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Horizon Zero Dawn’s PC Port Is A Beautiful Disaster

Horizon Zero Dawn doesn’t cut it on PC.
Credit: Sony
Maybe Sony should keep its PlayStation exclusives on PlayStation instead of porting them to PC.
Thats a controversial, incredibly loaded thing to say and Im sure some people will yell at me for saying it, but I offer up Horizon Zero Dawn as my argument.
The game ran perfectly fine on PS4 when it released just over three years ago. It ran even better on the PS4 Pro.
It runs very badly on PCeven on very powerful gaming rigs with specs far exceeding the recommended and minimum.
On Steam, the game is getting Mixed reviews from gamers. Many of the poor reviews note that the game is absolutely gorgeous, but it has a host of problems that will (hopefully sooner rather than later) be resolved with a patch. Many of these reviews say things like not never, but not now.
As in, wait for the issues with the game to be resolved before making a purchase.
The major issues appear to be framerate and crash-related. Even very powerful machines cant get the game to run at 60fps without drastically reducing graphics settings. Many gamers list constant crashing as a problem. Crashes seem to occur pretty much everywhere, from boss fights to simply going through menus. Its a mess.
Over at Kotaku, Luke Plunkett makes a very good point:
Im always fairly forgiving of brand new games when this kind of thing happens, but this is a three-year-old PS4 game that had no kind of pressing release window (like it having to come out on other systems at the same time) to adhere to. It was both a surprise and a disappointment to see it release in this state, especially since the other big PS4 port of the year, Death Stranding, looked so good and ran so smoothly.
If Horizon Zero Dawn is the argument against Sony porting its exclusives to PC, then Death Stranding is the counter-argument. The PC port of Hideo Kojimas super bizarre post-apocalyptic delivery sim has been widely praised as exactly what a PS4 to PC port should be. (The other counter-argument is that FromSoftware desperately needs to port Bloodborne to PC. It would be infinitely better with unlocked frame-rates).
Oddly enough, both Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn are built using the Decima Engine, so the stark contrast in how each game performs on PC is puzzling, to say the least.
Theres really no reason that Horizon Zero Dawn needed to come out this summer if it was having so many performance issues. Why not delay it and release the game in perfect condition, running smoothly and impressing gamers and critics alike?
Digital Foundry analyzed the games performance and came away disappointed:
Guerrilla Games is aware that some gamers are experiencing issues (weirdly, some have experienced no issues whatsoever) and so we should expect a patch in the not-too-distant future which will hopefully fix these problems.
The bigger problem remains: Horizon Zero Dawn is a gorgeous game thats just far too tedious despite a cool world with robot dinosaurs. I mean, the very fact that you could make a game about robot dinosaurs kind of boring is kind of shocking to me, but here we are.
I just wish games like this would dispense with all the tedious stuff (like constant harvesting and boring side missions) even if it meant that games were a little bit shorter and more streamlined.read more

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