the Elden Dust has settled, Mouthful Mode has been deactivated- and so i wanted to take this opportunity to briefly close the loop on the thread i started at the end of Jan. this is also partially an attempt to publicly call-out resident staff Horizon enthusiast @rorie to get his thoughts on HFW...jkjk...kinda ;)

my short version- HFW has its flaws (most of which i would ascribe to scope vs. quality), but i thought HFW was an absolutely rock solid continuation//escalation of the franchise- and i think with some refinements Guerrilla could produce something TREMENDOUS. i'm super-stoked for the hypothetical 3rd game- perhaps moreso than i was for HFW.

for those who care- some more specific, bulleted thoughts below (goes without saying !SPOILERS!):

disclosure:

(you could say i'm something of a fan; it was a PS5 system-seller for me, giant grain of salt, etc.)

- visually HFW is an absolute stunner. i know the super-saturated color palette isn't for everyone, but hearing some people say it looks like a slightly uprez'd version of Zero Dawn is some serious rose-tinting. there's been significant progress made on the visual fidelity and animation of humans (seriously- revisit baby Aloy from HZD)- to the extent that Guerrilla may have outdone Naughty Dog for best-looking video game humans. and jesus, the world just POPS with splendor.

- a recurring thought i had as i played: the Horizon franchise has fully supplanted Mass Effect as my favorite dialogue-driven//action RPG-ish thing. they both suffer from pretty dumb PLOT (destined heroes with escalating Big Bads...see also: video games)- and Mass Effect might have a slight edge when it comes to breadth of interesting characters (ride or die Garrus//Thane//Tali); but i am ALL IN on Erend, Kotallo, and Zo. the character writing is PRETTY SOLID- and in particular i continue to enjoy Erend's reflections on grieving his sister, Kotallo's veteran-trauma and his search for purpose, and Zo reconciling her beliefs in the face of conflicting info. i also VASTLYPREFER a protagonist with its own damage (Aloy) vs. a player avatar (Shepard)- the conversation with Beta re: Rost was particularly touching.

- admittedly the game can get pretty cheesy, and yes some of the costuming is ridiculous and yes some side quests land-the-plane better than others- but all-told the writing and characterizations felt equivalent in consistency to something like a Star Trek: The Next Generation season, and i found that INCREDIBLY ENDEARING. some high highs, a few low lows, a ton of 'just go with it' energy- and i kinda love that. and generally speaking i found the dialogue (particularly Aloy's sarcasm) pretty sharp.

- there's a decent diversity of storytelling outside the main questline- both in stories themselves and the characters involved. elders falling victim to senility, Kotallo's journey, Dekka and her grandson getting radicalized, Regalla and her enormous presence. also i'd like to state one more time- so nice to see significant efforts towards representing humans in a more varied spectrum of experience than just grizzled/attractive hetero white dude/dudette.

- one generalized critique: the game does feel like it lost some of the excellent melancholic tone found in HZD. it was great to have a complete understanding of everything that went down by the end of the first game- but in HFW i really missed the deeply sad, read-between-the-lines audiologs of academics and scientists desperately trying to secure a future they'd never see. (though the secret area in the mountain base does have a taste of this emotional resonance...for all the bemoaning of icon-barf and dragging the player by the wrist...there are bits of humanity tucked away to be found)

- i do wish we got more Sylens- every time Lance shows up he's the best.

- i still find the combat really satisfying- and while the stealth can be a bit simplistic/binary, this might be my favorite 3rd person action system. yeah, it sucks they made ammo expensive- but god DAMN that spike thrower and plasma damage. generally i found the status effects more fun to engage with this go-around as well. enemy design continues to be on point (Tideripper, Shellsnapper, Slitherfang, Tremortusk, and Slaughterspine were all rad additions). and i had a pretty good time with the arena! (though i wish you could build your own encounters)

- soundtrack is a banger. love how they incorporated themes/vocals from HZD and cranked the arpeggiated synths. sure the Landgods reboot tune/hymn is a bit cheesy, but it deeply appeals to the Oneohtrix Point Never fan in me.

