Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Features an Unexpected Upgrade

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered it set to release on PC and PS5 in three days on October 31. When it does, it will bring the graphics and performance of Horizon Zero Dawn to the standards of its PS5 sequel, Horizon Forbidden West. To this end, much of the game has to be upgraded to make this happen. Whether these upgrades will ultimately justify the existence of the remaster, let alone drive demand for it, remains to be seen. Still though, this isn’t the most straight forward remaster, as some have suggested.

One upgrade PlayStation fans did not expect, however, is that the game will feature not one, not two, but ten hours of additional motion-capture data for characters. According to developer of the remaster, Nixxes Software, this is exactly what it has. And according to Nixxes Software, this makes the game’s conversations between characters “much livelier” and more akin to the interactions in Horizon Forbidden West.

“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,” said Mark Bazelmans, Senior Technical Artist, of the upgrade. “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.”

Baselmans continued: “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.”

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is set to release worldwide on Halloween, October 31, via PS5 and PC. When it releases, it will cost PlayStation fans and PC gamers $49.99. However, those who own it on PS4 already will be to upgrade to the PS5 version for just $9.99.