Horizon: Zero Dawn coming to PC

what's this about Steam raising the price?...hasn't it always been $50?...or did they raise the price in other countries?
 
I didn't even know Death Stranding was going to support DLSS, which is surprising since I haven't seen a game only support one or the other with RTX and DLSS. Given that they're both on the same (Decima) engine, it would be nice if Horizon supported it, but no such info suggests it does from a quick search that I see at least.

HZD was part of an AMD promotion attached to it, so probably not. I would not complain though if I am wrong.
 
what's this about Steam raising the price?...hasn't it always been $50?...or did they raise the price in other countries?
It's always been $50 in the US.
In other countries, seemingly in response to people using VPNs to buy it cheaper.
More likely that Sony, having not published on Steam in a long time, used the recommended regional pricing adjustment instead of setting the price themselves. They probably felt that those prices "devalued" the game.
 
Even though I was ticked off about the price point, the summer sale discount & some bonus cash helped me get it. I will enjoy it on PC like many of you come August. 🎆
 
I was not, considering they have been showing this as a proper PC port which requires more time and money to develop. I have said before that I would have no issue paying full price for this game again. $50 is a no-brainer.
 
what's this about Steam raising the price?...hasn't it always been $50?...or did they raise the price in other countries?
It is €50 here, which is already 13% more expensive at the current exchange rate. I don't know where was it cheaper. But this is a definite skip at this price point.
 
It is €50 here, which is already 13% more expensive at the current exchange rate. I don't know where was it cheaper. But this is a definite skip at this price point.
Even though the exchange rate isn't 1:1 games are often the same in Euros and USD, primarily due to European countries including tax in the sale price while the US does not.
 
Even though the exchange rate isn't 1:1 games are often the same in Euros and USD, primarily due to European countries including tax in the sale price while the US does not.

Not saying you are wrong but years ago the exchange rate was in our favor, now not so anymore
 
Even though the exchange rate isn't 1:1 games are often the same in Euros and USD, primarily due to European countries including tax in the sale price while the US does not.

Yeah I always hear about people complaining about the price, but seem to forget they have to pay sales tax and VAT which is included in the list price.
 
what's this about Steam raising the price?...hasn't it always been $50?...or did they raise the price in other countries?

I think it's in regards to the game being under $20 on PS4.

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https://www.bestbuy.com/site/horizo...edition-playstation-4/6138365.p?skuId=6138365
 
what's this about Steam raising the price?...hasn't it always been $50?...or did they raise the price in other countries?

No, it's in regards to the fact that it was as cheap as like $7 USD with the exchange rates in some countries, leading to a lot of people using VPNs to buy it. The local currency rates were all fucked up. US price wasn't affected.
 
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-horizon-zero-dawn-pc-tech-review
and


Some selections from the article:
"When a game is content-complete but requires polish and bug-testing, it's considered beta code - and that's the impression we got from this conversion when we tested it, to the point where much of the reviewing process has been a case of testing and re-testing the game on multiple pieces of hardware to answer a simple question - is there something wrong with our kit or is the game at fault? It's a little bit of one and a lot of the other, but the bottom line is that there are many technical issues that need addressing to the point where not all of them can be included in this article. A 35GB day one patch arrived on the same day as the embargo lift - hence the delay in publishing our review - but the many and varied problems are still in effect in the code that makes its way to players."

"Like a number of DX12 and Vulkan titles, shaders are compiled and stored the first time you play the game - as opposed to generating them during play, potentially inducing stutter. It's an extended process to say the least, it adds to the storage footprint, and if your drive fills up during this procedure, the game crashes to desktop - sometimes with an ominous 'fatal error'. While testing and re-testing across systems, the process could often stall and lock-up even when required storage was available. Beyond that, when I booted the game on my 4K screen in full-screen mode, something didn't look right. It turned out that Horizon was rendering at 4K, downscaling to 1080p, then upscaling to 4K again. Switching to the borderless display option fixes this (albeit introducing other issues), as does swapping back to full-screen mode from borderless. Bizarre."

"Better still, the inclusion of an 'original' graphics preset is a great touch - and it's similar to the 'default' option on Death Stranding, where the settings are essentially a match for the PS4 version. You can define the console experience as the baseline and scale up - or down - from there. However, similar to Death Stranding's PC port, while the settings are there to push to higher quality levels, the actual improvements to visuals are thin on the ground."

