Hi lets discuss improvements/changes for next game. While i liked a lot of aspects of game , i hated some and disliked bunch of other things in game.

Just gonna write things i didn't like or should be changed

- Climbing system , it's bad you can't climb anywhere on the world but awkwardly jump to get mission areas, Climbing should be like zelda breath of wild. Use ICE Axes like in Modern Warfare 2. L2,R2 , L2, R2 to climb

- Hook to travel. A travel hook/grapple would be too fun and i just missed and wanted to use it in game. Our rope could have this feature we could aim etc , doesn't have to be like uncharted 4 which only hook on scripted areas.

- Use more instructive about your game mechanics. It says Triangle to mount but you can jump to them and mount already. I saw a lot of things like these in the game not explained to user. I don't know which mechanics in the game. I thought climbing was uncharted/assassin's creed but it was not. Then mounting is like RDR but you don't say it. Very bad idea.

- Flying mounts. It's a must to be honest. So cool idea to not do. Flying mount wars also but dont go over do it like Arkham Knight tank thing. Just enough .

-Better outfits. All Aloy outfits sucked , give her some cool outfits. I don't wanna look like boring piece of thing. Also make outfits change her hairstyle,lips,eyebrows etc.. Really go crazy on outfits , its darn stupid not to. Go fan service.

- Overlapping audio clips/game clips. Damn stupid , one of them should stop and continue after other finished. GTA,Uncharted etc doing this amazingly.

- Side Quest that aren't boring ass.I literally hate all side quests in this game. Meaningless , boring side quests. Make great ones like Witcher 3, Arkham City, GTA etc.. Maybe cut number of it but make them great !

- Too much text/audio/etc collectible. Don't rely telling story on these. Stupid game tactics , i hate going menus and watching reading some useless text to get info about game lore. Tell them in game, side quests, paintings on wall and more.

- Make more puzzles, i liked puzzles but there were like 2-3 of them. Make more meaningful puzzles , only ones in the game are changing arrows. Are you guys forgot to make game?

-Secrets. Game doesnt have any. make secret weapons,outfits,side quests maybe even gang. Areas.

- NPCs looks boring , make them different looking npcs.

-NPCS are useless in the game. Make them interact with each other also playable character.

-NO Fun activities or anythng to do in game. Why?? Its damn stupid. There should be games,events based on world of horizon. Card games, finger knife game type of thing maybe, circus maybe (you can shoot things with arrow and get items etc?) , there are so many possibilities based on world about robots and first civilization about mini games.

- Completely new melee combat . Melee was horrible beyond the shit in this game. I know they want arrow kinda focus but make melee much better. Devote a new skill tree to melee. Learn combos from them , make combos fluid not animation weight slow. Its so stupid there could be a lot of melee potentials.

- Make more melee weapons to utilize new melee combat. Axes, Maces,Swords etc. Though dont make them 10 version of them. treat melee weapons as unique. Just one Sword, one axe etc. Just like rope and other things.

- Make that calling mount skill in game from beginning. Aloy learned due ending of game etc .. Makes game more fun , its stupid every time to override a machine. maybe even modifiy your mount.

- New Robot types. Gorilla Robots, King Kong ,Monkey types which hangs on tress etc ..type of boss maybe, More dinos. go crazy about it .

- Enemies on mounts with spears or some kind of limited guns.

- Water gameplay. ( Water machines etc)

- Make animals and wildlife useful or remove it all together. Stupid to have animals just for fast travel

- Robots spawning mechanism needs overhaul. Sometimes they are everwhere in the world.

- Camera fixes, it gets too close on combat sometimes , just little back it off.

- no camera zoom in cities

- Make Aloy a bit more joky/lighter in some conversations. A bit too serious I feel. Maybe its ok for the main story but for side quests she could show a bit more personality

- Spread audio logs if you are gonna keep them, waiting 20 min in a room listening these types isnt fun at all.

- Pve Missions that you can do coop. Totally hunting missions or side quests. Not related to main story at all.(not sure if it wold work).

Other than graphics and animations are god tier. Beyond anything i seen. Main story was very cool even though beginning chapters kinda meh and boring. Go on more about robot vs human thing rather than colonies civil fight. Also maybe use more playable flashbacks to Operation Victory or something to old days when robots first fucked up. Use more flashbacks in general.

L3 for sprint felt particularly bad in this game. I'd like it to be on a face button.

@liquiddragon:

Kinda but what did you meant by face button ( x ? ) . most buttons are crowded so it makes sense assign L3 to it.

Big Lol to dressing Alloy up. Being honest to her environment and world bothers you? This is not a 'stylized' game, as that other game being discussed. Let's face it, Alloy was more on the side of using leaves and such for 'cleaning up' and other personal needs.

On the rest, some have merit with how the game is structured. And they may happen to jazz things up.

