I enjoyed Zero Dawn and thought it was a great game, it’s the only PSN game I ever got a Plat on. I do feel it gets rather unfairly maligned at times, especially when it was compared to Breath of the Wild, which came out the same year. (I think Horizon is far superior) I enjoyed the combat and exploration and I do think the narrative was real nice; it felt like New Vegas in spirit in some ways which isn’t surprising considering they shared the same head writer. So I was obviously looking forward to Forbidden West. Thing is though when I finally played it I actually ended up dropping it.
You see what pushed me to finally drop it was when I tried starting a sidequest by following an NPC but he kept getting stuck walking around preventing progression. This kept happening even when I left and came back. This game is so much buggier than the OG game. Not long before that I got almost softlocked by a robot falling on top of me, trapping me in the ground. If I didn’t have a fast travel pack on hand I would have had to reset the game. But you see that sidequest bug was just the straw that broke the camel’s back for me because there were a bunch of flaws that were building up that didn’t make the game bad persay, but were making it more mediocre for me and an inferior experience compared to Zero Dawn.
First of all, the combat is expanded upon, but to the game’s detriment I feel. Now you have to juggle so many different weapon, element, and damage types that it feels excessive and convoluted. The game keeps throwing all these weapons at you that there’s little point in upgrading your weapons as well. The game forces you to have to juggle all these weapons too because enemies are just annoyingly more tanky and hyper aggro than they ever were in the first game across the board and the game heavily pushes you to have to use the exact strategies the devs want you to do, limiting the freedom the original game gave you to some degree. Climbing is so much worse because I guess too many people complained about all climbable objects being readily visible with yellow paint because now you pretty much have to have Aloy’s focus on at all times to have any idea of what you can actually climb on. It sucks.
The narrative is much worse than the OG’s game as the sense of mystery is gone and all we have left is just the most rote genre fiction direction they could have possibly gone with the series, especially when the new bland doomsday villains who stick out from the series’ aesthetic like a sore thumb show up. Admittedly, I stopped about a quarter of the way in the game, at the start of looking for the AI cores, but I don’t think the narrative would have gotten much better. (And from the sound of it, it doesn’t.)
Aloy also seems more of an asshole for some reason? Like its completely understandable why she’s short with people because she has to deal with their petty bullshit squabbles when she has a looming apocalyptic deadline fast approaching, but she feels really full of herself in a way that feels complete anathema to the character in the last game, who rejected being lauded as a Chosen One by the people who had considered her an outcast for her entire life up until that moment. That element of her being this relative stranger curious for answers in a strange land when it came to the world outside of the Noras’ domain, is quickly lost and she becomes a lot more generic because of that. She’s just become the bog standard Chosen One protag and she won’t let you forget it. They also add this weird character flaw that gets harped on that she doesn’t want any help from her friends and it feels like how Back to the Future 2 just shoehorned in Marty being unable to accept being called a chicken when it didn’t exist at all in the OG movie, but that was forgivable because BttF is mainly comedic, unlike Horizon.
The only real improvement I feel Forbidden West has over Dawn is that the sidequests are much more fleshed out. They are actually multi-part in some regards and you need to progress the story along before you can complete the next chain on some of them. The characters will even acknowledge having done some of the sidequests in unrelated scenes too which is a neat attention to detail.
Really thinking Horizon should have seriously been a one and done game because even if I didn’t run into these bugs and decided to make it through this game I don’t think I’d be looking forward to a third game. Just a middling disappointment overall.
You see what pushed me to finally drop it was when I tried starting a sidequest by following an NPC but he kept getting stuck walking around preventing progression. This kept happening even when I left and came back. This game is so much buggier than the OG game. Not long before that I got almost softlocked by a robot falling on top of me, trapping me in the ground. If I didn’t have a fast travel pack on hand I would have had to reset the game. But you see that sidequest bug was just the straw that broke the camel’s back for me because there were a bunch of flaws that were building up that didn’t make the game bad persay, but were making it more mediocre for me and an inferior experience compared to Zero Dawn.
First of all, the combat is expanded upon, but to the game’s detriment I feel. Now you have to juggle so many different weapon, element, and damage types that it feels excessive and convoluted. The game keeps throwing all these weapons at you that there’s little point in upgrading your weapons as well. The game forces you to have to juggle all these weapons too because enemies are just annoyingly more tanky and hyper aggro than they ever were in the first game across the board and the game heavily pushes you to have to use the exact strategies the devs want you to do, limiting the freedom the original game gave you to some degree. Climbing is so much worse because I guess too many people complained about all climbable objects being readily visible with yellow paint because now you pretty much have to have Aloy’s focus on at all times to have any idea of what you can actually climb on. It sucks.
The narrative is much worse than the OG’s game as the sense of mystery is gone and all we have left is just the most rote genre fiction direction they could have possibly gone with the series, especially when the new bland doomsday villains who stick out from the series’ aesthetic like a sore thumb show up. Admittedly, I stopped about a quarter of the way in the game, at the start of looking for the AI cores, but I don’t think the narrative would have gotten much better. (And from the sound of it, it doesn’t.)
Aloy also seems more of an asshole for some reason? Like its completely understandable why she’s short with people because she has to deal with their petty bullshit squabbles when she has a looming apocalyptic deadline fast approaching, but she feels really full of herself in a way that feels complete anathema to the character in the last game, who rejected being lauded as a Chosen One by the people who had considered her an outcast for her entire life up until that moment. That element of her being this relative stranger curious for answers in a strange land when it came to the world outside of the Noras’ domain, is quickly lost and she becomes a lot more generic because of that. She’s just become the bog standard Chosen One protag and she won’t let you forget it. They also add this weird character flaw that gets harped on that she doesn’t want any help from her friends and it feels like how Back to the Future 2 just shoehorned in Marty being unable to accept being called a chicken when it didn’t exist at all in the OG movie, but that was forgivable because BttF is mainly comedic, unlike Horizon.
The only real improvement I feel Forbidden West has over Dawn is that the sidequests are much more fleshed out. They are actually multi-part in some regards and you need to progress the story along before you can complete the next chain on some of them. The characters will even acknowledge having done some of the sidequests in unrelated scenes too which is a neat attention to detail.
Really thinking Horizon should have seriously been a one and done game because even if I didn’t run into these bugs and decided to make it through this game I don’t think I’d be looking forward to a third game. Just a middling disappointment overall.