"If you were looking to utilise the game's dynamic resolution scaling for balancing performance, I do not recommend it at all, as it is overzealous to the extreme and coarse in its application."

"Apparently, I can run Horizon Zero Dawn at native 4K at an average of 78 frames per second on an RTX 2080 Ti. What it doesn't tell you is that the actual game experience will be a fair bit lower than that, with frequent stutters. Stutters in excess of 40ms, 70ms or over 100ms can happen as a cutscenes starts or ends, when a camera changes position in a cutscene, when a UI element updates for a quest, or when you are just walking around in the world not doing anything special in particular. This happens reproducibly across multiple graphics card and CPUs and chosen resolutions, impacting the fluidity of the game, producing an experience less consistent overall that the PlayStation 4 version, which has no such stutter."

"Also, if you are experiencing profound performance problems, make sure you have your mainboard properly configured for 16x PCIe bandwidth for the GPU. This one's on me but I didn't - my slot was set to 8x bandwidth and it hobbled performance, while switching up to 16x solve that particular problem. Going back to Death Stranding, PCIe bandwidth made no difference at all."

"Death Stranding would deliver 1080p60 on a GTX 1060 or RX 580 system. Horizon Zero Dawn - based on an older iteration of the Decima Engine - does not, far from it. The lack of a day one driver from Nvidia is also curious. Horizon certainly seems to need it as GTX 1060 performance up against RX 580 - its perennial rival - is remarkably poor. Indeed, on optimised settings, the GTX 1060 can drop beneath 1080p30 with highly erratic frame-times, meaning that it's performing worse than a PlayStation 4 with only a small visual uplift."

"There are other issues that need to be addressed. Cutscenes run at arbitrary frame-rates but facial animation is locked to 30 frames per second - it doesn't look right, with an almost Wallace and Gromit-like effect. Another problem in cutscenes is how they were not authored around the idea of interpolated frame-rates above 30fps, so in some cutscenes you can see characters warp around during scene cuts. Mismatches in animation refresh are evident elsewhere: Horizon's tall 'stealth grass' runs at the correct frame-rate at all times, but the new dynamic plants and foliage added to the PC version are locked at 30 frames per second refresh instead."

"What's so baffling about this is that Guerrilla Games are perfectionists - I can't help but feel that intrusive stutter and mismatched animation would never make their way into one of their PlayStation products so it's disappointing to see that happen here."

"Our feedback was submitted to the developer and we understand that addressing the stutter and fixing the broken texture filtering is a priority, while essential features like full frame-rate animation are being looked into. But to see such an amazingly polished console experience transition to PC with so many issues and with depressed performance is a problem. Death Stranding set the bar with a technically solid (if not especially scalable) port and to see Horizon Zero Dawn fall so far short by comparison is such a let down."
 
I'm hearing about terrible performance even on high end systems. I was poised to buy day one, but Ima hold off and let the dust settle. Any of you that pick it up please share your thoughts on the performance.
 
This is pretty disappointing considering how well Death Stranding runs and how good it looks.
Hopefully there's an easily accessible resolution render option. I'm part of the "60fps or nothing" club and 1080p is a pretty big step back from 4K. Usually setting the resolution render to 75-85% of 4K is the best of all worlds.
 
I'm hearing about terrible performance even on high end systems. I was poised to buy day one, but Ima hold off and let the dust settle. Any of you that pick it up please share your thoughts on the performance.

I was going to pick it up today, but like you, I think I'll wait until I hear that it's been cleaned up a bit.
 
Death Stranding uses the same engine but the world is a barren, mostly empty wasteland...HZD is more alive and vibrant...giant mech robots...it's not a surprise that the 2 games are running way differently
Exactly, DS is an empty barren world with barely any npcs foliage or creatures. It's not a valid comparison just because they run on the same engine.
That doesn't mean the issues with this port are excusable. But death stranding is just not relevant.
Sadly these issues don't seem like they have an easy fix. It has the telltale signs of lazy development. Which usually means tons of hacks in the code. Which means trying to rework some things like facial animations being locked to 30 fps is opening a can of whoopass.

