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[XXL]

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered: A deep dive into its enhancements

Nixxes shares developer insights on remastering Guerrilla’s action adventure for PS5 and PC.

blog.playstation.com

Hey everyone, you may be familiar with Nixxes as the developer behind PC ports of PlayStation games, but behind the scenes we have also been hard at work on a project of a very different nature. Working closely with our friends at Guerrilla, we set out to create Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered for both PS5 and PC.

In our announcement last month, we shared details of improved features and technology, such as the completely revamped sound mix by Guerrilla’s audio team, support for DualSense controllers, and new motion capture for conversations. Today, I’d like to introduce you to some of the team members at Nixxes to give you more insight into some of the enhancements that have been made in the remaster.

 

[XXL]

To bring the foliage in the remaster up to the same level of quality as in Horizon Forbidden West, we enhanced the shaders, textures, geometry and foliage interaction. We assessed all the foliage assets in Horizon Zero Dawn and upgraded them with all these new features. We did this for hundreds of plants, bushes, flowers and trees."We looked at the biomes in the original game and compared them to the concept art. We found places that we could enhance and bring closer to the original intent, with the rainforest biome being a good example of this. With powerful procedural technology, we injected new foliage and raised the quality and density to new heights. The riverbanks have also been upgraded with more biodiversity to bring them closer to the original intention as seen in the concept art."

"Building the game for PS5 allowed us to leverage the increased amount of memory available, enabling us to significantly boost the number of non-player characters. We added many more places for NPCs to stand, sit, work and fulfil their needs. We gave them more varied schedules to increase movement and liveliness in different areas."

"We began by replacing all the Horizon Zero Dawn terrain materials with their new Horizon Forbidden West counterparts. This was only the first step, as the sequel's terrain materials didn't always align with the original aesthetics. To address this, we carefully tweaked and polished each individual terrain material to closely match the look and feel of the original game, while maintaining the visual fidelity of the terrain materials in Horizon Forbidden West."
"In addition to updating all the terrain textures and materials, we incorporated features like deformable snow and sand. Snow deformation was first introduced in the Frozen Wilds expansion, but in the remaster, you will find this feature outside that area as well."

"With lighting in cinematics and conversations, we wanted to match the art direction and visual quality of Horizon Forbidden West. This, combined with all updated animations, motion-capture and camera shots, meant we built all the cinematic lighting in the remaster from scratch.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered features significant upgrades to character models and how they react to lighting. Many enhancements in areas such as detail, skin tones, hair quality, and outfits have been carried over from Horizon Forbidden West.
"In Horizon Zero Dawn, only the character model for Aloy reacts to environmental elements like weather. For the remaster we wanted to give all companion characters the same level of interaction to bring that cinematic feel to the whole world. For example, you will now see both Aloy and her companions react to warm and cold weather."

This is a pretty big fucking upgrade.

I wasn't expecting all this.

 

[TommyCronin6969]

 

[March Climber]

Looking forward to the breakdown of this game in the graphical threads. I'm one of the few who didn't play the original so hopefully it will run as smooth as it looks.

 

[FoxMcChief]

Holy shit!

 

[Tiago Rodrigues]

I'm gonna end up buying this 10 bucks upgrade and play this game like a lil bitch after complaining, right?

 

[Gaiff]

Did they redo the cutscenes for when you speak with characters? This was my biggest gripes with the first game. Characters just standing there cross-eyed and staring into the nothingness while talking to Aloy. Looked awful and was massively improved in FW.

 

[adamsapple]

This is a pretty big fucking upgrade.

I wasn't expecting all this.

But on a real note, what will it take for them to add RTGI to this?

 

[Rush2112]

Horizon: zero calories

 

[Robb]

Holy crap, what a huge waste of time and resources.

 

[XXL]

Did they redo the cutscenes for when you speak with characters? This was my biggest gripes with the first game. Characters just standing there cross-eyed and staring into the nothingness while talking to Aloy. Looked awful and was massively improved in FW.

Sounds like it.

"With lighting in cinematics and conversations, we wanted to match the art direction and visual quality of Horizon Forbidden West. This, combined with all updated animations, motion-capture and camera shots, meant we built all the cinematic lighting in the remaster from scratch."

