Topic: Horizon Forbidden West

@CJD87 definitely like the others have said already, play Zero Dawn first. The Horizon series is my favourite of all the Sony first party stuff although I love them all.

Also like @render and @johncalmc have said It's one of the best sci-fi worlds in gaming and I can't wait for more!

@MightyDemon82 I'm convinced mate! Elden Ring platinum hopefully wrapped over the weekend... then HZD here I come

@CJD87 I'm jumping into Elden Ring once I've played some smaller games after spending 140 hours in HFW.

@CJD87 I dunno, I sense that you're only 99% convinced, so I'll give one more recommendation to playing Zero Dawn first. Or I just want to add myself to the list of people since I'm late to the "party".

Enjoy

@KilloWertz How are you getting on in the game?

I'm well convinced thanks to the unanimous feedback @RogerRoger !

And there was me, on the cusp of foolishly rushing out to buy HFW without tackling its predecessor..

Thanks to everyone who chipped in, I have full confidence to kick of with ZD - really looking forward to it

Having finished ER I’ll probably buy this soon. Anyone know if the deluxe is at all worth it? I assume the items aren’t useful after a few hours?

@MightyDemon82 Still good. I just wrapped up Seeds of the Past this morning, so Faro's Tomb is my next main quest. I'm going to do side quests for a while though, especially now that I can actually get rid of the vines/metal flowers after doing Seeds of the Past.

I'm somewhere in the 80's for hours now. I haven't checked it since the weekend, but I'm guessing in the mid-80's.

I'm glad it allows you to play the game while you download the patch since today was the day for the weekly Horizon patch. I remember when I used to play on Xbox, if there was a patch for a game I was screwed.

After 92 hours of gameplay I've unlocked 'The Wings of the Ten' and all that it entails. Apparently I'm 82.57% complete too. I'm guessing most people unlocked it way earlier than me but I don't mind, I like to explore and always tend missions/side missions in order of level requirement. I don't think I'll be fast travelling anymore.

@BearsEatBeets I think I was around 100 hours or so and around 75% or less before I finally unlocked that, so you could say I wasn't much earlier if at all. It took me a little while to get the hang of using the Sunwing, but the story stuff attached to it was great.

@BearsEatBeets I can’t remember exactly how much I’d got left to do but I pretty much left the main story until the end so likely was around the same. I could have happily done another hundred hours of side content but alas I’d done everything except the more advanced tables of machine strike.

@RogerRoger I went a few weeks without gaming much not long after it came out so behind most of the early purchasers but I've been doing some good sessions recently. I don't currently have many side missions left but still quite a few undiscovered question marks to search out. I've also been finding going back to some of the settlements have resulted in new side quests popping up.
@KilloWertz @render Not too unusual then. To be fair the more I think about it, it would probably spoil the game a bit if it was unlocked too early.
Hopefully I'll come across some more Deadwings soon, I've only had one in the game in a story mission so far. I need 4 or 5 of them to upgrade a load off stuff.

Pros: Nice graphics, fun combat and gameplay, impressive animations, soundtrack, voice acting, production value, content, robot dinosaurs. 🤖 🦕

Cons: Aloy. She constantly rubbed me the wrong way throughout the game as a narcissist, with a hero complex and insensitive to other tribal people's culture, faith, and way of life. It's like the writers gave her the excuse of "saving the world" just for her to be constantly rude and unpleasant.

Unfortunately there is nothing else to play so I'm going to have to keep playing this heavy story-driven game, who whole story revolves around a character that I don't like.. 😮‍💨 everything else is fine, even her voice actor and animations. (Facial animation is goofy sometimes but whatever)

I finished the story yesterday and really enjoyed it. I'm glad they're clearly planning another one but still provided a good ending whilst setting up the next. I only had a few trophies to get afterwards so had the Platinum a couple of hours later. Here are a just few random thoughts I have on the game.

Two great additions to the gameplay were the gliding and underwater swimming abilities. It's a shame they didn't find a way to incorporate combat into the later though so you weren't forced to hide and sneak around. And on the subject of combat I wasn't massively sold on the additions to melee combat. I never really used it unless someone got really close or it was a forced part of the game. So much like any game with lots of 'button-combo' moves I never remembered and therefore never used any of them. The Melee pits were probably the worst part of the game and only slogged through those because of the trophy tied to them. I also forgot about the Valor Surge moves for most of the game.

