Horizon is Ugly and Here's Why

hit the dab fam

Oh boy!

Felt like I was going crazy, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks it looks ugly

Disagree but to each their own. Glad Jess gets to make these!

If Horizon is ugly, I wanna be ugly so bad....

100% agree. Horizon is the Thomas Kinkade painting of video games.

Keen to watch this!!!

I remember when a hot take like this on Gamefaqs or something would end with *flame shield up*

I'm sure this'll be a well thought out video. But that title is gonna lead to some real knee jerk responses.

Ok, after watching... I don't know if "ugly" is the right term. More like unappealing, or overwhelming, or not my thing. Saying "this is that and here's why" seems like a definitive statement despite being an opinion. I dunno, maybe I'm just not convinced by this whole argument.

Shoutout papyrus.

There was once a Thomas Kinkade gallery store thing in the mall where I live. That was a long time ago and now THERE'S NOTHING IN THE MALL WHERE I LIVE.

The real controversy here is the usage of Papyrus font. (I love it)

Great video! To an added effect, I'd actually say I'd find Horizon's visual language to be more agreeable if I had found the gameplay simply a bit more novel or interesting - but it just wasn't for me anyways.

Great vid with a lot of good points. I get that Horizon can easily be visually overwhelming, but i love that shit. On the other hand i always disliked the "washed out" look of BOTW. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But hey, wouldn´t it be boring if everybody liked the same things.

PS: If Aloy didn´t have red hair she would have been long dead, because she couldn´t have hidden in all those conveniently placed red bushes ;)

Disagree

Great video! The color blending made it extremely difficult to parse information in the beginning. The choice to set the first zone in a canyon full of reds, yellows and browns was certainly a choice. And no, Aloy still talks all the time. It's insufferable.

The game is colourful for sure and the distinct colours help with my colour blindness, but I somewhat agree. It feels so out of place, even the original.

Asides the aesthetics and so forth the game also continues to tread the lines of cultural appropriation with the costumes. To preface, I'm not Indigenous but a Chinese guy who knows a few people with Indigenous roots here in Canada. I'm not a stranger to white people doing the same with my culture. It's just weird seeing it in a AAA title with so much research put into it (I assume).

The Kinkade reference is all of the argument I needed and now I'm fully onboard with this hot take. Also, this video was entertaining. Thanks!

@toysoda: hoo yeah, I steered well clear of bringing up any of the fashion/hair choices in this game cuz that's a WHOLE can of worms that I'm not equipped to open, haha

Yes! This is my favourite type of content - deep dive into a design aspect (gameplay, visuals, etc). On this site there's precious few of these types of discussions, despite it being a site about video games. I know they talk about games every week on Bombcast, but they never discuss in depth partly (I assume) because they're doing it live and didn't get a chance to think about it, or because they're time-constrained and have to keep it moving.

With regards to Horizon games, I 100% agree that it's very visually busy. Especially human costumes - almost feels like an AI kitbashed random parts together. I've seen more coherent designs on Warhammer 40k fan art. Another thing that gets glossed over is how distracting the GUI is and clutters up the screen as though it were an MMO. I know you can hide them, but these games aren't designed to be played like that.

Ehhh. I won't disagree that Horizon might not be as wonderful as a lot of people think it is (it's sneakily on my "Most Disappointing" list for this year), but I dunno if this is the argument you want to make. There are plenty of more reasonable things go after other than the graphics. For example:

• The itemization is truly, truly bad. There are too many weapons of the same type that differ in only the slightest of ways and different weapon types are often too similar in function to justify having them as a separate category. It was already an issue in Zero Dawn, but the problem got super-charged in Forbidden West.

• In a post-Elden Ring world, this game makes it clear that the "explore by question mark, icon-vomit" open world style needs to be retired. Trudging question mark to question mark just to check things off a list wastes the open world and forfeits whatever sense of "strange new world" wonder they were going for.

• The villains in Forbidden West are lame and their plan makes absolutely no sense. They have almost no characterization beyond being eeeeevvvvvviilllllll. And as far as their plan goes, even though they (a) are already capable of surviving on Earth and (b) even though their level of technology would easily allow them to wipe out/enslave/be worshipped as gods by the tribes on the planet, they instead want to destroy all life on Earth, re-terraform it, and then wait however many hundred of years the re-terraforming process will take because . . . rich people are . . . evil . . . or something?