 

[Gonzito]

Did they redo the cutscenes for when you speak with characters? This was my biggest gripes with the first game. Characters just standing there cross-eyed and staring into the nothingness while talking to Aloy. Looked awful and was massively improved in FW.

yes

 

[Kaiserstark]

• "To bring the foliage in the remaster up to the same level of quality as in Horizon Forbidden West, we enhanced the shaders, textures, geometry and foliage interaction. We assessed all the foliage assets in Horizon Zero Dawn and upgraded them with all these new features. We did this for hundreds of plants, bushes, flowers and trees."We looked at the biomes in the original game and compared them to the concept art. We found places that we could enhance and bring closer to the original intent, with the rainforest biome being a good example of this. With powerful procedural technology, we injected new foliage and raised the quality and density to new heights. The riverbanks have also been upgraded with more biodiversity to bring them closer to the original intention as seen in the concept art."

• "Building the game for PS5 allowed us to leverage the increased amount of memory available, enabling us to significantly boost the number of non-player characters. We added many more places for NPCs to stand, sit, work and fulfil their needs. We gave them more varied schedules to increase movement and liveliness in different areas.

• "We began by replacing all the Horizon Zero Dawn terrain materials with their new Horizon Forbidden West counterparts. This was only the first step, as the sequel's terrain materials didn't always align with the original aesthetics. To address this, we carefully tweaked and polished each individual terrain material to closely match the look and feel of the original game, while maintaining the visual fidelity of the terrain materials in Horizon Forbidden West."
• "In addition to updating all the terrain textures and materials, we incorporated features like deformable snow and sand. Snow deformation was first introduced in the Frozen Wilds expansion, but in the remaster, you will find this feature outside that area as well."

• A big change in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is the addition of over 10 hours of additional motion-capture data for characters, directed and captured by Guerrilla at their motion Capture Stage in Amsterdam, making the game's conversations much livelier and in line with those in Horizon Forbidden West.
• "Alongside the updated body animation, new facial animations were captured for the conversations. Initially this was deemed a straightforward 'overwrite and replace', but after seeing some of the results we decided to build a pipeline to be able to edit the updated facial animations."

• The Atmospherics team at Guerrilla recreated the sweeping cloudscapes from Horizon Zero Dawn in the new Nubis cloud system from Horizon Forbidden West. 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.
• "To use the improved features to their fullest potential, we revised all the atmospherics settings that control the biomes within the game world. This included changing the light intensities to Physically Based Rendering values. This is true for the sun and the moon itself, but also detailed lighting in areas such as caves and ruins that players can explore. Think of fog, the color of the sun, glow intensities and so forth."

• "With lighting in cinematics and conversations, we wanted to match the art direction and visual quality of Horizon Forbidden West. This, combined with all updated animations, motion-capture and camera shots, meant we built all the cinematic lighting in the remaster from scratch.
• Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered features significant upgrades to character models and how they react to lighting. Many enhancements in areas such as detail, skin tones, hair quality, and outfits have been carried over from Horizon Forbidden West.
• "In Horizon Zero Dawn, only the character model for Aloy reacts to environmental elements like weather. For the remaster we wanted to give all companion characters the same level of interaction to bring that cinematic feel to the whole world. For example, you will now see both Aloy and her companions react to warm and cold weather."

Honestly for a 10 dollars upgrade it's not bad.

 

[Kenpachii]

I bet it still has no RT. Let alone pathtracing.

 

[Majormaxxx]

I'm gonna end up buying this 10 bucks upgrade and play this game like a lil bitch after complaining, right?

I am buying the upgrade

 

[HeWhoWalks]

Holy crap, what a huge waste of time and resources.

Good, don’t buy it.

OT: XXL ’ppreciate the heads up!

 

[Chuck Berry]

Looking forward to running through this for the 3rd time. Super fun platinum as well. A perfect podcast game.

 

[Gaiff]

I bet it still has no RT. Let alone pathtracing.

Shadows would have taken too long. Lighting I imagine would have changed the game to a degree where they'd have to recheck everything.

DF: Was ray tracing considered for Horizon Forbidden West, like the RT shadows in previous Nixxes PC port Shadow of the Tomb Raider?