On the npc's...a few of them were all right. But most, they, idk, ended up somewhere in the; we-are-real-people-sort-of, uncanny valley. And the Emperor didn't really act like a full of himself Sun King. A little too humanized.

P.S. Agree about sprint with @liquiddragon But if there is no choice, I've seen it done that way. I would yell at Alloy to pick it up while re-pressing L3. That usually worked....

I just need infinite inventory space / infinite stacks, and I'm good. Everything else was fine for me, personally. I think it's safe to say we can expect the next installment to be improved and added upon, especially since the first game was so successful. I recommend checking out the Horizon Documentary by Noclip on youtube. Definitely can't wait for the next one, I hope John Gonzalez is still going to be a writer since the writing was quite good. Also, NPCs look boring? I disagree, Horizon probably had one of the most diverse NPCs ever, they all look super different too.

Aloy dresses like people in that world dress, and there was a lot of variety. It doesn't need to get all crazy.

Anyway a thing that should have been in this game and so better appear in any subsequent one: Any given merchant can be paid to fill up your god damned medical pouch.

@bybeach: @efesell: Yes it bothers me. I want to have fun and wearing different shit costumes. I dont mean her to sex her up. Though why not to yes to that too? Just make it optional there are like 20 costumes in the game and all looks like color swaps or total bullshit.

I want unique costumes, Like a robot costume with feathers. Pharoah costume, cleopatra costume maybe, modern outfit (her science mother outfit). Possibilities are endless. In the end those are extra costumes. I dont care if they break game's so called realism.

I literally bought one stupid outfit and completed whole game with it. Because all others looks trash.

While in AssCreed games they have crazy amount of costumes,outfits etc and all look pretty fun. If they have no creativity atleast crossover some other game maybe Ellie costume idk? Gravity Rush girl

etc

• I could call a mount a few hours into the game, it didn't take long to put enough skill points.
• The climbing could be better. Uncharted 4's climbing system blows it out of the water. It should happen more often and be less automatic.
• I was fine with Aloy's clothes other than it looking odd for a ginger to be wearing Native American/African looking clothes.
• Flying mounts would be nice, but it's not a big deal to me.
• Audio logs messing with the mission's dialogue annoyed me too.
• It's not a RPG, so I never expected NPCs to be all that exciting or to interact with them.
• I agree about the melee system. I hardly ever used melee since it wasn't effective due to the power of it and being SO slow.
• You need animals to craft potions and increase a bag's capacity, so they are useful, but there should be more of them.
• Running out of resource space even with a maxed out bag annoyed me the most. You should also be able to sell all valuables with one button. Going through marking them got tedious.

@paypay88: Yeah I just couldn't play a game like Horizon in some sort of wildly out of place costume. Even in Assassin's Creed which always has like the protagonists outfits from previous games and they look terrible and wrong on the new character and setting.

Release it later in the year so that pundits can't not award it anything because they feel like they haven't even thought about the game in months.

Agree on Aloy's outfits. All her armor except maybe one look real dumb, especially the head pieces.

While I liked the story I thought the dialog was boring as hell. I thought the same thing about New Vegas as well which he was also the lead writer on. I get that it's hard to make the dialog interesting in a big open world game but The Witcher 3 managed. Granted not many games do.

Personally my biggest problem was the inventory limits, beyond that i'm just tired of the Ubisoft/Warner Bros. styled open world games. To Horizon's credit I thought the combat was much better than any of those.

I'm not a fan of inventory management or crafting in general, but I loved the feel of the on-the-fly ammo crafting in this game so much that they obviously need those systems for that to happen...something massive needs to change with their iconography, however. The menus are startlingly unattractive for such an attractive game and even after 30 hours I had trouble remembering which item was which just from looking at the screen.

I'd love for them to find more ways for you to engage with the enemies at close range, even if primarily just the humans. I understand why they had the human combat from a variety angle, but it really doesn't change much when it's no fun to get up close and drop a combo on them, it just makes for a combat scenario that's arguably more generic and definitely more one note.

The idea of the story was great, the execution less so. Almost everything going on in the present day was simply motivation for Aloy to move towards the next big clue about the past, and while Aloy was fine I didn't like any of the other present day characters at all. As others have mentioned, for a game so heavily focused on its invisible past they sure didn't go far enough in ensuring that you remained engaged with that history. Whether it was having to just stand still and stare at a wall for five minutes while an audio log played so as to ensure Aloy/a voice in your ear didn't butt in and obscure an important piece of information or just depicting everything through holograms, Horizon: Zero Dawn was one of 2017's coolest story concepts with one of its poorest story executions.

To that end, they need to make the present day something I'm invested in for more reasons than I'm having more fun fighting these robot dinosaurs than I've had with any video game in years.

I finally downloaded Frozen Wilds, so I'm interested to see what else I think of; I'm hopeful that that DLC is just as refreshing gameplay-wise as the main game was a year ago.