It's like they made a realistic-looking game and put a LUT like Photoshop's 3strip on top of it.

Great video by the way. Always looking forward to your hot takeouts, Jess.
Me and my partner both love this content!

100% agree with your take and love the heavy usage of papyrus. I always found the design and art in Horizon to be a visual overload. With family members of mine being of indigenous American origin, I'm also not a fan of the outfits everyone makes for themselves in the game either.

Having the thumbnail for this be a close-up of Aloy's face and the word "ugly" feels like some real clickbait, considering all the dumb outrage over them making Aloy's cheeks bigger in the sequel or whatever.

eeey, this was great! it still stings that jess thinks aloy is an uggo, but at least i get it :')

real talk: i really appreciate jess walking through her (very well-reasoned tbh) critique, even if it appears we're on opposite sides of aesthetic preferences. i quite like super dense, perhaps overly-busy environments (Horizon and TLOU are among my favs of the past few years)- even with the consequence of sometimes getting spun around and temporarily disoriented. at the risk of using a marketing buzz word- i actually find myself more fully IMMERSED when the world takes a little more effort to parse- though i recognize that might not be the common experience or preference.

...and then just to go full contrarian- i honestly find the washed-out, (at least relative to Horizon) muted and subdued visual language of Breath of the Wild, Neon White and Elden Ring a little flat. i'll grant that both those worlds are orders of magnitude more legible than Horizon, but on a personal level i just find the super-saturation of Horizon nice change of pace. it's clearly divisive- but i think if you remove characters and were just to show screens of environments you'd be able to pick Horizon out of a line up.

one aspect of the overall game design i'd be interested in learning about with all these open world games is how different devs approach visual language and how that interacts with with narrative intent. Horizon is pretty distinct from Elden Ring and Zelda insofar as it has a Mass Effect style, dialogue driven narrative with a defined protagonist it's attempting to convey- whereas Elden Ring and Zelda seemingly just want you to be in a player avatar in a space (yes, they have 'stories' but clearly the devs didn't have a distinct narrative as a prioritized goal). for example- jess made the good point of how the Focus is often a bandaid for guiding the player- but the story relies pretty fundamentally on it as a narrative tool as well.

this was rad though, looking forward to more!

L

This video actually solved a lifelong mystery of why I can't remember anything about Resistance: Fall of Man, a game I owned and completed, yet can still remember every second of half a Halo 1 campaign I played twice at my friend's house. The dull, realistic toned former never matched the bright high contrast latter even though the former probably had higher fidelity textures. So thank you Jess and thank you Hot Takeouts, now I'm thinking with colors.

I loved the video by the way. My best friend holds these games in very high esteem but Zero Dawn completely disappeared from my mind even after I beat it. I was having trouble figuring out why certain games don't stick and I'm starting to believe this is why.

I’ve been playing this game a lot lately, and while I’m easily impressed by pretty landscape (a lot of me playing is saying to myself “wow! Mountains! Oooh! Pretty clouds!” etc) I think my biggest problem with the game is that the colors (especially red) are SO saturated sometimes. If they dialed it down from 11 to like, a 7 or 8 it would look much better I think. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the game ugly but I would say it could use more restraint. I could see how it’s aesthetic wouldn’t be for everyone, though.

On a separate note, the Kinkade comparisons are bit too harsh I feel like, because Kinkade was a rather cynical and hacky painter. His work is both soulless and not very good on a technical level; while the horizon games have their problems I think they’re a bit more sincere when it comes to their goals they’re trying to achieve with the art style (as much as an AAA game can be, at least. What I mean though is that to me it seems like there’s a purpose beyond commercialized sentimentality; the emphasis on the beauty of nature actually ties in very nicely to the game’s story and themes regarding the environment, so it’s motivated by more than just flashiness at least). And even if you don’t like the art direction, they’re hitting really high bars on a technical level. Kinkade on the other hand was a bit unsophisticated as a painter.

The costumes and stuff though, that’s a whole different conversation…

EFFIN THX! I really like the Horizon games, each design individually is so cool. Love the IP. It really does get rather bizzy tho, and when the awwwh!factor sizzles down, it becomes a little apparent that the frequent narration is there in a forest for the literal trees function. This does feel a little like complaining about a restaurant having food that is too good, after all glowing objects and handholding in general is perhaps just as big of a reminder of what kind of videogame you are playing. I would say tho, it is reasonable to think that this crew could walk that line and hit it better than anyone. That this is where we are is also not that surprising, late gen/new hardware, and historically perhaps the inverse of the beiGears of War era. It will adjust. Great vid Jess!

