@tennmuerti said:

1. An additional issue with the melee combat I'm having right now is with the critical strike prompt you get when you stun an enemy. It's wholly inconsistent because the game requires you to be in such a specific spot to get the prompt. This leads to situations where the prompt is flitting on and off the screen and it's basically 50-50 whether you do the critical strike of simple whack them with your puny stick. Given that any melee damage removes the stun, I'm finding situations where I am now facing a fully functioning enemy for no benefit after the game decides I wasn't in exactly the right spot for the critical strike. It's really bad when you are one uneven ground.

2. I think with the enemy hitboxes the problem is twofold. First, your dodge is wholly inadequate to move you out of the way most of the time, even with the upgraded dodge distance. This is a particular problem with the larger machines. No matter what way you dodge, you don't travel far enough to get out of the way of the attack zone because the swipe is so big. The second problem is that enemies seem to have a large amount of tracking on their attacks that means you get hit even when it feels like you should have dodged past them. I've been hit several times by the giant bull machines where I dodge past their charge but they spin nearly 180 degrees at the last second and hit me anyway.

It feels weird because it seems like there are i-frames on your roll sometimes, like Dark Souls, but it works inconsistently.

3. Great. Now you got me started on the menu system and I need to vent - so:

• The lack of ability to sort the inventory is a huge miss. I just want to sort all the things that have no purpose other than selling so I can easily dump them at a merchant, but the game can't even manage that.
• You can sell things in bulk, but for some reason can't buy things in bulk. How does that make sense? It isn't fun when you need to buy a ton of blaze/chillwater/whatever to make ammo and then need to do that one at a time. Again, what the hell were they thinking?
• The item stacks in the inventory are wholly inconsistent and frequently too small. Why does wood stack to 250 but ammo only stack to 50? Why does machine loot only stack to 5 despite it being by far the most common thing you will pick up? And why does the number that shows up when you loot something show the number of filled slots in your overall inventory as opposed to the number of things is the stack you are currently picking up? Do I have enough blaze or not? Who knows, because the game can't be arsed to tell you!
  • Going along with this, the game tells you whether an item is needed for crafting or trade, but doesn't list the items. Thus, you cannot tell whether the items still have any use or whether you've crafted everything that mat is used for already. I'm sitting on a bunch of animal mats right now that I may not need, but because they were such a colossal pain to gather, I don't want to sell them because I might need them later.
  • Additionally, for how much crap you pick up, the icons in the menu are basically worthless in telling one thing from another. Why does each machine need it's own separate type of lens that takes up an inventory spot? And why do those lenses have icons that are basically the same except for one or two differences? It's stupid and obnoxious given you can't sort your inventory
• The way the game handles weapons is just dumb. Literally the only things that change are the number of mod slots and what types of ammunition a weapon takes. This leads to you carrying around a bunch of essentially duplicate weapons just to get different elemental types. That's really boring, clutters your inventory, and makes no coherent sense. Why do I need a separate sling just for blast damage and a second sling for everything else? They should have made the differences more appreciable i.e. a better sling has more range or a faster load or something. The only purpose for doing things this way is to add bloat to an already bloated crafting system.

4. I actually think Aloy is the best part of the game. I don't get where people are coming from when they say she's inconsistent. It feels like those people just weren't paying attention to the story beats closely enough or were skipping cutscenes because I definitely feel like she's got a defined and consistent personality so far. That said, I do sort of agree about the conversation choice thing. The problem is that your different emotional responses never lead anywhere, so the entire exercise of a dialogue wheel is pointless.

@lawgamer: the dodge issue you bring up has been something that has been ESPECIALLY bothering me the more I play. It's a gigantic issue with bigger machines that take off like 1/3 of your life bar with a single melee attack. So many times I've died because a ravaged or something would leap at me from what seems like insane distances and even if I time my dodge perfectly they'll instantly follow up that initial leap with a secondary swipe that hits me. It almost feels like the combat encounters are designed to make you take damage no matter what.

This brings about my issues with the health itself which is a really weird and crummy system that combined with the rather sparse checkpointing leads to a lot of death and backtracking. The fact that you don't regain life at bonfires seems a little nuts as well.

I dunno it's still a fun game at times but like I said so many posts ago: you can definitely tell this is a developers first crack at the genre.

The weapons have different handling, which equates to different draw times. The reason for the separation is also for the mods. If you had a single bow and sling you could only fit in three mods in that one weapon, which in a case like the bow would mean 3 mods for 9 different ammo types (making most of your options really bad compared to the 1-2 you mod up). And if they increased the amount of mods on the weapon you would probably be better off just specializing even more. Now, they could've made the mods a "per ammo" type, but then there's no longer any choice about what you want to mod up or not. The way it's set up you're able to pick and choose what you want to focus on while still having a good arsenal of options.

