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Finally got around to playing it and finishing it, still a great game in a lot of ways but couldn't help but feel disappointed. I knew there'd be no way they could top the story of the first one, especially since they spent that game answering most of the big lore questions. So all I wanted was a fun story, more discoveries, and a more fine tuned experience. Generally, they provided that. But the combat felt...off to me compared to the first one. There were a lot of small, nagging issues that kept popping up. A lot of the new machines felt overengineered and my favorite fights just ended up being the old machines. Every improvement felt like it had new problems. The more I played the first game, the more I loved it. The more I played this one, the more annoyed I got by all these little things. It was a death by a thousand cuts. Stray thoughts The story going full sci-fi schlock was not the direction I wanted but it ended up being a fun enough ride and probably still my favorite part. It's not paced as well, the ending was hilariously absurd, but the missions themselves were fun in the moment. Going full schlock was probably one of the few options they had, but I was still hoping for a more grounded story like the first game describing the downfall of humanity instead of immortal space narcissists. Was absolutely furious at the Ted Faro chapter. It turned him from a realistic villain into a cartoonishly vain mustache twirler with a private harem and massive statue of himself keeping himself alive on experiments and murdering dissenters. Fine. Not out of character if you go that route, but then they went through the effort to explain that HE WAS STILL ALIVE...just past that door...and then you dont even get to see his ugly mutated rear end and some random mook kills him offscreen. No one in the entire game's world was more deserving of getting a spear through the guts than Ted Faro and they designed the story to give you a chance to do just that and instead he dies offscreen by some nameless guy. What a waste. Let me loving kill him, or at least let me watch him die, since killing him might be out of character. New machines I liked - Widemaws, Leaplashers, Spikesnouts, Bristlebacks, Tremortusks, and most of the tweaks they made to old machines were welcome New machines I hated - Tiderippers (holy poo poo gently caress these things), Shellsnappers, Clamberjaws There is an animation that plays when you get knocked down sometimes that takes so annoyingly long to come out of that it's infuriating. Especially when most of the machines in the game now have huge gap closing lunge attacks. I got stuck in a knockdown loop so many times because Aloy would take too long to get up. Fights with multiple machines were an obnoxious "hit by projectile from offscreen" annoyance fest. The hitboxes occasionally felt wonky and inconsistent. I don't remember having these problems with HZD at all. They also nerfed my favorite playstyle from the first game and made overrides pretty meaningless too outside mounts. Felt like ropecasters were useless compared to the first game. Slower and less effective eve upgraded with coils than just overloading a machine with an element attack. But the new weapon additions are mostly good and my layout was more varied this time around. Kotallo is my favorite new character, Zo was dull, Alva was kind of irritating but a good addition to the cast. RIP Varl Ran into a lot more bugs. My sunwing mount got trapped in trees picking me up maybe 30% of the time, lost sound effect audio a number of times, boltcasters did not fire appropriately occasionally for no reason I could determine. Catching fish for upgrades was almost unfathomly bad, as literally half the fish I'd swim to would simply...despawn when I reached them. I think the game was actually spawning fake fish for scenery and that's why they'd vanish on me, but it was impossible to determine which would vanish until I was near them. Team Drakka Still a good game and I'll happily play the next one, but it felt like a chore in ways the first one never did to me.
