Topic: Horizon Forbidden West

@RogerRoger I thought that the story had promise early on. The bit where Aloy first met the Zeniths when they gained access to the proving lab was a great WTF! moment. But after that we never see them again until near the end of the game where they just appear to come across as generic super villain baddies. That's when Nemesis is Sprung on us as the real threat, a threat that the player is supposed to care about after only just hearing about it. I also didn't like the fact that everything Sylens had done to get his hands on Apollo, he just leaves it in favour of staying on Earth because he's touched by Aloy and gang's togetherness. Very out of character.
I just thought that the story wasn't investing enough for the player.

Just had a thrilling battle against a Thunderjaw, Tremortusk and Skydrifter. I'm sure some of you will know the sidequest I'm on about.

Currently preparing for the Gemini mission. Sitting at just over 93 hours played at 57% and still loads to discover and do.

This is more of a knock on Sony and having the PS5's UI not work properly, especially the Games portion of your profile, but the game shows nearly 10 hours of playtime more than the PS5 says I've played. I was saying I was only somewhere in the 40's, but then I looked at my stats in the game and I was approaching 60 hours. I think I'll trust the game over the PS5 that will sometimes list a game as being played 3 times when I look at other people's profiles.

Anyways, still having a lot of fun with the game as well, minor annoyances aside. Like the game not telling me that I can't complete a side mission until I got the Diving Mask from another quest, so I spent about 15 minutes doing that for no reason. If you're going to gate a mission behind another one, at least say you can't do it yet then. The plus is that The Sea of Sands quest seems like it's a pretty good one, as far as I've gotten in it so far. I was going to clean up more side quests before doing any more main story quests, but oh well.

@KilloWertz There was one quest that I managed to circumvent the gating and then it looked like it was just plain broken but I've just accepted that it's the open world nature of the game and the fact that there's just so many combinations of things you could do.

I didn't check the PS5 record of my time spent but I'll have a look later to see if it keys in with the in game stats. I can imagine it probably doesn't though as a number of other games I've played seemed to be well out too. Hopefully they will tune that as they go though as it's still early days for the system.

@KilloWertz Most of the time Aloy will say she will need to come back later. The sea of sands quest is very good.

I'll have to check my time on the PS5 but like @render has said most if not all game times are skewed compared to the actual in game clocks.

These Gauntlet Runs are the worst. Who thought they would be a good addition as is? Literally the only thing between me and a platinum.

@Octane yeah I've never spawned stuck but i have gotten stuck from falling and during combat (rolling around, dodging and such).

Also:

-dreadwings either fly into the ground or disappear never to return a lot.
-had aloys labored breathing throughout entire final cutscenes, and i just finished yesterday
-died in kappa cauldron then spawned completely out of map, had to load earlier save
-had my grappling gun just completely stop working one session
-so so many item crates are inaccessible/stuck in the ground
-pop in is still terrible
-the repeating of dialogue over and over and over even after completing whatever she's talking about... Like, please stop. Please. For the love of god please.
-some metal flowers and firegleam still show on map after already collected
-waypoints to missions still show on map even after completion

These are all post most recent patch. PS5. Resolution mode.

Pretty disappointed in the execution even if at its core it is a game i really enjoy. Also found the story a little lacking but not the worst.

@KilloWertz i also wasted a good chunk of time diving for that same thing. i ended up looking it up online just so I'd know whether to continue trying or not.

@KilloWertz @render my PS5 tells me 80 hours but the in game clock is 95 hours 13 minutes.

@zupertramp I quite enjoy the gauntlets. The two I've done so far anyway!

@MightyDemon82 @KilloWertz Mine is only 5 hours out. In game says 110 and my profile says 115. I’m assuming the in game counter is more likely to be correct.

@MightyDemon82 Most of the time, yes, but in that instance she never said a word about not being able to do it until I had the Diving Mask. In the end, not a huge deal, but figured I'd still mention it as it was pretty annoying at the time. You are right though that the Sea of Sands quest is really good. That helped me get over my annoyance this morning with the game from yesterday.

While you only spend a short amount of time overall with a lot of these side characters, Guerrilla did a pretty good job making them look different from eachother and unique as a whole. I know some have said that they found a lot of the side characters forgettable, but I've found several of them to be quite good, with the trio from the Sea of Sands quest high on that list so far.

@render True, we are only 16 months into this console generation, but features like play time and just the whole Games page in general (with it showing games multiple times on there for no reason, especially when a game doesn't have a demo) should be in better shape than they are now. Honestly, it's something that should be considered a basic feature of the PS5's UI. I can forgive the times of games you've played before you had a PS5 being off, but not what you've played on the actual PS5. It would be a great feature as I like looking at what others have played and to see how many have played some games I have.

Some things in the PSN Store on the PS5 are still broken as well, like the file size for games being way off and even how many friends have played certain games. I didn't know this until the weekend, but it showed a higher number of friends had played GTA V than I have on my friends list total.

Will these things cause me to stop using my PS5 much and switch to my Series X as my primary console? No, of course not, but it's a shame so many nice extra features on the PS5 don't work the way they should at this point.

@MightyDemon82 get back to me when you've done the next two. absolutely brutal. I don't throw controllers (anymore) because I'm 40+ and that'd be ridiculous but I came really, really close on race number 3. Eventually beat it only to give up entirely on the 4th. There's just no way.

@zupertramp I beat all the races and the 3rd one wasn’t that bad (got it in 2 tries) but the 4th one SUCKS

@Voltan good thing you only need 2 for the plat!

@jdv95 Yep. I only did it because I had one character bio missing from the notebook and thought it might be Red Teeth - but it wasn’t (still no idea who it is).
You do get a legendary weapon though (or was it legendary armor?).

@jdv95 for some reason i was thinking you need them all, thanks for pointing that out.

@Voltan it's entirely possible I'm just not very good at them but I found the third extremely difficult. I did kinda want the legendary item but i can live without lol

The desert area (Arizona) was my favourite location. Most of the quests and characters there were some of the best in the game. The far west areas, especially San Francisco, were very underused, I thought.

@RogerRoger You are definitely not wrong. I don't normally take many screenshots while playing games (I think I've taken 2 or 3 so far after nearly 60 hours in this game), but I was like "damn it, I wish I took a screenshot during the beginning of that cinematic".

@zupertramp Ok will do. I have a lot of patience, will be 40 next week and never thrown a controller in over 30 years of gaming so yay to me I guess 😂

@RogerRoger Thanks for your comment about my picture in the other thread. I'm excited to see what goes down later in the game that seems to be dividing people and of course take plenty more pictures, tonight I'm heading to the most northern central part of the map to do my third cauldron.

@MightyDemon82 lol yeah, admittedly I had anger issues in my youth. Good times. Patience is in far greater supply these days. Kinda why I had about 130 hours in before actually finishing the story. I rather enjoy taking my time with games now. Delayed gratification and all that. Sounds like you've been doing the same. It's a game that probably benefits from it.

Still after I finished the story I did kinda just wanna wrap up the platinum and take a break, wait for New Game+. So that could somewhat explain my impatience with the Gauntlets. That and I just don't think this game needed Mario Kart shoe-horned in but that's me.