope a little further while the sequel’s production is still going through the gears.
In the case of Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, it’s Sony’s PC porting specialists at Nixxes taking on a very different job, in partnership with Guerrilla Games, broadening the scope of what that studio is charged with doing for a full remaster in the latest iteration of the Decima Engine. While Nixxes was able to automate some parts of this, dropping new replacement assets in place with systemic changes, an awful lot has required a manual pass and complete overhauls with new techniques.
This could have come at the cost of performance, but thankfully it really hasn’t. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered offers 30fps, 40fps (on a 120Hz screen) and 60fps modes, and there’s going to be some trade-offs here, but I felt like the 60fps performance mode looked absolutely fantastic. It matches the frame rate that the original game can get when played on PS5, but brings all the improvements we’re about to delve into, keeps a high resolution and has higher-quality anti-aliasing and upscaling. The frame rate and resolution metrics will only be pushed further with the PS5 Pro, which this game natively supports.
Arguably the biggest change and improvement is an overhaul for many of the conversations and dialogues in the game. This was one of the weakest aspects of the original release in 2017, with particularly stilted-looking animations for a lot of dialogue and fixed camera angles that lacked the dynamism of the rest of the game. To improve this, they’ve gone back to the motion capture stage, grabbing new motion capture with which to liven up the thousands of dialogue elements in the game, and going through a bunch of rather complicated steps to feed those back in place.
The end result is worth the effort, as you go from the very workmanlike style of the original to something much closer to Horizon Forbidden West, and it’s seemingly across the board. Even relatively straightforward chats with a simple side quest giver now has the camera pulled back a bit, the opportunity for more upper body movement, more nuanced facial animation and character expression. It doesn’t change the story, of course, but it makes its delivery a smidgeon more engaging.
Beyond that, Nixxes has gone through the game with a fine-tooth comb to find other places to improve. The world lighting has been updated to use some of the techniques from the PS5-exclusive expansion Burning Shores, but there’s also needed the world lighting to be be redone by hand, just to try and match the same mood of the original with the fidelity of its sequel. The snow effects from the Frozen Wilds DLC have been applied to all snowy regions in the game, and there’s now the ability for a snow shader to build up on characters, and screen-space reflections help streams and bodies of water look so much better.
In general, it’s the lighting that can lead to the most striking differences. To give just one example, if you head down to the densely wooded, jungle-like biome to the south of the world map, the depth of colour feels much greater, the shadows feels darker and the streams of light and robot-induced lens flair all the more impactful.
The team also highlighted key areas, such as the ground of Meridian City, that were completely redone, the manual pass to manmade structures, the new skin shaders for character models to match Horizon Forbidden West – characters have that peach fuzz of hair to their skin, for example – and plenty more besides.
Some of these are very fine tweaks that you’ll barely have a chance to notice while sprinting through the world, and will still take a good long look to really appreciate when comparing set scenes and still images. What I will say is that Meridian City does definitely feel more lively than it does in the original. There is maybe a doubling of NPC counts for the same time of day, adding a bit more of the hustle and bustle that you might expect in a capital city.
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- Meridian City has completely redone floors, improved buildings and higher NPC counts
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- Lighting can make the various biomes that bit more striking
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- Aloy’s character model has been changed to better match Forbidden West
This does, however, highlight some of the dumb-as-bricks NPC pathfinding, though. I’ve seen a few characters spin on the spot, as they encounter other characters walking toward them, children walk through someone else’s legs, and instead of sticking to paths, they might clamber over rocks alongside.
That, then goes to highlight some of the occasionally wacky physics that clothes can have, whether it’s Erend’s chunky armour flapping up over his legs while walking, or capes and cloaks of background character whipping around when there’s camera cuts during dialogue. Hair is seemingly less susceptible to this now, or at least in Aloy’s case.
As impressive as all of this is, though…. I’m pleasantly surprised with how well Horizon Zero Dawn still holds up. Sure, an awful lot of people would have played this game originally on base PS4, but PS4 Pro gave a lot of enhancements just from the jump up in resolution and checkerboarding, and a patch was released a few years ago that allowed the game to run at 4K checkerboarding with 60FPS on PS5. That level of performance on PS5 is fantastic.
It makes this upgrade feel rather inessential…. the saving grace being that upgrading on this occasion is rather cheap. Anyone that owns the original game, whether that’s the base game, the complete edition, or the freebie handout during Days of Play, can pay $10 for a pretty decent visual overhaul, and return to Aloy’s original adventure with a smattering of new finery.
