Sean Fenian#Gaming commentary: Horizon—Forbidden West (1/2)
So for the past week or two I've been working my way through #Horizon: #ForbiddenWest in my spare time.
It certainly does follow on in all the important ways from Zero Dawn. Aloy remains a strong, clever, smart, likable female protagonist. Silens remains a complete and utter asshole (possibly even a bigger asshole than Ted Faro, and that's a high bar to pass). Several of the tribal leaderships are still stupidly self-interested. (Nothing new there.) There's new settings, new machines, some clever machine designs.
Unfortunately, most of what's new about the actual gameplay is that they totally changed many of the key mappings from Zero Dawn, provide no mechanism for setting them back to what they were, and liberally litter the game with a bewildering array of complex new combat mechanisms with almost-identical invocations and dubious value, complexity for the sake of complexity, and SO MANY DAMN WEAPONS, and at least half of the new weapon "innovations" are stupid. I think I'm carrying something like thirty weapons. Talk about immersion-breaking.
And then there's the special tools. The various things that are gated behind different kinds of obstacles that require a special tool to breach, seemingly solely in order to make you figure out where to get the Sooper Sekrit Speshul Tool.
The worst of these is the vine cutter.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST it's a PERFECTLY ORDINARY LOOKING VINE, you have edged weapons, you have high explosives, you have incendiaries, you have super-acids, you have freaking plasma weapons, what more can it possibly take to get past a damn VINE? Does it contain Ringworld shadow-square wire or something?
It's artificial fake difficulty, and even worse than that, it's stupid artificial fake difficulty. That's not challenging, it's just annoying.
I obtained the Firegleam igniter because it's a main storyline item, and the rebreather which is also main storyline, but is it worth the trouble of going back for all the blow-up walls and deep dives I had to bypass because I didn't have them?
...No. It isn't. Fundamentally NONE of them contain anything worth going back for. And fuck only knows where or when I get the vine cutter. Or whatever mystery tool opens the metal flowers that in H:ZD you just had to walk up to and collect. And to hell with all the hovering drones that you have to somehow jump onto, which don't do a thing anyway except change the decor of one room in your base (when you get it).
The developers couldn't even be bothered to make the metal flowers show up on the map as something other than "blocked paths". They managed to take a previously working feature and phone it in.
(1/2, contd. in comment)
So for the past week or two I've been working my way through #Horizon: #ForbiddenWest in my spare time.
It certainly does follow on in all the important ways from Zero Dawn. Aloy remains a strong, clever, smart, likable female protagonist. Silens remains a complete and utter asshole (possibly even a bigger asshole than Ted Faro, and that's a high bar to pass). Several of the tribal leaderships are still stupidly self-interested. (Nothing new there.) There's new settings, new machines, some clever machine designs.
Unfortunately, most of what's new about the actual gameplay is that they totally changed many of the key mappings from Zero Dawn, provide no mechanism for setting them back to what they were, and liberally litter the game with a bewildering array of complex new combat mechanisms with almost-identical invocations and dubious value, complexity for the sake of complexity, and SO MANY DAMN WEAPONS, and at least half of the new weapon "innovations" are stupid. I think I'm carrying something like thirty weapons. Talk about immersion-breaking.
And then there's the special tools. The various things that are gated behind different kinds of obstacles that require a special tool to breach, seemingly solely in order to make you figure out where to get the Sooper Sekrit Speshul Tool.
The worst of these is the vine cutter.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST it's a PERFECTLY ORDINARY LOOKING VINE, you have edged weapons, you have high explosives, you have incendiaries, you have super-acids, you have freaking plasma weapons, what more can it possibly take to get past a damn VINE? Does it contain Ringworld shadow-square wire or something?
It's artificial fake difficulty, and even worse than that, it's stupid artificial fake difficulty. That's not challenging, it's just annoying.
I obtained the Firegleam igniter because it's a main storyline item, and the rebreather which is also main storyline, but is it worth the trouble of going back for all the blow-up walls and deep dives I had to bypass because I didn't have them?
...No. It isn't. Fundamentally NONE of them contain anything worth going back for. And fuck only knows where or when I get the vine cutter. Or whatever mystery tool opens the metal flowers that in H:ZD you just had to walk up to and collect. And to hell with all the hovering drones that you have to somehow jump onto, which don't do a thing anyway except change the decor of one room in your base (when you get it).
The developers couldn't even be bothered to make the metal flowers show up on the map as something other than "blocked paths". They managed to take a previously working feature and phone it in.
(1/2, contd. in comment)