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Horizon: The Frozen Wilds is an unmissable tech showcase

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  • Horizon: The Frozen Wilds is an unmissable tech showcase

    Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds is an expansion for one of the year's best games in just about every sense of the word. This isn't just more of the same - from a technological standpoint, it's a genuine effort to push on to even greater heights, and an impressive evolution of Guerrilla Games' peerless Decima Engine. Pushing beyond the forests and great plains of the original experience, The Frozen Wilds invites players to the northern-most region of the map to explore snow-covered fields and steep mountains. New features are added to Decima to emphasis the new environments and weather systems, but the core aspects of the technology are just as strong as they ever were: from the gorgeous lighting to the world class HDR implementation and smooth performance, there's little doubt that Horizon remains a beautiful game.
    So where does The Frozen Wilds innovate? First and foremost is the debut of new snow deformation technology. While moving through areas packed with deep snow, Aloy and other entities carve up the landscape in a realistic manner, leaving behind lengthy indents in the powder. These trails persist for quite some time after wandering through them as well. This means, following any skirmish, you can even follow the trail of deformation around the battlefield to retrace the fight. Beyond this, as the snow deforms in your wake, grass textures become visible beneath the surface creating the illusion of snow resting atop a once grassy plain.
    Even better, as Aloy moves through the snow, her animation is adjusted to match. Her feet realistically kick up snow while pushing through it, while snowy textures are applied to her character model. The result is a convincing sensation of moving through a snowy landscape that was missing in similar areas featured in the original game. This is enhanced further by the snow showers themselves. Often thick, the use of lit snow particles does an excellent job of building just the right atmosphere for each scene.
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