Michiel Roza - Nixxes : It was definitely considered, and it's good that you mentioned Shadow of the Tomb Raider. There, we had to do an entire lighting pass to get RT shadows to work. And for this project, with the hours of cinematics and the scope... we decided that the game already looks really good, there's a strong direction here and we really didn't want to mess with it.

Jeroen Krebbers - Guerrilla: Don't forget a lot of the content is alpha-tested trees. I mean, a lot. Of course we have settlements and some hard surfaces, but most of it is really hard to ray trace against, even for shadows. There's a lot of content, maybe 100 square kilometres of content or more, and we'd need to go through the whole game... it's just mind-boggling... obviously having the scalability between PS4 and PS5 meant that we wanted to focus on stuff that would work on both PS4 and PS5, that sadly excluded RT. And it's not an easy addition to the PC version. We really like the tech of course. Watch this space.

 

[Robb]

Good, don’t buy it.

How is that good?

Of course I won’t buy it.

 

[Astray]

Already had the game on Steam so I went for the Remaster upgrade on there.

This is a lot more work than I anticipated, and it makes me glad I went for it.

 

[Kaiserstark]

Did they redo the cutscenes for when you speak with characters? This was my biggest gripes with the first game. Characters just standing there cross-eyed and staring into the nothingness while talking to Aloy. Looked awful and was massively improved in FW.

Yes

Horizon Zero Dawn has almost 300 conversations and well over 3100 dialog options, so we needed to find a way to easily integrate this huge number of updated animations into the conversations. We created a tool with Python to process the almost 2500 mocap files that Guerrilla provided to replace the original animation in the conversations, removing deprecated events and replacing those with the mocap and setup.”“We then focused on creating a pipeline in Maya for our animators to easily load, edit and re-export the individual mocap files for any other edits that were needed, such as finger animation, art direction feedback and fixes. Animators could select the conversation and subsequent dialog option from a list which created the scene from scratch, or simply opened it if it already existed. Our tool referenced the characters and imported the dialogue audio, so the animators could time the movement better and create the camera cuts and layout. Later, we extended this pipeline to also include existing animations for both conversations and cinematics, as some of these also required edits. Our animators could then go into Guerrilla’s DECIMA engine and edit or change the updated conversation.

A big change in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is the addition of over 10 hours of additional motion-capture data for characters, directed and captured by Guerrilla at their motion Capture Stage in Amsterdam, making the game's conversations much livelier and in line with those in Horizon Forbidden West.

"Alongside the updated body animation, new facial animations were captured for the conversations. Initially this was deemed a straightforward 'overwrite and replace', but after seeing some of the results we decided to build a pipeline to be able to edit the updated facial animations."

 

[XXL]

I'm gonna end up buying this 10 bucks upgrade and play this game like a lil bitch after complaining, right?

 

[TrebleShot]

Sounds sick, ill be playing this for sure.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Game already looked more than fine. Wish resources were spent in remasters of games that actually could use them.

 

[Hrk69]

I bet it still has no RT. Let alone pathtracing.

Like most games?

 

[PixelatedBeast]

Cant wait to jump in and experience this game again. It's been a while since I played.

 

[Mibu no ookami]

Game already looked more than fine. Wish resources were spent in remasters of games that actually could use them.

It's about return on investment.

Sony is investing in games that it can build a transmedia strategy around. Unfortunately for Horizon, the TV show was canceled. That had to be a punch in the gut to Sony. They've cleared done work here to get people to play this or replay this and thus be more likely to jump into Horizon Forbidden West and Horizon Online.

It's funny how fans think Sony should focus on doing remasters of games that didn't sell well in the first place.

 

[Radical_3d]

I'm gonna end up buying this 10 bucks upgrade and play this game like a lil bitch after complaining, right?

 

[HeWhoWalks]

How is that good?

Of course I won’t buy it.

Respectfully, why are you here then? I don't go into topics of games I have no interest. Makes sense, no?

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

 

[semiconscious]

Honestly for a 10 dollars upgrade it's not bad.

nope. but that doesn't mean it's not also completely unnecessary...

 

[King Dazzar]

Hey, big girls need loving too.

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

IMO big mistake to make it look like HFW and now this looks like a large DLC of the second game. They should have kept the artistic direction.

 

[Robb]

Respectfully, why are you here then? I don't go into topics of games I have no interest. Makes sense, no?