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Jul 3, 2022 02:18
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 01:40 |
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Honestly, I was thankful Elden Ring took the spotlight of the "constantly mentioned groundbreaking open world game" crown from BotW, because I actually loved Elden Ring whereas I found BotW pretty overrated, my biggest surprise that year was liking HZD much more. I think ER and HFW are very different overall and I'm fine with and have problems with both approaches. I played them both back to back (ER first) and the thing that really stood out to me comparing the two was just how explicitly clear and well put together ER's world was. Horizon looks absolutely beautiful and incredibly detailed but it actually kind of works against it sometimes, I was constantly tapping my focus to find out what parts of the world were interactable, where I could actually climb, where these little holes in the wall were, and following the little ?'s on the map because they weren't clearly defined otherwise. You pretty much have to use the focus to explore at times, even with the yellow climb paint. Trying to find those loose rock walls underwater to open a hole had me stumped multiple times, even with the focus on
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Aug 31, 2022 17:25
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Mr. Funny Pants posted:I can't even say I "hate" it, I haven't played it and my exposure is limited. I have infinite respect for FS, they have a singular style and vision that they don't compromise on. I don't care for their aesthetic, but that's not a knock on their talent, just a difference of taste; they are obviously insanely talented artists and craftspeople. But yeah, to me it looks like largely aimless wandering. When I ask my son, who ostensibly is paying more attention than I am, what he's doing, he can't ever really give me an idea of what's going on. He doesn't have the greatest attention span, but in most games he can at least give me the gist of what he's trying to accomplish. The joy he's getting out the game appears to be entirely from the awesome enemy design and the challenge of the combat (to which I always helpfully contribute by yelling, "I'd go for this one's ankles."). Nothing wrong with either of those things of course, I just struggle to understand how it rewrites the rules or sets the standard for open world games. And again, I'm not saying that Horizon is the perfect template, it's got a long list of issues of its own. The main thing ER (and BotW) did that sets itself apart from ubisoft and most other open world games is how the exploration works. It's completely based on freedom. There are very few actual chokepoints that require you to do certain things to progress. You have side activities in Horizon, but to actually finish the game you have to do a long series of quests, things won't open up to you till you do other things, you have to sit through story sequences, everything is marked...it works, but ER and BotW have this quality to exploration that Horizon just doesn't have. You can wander wherever you want at any time and the joy is just turning a corner and finding something new and weird, and you found it organically, not because it had a ? On the map or a quest sent you there Horizon and the like can be better for setting up good story moments, but it's missing that freedom. I found a bunch of cool locations in Horizon that were just empty because I clearly was supposed to activate the quest to set up the encounter first. While I love FS games I will say they are...not interesting to watch other people play because it does look like aimless wandering and slow combat. A lot of the joy comes from how it feels to play. Horizon is a better watch Febreeze fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Aug 31, 2022 |
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Aug 31, 2022 21:31
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Absolutely agree they shouldn't have went through the writing effort to make Ted still alive through all that build up, especially over two games, just to hear some vague sounds and have him die an offscreen death to some nameless guard. It was so lame and the biggest disappointment of the game for me. The dude killed the world, maybe he is a joke of a person but in the world of horizon he absolutely deserved a pathetic, cathartic death instead of an offscreen flatline. I'd have have preferred finding his body in some back room where he died a pathetic lonely death because everyone he enslaved for his little end of world harem rebelled and offed themselves rather than keep him happy. Hell even the CEO killing him by his own hand to "take his place" or something would have been better than nameless goon 43 sets him on fire offscreen
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Sep 10, 2022 07:06
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The Horus that wakes up might not even be fully operational, kind of like how the first deathbringer you fight in ZD is busted and stuck in one spot. They have plenty of options to make the fight epic but..within forgivable reason. the ending of FW has a lot of insane silly stuff happening already. I always wanted to fight one and I figured it would be a shadow of the colossus setpiece kinda multistage fight with aloy climbing on it as it moved, getting in there to hack parts or destroy things from within.