@ares42: Then why not have separate slings for each individual ammo type? Right now it's three and one, which is bizarre. And as to the number of mods, that's entirely a design decision. Nothing says it has to be three, it could just as easily be 5, or 10 or whatever. Personally, I think they should just ditch +elemental damage as a mod and stick with straight damage. Then the problem is solved, mods are equally useful for all weapons, and it would greatly reduce the clutter piling up in the inventory.

Or better yet, let me equip more than 4 weapons at a time. Having to go into the inventory constantly to swap things out depending on what I'm fighting in obnoxious.

@tennmuerti@lawgamer said:

Ok lets get to the real nuts. The melee combat sucks, it's abysmal. Combine the sluggish 30 fps, plus no real lock on, plus the insane inconsistency and rubber banding of you to the enemy and visa versa, sometimes you will leap 10 meters to the enemy and hit them, other times you'll miss point blank, plus the terrain differences, plus the dodge that fails to work half the time, plus an occasional situation when you can get basically stun locked by 2 or more machines in melee just jumping at you 24/7 non stop. I've lost count of the times I've been hit by some leaping machine whose hit box was nowhere near me, but the general mad flailing and jumping can just becomes a mess. After the initial opening hours of the game I've made a general rule to avoid it like the plague. Thankfully the ranged tools you are given are enough to avoid it for 90% of the time. But when you don't avoid it, it blows, bleeeegh :P

1. An additional issue with the melee combat I'm having right now is with the critical strike prompt you get when you stun an enemy. It's wholly inconsistent because the game requires you to be in such a specific spot to get the prompt. This leads to situations where the prompt is flitting on and off the screen and it's basically 50-50 whether you do the critical strike of simple whack them with your puny stick. Given that any melee damage removes the stun, I'm finding situations where I am now facing a fully functioning enemy for no benefit after the game decides I wasn't in exactly the right spot for the critical strike. It's really bad when you are one uneven ground.

What I'm confused by is why either of you are engaging with the melee combat in the first place. I use the melee combat against human enemies but I try to stay as far away from the machines as possible at all times, even when I've tied them down I'm simply quick-firing my bows at their weak points or stacking elemental weaknesses with my slings/bows. I won't apologize for the melee combat, it's not great, but I do enjoy the weight to it and, at least against the smaller beginner robots, there was a satisfying risk/reward to using the heavy attack to knock enemies over. But I rarely think to do it anymore because I'm too busy scrambling around setting tripwires and crafting tearblast arrows.

2. I think with the enemy hitboxes the problem is twofold. First, your dodge is wholly inadequate to move you out of the way most of the time, even with the upgraded dodge distance. This is a particular problem with the larger machines. No matter what way you dodge, you don't travel far enough to get out of the way of the attack zone because the swipe is so big. The second problem is that enemies seem to have a large amount of tracking on their attacks that means you get hit even when it feels like you should have dodged past them. I've been hit several times by the giant bull machines where I dodge past their charge but they spin nearly 180 degrees at the last second and hit me anyway.

It feels weird because it seems like there are i-frames on your roll sometimes, like Dark Souls, but it works inconsistently.

@lawgamer said: 3. Great. Now you got me started on the menu system and I need to vent - so:

• The lack of ability to sort the inventory is a huge miss. I just want to sort all the things that have no purpose other than selling so I can easily dump them at a merchant, but the game can't even manage that.

• You can sell things in bulk, but for some reason can't buy things in bulk. How does that make sense? It isn't fun when you need to buy a ton of blaze/chillwater/whatever to make ammo and then need to do that one at a time. Again, what the hell were they thinking?

• The item stacks in the inventory are wholly inconsistent and frequently too small. Why does wood stack to 250 but ammo only stack to 50? Why does machine loot only stack to 5 despite it being by far the most common thing you will pick up? And why does the number that shows up when you loot something show the number of filled slots in your overall inventory as opposed to the number of things is the stack you are currently picking up? Do I have enough blaze or not? Who knows, because the game can't be arsed to tell you!The way the game handles weapons is just dumb. Literally the only things that change are the number of mod slots and what types of ammunition a weapon takes. This leads to you carrying around a bunch of essentially duplicate weapons just to get different elemental types. That's really boring, clutters your inventory, and makes no coherent sense. Why do I need a separate sling just for blast damage and a second sling for everything else? They should have made the differences more appreciable i.e. a better sling has more range or a faster load or something. The only purpose for doing things this way is to add bloat to an already bloated crafting system.

  • Going along with this, the game tells you whether an item is needed for crafting or trade, but doesn't list the items. Thus, you cannot tell whether the items still have any use or whether you've crafted everything that mat is used for already. I'm sitting on a bunch of animal mats right now that I may not need, but because they were such a colossal pain to gather, I don't want to sell them because I might need them later.

  • Additionally, for how much crap you pick up, the icons in the menu are basically worthless in telling one thing from another. Why does each machine need it's own separate type of lens that takes up an inventory spot? And why do those lenses have icons that are basically the same except for one or two differences? It's stupid and obnoxious given you can't sort your inventory

I agree that the loot system is pretty impractical, but it doesn't bother me or stand out as a flaw because I've never met a loot system in this sort of game that felt like anything other than busywork and pointlessness. I've been playing The Witcher 3 off and on for two years and am about halfway through the Hearts of Stone expansion but I'm still wearing mastercrafted Griffin armor with mastercrafted Griffin weapons because none of the other gear intrigues me or offers negligible differences to what I already have, and you see the designs for 95% of the armor in your first several hours of the game so new loot quickly becomes less an exciting chance to try on some new clothes than just another item to immediately drop from your inventory.

Speaking of inventory, I don't find this inventory nearly as cumbersome as that game because at least it doesn't weigh you down at a certain point; I'd rather Geralt just refuse to pick something up the way Aloy does than make it so I can't run or do anything remotely physical and have to make the choice to either ride my horse back to town or drop the stuff I don't want. Even after the patches to make almost all the inventory weightless I'm still constantly pushing through my weight limit in that game. And also in comparison to that game, which I've put over 110 hours into and have enjoyed very much, I'm still fighting enemies in exactly the same way I was 40 hours into the game using the same tactics and making the same mistakes because there just isn't much to that game's fighting at all rather than the preparation for monster contracts, and even those at some point become repetitive. I love how agile this combat is compared to the stiff encounters in the swamps of Velen and caves of Skellige.

I also agree that the iconography is bad, and the lack of sorting is a real problem, but I'm a bit surprised anyone even came across the inability to buy materials in bulk. Maybe I'm just stopping to fight machines far more often than you because I'm infatuated with this combat system and you aren't, but I almost always have 100-150 chillwaters, blazes, etc. and if anything I'm selling off my third and fourth reserves of them for extra shards just because I know I'll have fifty more in a half hour. The only things I've bought form merchants are health potions, weapons and armor and I don't see that changing. At this point most of my weapons have three ammunition slots and I'm able to constantly fill them up before and after fights without worry I'm close to running out of materials.

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At this point I think it's fair to say that if the combat hasn't grabbed you, the desert area with the flying enemies and introduction of large sized machines probably won't be the thing to convert you but I'm honestly impressed more than anything else with people who find themselves so at odds with this combat system. The Shadow weapons feel entirely different from the Carja weapons from the Nora weapons, thanks to the handling stat and wider array of ammo options. The on-the-fly ammo crafting system feels wonderful and juggling ropes, tripwires, tearblast arrows, hardpoint arrows, freeze bombs and health roots while fighting seven different machines all of which can kill you in just a handful of hits is fucking exhilarating. I can't recall if I said this before but I have just a few hours worth of hands-on experience with the Souls games via Demon's Souls on PS3 and Bloodborne on PS4 and felt too overwhelmed by both to push on further than an hour or two, but I don't get that feeling at all here and I think it's really interesting that those games earned so much praise in part because of how much strategy went into medium and large enemies not to mention bosses, and how dangerous every encounter in those games felt, and yet those same aspects are a strong negative for some with regards to this game.

@lawgamer: Again, if you separate the ammo out so you can mod them all separately there's no choice left, you just put +fire on fire arrows and +dmg on damage arrows etc. As for number of mods, yes it's an arbitrary number. What I was trying to say was that increasing the number wouldn't be an answer to the problem of having all the ammo modded by one single weapon. While you definitely could argue that the system is fairly pointless, at least it's trying to give you some sense of customization. If you were to strip it down even more it would literally be a waste of time. If the system was that you have one weapon which can use all the ammo types, and all the mods you're getting are +dmg which affects all the ammo equally, why are you even getting mods at all ?

I have only a few hours played so far, I'm just at the part where you're looking around an ambush.

I really like it so far, feels like a mixture between the new Tomb Raider games and The Witcher 3. The story is interesting but some of the voice acting is meh at best.

@ares42: Well currently the system where I have to go into my inventory in the middle of a fight, and equip another bow to one of the four slots in order to fire the one specific arrow type I need from it, then go back in the inventory when I've fired it and switch it back out to the other bow I was using because it has the other property I need - all because I only have 4 slots and I already have my tripcaster and ropecaster selection as well as my mainstay war bow.. well that system currently kind of sucks.

I...think I'm close to the end now and I'm not complaining, since I've had a blast the whole way through, but I don't know if Jeff expected this to be a 8-10 hour game, because I haven't really come across any "Oh, this is probably where the story ends..." false moments yet. I guess the current quest might be one of those, but I have a feeling it's the final thing. Unless he meant doing some of the bigger side quests before finishing the main story.

@glots: Feels kinda long doesn't it? I am not sure where I'm at either to be honest. I've started getting a ton of info-dumps on what happened to the world and all that but I'm not sure how much of an indicator that is as to where the story going. To be perfectly honest I'm starting to lose the thread a little as to what the ultimate goal supposed to be anymore.

