Horizon: Forbidden West

[Whoracle]

So, Horizon: Forbidden West has been out for a few days now. I'm having a lot of fun with it so far and am now squarely in the end game, storywise.

Short impressions:

Graphics are gorgeous, even on my plain standard PS4. Had one instance of the game lagging to hell and back, and three or four instances of broken quest triggers. Each time a restart of the game resolved the issue.

Traversal is fun. The climbing mechanics still feel a bit stiff, but way more open than in the last game.

I am so not a fan of ranged combat in this, but that's on me, since I HATE controllers for targetting and thus am bad with it. Don't know how it'd compare objectively. Go ask someone else :)
Melee is OK, but due to the size of the enemies it gets confusing at times. Still fun enough.

Now, the story:
Short version is that it's not as good as the first, but still good enough. Aloys character, at least in the beginning, feels a bit off-putting since she has a HUGE chip on her shoulder and feels needlessly antagonistic at times. She softens up a bit as the game progresses, but still her characterization feels a little bit off as a natural progression from the first game.

Worldbuilding is still top notch.

However, I've got two major gripes, spoilered below. Do not read until you finished the main quest Wings of the Ten. You have been warned!


First, the main antagonists: I feel the Far Zeniths are absolutely pale Villains. They feel... I guess "creatively bankrupt" is kind of fitting. They're immortal, overpowered and moustache-twirling evil for no (as of yet) adequately explained reason. I get that it was hard to follow up the plot of the first game adequately, but the Far Zeniths feel lackluster, like a comitee-driven safe option.

And secondly, the the end of Gemini Cauldron:
- You easily get manhandled by Far Zenith
- Your careful plans were not even a speed bump in their plans
- Varl dies needlessly, to be replaces by the much weaker Tilda - and for me personally, Varls death didn't strike a chord. Aloy was so distant and cold-ish towards him for most of the early-to-mid game, and while the interactions in the Base painted him as kind of the Heart of the team, it never really felt that way. And Tildas coat turn felt unearned because she was a complete non-entity during the rest of the game.
- Sylens. Just... Sylens. While we were gathering the subordinate functions, he gathered an Army and built a weapon that could disable the Far Zenith shields. Since so far we've seen for (or maybe five) Zeniths, one of which is dead and one of which turned tail, he should absolutely STEAMROLL them. Shure, he did it in a morally at least questionable if not outright bad way, but still it kinda undermines everything Aloy did during the 15-odd hours or however long it took me to get there kinda hard.
Add to that Aloys smug line at the end of Wings of the ten - "Leave it to someone who knows what she's doing" - and I just cringe. Aloy gathered 3 functions and a bunch of friends, managed to reassemble GAIA only with Sylens' help in the first place, and managed to do Far Zeniths work for them, basically, while Sylens has a (arguably, according to Tilda) workable plan in action to actually defeat the Zeniths.
No tot mention that even in the prologue he was like "Aloy, you screwed around for 6 months while I have done your work for you - btw here's GAIA, kthxbye". The writing here is just weak and reminds me a little of Kai Leng from ME3. He's for some reason way more effective than our protagonist, and I can't fathom why the writers went that route - especially since Aloy is called "Saviour" left and right. It just doesn't feel good to me, in any way.


Now, those spoiler problems are of course not bad enough to prevent me from finishing the game, but after the very good story in first game and the (excluding spoilered stuff above) at least servicable to competent story during this game, it kind of leaves a bad taste.



So, anyone played it? Impressions? Opinions?

And since the game is pretty new, please tag spoilers, ideally denoting up to where in the story they are.

[JadedDM]

I've started it. I'm about 7-8 hours in, and I haven't even reached the titular Forbidden West yet! I have a feeling this game is going to take me a loooong time to finish.

[Dire_Flumph]

Yeah, I just finished the 2nd tutorial area and moving into the wider world, and I'm having a lot of fun now, but I'm a bit worried about all the extra grindy fluff.

The original would have been fantastic as a more focused linear game in the style of a Naughty Dog release. The story portions were great, as was the combat. But the open world had so little of interest to it, yet it was necessary to level up gear and skills. I've already got weapons that I can tell aren't going to last me very long and I'm just dreading having to grind to level up newer weapons only to discard those. I'm also getting really tired of games that tell me that I can only use one particular animal to make a bag for one item but I need a completely different specific animal to make a bag for another item. Especially when it's something like squirrels that are hard to even see.

