Thread: Horizon Forbidden West |OT| Robots in Disguise
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Watched it this morning. Seems like even Dunkey is feeling the drag of too many open world games.

I love his last line "The first Horizon will forever be some game that came out around Breath of the Wild, and this Horizon will be the game that came out around Elden Ring"
Yeah it's a goodie.

I don't really take what he says seriously for the most part. I think some people get upset when he bags on their favorite game but I get the impression he's just kinda trolling a bit, and I find that trolling is a art.
 
So what's your verdict?
Game lives up to the hype when it comes to its visuals. I had fun with the story and played most of the side quests which says a lot for an open world game. Combat can be really cheap at times(Final boss for ex) and sometimes the platforming isn't the best.

Most things have improved over the original especially the cutscene animations. So if you enjoyed the original you will have a good time with this one.
 
I had to lower the difficulty to easy to finish the final boss. Only time in the game I did it. Cheap 1 hit deaths and I just wanted to be over with the game.
I did the same. It wasnt worth the grind of 10 minutes chipping away at their health to be killed randomly.
 
I did the same. It wasnt worth the grind of 10 minutes chipping away at their health to be killed randomly.
I was literally a few hits away from killing her too and yet she hit me once and game over for me. :( I was at full health too. Gave my TV the finger 😂
 
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I was literally a few hits away from killing her too and yet she hit me once and game over for me. :( I was at full health too. Gave my TV the finger 😂
Yeah I found that fight to be pretty terrible. It became a game it wasnt.
 
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The only people allowed to be stupid or incompetent are men. The antagonist and protagonist are both badass women. Almost all the missions are based around women. An audio log between 3 airforce pilots, all 3 female. Shit like that. It's getting harder to ignore the longer the game goes on.
Same shit as Outer Worlds then. What a fucking surprise.
 
The only people allowed to be stupid or incompetent are men. The antagonist and protagonist are both badass women. Almost all the missions are based around women. An audio log between 3 airforce pilots, all 3 female. Shit like that. It's getting harder to ignore the longer the game goes on.

Felt this way during the first Horizon, even in the intro chapters. All of the men were assholes or simps, but the women are likable and strong.
 
Well strap in! ;)

more like strap ON haha am I right my fellow lesbian sisterhood?

what's weird (first game spoilers I guess) is that the morally-superior Matriarchy worships a Vault 101 door and despises technology / exploration, and this is misguided but they're still Good. The massive human empire that is being genocided by machines is Bad because they use bullets I guess
 
I had to lower the difficulty to easy to finish the final boss. Only time in the game I did it. Cheap 1 hit deaths and I just wanted to be over with the game.
That reminds me of Crackdown 3. The final boss was physically impossible on the hard difficulty when it launched. They had to patch it later to fix it, but I had already played/beaten it.

I had to turn the difficulty down to easy just to get past it and it was the only time in the whole game I had to do it. But it was legitimately broken (like most things in that fucking game).
 
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Watched it this morning. Seems like even Dunkey is feeling the drag of too many open world games.

I love his last line "The first Horizon will forever be some game that came out around Breath of the Wild, and this Horizon will be the game that came out around Elden Ring"

I thought his Nintendo bias shined through there, the game sold 20 million copies, that's not an overshadowed game lol. As an open world game it doesn't compare to BOTW but BOTW wishes it had combat as engaging (robot dinosaur fights are FUCKING LIT).
 
I thought his Nintendo bias shined through there, the game sold 20 million copies, that's not an overshadowed game lol. As an open world game it doesn't compare to BOTW but BOTW wishes it had combat as engaging (robot dinosaur fights are FUCKING LIT).

The combat in Horizon is much better even early on in the game, not that I hated combat in BotW.

The setting and the visual design in Horizon are also really cool. A genuinely neat twist on the typical post apocalyptic open world game with an excellent sci fi aesthetic. I'd love if Guerilla tackles space opera next, maybe with a stronger emphasis on vehicles than previous games (to match the setting). Killzone series also has an excellent sci fi setting but Guerilla can't seem to tell a decent story in the midst of their world crafting.

