So I let the people out in internetland decide for me what game I was going to play next between Horizon: Forbidden West, Death Stranding, and South Park: The Fractured, but whole and the outcome was what I really should have expected in that Horizon was overwhelmingly the choice by the masses. I should have seen that coming and in the future I will make an effort to ensure that one of the games isn't a lot more popular and well-known than the others. Now that I think about it the voting was kind of rigged because of this since Horizon is significantly more well-known and sold much better than the other two, probably combined.
So even though this game has been in my library for close to 6 months and on my hard drive for a month or so, a few days ago was the very first time that I ever fired it up. Thus far the experience has been relatively good and very reminiscent of how I felt about the first release in the series, Zero Dawn.
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First off I want to congratulate Guerrilla Games and Sony for somehow managing to have the game boot up in less than half an hour. I'm exaggerating here, I don't know how long the game took to boot up but compared to other AAA games of this magnitude, it actually booted up very rapidly even on a PS4. I don't understand how any of this works but it was a delightful to have it move so quickly. This is something I was not expecting and was a nice surprise. I think that a lot of games out there really kick us in the nuts right from the start by giving us a bunch of unskippable, basically advertisements for all the crews involved in making the games and this just irritates the hell out of me. I DGAF about your company and neither does anyone else. If I like the game I am going to remember your company name, stop spamming me with a 30 second graphic about it or at least allow me to skip it.
Then when you get into the game Horizon surprised me a second time by not having some sort of absurd-length movie that you have to watch before you can play. Some people don't mind this sort of thing but it irritates me an many other gamers. If I wanted to watch a movie, I would do that.
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Instead we get a reasonable-length video that introduces us to a few major new characters and a catchup about what happened at the conclusion of the first game. We are shown that Aloy is a bit older and that things have not resolved themselves on earth and in many ways have gotten worse. This was good because it has been long enough since I completed part one that I had forgotten a bunch of this.
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we then get a tutorial area that is considerably shorter than the first game and much shorter than other titles, which I thought was actually just the perfect length. I think most players were already at least somewhat familiar with how the game works so they didn't feel the need to hold your hand for an hour and instead we are only in the "tutorial area" for about 10 minutes but screentips (which you can deactivate entirely any time you want) pop up every now and then, even hours into the game. This is very good programming IMO.
If you know me, you know I am a fussy gamer and little things like this that are done incorrectly really piss me off a lot more than they probably should.
Now, onto the things that have changed that I am still trying to wrap my head around.
The skill tree, which is where you spend skill points earned from quests or leveling up, is absolutely fucking massive. Thus far I have found it quite confusing and I haven't used any of the active bonuses to my advantage just yet. There are some pretty complicated combos in there such as melee 2x followed by a jump action, followed by slowing down time and firing an arrow while in the air. That hurts my head just trying to think about actually pulling that off and I don't see myself ever using it.
For me, I have just been aiming for passive bonuses such as added defense, increased stamina and damage.... you know, the usual stuff. It has been working out for me.
The game is actually quite easy to breeze through on the normal setting. I'm in areas that are 5-8 levels above my own level and not experiencing a great deal of trouble and have only died once. I think this has a lot to do with the massive amount of healing items that you have access to early on in the game. I can only presume that this will change later as enemies start to hurt you a bit more with each hit. In the beginning it is quite easy to survive any fight simply by using the plethora of healing herbs that you find all over the damn place.
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Now if you know me and am familiar with you I roll, you know I can't possibly showcase a game without finding something to gripe about and so far, I only have two minor gripes and one of them there is nothing that they could have done to prevent.
First off, there are a TON of cutscenes in this game, to the point of overuse. This might appeal to some people who love getting engrossed in a story but I do NOT like that. I appreciated how in the first game that a lot of the additional information was optional and accessed via your scanner, in Forbidden West most of this stuff just happens and interrupts gameplay. I admit that I am reticent to talk to many of the optional people that I encounter because I know it is most likely going to trigger a cutscene that I am forced to watch just to get an optional quest that I likely won't end up doing anyway. Thankfully, in some of these scenes the dialogue is skippable line by line since most of us can read subtitles faster than the voice actors are going to say the lines. However, in a lot of them the only option is to skip the scene entirely, or endure the very long and drawn out sequences. It would have been better in my mind if all of the scenes were advance-able line by line at your own pace.