But it's really good so far, and the story is enough to keep me on the hook. I'm just hoping the open world portions are either more interesting or less necessary.

About the ranged combat on console, I'd agree normally, but the concentration mechanic a lot of these games have works well for me and Forbidden West's seems pretty generous. In the last big story battle I was able to hit and light three blaze canisters with fire arrows on a group of machine riders as they rode past at speed, and it just felt *good* (Even better when the canisters all exploded under their riders a few seconds later). I am playing on a PS5 in performance mode though, so that could be making a difference.

I don't mind the chip on Aloy's shoulder, at least so far. I mean, other than Sylens she's the only one with the proper worldview to even understand what's actually going on in the world and it's got to be frustrating to try to explain why you need to do things to people who don't understand half of what you're talking about. She's also gone from loner outcast to heralded Savior in a pretty short span, so her social skills are pretty good, considering.

Still a few bugs here and there. After fighting a group of raiders for instance, post cutscene all the raiders I killed were standing up, but not moving and still lootable. Eerie.

[thethird]

I'm playing it on PS4 too, and it looks good.

Horizon Zero Dawn was probably my favorite PS4 game. The jury is still out in whether I like forbidden west more or not.

Storywise I like the changes. They are doing something different from the first. Wether it's better or worse is probably a mater of opinion. Still the tone hasn't changed much (which is good). It's not like Last of Us and Last of Us 2. I also think that the change is necessary, had they gone with a story really similar to the first I think it would have been worse.
The tribes feel different from the tribes on the first game, and from each other. Still I feel that where on the first game we got the Nora, the Oseram, the Carja, and the Banuk (well, we mostly got Banuk on the dlc) here we are getting less. Also, Eclipse and Shadow Carja were distinct from Carja, here Tenakth rebels are very much Tenakth.
Exploration wise I think they took what worked from the first game and added some spice from other open worlds that work (the tallneck are still the best towers). They got some inspiration from Zelda with the paraglider which makes for a fun traversing option. The hook adds some complexity to climbing/puzzles They have also added "gates" of you need this ability to cross, not a big fan of those but mostly because I try to explore everywhere. Also it feels game-y to make a beeline for the under water breathing mask, but I wish I had done that.
There is a bag of spilling. I hate bags of spilling. Like really hate those. It's not only the shieldweaver armor isn't working any more (and now it won't survive the endgame, I really liked that armor aesthetically) but machines you were able to hack before are no longer hackable.
Speaking of machines. Some machines make a reapparance. Why not all of them? I think it would have added more variety to the enemies, and that could be fun. Of course, with more enemies there would be more...
Grind. The materials grind is tiring. I am trying not to focus too much on those. My old tactic of using a simple non elemental bow and taking out the bits of pieces of machines is working so I gather enough pieces as I normally do combat.
The elemental rock paper scissors seems really strong. Maybe it's because I am used to using non elemental arrows. But a well placed fire arrow at a lumber, or making acid reserves explode, or sparks, or whatever feels like really strong. I have started to collect a lot of bows for elemental arrows and just switch momentarily to those to hit elemental weak points.
Leveling, I am not a fan of the new leveling system. I prefered the simpler easier paths of Zero Dawn. Or the pretty inspired ones from Ghost of Tsushima (in which you had to observe and study enemies). But this leveling system has allowed me to cherry pick abilities and that's nice.
The ultimate skills. What are you guys using? I pumped all my points into the first one from the recovery tree, and now it lasts me an entire combat. When I need to fight a boss monster, just plop it, and my health doesn't go down. On the one hand it's really strong, it has saved my life plenty of times, and dying would be really frustating. On the other I feel like no other ultimate skill can overshadow it, perhaps the shield from the same skill tree?

[VoxRationis]

I was laughing as the three Oseram posited essentially resurrecting Las Vegas; I cannot wait for the internet memes announcing "Horizon: New Vegas," though I must note that Aloy is perhaps the least "whoo, Vegas" video game protagonist since protagonists stopped being 16-bit blobs of light and started being characters.

