yeah
you should rush as fast as you can to the west; get out of the starting zone, get out of the eastern half of the world, because the game will lie to you and pretend it’s a Last of Us sequel to its own shame
Get west and the game will cough up some more fantasy concepts and be in a much better spot
the hero’s journey from michigan to seattle
go west, young man
just want to point out to any game designers who might be reading this that if the studio hired me to make the DLC I would do a quest where you can revive and sleep with his wife after that and get a much better spear
That would at least be much more faithful to the game’s Book of the New Sun influence.
yeah and I know that’s one of the lessons that ubisoft managed to “learn” from the witcher given how the recent assassins creeds were received but I still don’t think they’ve reached the level of deliberately creating fucked up love triangles with every single gear upgrade you pursue, it should be like saints row 4 but with consequences
license the nemesis system and rechristen it the ex wife system
also weirds me out how the game is set in a disneyland-scale version of a space that ranges from denver to salt lake city but doesn’t bother to really draw on this in a compelling or even all that distinctive way
coming across delicate arch and friends in environs that otherwise felt nothing like the arches national park area was kind of cool but also really weird and kinda unsatisfying
Barely played any more of this because Nier is so much more engaging. But I’ve got to hand it to this game: Going to the first village and immediately getting realistically and obnoxiously hit on by the first dude I talk to, that was a novel videogame experience and almost justifies this game in itself. It really puts into perspective how male gazey the entire medium of videogames is, that this is the first time I’ve seen a game put you in that position.
I made you clothes uwu~~
Oh lol, I guess that was the first guy. I was actually thinking of the brash traveler from another tribe who really lays it on thick.
do appreciate how all the dudes are just falling over her throughout the game and she’s completely disinterested
Yeah I don’t think the game is quite as interesting as I want it to be but it’s definitely more interesting than AAA openworlds usually are. It’s like 18-23% better than Asscreed along each measurable axis
that sums it up perfectly actually. this’d go on the wiki entry if we added it i reckon
The biggest coup is casting Aloy as a modern woman against traditional culture (and Ashly Burch’s read, with no concession to tropey respectful fantasy acting is key to this!). She just doesn’t understand her role or place and can give us the hero’s thrill of having the gumption and power to ask, why? and shove it back in someone’s face. It’s clever-cute how that connection to our modern perspective is enabled by her unique techno-vision that grants her meta-game information.
Wait she’s the main lady what the hell
every time I play one of these modern AAA titles (and it’s usually years late, for free, for a few hours) I’m always amused by the extent to which they feel like they have to rationalize their own contrivances. What writer’s room decided this was necessary? “Oh, you’re an immortal, that’s how we scaffold the continuity of the death loop.” It all feels like the kind of videogame concept that you used to see described as a narrative aside on TV shows, the kind that was so unnecessarily pat that it always scanned as false that a videogame would have to explain itself away.
Detective Vision is the bane of the modern 3D game and if it’s not lampshaded what is a videogame company’s writers room even doing honestly?
I would hate it if they dragged it up from subtext, but the opening is dry enough (and like twice as long as it should be) that I didn’t think it was in danger of perfectly-thematic-appropriate TV.
Another way to put it is, I haven’t gotten to the point where I’ve seen gameplay express and reinforce narrative devices elegantly so I still enjoy seeing them.
I just noticed that this thread exists. When I played Horizon Zero Dawn last year I put my impressions in the Games You Played Today thread.
The response ITT averages a bit on the negative side so I want to put in a more positive word for this: although I find nothing to disagree with in any particular criticism, I liked this game a lot. From my point of view, the game’s prettiness speaks for itself and the fantasy it peddles is way more compelling than all the other open-world games. Tensely drawing an arrow at a robot dinosaur’s energy canister glowing in the twilight on a ridge, what’s not to like here? Here’s how I had put it as I was playing it:
It’s also worth noting that both the storytelling and combat got a notch sharper in Frozen Wilds. If that rate of improvement continues, I expect the sequel to suffer less from the death-by-thousand-nitpicks that many people are experiencing.
Remained true all the way to the end.
There were a lot of ways this game could have converted itself from “better than Asscreed” to “legitimately interesting” and it studiously avoided each and every one. It got less and less charming as it went on, especially when the main questline decided to start crushing you with TEXT so that you GOT IT. Hey player did you GET IT? But then, the very last image was a nice little catharsis and brightened my mood a bit.