‘Horizon Zero Dawn’ achieves ‘BBC-realism,’ too real to believe; Patch brings lots of fixes

If latest reports are to be believed, everything a player sees in “Horizon Zero Dawn” has been fine-tuned to look amazing. The game looks brilliant because of the presence of hyper-realism.

Guerrilla Games spent hours watching BBC nature documentaries that allowed it to develop a conceptual framework for the game’s visuals. The game looks exquisitely beautiful in some places and this is how developers achieved the quality. Being a game, the developer did not have to wait for the perfect conditions. Instead, they used programming to always capture the most-picturesque quality. Weather transitions were tweaked to be faster so that players never see anything that is below the best quality.

“It’s a quality that isn’t actually completely photorealistic. It’s a form of hyper-realism that we started calling ‘BBC-realism.’ It’s all shot in perfect condition, at the perfect time of day, with exactly the right dramatic light angle, cloudscapes and weather. There is a lot of cinematic grading to add contrast, atmosphere and saturation to the screen. It’s a film process that takes weeks to find those conditions and film a 10 second snippet,” Studio art director Jan-Bart van Beek told Kotaku.

Beek added that “Horizon Zero Dawn” is like a 24/7 version of BBC’s nature. Anything less than the best look were scrapped. Around 80 percent of the landscape is procedurally generated, though some of the visuals such as human settlements are tailor-made.

“Procedural nature simply means that the artist does not have to place every single rock, tree or blade of grass by hand. Instead the artists define rules and draw maps on where they want to certain assets to appear. So with a simple paint stroke on the terrain they can have a collection of flowers to appear. It gives them a lot of control, but also a lot of speed when working on a world as big as Horizon’s,” Beek further explained.

According to WWG, Guerrilla has come up with a hefty update and it’s already available. There are a lot of additions, adjustments, progression fixes, general fixes and crash fixes. Another patch is incoming that will fix the issue in 1.10 when a player buys an outfit or weapon he already owns. If someone faces any other issue with “Horizon Zero Dawn,” it is advisable to reload a recent manual save, auto save or quick save to address the problem. Stay tuned on IBT AU for more updates on the game.