Horizon Zero Dawn Remaster Comparison Shows Big Visual Upgrades

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At only seven years old, Sony's Horizon Zero Dawn didn't seem like an obvious choice to get a new remastered edition. Regardless, Horizon Zero Dawn Remaster is only a week away, and a trio of players have taken it upon themselves to create a detailed comparison between the original version and its new upgrade.

Reddit users Lanny16_I_think, Nixxes, and Guerrilla compiled the comparison and painstakingly used an early copy of Zero Dawn Remaster to match up with shots from the game's first incarnation. In each instance, the remaster added noticeable improvements beyond the graphics that made the world of Aloy seem more alive and real than before. Check it out in the images below, captured by Lanny16_I_think on PC.

For example, this town sequence in the original Zero Dawn is noticeably lacking in NPC characters and has a distracting orange tint to the colors.

Aloy arrives in a town from the original version of Horizon Zero Dawn.

The remastered version significantly increases the background NPCs and removes the orange tint, revealing a much more vibrant environment.

Aloy's arrival in town in Zero Dawn Remastered.

The Reddit thread also included a look at the remaster's vastly improved skin textures, as well as the lush background details. However, some of the shots from the original Horizon Zero Dawn don't reflect the intent of the title's developer, Guerrilla Games. In a post on X, Guerrilla Games Studio Art Director Jan-Bart van Beek noted that the screenshot shown below reflects a mistake in the game's lighting function.

Horizon Zero Dawn was our first open-world game. It featured locations over a 30+ square kilometer area in a 24-hour light cycle. It was extremely hard to check every nook and cranny of the world to see if the lighting functioned correctly. This was a location that malfunctioned https://t.co/M81wLxmL9E

— Jan-Bart van AstroBeek (@janbartvanbeek) October 22, 2024

In a later post, van Beek explains that the game uses a system called autobot to make screenshots in thousands of the game's locations at different times of the day. But he also notes that "checking the results is still a human effort."

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered will hit PC and PlayStation 5 on October 31. Players who already have the original Horizon Zero Dawn can get the PS5 upgrade for $10.

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