Sony’s announcement, made earlier this year, that Horizon Zero Dawn would be released on PC caused quite some uproar. And with good reason: it’s the first time that the company will release one of its flagship single-player first-party games on the platform. It is, as of yet, unknown whether this is a one-off exception, part of a new approach of porting older games, or even indicative of a larger strategic shift. What we can discuss in detail, however, is the quality of the game’s PC port. In this article I’ll get into its features, discuss the available graphics options, and most importantly point out some important and unusual performance properties to be aware of in order to get the most out of the game.

Feature Overview

Horizon on PC ticks all the basic boxes one would expect from a high-profile PC port in 2020: it supports arbitrary rendering resolution, unlocked framerates, ultrawide aspect ratios, and a sizable set of graphics options. All of these work as expected, with a few caveats. For one, the built-in frame limiter has proven relatively problematic for me, and as such I’d suggest always keeping it turned off and externally limiting the frame rate if desired. There is also an adaptive quality option which allows you to set a target framerate and have the game adapt the rendering resolution to try and keep it. While a very useful feature in theory, this is rarely desirable in practice, for reasons that will become more clear when discussing graphics options and performance.

Regarding ultrawide support, as you can see in the screenshot up top, it works great during gameplay and often looks fantastic. Cutscenes, however, remain constrained to 16:9 as shown above. This is not unusual, but the developers chose a rather unique way to fill the side areas: as you can see above, they show the left and right parts of the center, but darkened and blurred to some extent. While an interesting choice, I personally found it distracting compared to simple black bars, and hope that an option can be added for people who prefer those.

An incredibly important – to me at least – related feature is the field of view setting. This is extremely welcome, and the game felt very claustrophobic when sitting directly in front of a large monitor without adjusting this setting. I’ve always argued that the best field of view for a 3D rendered game is a direct function of each individual player’s setup, including display size, distance and aspect ratio, and as such should always be a configurable option.

Input Mechanisms and Key Binding

Horizon Zero Dawn does a great job supporting various input methods and configuration preferences. General options such as toggling aim assist, changing sensitivity, switching between toggling and holding for movement options, and inverting camera directions are available regardless of input method.

The mouse and keyboard controls support full remapping, including the ability to map two distinct bindings to each action, which can be of great utility – for example when assigning actions to additional mouse buttons. Speaking of those, mouse button 4 and 5 are natively supported, while – as in most games – this is not the case for further extra buttons. The default controls feel very familiar to anyone who plays third person action RPGs on PC, with keys such as K, I, M and J doing exactly what you expect. Overall, as expected in an aiming-heavy game such as this, I found that it plays very well with mouse and keyboard and I prefer that to playing with a controller.

There is one small nitpick I have concerning the controls. At first I was positively surprised to see that the game has an official Steam controller profile. However, sadly this profile uses the right touchpad in joystick simulation mode rather than trackball mode. As a big fan of the Steam controller I’m pretty sure that no one who actually likes the hardware uses this type of mapping for camera control, making the built-in support actually worse than not including a profile at all and falling back to the user’s defaults.