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Horizon Zero Dawn PC patch makes Aloy walk straight

Apocalypse ow.

I'd like to think that - should all life on Earth be completely destroyed - the next civilisation will at least be able to figure out the basics of winemaking. And judging by Aloy's wonky walking in the PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn, it seems they probably will.

Guerilla Games has now rolled out another patch for Horizon Zero Dawn's PC port, and amongst the usual raft of bugfixes comes a solution to a problem that had plagued players since launch: Aloy's sideways walking. Aloy had a tendency to walk slightly off-centre to the left, rather than simply following the direction the camera was facing (as neatly displayed by ComManDerNomad in the video below). While that may sound like only a mild annoyance, some players reported it actually made them feel nauseous, so it's just as well that this is now being addressed in the patch. "Aloy now walks directly towards the direction the camera is facing when you press forward, rather than at a slight angle," the patch notes say. Back on the straight and arrow.

Cover image for YouTube videoHorizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition 2020 08 07 13 41 15 03

The patch also includes a number of crash fixes, and graphical improvements to stop character warping and flashing graphics in certain cutscenes. One fix tackles a HDR issue where the UI could be overlapped by a black screen, while a problem where "turning on the adaptive FPS option gave lower performance results than setting similar results manually" has also been resolved.

When Horizon Zero Dawn launched on PC in August, many were disappointed by the quality of the port, with Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia finding a range of problems including frame rate stutters and broken texture filtering. Since then multiple patches have been released to fix the problems, with Guerilla continually plugging away at the list of issues.

Cover image for YouTube videoHorizon Zero Dawn PC: An Amazing Game Gets A Disappointing Port

One problem the community is still hoping will be fixed is the game's anisotropic filtering (which gives clarity to distant surface textures when viewed at an angle). On the Horizon subreddit, Guerilla developers explained the team was "continuing to look into AF" but it had been one of the "trickier issues" to solve. The patch notes also detail further known issues under investigation, including problems with HDR not working correctly, performance issues on specific GPUs and hardware combinations, and an "out of memory" error during the game optimisation process.

Most importantly of all, Guerilla is also investigating reports of a bug that makes Aloy's hair float when she changes pose in photo mode. Well, it is nearly Halloween - maybe she saw a ghost.