Now Playing - Horizon: Zero Dawn

Every time I try to write one of these articles, I usually wind up moving onto some other activity before I finish, or go so deep into the game I'm beyond the talk I started the article with. Let's see if this one get's finished and posted while I'm still playing. So.. this is Horizon. Obviously, being both a fan of creative themes, and Guerrilla's Killzone series, I really wanted to see how this would go. Unlike my habits with obsessing over Killzone, I denied myself too much info, and tried keeping this game a surprise. I'm... not sure I made the best of options, because this game really doesn't have a ton of surprises in it. Everything I didn't know about is generic open world stuff under the skin of this game's theme and lore, which were things I definitly knew about. The only surprises are a couple of the enemy types, like the fact there's a giant robot aligator, and a massive bull thing that shoots stuff out of it's horns, then a little shell carrier that's cheap as hell. Stuff like that is a surprise, but... radio tower dinos, vantage points, and dungeon rooms that unlock secrets, upgrade systems, and mods... not so much. However for what it's worth, nearly every single attribute is handled amazingly well.

Honestly, I think what I have to think about the game is shown in the way I love the story. It's a story we kinda know and have seen before. A strange person is an outcast to society, born by odd means with some messiah/demon questions floating about, and literally tossed into a group called the outcasts who are basically the criminals and rejects. She trains hard, rises to the top, just to be struck with a great conflict that gives her a motive to find her true purpose. Okay, so we got all the cliches out of the way, now let me tell you how freakin' awesome it is handled! You're in a setting barely ever done in gaming, where robot creatures rule the land, and man-kind as we know it has been mysteriously reverted back into tribal days. Why? Who knows. Newer civilization is a mix of sci-fi wizardry, and primitive spears. The underground is made entirely of metal, with giant wire tunnels, and massive flying conveyor belts. Your surface world is mixed with crumbling buildings and re-purposed towns mixed with fantasy and real cultures from a world that was once globalized. Then on top of all that, side-quests are handled witcher style (with actual story) with some incredible surprises and very well-written characters. The friend that introduces you to bandit camps is a former soldier, who fights them to make the best of his psychopathic tendencies. You help out an elder who is forbidden to talk to you, so she talks to you through praying to the goddess. Odd but interesting characters like that, coupled with this incredible and beautiful world full of mystery and a tried but true plot of equally gripping suspense, make this an incredibly compelling experience. Even if you need more than your two hands to count all the cliches, you won't be doing that at all when you realize that means putting down the controller

Gameplay is almost exactly the same way. Much like with the story, it ain't perfect. Cliches that seem like they're just there for a quota are present, and occasional misses will have you wondering why, but for the most part everything is good; even if you've seen most of it in some way before. Ultimately, I've concluded it's a mostly good mix of Far Cry and Witcher 3 gameplay. It has the drive and story/quest delivery of Witcher, feeling truly open world in that sense of going places, getting story, and traveling around. However it has an ubisoft (and more specifically, Far Cry because of outposts) way of dealing with map clutter and how the open world is actually used. You'll have these arbitrary boxes to tick off if you want to complete stuff. A lot of it has good contexts, like collecting cups for a merchant because he wants to learn about them from the old world. And the metal caves are explored to unlock data that allows you to work better with machines of the world. ...but then you're also doing things like finding some arbitrary data point to catch the slightest glimpse into the old world, even if it gives you nothing of meaning, and has no real logic. Or you'll be doing hunter lodge mini-games, with some clunky excuse that it's like a big hunter club for sport, but it's... really just a generic mini-game compilation thrown in. I'm not exactly complaining, but it's not exactly in my personal interests to fulfill this sort of world, and at one point I kind of groaned to myself when an interesting side quest marker just turned out to be a guy advertising the hunter mini-games. I guess it just sounds like I'm complaining, because I am covering the strange mix of open world tropes.

While I'm nitpicking things and making comparisons, I guess I'll just let out my complaints right now for the time being so we can get them out of the way anyways. Most of them are minor when taken into consideration with the whole picture. Then I'll resume talking about how awesome the game is.

Complaint round!

Uh oh, here we go...