Thanks Jess! A friend of mine had this issue in Monster Hunter World, specifically the Jungle area with the huge tree surrounded by flora and fauna. The visual palette was overwhelming and distracting from the gameplay.

Are those hot takes though? Jess had no issues with the graphical fidelity, moreso the oversaturation that dampened recognizability to the point where there's more than 2 systems leading the player by the nose.

As a complete idiot who doesn't know shit about fuck, I wonder if a lack of knowledge helps someone enjoy visuals like this more. I imagine once you actually understand...uhh...art stuff, you're able to look at something and pick out things about it that bothers you in a much more specific manner, like the things talked about in this video, versus someone like me, a dummy, who looks at Horizon and goes "ooooooh preeetttyyyy", and that's kinda the end of the thought. Also, I turned on permanent ledge markers in the options menu in the beginning of the game and completely forgot it didn't always have that, so I guess I sidestepped most of the climbing issues. Again, being dumb made things better lol. Ignorance truly is bliss.

I love this video and hope there is more design and art content in the future.

I'm playing RDR2 for the first time and am having similar problems with the visuals washing out enemies to the point where I'm never sure who I need to shoot. They bail themselves out with a ridiculously detailed minimap which is another work around to add to the list.

Can you do a Hot Take on Shadow of Tomb Raider - I expect it to be a raving opposite of this one

A well-explained and entertaining if not entirely convincing argument. I do agree that the focus seems to serve as a band-aid but, I think it's more of a level design issue than an art design one.

I do appreciate the KINKade shaming bit towards the end.

Yeah nothing about Horizon has ever appealed to me, just looks awful.

Great vid VB :)

I think it’s a wildly technically impressive game that I don’t like to look at for an extended period. Games like this where its constantly visual busy tend to give me a headache after playing for a bit. Guerilla’s striving for “realness” hampers the game in more than just making it hard for players to know where to go at a glance. Aloy moves and animates in such a realistic way she’s hard to control. I know a person can’t really be as dexterous as Nathan Drake but moving Aloy often feels like driving a truck.

Classic designer point of view and I get it, but there's a life outside of the Pantone(R) books too. Sometimes you just want that paradise to be an island filled with tropical animals and a San Fransisco in your hand. De we really need to deem things ugly?

I will take any amount of ugly neon clusterfuck that this is vs the decade and a half of brown and gritty that videogames were prior.

Nothing says Labor Day like Jess posting a video when she should be taking time off ;) Thanks for the content, I've been eagerly anticipating hearing your extended thoughts on this.

I disagree.

I think Horizon is a high budget game that makes Indie games look bad.

The sheer density and overwhelming use of clashing colours definitely makes Horizon just, not hard to look at, but hard to parse.

You didn't dive into Elden Ring, as much as I would've loved to hear it, but ER manages to look striking and colourful without ULTRA OLED 4K RTX etc graphical power by using big interesting visual markers like "here's a giant castle on a raised cliff surrounded by a foggy lake" and dominant biome colours to theme the areas so that you always recognise where you are, Liurnia is blue and foggy, Altus Plateu is covered in golden flora, Caelid is a crimson red hellspace and so on.

This certainly gets more complicated when Horizon is a series that wants to revel in the excess, filling your screen with information; HUD, map markers, item drops and more that further clutter up the visual clarity on screen.

Very much enjoyed the video and always excited to see your video essays pop up.

@curufinwe: A well thought out written and edited long form video? Wow how sad indeed.

I love that Jess is making this kind of content, fantastic stuff.

This was great!

I had similar issues when I started Cyberpunk on PS5 recently. Night City was so visually and chromatically busy that I got disoriented (and a little motion sick!) when I first started navigating around.

I adjusted eventually, but man, It nearly made me put the game down after the first couple hours.

Great stuff! It feels like as "AAA" games have been able to achieve better graphical fidelity, it's led to studios neglecting their art design teams (sort of "why do we need art design? Look at these graphics!"). Going back to, say, MGS2, it's striking how much better it looks than a lot of modern "AAA" games just by virtue of having, like, legible, eye-catching art design.

Oh this is gonna be spicy.

@curufinwe: great constructive criticism WAY better than in her video of course :D