Horizon Zero Dawn tells the story of Aloy, a young girl growing up in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by dinosaur robots, who embarks on an adventure to unravel the mysteries of the strange world she lives in. For some players, however, her coming-of-age moment never came, due to a strange bug and a bit of bad luck. Even the game's characters can be stunted in their development.

As explained in an article posted on Reddit in August (via Kotaku), if a crash occurs during a cutscene in which Aloy is growing up, she will be stuck in her childhood state forever. This will not be interesting to players who actually encounter the bug, but it is kind of funny.

The latest update that brings the Steam version to 1.03 promises to fix this literal progression problem, as well as crash bugs and functional issues. Other additions include proper 4K scaling, improved frame rate limiter, improved minimum spec warnings, etc.

This is the third update released for Horizon Zero Dawn on Steam since the game launched on August 7. Unfortunately, out-of-memory errors during the optimization process, graphics settings including anisotropic filtering and HDR not not working, performance issues with certain hardware configurations, and other fairly significant known issues still remain. The developer also stated that it is "aware of and continues to investigate" the problems with the listings maintained by redditors EvilMonkeySlayer and Rampage572.

Players still having problems with the game after the 1.03 patch are asked to provide feedback at guerrilla-games.com. The full patch notes are as follows.

Crash fixes:

Progression issues:

Functionality issues:

Other improvements: