Horizon Zero Dawn Patch 1.02 out now

Horizon Zero Dawn marks Sony’s first attempt to publish a game of this scale on PC, and has sadly been marred with a wide variety of technical issues since release. Seeing Sony stumble out of the gate with a major game on PC has been disappointing, and has left players hoping for developer Guerilla Games to get to work on improving the PC conversion of their previously PS4-only open-world action-RPG.

The biggest problems have been regular crashes and graphical bugs. For some players, the game has been incredibly unstable, with play being interrupted by regular crashes. Horizon Zero Dawn has received thousands of negative reviews on Steam, resulting in the game earning a “mixed” flag from Steam’s user review system.

In hopes of turning things around, and getting the game working properly for paying customers, Guerilla Games has just released a second patch, with version 1.02 of Horizon Dawn now being made available for download. The patch is live on both Steam and Epic Games Store, here’s what’s new with the latest patch:

Crash Fixes

• Fixed an issue where some players would crash during their first game boot when the ‘game optimization’ screen is active and they ran out of disc space.
• Fixed an issue where some players would crash if they updated their video drivers after the game was already optimized previously.
• Fixed an issue where some players would crash during gameplay because of memory incorrectly being overwritten.
• Fixed an issue where some players would crash during gameplay due to a texture unstreaming bug.

Game Improvements

• Improved performance when auto-saving (e.g. when completing a quest step).
• Fixed an issue where some players experienced that V-sync wouldn’t properly turn off in borderless mode
• Fixed an issue where some players experienced out of sync facial animations due to them being locked at 30FPS.
• Reduced memory used when streaming shaders.

Other changes

• Improved crash report flow and messaging. Each crash now includes an identifier you can use to communicate with our Customer Support.
• Added more features to improve diagnostic data collection when submitting a crash report.

These will hopefully improve the game for players, with these major issues seriously hampering enjoyment for a lot of users. We’ll have to wait and see just how effective this patch is in resolving issues for everyone, since performance can vary depending on hardware and software configuration.

Guerilla Games have also implemented a new user system for reporting technical issues, where the game will report crashes directly to Guerilla, or users can upload crash reports here.

We really hope that this port can eventually be updated to become a solid and reliable conversion. It’s a great game, and it deserves to run smoothly on gaming PCs. Guerilla has pledged to continue to support it, and given that they’re actively hoping to address the causes behind any crashes that this patch doesn’t address.

I still think questions need to be asked about how this port was released in the state it was, at least internally at Sony. Had these issues not been a factor, I think it could have very easily sold more than it has. When it comes time for Sony’s next PC release, perhaps The Last Of Us 2, Dreams, Ghost of Tsushima, Days Gone, or God of War, will people be confident to buy it on day one? I’d certainly be cautious of any future Sony releases on PC, although Guerilla Games doing a decent job of post-launch support will go some way to reassuring me. We’ll have to wait and see what exactly Sony’s strategy for the future of their games on PC is, but hopefully whatever comes next they can avoid delivering a product with these kinds of fundamental flaws going forward.

Have you picked up Horizon Zero Dawn on PC? Did you have issues with crashes and instability? Let us know how you get on with this new patch.