I also feel like the more overpowered your weapons and stuff get the more enjoyable the combat it. Fighting things and being able to quickly disarm their plating and tie them down and then override them is a lot more enjoyable than the squirrely balet of dodging I was doing at the beginning of the game.

It's not so much that your weapons get overpowered as you're slowly getting on even ground with the enemies you're fighting. Have you used any of their heavy weapons yet? The Ravager's minigun, for instance, kills it and the only other machine I've tried it on, a Snapmaw, in like five hits no matter where you hit them. It really puts in perspective how powerful their weaponry is compared to yours.

@nodima: oh yah shooting off the ravager cannon is the first order of business. The machine weapons make mincemeat out out of even the biggest of the bunch in a matter of seconds. It's just with my purple high fire rate bow that has tear arrows and several +42% tear mods on it as well a ropecaster that buckles down pretty much every machine with only two cables it's become a lot easier to handle. The dodge will still screw me over on a regular basis but if I'm quick and get a bit lucky then I can usually avoid a close quarters engagement.

Just started playing it today and OH GOD THE OPEN WORLD IS BIG IT SCARES ME.

Like I have already been playing Zelda along with this and that is similarly a giant open world that scares the shit out of me. I don't know if I'm going to be able to finish either of these games in the month of March. because they are huge and also I've got school shit to deal which takes priority over anything else. But as much as the open world scares me I am all about discovering what the world of Horizon (and zelda) have to offer.

I have some minor nitpicks on the game but overall I have been having a phonemonal time with it. I really love the world they set up, both the one Alloy exsits in and the "ancient world". It has a unique problem in that there are tons of things to do in the game but right now I all I really wanna do is absorb more information about the past. The background world and main story have grabbed me more than I ever expected and each time I do a mission that pushes that forward is been fantastic.

I really like the combat so far too. The ani-bots are fun to fight for the most part and I think most of the tools you're given are really fun to mess with. My issues lie in some of the combat though, I don't know why I need to have 3 separate bows to shoot arrows. I can get behind the "sharpshooter" bow but having the hunter bow and warrior bow as a different thing seems kinda dumb. I think one of the slings does that too where you need to have two separate slings for different ammo types. It jus rides to make any sense and they either should've included all the elemental effects into one sling or broken them out into a new weapon entirely. I also had some trouble with the base roll you have, I don't know if it's me, the distance of the roll or the hitbox but I had a lot of trouble dodging some enemy attacks. Now that I have the upgraded roll it's gotten better but that did present an issue for me. Especially when those some machines throw rocks at you and the splash damage on those things is like a god damn RPG. But still, these are minor annoyances in a fantastic package.

It goes without saying the game looks gorgoues and runs nearly perfect. I haven't seen too many issues with the lip syncing although it does exist and there certainly are some voice actors that are jamming it up. But I think Alloy so far is a really great character who sometimes seems to be a little more outward thinking and know more than I would expect (maybe the story will explain this better as I continue). Overall this game is totally rad, I definitely see where that 5 star review came from and agree with it so far. 30 hours in and I still can't wait to go home from work and sink more time into it.

Probably was a reference to the first time your hologram friend says "make sure you are ready, this is the point of no return"

I just beat it. I still think the gameplay is mediocre at its best and Aloy kinda sucks but loved mostly everything else. Really dug the story and characters despite some questionable voice acting and writing. Its also probably my favorite setup for an apocalypse in a video game. I would be down to play a prequel showing the fall of civilization

Just picked it up and got about 45 min in before I had to go to work. Really strong writing and characterization so far. The world is interesting and I'm excited to learn more and get deeper into the combat and what not.

I think this is going to help alleviate the Zelda lust I'm currently feeling.

I have been enjoying the game a lot. For me the combat felt pretty great except when it came to the combat against humans. That is where the games combat systems is kinda lacking since you have so few options when it comes to melee combat (i agree with neogafs forums thread where someone said that parrying and countering would have improved the human based melee combat).

It took me almost 60 hours to finish Horizon (reached the max level and skillpoint cap). Though bear in mind that I played on very hard difficulty and did almost everything except the hunters lodges timed trials (i did do some of them also just not all of them). Also didnt collect a lot of the datapoints scattered around the world.

In the end the game took me on a great emotional journey and showed me some visually nice landscapes in the process.

My only nitpicks with the game have been: 1) It doesnt set health potions as a default menu item after death 2) Buying resources in stacks isnt an option for some reason (wires, blaze and so on) 3) It is sometimes damn hard to get out of water.

...and it's done! Save file suggests that it took me around 56 hours to beat the story and some side-missions. Don't know if that counts in idle time in the menus, but it'd still be +40 something hours. Still have a few missions left in the world to take care of, but I'm not sure if I can be bothered to pick up all the collectibles and that, even with unlimited travelling.