I must admit I pretty much played most of the game just using hunter bows with various ammo and one sharpshot for the tearblast arrows and very rarely bothered with traps either. This meant by the time my level was about 30ish I had all the skills unlocked I wanted and just kind of spent skill points randomly after that. All my legendary weapons/armour are pretty much left completely un-upgraded as they almost all wanted loads of Dreadwing parts and they only seemed to appear in the world after I finished the story and by then everything was nearly done. Oh well I was happy with my fully upgraded purple ones.

I liked the addition of certain parts of the machines being needed to be removed before being killed as I thought that added an extra element to the combat. I don't know if I'm getting worse at games though because I turned the difficulty down to Easy about half way through. I think it was after a fight with a Shellsnapper. It had gone on for several minutes where it felt like I only got a second here and there to get a hit in and chip a bit of health off in-between dodging and getting knocked down, or healing from the massive damage it did. I think I could have carried on and beaten it on normal but some of the battles, especially with some of those larger machines, seemed a bit too tough. It seemed almost impossible to evade a lot of their attacks and would often get knocked down even if I thought I got out of the way enough.

After thinking there were going to be some better looking armours in this sequel I discovered most were very silly looking again. I personally didn't like any of the Utaru or Tenakth ones and the few I did like always seemed to have skills about traps attached or something else I barely used. It's a shame you couldn't swap all the skills like the coils. It's another reason why I eventually went with Easy, I'd rather my character looked cool than had the best skill boosts. That brings me to the dyes. No wonder I didn't get the trophy for using the flowers as most dye sets didn't need them. Strange choice for one colour set to use loads of flowers and others just shards. I'd gotten to the end never picking a flower colour set.

Whilst the Firegleam seemed a reasonable addition to block certain routes or things until a bit later in game the metal flowers seemed pointless. For the vast majority it just hid a quite good chest of bits that could be found just as easily randomly about the world.

Okay this is looking bigger than planned so a few quick good points. I liked the base which you added your allies and slowly expanded to. It's great when you see changes in the world as a result of gameplay like Vegas and Plainsong. And I really liked all the various silent strike moves on bandits, I was quite surprised how many different ones there were.

Although most of this is probably negative bits I really enjoyed it, much like the original, and look forward to any DLC and the next game.

@RogerRoger That's a good idea about adding the underwater fighting for part 3. My lapse with Photo Modes pretty much continued even with this beautiful game. I did take some pictures but way less than the original and mostly early on. I noticed when taking a few pictures of Aloy that she actually sweats in the hot areas, the detail in the game is bonkers. Now I'm mostly done bar some Rebel Outposts I might take some pics as I wander around. I like this pic but it's mostly posed/framed by the game.

Did anyone else play through the game wondering when Erend was going to be caught? As I got near the end of the game I was pondering how it was going to fit in. It was only looking it up afterwards I read how that State of Play gameplay was made specifically to show off elements of the game and not actually taken from a part of the story.

One other thing I've remembered is I'm curious if a certain choice plays out much different. Deciding if Regalla dies after beating her or joins the battle. I let her live. Just curious as I don't recall any choice variance in the original, even if only minor.

@BearsEatBeets I actually was wondering when he would get caught as well. There were a couple of story points where I thought it was going to happen, but obviously nearly everything in the teaser trailer was done specifically for the teaser trailer (other than Aloy riding the mount, which I believe was in the intro).

I'm also curious what happens when you don't let Regalla live because I too was a merciful Aloy.

@BearsEatBeets yeah the outfits were fairly ugly. Especially the utaru which sucked because they were the stealth ones and that fits my playstyle.

@zupertramp It's all good. I misunderstood and posted the wrong thing, which is why I quickly edited it after I posted it.

@KilloWertz completely understand. I've edited my previous post accordingly.

One thing I will add about this game, since I'm here, is I didn't spend nearly as much time with it upon completion. Like I finished it and dropped it immediately. Still haven't gone back for the machine strike trophy which would give me the platinum. It's like I loved the game and all but clearly there's some bit of the magic missing that was present in the first because I stayed on that one for a long while even after finishing.

@KilloWertz I'm guessing you just have one less person for the last fight if you kill her then and no-one takes that 'spot'. No-one else gets trapped by the Specters and dies.

@zupertramp Yeah hopefully they allow more flexibilty between outfits and skills for the next one. Or even do a update like with AC Odyssey that allowed an outfit with certain skills to be 'transmogged' (I forget the word)to look like another.

Also this game is one of the rare occasions I left the credits rolling.