• The saving can be weird. There's an auto and manual bonfire save deal going on, so you never know for sure where it really kicked in or where you should be stopping. At one point I did a massive trade, bought four new major things and offloaded a lot of junk, ran out to kill two broadheads, and climbed around for a vantage point. I fell, and lost EVERYTHING, even the shop transactions, just because... I didn't get to another fire? But then I later had the game save sometime in the middle of riding around on a mount, doing absolutely nothing of importance in between the last fire and getting that. What the hell, GG?
• The leveling system is one of those arbitrary garbage ones that waste your time and break the natural game flow. Look guys, just because it's an RPG doesn't mean you NEED to take away features just to unlock them. Only a very minor couple are true improvements, the others are needlessly expensive XP crap that you're just grinding for to make the character less powerful. There's a separate 2 then 3 point cost for a ledge take-down and a drop take-down. How much "skill" do you need to just jump off a rock and spear a guy directly below!? How much "skill" does it take to pull a guy down by his shoe? Why do I need 3 points to make a combat roll actually effective? These are things a character who, in their infancy could disarm a person, should be able to do from all their narrative-gifted training! Stop forcing skinner boxes over us. Just to show you how this gets in the way: I currently can't use a new bow, because I need to get the tinker ability to allow me to relocate the worthwhile mod (my original bow is technically more powerful than the new one, but that can become the better one long-term), but simultaneously I can't do the bandit camp I want to because it's filled with elites who you cannot kill stealthily until you unlock some stupid arbitrary piece. Both upgrades are locked behind layers of more useless upgrades I don't need, even with hours of leveling into the game.
• The dialogue choice system just had to take a page from bioware, of all things. I hate Bioware's style of this, and Guerrilla is barely doing it any better. You get the mean guy/smartie/loving moral boxes, and every time you choose one Aloy goes and shoves an extra paragraph in there that involves some message different than what you probably tried to say. I hate that. It's incredibly immature to sit there and think you can just break down somebody's thought process in a conversation as "mean/good/nah, I'll be witty today", and I don't just say that lightly. This is a game about robot dinosaurs, so I typically don't care for "mature" stuff. But this is a system that truly feels like it was invented by a 6 year old's view of morality, or someone who goes building strawmen for a living. For a story that wants to have an edge, this is the fastest way you disassemble it. And then the next bit, about how disconnected the actual dialogue is, is just extra insult to remind you that you actually never had a choice. The game betrays that choice, you just picked your poison.
• A couple of these guys are kind of cheap. It's not a huge deal, and for the most part every creature poses a good challenge, but some of them just feel a bit off. Like how the shell carrier can just spam massive lighting charges that cover massive ground and pull big damage. Then the projectile attacks just make no sense a lot of times, with them all following an unpredictable rhythm and splash effect. I've had many times where you can roll as soon as you see the animation, and still taken damage or find that it was coming right to where you rolled like they were psychic. On a similar note, I've even seen them miss in a similar fashion, firing upon a location I was never at, nor heading to, so there's kind of this skill-less dice roll to their projectile tendencies (and you can't rely on a last-moment roll, because again that splash damage is random... or the default roll just sucks and we're back discussing that horrible unlock system where you magically roll better after you pay 3 skill points). While I'm nitpicking combat, the camera also does some horrible things with the environment. I've had many shots prepared and fail because the deep zoom and tall grass decides it's more important than what I'm actually aiming at. Oh and... why is concentration a thing you need full power to use? If I start it and stop it to cancel, shouldn't I be able to use what's left again instead of being forced to wait on the cool-down? Maybe that's an intentional balance, but it's weird and I'm not a big fan of it.

Back to the awesome!

...and now we're back. In the grand scheme, those gripes aren't a whole lot. They're annoying, and even at times mess with the sense of fun going on, but there's a lot of fun typically going on anyway. For all the bad gripes, there's a lot of big and small awesome things beyond any list. Things like the launch-day photo mode, the awesome environments, the awesome fight sequences, the way the non-XP bar RPG elements are done so well, the stealth, and just that feeling of running into a new abandoned city and learning some more about the lore. Everything from the way your people speak of the land, to the way a shop will label a pair of keys "ancient chimes" is just cool and makes you push to keep going. I enjoy spotting every new creature, get curious at every other forked path that isn't where I was originally heading, and I love the way I can set up quest tracking so that it's only basic navigation until I put my own waypoint on it for emergency help if I'm having issues with some mountain pass. It's all a part of a game that's pretty amazing, even if it isn't breaking any big records. It's a great experience, and I'm finding myself frequently stopping for photos, while then suddenly finding myself regretting the lack of photos in combat because I was too engaged in the moment with them.

I remember that original reveal for Horizon: Zero Dawn. After all those rumors, supposed leaked images, and a long period of "we've got some kind of new IP" talk, we finally got a huge reveal. A nice CGI movie set the tone for the world, and then a sudden shock as we got a big chunk of quality gameplay footage that continues to look fairly similar to the final product in a lot of ways (at least I think, still haven't gotten to that T-rex machine myself). I didn't quite know what to expect fully, but I was really pumped. I've got to say, it mostly delivered. While not necessarily a big innovator, it managed to also stay away from most of my worst fears for what comes to mind with "open world RPG". It turns out to be a great action game with a rich world worth exploring, a compelling story with great characters and sequences, and while the open world aspect is generic there's just something about the land that still lends itself to a sense of discovery that keeps me energized and excited to push further. The world just gets your sense of wonder and imagination pumping, and it's almost good enough to hide the fact that you've got to grind just to unlock a pull-guy-off-ledge action. I don't know when I'll complete it, if it'll be a simple stick and true Far Cry type experience, or something like the Witcher where as much as I love it I just can't sink 40 freakin' hours to it without some diversions. Still, it's a game I'm glad to be playing, and while I'll be waiting on the next Killzone... I'm glad the team behind it got to produce something as interesting as Horizon. It's got it's problems, but it's mostly got a lot of fun and nice stuff worth seeing. Thanks Guerrilla.

It's a big and exciting world out there.