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Korax

Horizon: Zero Dawn

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Hey, this came out! To some rather effusive praise.

 

I've only played about 1.5 hours, so I expect (or hope, at least) that this will mostly stop when the game opens up, but HOLY SHIT does this game just want to grab you by the wrist and start cramming exposition into your ears. Did you know that you're an outcast? I'll let you know by talking out loud in a way that people never do that you're an outcast, just in case you missed it. Because that's what you are. An outcast. Who's been cast out. And shunned because you're an outcast. I sure hope you perform Dracula's Wedding, that my favorite.

 

Then the tutorial can't decide whether it wants to hold your hand or pretend like it doesn't care. After deliberately failing a stealth section to see what happened, it reloads to a checkpoint (despite playing through what appears to be a dynamic reaction meant to keep you in the fiction), because GOD DAMN IT YOU'RE GOING TO LEARN TO STEALTH THREE TIMES IN A ROW, NOT JUST TWO. During a later sneaking area, I completely ignored the "tracking" tutorial because the enemies are completely predictable without it, and it just lets me go on with the tutorial prompt on the screen and other characters acting as if I'm following it.

 

Like I said, this all seems like the typical overly-hand-held big-budget game opening, so I'm really looking forward to not having to deal with it any more, but it's incredibly annoying to play through.

 

One thing that I can tell is going to bother me for the whole game is character faces. The game generally looks great. Detailed environments, detailed animations when moving around, really nice effects, etc. Some people have been lauding it as THE REASON to upgrade to a 4K TV. But then you start a conversation with someone and you get a screen full of close-ups, and man, does it not look good. Faces barely move, and when they do it's like a rubber Halloween mask has been pulled over a shoddy animatronic frame. Jedi Academy had more expressive mouth movements, and those were just animation spasms in response to the voice clips being played.

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Decided to go in for the game, it's on a truck somewhere out there. I did it after reviews came back extremely positive, and I've basically put myself on blackout besides podcast discussion. That doesn't usually happen for me, but I'm planning on streaming the entire game starting tonight. I'll let you know if I feel the same way after the first session.

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I really want to get this game, but think I am going to finish off a couple older games then get Mass Effect first. By then maybe Horizon will be slightly cheaper, but I haven't really heard a single negative thing about the game yet. 

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Okay, so, as expected, once the story finally kicks off, you get turned loose in a huge area with all sorts of stuff to find and things to do. That's much better. Faces haven't improved, but I have noticed something: when an actual cutscene is happening, there's some decent emoting going on, but as soon as you're in a conversation, the characters just lock in on each other, staring blankly and vaguely opening their lips. It's weird.

 

One thing I will say is that stealth is way less possible/important than the intro bits want you to believe. There are some spots where you can creep around and eliminate targets one-by-one, but my overwhelming experience has been that I can get one, maybe two enemies down and then things go loud. Which is mostly fine, because the melee spear attack can just waste enemies in a way that nothing else does. Even the major story points just shove stealth to the side. The first major challenge is against an enemy that you will have to ambush multiple times and is hard to hide from once alerted. Then there's an arena fight that you just can't hide during. And then ANOTHER arena fight that prevents any stealth. Oh, and if you didn't go to the trouble of buying other weapons along the way, it's gonna be a problem, because your regular ol' bow is pretty shitty during two of those fights.

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I had the opposite experience, Korax. The time I failed a tutorial I wasn't listening. Rost shot what I was supposed to distract with a bow and yelled "Do it again you weren't listening!" So, he's got me dead to rights there I'll give him that. I think the game looks amazing, and the faces are really expressive. People on the stream were reporting desync with the dialogue and video, but I wasn't experiencing that. The faces do get a little Video Game Rigging during dialogue, but they're mostly good. The non-Matriarchs are all interesting characters! That one dude so thirsty for you.

 

This game's awesome, and weirdly easy and hard right next to each other. I stayed up until 2 am and I finished all the "intro" bits to the story. When I woke up I realized I didn't explore every nook and cranny of that starter area, and became regretful. Hopefully I'll be able to go back and poke.