It's been a long, long while since the last time I put that many hours into an open world game (or any type of game besides WoW, really) and enjoyed the trip the whole way through. The combat was super fun, especially against the machines. Humans were kinda whatever, though at least it felt (and sounded) satisfying to unload three arrows into their faces. Some of the trials were actually harder than the final missions, especially the one where you have to "tame" two ravagers and kill a Thunderjaw. I probably couldn't have done it without the Ancient Armor and I was still left with only 25 seconds when I got the best time.

My nitpicks;

• Facial animations seemingly getting worse the further the game progressed, though at least it remained mainly ok on main characters. I think I got used to the voice acting by the end, it probably helped that it was never "My ears are bleeding, shut the hell up!" level of bad, but more campy and so-bad-it's-good. Maybe now that they've got the engine and all that sorted-out, they can spend a bigger portion of the sequel budget on some good voice actors!
• Invertory management was kinda janky all-around, but at least I "solved" the problem by crafting bigger bags as soon as it was possible. Another thing easily fixed for the next game.
• "You are leaving the play area and should turn back. If you continue, your last save game will be reloaded" notifications. I understand those popping up in situations where you "Skyrim" your way up a mountain, even if it was still a bummer, but when it appeared as I was exploring something on the ground-level that I thought could be a secret area, it was kinda annyoing and immersion-breaking. Just invisible walls would be better of the two.
• Kinda in relation to the one above, not being able to climb more freely was unfortunate. Don't expect BOTW level of climbing, but being able to climp up most surfaces would've been nice. Again something that can be improved upon and probably will be, as I'm sure that bunch of open world games are going to ape it from Zelda.
• I was really hoping to see a giant fish robot!! Snapmaws were a good alternative, but that needs to be a thing in the sequel(s).

Like Jeff said, I would be happy with Guerrilla tackling another new IP after this, but I think I'm also going to enjoy playing a whole trilogy of Horizon, which I'm guessing is definitely going to happen now with all the praise and good sales.

@glots: God yes, the climbing in Horizon really blows. Traversing the world in general isn't all that good since the mounts are pretty slow but circling a mountain until you see the white painted ledge was really annoying.

As I've finally gotten on with the process of actually advancing the storyline through the Meridian stuff, I have to say if anything is a bummer about this game for me it's the obvious lack of polish on this story. Over and over, I find myself interested in the content of it but fairly put off by the presentation. I spent a half hour last night in a single room listening to audio logs and reading email records that were all very compelling and interesting, but you could only do one thing at a time and I constantly ran into the issue Patrick mentioned on the Waypoint pod of Aloy monologuing underneath the audio log because I walked through the invisible tripwire that triggered a comment from her.

Coupled with several very important conversations taking place Mafia III-style (aka static, animatronic figures speaking to each other rather than proper cutscenes) and some dramatic swings in tone, it really dulls the impact of a story that is setting itself up to be a really fun twist on the Computer Apocalypse I think. I want to know more, but I'm 95% certain I'm not going to enjoy very much the process of that learning. As an example of those dramatic swings that comes from a meaningless side quest (or three), this game will have you in conversation with a character you were asked to find for someone else and then that person will just appear in the scene; once they admitted to following me (through all those Stalkers? Impressive!) and another time they literally just popped in like a children's cartoon.

Characterization is also shaky. Me personally, I buy Aloy as a snarky "video game protagonist" because they made it clear early in the game that she can read English where the others only write in glyphs and that she was clearly studying as much literature about the world around her as was made available. But they don't always play her that way, and it's not clear why she lacks knowledge on certain subjects like the Sun-King or nature of the machines for any reason other than Horizon does the bulk if not all of its storytelling through exposition. This is one of the most blatant examples of Tell, Don't Show in video games I've seen in a while and exposes the huge risk Horizon took by placing the real meat of their story somewhere other than where Aloy is. It also shines a light on just how cleverly written The Witcher 3's dialogue was written in order to introduce people to all the rules of this world while also making it feel lived in and understood by everyone. Horizon could use more of that; it's heavy on ideas, light on execution, and as I begin to focus on the story missions more than the side quests and combat it's becoming more and more clear how high the highs and how low the lows are for this portion of the Horizon experience.

@nodima said:

I agree with most of this. There are definitely some rough edges to not just the actual story, but the way gameplay interacts with the storytelling, i.e. audio-logs being interrupted by invisible triggers for other dialogue.

As far as Aloy goes, I think the devs never quite figured out how to make a smart player character work with trying to convey that information to the player. I mean, Aloy as a character in the world probably would know about the Sun-King and the politics of that world, etc. But the player doesn't and needs it explained. The problem is by having those explanations come from Aloy asking questions, it creates the problem of the character asking about things she should clearly know already. It kind of demonstrates the weakness of that Mass-Effect dialogue wheel style of conversations - it boils everything down to a discrete set of questions and answers that doesn't flow very well as a conversation.

