First of all, the team wanted to bring the detail of foliage on par with Horizon Forbidden West. The game’s senior environment artist, Patrick Blankenzee, commented:
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.
Related Content — Upcoming PS5 Games 2024: The Best PS5 Games Coming Soon
Elsewhere, major additions to the game’s living world have been made, including a greater amount of NPCs having been implemented. The team looked at all the game’s villages, outposts, cities and more to determine which areas would benefit from additional realism and immersion.
Speaking on the PS Blog post, Brian van Nunen, Senior Technical Game Director, explains further:
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 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.
Another major inclusion in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered for PS5 is over 10 hours of new motion-capture data for its vast array of characters, which was recorded by Guerrilla in Amsterdam at their dedicated mo-cap stage.
Mark Bazelmans, Senior Technical Artists for Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, commented:
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.
There’s tons more information available on the PlayStation Blog post, so be sure to have a read of it here. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is available for PS5 and PC on October 31.
