There are few things in gaming that rile people up more than Aloy’s face. WhenHorizon Forbidden Westwas first revealed,a small cadre of gamers were incensedthat Aloy had a beard - which was actually just the regular fine white hairs everyone has on their face. Maybe if these gamershad been near a woman recently, they’d have known that.
You might remember that they yassified Aloy, giving her plucked brows, lip fillers, and thick lashes while still in her tribal furs like Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC. Or maybe you remember it without the reference to the 1960s movie with no dialogue. In any case, we all had a good laugh. But now? Well, I kinda hate Aloy’s face too.
As part ofHorizon Zero Dawn Remastered, Aloy has gotten a glow up. Oddly, it looks remarkably similar to the much mocked yassified picture. Her face is thinner, smoother, even her clothes have lost their ragged appearance around the edges in favour of something cleaner and more fluid. Leaving aesthetics aside, the new one is probably better on a technical level - more polished and with greater detail. It is, a dev confirmed in a defence of the design, the Forbidden West model with some subtle changes. But the thing is, nobody is going to leave aesthetics aside.
We brought over Aloy’s model from
Forbidden west. We also reworked the character lighting to match the look of HFW and improve skin tones. Hair shaders are also improved. The slight blurring you see between ps4 and ps5 is because the PS4 image here has motion blur turned offhttps://t.co/F0ijlydZBT
— Jan-Bart van AstroBeek (@janbartvanbeek)Jun 10, 2025
Simply Put, Horizon Zero Dawn Doesn’t Need A Remaster
It’s a consequence of remastering a game like this in the first place.The point, fairly bluntly, is to make money. That’s the point of all video games when you really get down to it, but at least when they remake something likeCrash Bandicootthere’s a very clear ‘okay yeah, this looks a lot better’. At their most altruistic, remakes and remasters exist to make a game more accessible (either because it’s not on modern systems or its controls feel arcane to modern players), or to make the game look better than it ever could have dreamed of when it launched.
This is not the case with Horizon. Visuals haven’t developed in a way that players particularly care about since 2017, even if devs with under the hood knowledge feel there’s a significant difference. Zero Dawn is readily available on thePS5and plays just fine. The sequel, released for the PS4 and PS5 in 2022, plays mostly the same only with a few extra abilities added in the way sequels do. There’s no major way to make Zero Dawn look or play any better than it did, so the money grubbing truth feels more exposed. To try to justify the outlay, changes have been made anyway. And, well, you know that expression ‘if it ain’t broke…’?
In the interest of balance, I should point out that people who own the game on PS4 will only need to pay $10 to upgrade. That’s $10 more than the free 4K upgrades other games have gotten, or the Pro compatibility patches others will receive, which is the route Zero Dawn should have taken.
Tribal outcast warriors are interesting and people, as a basic concept, are boring. Aloy used to be a tribal outcast warrior, and now she’s a person, and thus looks boring. She’s always been both - she was still a person in 2017 and is still a tribal outcast warrior in 2024. But the emphasis has changed. Technological limitations that forced the slimmest of art styles and personality onto Aloy’s design have been lifted, and thus her design is now free to be as generic as possible. Aloy once looked like a video game character - a character who was a tribal outcast warrior. Now she looks like a real person. It’s better. And it’s also worse.
It looks impressive at first glance, especially to people who only play a handful of games a year (who increasingly seem to be the gallery Sony wishes to play to with its blockbusters), but it leads to a lot of money being spent on generic, repetitive designs that all the other studios owned by the same parent company are also funnelling hundreds of thousands of dollars into. I don’t see the point or the strategy, especially in the wake ofAstro Bot.
The quirky platformer not only proved that Sony doesn’t need to rely entirely on third person action-adventure games with a HBO-tinged story and photorealism, it also highlighted how rich Sony’s stable is, and how broad the gaming landscape could be today if Sony’s vision for masterpieces was broader than it is now. For once, Aloy’s face really is worth getting mad over.