“Go fan service.”

Lmao. This is where I stopped.

@awesomeusername: Maybe you would have more constructive reply if you read whole thing but cool

• The character writing didn't work for me. The background writing is cool, there's a lot of lore and clear reasons for why these different tribes are the way they are and how the world became how it is. But the actual characters in the game are very dull and unmemorable, and that made it hard to care about them. I think a lot of this is just an issue of tone - Horizon Zero Dawn has more robot animals than Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, but it takes itself so seriously that the most levity you're gonna get are a couple of generic, bickering merchants. Have a bit of fun next time. Characters like Nil should be entertaining, and they should look at why they aren't that at all.
• The combat against machines is great. Really strong. But the combat against humans, and you fight a lot of humans, is terrible. They hardly react to shots, there's hardly any variation to them, and there are no longer any weakpoints besides the head to hit. You can't hit specific parts to them to strip them of attacks or armor the way you can with the machines. You only have something like two melee attacks and a single weapon, so there's no variety to be gained from taking them on that way. It's just dull. It could be made cool - Maybe have some cyborgs around, maybe have the humans pilot unique robots etc. Or maybe just take them out.
• The traversal is very weak, best you've got are a few mounts that feel like the exact same mount and the ability to climb on predetermined ledges. This was the hardest part of the game to play after Breath of the Wild. It's totally adequate, but it's completely uninteresting and mindless.
• Either work on the faces so they look good, or just don't stick a camera up to them, Bioware-style, for the dialogue. A majority of them are unemotive and odd.
• Wary up the missions a bit. A lot of the late game involved standing in caves listening to holograms. Did I really need to visit 5 or 6 different vaults to learn all about the apocalypse or would two have done the trick?

Tighten up the combat - it was a great idea but dodging was always awkward and as mentioned above, fighting humans ranged from bad to awful; definitely felt like an afterthought they tacked on after all the cool machine combat stuff was put in place. Some of the larger machines also felt tiring to fight, especially since it would take a great deal of time to take them down, while a few hits would kill you which led to feeling like you can't make any mistakes.

Improve the UI - selecting from 3 different bows and all that stuff really breaks up the flow of things. The actual inventory was a huge mess. Generally speaking the UI and menus were pretty bad and thats not a good look for a game that requires you to craft a whole lot

Greatly improve traversal and mobility - imagine a Horizon with the mobility of like a Dragons Dogma or something, where you can actually climb the bigger machines. Limiting your movement in the world only to yellow handholds made the world feel a little fake at times. That stuff works in Uncharted because they construct very tight, linear and cinematic experiences.

Improve the writing delivery - the entire story behind what happened to the world was interesting but the way it was delivered to the player was extremely dull. Reading through pages and pages of old e-mails or standing around while holograms deliver monologues got extremely tiring towards the end of the game. A single well directed cutscene will do so much more than 50 pages of text. Also beyond our main protagonist everyone else in the game felt very weak and one note.

Great first showing, but they have a long way to go in order to catch up to other open world games out there in terms of movement and variety.

Maybe have an easier ramp up? I felt like the game just took the difficulty reigns off way to quick. The sidequest where you have to take down two sabers right next to each other at lvl 10 was impossible for me. I felt like I missed some key info during a tutorial section. Even on the easiest difficulty I couldn't take them both down. I'm not usually one to have this much trouble with games. It was confusing enough to just make me stop playing entirely.

Obviously everything is subjective (it took all of thirty minutes for Demon's Souls and Bloodborne to turn me away) but I loved the difficulty curve of Horizon and have been chasing that rush ever since. It's not often I play games on the harder difficulties, but I started Horizon on Hard for some reason I can't recall anymore and by the end of the game I'd bumped it up to Very Hard. I just recently started a New Game + last night after finally buying Frozen Wilds and figured, with all the gear at my disposal and being max level I might as well choose the new Ultra Hard difficulty, but even still I can't recapture that feeling of being terrified by the presence of a single, low-level walker or small herd of horse-robots. I remember thinking about that first Sawtooth encounter for several minutes and the fight drawing itself out over nearly a half hour, whereas with my full array of weapons I basically stood still, popped all its armor off, tied it to a rock and devastated it.

All of that is still a lot of fun for me (and I'd forgotten how good it feels to notice a charging exclamation point at the edge of your screen just before it gets to you, rolling out of the way, popping up with three arrows loaded, engaging the slowed time and knocking all the power canisters off a grazer's back) but I can't think of a time in many years that I've been so wrapped up in my fear of enemies in a game as I did the first several hours of Horizon. I also can't remember the last time I felt so satisfied when I started figuring out how to use new weapons to my advantage and started upgrading my skill tree enough that the weaker enemies finally started feeling like easy encounters. Horizon did one of the better jobs of you actually feeling like you're upgrading your skills with the game at the pace your character is increasing their understanding of the world.