We already learned a bit about the kinds of changes Guerrilla Games and Nixxes brought to Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, but beyond noting how much more dialogue and mo-cap was recorded, there weren’t many specifics. A new PlayStation blog post has gone into more detail about the improvements, including how the teams worked to make the world feel more alive.
Nixxes senior technical game designer Brian van Nunen wrote in the post that one of those ways was to add more NPCs in villages, cities, and outposts, which they were able to do because of the PlayStation 5’s more powerful specs. And not only will there be more of them but they’ll have more varied schedules and will move around in a more realistic manner.
“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,” van Nunen wrote. “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.”
One of the big improvements going from the original Zero Dawn to its sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, was just how the developers were able to utilize PS5 versus PS4. So there was a lot more activity in cities, with people mulling about and getting in Aloy’s way as she walked around. These details have become more important as open-world games get larger, so it’s nice to see Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered looking to compete.
To make NPCs feel even more lifelike, Nixxes also made changes to “skin tones, hair quality, and outfits,” which were carried over from Forbidden West. This also applies to Aloy, who got the full peach fuzz treatment.
Nixxes senior technical artist Mark Bazelmans also delved into more details surrounding how much new dialogue and mocap was added, and how the team took on that endeavor. There was over 10 hours of new mo-cap recorded by Guerilla, which made up about 2,500 new mo-cap files for Nixxes to process. Bazelmans said Nixxes developed a tool in Python to process them and replace the original files.
“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,” Bazelmans wrote. Animator Alexander Georgiev added that one of the obstacles involved matching heights and build with the surrounding space.
“We made small, automated scripts to fix shoulders and arms clipping. All these tools gave the animators a way to focus more on enhancing the acting of the characters to support what they want to say,” Georgiev said.
The post is packed with anecdotes about how Nixxes made improvements to environments, textures, foliage, lighting, terrain, and more, so check it out if that’s of interest,
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered was announced earlier this year at the September 2024 State of Play, and is set to release on PS5 and PC on October 31.