Hasty EDIT: dangit, I forgot Rigs, another Guerilla game I loved with top notch vehicle design and sci fi world though that game wasn't story-driven.
 
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Really love the visuals, but the game starts slow and Aloy is an Ahole. Was she this bratty and arrogant in the first game? I don't recall her being like this.
I guess you could say she got a big head after the events of the first game.

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Man, I'm so torn on this game. On one hand the core of the game is great (fighting the machines and exploring the world) but every time Aloy opens her goddamn trap it's like a slow motion train wreck. She is a terrible character; bossy, smarmy, continuously aware of her own self-importance and the rest of the characters aren't much better. I don't even need to think when I go into a town; all the essential characters are overweight women with shitty attitudes. The hint guide for this game should read: Look for the fat bitch in each town for an important quest. And really, how believable is it that there are a bunch of fatties running around in post-apocalyptic America when there's only one cook in town and almost no sources of food? This makes me think that some 'body positive' fucker on the team piped up and shamed the others for making everyone too thin, so they went overboard. Same with the number of black characters... so we are to believe that 13% of the population survived the apocalypse magically and now somehow makes up around 50% and yet all the Gingers got wiped out? Interesting. I mean, it's a fictional place, so Guerrilla could do whatever the fuck they wanted, but yeah... interesting. Or maybe Guerrilla just based their race ratios off American commercials, who knows? Does it really matter? No. Is it a little weird.? Yeah. Honestly it doesn't matter anyway, because the characters are all shitty, regardless of what color they are.

Then there's also this shitty mini game called Machine Strike which the tutorial is so mind numbingly awful I'll never play that again. The climbing seems really janky too -- sometimes she'll vault up a wall while others she seems to get all fidgety and indecisive. I've also found she frequently gets hung up on geometry just walking around as well. Sometimes, this game feels about 5% unfinished, like they never Beta tested it or they just had super shitty testers.

The game is just flat fucking stunning though, and like I said fighting the machines is a ton of fun, as is exploring the ruins (puzzles essentially). So yeah, I'm really digging the game part of Forbidden West, but I just wish all the characters would die in a fire. There is not one single likable character I've encountered so far. Perhaps I'm just getting more jaded or being too hard on the game, or perhaps it's just because Ghost of Tsushima came along and did most of what I'm bitching about in Forbidden West a lot better. I think the bar raised sometime between the first Horizon and this one and Guerrilla might have been a little too worried about making strong wamans instead of interesting, engaging characters.

There's a ton of this game left; maybe my impressions of it will change.
 
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Then there's also this shitty mini game called Machine Strike which the tutorial is so mind numbingly awful I'll never play that again. The climbing seems really janky too -- sometimes she'll vault up a wall while others she seems to get all fidgety and indecisive. I've also found she frequently gets hung up on geometry just walking around as well. Sometimes, this game feels about 5% unfinished, like they never Beta tested it or they just had super shitty testers.

On the mini-game thing, I never understood why open-world games need to take an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to game design.

It just seems to me like a total waste of budget and resources.

Personally, I feel like they should try to get a little more comfortable with allowing their open world to be more empty and to have more space that is just there for traversal without needing to have something to keep the player occupied every step of the way.

This game is just completely loaded with "stuff" but a lot of it, such as Machine Strike, is just pointless content that I bet most players never touch.

Maybe try just using the "overworld" as an immersion technique rather than having a million distractions.

This really doesn't work for me when the game is trying to be more story based than exploration based.

Like, in what story context would Aloy be scouring the map for obscure and irrelevant shit when she is also narratively in a race against the clock to save the world?

I think the situation with open-world games is that having a massive open world with a billion things to do is actually pretty good for marketing and gets them a lot of sales even if players probably don't touch most of the content. Compare to an indie game that will have it's shorter play time criticized in reviews when most players would probably get more out of completing a game than just leaving something mostly untouched.

Going by the trophies for the first Horizon game:
Less than 60% of players scaled a Tallneck. (57%)
Only 52% cleared at least one bandit camp.
Less than half, 44%, ever cleared out one of the Cauldron areas.
Just over a third, 34%, ever found one of the vantage points.
Only 23% encountered and scanned every type of machine.