I'm a mite concerned about the lack of strategic awareness being displayed in a couple of fields here. The first is the unsuspecting manner in which Aloy welcomes Beta into the fold. Beta has been known to work explicitly for the enemy of all life on Earth. She claims (or implies) that she does not share the Zeniths' motives and goals, but that has not been verified. She is well-known to have technical know-how beyond that of any living Earth human. To leave her alone in GAIA's server room with a Focus seems the height of folly. Aloy mostly seems to be operating on the idea that a clone of Elisabet Sobeck will be likely to share her moral values, which seems like a misunderstanding of cloning that, if nothing else, GAIA could quickly cure her of.

The second strategic issue is the idea that HEPHAESTUS needs to be taken back under control so as to fight the Zeniths with a robot army. I have three issues with this notion.

Robot armies are fundamentally to be distrusted, as they are, ultimately, what got humanity into its present situation;
Currently, we need every available GAIA machine doing its appointed tasks as part of a unified terraforming system, not picking fights with the Zeniths;
The issue we have fighting the Zeniths isn't a lack of weapon platforms so much as a lack of weapons; we saw with Verbena that they die very quickly if shield-disabling weapons can be deployed, and their Spectre robots die really easily to acid damage. Almost any hunter in the setting could acquit themselves well if they had the appropriate tools.



Regarding non-spoiler aspects of the game: I'm a little miffed at the tendency of arrows to fly just a little to the left of where the center of the reticle lies.

On the other hand, the Tenakth have to be some of the best world-building the game has done, and probably one of the better instances of fantasy culture world-building in video games. We see with them both a traditionalist inclination (and the obligatory post-apocalyptic base of their culture on misunderstood fragments of past institutions) and the very recent efforts of reformers and nation-builders seeking to create new traditions and cultural institutions that move in the direction of greater unity and state capacity while still invoking and building upon old traditions. It's very believable and feels authentic in a way that many instances of social reformers in fiction don't, and indicates a culture that's evolving over time in response to changing conditions.

[t209]

So since we do see Faro company logo and humans who managed to "tame" robotic wildlife,
Does it mean that Pharos is still alive and going as "AM" from I have no mouth but I must scream?
Maybe decided to clone himself another batch but with Apollo system equivalent just that they can learn some basic survival skills (Ironically, seems that humans still figured out even if the Apollo system was destroyed and literally basing their culture from Kindergarten like Nora, some textbooks from ruins like Carja, and somehow Banuk still figure out rudimentary cybernetics despite having little to no technical experience).
Also did it explore the previous expedition by a Sun King as stated in the journal?

[Whoracle]

So, turns out Wings Of The Ten was the penultimate story mission, so after some cleanup with side missions I'm done with the game. Apart from some rebel outposts, Oseram contracts and the gauntlet runs I think I have done everything the game has to offer.

Final thoughts:

I stand by my earlier impressions re:controls and combat. Traversal still is fine, the late-game additional traversal technique you get could be a little bit faster for my tastes. Combat is a bit of a chore, especially with melee - the enemies are too big, everybody has stuns and groundpunds, everything jumps LEAGUES around the place. I've gotten a tad bit better with the controller, so softening up enemies with arrows helps massively. Still not a fan, but at least in the ranged portion not the games' fault. I've found climbing to be a hassle, and my only deaths remain when the game didn't register my button presses or me grabbing a ledge.
The worldbuilding is a bit weaker for the most part. The Tenakth start out as really interesting, but since you only really interact with them and a bit with the Quen, Utaru and the Oseram*, I'd have liked to see more differences between their three subclans.
Performance is solid enough, with minor glitches.
Graphics remain gorgeous, even on the base PS4. Can't wait for a PC release where I'll bling the game the hell out in a few years.
Story: See spoiler block below



Aloy continues to be a bit too grumpy for my tastes. The fact that what she did during the first 2/3rds of the game amounted to pretty much nothing of substance still grates. The sudden and inevitable betrayal by Tilda fell very flat. The whole Far Zenith thingamajig could have been left out, IMHO, and the game would've been better for it. The FZ characters just don't have any impact. I was mildly interested before they showed up, purely from their description in Datapoints, but the real thing was just meh.