I see two ways this can go: They put out a few quick patches that don't really fix much, or break more things than they fix, then abandon trying to fix it and support will just drop off as sales dwindle.
OR, they take the time to fix the game properly, but that will take months. 3-4 months would be my most optimistic guess.
 
Exactly, DS is an empty barren world with barely any npcs foliage or creatures. It's not a valid comparison just because they run on the same engine.
That doesn't mean the issues with this port are excusable. But death stranding is just not relevant.
Sadly these issues don't seem like they have an easy fix. It has the telltale signs of lazy development. Which usually means tons of hacks in the code. Which means trying to rework some things like facial animations being locked to 30 fps is opening a can of whoopass.

the developers also originally stated there would be no FOV slider and I think by adding that it introduced more performance issues
 
Death Stranding uses the same engine but the world is a barren, mostly empty wasteland...HZD is more alive and vibrant...giant mech robots...it's not a surprise that the 2 games are running way differently

HZD is also an older version of decima, perhapse the newer version has some baked in PC features that the older one lacks?
 
Well fuck it, i'm in. I want to see what the drama is about. I'll report back ASAP.
9700k
GTX 1080
16GB RAM
 
So the game runs smooth as silk for me at max settings with clouds set to high and motion blur off. This is a definite improvement over the PS4 Pro. It looks absolutely stunning at native 4K on my CX OLED in HDR. I may drop down to 1440P so I can play at 120hz refresh with HDR instead of 4K at 60hz with HDR. I get 58fps in the benchmark at 4K with max settings and clouds set to high with motion blur off. I did set anisotropic filtering to 16x in the nvidia control panel as it definitely is not working with the in game settings.

Looking at MSI Afterburner after playing the game for a while: It looks like the game is using all 12 cores on my 3900X but is not using the SMT cores, they sat idle the entire time I was playing. System RAM usage was around 11.5GB while playing, after exiting the game it dropped down to 2.5GB. My 2080Ti was pegged at 100% load the entire time, temperature was at 76C - which is higher than it usually is when playing other games (around 68C). I may repaste the GPU this weekend, something I have been meaning to do for a while now.

Played the intro area and hunted some small animals. my god - I KNEW that playing with a mouse and keyboard in this game would be a night and day difference compared to on the PS4 with a controller. This game was meant to be played on a pc, I can precision aim on a rabbit bouncing across the screen and still hit it.

I did not finish this game on my PS4 Pro as I got frustrated with the controller. I think knowing that if I was playing with a mouse and keyboard I would not have been missing the precision shots I was trying to make with the PS4 controller. When they announced this game was coming out on PC - I knew it would be a day one buy for me.

Definitely know what I'm going to be doing all weekend.
 
Well fuck it, i'm in. I want to see what the drama is about. I'll report back ASAP.
Always a weird thing that happens on a new high profile title: a rush to declare a game either: A) "broken unplayable shit port" or B) "yeah its decent but not 10/10". No in-between, the Reddit mafia wants blood.

But maybe you decide to play anyway and see for yourself; lo and behold it plays mostly fine - maybe a glitch here or there that will probably get patched eventually - and you wonder where you were supposed to be outraged and if maybe you missed something.
 
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HZD is also an older version of decima, perhapse the newer version has some baked in PC features that the older one lacks?

That is entirely possible. Let’s also not forget that KojiPro designed Death Stranding as a multi-platform game from the get go where as HZD was always intended to be an exclusive.
 
This is a definite improvement over the PS4 Pro.

no one is saying that the game does not look and perform (60+ FPS) better then the console version...the console is comparable to Medium settings on PC...but that doesn't take away from the numerous technical/performance issues which the developers have even acknowledged...is it playable as is?...sure but that's not the point...too many people already make up their minds before the game came out that they are going to love it and want to close their eyes to any issues...even on [H] you saw certain members deny any issues after the first few articles came out reporting it and only after multiple sites reported it did they finally somewhat reluctantly admit it
 
Disappointing to hear about the technical issues. Hopefully they can get that quickly fixed with a series of patches. Initial patches fixing what they can and then taking the time to fix and enhance other things if need be, should there be more in-depth issues. I'm worried that should they not move on things quickly and fix them properly, it will impact the game's sales and perception. Honestly though, between the very long delay since PS4 release and not helped by the expensive price of the game this really shouldn't have been an issue.