I think your point about the Witcher is well-taken on that score. That game did a better job of weaving the world building into dialogue in a more natural way. For example, there's a part where you need to cross a guarded river and the captain tells you he can't let you across until some Scoi'tel are dealt with. If that conversation existed in Horizon, you'd have an option to ask something like "Who are the Scoi'tel?" which would be dumb because Geralt would already know that. Instead, The Witcher just had the two characters talk about things for a bit and trusted the player to be smart enough to figure things out from context. Way better way of doing things.

As far as the story stuff goes, I actually think the Old World plot line is far less interesting that the relationships between the currently existing tribes, and I wish the machines hadn't been the main focus of the story. I think my distaste for it comes down to a couple of things - the writing and the structure of how you find out about the Old World. Namely, it's that too much of the cool stuff is linked to the main story chapters.

So, at least in my experience, most of the audio and text logs you find out in the open world don't relate to the machine conflict in any way. Instead, it's mostly just generic stuff from "everyday life." Not only do I find this boring, but most of it is written in a sort of obnoxious over-the-top "the modern world is, like, so shallow" kind of way to the extent that I find the lack of subtlety severely off-putting.

When you do get to the logs about the actual development of the machine war and the downfall of the Old World, it gets more interesting and better written. The problem is that almost all of it is stuck in areas you can only get to by doing the main story line. This severely hamstrings the sense of discovery you get from finding those logs because it feels like you're being railroaded into finding out about it. It isn't organic, it's just "OK, go into this room of the bunker. Now check this room. And then the room after that." And all the information you get from doing that is conveniently placed in near chronological order. You aren't piecing anything together. The most thrilling moments I had were when I would stumble on the rare war log out in the open world, because it generated a sense of discovery and mystery. I wish the game had done more of that.

@lawgamer: as many problems as I have with the story her not knowing the Sun King actually does make sense. The Nora appear to be the most primitive of all the tribes, most deeply steeped in superstition and hostile towards technological advances. They seem secluded from the rest of the world and even geographically there is a belt of mountains separating their lands from the rest of the map. On top of this Aloy grew up even further secluded in an already entrenched community, shunned as an outcast and exiled to live in the wilds outside of civilization.

For me the game just never made good on her being that much wiser than everyone else. At times they try to accent how she's a naive young adult through Sylens but then that clashes with everything else. I mean everyone is just such a dope compared to her. The nature of the game, without going into spoilers, doesn't justify that in my opinion.

You must remember Aloy grow up with the focus with some vague understanding of the tech unaffected by dogma and superstition of the tribe but oblivious to the goings on in the outside world outside the tribe, as a result Aloy often comes across wise and naive depending on the circumstances which is understandable.

I agree with most of this but honestly it didn't bother me all that much and I really liked where the story went despite some of how they present it being really corny. Like, I legitimately felt bummed out for that world listening to how it fell. Despite questionable writing and voice acting I did like a few of the characters like Vanasha, Nil and Varl. Im also not a big fan of Aloy, she talks way too much to herself during quests and out in the open world just describing the obvious thing thats happening. She's also a dick to a lot of people and there are some ham fisted attempts to show how much of an independent woman she is and how she doesn't need a man. Pretty much every major dude she meets falls in love with her immediately. It didn't bother me in the end that much but it really stood out.

Pretty much at the end of the game now. Ended up just going back and finishing up a few side quests and collectible hunts before I finish this out last night and I'm really glad i did. If you go for any set of collectibles in this game I would reccomend seeking out all the vantage points and reading through the longer versions of the entries once you've gotten them all. I thought it was a really good piece of writing and I'm glad I went back to get those pieces together.

Overall this game has been fantastic, I ended up picking up the Pro for this and don't regret it at all. Looking forward to seeing what comes next from Guerrilla

Twenty hours in and I finally figured out how elemental damage works. I didn't realize there was a little meter you needed to fill up with multiple strikes to make the machine vulnerable to regular attacks. Not a complaint, but I'm glad I'm hip to it now, cuz the machine battles have some pretty fun strategy to them.

I wish the human battles had more options, though. SoM and Far Cry gave you a number of options to take down a bandit camp. Is there a point where I can corrupt a machine and send it into a stronghold? It's a bit boring hiding in tall grass or just sniping everyone. I'll set up tripwires and fire bombs at enemy groups just to switch things up.

If anyone is having trouble with the scenarios where you have to deal with a lot of enemies at once, I highly recommend you unlock the summon mount skill. It is an easy, hassle free way to get some of the enemy horde off of your back and also the mounts can not only take a fair amount of damage but they are also good at dishing out damage as well. For example as I was about to enter into the final battle of the 'A Daughter's Vengeance' side quest, the mount that I rode to that location decided it would have a go at this mini boss and finished him and all of his cronies off in the time it took me to fire four arrows. Here's the video: https://youtu.be/DlhZELG8Ws8

Just finished the game tonight. Few nitpicks, but overall a pretty amazing open world game. Unique combat, unique setting, and a well-done story.