- GRAPPLING TO A SUNWING MOUNT WILL NEVER GET OLD. i just wish you got it a bit sooner (maybe game 3 will solve this?)

-brief aside: i really appreciate the way Guerrilla acknowledges death and grieving in this franchise. while Varl's death felt a bit by-the-numbers- his memorial is very touching, the way character interactions change afterwards feels real (Erend and Zo are noticeably kinder to eachother after)- and even the in-game memorial to the Guerrilla producer that passed away is legitimately touching. this game has a lot of heart!

-for as dumb and cliche as the ending is (an EVEN BIGGER BAD, etc.)- i do deeply appreciate that the root of all 'evil' in this universe remains steadfastly techbro hubris and ego. plenty of games have bosses to defeat, but it still feels kinda rare to have them rooted in contemporary, non-Manichean issues.

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so yeah! speaking as a fan, and for game i never expected to take huge narrative risks (it's a popcorn story, really)- i think the game over-delivered! and i'm very much looking forward to what i hope is in inevitable conclusion in part 3!

anyone else have thoughts?

(still the best photo mode in the biz, btw)

I have not finished the game yet, so I have avoided spoilers, but so far my impression is this:

There's a lot to like - the graphics are gorgeous, the voice acting is top notch, and where I am in the story is still interesting and making me want to find out what happens next. That said, I'm finding the actual act of playing the game is increasingly becoming more of a chore the more I play. It isn't that they don't have good ideas, but they haven't polished them enough to make them fit together in a satisfying way.

Basically I think they took a lot of the problems of the first game and doubled down on them rather than improving the underlying issue. For example, there are way too many weapons in the game. This was already an issue in Zero Dawn where for some reason you needed about 3 or 4 different slings to get all the ammo types. But now not only do you have even more weapons, weapons types, and elemental statuses, all the weapons have their own set of upgrades. It's obnoxious and leads to a lot of fiddling around in the inventory to find the combination of ammo types I'm looking for at a given moment. It's even worse since there isn't a super-convenient way to compare two weapons in your inventory. They would have been much better off having one of each type of weapon and giving them 10 or 12 upgrades to work through over the course of the entire game as opposed to having a bunch of the same type of weapons with 3-5 upgrades each.

Additionally, melee combat is still useless and feels bad even though they've now dedicated an entire skill tree to it. Even when upgraded, it does a paltry amount of damage compared to ranged attacks, has no elemental statuses you can apply, has an absolute crap sense of what you're trying to aim at, and is generally so slow you can't get off a combo before you get hit or have to dodge. While they did add the melee detonator thing, even with the upgrades it feels like it takes forever to charge - I can kill more things faster in the same amount of time using the bow.

I'm also not a huge fan of how they handle ammunition. It shares the problem that DOOM: Eternal had in that they're trying really hard to limit the amount of ammunition you can carry in order to try and increase tension, but then immediately undermine that by making the ability to replenish it abundant. In DOOM this led to a lot of having to sit through tedious chainsaw animations over and over again. In Horizon, I'm having to slow down time constantly to craft more arrows.

@mellotronrules: I've been writing up notes for a review! I'll throw a link to it in the forum when I get done with it! I think it's great!

oh nice one! i was mostly joshin ya but i'm excited you have some thoughts to share.

One thing I've grown to appreciate even more than I did while playing this game is the world's seeming awareness of the player's progression through it. While it wasn't quite wandering Red Dead 2 during the epilogue levels of "wait, they accounted for this at every moment?" Forbidden West always felt like a game the developers expected players to want to explore most of but could never be quite sure when that player would get to this or that activity. It's starkly contrasted by Elden Ring, a game in which you might stumble upon an early game quest a hundred hours into the game, where because your character doesn't speak the game can't acknowledge that at least you've been where a character is asking you to go before, or worse yet because you've already been there a quest has moved along to some other random point in its sequence.