How would I have done it? Let Aloy hunt for the subordinate Functions to restore GAIA, encounter the Utaru, 3 Tenakth factions and Quen more in-depth on her journey, explore how different Tribes handle their lives, and just introduce Nemesis at the end as a hook for the third game. The Quen had so much potential, and if explored a bit more, the whole Ceo subplot could have been really great. As it stands, the Faro facility still was my favourite, and realizing what's going on (even though it was a bit on the nose) with Ceo and the Quen's worship of the Ancesotrs was very interesting. More of that, pls!

Edit: Also, a throwaway line on reddit put the finger on something that bugged me but that I couldn't pinpoint: The plan of FZ was needlessly complicated. Why kill everyone on earth? The didn't trigger HADES, that was nemesis. Why not just sail in, ask for a backup copy of GAIA et al, maybe trade for a copy of APOLLO and then run, leaving Earth as a roadblock to buy them more time?


Overall I don't regret a single $monetary_unit I spent and enjoyed the time I put into the game, but I wish the story was a bit more interesting or different. Yes, the first game basically explained most if not all of the mysteries, so it was a hard follow up, but I feel guerilla could've done better.

*Thinking about it a bit more, you interact more than a bit with the Quen, Oseram and Utaru, but somehow those interactions feel like not much. Don't know why. Weird.

As for points mentioned by others: Yes, the bag of spilling sucked. No more words needed. Also, I'm with VoxRationis about his spoilers.

Edit: Added something (wooo... mystery :smallbiggrin: ) to the spoiler.

[VoxRationis]

The Thebes level did something that was very present in the first game (and that I really love) that has of necessity been somewhat absent in this game: instill a horror born of creeping dread and progressive revelation, rather than that born from, say, revulsion at some visceral monster*. The disturbing megalomania shown by the architecture of the place, the tale of fear and curiosity told by the doctor's daughter, and the foreboding manner in which guards were posted in each room, foreshadowing a fight to the surface well before it came, all contributed to a beautiful state wherein each successive piece of knowledge is both feared and greatly desired. It's the sort of thing that filled H:ZD (and Pillars of Eternity, another of my favorite games) but necessarily is somewhat lessened through most of this game, since the really most horrific revelations have already been made. Learning that the greedy miscalculation of a corporate executive threatened to destroy all life on Earth and thereafter that all life on Earth was destroyed, only to be brought back through the efforts of a humanity-wide effort of self-sacrifice that was nonetheless sabotaged, is far more significant, to my mind, than learning that a handful of people managed to escape into space and now want their property back.

I kind of expected Ceo to be a little more significant in the grand scheme of things when he was first introduced, but neither did it seem jarring when he died miserably and with little dignity. I was kind of expecting the Zeniths to show up, suitably impress Ceo, and cause a turnabout that would have been a difficult fight, but for the moment, that seems averted.

At this point in the game, I think my distrust of Beta has probably diminished somewhat; she has had too many chances to betray us for it to have been her plan all along to do so. I did find her line to the tune of "I could not have handled the Proving had I been born to the Nora" rather amusing, because both we and the people in the conversation know that "she" was, in fact, born to the Nora, and got through it fine.

*And yes, having played the level, I know that there is a viscerally disturbing monster in it, but it is never shown on screen, and its emotional impact is much less than that of the audio recordings from the companions of Faro realizing that they've been locked in a tomb with a madman.

Edit:It turned out that for some reason, the game crashed every time I used a cleanse potion, so I just made sure not to use one and to heal through the Slaughterspine's plasma damage.

I don't find Aloy's antagonistic attitude towards Tilda and Sylens to be at all unjustified. Sylens has shown repeatedly that, though he broadly shares Aloy's objective of "prevent life on Earth from being extinguished," his plans typically involve exposing her to great danger without adequate preparation while setting him up to glean the rewards. His most recent plan that involved her (which was to culminate in her surrender to the Zeniths) would have gotten her killed had she gone fully along with it. Sylens was also indirectly responsible for the threat of the previous game being as dangerous as it was, in that he helped start Eclipse and give HADES the infrastructure and personal connections it needed to set its plans in motion, so it isn't as though he has a perfect record of prudent and cautious progress in the interest of their common goal.