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To be clear, though I'm fine with some amount of guidance (gotta learn basic controls and systems), as soon as a lesson becomes an obvious railroad I almost always try to break it. If the game handles that gracefully, great! But Horizon doesn't, at least in what I saw. And it's especially strange how it then flip-flops between jamming a lesson in your face when you don't do it exactly right and then assuming that you would never do anything but follow those instructions, so obviously it doesn't need to pay attention to what you're doing.

 

I haven't tried going back to the beginning area, but I fully expect to be able to. When you're made a Seeker, the Matriarch is pretty clear about how it affords you the ability to come and go as you please.

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2 minutes ago, Korax said:

To be clear, though I'm fine with some amount of guidance (gotta learn basic controls and systems), as soon as a lesson becomes an obvious railroad I almost always try to break it. If the game handles that gracefully, great! But Horizon doesn't, at least in what I saw. And it's especially strange how it then flip-flops between jamming a lesson in your face when you don't do it exactly right and then assuming that you would never do anything but follow those instructions, so obviously it doesn't need to pay attention to what you're doing.

 

I haven't tried going back to the beginning area, but I fully expect to be able to. When you're made a Seeker, the Matriarch is pretty clear about how it affords you the ability to come and go as you please.

 

See I thought it handled it great. When I didn't listen to Dad, Dad gets annoyed and starts over. it was perfect. I was saying things Aloy said through the entire night.

 

I'm dug through every inch of that cave, but I'm not interested in breaking tutorials. I'm interested in finishing them to move on.

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I had heard or seen nothing of this game until a week or so ago, but the reviews and 10 minutes of a Quick Look convinced that I probably should get this game. I'm really impressed by the game so far. I also like the main character a lot.

 

I'm afraid that the game might become hard/frustrating for me, as I'm usually not into fast-paced, difficult actions games and especially boss encounters, but hopefully I can over-level my way through the obstacles. The Lure call and Silent Strike combo is really forgiving at least, so I can at least deal with packs of smaller enemies stealthily.

 

The tutorial was fine in my opinion.

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I went through the first Cauldron and it is cuh-RAZY.

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I wasn't really going to pick this one up (I also didn't have a PS4 yet) but I watched DigitalFoundry's tech analysis and holy moly that game is pretty. Then a local game store hit me with a big PS4 discount and long story short it's waiting for me when I get home. I'm excited to check it out (also because a bunch of people I know worked on it). Might stream some over the weekend.

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I finished all the Cauldrons. I like that after the first one they varied up the designs so they didn't feel too similar.

 

I also got all Blazing Suns on the hunting challenges. I like the idea of the challenges, but some of the later ones boil down to brewing a ton of potions and then just tanking damage from the 10 other machines in the area as you're trying your damnedest to kill the 2 that the challenge cares about.

 

I've done so much side stuff that the main quest branches open to me now are level 14 and 15, and I'm level 41.

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On 06/03/2017 at 11:36 AM, Korax said:

I've done so much side stuff that the main quest branches open to me now are level 14 and 15, and I'm level 41.

 

I'm well on my way to doing the exact same thing. The quests available to me at the moment are level 15 and 18, and I'm level 30 or so. The main storyline is actually quite well-written and revealed; some of the threads that I thought were going to be obvious reveals turned out to go in a completely different direction. Refreshing to be surprised by the story. The side quests remind me a lot of the way that Witcher 3 gave you a lot of 'grey' situations. Even if there are no real choices in the side missions, they tend to twist a little.

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God damn, the battles can be hectic, but also surprisingly fun! Dodging the machines, trying to get a shot in with all of the arrows in case one of them does extra damage, dodging again, hitting the enemy a couple of times, and running for safety feels pretty good most of the time. Accidentally bringing up the PS4 overlay, trying to get Aloy to sprint, failing to drink a potion or consume herbs, and getting one hit killed less so.

 

I also wish there were fewer human enemies.

 

By the way, which armor are you using? I have enough money to buy one of the heavier armors and can't decide between Nora Protector (melee damage resistance) and Nora Silent Hunter (stealth). I have a stealth focused light armor at the moment, but I have no idea how much the stealth boost actually helps in not being detected. On the other hand, it seems that in many cases a confrontation cannot be avoided, so it would be nice to have some damage resistance.

