The release of Horizon Zero Dawn for PC earlier this month has brought joy to many players. Unfortunately, not everyone has experienced ideal conditions with the port thus far. While Horizon plays well on most machines, there are still a number of users reporting crashes and other technical issues. Developer Guerrilla Games released an initial hotfix for some of the issues, but patch 1.01 left many problems unsolved. Impressively, Guerrilla has another update ready just several days later. Today’s Horizon Zero Dawn patch 1.02 picks up where the first left off to further reduce crashes and provide other important fixes.
The Guerrilla Games team posted the full patch notes on Reddit this morning. The post also promised more improvements in the near future and asked players to continue reporting issues. The actual patch notes are pretty self-explanatory as Guerrilla broke the information up into several categories. Here’s the rundown for everything in the Horizon Zero Dawn patch 1.02.
Keeping you in the game
As previously stated, reducing crash occurrences was a primary concern for the developers. Players should no longer experience a crash during their first game boot when the “game optimization” screen is active and the system runs out of disc space. Guerrilla also fixed an issue where some players would crash if they updated their video drivers after the game was optimized. Players also no longer need to worry about crashes related to incorrectly overwritten memory during gameplay. Another resolved crash was due to a texture unstreaming bug.
The team didn’t stop there though. Guerrilla Games takes crashes very seriously, as there’s nothing worse than an abrupt ending to a gaming experience. Therefore the developers created an improved crash report flow with messaging. It should help players identify problems and ensure the issues are accurately communicated to support agents. They also added more features to improve diagnostic data collection when submitting a crash report.
In addition to resolving crashes, the developers have made progress in other key areas, too. Notably, Guerrilla Games improved performance when auto-saving, and reduced the memory used when streaming shaders. However, the real shout-out goes to whoever fixed the 30 FPS-locked facial animations. Together, these changes should result in a far more immersive experience.
Next on the agenda
There’s still plenty of work to do though, and Guerrilla Games has a list of known issues it intends to solve next. For instance, some players are experiencing an out of memory error during the game optimization process. Others are seeing GPU-related hangs during gameplay. Speaking of GPUs, specific GPUs or hardware combinations are still creating problems. Furthermore, graphical settings issues persist, such as Anisotropic Filtering or HDR not working correctly.
Fortunately, Guerrilla Games has a dedicated fanbase which is reporting on many issues. That’s why it’s important to keep in mind that Horizon Zero Dawn patch 1.02 is just the beginning, especially if you’re still having issues yourself. Given enough time, the game should shape up to a seamless experience for all audiences.
