Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered highlights the futility of PlayStation’s current console generation

After winning the hearts of gamers with the release of Astro Bot, Sony has annoyed everyone again with its leaked remaster of Horizon Zero Dawn, a game that’s only seven years old. While not the shortest remaster time for modern PlayStation—that sits with The Last of Us Part 2 at just four years—it’s still a move that’s perplexed many.

While seven years used to create huge technological gulfs, some even changing the industry standard from 2D to 3D, that gulf no longer exists. From PS2 to PS3, the mass adoption of shaders arrived to offer a brand-new level of realism. PS4 then offered PBR rendering and global illumination before PS5 adopted ray-tracing. But has enough fundamentally changed to warrant continued remasters?

The gap isn’t big enough Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered

As a late PlayStation 4 exclusive, Horizon Zero Dawn was able to to benefit greatly from the existence of the PS4 Pro. While the game doesn’t run at 60fps, it does look great with a decently high resolution, stunning foliage and great quality textures. With the game’s PC port, there already exists a way to play the game at higher framerates with better visuals.

However, even when cranked to its absolute maximum on PC, there isn’t too much of a gulf between the current versions of Guerilla Games’ open-world robo-dinosaur game. Outside of a halved update on PlayStation, which could easily be addressed in a free update, there is no reason to charge a premium for a remaster.

Sure, a remaster could add better textures, overhaul the game’s lighting, add more pores-per-pixel to its character models and slap some ray-traced reflections into the game. But with the game’s visuals already looking peak on last-gen hardware, what needs to be added to make this a remaster worth paying for?

The same was true of The Last of Us Part 2, a remaster that looked pretty indistinguishable from the game’s PS4 Pro version running on PS5. There were improvements, yes, but for a full-priced release, there was little reason to shell out other than some extra missions and a roguelike mode. But with Horizon, a game already so vast with a massive expansion already made for it, not even additional missions are a great sell.

Diminishing results

We’re not in an age where pretty much every game looks sublime, unless their resolution is marred by AMD’s unstable FSR reconstruction. In a generation where Xbox has offered free upgrades from Xbox One to Series S and X for the past four years, paying for minor visual upgrades and a framerate enhancement feels like daylight robbery. Furthermore, with PlayStation also offering free PS5 upgrades to specific games, the situation with Horizon is even more bizarre.

No improvements made to Horizon Zero Dawn will be worth buying the game all over again. Even hardcore fans will be hard-pressed to find a strong reason to shell out $70 for the game a second—or if they purchased the complete edition—a third time.

This situation only really exists in this console generation where the gulf between last-gen machines doesn’t feel substantial at all. Especially when Sony’s first-party exclusives are on the block, games which stretched 2013 hardware as far as it could possibly go, the jump to PS5 is one that doesn’t feel worth an asking price.

When it comes to the upcoming PS6, a console that should be able to push better ray-tracing and machine-learned reconstruction further than ever before, then we might see a reason to pay for a remaster again. As it stands, it simply feels like the easiest cash-in video game history.