That's just the more open world related stuff.
For the story:
25% of players never even finished The Proving.
Maker's End is about the halfway point of the story and only 44% of players ever got that far.
Only 32% of players ever completed the main story.

It's crazy to think that 7 out of every 10 players who picked up this game in 2017 completely dropped it before completing the main story but for the sequel the developers still thought it was a neat idea to put in a stupid board game/mini-game thing. Probably something that two thirds of players will never bother with but that can be used to market the game as IGN or whoever will bang on about it.
 
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Man, I'm so torn on this game. On one hand the core of the game is great (fighting the machines and exploring the world) but every time Aloy opens her goddamn trap it's like a slow motion train wreck. She is a terrible character; bossy, smarmy, continuously aware of her own self-importance and the rest of the characters aren't much better. I don't even need to think when I go into a town; all the essential characters are overweight women with shitty attitudes. The hint guide for this game should read: Look for the fat bitch in each town for an important quest. And really, how believable is it that there are a bunch of fatties running around in post-apocalyptic America when there's only one cook in town and almost no sources of food? This makes me think that some 'body positive' fucker on the team piped up and shamed the others for making everyone too thin, so they went overboard. Same with the number of black characters... so we are to believe that 13% of the population survived the apocalypse magically and now somehow makes up around 50% and yet all the Gingers got wiped out? Interesting. I mean, it's a fictional place, so Guerrilla could do whatever the fuck they wanted, but yeah... interesting. Or maybe Guerrilla just based their race ratios off American commercials, who knows? Does it really matter? No. Is it a little weird.? Yeah. Honestly it doesn't matter anyway, because the characters are all shitty, regardless of what color they are.

Then there's also this shitty mini game called Machine Strike which the tutorial is so mind numbingly awful I'll never play that again. The climbing seems really janky too -- sometimes she'll vault up a wall while others she seems to get all fidgety and indecisive. I've also found she frequently gets hung up on geometry just walking around as well. Sometimes, this game feels about 5% unfinished, like they never Beta tested it or they just had super shitty testers.

The game is just flat fucking stunning though, and like I said fighting the machines is a ton of fun, as is exploring the ruins (puzzles essentially). So yeah, I'm really digging the game part of Forbidden West, but I just wish all the characters would die in a fire. There is not one single likable character I've encountered so far. Perhaps I'm just getting more jaded or being too hard on the game, or perhaps it's just because Ghost of Tsushima came along and did most of what I'm bitching about in Forbidden West a lot better. I think the bar raised sometime between the first Horizon and this one and Guerrilla might have been a little too worried about making strong wamans instead of interesting, engaging characters.

There's a ton of this game left; maybe my impressions of it will change.
That kinda settles it for me waiting for it to be cheap as hell before it buy it. I'm just not going to spend $75 after tax to be annoyed by the dialog and story.

I got the complete edition of the first one for $10 and didn't even like it at first. Almost never came back to it, but in the end had a similar feeling that the gameplay kept me going and a few of the story elements were interesting.

But this sequel sounds like the gameplay is all that's left. I keep seeing people, even fans of the first one's story, talking about how bad the story in this one turned out to be. I can't help but blame the woke agenda pushing people into positions in companies that weren't earned who then push their twitter-bred ideologies onto the project.

And who could refuse? If you're against the Narrative™, you're a bigot/racist/transphobe/sexist/nazi/Trumper/antivaxxer/antimasker. So sure, put it in the game McBraighleyfer! We're so proud to have you on the team!
 

While patch 1.08 does include some general fixes such as improvements to NPC animations and a fix for repeating music, the one that caught my eye was the one that fixes "Aloy's breathing sounds" during the game's Thebes based cinematic cutscene.

Along with no more heavy panting, this patch will also fix issues such as those that made Aloy not appear wet when coming out of the water.

Additionally, Kotallo will no longer become unresponsive when reloading from a specific save.

While the patch will include multiple visual improvements in shadows and clouds, as well as graphic fixes during cutscenes, there is still no fix for the strange shimmering players have noticed within the game.

