[Update]: The newest Horizon Zero Dawn PC update has fixed mouse sensitivity issues and improved performance.

While Horizon Zero Dawn is pretty fun to mess around with, the newly released PC version unfortunately has quite a few problems. The performance can be spotty even on powerful machines, crashes can be a frequent occurrence during gameplay, while a variety of annoying bugs (such as Aloy not being able to walk straight) make the process of playing the game a bit fiddly.

In order to address some of these issues, and also to improve the crash report tool to help figure out just what's going haywire, the Horizon Zero Dawn PC team has now released Patch 1.02. You find the brief list of changes, as well as the issues the developers are currently tracking, right below. Have a look:

Known Issues

• Some players are experiencing an out of memory error during the game optimization process.

• Some players are experiencing GPU-related hangs during gameplay. The improved diagnostic data collection added in Patch 1.01 and Patch 1.02 is aimed at making it easier to track these down.

• Some players are experiencing graphical settings issues, such as Anisotropic Filtering or HDR not working correctly.

• Some players are experiencing performance issues on specific GPUs or hardware combinations.

• Some players with a non-Latin-1 codepage may have had their save games missing after Patch 1.01; we have a script that can help relocate the missing save games. Please reach out to our team here using “Report Other Issue” for support.

• We're aware of and continue to investigate issues on both the player-compiled lists by u/EvilMonkeySlayer and u/Rampage572 – thank you!

 

PATCH NOTES

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.

Even though this patch doesn't address some of the major issues that have been around since launch, it's still a solid step forward, and hopefully one of many updates that are still to come. So if you're willing to accept some advice, I'd recommend keeping a close eye on Horizon Zero Dawn, but avoiding the PC version for at least a few more weeks.

You can read more about Horizon Zero Dawn, as well as keep track of any future updates, over at Steam.