Horizon: Zero Dawn was ported to PC a few days ago through Steam and the Epic Games Store. After being PlayStation-exclusive for years, the game is now hugely popular on PC, although it's quickly become apparent that the game is very buggy. One Reddit user looked through the game's dump files and has a theory as to why Horizon: Zero Dawn crashes so much on PC.

An anonymous Redditor who claims to be a programmer posted on r/horizon that the PC port of Horizon: Zero Dawn looks a lot like a debug build. While the game is hailed as one of the PS4's absolute best games, many people are calling the Horizon: Zero Dawn PC port disappointing and technically flawed. Many players are experiencing frequent crashing, lagging, and low framerates. After the visually stunning masterpiece that was the PS4 version, people were simply expecting better.

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The anonymous programmer claims to have the answer to these issues, providing a screenshot of a line of game code from the moment Horizon: Zero Dawn crashed for them. The user elaborates on the screenshot by saying that the code is trying to rewrite to a nonexistent memory. The program will try to rewrite to a "harcoded 0" for the memory address which, according to this Redditor, is an amateurish mistake for a programmer to make.

After other Reddit users began engaging with the post, the OP made some edits claiming that "investigating in a disassembler" showed there were over a hundred more lines of the game trying to rewrite to a vacant memory. The user claims the instruction is used mostly for "memory handling" and "debug functions" that are still in the game for reasons unknown, leading to the assumption that this is a debug build. After removing the instructions from the code, the game crashed way less for the user but wasn't a true fix as it didn't address Horizon: Zero Dawn's graphics and lagging issues.

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The mods on r/horizon have since removed the OP, but the comments that remain and are in agreement with the programmer in being critical of the PC port. One user remarked that this sort of mistake should have been learned in "Programming 101." Other users said they were lucky enough to not be experiencing frequent crashes, but that the graphics issues in the PC version are practically ubiquitous.

Thankfully, Guerrilla Games is investigating the crashes, outlining the steps on Steam it will take to solve the issues and making it clear that the recent bug reports are its top priority right now. Hopefully it can find a way to resolve everything soon so that players can enjoy the game everyone loved so much when it was on PS4.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is available for PC and PS4.

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Source: VG247, Reddit