As for Tilda, we see a woman who clearly cannot be trusted. Tilda has literally made a career out of misrepresenting herself, her capabilities, and her motives. She deals with Aloy using flattery, emotional appeal, and dangling of rewards, rather than forthrightness and commitment to shared values. It seems fairly clear (though it's not impossible that this is another trick) that she had some sort of romantic/sexual attraction to Elisabet and that is why she's so eager to treat with Beta and Aloy, yet her plans also seem like those hoping to orchestrate a coup. Notably, she gives Aloy no assistance against Zeniths in general (as that might impact her) but tries to set up a situation in which her erstwhile colleagues can be killed or at least suitably distracted while Aloy steals everything of value and retreats to the Zeniths' ship; I kind of suspect that her end game is to spirit Beta and/or Aloy away into orbit for personal reasons while using the high ground advantage to dictate favorable terms to Gerard. One way or another, Tilda is a woman who's accustomed to surviving by whatever means are necessary, and Aloy would be utterly foolish to trust her blindly. She isn't quite savvy enough to play along with Tilda fully (a more socially intelligent individual would have tried to appear receptive to Tilda's overtures, rather than challenging them constantly), but she knows that she has to try to operate under her own terms and not those of these figures who hope to use her as a pawn and have motivations that don't necessarily align with hers.

Looking back on the strategic situation regarding GAIA and HEPHAESTUS, I kind of wonder if the Zeniths' plan wasn't just to wait until we did something like this. We know that they have a copy of GAIA, but they don't have HADES, and without that entity, it will be extremely difficult to compel her to destroy life. She was specifically designed to value the biosphere intrinsically, after all. (I do have to agree with those critiques that the Zeniths' desires don't quite make sense. It would be trivially easy for Gerard to set himself up as a god, possessing both immortality and apparent invulnerability, and the last game suggested that GAIA's systems were depleted or almost depleted of the resources necessary to reconstitute the biosphere, making it more difficult than it ought to be to start anew. Even if Gerard didn't care to spend all his time answering prayers at an altar, it would be much easier to set up one or more communities in which he would be some sort of president for life, supported by a wider network of tributary communities that see the Zeniths as distant supernatural entities, than it would be to try to build up a new world in service to one's material desires.)

The game continues to run up against the issue of wanting to establish clear and pressing danger in the main story while also wanting the player to run through a bunch of small-time side missions and minor errands. Particularly egregious in this case is the mission given to you by Quen navigators that can't be done until one has already completed Wings of the Ten, at which point the clock is theoretically ticking on doomsday (and/or Beta is being constantly tortured) and you thus have little incentive to dally. That said, I CAN FLY! This is what Skyrim should have had. And sure, I can't rain death from the skies, since attacks seem to be disabled while aloft, but platforming is now a thing of the past, and I have a particularly elegant way of skipping over all encounters I do not wish to have.

[Dire_Flumph]

I have to give enormous props to ARTEMIS for being able to create so many Owls that apparently don't have any feathers.

Sorry, just venting. Think I've killed over 20 of the things and I have a grand total of 2 feathers.

[factotum]

I have to give enormous props to ARTEMIS for being able to create so many Owls that apparently don't have any feathers.

Sorry, just venting. Think I've killed over 20 of the things and I have a grand total of 2 feathers.

Sounds like those spiders in World of Warcraft you had to kill for their legs in one quest, and you'd often find ones that had no legs at all, despite every appearance to the contrary!

[Whoracle]

It turned out that for some reason, the game crashed every time I used a cleanse potion, so I just made sure not to use one and to heal through the Slaughterspine's plasma damage.

I don't find Aloy's antagonistic attitude towards Tilda and Sylens to be at all unjustified. Sylens has shown repeatedly that, though he broadly shares Aloy's objective of "prevent life on Earth from being extinguished," his plans typically involve exposing her to great danger without adequate preparation while setting him up to glean the rewards. His most recent plan that involved her (which was to culminate in her surrender to the Zeniths) would have gotten her killed had she gone fully along with it. Sylens was also indirectly responsible for the threat of the previous game being as dangerous as it was, in that he helped start Eclipse and give HADES the infrastructure and personal connections it needed to set its plans in motion, so it isn't as though he has a perfect record of prudent and cautious progress in the interest of their common goal.