As I write this day 1 Steam reviews are coming as "Mixed" predicated 90% on technical issues, NOT actual gameplay, mechanics, or other game-related issues. This is understandable, but coming in rather low and it could dissuade purchases. I'm worried that this will impact both the developer and publisher - those of us who have nothing but derision for store/platform/console exclusives, we need to this (generally well reviewed on the PS4) game to do well. We don't need any reason to for Sony, the developers etc... or anyone else to have a reason to claim "See, we tried to bring it to PC and everyone just shit on it." Regardless of validity, lots of publishers will go to any length to avoid any personal blame for a game not doing up to their (possibly unrealistic) standards, after all.

Its great that Death Stranding made it to PC and came away highly valued. Likewise, it took SEGA kicking Atlus in the butt for ages and even then they ported the long-lost Vita-only version of Persona 4 Golden (priced very reasonably not less!) arriving to overwhelming sales near immediately, for them to kinda consider their previous bias against PC to be questionable; we still dont know what will happen with Persona 5 Royal. There are tons of stories like this. Horizon Zero Dawn can either be part of the argument against console exclusivity for Sony, or it will be a one-off latecomer that won't stop everything from the next Spiderman game to Horizon 2 from being PS5 exclusives (or at least, launched FAR in advance of any possible PC version) in the PS5 era. Lets hope they can fix it quickly so it can be part of the former - I don't look forward to yet another console generation where exclusives continue to be a tedious, needless part of the landscape.
 
no one is saying that the game does not look and perform (60+ FPS) better then the console version...the console is comparable to Medium settings on PC...but that doesn't take away from the numerous technical/performance issues which the developers have even acknowledged...is it playable as is?...sure but that's not the point...too many people already make up their minds before the game came out that they are going to love it and want to close their eyes to any issues...even on [H] you saw certain members deny any issues after the first few articles came out reporting it and only after multiple sites reported it did they finally somewhat reluctantly admit it

Something to note here: One report of problems could be an anomaly, multiple is proof there is something wrong. It’s good to wait on confirming information from multiple sources before deciding on the quality of a game’s PC release. So yes, people were skeptical when early reports were mixed with only a small number citing issues while others did not. Once it became clear the problems were wide-spread it made sense to call out the problems with the port.
 
Something to note here: One report of problems could be an anomaly, multiple is proof there is something wrong. It’s good to wait on confirming information from multiple sources before deciding on the quality of a game’s PC release. So yes, people were skeptical when early reports were mixed with only a small number citing issues while others did not. Once it became clear the problems were wide-spread it made sense to call out the problems with the port.

every review I read pre-release mentioned performance issues of varying degrees...people just have low attention spans and don't like to watch a 20 minute video or read a long article and just skip to the end with the final score...so the game might have gotten an 8/10 but the issues were discussed (ACG's initial review of the game, Ars Technica, Gamespot etc)...

I still plan on getting the game as it sounds like a great one but I plan on waiting for a few patches (plus I'm planning on getting a new Ampere GPU)
 
the developers also originally stated there would be no FOV slider and I think by adding that it introduced more performance issues
A fov slider can cause glitches if the game wasn't made with it in mind, but doesn't really affect performance.
The performance issues seem to arise from poor utilization of resources, due to a ton of leftover code specifically made for the 30 fps target.
 
So right off the bat, a bizarre “optimizing” procedure. Not sure what it’s actually doing but it’s been going for 10 mins now..ima refund the shit out of this if it’s a buggy mess after “optimizing” for 20 mins. Fingers crossed. The steam forums look like Seattle Antifa riots, to the point I can’t find any info about tweaks or issues.
 
The voice acting is fucking terrible, story so far is autistic.

Edit: game treats the player like they are 8 years old. Over explaining everything.

“A metal door” well no shit I can fucking see 3 feet in front of me!

Also she can’t walk in a straight line it’s driving me crazy.

Everyone has nasty ass dreadlocks , it looks like woke hipsters. I’m waiting for the plot twist where moldy locks is this kids mother.
 
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