In recent months, Aloy has been a trendy commodity since her debut in Horizon: Zero Dawn in 2017. From chasing monsters in Capcom’s massively famous Monster Hunter World to dropping in and building constructions in Fortnite, the Nora brave has appeared in a slew of crossover events.
Aloy was recently featured as a special guest character in Genshin Impact, having access to a bow and cryo powers. Guerrilla has provided fans with an update on how Aloy has developed as she approaches her return to her own franchise in Horizon: Forbidden West.
Guerrilla Community Lead Bo de Vries and Narrative Director Ben McCaw discuss Aloy’s path from Horizon: Zero Dawn to her next game, both from a plot and production standpoint, in a new post on the PlayStation Blog.
Multiple teams were allocated to Aloy in an attempt to strike a balance between the familiar and the forward-thinking features of the character. While the revised combat mechanics demonstrated some of this, Guerrilla concentrated on more technical areas like rigging, animation, audio, lighting, and more to bring her to life on next-gen.
In addition to techniques and skills, the blog article discusses how Aloy’s appearance has changed throughout time. With access to the more capable PS5 specifications, Aloy’s character model has undergone a few aesthetic improvements, including more polygons.
Guerrilla has also been able to do more with each character in the game on a technical level, such as more delicate features like better contouring, the ability to add peach fuzz, and realistic materials expression.
While the way faces and expressions were animated in the original Horizon game was criticized, Guerrilla revealed that the PS5 hardware has allowed the team to increase the number of skeleton joints in each character model. As a result, considerably more realistic deformations and facial emotions are possible, making them feel more genuine and immersive than ever before.
Horizon: Forbidden West on PlayStation 4 has also been thoroughly tested, according to Guerrilla. While it may not have the same aesthetic impact as its PS5 brother, the team was able to uncover some previously untapped resources to assist advance the character assets from the original game.
Aloy’s new aesthetic appearance wasn’t always well received by gamers, and some of the more subtle modifications sparked debate among those who didn’t like them. However, part of the problem was that the comparisons were being made between screenshots from last-gen machines and those from next-gen machines, which had more polygons and superior technology.