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Feb 10, 2023 07:23
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Probably be able to find the Santa Monica pier underwater too, and the griffith observatory, maybe Dodger stadium and parts of Disney Edit: just rewatched the trailer and the observatory is like right at the beginning as she flies towards downtown Febreeze fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Feb 11, 2023 |
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Feb 11, 2023 00:03
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Finally got to play the DLC and felt kinda let down. It felt smaller with much less to do than Frozen Wilds did. I didn't buy the romance with Seyka at all, Aloy had better chemistry and way more good character moments with other members of the cast, like Tallanah. Everything with Seyka felt a little forced and unnatural and I never found her particularly interesting. Londra was okay, none of the zeniths were that compelling to begin Horus fight lived up to my hopes though, and Gildun showing back up was the best part of the entire thing Booting it up and hearing Lance Reddick's voice immediately was a huge bummer
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May 7, 2023 18:05
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I honestly would have felt more of a similarity between the two if Seyka had gotten arrested at the beginning for breaking the focus rule and Aloy had to break her out to continue the story, making her an actual outcast who has earned goodwill and changed minds by the end Instead the one compliance guy is just rude and you get rid of him in the one side quest and the Admiral is never really a problem
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May 7, 2023 19:56
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Maybe my type of playstyle helped me to some degree because I don't even know what 3 waterwing fight yall are complaining about I had more trouble with the first frog machine than any waterwings
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May 9, 2023 21:55
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Sivart13 posted:when you go on a sidequest to investigate the fate of the quen on the island immediately south of Fleet's End I genuinely don't remember having an issue there which surprises me because I'm far worse at the combat in this one compared to Zero Dawn. I think I downed one from stealth and just ran around popping the other two on occasion, I usually aimed for the big fat beaks so I don't recall ever hearing a screech attack
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May 9, 2023 22:07
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They will probably just recast a voice actor who can do a reasonable impression. They might downplay his role from the intended part too, but they can't poochie him now
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May 12, 2023 21:15
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One thing HZD did better was weapon bloat. HZD basically only had two weapons at every level, the one with damage ammo and the one with elemental ammo. It worked. FW got so, so bloated with weapons and ammo types that even with my preferred loadout I wasn't using half the ammo types I didn't like. I'd prefer it if they let you actually swap out ammo types on weapons so you didn't have to upgrade two bows because one bow had frost and the other had acid but you couldn't just put both on one bow and replace, like, the plasma or berserk arrows you never touched and save a weapon slot Let me get a weapon and personally slot what ammo I want on it. You can even make it so I have to buy/create the ammo the first time before it unlocks. Can't use plasma ammo till I do a sidequest? Sure, fine with that. I just want to customize my bow ammo. Would cut down on the weapons and grind and let you make a far more custom aloy and ignore what stuff you don't use easier Febreeze fucked around with this message at 00:25 on May 14, 2023 |
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May 14, 2023 00:22
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theCalamity posted:I agree and I said as much in my post. My issue is how it was done in the game where the Ceo just walks off screen and comes back disgusted. It’s pretty weak. Fully agree. Keeping nightmare Faro offscreen is a choice and that's fine, but the presentation of it is dull. We don't see Aloy's reaction because she doesn't see him. We don't see the CEO's immediate reaction to his world shattering, just the aftermath as he scoots away. Then a random goon just goes and kills him offscreen. You hear a few gross sounds. It's poorly staged. As soon as the scene ended I was like "wait that was it?"
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Jun 27, 2023 02:10
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Mr. Funny Pants posted:I've ranted a ton a long time ago in this thread about how Faro's scene was handled but I'll try to summarize my feelings since it's come up again. All of this. Faro's fate could have been left to the imagination and worked fine, but they decided to actually go to his bunker. They decided to build up his little end story. They choose to go through the effort of coming up with a story reason that he's still alive. They chose all of this, and climaxed it with a boring scene of Aloy standing there as the CEO reacts offscreen and then Faro is killed by a random goon, also offscreen. They went through the effort of all of this, for that? I remember distinctly going "wait, that was it?" After the scene ended. It was lame. Either go full fanservice or don't do it that way at all I would have also preferred to have just found him dead in a chair in the bunker, having died alone because his slaves rebelled, and his immortality failed because he thought he could do it himself instead of getting on the zenith ship. That would have been a more fitting fate than mutant blob, and the whole meltdown could trigger because the CEO does something else stupid
