Horizon Zero Dawn team crunched 30 PS5 dev kits each night to check remaster’s lighting effects

Guerrilla Games studio director Jan-Bart van Beek has shed more light on how the team got Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered ready for release.

Notably, this included hooking up more than 30 PlayStation 5 developer kits – special versions of Sony’s console designed for use by developers – to explore the game’s large open-world map each evening, in order to make sure everything looked right.

The detail comes from a conversation between van Beek and a Horizon fan on social media platform X, after the latter shared an impressively-brightened screenshot from the Horizon Zero Dawn remaster, alongside a noticeably duller image from the original as a comparison.

Aloy’s first outing was Guerrilla Games’ first open-world game – something which took some time for the studio’s lighting team to manage, as it “featured locations over a 30+ square kilometre area in a 24-hour light cycle”.

The scale of the project meant it was “extremely hard” for the Guerrilla to “check every nook and cranny of the world to see if the lighting functioned correctly”, Van Beek wrote. Indeed, the images posted by the fan showed an area in the original game where Guerrilla’s lighting solutions had “malfunctioned” – which is why the difference when compared with the game’s remake was so striking.

When further asked if Guerrilla now has a system in place to check the entirety of Horizon Zero Dawn’s world, van Beek confirmed that the studio now uses something called Autobot.

“It boots the game and makes a series of screenshots in thousands of locations at multiple times of day,” the developer explained. “It does this each night, it’s used 30+ PlayStation dev kits, but checking the results is still a human effort.”

So, does this mean that any of those locations in the original Horizon Zero Dawn that, in van Beek’s words, malfunction will now be sorted? “We can only hope,” the studio lead closed.

The remastered version of Horizon Zero Dawn will be released on 31st October, across PlayStation 5 and PC.

For more, our friends over at Digital Foundry just took a look at the spruced up game, concluding “yes, the upgrades are worthwhile” in their Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered tech review.