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So I've done every single side thing that I could find (cauldrons, tallnecks, side quests, collectibles, bandit camps, vantage points, corrupted zones), hit level 50, and started going through the story. While there have been a few elements to the main story that were a bit surprising to me, it's mostly gone the way I expected. A side effect of exploring almost everywhere before the game thinks I will is that some of the impact of what was supposed to be an introduction to a difficult enemy encounter is subverted. Oh, this quest's goal is deep in Stormbird territory, it's gonna be a hard thing to get to, but I already triggered the intro cinematic when I wandered here five hours ago, also I can just tie the thing down with my ropecaster and override it.

 

I appreciate that they tried to make collectibles useful by having vendors that will sell you reward boxes for completing sets, but almost all the actual rewards are more useful to an early-game character, and some of the areas you have to go the find them definitely aren't early-game. There's a little nod to how they're working with Kojima, with three "Stranded" collectibles.

 

As little as I've found stealth to be useful against the machines, it's much more viable when going after human targets. They're much more likely to go down in one hit, and they don't have the detection that some of the robots do. There have still been a couple times when the game was more interested in making a specific story happen, so some people have been impervious to my sniping but then went down easily after I walked forward enough to cause a cutscene.

 

I have the purple version of all the armor types, but I've been using the Protector armor almost exclusively, because of my proclivity to just run in and start swinging heavy spear attacks. I just finished the Ancient Armory side quest, though, and the armor I got from that seems pretty sweet.

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6 hours ago, Nappi said:

God damn, the battles can be hectic, but also surprisingly fun! Dodging the machines, trying to get a shot in with all of the arrows in case one of them does extra damage, dodging again, hitting the enemy a couple of times, and running for safety feels pretty good most of the time. Accidentally bringing up the PS4 overlay, trying to get Aloy to sprint, failing to drink a potion or consume herbs, and getting one hit killed less so.

 

I also wish there were fewer human enemies.

 

By the way, which armor are you using? I have enough money to buy one of the heavier armors and can't decide between Nora Protector (melee damage resistance) and Nora Silent Hunter (stealth). I have a stealth focused light armor at the moment, but I have no idea how much the stealth boost actually helps in not being detected. On the other hand, it seems that in many cases a confrontation cannot be avoided, so it would be nice to have some damage resistance.

 

In case you're not aware, your notebook will tell you which bits of any machines you've scanned are vulnerable to what, so you don't just have to cycle wildly through arrows to figure it out.

 

As for the armour, I had the same quandary. Since as you mentioned some fights can't be avoided, I went with the Nora Protector. However there is another viable option; I forget its name but the armour that has a number of elemental resistances on it. Survivor perhaps? Since I've been wearing the Protector armour I certainly can take a hit in melee, but any kind of elemental attack definitely fucks me up. That said, you can customise any armour set to a certain extent with modification items.

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Yeah, I know that I can check the weak spots and types of vulnerabilities, but usually don't do that in the middle of the battle. Also, some enemies are so fast and aggressive that I find it really hard to focus on their weak spots, so I tearblast them a couple of time, try to set them on fire, and then fill them with normal and precision arrows.

 

Also, it took me a long time to figure out that it is actually worth owning multiple bows. I don't think the game does a very good job explaining that. I have the hunter and sharpshot bows now, but I guess the war bow would be useful as well? 


Related to that, what weapon layout did you guys end up using? Or did you vary the 4 quick select weapons a lot? I currently have hunter and sharpshot bows, the tripcaster, and the slingshot equipped, but I'm not using the slingshot very often.

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A warbow can be extremely useful. If you hit a cryo cell with an ice arrow or a power cell with a shock arrow, it fizzles for a bit and then releases an elemental explosion that can help with crowd control. The purple version also has corruption arrows, which causes a berserk state that can make things crazy.

 

I mainly kept the hunter's bow, sharpshot bow, and ropecaster, with the fourth spot swapping between whatever elemental weapons seemed appropriate to what I was doing.

 

Just finished the main quest. I liked the ending, and they found a way to have a sequel cliffhanger without being dumb about it (though at first it seemed to be going in an extremely contrived direction). I just checked my trophies, and I only have two left to get the Platinum... so I will probably round out my playthrough of the game with those.

