Horizon Zero Dawn

Just finished Horizon Zero Dawn, I beat the DLC in the middle of my playthrough, ended up at level 55. Thoroughly enjoyed the game, story was absolutely amazing. I had two crashes in my 41 hours of play time, not bad at all I'd say. Probably wont go back to play New Game+. Combat never felt dull and the open world never felt grindy to me. 9/10 overall.

 

Somehow i doubt this.

 

At least up until Meridian I think it could work, clouds and reflections when they are present as two of the more costly options from what I remember but some parts of the game just won't behave nicely and it's stuttering prone, framerate dips and can even be unstable and see various crashes randomly.

Attempts have been made to lessen these and the patches and upcoming patch hopefully have also helped in part but the game needs a bit more still and at least getting these stability errors ironed out and making sure it's not the game or a software issue with say Steam or it's overlay or such.

EDIT: This one.
https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/1962-horizon-zero-dawn-memory-allocator-fix/

 

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1151640/announcements/detail/2876066180999314898

 

Well, good to see that they're trying to fix things.

 

Yeah the anisotropic filtering and general shader state and pipeline cache as the remaining engine issue I think can be resolved and then we'll see how the 30 FPS timing and animations might go, would hope hair physics could at least be resolved.
Overall optimization efforts and other known issues but it's getting pretty good now just the shader cache that needs some care and then it's mostly going to be fine.

For NVIDIA set any overrides - doesn't seem AMD applies for D3D12/Vulkan. - and then in-game set the options you want to use and delete the pipeline / d3d12 shader cache the game makes then when it re-makes it on next start it'll be proper using the data from the selected settings and stuff like filtering (AF) but it's not a huge problem and it looks like most major glitches are resolved since earlier too in regards to this.

 

Nvidia will not support AF overrides in the next driver.

 

What? Why is that?

 

not everyone bothers checking forums to see how to fix a pipeline state cache issue brought about by changing the requested AF mode after the cache has already been created.

 

So will it only be for this game or for all games that build shader cache?

 

Just this one (and inspector can still override it)

 

Finished the game yesterday.I liked the diversity in enemies, it was fun and didn't feel too repetitive. I enjoyed the combat very much, and the graphics were breathtaking at times with HDR on. I felt the DLC was longer than it should've been (especially that last mission), I was getting a Tomb Raider vibe from it throughout. Great game, well worth the price.

 

I was one of the lucky ones, cranked everything up to max first time I booted the game and have left it there since with no issues at all.

As for the game, it's a weird one I am getting very close to what I believe is the end of the game and I have a few thoughts about the game overall.

The gameplay can be set in to two very distinct groups. The fast paced engagements with the robot enemies, who actually seem to display some level of intelligence are fun to engage, combined with the range and type of weapons it also allows players a few options on how they want to take down enemies. The humans on the other hand are dumb as a bag of squirrels. The second group is the much slower paced discovery and climbing sections of the game and it's in these locations that the majority of the story seems to be delivered. This is were the games biggest downfall is.

I do like the story, despite it having a few big holes in the plot (these may get filled as a finish the game) I really do not like the way it is delivered. The story going on in the here and now is delivered through character to character cut scenes and dialogue but the story involving how the world came to be seems to be delivered purely through the player trawling very slowly through these old wrecked bunkers scanning audio play back devices, text information devices that require reading or holographic playback devices. The issue is that the gameplay through these parts is non existent, it slows the pace of the game horribly and it delivers massive dumps of back story in what is an awfully haphazard and very slow manner. These locations also sufer from the other big issue with the games mechanics and that's the fixed climbing model. You can only climb and grab surfaces that have been specifically designed to be grabbed. Let's remember it's 20 years since Tomb Raider allowed players to do this and you could go where ever you could manage to get the character to go. Why developers have chosen to turn free climbing mechanics in to nothing more than a glorified push the right button to go in right direction simulator is beyond me and the situation only gets worse if you need to do this under any kind of time constraints.

The only other issue I have is the limited amount of weapon variants (Carja Bow, Nora Bow, etc) save for a few very mission specific weapon and armour types most players will have unlocked all the armours and weapons the game has to offer by the time they are a third of the way through the game. I currently have 12,000shards and have nothing I can spend them on.

The core combat, the world and story is easily good enough to keep me playing till the end but I am now playing to see the final details of Faro, Hades, Gaia saga. I doubt I will even bother with the DLC content once I know the final details.

Spoiler for end game stuff

Spoiler

Just completed the game kinda let down by both the ending of the story and the final boss. Final mission is dull, stand at location a and keeping firing a provided weapon at what appears to be an endless horde of bad guys. Climb up to final bad guy to find out it's just a Deathbringer but a good deal tougher, try to beat that while being set on by a whole bunch of bad guys. Very poor indeed.

The story was fine throughout and could have been so much better had it been pivoted more towards a wholly self contained, the folly of man followed by man trying to make up and fix what can't be fixed even if it costs everything but the fly in the ointment is this mystery signal and that final stinger with Sylis speaking to Hades at the end. Something else other than a 'mystery signal' infecting Gaia and Hades, some hold over from the Faro glitch would have been better but this mystery signal thing just seems like a cope out.

Still a good game overall but defiant room for improvement. Can't see myself playing it again though, seems also that only around 16% of people who have the game have actually completed it.

 

This game now runs much much better than at launch but it's a shame they didn't delay and it release it in a better state. The problem is that all these fixes come after I have already played it for 60+ hours and almost completed it. Finally, got to see the snow deformation effects for the first time in this game yesterday. Great game but maybe the lesson is for me to just not buy a PC at launch? I never learn, do I?

 

if u want to test different versions u can just replace the game exe with an earlier version
link to all versions: http://www.fileconvoy.com/dfl.php?id=gf94bb7a227f700a810002777579bff75648a88c6ef
no recompiling needed, just replace and launch

 

do i have the right game ver. ?? also Fullscreen is now broken, it feels like 1080p on a 4k display

 

yup, 46 is the latest https://www.guerrilla-games.com/play/horizon/patch

 

Have they said anything about the Old CPU's support?

I have i5 750 and cant even launch.

 

Game still doesnt run without avx support. Maybe in the future...

 

Thanks, i guess i have to wait a bit longer.