The combat really takes off once you get a few of the key abilities and advanced weapons. I mostly stuck to bows, but the weapon wheel with subdivisions for ammo types made it really easy and fun to switch on the fly between tearing off equipment, freezing, knocking them down - and it was easy to mix in some stealth and overriding machines at times. Once you get the hang of it it's amazing how much better you feel taking on things that used to tear you apart. You spend big parts of the game scared of any combat scenario or the more dangerous machines, but eventually you get the tools and talent to just run into two behemoths or three stalkers and take them down no problem.

The opening of the game is a masterclass in building the world and characters, letting the mystery and story unfold over time. The game hits on a lot of standard video game tropes later on, but it's wrapped in a fairly interesting take on post-post apocalypse and some twists that (at least for me) were pretty impressive to see unfold. There were a few major exposition dumps in missions, but I didn't mind that much. And like Jeff noted, it was great just to see a game that wasn't afraid to pose all of these major questions implicitly and explicitly, and then answer nearly all of them in the game. There are some loose ends for sequel/DLC-bait, but it was very satisfying to see through in a way that's often missing in games these days.

And as much as I wasn't sold on Aloy the character at times, I did like her journey and really liked all the other characters around her. There are maybe a dozen characters that are all really interesting and well-developed.

Random things that should have been better:

Inventory management and associated vendor dealings all were way more annoying than they needed to be. The game is extremely unclear on what you should/shouldn't keep, there's no easy way to sell vendor trash, and the item stacks exacerbate the issue by punishing you for picking up too much in the way of crafting materials.

Quests may as well as not have rewards. Most of the side quests were interesting in their own right, but the fact that almost every quest just gives you a generic box that usually has trash in it still dissuaded me from completing stuff. When I first made it to the hub and turned in collectables only to find out there was no real reward beyond blind boxes made the whole thing seem like pointless open-world nonsense. Upgrading your bow to handle different ammo types through targeted quests seems a lot better than buying it off one of the dozens of generic vendors.

Edit: And I forgot the most annoying thing by far. Once I reached the point of inventory limit and no need to pick up craftable materials, literally the only thing I picked up was medical plants. The fact that they blended together with fire kiln roots annoyed me constantly. It probably would break the game as is, but I would have preferred the game be balanced to refill your medical supplies at fires as opposed to creating busywork of me scouring the countryside or stopping constantly when running between quests. If I ran out in a big battle it takes a dozen plus plants to refill, which means running and stopping instead of riding a mount.

Just beat the game, holy shit the story in this game in smart, original and really wonderfully put together. If you told me this game would shine because of its story a year ago I would've laughed and said " by the Team who made Kill one? Please!!" But I am so happy about how wrong I was. The game certainly has flaws but I think the majority of the gameplay is engaging and the story with all the bits of text and dialogue really make this game special.

I would urge anyone who has a PS4 to give the game a shot and anyone who doesn't to either get your hands on one somehow or enjoy the story ny some other means. I loved it.

Finished the game tonight. I love the idea of the story but I think it was delivered in a pretty ramshackle way and once the story became my main focus (I didn't start down the main quest line in earnest until I was in the mid-30s, or about where Jeff's endgame save was in the Quick Look) I often took dialogue moments as breaks to read articles on sites I'd been ignoring during my first few days with the game when gameplay was front and center. I wish there were more actual cutscenes in the game, and I found the way the game delivered so much of its story through audio logs that could be cut off by cutscenes, obscured by Aloy talking to herself/Sylens or go on for several minutes while another audio log (and three more after that) is staring you in the face a real momentum and engagement killer.

But even more than that, it was all the critical dialogue being delivered between two animatronic puppets that really fell flat for me; I'd have been more okay with just how much of the original, engaging, smart story is obfuscated by thousands of years of time elapsing between that time and Aloy's if Aloy's world wasn't so filled with hollow back-and-forths between two statuesque lumps of polygons.

I love talking about what the story of this game was but in practice it felt fairly flat and unengaging; I can't tell if this is a contrary to popular opinion thought or not yet, but I really, really, really dislike everything about Sylens as a character (and I love Lance Reddick).

Started it yesterday and so far I'm really, really enjoying my time with this game. I welled up a little bit within the first 15 minutes, which definitely took me by surprise.

Game has sold pretty well and is also getting some DLC, apparently. Sign me up.

https://www.guerrilla-games.com/read/horizon-zero-dawn-global-sales-exceed-2-6-million

“We’re thrilled that Horizon Zero Dawn has been embraced by critics and players alike. Developing the game was a labor of love, so it’s extremely satisfying to see that it elicits the same passion and enthusiasm from the gaming public that we felt during its development,” said Guerrilla Managing Director Hermen Hulst. “This is only the beginning of Aloy’s story and our exploration of the world of Horizon Zero Dawn, with the team already hard at work on an expansion to the story.”