As for Tilda, we see a woman who clearly cannot be trusted. Tilda has literally made a career out of misrepresenting herself, her capabilities, and her motives. She deals with Aloy using flattery, emotional appeal, and dangling of rewards, rather than forthrightness and commitment to shared values. It seems fairly clear (though it's not impossible that this is another trick) that she had some sort of romantic/sexual attraction to Elisabet and that is why she's so eager to treat with Beta and Aloy, yet her plans also seem like those hoping to orchestrate a coup. Notably, she gives Aloy no assistance against Zeniths in general (as that might impact her) but tries to set up a situation in which her erstwhile colleagues can be killed or at least suitably distracted while Aloy steals everything of value and retreats to the Zeniths' ship; I kind of suspect that her end game is to spirit Beta and/or Aloy away into orbit for personal reasons while using the high ground advantage to dictate favorable terms to Gerard. One way or another, Tilda is a woman who's accustomed to surviving by whatever means are necessary, and Aloy would be utterly foolish to trust her blindly. She isn't quite savvy enough to play along with Tilda fully (a more socially intelligent individual would have tried to appear receptive to Tilda's overtures, rather than challenging them constantly), but she knows that she has to try to operate under her own terms and not those of these figures who hope to use her as a pawn and have motivations that don't necessarily align with hers.

Looking back on the strategic situation regarding GAIA and HEPHAESTUS, I kind of wonder if the Zeniths' plan wasn't just to wait until we did something like this. We know that they have a copy of GAIA, but they don't have HADES, and without that entity, it will be extremely difficult to compel her to destroy life. She was specifically designed to value the biosphere intrinsically, after all. (I do have to agree with those critiques that the Zeniths' desires don't quite make sense. It would be trivially easy for Gerard to set himself up as a god, possessing both immortality and apparent invulnerability, and the last game suggested that GAIA's systems were depleted or almost depleted of the resources necessary to reconstitute the biosphere, making it more difficult than it ought to be to start anew. Even if Gerard didn't care to spend all his time answering prayers at an altar, it would be much easier to set up one or more communities in which he would be some sort of president for life, supported by a wider network of tributary communities that see the Zeniths as distant supernatural entities, than it would be to try to build up a new world in service to one's material desires.)

The game continues to run up against the issue of wanting to establish clear and pressing danger in the main story while also wanting the player to run through a bunch of small-time side missions and minor errands. Particularly egregious in this case is the mission given to you by Quen navigators that can't be done until one has already completed Wings of the Ten, at which point the clock is theoretically ticking on doomsday (and/or Beta is being constantly tortured) and you thus have little incentive to dally. That said, I CAN FLY! This is what Skyrim should have had. And sure, I can't rain death from the skies, since attacks seem to be disabled while aloft, but platforming is now a thing of the past, and I have a particularly elegant way of skipping over all encounters I do not wish to have.


Oh, I'm a 100% with you - The mistrust and "general bitchiness" (sorry, non-native speaker, can't think of a better word atm) towards Sylens and Tilda is justified.

But the "how" kind of galls me - mostly because of the overall writing. The game starts out with you accomplishing almost nothing for 6 months, then Sylens hands you GAIA. Then you hunt down the three subordinate functions and cage Heph, and the game takes them from you. Then you basically get the Keys to winning handed to you by Beta (Sunwing override, which some stuff indicates wasn't supposed to be given by beta*), which is basically the only way why Sylens Plans fail, and Aloy goes LITERALLY "leave the planning to the Person who knows what she's doing". No, she doesn't know what she's doing. She basically wings it and gets a Deus Ex Machina handed to her three times (Given GAIA by Sylens, Tildas rescue and backdoor during Gemini and the Sunwing Override), and still acts all smug.

If they had written the game so that she had at least two of those three accomplishments to her own name, the "Sit down kid and let the adults do the talking" attitude would've been so much better.