I think there was another story spoilers thread a couple months ago with most of my thoughts on the story so I won't rehash that again, but I think Horizon inverted a bit in that it really excelled in many of its smaller moments while dropping the ball a bit on the bigger picture. Zero Dawn could be corny at times but it was never actually silly, whereas Forbidden West struggles like hell to take the silliest of premises remotely seriously. It also asks a lot of the player to imagine a world in which the primary antagonists have the capabilities they do and yet Aloy and her squad can just putz about the world achieving their goals small and large without any risk of being detected until the plot demands it. I found it unfortunate that the sequel to a game with pretty astounding attention to detail and pacing so often felt like a sprawling mess.

But again, that sprawl felt real, and lived in, and manageable. It never felt like too much in the way Elden Ring has begun to, and I'm retroactively really coming to appreciate even if in the moment I'd sometimes find myself wondering where exactly I was in the main story progression. In retrospect most of that confusion could be summed up as my own excitement and curiosity as to just how much content was going to get crammed into that game, content I ultimately was pretty much always aware of in some capacity and free to tackle or discover at my leisure. I didn't 100% it like you (not that interested in the melee or robot arenas, sadly) but I also had an awesome time and despite a lot of nitpicks and an overall feeling that it might not quite measure up to Zero Dawn as a total package, I'm still pretty comfortable calling it my favorite game I've played this year, flaws and all.

I agree with pretty much all of what you said.

SPOILERS FOR SIDE QUESTS, A BIT OF MAIN QUEST STUFF, AND CHARACTER STUFF. Apologies for this being kinda long.

Like was mentioned above, I also think this game will be hard to overtake as my favourite game of the year. It's not a flawless game for sure, but some of the stuff they did from both a technical and writing perspective will be very difficult to beat out.

One criticism I've wanted to address somewhere for a bit, and Turk reminded me of, is the idea that there are too many weapons segregating too many types of ammo. I could, in theory, agree that there's a very simply solution to this issue though I haven't seen anybody else suggest it - let the ammo slots be customized by the player - and that if a multitude of players are complaining about the thing it's not not a problem, but...

I personally never found it to be an issue. They trivialized a couple old guard weapons (specifically the tripcaster generally and the percussive arrow specifically, forgive me for forgetting the in-game nomenscripture) but they did codify their combat better overall, I felt. All you want out of your precision bow is power, to be used if you carry both the OP attack Valor and the Braced Arrow special skill. The combat bow is for applying status effects super quickly at close range before backing out to use normal arrows and blast slings. Then you choose your one or two (or three? already forget how many weapons you equip at a time) specialty weapons and make sure they apply the status effects you like - probably acid and fire or freeze - and at that point you don't ever really have to think about it again.

There's a point in the midgame where this all feels fairly overwhelming, particularly if you played the first game where the progression feels pretty standard, or maybe it's more appropriate to say progressive, but I get what Guerilla was trying to do. They wanted to let players try to customize their playstyle more while challenging them to find or equip the right set of weapons. It's similar to the way they limit on hand items despite some of them going into a nebulous inventory you can pull from out of thin air and a stash you can...stash things in from miles and miles away. The idea of a going on a hunt - or a boss run, in Souls parlance - is there, but somewhere along the way they pulled a half measure and did a bit of old and new.

It's an easily criticized pair of systems, in other words, but ultimately I found the flaws pretty negligible. Caveat to that being, as usual, I'm drawn to a random encounter with a herd of Ravagers the way others are drawn to 3 hours of one-on-one headbutting with the Orphan of Kos. The thrill never left me for 80 hours no matter what little flaws I'd find here or there.

@nodima: @therealturk: re: weapons - yeah, this is an interesting one. despite my own obvious enjoyment of the table Guerrila has set- i don't begrudge anyone who takes issue with the way it's all presented. between the ammo types, green//blue//purple rarities, mods, upgrades, and quantity and duplication of purpose (there's like 6 ways to put a freeze on a robo)- the weapon system does appear a bit much. however in practice found i was able to largely ignore the mods/upgrades and lower grade weapons in anticipation of the purples and legendaries i eventually acquired. while i wouldn't mess with the mechanics of all this- there probably is a more elegant way to house the same systems in a UI that feels better- whether that's more customization of the weapon wheel, better shortcuts, keeping one weapon type and using it as platform for upgrades, etc. room for improvement, for sure.