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Jun 29, 2023 16:19
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massive spider posted:The thing is Faro is absolutely am egotistical shithead but the gold statue of himself felt too on the nose, or at the very least more Trump than Silicon Valley shithead. Yeah the statue was absurd and his weird plan to be a god of the new world didn't seem to quite coalesce with the Faro we saw at the end of HZD. Him deleting the Apollo database out of a mixture of guilt for ending the world and not wanting anyone to know, and the egotistical rationalization of "starting fresh" to cover up his guilt was so perfect tech billionaire brain. A guy who thinks he knows what's best for everyone even though the entire situation was caused by his own hubris. Then in FW it turns out he did it because he secretly planned to live forever as a god of the new world, and it just felt like it turned him from realistic ego driven tech bro to mustache twirling villian It wasn't enough to ruin the story or anything but I found it disappointing
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Jun 29, 2023 22:50
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I dont think the game gives a solid time frame between sobecks sacrifice and Ted killing everyone but it didn't seem like he had a lot of time to go that far and set up his little harem bunker plan, because it wasn't just him down there. He had to have some plan in place His mental state could have certainly devolved that quickly but by the time sobeck dies and he scoots back to his bunker the air isn't even breathable It just felt like it didn't quite match up. Then again the idea of building an entire self sufficient ai system to terraform the planet in the timeframe from planning to end while the earth is getting destroyed also seemed unrealistic so maybe I'm thinking too hard
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Jun 29, 2023 23:43
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Falukorv posted:Verbena bleeds red though, for some reason. It did surprise me that her death didnt seem to rattle the rest of the zeniths at all. Not because they care for her but the factt that someone manage to bypass her shield should raise some concern Maybe they didn't know? She's all alone on the mountaintop when she bites it and they are definitely the type to probably just assume she was an idiot who got herself killed. We really don't get to see their reaction to her because we don't spend a lot of time with them in general. Ytlaya posted:While that's true, I never got the impression you were supposed to care about them as characters. And Ted Faro's characterization was never really interesting, because he was basically just this comically evil character without any interesting motives beyond self-enrichment (which is fine for an antagonist, but I don't think he really comes off that much better than the characters in this game). Disagree with this, I think Faro from the first game is interesting precisely because he's not comically evil. He's just a regular idiot tech bro. He was kinda successful, got lucky and hired the right scientist who designed robots who helped save the world, let the praise go to his head, and then makes dumb decision after dumb decision based around profit like pivoting to war machines, designing them to be self-sustaining and unhackable without understanding the obvious bad idea that is, and then goes slowly insane when that accidentally dooms the world. He tries to do the right thing when it becomes clear he can't fix it himself and enlists Elizabet but he just goes slowly down the drain because he's now surrounded by people smarter than him doing better than him, and after Liz dies he drops off into delusion really fast. He destroys Apollo because his guilt over killing everyone and not wanting to be remembered as the guy who did it causes him to think the answer is giving humanity a "fresh start". He works so well as a villain because of how authentic he feels to real dipshits like Musk or Zuckerberg. He's a mediocre man who got lucky and then made very poor decisions. If he wasn't that interesting I don't think "gently caress Ted Faro" would have become such a catchphrase among the fanbase as it did. We all hate him for a reason. He's authentic and real in a very uncomfortable modern way and they achieved it with relatively limited screentime and info. One of the reasons I disliked FW was how it does make him comically evil. He goes from a realistic idiot tech bro with a massive ego who makes stupid decisions to a nutcase who is making giant gold idols of himself for his special bunker with his playboy harem while enslaving a doctor to make him immortal so he can be a new god to the next edition of humanity. Real billionaires are certainly also lunatics who might do something this bad but it felt like a dialed to 11 version from what we saw in ZD. I did at least appreciate that he got weird whereas the Zeniths never really get much characterization besides Tilda and then Londra to a lesser extent. FW felt like it took everything in a more schlocky direction overall. I think in the first game the modern world stuff is the weaker material. It's okay, but it doesn't have nearly the same power as the mystery backstory that slowly unravels. FW is kind of the reverse. The modern tribal stuff is more compelling/well done and the stuff related to the past is far less interesting since they already explained what happened.