*As of patch 1.07, if you 100% the game, there's one locked override that you can't unlock left, with a question mark icon and everything. Some people have speculated that this was supposed to be the Sunwing, and looking at the abruptness of the Gemini Scene where Beta just hands the override to you as well as the very early hint of "You'll be able to fly" in some early game Tenakth sidemission in the North, it kind of feels like Guerilla Games were originally going to let you find the Override yourself. Which would feel so much better for the overall narrative, IMHO.

[VoxRationis]

Well, I called it with Tilda. I didn't predict just why she planned on skipping the planet with Aloy, but I predicted that that was her intent.

I do have to agree with the idea that Aloy is rather less effective and self-driven than she was in the last game, and there were a few points where the overall plot could have been kept the same while showing our protagonist to be forward-thinking. (I didn't even notice the line where the Sunwing override is provided by Beta; I must have missed it during dialogue, and I assumed that it was made by Aloy as all the others were, and the fact that it had to be installed was purely due to the game trying to avoid sequence breaking. Actually, when you say Beta "hands over" the Sunwing override, are you referring to the scene where she sort of bats over the hologram to Aloy? That's not really a sign of technical prowess so much as the equivalent of an email forward, and that would be a reward equally earned by both of them.)

One links in with one of the critiques I do have of Far Zenith, which is that they don't employ all the sorts of technology they really could. Given that GAIA was able to figure out active camouflage, I figured that it was a sure thing that FZ would have it, too, and it seemed reasonable that Aloy could infer that as well. What I would have loved, therefore, was a cutscene where a Zenith (maybe even Tilda) pops up out of active camouflage, only for Aloy to reveal a countermeasure she had conceived of to guard against such surprise attacks (at least by distracting and delaying the attackers).

The other is that some of the measures Aloy does develop end up being for naught. Aloy makes a big deal to Alva about trying to get additional intelligence on the Zeniths and learn things Tilda's not saying, but that effort yields very little information very shortly before Aloy would have had to learn it anyway. It doesn't seem like the effort actually changed anything.

Regarding Far Zenith being made of simplistic villains, I have to say that I don't think it unrealistic or inappropriate to the plot. The very nature of the group makes a culture of egotism, selfishness, and belief in its own superiority almost inevitable. After all, it's comprised of the people who 1) bought golden tickets off Earth while abandoning the rest of humanity to die, 2) chose to prolong their lives for a millennium, and 3) very recently survived yet another extinction event which is likely to kill all life on Earth regardless of what they do or how nice they are. One would expect people filtered by those three events to have little regard for whoever they find on Earth and to prioritize their own survival and comfort over everything else.

The reveal of Nemesis at the end does solve the issue that bugged me through the game of why the Zeniths would bother trying to wipe out life on Earth and tie together some loose ends. However, the ending of this game, though it seems to portend a third, leaves me somewhat skeptical that a third game could be satisfyingly constructed so as to be similar in play to the first two. At the end of Forbidden West, HEPHAESTUS is still loose and the biosphere still out of sorts, which would seem to promise an appropriate challenge, except that with Sylens on board and no Zenith threat, Aloy et al. should be able to fix things fairly easily. Moreover, if they don't, everything on Earth dies anyway, so that challenge would need to be solved very, very early in the third game or even between the two. And once HEPHAESTUS is unified with GAIA, the basic conceit of the two games becomes very different. The machines no longer act as a threat and can be counted on to be a consistent ally. With APOLLO retrieved, all the issues of incomplete records and lost technical knowledge disappear. And since our protagonists know that Nemesis is coming and could conceivably send another signal to GAIA, they would conceivably make efforts at backing up the most important aspects of that knowledge, possibly even with physical copy backups since they could easily call on Avad to provide a team of Carja scribes to assist in such an endeavor. Under such circumstances, the core mechanics of the game, reading old computer recordings and fighting hostile machines, become of much less importance. Aloy and friends will face challenges, but they won't be the challenges that a player's skill will correspond to.

Edit: As an aside unrelated to the actual plot, I found myself, over the course of the game, gathering a large number of weapons I didn't ever intend to use. In general, the game's emphasis on precision attacks makes me loathe to ever stray away from just using hunter and sharpshooter bows. (I did use a warrior bow early in the game, when it was the only means I had of applying shock and acid damage, but I fell away from that as soon as I had a hunter bow with elemental arrows.) I never got into most of the different ranged weapon types. Did anyone else ever use shredder gauntlets or harpoon throwers to a significant extent?