However, the team at Guerrilla are "continuing to investigate and tweak the reported graphical issues regarding shimmering, sharpening and screen saturation", so hopefully that fix will come soon.

 
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I haven't touched it since E.R. and didn't have any real technical issues. That said, it'll just be more stable when I jump back in. ;)
 
The first game was one of my favs last gen. I burned through 30 hours of this one and started to get fatigue. Then Elden Ring came out. The icon bloat wears you out after awhile. I hope more games take the discovery aspects from ER and implement stuff like that. It's a lot more fun then following the icons or big yellow line.

My other gripes with this one is the story is not that good and feels like a rehash of the first game. The first game had me interested because I liked the world and wanted to learn why things are the way they are. That made up for the shitty characters. This game doesn't have that so I feel it has to fall back on the characters more and they are all forgettable. The side quests are much better this time around, but still generic and forgettable stories.

Still a fun game. I've been near the end and haven't really wanted to return since ER came out. I'll beat it eventually. It's probably an 8/10 game. It just needs better story, less hand holding, less icon bloat and less cutscenes. There are too many cutscenes for a story that isn't good.
 
Took a break from Elden Ring, started this back up, and found a recording in the main base which references a kid as they/them/their. Of course.

I was excited for the game, it looks amazing and I loved the first one. But man, I really don't want to play it anymore. All that gender and sexual identity shit in there has killed my excitement.
 
It's still good for the over arching story and robo combat.
The only compelling thing about the story is that I find myself kind of glad that it supports my supposition that if there ever were a reset, the nut jobs present in today's society would be the first to die off. Overall it's a fun game wrapped in beautiful visuals with a banal story and shitty, unlikeable characters.
 
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I was excited for the game, it looks amazing and I loved the first one. But man, I really don't want to play it anymore. All that gender and sexual identity shit in there has killed my excitement.
Honestly it's not that bad, yeah it's there and it sucks but it took me 90 hours to platinum it and i was going fast and so those instances seem rather insignificant in the end. I'm more offended by the non-sensical story and even that is okay because the game is still fun and the visuals and presentation are top-notch. I understand why the devs are pissed that Elden Ring overshadowed their game, I mean this game really raises the technical bar to new heights.

unlikeable characters.
I wouldn't say they're unlikeable, but they're certainly not likeable either, they leave you with a sense of indifference mostly. Except Sylens of course, Sylens is still the best character by light-years even though he's in this game even less than he was in the first one. Lance Reddick's acting is top notch, I just love the condescension in his tone; it's perfect. I would love a DLC where you play as Sylens.
 
Yeah, that Ted Faro twist was absolutely nonsensical and unneeded.
For me it's pretty much everything, I mean just the fact that Sylens found a broken focus and repaired it is laughable. It's like an ancient roman fixing your smart phone, it has zero chance of happening. Also the fact that the humans got to the level they're at without major agriculture (plainsong has a little) and horses and cattle is highly unlikely. 1000 years of technological advances and the Zenith's machines are weaker than most of Hephaestus' machines. it's one impossibility after another.
 
Aloy is kind of a bitch in this game.

She's constantly treating her friends like they are children who need to be occasionally pacified so she can get back to the real issues. I guess to be fair, they are written kinda like morons; they're constantly treated like shit by her and they never call her out or even show an ounce of being irritated by her constant condescension.
 
Aloy is kind of a bitch in this game.

She's constantly treating her friends like they are children who need to be occasionally pacified so she can get back to the real issues. I guess to be fair, they are written kinda like morons; they're constantly treated like shit by her and they never call her out or even show an ounce of being irritated by her constant condescension.
...Now I'm seeing uncanny similarities to Legend of Korra.
 
Aloy is kind of a bitch in this game.

She's constantly treating her friends like they are children who need to be occasionally pacified so she can get back to the real issues. I guess to be fair, they are written kinda like morons; they're constantly treated like shit by her and they never call her out or even show an ounce of being irritated by her constant condescension.
To be fair, I'd rather her be a bitch and drop all the hang-ons off at base, than have them tag along. ;)