Topic: Horizon Forbidden West

@MightyDemon82 I’d be doing the same. Waiting for the kids to go to bed and then it’s on 😄

@Voltan I think that’s one thing that kinda annoyed me. You’re dead excited to polish off the icons on the map with your new equipment and the only reward is the one chest or some greenshine.

@nessisonett Greenshine is needed to upgrade some of the better equipment though, and it's not that easily found elsewhere (especially the chunks and clusters). Anyway, so far I didn't mind.

In other news, I didn't end up doing the story mission yet but I did override another tallneck (and met some monke machines). This week will be a little slower for gaming (because of reasons ) so I don't expect to finish the game until the next.

All these NPCs are so ridiculously overdressed. It's just silly.

@Octane sounds like you gotta GIIIT GUUUDD

I’m sorry.

@RogerRoger Like others have said, I don't really have a problem with the controls either. Yes, they tried to overcomplicate jumping/climbing by having you press circle to jump to something behind you, but I've only had to do it a couple of times. My only real issue so far is that it takes a few tries for me to choose the correct weapon on the weapon wheel because it occasionally won't go where I tell it to. Climbing has probably regressed a bit, but I manage.

Maybe it helps that I replayed Horizon Zero Dawn a couple of months ago, so the basics are already second nature. I'm loving it, so it is going to be a shame if I see somebody else not enjoying it like I am, but in the end it is what it is. I see you are getting some enjoyment out of it at least (the main story and such), so hopefully it can at least be enjoyable overall in the end.

@velio84 The Utaru region is where I'm at right now. It would have been going fine so far honestly except for the fact that I've had to try to collect the 6 metal pods from the Widermaws 3 times. Once I died, but the second time the first one I killed disappeared into thin air. I still kept going and killed the second one hoping there would be another one around, but no dice, so I had to reload my save and try it for a third time. I was about to go and fight the 2nd one again, but I ran out of time and had to put my PS5 in rest mode. I'll finish that in a little bit.

@MightyDemon82 I think I figured out what you did. You got the couch ready since that's where you'll be sleeping tonight?

Game crashed.

Already experienced a couple of time where the game went black for a few seconds, but now it straight up crashed. I least I didn't lose hours of gameplay, like what happened with Pokemon Legends.

Game crashed today and wiped a couple of hours of progress. Seemed to automatically download from the cloud for some reason, which hadn’t updated due to the hard crash.

@Fragile I'm not saying you're wrong, but I have a feeling the fact that they still have to work from home is a big reason. Sony first party studio games usually release in pretty good shape. Not saying this didn't release in better shape than several other games over the last year or so, but the pre-pandemic first party releases usually were pretty clean (with rare exceptions of course, like Days Gone).

I have faith these issues will be fixed by them, but I do hope everybody can start working in the studios again soon enough.

@KilloWertz Nah she got fed and to watch her shows on the t.v. then I played from about half 8 till half 11 before going to bed.

I had planned on continuing the main story but didn't quite go to plan. 2 sidequests, 2 bandit camps and a new activity then it was bedtime, could have easily stayed up longer, being a responsible adult sucks sometimes 😂

@nessisonett I turned off auto sync to the cloud, because I kept getting error messages, both for Horizon and Spider-Man, every time I booted up my console.

@Octane I've found (with another game but I've been doing that since) that closing the game before turning off the console lets you avoid that entirely.

@Fragile I reckon there's a lot of truth in what @KilloWertz is saying, working from home has really had an huge impact on these games releasing now. It was mentioned back when the lockdowns started to happen that the real impact would be felt further down the line and that is really playing out now.

Unfortunately another fact feeding into that is that software always launches with bugs. Some of them will be unknown of course but the developer will also have a bunch of issues they know about and will assess those to determine if they are so bad that they need to get everyone working like crazy to fix or push the release date out. There's only so many delays they can announce before the public will loose interest in the game and the publisher will also need to recoup some of their investment in order to continue paying people / showing the shareholders that they are making profit. It's a shame when we do experience issues with these games, especially PS Studios games when we are used to such high quality, but I do think they have to make that call sometime as otherwise they risk never releasing or losing money on their investment.

