The new action role-playing game, Horizon Zero Dawn, was created by Guerrilla Games exclusively for the PlayStation 4. In a post apocalyptic world, Machines have taken over and tribes of humans fight to regain control. You play as a young hunter named Aloy. She is alone in an unforgiving world trying to find herself while hunting Machines and defending herself against rival tribes.

PlayStation says that the game they demonstrated at the past two E3’s were running on standard PS4 hardware, but even though it still looks amazing on the normal PS4, that it will look even better on the PS4 Pro, especially paired with an HDR-compatible 4K TV. They state that using the enhanced hardware of the PS4 Pro allowed them to do excited things for Horizon Zero Dawn.

“As we showed at the PS4 Pro reveal event last September in New York City, the extra power of the new hardware allows us to get even closer to our vision for a lush and vibrant living world. The extra detail in the natural environment and the enhanced colors really add to the experience… For us, Horizon Zero Dawn is all about scope, scale, and visual splendor. Though the game is technically post apocalyptic (or perhaps more accurately, post-post apocalyptic) we wanted to create a vision of nature reclaiming the Earth. PS4 Pro’s power afforded us a number of interesting possibilities to expand this vision even further.”

For those players who have a standard 1080P HDTV they still have a lot of techniques to offer better image quality, including super-sampling. What that means is that they internally render at a higher resolution before shrinking the image down to the 1080P resolution which causes more details including smoother edges and a more stable image overall. PlayStation is also looking at a technique called anisotropic filtering which creates better quality texture sampling to add more detail to the environments textures. For the 4K TV users there will be a higher resolution output. They are using a 2160P checkerboard technique that will make subtle details more noticeable, “from the stitching on Aloy’s outfit, individual leaves and branches swaying in the wind, kilometers away in distance, and more detail in all the machines and NPC’s in the world.” PlayStation also has a brand new feature, high dynamic range (HDR), which enhances the range of colors displayed.

“It’s very exciting and hard to explain as it’s something which most people haven’t seen before, so they don’t know what to expect. You can’t print it, it’s not in cinemas, your phone’s screen can’t do it. The only thing that you can compare HDR with is reality. We normally have to do a lot of work in the engine to take an internal high dynamic range image and then make it suitable to be displayed on a normal TV. A lot of color fidelity gets lost in the process. If you own an HDR-enabled TV, we don’t have to lose that data and you’re looking at the image in its full glory, with brighter and deeper colors, more contrast and vibrancy, in its pristine state. The benefits are truly awesome.”

This sounds amazing and we can’t wait to see it for ourselves! We talked before about PlayStation 4 Pro’s removable hard drive and with all the new and beautiful things being shown every day, the anticipation is growing! Are you excited to see Horizon Zero Dawn in all it’s glory? Let us know down below and visit DFTG often for all your gaming news! You can also check out the trailer below to see if this title is something that tickles your fancy: