Horizon: Zero Dawn

[Vulpes Absurda]

I believe that that is part of the criticism of the games use of Native American cultures. It's a largely negative take on tribal societies which is salt in the wound of it's use of words that are often used as racist slurs against them. I found that as it moved on from the Nora it gets a bit more nuanced but it's never not negative especially towards faith as the basis of any kind of society.

[Badfinger]

13 hours ago, itsamoose said:

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.

 

I find that stuff to be fascinating. My take is it's not supposed to be something that's good so much as it's just what their society is. The heirarchy explicitly being women with the most generations of children is amazing in an through the looking glass sort of way. I have no grounding on the less societal and more thematic elements (ie takes on Native Americans), so I can't comment on that part. If someone raises criticism as they've done, it's important for me to see what's being said and go from there.

 

I don't have any war bows yet, so I'm running with two blue sharpshot bows (one modded for damage, one for tear), the slingshot, and the ropecaster. I was running the tripcaster but I've been fighting birds most recently and birds don't trip over stuff very much.

[hedgefield]

To me it reads more as an exploration of how things could get fucked up in isolated communities. That's the strongest reaction I had to it, realizing how people in these situations start thinking of arbitrary rules in service of structure that do more harm than good. It's no wonder Aloy doesn't want to be associated with the Nora. But I'm not that far in yet. So far I've found the Carja to be surprisingly nuanced; they are made out to be assholes at the start, and then you get to their outpost and they're super accommodating and gentle. But maybe that will turn on its head later too.

I think I'm about 15 to 20 hours in now, just reached the Carja gate that leads to the second biome. Holy moly this world is huge. I still feel pretty inadequate so I'm going to spend more time practicing on the bigger bots. Although I did survive taking down all four gators on that island in the west. It's nice when you feel like you're starting to get a grip on the big bots and then go back to striders or grazers, they're so easy.

[thenexus6]

I am around 13 hours into the game, level 17 I think. I have mixed feelings on it. 

 

- Its very pretty, but the occasional bug out or lip sync thing stands out alot more than normal because of how great it looks most of the time. Lighting, day cycles, and landscapes are incredible. I love the world and art direction too, such a wide mix of stuff here.

 

- Gameplay is okay, I get frustrated with the climbing most of the time and I often miss arrow shots which I feel are spot on but whatever. I also love that you can pretty much Skyrim up any mountain which is great for taking short cuts. 

 

- I am interested seeing where the story goes, but so far it seems fairly standard. I really didn't enjoy the dialogue so far (which won't change) especially the start with Aloy constantly talking to herself. It just screams video gamey to me.

 

- Focus. Why does every game need a "detective" cheat mode?? Okay, well I *kinda* get it here, as it links with the story but man, almost every game. Just press a button and see the icon to follow on the ground, or scan this and that its just... ugh. Because of this alot of the missions are just scan area, follow trail to encounter.

 

Over the last four months I played Arkham Knight, Watch Dogs 2, Mad Max and playing open world games is weird. I always lose interest the more I play, every game is full of icons and collectibles and its too much for me. I play the story, a few side missions that interest me. So I will probably miss alot of stuff in Horizon but I think I am okay with that.

 

I was excited for this game, I saw all the E3 and game conference stuff and it looked great. But I didn't get myself super hyped for it. It's just a solid third person action game. Definitely could be the start of something new. But i'm not like madly in love or like it's the best thing ever.

 

The next two games I am interested in are Mass Effect and Persona 5, both massive games but I feel a little more linear so they should be alot more focused (I hope)

 

 

[Badfinger]

Don't buy the collectible maps. Your main map will still have a lot of dinosaur outlines on it, but it'll at least not be filled with icons of coffee cups and pots.

[thenexus6]

I beat the game, wrote my impressions in the recently completed games thread.

[Nappi]

I still have the final mission left, but I think I'm ready to give my impressions.

 

As I said earlier, I usually don't like hectic action gameplay, so I find it quite impressive that this game did not become overly frustrating for me, despite being at least somewhat challenging all the way through. The progress system is really well implemented. Even the lower tier machines remain deadly throughout the game if you are not careful, but because of the upgrades to your arsenal and the skills of both you and Aloy improving, you really feel that you become much more powerful as you progress through the game. When I first encountered the Sawtooth, I decided that I never want to fight them again. Then, about 20 levels later, I attacked two of them simultaneously just for fun and didn't take any damage. It felt awesome.

 

Unfortunately, the mission progression is much worse. Because of the story they were going for, Aloy has to fight more and more human enemies as the story unfolds. None of these encounters were fun or memorable for me. In addition, some of the later boss fights are really boring as well. Deathbringers, for example, soak incredible amounts of damage but have an aiming system programmed by a Hollywood action movie director, which means that one of the simplest (?) ways of dealing with it is to run around constantly shooting fire arrows at it, with the biggest danger being that you get stuck in the geometry, which happens quite often because the developers were big on placing a bunch of debris on the boss arenas. I also wish that more of the machine encounters gave you an opportunity to place traps and make other preparations before angering the giant, instead of dropping you in the middle of the fight, as so many of the skills are centered around stealthy approach.

 

I was interested to see where the developers were going with some of the story elements, namely discrimination and faith, but unfortunately they seemed to take a back seat in favor of the boring-ass Chosen One storyline. I wish the premise was a bit more believable, that all of it wasn't explicitly revealed throughout the story missions but the players had to parse what had happened themselves, and that Aloy wasn't the fucking sole savior of the human race. I played a bunch of the early side quests, but stopped at some point because most of them were not very interesting in terms of either narrative or the gameplay ("He went to gather herbs a while ago, find out what happe.. oh he is standing on a rock surrounded by machi... oh you killed them."). Maybe some of the later ones were more interesting? 

 

Anyway, I'm still really impressed by the gameplay and the technical execution of the game. I just wish the story and mission progression had been a bit better.

[Merus]

I'm playing this! It's aces.

 

I'm enjoying that the main story quest, once you finish the Proving, is almost entirely 'go to this edge of the map because there's something there' and the game can trust that there'll be enough things going on from here to there that you'll have a little adventure just getting there. I had a story mission send me north, and on the way I ran across two side quests, a bandit nest with a very creepy-yet-friendly NPC, a corrupted zone, two ambushes and two boss fights. Only one each of those last two were part of the main quest, to my knowledge.

 

I am really liking the combat system, as well - it's a really smart elaboration on headshots. At first, you shoot the watchers right in the eyes and they go down, but other machines need to be shot in the side first and then in the face. Later, you understand that the machines have both armour and components, and if the components get ripped off or damaged enough in a specific way, the machine loses a big chunk of HP.

 

So when you go hunting you start looking to rip off specific components because you need those resources, which you don't get if you just kill the machine, and you start running into machines that have separate weapon components and have components that are only exposed under certain conditions, and components that, if you damage them enough, cause them to expose their weakpoints more frequently, so each boss fight becomes trying to decide between a dozen different options for weakpoints to aim for or states to put it in, which all affect the machine in different, specific ways - go for the weapon mowing you down, or rip off the heavy weapon so you can use it, or break its legs, or set it on fire? I love how fluid the combat can get even without the stealth stuff, and when you can use the stealth it's pretty good too (although humans, disappointingly, go down pretty quickly with one sniper shot so arrays of human enemies are frankly not that interesting). I notice that Guerilla Games have borrowed the Dark Souls model for status effects, which I think is a big reason why status effects feel so good in this game and is probably the one mechanic Dark Souls has that I think every game should swipe. Building up a meter that applies the status effect, which then runs for a set time, gives you so much more room for interesting decisions than binary on/off status effects or status effects you have to keep topping up.

 

I also like the corrupted zones - the trick there is that you have to use stealth because you mostly can't survive being attacked by a pack of machines, but once a machine gets hurt the rest are informed of your presence, so you have to set up your booby traps ahead of time and know your escape routes and where to break line of sight. Also doesn't hurt bringing along a friendly machine because their attacks are inexplicably powerful; I had a fight where I was stuck on a tiny rock tower with three birds spitting liquid nitrogen at me, which lingers, but they panic and stop flying when they catch on fire. So I set them on fire, they'd plummet to the ground, and my mount would spot a hostile machine, run over, and kick it to death. I had another fight where I was hiding in long grass from corrupted machines, and they had lost me. Unfortunately when those machines aren't sure where their prey got to, they use their goddamn echolocation. So I ran blindly backwards away from the pursuing corrupted machines into another pack of machines, who swivelled around, saw me and the corrupted machines, and they weren't having any of that. I ducked into a lake and the machines started fighting each other, and got out of the lake to see this massive fire-spitting bellowback come charging out of the forest, drawn by the fight, and start smashing the corrupted machines, forgetting all about me. I then get a pop-up: 'Corrupted Zone Cleared'.

 

It's aces.

[miffy495]

God, I got this on sale forever ago and still haven't started it. Must get on that.

[Merus]

I stopped thinking of it as an open-world game and started thinking of it as an action RPG and it helps. You see all the icons on your map and get fatigued, but 95% of those icons are indicators of what is around and there's very little hoovering up of collectibles. (There are some collectibles. I haven't bought the items that add the collectibles to my map because I'd prefer to finish exploring the world first before I give myself a checklist, and it's paid off because I've managed to stumble across a collectible during a fight.)