I have plenty of interest in both the studio and the franchise. If you think people only enter and post in threads they have positive views on I have a bridge to sell you.

 

[Represent.]

lmao

 

[Cakeboxer]

If Berta from Two and a Half men ever gets reborn i expect her to look exactly like this.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

I have plenty of interest in both the studio and the franchise. If you think people only enter and post in threads they have positive views on I have a bridge to sell you.

Here's my bridge —

"it's a waste of time and resources".

"Good, don't buy it"

"but, but..... I'm not buying it"

What is happening here?

Besides, you don't know what they have going on, so calling it "a waste" is nothing more than hyperbole.

 

[adamsapple]

Hey, big girls need loving too.

 

[Robb]

Here's my bridge —

"it's a waste of time and resources".

"Good, don't buy it"

"but, but..... I'm not buying it"

What is happening here?

Besides, you don't know what they have going on, so calling it "a waste" is nothing more than hyperbole.

You tell me. You said it was good. I asked why you think wasting time and resources would be considered “good”. Then you just went on about something entirely unrelated.

 

[Elios83]

At 10$ this is a no brainer. People complaining are just not interested in the series and that's their own business or trolling.

 

[Senua]

RT or bust! Bust I say!

 

[HeWhoWalks]

You tell me. You said it was good. I asked why you think wasting time and resources would be considered “good”. Then you just went on about something entirely unrelated.

I'm not the one who made the claim, buddy. How do you figure it's a waste? What does this take away from that you know for sure?

 

[The Cockatrice]

Doesnt matter how good it is, it wasnt that hard to bring the assets from the second game to the first nor was it necessary to pull the original game and charge people for what used to be a patch but nowadays they call it "remaster". I will call anyone buying this that HAS PLAYED the original game, retarded just like I was for getting TLOU2 on PS5 even tho I played it. Yes, I have no shame admitting I'm an idiot as well.

 

[GymWolf]

Hopefully the game use the better ragdoll for the dinobots\humans whem they die from the sequel, in the first the ragdoll was rigid as fuck.

 

[Robb]

I'm not the one who made the claim, buddy. How do you figure it's a waste? What does this take away from that you know for sure?

It takes away time and resources for other opportunities. Not sure what’s difficult to understand here. Everything has an alternative cost.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

It takes away time and resources for other opportunities. Not sure what’s difficult to understand here. Everything has an alternative cost.

It's not that folks don't understand. You didn't exactly break the black hole here.

Until I see their other games suffer as a result of a simple remaster of a 2017 game, I doubt it's that big of a deal.

 

[Robb]

It's not that folks don't understand. You didn't exactly break the black hole here.

Until I see their other games suffer for a simple remaster of a 2017 game, I doubt it's that big of a deal.

Then why do you even ask?

You likely won’t see games in the pipeline suffer because resources have already been distributed and other alternatives have already been forgone in favor of what we’re currently getting, if that makes you feel better.

 

[TintoConCasera]

It's about return on investment.

Sony is investing in games that it can build a transmedia strategy around. Unfortunately for Horizon, the TV show was canceled. That had to be a punch in the gut to Sony. They've cleared done work here to get people to play this or replay this and thus be more likely to jump into Horizon Forbidden West and Horizon Online.

Psé, maybe, but you don't need a remaster for that imo. Just put the first game on sale or something.

It's funny how fans think Sony should focus on doing remasters of games that didn't sell well in the first place.

Makes sense to me. Grab a game that had some flaws, remaster/remake it getting rid of said flaws and see the game turn into a success. An example could be Nier: Replicant, and I'd love to see more of those.

 

[Tiago Rodrigues]

RT or bust! Bust I say!

RT is such a waste of resources. I still don't get the hype.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

Then why do even ask?

You likely won’t see games in the pipeline suffer because resources have already been distributed and other alternatives have already been forgone in favor of what we’re currently getting, if that makes you feel better.

Why ask? Because this is a forum and asking questions is what takes place here. I like discussion.

As for "feeling better", I mean, you're in here griping about resources. I made a suggestion — avoid it. Now, on the respectful end, I get not wanting this, sincerely, as it's an old game and this will do nothing to move the needle. But, I doubt it really takes much from anything is all I'm getting at.