@ben_h: glad to hear you caught a similar TNG vibe! and yes, i forgot to mention the weaponsmith sisters you meet at various points- really enjoyable to see some neurodiversity represented in a naturalistic way. and i think you're right- while the 'normalization of difference' as found in TNG can feel unrealistic, cheesy, or maybe (least charitably) ignorant to some- i think there's a fundamental optimism to that sort of worldbuilding that can be refreshing to step into every now and then. speaking of which (and as you draw attention to)- i really continue to enjoy the detailed worldbuilding in HFW- that character submenu is one narrator and a few entries away from being a decent little codex.

i'm not one to get hung up on design minutiae- but i noticed this as well and it really is impressive. the amount of bespoke-feeling Aloy dialogue is really astounding. i can't tell you the number of times my completionist tendencies were audibly acknowledged during quest dialogue...often i would already have what a quest required, or i would have completed 'step 3' first, and either Aloy or the quest-giver would have unique, specific dialogue akin to "but fortunately you seem to be on top of things so we can skip to the next part."

there must have been some wild flow charts for recording voice in this game.

I would love that you could see instantly when either your picked a weapon stat that you could instantly see where it could be applied, instead of having to go into details on all your weapons and then select which one to apply that upgrade for.

Just let me choose for instant fire upgrade and then you get a list with every weapon you can apply it to.

I had a few problems with the bloat of the game and in some of the narrative, including the entire ending sequence. It is one of the prettiest games I’ve ever played and had it not been released so close to Elden Ring, I likely would have enjoyed the controls more than I did.

Spoilers

I’m on my phone and can’t seem to set up the spoilers tag, so I’ll stay relatively vague here:

The ending was dumb. Unbelievable last minute loss of sanity on the part of Carrie Anne Moss’s character after developing her significantly better than the other kryptonians up to then. Also, the big ball of bad vibes was a dumb sequel setup. Actually, all the villains sucked after their initial cool reveal, partly because most of them stayed off screen for 90% of the game and we didn’t get to know much about them other than they were assholes. Which I get was the commentary, but even assholes have a story on how they got that way.

It’s a good game but after the amazing story and setting of the first one, this just didn’t live up to the same quality. Not that it was bad at all, but not as good

@mellotronrules: On the subject of weapons and combat in general, I think there are a few solvable issues.

First, there are just too damn many weapons. I am not very far into the game (unfogged maybe 1/3 of the map). I currently have 20 weapons in my inventory, some from quest rewards and some that I bought before figuring out buying them was pointless. I've seen probably 6-8 more in shops that I haven't bothered to purchase. I can only imagine how many more there will be by the time I'm through the game. Given that many of the weapons are of the same type and rarity, but with only so very slightly different stats, it just doesn't seem worth it.

It would be far better to have one weapon of each type, and rather than having 3-5 upgrades, each one of those weapons should have like 10-12 to take it through the entire game. That would massively reduce clutter and give players something to work towards over a longer period of time.

Second, I think there are too many weapon types. While I get the utility of some of them, I can't say I understand what tactical niche some of them are supposed to fill. For example, I've got a blast sling and an explosive spear thrower right now. Both are mid to long range, both are slow firing, both have limited ammo, and both deal almost the same amount of explosive damage. I don't quite understand when I should be using one over the other and it seems like the game could get by with having one or the other.

In fact, the use of the weapon seems almost more defined by the element of its ammo than its specific characteristics. Given that, I'd rather that the ammo types be equippable slots like the weapon coils rather than intrinsic characteristics of a weapon. That would allow more player flexibility while also removing the need to have a billion of the same type of weapon. You could increase the number of available slots as you upgrade the weapon.

Third, and this is a more minor problem, but the ammo counts are stupidly low at the beginning of the game. It doesn't even make sense given how plentiful crafting materials are. All it means is that you have to slow down time constantly to make more. Either they need to up the ammo count massively (I think basic arrows should be unlimited), or they need to make the more powerful ammo harder to craft so you need to be more considered about what you are using. Maybe something like you can only craft elemental ammo at a workbench would strike the balance, I dunno, but I find it obnoxious how often I'm having to slow down time in combat. Right now it's a limitation that isn't really a limitation, which I find kind of bad design.