Horizon Zero Dawn devs shift focus to sequel after latest PC patch

Horizon Zero Dawn was pretty darn buggy when it came out on PC last year. It was a shame considering it was the first bug PlayStation exclusive to make the jump to PC. But Guerrilla Games have been steadily updating it to fix all sorts of problems, and yesterday the game received its 1.10 patch, adding in a couple more crash fixes and performance improvements.

Notably, this patch marks the start of Guerrilla slowing down on their HZD updates, so they can shift focus to work on the game’s sequel, Horizon Forbidden West.

“As our team continues development on our upcoming title Horizon Forbidden West, we are shifting to less frequent updates for Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition for PC after this patch. Please note that we will continue to monitor our community spaces as always!” they said.

“We want to thank you all for your continued support and for sending in your crash reports over the past months. The information we received through your reports was invaluable to further investigate and help fix some of the trickier issues that we fixed in Patch 1.10.”

Strangely, these quotes are actually no longer on Guerrilla’s website. They were there when the post went live yesterday, but seem to have been removed now. It’s a wonder why – it doesn’t look as though there’s any particularly sensitive info in there. It seems like a pretty natural assumption that the Horizon team would be working more on the game’s sequel by now, and I can’t think of any reason why they’d get rid of their “thank yous” to the community.

I’ve contacted Guerrilla Games to ask why they took those bits out, but haven’t received a response just yet.

Horizon Forbidden West was announced in June last year, and is expected to come out sometime this year. It’s unclear right now if it’ll launch on PC; at the moment it seems like it’ll be a PlayStation scloosie.

Despite its many bugs (like the hilarious one that accidentally made main character Aloy be a tiny child forever), Nate still thought the game was brilliant in his Horizon Zero Dawn review, saying: “It’s one of the most compelling, beautiful open world adventures ever made.”

If you’re interested, here are the full patch notes for Horizon Zero Dawn’s 1.10 update:

Crash Fixes

Crash fix for when players continuously pressed the windows key Crash fix for when you press the LMB on the ESC button in the Benchmark Results

Performance Improvements

Fixed an issue which saves up to 250MB of VRAM on all AMD GPUs

Graphical Improvements

Fix for negative values in cubemap relighting shader (fixes for example the red graphical glitches in the Hades fight if you let the timer run out) Fix for the graphics settings preset name not updating when you pressed Auto-Detect Fix for the menu (and loading screen) being displayed at incorrect scale when changing AF in borderless mode Fix for the resolution sometimes being too low in windowed mode Fix for the errands quest list overlapping with tutorial quest list

Other Changes

Graphics settings are now stored in a text file instead of a binary file to facilitate easier tweaking