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Apr 12, 2024 01:59
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Apraxin posted:There’s also a nice little character reason to go back to the main map during the dlc, although the game doesn’t tell you about it: (big spoiler for the main game) after every main mission in burning shores, if you go back to the grave outside your base, aloy will talk to her late friend about her experiences in LA and how she’s feeling. She does this in the first game too if you go back to visit Rost's grave periodically. I discovered it on my second playthrough and it actually adds a lot to that relationship
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Apr 13, 2024 05:22
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I don't think we ever really get enough information on Aloy pre-HZD to have an accurate idea on how much she knows about sexuality. we don't know what she learned in her downtime from watching others at a distance, Rost teaching, or her focus. I got the sense from HZD that she just pushed all romance out of her brain because she had more important poo poo to do and didnt consider it vital. There is a brief moment early on in the denver stadium mission where she talks to herself and briefly considers Varl as a prospect if I remember correctly, but that's all we get besides her dismissing everyone who hits on her I definitely felt Erend had a small crush that he knew was futile though. Air Skwirl posted:I kinda thought she'd hook up with Talanah Tbh I think this would have been better. She had an interesting history with Tanallah and a relationship forming from that feels like it would have been fairly natural
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Apr 28, 2024 08:17
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FW definitely has a deeper and more complicated combat system if you are into that. Lots more specialized options and enemy types, but upgrading is far more of a pain. Good system for people who like to plan and execute and specialize in their build. It got so frustrating when things went off script though and that agonizingly long 3 second knockdown effect when you get hit sometimes pissed me off endlessly I preferred the HZD system personally but I can see why someone would prefer FW. Nothing in FW felt as good to me as concentration bunny hopping while strafing in ZD so you could pop arrows into robots. That was my preferred method once I got better weapons and FW ruined that because it took away the auto concentration when jumping. Febreeze fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Apr 29, 2024 |
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Apr 29, 2024 00:56
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Olothreutes posted:FW doesn't tell you this, but you should be jumping/sliding around because it makes Aloy draw her bow faster. There's a quickdraw mechanic that basically works when you would get the ZD concentration, including a small amount of time slowdown and additional aim assist. It works for sliding, jumping, and falling. The catch, I think, is that you have to start aiming while the motion is in progress. I'm not sure if it works if you are already aiming when you jump. It doesn't feel the same even when you do it right, I never managed to get the hang of it in my entire playthrough and I never used slide because inevitably I'd slide into geometry and get stopped/hit I don't need fast drawing, I wanted that explicit auto concentration that occurred when you jumped and then began aiming that HZD has, I'm pretty sure it was an upgrade skill point. I spent like an hour hopping around trying different aiming techniques and movement they made and they definitely changed how it works and I hated it. HZD had simpler mechanics and movement and I think it was better for it. FW is burdened by making everything more advanced and complicated like "sliding gives you quick draws" and the like. I'm sure it's fun to master if you put the effort in but I just never gelled with it and had it become second nature in this one like I did in ZD. By the end of ZD I was willingly running up to thunderjaws and picking fights just for the fun of it, by the end of FW I didn't even want to fight anything unless I had to for whatever mission I was doing. Except tremortusks, those were still really cool to fight every time. Tiderippers can get hosed Febreeze fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Apr 30, 2024 05:56
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 01:40 |
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Did anyone use Adhesive at all? Nobody ever brings it up. I tried it out for a bit but it didn't seem to be worth the trouble. I also never used the ropecaster variant that attaches canisters to enemies, seemed interesting but rather too situational to bother with when most enemies simply already have elemental targets built into them that do the same thing if you hit themexquisite tea posted:If I were making Horizon 3 I’d combine the effects of Acid/Purgewater and Fire/Plasma and make the plasma explosion scale a lot better. I like this idea, fire seemed less useful in FW overall when it was the best way to deal with glinthawks in ZD. I actually used Plasma a lot during my playthrough, not because it did a lot of damage but it was a pretty effective form of crowd control in a game with a lot of group fights but a lack of good crowd control weapons. You could pop an enemy right off the bat with a plasma timer and then run to reposition and fight the next enemy while the first one blows up and gets stunned for a bit. You could actually keep groups in a state of rotating stunlocks, it was mostly how I dealt with flying enemies. I never had any issue with waterwings because I'd just plasma them and they'd get knocked down so I could better focus on single targets. Also the plasma explosion sounds really cool
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May 8, 2024 17:52
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