That’s just lazy work of them. They could use a differ patch, so the “bigfile“ gets extracted and rebuild with the difference. I don’t know what game it was, if I recall it was wolcen. They changed their patching system (shortly after release) to differ-patch very quickly after people were complaining. Because the game got so many updates which were almost like the whole game every time.
I'll re-post what I wrote in the DF analysis video: Sheesh! The Day One patch is 35 GB - basically half the compressed pre-load size - but it STILL has all those issues??? Just... WOW! Seems like the game could have done with another couple of months polishing up. This is going to damage the game's reputation on PC because most people's impressions of the game will be what they experience on Friday, 7th August as that is when the majority of the pre-order sales will be downloaded and played. I had such high hopes for this game after playing the awesome port of Death Stranding and the PS4 Pro version of Horizon Zero Dawn is polished to perfection. What happened? Developer inexperience with the PC? Not enough development time? What? I noticed that ACG's review footage, which was supposedly 4K on a 2080 Ti looked rather soft and not like 4K at all and, guess what, turns out the game has a bug with 4K rendering in exclusive fullscreen mode requiring the use of either borderless mode or switching between borderless then back to fullscreen. This really should have been picked up during testing. And what is it with the 10+ minute shader compilation during loading? The PS4 Pro does not require that so why is it necessary on PC. DF mention that Richard Leadbetter had several crashes during this shader compilation as well. Game seems unfinished to me, like it was not properly play-tested. Death Stranding has its crashing issues - for me that was fixed by disabling the RTSS overlay in game - but it was otherwise a very polished and well-optimised game. So disappointing. This is a terrific game and it deserved better.
A 3 year old game ported so sloppy....and now later these companies will say "our games don't sell on pc". So unfortunate. Game was a blast on PS4 Pro.
I was preloading but reading Darren's post cancelled, I'll rather download after release with the patch included to avoid re-downloading basically half the game. Too bad though if the state of the game (=port) is so rough, was really looking forward to playing this over the weekend.
I really really wanted this game to succeed on PC and have a good launch. But, they really blew it. 35GB day one patch is unforgivable , why pre-load 2 days prior to release when there will be another 35GB to download. They should have delayed the release, the bugs in the game seem to effect a lot of different systems from different reviewers , so its pretty obvious quality standards have been set to very low. and about textures , missed opportunity as well here, instead of enhancing the texture size and fidelity they used negative LOD settings which is the lazy way to do this. All in all , it looks like there weren't enough resources or effort put into porting this game. What a way to win the PC crowd Herman Hulst , get ready for your beautiful baby to do the walk of shame on Steam. such a shame!
I have the game pre-loaded from yesterday but it may be that the Day One patch is incorporated into those files? DF's analysis video mentions they were using the patch and they would have likely filmed it earlier on this week, possibly even over the last weekend. I have a very fast fibre connection anyway (420 Mbps down) which ironically means games take longer to decrypt than they do to just download but, whatever, a 35 GB will not take long if it is not part of the pre-load.
The pessimist in me wants to say all this was on purpose. Minimum effort (=cost) port that runs badly so PC port will flop, not sell and Sony won't make more ports due to that. (EA successfully killed the NHL series on PC with this tactic, always porting the crappy PS2 versions and pulling the plug because the series didn't sell). Of course begs the question then why port at all and that's a good question. I suspect Guerrilla / Sony underestimated what a PC port takes but likely Sony was reluctant to push back release or Guerrilla didn't admit they need more time. At least Guerrilla have acknowledged these issues. Except maybe performance. Though I guess PS4 versions had tons of platform specific optimizations in place, all of which had to be undone and replaced for the PC version. I really hope Guerrilla can at the very least patch out the issues. If any performance is to be gained, well, that would be very welcome as well. Personally I'm happy with a rock solid 1080p/60 w/ medium or high settings. On the other hand that's pretty much bare minimum for any PC port with any semi-decent rig. Now if you'll excuse me, while waiting for patch(es) I'll go play a game that runs on PC like it should (take one guess what game )
I don't know what excuse you can reasonably throw at Horizon Zero Dawn because the fact remains that Death Stranding, a much newer PS4 game that only released late last year not in 2017, was released on PC in a well optimised state and was generally well received because of it. Even I had a new found appreciation of this downright weird game and consider the PC version to be the definitive article. Some better TAA would be nice to reduce the shimmering (I cannot use DLSS on my 1080 Ti) but otherwise that is a great game. People were quite rightly expecting Horizon to run as welll on PC because they both share the same Decima engine. That's what makes this so disappointing. I won't lie: Horizon is by the far the better game of the two. I really hope they fix the stuttering issue, which begs the question of how no-one picked up on it during testing, because I cannot stand playing games that stutter. In poorly optimised console ports, usually capping the framerate to 30 fps fixes such issues and sometimes installing it to an SSD instead of a HDD can help too (both fixed the issue with Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order for example) , but apparently this won't help with this game because the stuttering is due to a bug in the game engine. Even the game's own 30 fps is bugged and caps the game at 29 fps according to DF. What a mess!
Apparently Kojima Productions are far more competent dealing with PC than Guerrilla. Well, at least Death Stranding was a success in that regard.
Maybe or the guys having more experience with PC in general. At least Hideo himself has (Metal Gear). Re-Edit: lols, Decima engine was apparently co-developed by Kojima and Guerrilla. Make of that what you will...
Guerilla Games has been eating Playstation day and night for 15 years+, did they make the port themself?
Been looking through the RPS/IGN/ARS articles for reports of a second developer on the pc port but haven’t found signs of any. An aside, there were complaints around the PS4’s performance of the game at launch.
The difference between Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn is that Death Stranding was always intended to have a PC release, there was probably zero consideration that HZD would ever launch on PC and so that makes things quite a bit more difficult. At lease most of the issues brought up in the DF video were already listed as “Known issues” by Guerrilla so hopefully updates will improve things.
Its not. https://steamdb.info/app/1151640/history/?changeid=9109191 Depots gets updated/added with the day1 patch once the game is released.