So I'm deeper in now, around 12-15 hours, and I really like the game but there are things holding it back from a 5/5 for me. Human combat is really lacking, even on hard. Climbing is very limited yet it isn't very intuitive. There have been a bunch of times where it's very clear where Aloy needs to go next and I tell her to go there, but instead she just hesitantly lifts an arm in that direction then goes back to holding onto whatever ledge she is on. The fact that this has happened so much but climbing is so limited is disappointing. I mean the entire map looks like it's a climbing while at the Y but you can only actually climb in very limited spots.

There's also some open world jank that hasn't been bad but is expected. I guess the weirdest jank for me are the abrupt and random camera cuts in dialogue scenes. Idk why it randomly cuts slightly closer or at a slightly different angle during these parts. They aren't adding drama or anything. They're just the slightest varioations in camera position and they happen, seemingly, for no reason. It takes me out of the scenes whenever they happen.

It's still a really great game that seems to have polished the standard open world formula better than any game yet.

Those bits are where you are actually supposed to hit a button to jump from one ledge to the next. Why you need to do that when the rest is automatic, I don't know. Presumably so the camera can slow down and you can look "epic" doing your jump. But given the fact there is no risk to doing it, it just doesn't make much sense.

My personal issue with the climbing is the inconsistent color-coding. The yellow is fine, but the white causes problems. I mean, I get that it looks more natural that way, but given that there are whole areas of the map covered in snow it becomes really hard to see where you can climb, particularly if there is a blizzard going on at the same time.

@lawgamer: thanks for the tip. When climbing is so linear and rote like this I usually just press in the direction and spam the jump button. It's what I do in Uncharted and Tomb Raider; I'm really tired of the linear climbing sequences, but it's more tolerable in an open world compared to the straight line of Uncharted.

I just finished this game, I thought it was amazing. Probably the best RPG game I've played on this gen of consoles along with Witcher 3. I have Zelda too, and after playing both I can't understand how Zelda is a 97% and this an 88% in review scores, I think this game is way better than Zelda. What does Zelda do better, puzzles? climbing? cooking? The story in Horizon is just so much better and the combat is much more fun.

I'm having a good time so far, but I have my frustrations, too. For one thing, I've killed more humans than any single robot. Jeff mentioned in the quick look that there are like four bandit camps(that he had found). That might well be true! But I've done three of them now, and additionally, one of the big main quests had my clean up a whopping five cultist camps. Who's idea was it to put humans in my robot hunting game? It's easily the most dull part of the game. The humans don't do anything special, they have no specific weak points other than the head, and they die with a non-satisfying red cloud. They're also real easy to kill with the whistling ability.

Overall, I have a difficult time with the combat. I get the sense that I'm supposed to use tear weapons to remove the armor parts and aim for blaze cannisters with fire arrows, but I only have one weapon(a shadow hunter bow, I believe) so far that does any significant tear damage. Even then, not too much. I tried lots of times to take a Thunderjaw head on, but there was just no way I was able to dodge all of those attacks and take him out with the hardheaded arrows, fire arrows and rope arrows I had on hand, while my blast/elemental slings barely dented him. The only way I was able to kill him was by jumping up a cliff where he had difficulty following and play it as a cover shooter, popping up and dismantling all his guns and weak spots piece by piece. And that's not very fun, but considering Aloy dies in like two hits while every bigger enemy is a project, I don't know what to do. So if anybody here have some hot tips for the combat, I'd love to hear it. For the record, I'm around level 20 and just made it to the outside of Meridia. Got distracted by the quarry and took a look at the boss there before stopping for the day.

@redhotchilimist: The way I played the game I mostly used 3 things

1. Tearblast arrows to remove armor and components

2. Freeze bombs because freezing enemies will boost damage

3. Sharpshooter arrows because they did the most damage

The biggest thing is the freeze bombs, if you wanna kill shit fast use the freeze bombs just make sure you fill the meter to actually freeze the enemies

@theveteran13: Thanks, those tips helped me a lot. I got some tearblast arrows today, and I can't believe how overpowered they seem, they just rip all that armor right off. Both the freeze bombs and shock bombs were helpful. As was the rope gun that ties enemies to the ground. Turns out it's a lot easier if you can just get the enemies into some sort of "stun" state. I'm shooting my tearblast arrows at foes, stunning them in different ways and then just wailing on their weakspots with my sharpshooter arrows. That stuff works.

@redhotchilimist: Get the fast bow that has arrows which deal tear damage and then kit it out with all 25%++ tear damage boosts and boom - you'll be blowing parts off those nasty machines at a nice steady clip. Also invest in the "slow down time when jumping" ability. I found shooting while sliding to be fairly useless, but having that ability lets you just hop around and each time you're in the air and aiming the slow-mo kicks in. It might not be very cinematic, but in clutch situations it's good for a breather.

The game gives you a ton of options that you really don't need to engage with all that much. Get the slingshot with blast damage and that will also take care of anything quite quickly. Sell all traps, unless you know, you really want to roleplay or something.