Horizon Zero Dawn is the first major first-party exclusive to hit the PlayStation 4 in 2017 and is the first game to launch with PS4 Pro support. But Horizon Zero Dawn isn’t really pulling out the full capabilities and power of the PS4 Pro, as revealed by senior producer Samrat Sharma in a recent interview with The Sixth Axis.
In the interview, Samrat explains that while they were able to work with the PS4 Pro dev kit during the development of Horizon Zero Dawn, it came much later during development so the game’s foundations were already in place, limiting their options for utilizing the power of the PS4 Pro. According to Samrat, if they had designed the game for the Pro from the beginning, they would have utilized it differently.
The machine has a lot of power, so we understand what it can do, but the game was already in place when we learnt about the Pro and got the dev kit. So what we’ve done is taken the power and tried to make the best improvements we think for our existing game. We didn’t design the game from the ground up for the Pro, but we tried to use that processing power to do the best things we could to make the experience look or feel better for you.
I don’t think it’s fair to say we haven’t used it fully, but I do think it’s fair to say that if we’d designed the game from the ground up for the Pro, we’d have probably used it differently.
In nitty gritty detail, this is a question for our tech director, but I think my two favourite improvements are the anti-aliasing and supersampling even on 1080p televisions so it just looks smooth and beautiful, and if you’ve got a proper HDR TV, the colours, especially in the lush forest regions, they just pop. Those are my favourite improvements that we’ve been able to squeeze in.
While Horizon Zero Dawn may not be using the PS4 Pro to its fullest, the differences in graphical fidelity between the standard PS4 and PS4 Pro when running Horizon Zero Dawn are still quite impressive. Read our review of the game here.
[Source: The Sixth Axis via Gaming Bolt]