[t209]

I think I found a screenshot that described the plot of the sequel.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/639616960803635253/949520586156146738/unknown.png

[Dire_Flumph]

Edit: As an aside unrelated to the actual plot, I found myself, over the course of the game, gathering a large number of weapons I didn't ever intend to use. In general, the game's emphasis on precision attacks makes me loathe to ever stray away from just using hunter and sharpshooter bows. (I did use a warrior bow early in the game, when it was the only means I had of applying shock and acid damage, but I fell away from that as soon as I had a hunter bow with elemental arrows.) I never got into most of the different ranged weapon types. Did anyone else ever use shredder gauntlets or harpoon throwers to a significant extent?

The Spike Throwers are 100% the best way to sling massive damage against enemies when you just want something dead fast (And they can pretty much be used to cheese most of the arena battles). Used both the drill and explosive versions heavily and the Vindicator Spike Thrower was one of the few weapons I bothered to fully upgrade. I also liked the Bolt Blaster quite a bit for speedy damage delivery, particularly when something needed a lot of plasma damage thrown at it in a hurry (Used the Icestorm Boltblaster as it had a good range of elemental effects). The skill that allows you to empty an entire bolt clip at something in a huge burst is very useful. Other than that, yeah, Sharpshot Bow + 2 Hunter Bows for elemental damage pretty much ruled my top 3 weapon slots on the wheel.

I tried to make use of the shredders as I loved using similar weapons in Dead Space and Klingon Honor Guard (way back when...), but it just didn't do enough damage or tear components half as well as Tearblast arrows to be useful. Possible I just was using them wrong, I think they were supposed to be ammo efficient weapons, but catching the returning discs was just too iffy even as an early game weapon when resources were tighter. Warrior bows and blastslings were just too short range to be of use and too few battles felt like I could set the field enough for tripwires to be useful. Despite using them heavily in Zero Dawn I forgot all about my Ropecaster early in the game.

What I want to know is why there were so many Valor skills that seemed to have little to no use, especially when there was no easy way to switch them on the fly. Well before the midpoint in the game I don't think I used anything other than the Overshield. The Stealth Field was less useful than a smoke bomb, and I didn't even really notice the boosts from the others the few times I tried them out.


- Game needed more Sylens. He was gone during way too much of the middle. About the only thing really interesting me about where the story is going from here is the chance to get into his head more now that he's Team Aloy's token evil member.

- Horizon 3 needs to be built around having early access to the Sunwing or other flyers. It would be an easy way to distinguish it from most of the other open world time sink games. Sadly I'm bracing for Aloy forgetting how to override just about everything again.

- Other than that, there's not much of a hook unlike where Zero Dawn left off. We need to get Hephaestus (again), and Nemesis just isn't much of an interesting adversary given what little we've seen (Not that the Zeniths were much better for the most part). What other big mysteries are left? Is anyone interested about what happened to the Elysium habitat? Am I forgetting anything big?

- Glad the game found an excuse to get us to Thebes. But I really wish they had just gone ahead and showed us what Faro had become (guessing a mass of gurgling tumors).

- Not sure how everyone else feels, but I think the character work was better this time around. Aloy got some solid development, and I liked the new crew members much better than the main NPCs we got in the last game, though Varl and Erend were more interesting as well this time out. Sadly I had guessed Varl wasn't going to make it given how he was the only one of the crew not to get an optional side mission. The Tenakth, Quen and Utaru also felt a bit more fleshed out than the Carja, Oseram and Nora in Zero Dawn.

All in all, I enjoyed Forbidden West quite a bit. The open world was more interesting than Zero Dawn's. The story couldn't match the slow reveal of the ending of the world from the first game, and the Zeniths just were not interesting as antagonists, but I enjoyed the bulk of the game itself more this time around.

[SaintRidley]

I'm almost done with the game (120 hours in on Very Hard, just finished Gemini). My mind has been blown several times already in terms of what I came in expecting. Easily the most beautiful game I've ever played.

[SarahCornel]

My favorite one here.