In last month’s announcement, we detailed improvements and new technologies such as Guerrilla’s fully revamped sound mix, DualSense controller support, and updated motion capture for conversations. Today, I’d like to introduce some of the team members at Nixxes, who will provide more insight into the enhancements made for the remaster.
Overhauling Nature
Foliage plays a crucial role in depicting the lush, overgrown ruins of a long-lost civilization in Horizon’s world. Our Environment Artists viewed the foliage in Horizon Zero Dawn as a benchmark for the industry, with Horizon Forbidden West improving visual quality even further. For the remaster, the team aimed to give the foliage the same attention to detail.
Patrick Blankenzee, Senior Environment Artist: “To bring the foliage in the remaster up to the quality of Horizon Forbidden West, we improved shaders, textures, geometry, and foliage interaction. We reviewed all the foliage assets in Horizon Zero Dawn and upgraded hundreds of plants, bushes, flowers, and trees with these new features.”
“We revisited the original game’s biomes and compared them to the concept art. This helped us find areas to enhance and align more closely with the original vision—particularly in the rainforest biome. Using advanced procedural technology, we introduced new foliage and increased quality and density. The riverbanks have also been enhanced with greater biodiversity to better reflect the concept art’s vision.”
Julian Hofman, Environment Artist: “Working closely with the original team at Guerrilla allowed us to ask questions and directly compare their latest work on Horizon Forbidden West with what we were doing for the remaster. This collaboration gave us clear goals, such as the new generation of moss now featured in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.”
“For me, the changes in foliage make the game feel more vibrant, helping it meet the incredibly high standards of the Horizon series. The result is a cohesive world that’s exciting to replay or experience for the first time.”
Enhancing the Living World
The Design team at Nixxes made several key improvements to Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, with one of the most notable being the enhancement of the living world.
Brian van Nunen, Senior Technical Game Designer: “To achieve this, we reviewed all the villages, outposts, and cities, identifying areas that felt empty or could benefit from improved realism and immersion.”
“Developing the game for PS5 allowed us to take advantage of the increased memory, enabling a significant boost in the number of non-player characters (NPCs). We added many more locations for NPCs to stand, sit, work, and go about their daily lives. Their schedules were also made more varied, increasing movement and liveliness across different areas. We got creative with existing animations too. For example, there’s now a woman feeding geese at the well in Meridian, using an animation that originally showed someone sowing. Additionally, we made big strides in enhancing the atmosphere and activity on the bridge to Meridian.
Improving Terrain and Building Blocks
The Tech Art team at Nixxes utilized the next-gen material library developed for Horizon Forbidden West to significantly enhance the quality of assets used for terrain, objects, and buildings in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.
Sander Bronkhorst, Senior Technical Artist: “We started by replacing all of Horizon Zero Dawn’s terrain materials with their updated Horizon Forbidden West counterparts. However, this was just the first step, as the sequel’s terrain materials didn’t always match the original game’s aesthetics. To address this, we carefully tweaked and refined each terrain material to closely align with the look and feel of the original game while preserving the visual fidelity introduced in Horizon Forbidden West.
“In addition to updating all the terrain textures and materials, we added features like deformable snow and sand. Snow deformation was first introduced in The Frozen Wilds expansion, but in the remaster, you’ll find this feature outside that region as well.”
“In settlements like Meridian and Daytower, the ground required a more unique aesthetic. Originally, Guerrilla used custom meshes and materials for the floors in these settlements, making them exclusive to those locations. For the remaster, we initially followed this approach, considering higher texture resolution and adding parallax mapping to areas like brick floors. However, after testing, we realized this wouldn’t achieve the visual quality we were aiming for. As a result, we chose to completely remake the floors in Meridian and Daytower from scratch. This process involved creating new high-resolution textures, setting up new materials, painting blend maps, and designing new high-resolution geometry to support the shapes within the material textures.”
“Another key upgrade to the game environment in the remaster is the overhaul of Building Blocks. To provide some context: Building Blocks are the individual assets used to set dress the world of Horizon Zero Dawn. These include objects like rocks, plants, utensils, and even buildings.”
“Building Blocks can be divided into two categories: natural and man-made. For both types, we increased the resolution of the textures and adjusted the level of detail (LOD) ranges to ensure higher mesh fidelity.”
“We conducted a separate pass on all the man-made Building Blocks, creating new high-resolution geometry for assets that would benefit from it. Buildings, in particular, greatly improved from having more detailed geometry, as most originally used brick-like textures without the brick shapes being reflected in the geometry.”
“To resolve this, we developed custom tools to generate more detailed geometry for these buildings. Artists used these tools to create new geometry, then manually tweaked and adjusted each building for the best visual result.”
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