Recently I was thinking of going and playing the Frozen Wilds DLC (which I only barely touched before) but I can’t find the binder that probably has my disc in it, and it’s probably somewhere near where the binder that has all of my movies and anime in it that has been missing for a few years. So I’m probably going to have to wait until the PC release to try out the Frozen Wilds.
I remember one time booting up Horizon after a long, long time and thinking there was something wrong with it due to how low the framerate was, but after googling footage I realized I’d just gotten so used to my new 144hz monitor that it was like a culture shock going back to Horizon’s 30fps (variable?) So playing it on PC will probably be a nicer experience anyway. It’s a nice looking game and it will be really, really nice to be playing it at a higher framerate. And also being able to turn off motion blur.
Here’s hoping Horizon 2 has a more affecting environment design instead of H1’s almost universally flat landscapes and gently rolling hills.
This game is now free on PS4 and PS5! Just played the intro and it’s a little bland but nice enough storytelling. I want to play the whole game as a weird tech-enhanced 6 year old doing echolalia and throwing rocks. Bummer about the time-skip after the tutorial. That probably would have been a more interesting story!
I just played through the whole game last month (not including the expansion, which I have but didn’t feel compelled to fuck with), and the game really left me cold and it was basically a hate-play at the end. The combat feels nice and weighty, but the story so broadly telegraphed every place it went before it did and the ultimately pretty cavalier attitude about human life-taking felt very uncomfortable to me and at odds with the overall story.
I’ve lost count of how many sony over the shoulder action games I’ve played in the past 5 years while being unsure as to whether they’re wasting my time, but this is as strenuously competent as everyone assured me it was, might be the only one I hadn’t bought yet somehow, and my french is getting better all the time
It’s funny, I own this game on disc and haven’t played it yet, and I’m still considering just downloading the damn thing because the disc drive on my PS4 is pretty loud
While the game is both a technical marvel and a rote by-the-numbers open-worlder it’s pretty impressive that a studio that had made neither a Monster Hunter nor a typical open world explorathon managed to do both at once the first time they tried it.
I guess that’s what Sony’s deep pockets will get you. Pretty sure they hired a lot of people who already knew how to make those kinds of games but it still kind of blows me away that the Killzone people not only made a Monster Hunter-lite but it actually wasn’t bad either.
The story was fine if predictable but I really liked the world building. Unfortunately they stick all the bits and pieces that flesh out the world behind little collectible items you have to go out of your way to find so if that’s not really your play style then you don’t really get to hear a lot about all the stuff that led up to the current world state outside of what’s revealed during the main quest. But this is also a problem inherent to every open world game with a big linear, set-pieced “Main Quest” that ends up existing in a vacuum alongside the rest of the game.
Video games would be a lot better if they would just stop trying to Tell A Story and just dumped you in a place where things had happened and were about to happen, and then let you put it all together yourself. Unless you’re going to make a tightly scripted, linear game where the player can only ever continue to move forward then you shouldn’t try to tell a tightly scripted, linear story.
I think the sequel looks gorgeous and can’t wait to play it but I also don’t have a PS5 yet so I might just learn to wait.
Everyone I talked to that sold me on this thing being Monster Hunter did not seem to get Monster Hunter because this game dis not give me Monster Hunter.
Relentlessly competent was how I felt about it, yeah.
I should add I’ve always compared this to Monster Hunter because that’s what it looks like superficially but I have not actually played a Monster Hunter yet.
I am scarred because one time while I was playing Like a Dragon my PS4 decided to just randomly vomit out the disc and the game crashed when I was in the middle of making progress
I think it represents a Western attempt to make some of the Monster Hunter concepts accessible, but Capcom has since solved that problem in its own right.
First sidequest in the game was essentially “go kill a monster and bring me back an item”. But the story to go with it was, “my dear departed wife crafted the finest spear around right before she died, and it’s all I have to remember her by, but I got it stuck in a monster, and then it crippled me, and now I’m a crippled man with a dead wife and my daughter went to get the spear and now I’m going to be a crippled man with a dead wife AND a dead daughter, please get me my special spear back!” And then I go find the daughter and she’s like, “oh, my dear departed mother was the greatest crafter and I miss her so dearly and I wanted to retrieve her spear because it means so much to me, please retrieve the spear so I can hold her close in my memory, I would be so very sad to not have this extremely sentimental spear.” So I get this mawkish fucking spear and bring it back to them and they have a big tearful reunion and then the dad is like “I’m not the marvelous crafter my dear departed wife was, in fact I’m just a sad and crippled old dad, but she taught me a thing or two, here, I’ll upgrade your spear to have +1 sentimentality.”
Oh dear, this is really going to be that kind of game, isn’t it?