I went back to this game and suddenly got hooked. When I’d stopped before I was still in the very early game (about to do The Proving). Getting off those rails was critical. This game’s dialogue is pretty piss poor most of the time and I don’t see how anyone could care about the drama between these boring tribes, so the game really doesn’t show its good side until you get through the relentless plot stuff at the beginning and get the chance to roam freely.
So after that whole cinematic YA-novel-movie opening, there’s a large, sort of introductory zone, and after you do a few story missions it lets you get through a big gate that opens up to the rest of the world. I just got to that point. The intro zone had some fun stuff and a few mysteries but was largely kind of samey, so I’m interested to see whether exploration gets more compelling once the map opens up.
I still wish this game didn’t have a near-terminal case of AAA syndrome though. Good god, you can really feel the constant presence of the 600 spreadsheets they used to fine-tune the math on their 30 unnecessary systems that keep poking in like intrusive thoughts. Why does this game have loot boxes? Why do I need to decide between a 15% fire damage module and a 14% fire damage and 1% physical damage module on one of my 5 slightly different bows? Why do I have to interrupt every battle 6 times to craft more arrows in the menu in the middle of the fight? Why do I have to spend 1/5th of my time in this game managing the 50 different resources clogging up my very limited inventory? None of this crap had to be in this game, it took more work for them to do it this way. Who wants this!?
On one level it’s the ammo system in Doom, elaborated further. If you start preferring freeze-type status effects for instance, you’ll notice that every freezing ammunition shares the same underlying crafting resource kinda like cells are used for plasma and BFG.
So you either can’t abuse it too hard and need to mix in other approaches you’re less comfortable with, or if you really want to commit to freezing the crap out of everything then you need to go on special hunts for herds of freeze canister deer (which are great fun)
It’s a good system. Not just junk for the sake of junk
I don’t think this really works though because there’s no case where a player would “prefer” freezing; the monsters all have clearly marked elemental weaknesses you are meant to abuse, for which there are purpose-built weapons. There’s still enough of a weapon spread that you can develop preferences for delivery, but an efficient player will rotate ideal weapons on a per-monster basis.
One thing I did like was how much of a joke human enemies were in contrast to the giant machine monsters, although it makes the player’s functional durability that much more jarring. That’s pretty much the form of every critical statement about this game: “I did like x, but it made y all the more jarring”
the why is pretty straightforward: you’ll have plenty to learn and see and do up through hour twenty but once you’ve been to the four corners and met the sketchings of plot and become combat-competent…that’s when the only sustained trick we know is progression boulevard
I will say that the combat in this is quite good. And I’m starting to find myself actually using some of the various tools on offer, even though my usual way of playing a game like this is to just go with the attack method of least resistance.
Between the combat, the gorgeous vistas, and wanting to know more about the robonoids, I actually am super on board despite my significant reservations about all the AAA systems.
There’s a mod I used (or a cheat?) that gives you unlimited inventory space and ammo. Recommend if you just want to explore and make mecha dinos explode.
OK so I got to the part where they give you a MASSIVE lore dump that includes an explanation of what Horizon Zero Dawn actually is. It’s all surprisingly depressing! Some of it is cool. It’s 20% more interesting than I expected. I’m 100% not sure whether the hardcore neoliberal technocrat tone of the voicelogs and loretext is intentional satire or unintentional AAA gamedev brain, but it’s grating either way.
Yeah, I also went into the lore sections steeled to expect boring, aura-of-mystery-stripping garbage and instead got mildly interesting (also, you couldn’t possibly make these dinosaurs less delightful with any lore no matter how bad)
It’s still a problem that the game is structured in a way that assumes the player is highly motivated to unravel the mystery though
Also this game’s understanding of the archival profession is comically uninformed. The archivist on the Horizon Zero Dawn project was NOT exercising proper professional ethics!!
Massive spoiler:
“Exploitation movies are prurient PORNOGRAPHY so I will personally shut down your requests and decide that they can’t go in the grand archives of all human culture to be preserved for the second coming of mankind! But I will include Salo but only because it’s considered highbrow.”
Also it’s very silly how all of the actually interesting lore is kept in like 3 or 4 discrete lore dungeons that you enter into and read found text for 3 hours, and then leave and resume the game.
By the way, in case you’re gaining the option to go there soon, the storytelling in the DLC section is systematically better in my opinion. I’m not going to say it escapes AAA-brain but I really felt the improvement in execution. It helps that they don’t need to tell a story about The Fate of the World which is inherently limiting (well, the main game didn’t need to either, but I digress)
I keep hearing how much the DLC improves on the main game! I’m gonna have to check it out. Maybe that foreshadows good things for the sequel, which I’m totally agnostic on whether I actually want to play.
This might be a lore spoiler depending on what you’ve seen so far (I forget the exact order of revelations) but I think the overall premise of the sequel will hopefully be different AIs like a Greek pantheon allying with and manipulating different tribes like the different Greek city-states, with constantly shifting alignments and spheres of influence in each of the two different planes. If it’s not that, then they don’t understand their own inspirations well enough to develop them
I’m hoping they don’t go all in on making Hades sentient and instead leave open the interpretation that, no how much AAA voice acting it inevitably gets, it’s just fulfilling it’s job as programmed. There area no actual feelings or animosity.
I thought all the lore stuff was alright I guess, but it’s almost completely divorced from the main narrative and Aloy herself (did she even have a personal story? I can’t remember). Also, all of those lore dungeons were just walking forward and listening to voice logs for 40 minutes rather than any kind of interesting narrative or plotting. That’s something they really need to improve in H2o.
Aloy’s personal story is that she leaves her blinkered tribal origins and gains more and more perspective on the world. This teaches her the wisdom that she is and always was the most important and courageous person in it, on a genetic level
These are interesting reads to me because, as a terminal sidequester, I got all these tantalizing hints of the broader story and had basically figured the whole thing out through context clues, only to have it all dumped on me in an extremely frank and uninteresting way when I hit up the main questline. Enervating.