Horizon Zero Dawn's questionable Remaster Launches to Mixed Reviews as Players Lament a New Mandatory PSN Sign-In that Wasn't in the Original, Visual Glitches, and Audio Bugs

The prettied up re-do Horizon Zero Dawn has received praise from testers, despite being among history's least needed remasters. We were among them. Nick Evanson, PCG's hardware guru, was impressed with what he saw after taking the Horizon remaster out for a spin. He called it "the best version of Horizon Zero Dawn that it could be, short of an entire remake." I admit it: I almost want to upgrade to the PS10 just to to see.

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered has a "Mixed User Review Score" on Steam, following its launch yesterday. It's true that some fans love it - 61% of reviews are positive - but it seems like the experience varies depending on your hardware. Steam users and others have reported audio glitches and bugs with the new version. Some of them are rightfully annoyed by the PSN login requirement.

"Really enjoying this remaster but it definitely needs a few patches," writes a user called Travbedaman in the Horizon subreddit. "I'm noticing some small stutters and hitching during cutscenes. The audio mix in the first town area has a weird reverberation with NPC chatter, sound effects... Some minor floating items or graphics glitches. This isn't affecting my immersion at all but it would be nice to have these things fixed."

NiceColdPint replies, "Agreed. They need to fix quite a few visual glitches." p0rnw0lf, and if you don't trust someone with a name like this, who can you?--adds "The audio issues were bugs." If you pause the game, hit the windows key and open the sound mixer on the bottom right of the taskbar, you will see that the game is only 30%.

This audio bug is particularly annoying. Another user reported the exact same thing in their game on a separate thread. Some Steam users also report similar weird things in their Windows audio settings while playing the game.

Other reviewers mention freezes, crashes and issues with gamepads. The real culprit behind most of the negative Steam comments is the PSN requirement. Players are confused as to why a singleplayer game such as Horizon, which in its original version did not have this restriction, would require them to jump through Sony's hoops. It's a fair trade. I can't get upset about a login. But I've long since resigned myself the hell of account-based data-scraping that we live in. I can't really blame other people for still fighting this good fight. I imagine that there are some people who have created new PSN accounts to play games.

Some users have reported that adding "-showlinkingqr", without quotes, to the launch options of the game allows you to bypass it. I haven't personally tried this. I couldn't, even if I tried: I don’t own the remaster. I probably won't, until Sony releases a patch or two.