I’ll be honest, I played through HZD and liked it a lot, but I came away with a list of minor improvements that could have made the game better.
If anything, Forbidden West had all of those same problems and more, and it had a less interesting story. Just to talk about the quests, for instance, I found myself running in boring laps trying to get a particular resource to upgrade a particular weapon, repeating the same battle so many times that it became truly tiresome.
Then I finally upgraded the weapon… and found that by the end of the story I had a bunch of incompletely-upgraded weapons and armor that nevertheless left me so overpowered that the final boss fight was hilariously trivial. If I’d invested the enormous amount of grind to actually max out all the top-tier equipment, then the fight would have been even easier than that.
The franchise has a lot going for it, but they need to figure out their pacing.
Edit: Also, I definitely don’t need a pointless little board game. “Hey, you want to play Strike?” “Fuck no! I’m out here trying to save the fucking world! Fuck off with your minis!”
With as much as they talked about the irrevocable destruction of the global ecosystem coming up in a matter of months, and then the constantly rotating day-night cycle, I imagine it would be possible to find out if your in-game time played actually was more or less than that deadline. It would be hilarious if the world was going to end in six months but then the math showed that you actually spent more than a year running around shooting the fins off of robo-pterodactyls.
I had fun with Zero Dawn but came out with a list of minor improvements that would make the game significantly better. Forbidden West had almost all the same problems, and added several more besides. The game really started to lose me when I was trying to upgrade a particular piece of equipment and just had to keep doing laps up and down a goddamn mountain with no nearby quick travel location, hoping that an elite version of an enemy would spawn, then laboriously killing it in the hopes that a particular resource would drop, only to get disappointed by the RNG and have to repeat the process, because that was the only place where that resource could be got, and that was the only place where that enemy would spawn.
The grind was appalling, and it took what was a moderately interesting fight the first couple of times and turned it into a monotonous chore.
Also the upgrade barely turned out to be worth the effort.
I finished the game more out of spite than anything else, and I did not purchase the DLC, nor do I have any plans of getting any sequels. Damn shame, because there’s an awful lot about both games to like.
The core gameplay of shooting robots with arrows and spears while exploring a huge and beautiful post-post-apocalyptic world with your trusty grappling hook and hang glider is really fucking great.
The never ending scrounging for materials, especially when those materials have to be ground out of %chance drops from huge monsters that don’t appear frequently enough for the % to trigger without running in circles is not so great.
The plot being firmly on the rails while trying to pretend that you’re making choices sometimes, is pretty fucking obnoxious. If they just stopped pretending that my choices matter and made the way the story unfolded more linear, it would be a lot less infuriating.
The character face animations and the pace of the editing during conversations is TERRIBLE. It’s not so bad when everyone is fairly stoic, but every time someone has a big smile it looks like the “Is this better?” moment from Men In Black. And virtually every conversation is punctuated with a bizarre pause where it’s obvious that the game is transitioning from conversation mode to gameplay mode, but they couldn’t be bothered to trim that added ¾ of a second so there’s this super unnatural pause where the character model goes back to neutral while the camera is right on them.
Oh, and also there’s a handful of weapons that work with any reliability, and then there are several that are worse than useless and get me killed every time I try to use them. I justify these in my mind by pretending they are the in-universe equivalent of mall ninja shit that someone thought would look cool but would never actually be used.
Once I assumed that my kid could and would destroy everything that she touched, my outlook on life got a lot better. She’s actually not all that destructive at all, so most of the time I’m pleased with how well she’s doing, and when she does destroy something, I simply acknowledge that the truth I had previously assumed is being confirmed.
This probably isn’t what you meant, but I’m a huge fan of games that are obligate couch co-op games. Things like Overcooked, Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime, or Trine where you could play it alone, but there wouldn’t be much point. Playing a game where you have to cooperate with another person is a ton of fun.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered confirmed by ESRB rating (www.videogamer.com) angielski
We have reached new levels of “remaster of game that already looks great and runs well”
Higher difficulties in every single RPG. angielski
What's your love/hate game? (lemmy.zip) angielski
Mine would have to be League or Warframe tbh.
Are there any games like Diablo but not Diablo because Diablo? angielski
Play Station (lemmy.world)
deleted_by_author
You teleport into the last game world you played. What happens next? angielski
(Idea taken from a similar post I saw in Reddit a longer time ago)...