@velio84 You are motoring along. Good to hear that it's a straight forward platinum though 👍

I like the traversal changes, having more freedom to climb everything is great, basically climb every mountain, hill or rock you see, like rock climbing you just have to plan a bit on the route obviously you not climbing a flat sheer face. Only bits where its part of quest or something that they put some restrictions in.

@velio84 I found that Nessi to be a disappointing and killed the 1st too easily I thought, find Cobra Kai much tougher, even glued down its a pain.

Braced Shot + precision arrows = win.

@MightyDemon82 Ok, so you did what you were supposed to do. Smart man. You probably slept a lot more comfortably too.

Not too surprising that you got distracted by side quests and such. I still have yet to touch much of anything with the main story since the Embassy went sideways. I know that's really early, but I'm also only roughly a Level 16, so it also shows I haven't gotten to play as much as some others have.

@render I'd imagine one of the biggest things it has messed with is QA. It would likely take a lot longer to do thoroughly like every game needs, but I highly doubt any publisher is going to take all of the extra time needed.

@KilloWertz life wouldn't be worth living if I hadn't haha.

Yes I'm level 23 as of last night and going to go and do all quests within that level, before I move on any further with the main story. I'm not that far ahead of you maybe 2-3 main missions ahead and just sitting at about 40 hours!

@RogerRoger Been casually following this thread and the reactions and impressions. I find your report of your early time with the game quite informative.

One of my issues with sequels is the fact that they inevitably make the game more complex, and sometimes that drowns (no pun intended with your swimming struggles) out what made the original game so appealing. Sequels often get caught up in going bigger and adding more mechanics. I mean, this isn’t a complaint per se because what else is a sequel supposed to do — regress? Or recycle the same game again? Of course not. So I understand the want for the developers to add things like swimming and more complicated jump and combat mechanics. But there’s a fine line between a game evolving naturally into something better and more satisfying versus unnecessarily adding elaborate input schemes or outlandish abilities just for variety’s sake.

Not to mention the convoluted and advanced controls of sequels can often rely on a mastery of the first game’s base controls, which runs the risk of alienating a new player base or a returning crowd whose forgotten all the old game’s mechanics. I worry I’m in the latter group since I’ve not played HZD in a few years and I’m likely to be really rusty.

It’s part of what killed Arkham Knight for me — I felt the game assumed a certain familiarity with the earlier games and didn’t reteach the controls and mechanics at a slow enough pace and I quickly grew frustrated because I felt they dumped a lot of presumed competence of the controls on you. Then it added the Batmobile stuff which felt a slight poorly implemented (imho — and I know we’ve discussed this before and fortunately your experience was different). Anyways, that previous struggle coupled with your early impressions has me a bit worried about this game for me. Not to mention, as I’ve stated before on these forums, that I am not a fan of swimming and underwater play in my games. It rarely feels intuitive and is often very frustrating to control and navigate, along with the background “timer” of the oxygen level slowly decreasing. I don’t usually like timed or rushed events in games. I reckon Aloy’s not swimming the majority of the time, but if that’s one of the feature “updates” then it’s not a plus for me.

Add to all this the crashes I’m hearing and I’m leaning more toward holding off on HFW until I am in a very distinct mood. I’m certain I’ll play it eventually, if not out of sheer obligation for being a PlayStation fan. And I’m sure I’ll adore the game when I do, but there’s a hint of doubt now.

@velio84 that might be the one I made the mistake of going into while I was wondering around exploring called CAI or something near the cost, also had a Bear and the ape thing, I was way to low level with only green gear, lost count of how many times that thing at the end killed me. Kept missing as sways its head all over the place, in the end got lucky hits that destroyed some its abilities with the cannon from the dead ravager and then managed to hit and get rid of the tail weapon that was one shot killing me, then used the 3 weapons off that to kill it

@velio84 Fortunately tearblast arrows make collecting Widemaw tusks easy! Got it yesterday and found a Widemaw, got both tusks out of it. Just shoot two or three tearblast arrows in its mouth and they will come off guaranteed.