The second gripe is something the Guerilla couldn't have prevented and this is the loading times. I really believe that this game is pushing the limits of the PS4 and therefore there is a lot of waiting whenever you want to do almost anything. Annoyingly, this happens even when just accessing your inventory, map, and quest menus. I wonder if this was put in there intentionally to try to encourage people to buy a PS5.
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the enemy of all gamers!
For those of you that have played on a PS5-I do not own one - I would be curious to know if there is a lag/load time when accessing the menus.
So far the game is as great as I expected it to be and I am really enjoying it. This is a great start and I can already tell that even though I promised to play at least 10 hours, that I will likely end up playing far more than that.
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Looks like you finally got to write about it :3. i wonder if i played a role in pushing this out lol.
You are right about loading being the enemy. I can't think of any games that have no loading is there such a game. There's always some sort of transition loading when playing something from main menu to in game etc @_@. I guess in the future the CPUS/GPUS will be even stronger which would prob help load all this faster maybe to one day being almost instant but who knows.
As for this game it looks good and worth playing if had the liberty to try games like this but there's just way too many games out there and little time hehe so at least being able to see your review is kind of like shortcutting the whole game. either that or watching speedruns~
lol, yes, you were rather instrumental in me getting this "out the door" so to speak but it was easy to write because I am really enjoying my gameplay. This is a very different experience than how I normally game because I am playing ONLY this game now whereas in the past I have always been playing several at once.
The load times are only going to get worse for big RPG's like this on a PS4. I will have to upgrade at some point because there are a lot of games that I feel the ps4 loads entirely too slowly but the machine is 10 years old so I guess that is expected. Imagine trying to play a newly released on a PC that is 10 years old... you probably wouldn't even be able to run it.
You're welcome for getting you out the door. glad it was easy for you to write. i always love the writing when the words just come out and typed out super fast and smooth. Wow game so good u only played this one it must be that good. I don't think ive ever had that mabye pokemon when im younger.
That's great get a ps6 when its out or its already out i have no clue lol. load time sucks but not much can be done maybe in future we can go into the game like ive seen in animes hehe.
yeah, it's a pretty fantastic game. I only found two bugs in the game that required a restart or zoning and and out of a place to fix it too. I am kind of surprised that those exist in a game this huge though.
I'll detail them later but they were pretty bad and one of them it seems as though many other people have had the same problem and it hasn't been patched out even though the bug happens at a major part of the main story path.
but the game is old now so i guess theres no update for it?
Interesting they got major bug tho O.O but u still love the game.
The two bugs in particular that I am talking about happen at the end of what I believe to be two quests that are part of the main story. You cannot proceed in the story until these two people move into a certain point on the map but for some reason, they get stuck in a certain place and can't make it to that point. I've tried nudging them, attacking them, leaving the area and coming back, blowing things up next to them, but nothing works. As it turns out you need to fast travel somewhere or save the game and then reload the game and they will reset to the position they were meant to make it to and that is the only way to resolve this.
These are widely known so it is surprising to me that this hasn't been repaired yet.
That bug sounds annoying. u wasted time trying to work a way around a bug just to finish the game.
is there a way for it to be even repaired? to be honest the devs probably moved onto a new game? cuz this game alr quite old?
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I didn't like the way the NPC's talks in the first game. I hope it is improved in this one.
the spoken dialogue is actually very good in this game. I believe they put a lot of time and effort into insuring quality acting. I think they actually put a little too much voice acting into it and I end up skipping a lot of it. Thus far I have only found about 1 or 2 bad voice actors in the entire lineup and I have spoken to hundreds of characters.