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And done! Just short of 50 hours to complete.

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I actually don't seem to have access to any war bows yet, despite having the purple sharpshot and hunter's bows. Which is annoying because, yeah, I keep seeing things asking for frost and shock arrows. As for my select wheel, I mostly keep the two bows I do have in, and then usually a ropecaster and tripcaster in the other two, but often one of those will get swapped out for the sling. If I ever get a war bow it'll probably go into that secondary set of rotating debuff weapons too.

 

There are just those six weapon types, right? I kind of think they should have just made the two side slots have primary and secondary weapons in that case - maybe you "mouseover" them and press a button to switch. Having four slots for six weapons is just annoying enough to manage that it takes away from the smooth freeform nature of the combat. If there had been like 12 weapons I would have understood their desire to have the UI be less finicky more.

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Hunter's bow, sharpshot bow, war bow, ropecaster, tripcaster, two slings - blast (explosive) and regular (elementals), rattler (burst-fire bolt thrower, never really used it), and tearblast cannon (a short-range air cannon that only blows off components - got it from the hunters' lodge sidequest chain).

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I just beat this so I guess I'll repost my Mastodon hot take here:

 

Horizon does compare to BOTW and it's a better game by a fair margin. It's less novel for sure but it's far better executed and the writing is so far above BOTW it's not even funny. The combat is better, it looks far nicer and yes I am accounting for art style I do think Horizon has the better art style, and no I don't care that it wasn't made in Japan. And frankly BOTW's much hyped systems are shallow as all hell. Overriding machines and the elemental weapon types lead to far more interesting system interactions then anything that happened to me in Zelda.

 

And yeah Horizon has issues with appropriation of Native American cultures and it's gross and it shouldn't be there but I'll take it over BOTW's homophobia and Transphobia.

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2 hours ago, Vulpes Absurda said:

Overriding machines and the elemental weapon types lead to far more interesting system interactions then anything that happened to me in Zelda.

 

What kind of things are you referring to? I haven't played Zelda, so I can't speak for the comparison, but one thing I have been missing in Horizon Zero Dawn so far is "the grenade rolled down a hill" moments. Granted, I haven't even bought the war bow yet so I don't know what kind of whacky elemental stuff can happen, but so far the coolest non-scripted moment for me was when I rode through a machine territory with my mount, angered them, got stuck on a ledge shortly after, jumped off, and watched as my mount desperately took on the pursuers.

 

I also wish the world of Horizon was less dense, so that wandering into enemy territory would feel more special. As it is, there is a machine site basically every 200 paces, and very few places where one can just walk and focus on the scenery.

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For me there were a lot of moments of downing one creature with fire arrows, overriding another and then blowing off parts from another to trigger an explosion and then finishing them all off with a few well placed arrows and melee attacks. It's all super dynamic. Though you may need to be on higher difficulties to really get any of that. And for my own experience I've never been one for grenades rolling down hills. That stuff is fun once but it's rare it's repeatable so it always feels like a fun but pointless gimmick over any kind of interesting design to me. Things like Dishonored do it better but on the whole that's the exception that proves the rule.

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I'm only 10 or so hours into Horizon, so I haven't seen all the various societies but just about everything so far is pretty horrifying.  The Native american thing seems to be getting a lot of play for the medium article, but the structure and practices of these societies is pretty universally bad.  Let's just take Nora for example-- this is a society where only women who have children can rise to leadership positions, women who are responsible for multiple generations are held in higher esteem and actually outrank childless women, and these same individuals can seemingly make anyone an outcast for just about any perceived slight.  That's not to mention the fascistic treatment of the members of the society all the way down to who they are allowed to speak to, and the legally required shunning of people who have angered the society's power brokers.  I get that people tend to like this society because it is lead by women, but just about every aspect of it is a controlling, abusive relationship writ large.

 

On the gameplay front, the Create Job feature might be the best idea I've seen in a game in a while.  It really makes the exploration and crafting way more enjoyable when I don't have to keep popping open an inventory to see what other animal parts I need to make something.

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