Capturing Beauty in a Machine-Infested World

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a beautiful game through and through. Such visually rich games make me feel that we are reaching an upper limit in terms of how much we can push the graphics in the current cycle.

If you don't believe that, then let me show you how good these graphics have become. All the shots in this post were taken in low to medium settings only. Hive front-ends also lie to compress them, which reduces the quality of the photo that you can see here. These were taken on a 1440p resolution. Imagine this as a 4k monitor and in the ultra quality presets. They would look amazing.

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I turned on the lens flare for these shots. I usually keep it off when I am playing the game, but once in a while, I put it on to show you how these look.

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There is a dynamic weather effect which makes the whole landscape feel fresh, even if you are constantly hovering in the same area. I love the foggy weather in the snow biome.

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While the landscape is so beautiful and at times looks very peaceful. It rarely is so... there are a lot of dangers in this area, mostly the machines.

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Hunting these machines is both fun and dangerous at the same time. Sometimes you end up in the middle of a big herd with multiple dangerous machines. But thankfully, Aloy is a beast at handling them as well.

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You can choose the stealthy approach if you want. I like that a lot in games. You can get a lot of interesting battles. Not all machines can be tackled this way, especially bigger ones, but it's still fun to approach them silently and strike them without being noticed.

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Even though I am not using the highest graphics in the game, you can still see a lot of details in the foliage and trees. Look at the variety of leaves and details on them in the foreground. Even the tree bark models are very detailed. Games have come a long way from using a mostly flat texture file for trees to highly detailed textures like these.

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I will show you an interesting tree that I spotted, which was growing on top of a mountain peak, on the side of a cliff. This tree reminds me of Ghost of Tsushima, where similar trees were growing on the side of a village next to a lake.

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The way light comes through the trees just after sunset behind the cliff looked good to me. Even though the sky looked mostly clear, there was a slight snowfall happening there.

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Primitive tribes are trying to survive in this dangerous machine-infested world. You can see the clues of it everywhere. There are a lot of man-made structures near the settlements.

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The world of Horizon Zero Dawn is filled with the signs of a lost civilisation. It is in ruins, and nature is trying to reclaim it. But humanity survived and is living in primitive tribes, but the challenge is not over.

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Let me know if you liked these shots and which one is your favourite.