Despite this being one of the most controversial decisions made in the PC ports of their PlayStation games, Sony is doing it again. The PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered on PC will add a mandatory PSN account requirement. The decision to do this in their previous games has already had Sony under fire by the masses, and it seems that they haven’t read the criticisms, or they would stray from making such a decision.
While the PC upgrade will come with benefits, this serves as a huge inconvenience to those who don’t want to have to make a PlayStation account to play their PC game. Once you have a PlayStation account set up for the game, it will come with a PlayStation overlay with Trophy Support, as well as its own set of features which includes support for ultra-wide resolutions.
Additionally, the upgrade will use performance-enhancing technologies such as NVIDIA DLSS 3 and AMD FSR 3.1 with frame generation. All of this information will be covered in another blog post at a later date.
In a blog post released on the PlayStation website after the announcement, Jan-Bart Van Beek discusses the decision to remaster the game and how it came to be. Jan-Bart van Beek is the Studio Director, as well as the Studio Art & Animation Director at Guerilla. To help remaster the game, Nixxes got involved and has been leading the charge on remastering the game. Nixxes was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment in July 2021, with the specific job of bringing PlayStation games to PC. They have worked on port developments for games such as Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut.
The Horizon Zero Dawn Remaster will of course have the technological improvements and visual enhancements. Still, this version of the game will also include The Frozen Wilds, which is the huge expansion created for the game, adding extra environments, weapons, and machines for you to explore.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered has also been announced to come with native support for the Playstation 5 Pro. The game will utilize all of the features of the PlayStation 5 and the DualSense controller by adding custom haptics to make it more tactile and immersive. The blog post states that the game will allow you to access your old save games from the older version, allowing players to dive into a New Game+ or utilize the Photo Mode available.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered will be available on PC via Steam or the Epic Game Store, priced at $49.99. Although those who previously owned the PS4 or PC version of the game can get the remaster for $9.99, those who have a disc-less console and own the previous iteration on a disc won’t be able to access the upgrade offer.
