Nixxes continue to deliver small regular updates for the Complete Edition of Horizon Forbidden West. This week’s Patch 1.4.59 improves snow visuals and Photo Mode textures and fixes a few bugs. Let’s take a look!
1.4.59 Changes Highlights
This Thursday’s patch, labeled 1.4.59, is very tiny in size, only about 2.4 MB on Steam. It does bring a few interesting changes that I want to show you in more details, though.
“Patch 1.4 for Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition is available now. This update contains various visual upgrades, bugfixes and improvements to the user interface, based on community feedback. Check out the details in the release notes below.” – Nixxes.
No Man’s Land Relic Ruins Battery Fix
One of my favorite activities in the game is to explore ruins and solve the Relic Puzzles while I personally have not encountered any issues with them, there was apparently one annoying bug reported by players.
In No Man’s Land Relic Ruins you have to carry a battery through a water pool. The puzzle requires you to find a way to safely bring it across without touching the water or the battery would immediately lose its charge.
The bug that existed prior to this patch, made it so that sometimes the battery would lose its charge without touching the water at all. This is now fixed.
If you were stuck on this puzzle, now you should be able to complete it and progress through the Nights of Lights quest to get your Legendary Shredder Gauntlet reward.
Aloy looks better in Photo Mode now
In this patch, the devs have improved the texture quality of Aloy’s character in Photo Mode. Now you should be able to take even more stunning pictures of the main character. This change only affects the Very High textures setting.
You can change the texture settings by going to the main menu, and then into Graphics. At the very top of the screen, you will find the Texture Quality selector.
Snow matches Dust now
Last week we got an update and fix for the dust effect in the deserts of the Forbidden West. This week we have a similar improvement made to the visual quality of the snow.
I was not aware of the dust bug with the weird red-ish lines that existed before last week’s patch and I am not aware of any glitches or bugs with the snow.
I very much enjoy the way snow slowly fills back in (that’s not new from 1.4.59 though). Overall the snow effects and animations were a huge step up from the first game.
Focus Highlight no longer bound to F
If you use a Keyboard and Mouse to play Horizon Forbidden West’s Complete Edtion, you would be happy to hear that yet another previously hard-coded key is now free for you to rebind.
The Focus Highlight feature was tied permanently to the F key. As of 1.5.59 you can swap it to any other button you like. I personally am used to F by now, but it’s nice to see that Nixxes continue to free up hard-coded keybinds and allow for more and better customization.
The Focus Highlight Track is related and bound now to the Weapon Wheel key. You can find and change this setting in the Mouse and Keyboard menu, at the very top is the Mouse and Keyboard Remapping sub-menu.
As you may remember, the Weapon Wheel used to also be hard-coded to F, but as of a few patches ago, you can now freely map it to something else. Maybe TAB, if you want to use your pre-built habbits from Horizon Zero Dawn.
As someone who would perform worse than a toddler playing a game with a Controller, I highly value these small changes Nixxes continue to make. Console players may disagree with me, but I find the keyboard and mouse controls way more precise and adaptive, especially when it comes to third-person and first-person games.
Check our our Controls guide for Horizon Forbidden West’s Complete Edition to find out what we recommend you should remap and why.
Misc Fixes
The patch notes contain a few more bullet points with fixes, but I will leave you to read them yourselves if you are interested.
What surprises me is the fact that that while we have the traditional “Various UI bug fixes” at the bottom of the list with changes, this time the other generic phrase “Various Performance Improvements” is not present.
I do think that Nixxes did a great job with this port. Maybe minus the Burning Shores area, where FPS drops considerably.
There will always be issues for certain configurations and while the game offers a ton of settings to tweak to achieve your desired FPS number, I would dare to advise those who strive to the to 100 or 150 FPS, to consider dropping a few FPS in favor of improving the visuals of the game.
You will not perform worse against even the toughest machines if you lose a few FPS, but you will appreciate the gorgeous vistas and the beautiful environement all around you if you bump the graphics a bit.
Our guide to what settings you should change to improve your gameplay does not dive into performance improvements, but it contains helpful tips that will help improve your gameplay and fun while farming monsters in the Forbidden West.
Patch 1.4.59 Changes
Below you can check out the list of release notes officially published by Nixxes and Guerilla.
Patch 1.4 for Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition is available now. This update contains various visual upgrades, bugfixes and improvements to the user interface, based on community feedback. Check out the details in the release notes below.
On behalf of the teams at Nixxes and Guerrilla, thanks to everyone for playing Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition on PC and for providing input helping us to improve the game!
- Fixed an issue where the power cell in the No Man’s Land Relic Ruin would lose its charge without touching the water.
- Improved the texture quality of Aloy in Photo Mode when using Very High textures.
- Improved the visual quality of snow to match the improvements made to dust visuals.
- Focus Highlight Track is no longer hardcoded to the F key when using mouse and keyboard. You can reassign the function by remapping the Weapon Wheel key binding.
- Fixed a bug that caused the subtitle size setting to reset to default when changing peripheral devices or updating the interface text size.
- Fixed an issue with various item lists where items would be displayed off-screen after scrolling through another list.
- Fixed an issue that prevented players from taking all chest items if they opened it using a controller and would then swap to mouse and keyboard controls.
- Various UI bug fixes.
