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Finished all the way through Burning Shores main quest over the weekend, a very solid experience. I played the entire thing on Linux via Proton, and it was almost entirely flawless throughout. Occasional graphical glitches during dialogue cutscenes, but never during gameplay, and no crashes at all. This game was my big litmus test to see if I could drop my Windows partition and switch over to Linux entirely for gaming, and it passed with flying colors. I'm running a necessarily idiosyncratic Gentoo installation, too, not a standardized SteamOS or Ubuntu setup, so it's doubly impressive. Although Steam and Proton are pretty self-contained once they're installed, so it's probably pretty solid across distributions unless you're messing around with an alternative libc or something. I love the game and the core gameplay loop enough that I'm going through the motions of maxing out some legendaries for an eventual NG+ playthrough, but there were plenty of small frustrations that keep me from calling it a 10/10 game. Details in the world geometry present unnecessary obstacles both during combat and mounted travel. Rolled into a rock or a tree behind you mid-fight? Oops, too bad, stay stuck for a moment while enemy machine charges you at ramming speed. Same thing if your mount encounters, say, a protruding log that's all too common in Tenakth territory, or a sharp curve up a mountainside. Too much to negotiate for its shorted-out little machine brain, looks like you better spur it back into action even though you were running free a second ago, hope you didn't aggro that last pack of machines you passed! This latter is especially sad, because the mounted pathfinding is otherwise excellent. It seems like the intent was that you could set your destination marker and watch the world go by hands-free, and that was certainly what I tried to do far more often than I used fast travel, but the mount would get stuck far too often for this to be fully realized. It definitely seems like there was a disconnect between the art team and the gameplay team or the testers, and the game was only being tested so late that there was no time to go back and fix it. All the many little geometry details are part of what makes this game so beautiful, but I hope they're well aware of the resulting gameplay hangups and prepared to clean it up for the next game. Likewise, the more complex combat and movement options kind of fell flat for me, a relatively casual gamer who played the first game back in 2021 and never did NG+ with it. I wanted to give melee + warrior bows a fair shot at the start of the game, but the nerfed dodge roll plus the lengthy knockdown and stun animations made me get trampled to death far too often to be fun, so I ended up on a hunter+sharpshot setup very similar to what I used in the first game. Count me among the many who glossed over the combat utility of sliding and wouldn't have ever bothered with it if not for this thread. I think a lot of players are only going to bother with the new combat options if they bother with NG+. If anything, Aloy's stun and knockdown animations were too long for my taste, and were what had me cussing at the screen more often than anything; especially during the final stage of the big boss fight at the end of Burning Shores. This isn't Guilty Gear, I'm not getting locked down in the corner by a skilled Sin or Bridget player, let me play the game. Whoever told them they should move in a Soulslike direction by having Aloy take her time getting back up had it wrong. That said, I might not do it right away, but I am certainly inspired to do back to back NG+ runs of Zero Dawn and Forbidden West. I actually never bothered with Frozen Wilds the first time around, because I didn't realize it was meant to be completed before the final boss fight, but I will definitely have to go back and play that at the very least. That means I didn't know who Gildun was when he turned up, but his one quest had enough personality and character injected into it that I came away loving him anyway. It makes losing Lance Reddick feel like a fresh pain all over again, because Burning Shores having Sylens assert that they were going to need to delve the ruins of all these ancient defense contractors, plus having Gildun the crazy delver get signed up with the Focus squad, seems like they were telegraphing the greatest one-sided buddy comedy of all time for Horizon 3. And Sylens choking out that he actually appreciates Aloy's efforts and respects her as his final line of the DLC epilogue was just a total gut-punch. Admiral Gerrit from Burning Shores was one character who stuck out as seriously underutilized, and I hope they bring him back for the next game. IMDB tells me that the voice actor, Mark Noble, also played Regis in Witcher 3... they 100% need to give him a bigger role. Definitely seems like he, Alva, and Seyka are being poised as the change agents for Quen society, and I would bet that means Quen territory will be a major setting. Wouldn't be surprised if the Zenith shuttle gets used as a travel system, or at least a travel MacGuffin.
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Apr 16, 2024 00:36
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 09:07 |
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