The Dreamcast controller is ugly as sin but surprisingly comfortable to hold. It must have the widest delta between looks and ergonomics of any controller.
Horizon Zero Dawn would have been awesome with a nemesis system, especially if it was applied to the robo-dinosaurs. You could have the in-universe justification that a particular robot uploads its consciousness upon death and downloads into a new body, and now it remembers how you killed it before and it will adapt accordingly. Start having epic robots that know you, and you have to keep an eye out for them, but also upon being destroyed they could dispense better scraps.
Don’t get me started on Horizon: Forbidden West. It was a beautiful game. It also had every gameplay problem the first one did, and added several more to boot. The last half of the game was fucking tedious, and I basically finished it out of spite.
“I tried to find out who was playing Baldur’s Gate 3, but all I found was this worthless pile of sexual abuse evidence!” [Throws cardboard box into incinerator]
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’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!”
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.