Horizon Zero Dawn’s release on PC is welcome, and it’s still a really good game, but as far as PC experiences go, it’s not exactly ideal for many people at the moment.
I installed and unlocked the game over the weekend, excited to see what the game will look like on my brand new PC (i7-9700, RTX 2070 Super, which waaaaaaaay above the recommended specs). After a long process of automatic configuration it looked like beautiful, but it also ran like complete shit! I talk 20-30fps, with moments where the whole screen would just hang and stutter.
I always forget pretty new games when this kind of thing happens, but this is a three-year-old PS4 game that had no sort of time frame for print release (as it should come out on other systems at the same time). It was both a surprise and a disappointment to see it freely in this state, especially since the other major PS4 port of the year, Death Stranding, had looked so good and walked so smoothly.
But that’s just me, and you can never say that a PC game uniquely “runs like shit” unless the same goes for plenty of of people. Which … it is. The Digital Foundry review is critical, calls it a “disappointing haven”, and you do not have to travel far on reddits or forums to find people complaining about the game’s bugs and poor performance.
What’s strange about it, though, is that things are not entirely wrong. Certain hardware configurations run beautifully, while other, more powerful systems can wrestle.
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I got it seen mention of a memory leak present during the initial automatic configuration process, and that restarting the game when done can help repair it some of the problems. On subsequent sessions, I have noticed that performance has improved somewhat, especially in cuts, but it is still not at all close to what I would expect.
Hopefully things will not stay that long. An update on the game’s Steam page says the team is “aware that some players have experienced crashes and other technical issues”, and that investigating the cause of all these hiccups is their “top priority”.
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