Guerilla Games Releases Small Horizon Zero Dawn Patch to Address Performance Issues

After an initial launch marred by performance hiccups, Horizon Zero Dawn on PC lands its first post-release patch today, albeit a small one, aiming to remedy a sparse selection of the game’s more pressing issues.

From crashes to stuttering by way of innumerable bugs, early adopters have been left to contend with a long list of technical issues that fall short of what was supposed to be Horizon Zero Dawn’s momentous arrival on PC, and Sony’s first push to expand its first-party portfolio beyond the PlayStation platform. Frustration among the player base has left Horizon Zero Dawn nursing a disappointing ‘Mixed’ Steam user review.

Developer Guerilla Games acknowledged the issues in a Steam post last week and vowed to investigate the problems as its ‘highest priority.’

“We have been monitoring all of our channels and are aware that some players have been experiencing crashes and other technical issues. Please know that we are investigating your reports as our highest priority.”

Near enough a week on, Horizon Zero Dawn Patch 1.01 is now available for players to download. It’s not quite the seismic fix-all players were expecting, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction, including fixing several startup crashes.

In a post shared on the Horizon Zero Dawn subreddit, Guerilla said it plans to push out another patch next week:

“We’re very grateful for all the reports and posts from our players so far! Some issues still need more investigation and testing, so our team is hard at work on the next patch which will go live next week.”

Patch 1.01 is currently available on both Steam and the Epic Games Store. You can read the full patch notes below.

KNOWN ISSUES

In addition to the issues identified previously, we’re working on a number of high-priority issues:

• Some players are experiencing startup crashes. Patch 1.01 fixes a few, but not all, of these crashes.
• Some players are experiencing GPU-related hangs during gameplay. The improved diagnostic data collection added in Patch 1.01 is aimed at making it easier to track these down.
• Some players are experiencing graphical settings issues, such as Anisotropic Filtering not working, 4K not displaying correctly, or HDR not working correctly.
• Some players are experiencing performance issues on specific GPUs or hardware combinations.
• We’re aware of and continue to investigate all issues in this list on Reddit as well. Thank you to u/EvilMonkeySlayer for compiling this for us.

PATCH NOTES

Crash/Hang Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the game would crash if the SteamUI didn’t initialize properly on startup.

Functionality Issue Fixes

• Fixed an issue where Concentration and other slowdown mechanics wouldn’t work for everyone.
• Fixed an issue where Windows/Steam profile names containing special characters would prevent some players from saving the game. We are still investigating other saved game issues as well.
• Fixed an issue where Windows/Steam profile names containing special characters would prevent some players from saving screenshots in Photo Mode.

Other Fixes

• Added improved diagnostic data collection when submitting a crash report.
• Fixed several backend issues.
• Fixed a video corruption issue for specific hardware. We’re continuing to look at other hardware configurations as well.”