Topic: Horizon Forbidden West

@velio84 Yeah, that’s fair. Like I say, my quirkiness with trying to mop up all the icons in an area before I move on has ruined many games for me.

I thought Ghost of Tsushima handled it fairly well. The way the side stories were laid out made them seem rather cohesive and self contained. And there wasn’t so many of them that it got too overwhelming. But yeah, they could make you overpowered to an extent if you spent a lot of time doing the questing and collecting.

The main thing is that I want to feel interested in the storyline, whether it be main or side content. “Clear out this bandit camp” or “Kill all these corrupted robots” needs to have a narrative context and consequences that I care about in order to do it for the gazillionth time before losing interest.

And I’m being overly critical and making it sound like I hated the first game, which is definitely not the case. But I did drift away from it for a couple months in the middle stretch before I was motivated enough to try to finish it. And when I try to deduce why I lost interest briefly, I think it comes down to lack of truly absorbing side narrative and characters.

@Th3solution I always end up with the same issue - with open world games I just start going off on trying to mop up as many side quests as possible and kind of lose track of what's happening with the story a bit. With HZD the story was strong enough for me not to forget too much of what was going on and I thought they did a good job of metering that out in sections so as to keep you going from one location to the next, but even so there was just so much to get done.

I'd totally agree with regards to side quests having meaning though and it would be nice for them to have some sort of consequence at least with regards to alliances or how people react to your character. I'm currently playing Mass Effect and even that has a mixed bag of ones that loosely relate to the story and those that feel like they've just been tacked on. One thing that always amuses me in open world games is things having a sense of urgency and there actually being some sort of time limit on those things e.g. someone will say something like "My grandfather is dying, I need these things for the medicine now", so you'll accept the quest and then it'll just get thrown into the big bag of quests to be later read. After some much needed gathering and completion of a few other quests you'll eventually pick that one back up, gather the goods and return to the quest giver only to find that hey they are still waiting and their grandfather is still in the same state of dying as before. It'd be great if there were different outcomes for things like that.

It certainly looks like they've improved the melee and climbing for HFW but I still feel it's a shame that we haven't got the same traversal abilities as Death Stranding as having that ability to go pretty much anywhere would have been great. Aloy suddenly whipping out the Nora equivalent of a chiral ladder would have been awesome 😀

I think I mentioned this on another thread but also would have loved to see some Shadow of the Colossus style fights where the machines require you to climb up in order to take them down and them being able to shake you off or something like that. We got a taste of that with the Tallnecks but they could have taken that a bit further.

@render Glad I’m not the only one who can get distracted easily on these open world games.

I played Assassin’s Creed Origins not too long after HZD and I went in with the attitude that I knew the game was crazy-long and that I would likely never finish it if I tried to do ‘everything’, so I skipped quite a bit of the side content when it didn’t look particularly compelling or seemed too much of a chore (like those nice little flashbacks looking at constellations with the son — they seemed to be good for building Bayek’s character, but I couldn’t be bothered to track them all down), and by trying to ‘mainline’ the game in a little more focused manner I was able to complete it without ever losing interest or being dragged away by another game.

So I guess what I’m saying is that if I know ahead of time that the game is bloated then I can probably overcome my habit of trying to see and do it all. We’ll see how the HFW reviews go with regard to this. If they indicate that the side and exploration based content is nonessential, then I can plan accordingly.

Not sure where all this started from, but it is pretty dumb. Does it really matter in the grander scheme of things?

@velio84 exactly I'd do away with the internet entirely, but then I wouldn't get to talk about games with great people like yourself.

Can't wait for the 18th. Wife will go nuts when she see's the collector's edition. Need to reorganise so I've a space for that Tremor Tusk!

@JohnnyShoulder Armchair devs are the absolute worst. I’ve had to hold back commenting several paragraphs on here in reply to people who spout off about things they don’t know about. I just don’t get it. If you don‘t know anything about software development then either do research or don’t come out with nonsense!

@JohnnyShoulder It’s like puddlegate all over again.

@JohnnyShoulder I missed the post in it's original location, but to answer the question again, it shouldn't matter. It's almost as dumb as the argument about her looks in the sequel, especially considering there was no reason to "update" the grapple down animation. There were some animation issues in the first game, but that was not one of them. They did a pretty good job with that one, so it would have been a total waste of time to try to make it new and then have it end up the same since it's pretty much a perfect animation as is (without dissecting it frame by frame).

Media people are now openly tweeting that they received review codes for Forbidden West (so the same day it officially went gold) and that the review embargo is on Feb 14 (4 days ahead of release).
That looks like a lot of confidence from Guerilla - which is obviously a good thing

@Iver I wear underpants with the exact same message.

@Voltan that is a very confident move by Sony and Guerilla.

Getting excited now… I usually have Wednesdays off work but am considering swapping it with the Friday during the week of release, to have a three day long weekend to fully get into it. The only thing that could scupper this… is if Amazon doesn’t deliver my copy early Friday morning (or sometime on Thursday would be even better 😉).

@colonelkilgore Not sure if yours is different, but my experience from Amazon is that never deliver games before release day. Which is why I always try to pre-order games from sites like Simply Games, Shopto, The Game Collection as they tend to. I remember ordering Dark Souls 3 from one of them and getting it on the Friday before it was released the following Tuesday.

@JohnnyShoulder I’ve had both mate… sometimes I’ve received games a day or two early, most of the time it’s on the day and I’ve even received one a day late.

@Voltan

Is it next week yet?

@Voltan 9 more days.

the last ones are the slowest ofcourse.

@Voltan We're almost at the finish line. Like @jdv95 said, only 9 days. I'm very much looking forward to it as well.

I've just blasted through a new game+ on ultra hard so I can start a new thorough playthrough donning the carja hawk face paint because Aloy looks ace with it.

@Voltan It's definitely going to be worth the wait and at least this time it's only a week away, not several more months

While we're at it - some brief base PS4 footage: