Horizon Zero Dawn

Hmmm, I think I'll have to add another game to my list now. Looks like it plays a lot like Assassin's Creed in the stealth mechanics and the fighting mechanics look like fun.. Plus the story premise has me really interested.

I'm expecting a plot twist where you were on Helghan the whole time. /sarcasm

I nearly forgot about this game, and apparently its been delayed a few times, including today... it will comeout 2/28/17.

Heh, I completely forgot about it until Matimi0 mentioned it on his stream today. Man I can't wait until that comes out, that trailer has me even more intrigued (finally happy to have a release date attached as well).

That is so visually impressive. But with all the robots, I wonder what they actually eat for food.

I liked what I saw in that gameplay video. The visuals are great, the combat looks fluid, and overall it looks like it's going to be a great game. I can't wait to see more game play as we move forward toward the release.

This game looks really good. The menus are sharp, it seems to be open world sandbox, and the visuals are stunning. Its good to see more than just gun shooting games come out this year. As much as I love em, my game buying has slimmed down tremendously because of the lack of variety in genre.

http://kotaku.com/horizon-zero-dawn-has-a-smart-solution-to-to-a-common-1782178588?utm_campaign=Socialflow_Kotaku_Facebook&utm_source=Kotaku_Facebook&utm_medium=Socialflow

Nice... the best part is this game is going to be first party priced. Next year is shaping up to be a great one for gaming.

Wow, my mouth literally dropped open when reading that. Almost every game should have that feature.

I really wish MMO's would take this route, would make doing some of the crafting quests in FFXIV so much easier if I could just quest for the given items needed.

The fact that this has been getting stellar reviews makes me beyond happy I pre-ordered this on a whim a couple nights back (CE none-the-less as Amazon still had copies of it). Seriously can't wait until Tuesday to get my hands on this and start playing it.

I'm just posting base impressions on this based on what little game time I actually have in it (I've put about 8 hours into the game as of writing this) and after having it stare me in the face for 3 days before I could play it (god damn was that the longest wait I've ever had before playing a game (didn't have any time during the week and I've completely stayed away from any articles/videos that may give away spoilers for this game)).

I'm highly impressed with this game, Guerilla went out of their way to give a a highly polished game out of the get go (it had the smallest day 1 patch out of any game released in recent years that's how polished this was). The visuals are amazing, even on my old school PS4. Don't get me wrong there are some wonky animations here and there (I ran into an NPC who's eyes liked to wander up into her head (kinda creepy when you talk to her)) but overall this is an impressive looking game (I climbed up my first Long Neck today and the view from on top of it's head was breath taking). I'm also extremely happy the the map is rather big, not huge like a lot of games like it (no where near as big as Zelda's map (good god that map is huge from what I've seen on live streams) but big enough that I can see why this game will take up to 50 hours to beat (I hear if you just do the story the game is rather short but I'm OCD so I'm doing all the side quests and getting all the collectibles while I travel between story missions).

I can't speak much on the story but what I have done of the story missions I have to say it's rather interesting and engaging. There's a lot of mystery in this game and I wonder just how much of it we unravel as we play through it (like why is the world the way it is, who was Aloy's mother (a major plot point I'm gathering from little I know), what's with the machine animals, etc (I'd put more examples but I'd be walking a thin line for spoilers based on where I think the story is going)) because I'm expecting this game to be a series. While most of the characters I've run into are rather bland (not much to say about them, I've run into a few that have been interesting but they seem few and far between) Aloy is a wonderful protagonist who, much like me, is questioning what the hell is wrong with the world. She's sarcastic as hell when dealing with assholes and a compassionate person when she wants to be (lets just say not many people like her from the get go so she's rather callous until the need arises for her not to be). Overall she's probably one of my favorite protagonists to date.

Combat is a joy and I say this after having my ass handed to me a few times (I have yet to be killed but I've been pretty close to dieing a few times). A lot of it is stealth based and going loud and proud isn't a viable tactic in this game (especially when fighting corrupted machines, a few reviews have pointed this out). Almost everything travels in herds (or at least the ones I've run into, I haven't run into the huge T-Rex looking machine yet nor have I run into any of the machine birds) and alerting one pretty much alerts all of them. Picking targets and luring them away one by one is pretty much the key to most encounters (human and machine alike) when you can pick and choose them (some encounters do not give you a choice and a lot of those have been story based at the moment) otherwise it's all about relying on your skills and weapons. There isn't much choice in weaponry I've noticed. Pretty much all you get is you're spear (I don't know if you get another one throughout the game but the one I started with has been upgraded once due to a side quest), a variety of bows with varying uses (some are for sharpshooting, some for close range combat, some built with stopping power in mind, etc), a variety of slings (for launching elemental type bombs that cause status effects), tripcasters (used to create traps on the battle field that trip machines), traps in general, and some others I haven't tried yet. There is of course a variety of different ammunition types for you're bow and I can't list all of them as I haven't exactly run into any other then normal, precise, fire, and tear arrows (tear arrows rip armor and components off of machines).

All in all I'm very happy with this game and the hype I had for it was definitely rewarded. This is probably my game of the year and it's barely started, that's how much I'm enjoying it.

This sounds more like a game I can play while I'm working. I'll get around to it eventually. Right now I can spend 2-3 hours just making my way to a shrine I marked on my map in Zelda because I get distracted by 4000 other things. I'm glad I took the week off for that game. I know people that didn't that haven't even left the starting area yet.

I'm liking the move towards tactical play in these AAA games now.

I beat Horizon Zero Dawn yesterday and I'm about 1/4 through the Frozen Wilds DLC. Without getting into too much detail I gotta say this game was really good. Everything is explained.. Literally just about everything (robots, humanity, culture, technology, etc.) and the plot is amazing. With this plot, it could be made into a movie. I focused way too much on the side quests initially. I did so many side quests that once I started playing the main mission again I kind of steamrolled the enemies because I was so leveled up.  The only real negatives to the game is the lack of direction. Without spoiling anything, what the game should have done was force you to play the initial hunting grounds instead of skipping them. The game doesn't say it but all the hunting grounds are basically tutorials for how to destroy the different robots. It would have been extremely useful knowledge if I didn't skip them entirely, get frustrated on some enemies, watched a few youtube videos on how to kill them, when I could have jumped into the hunting grounds and actually learned in the game. The same applies to cauldrons and bandit camps, aside from the initial two, you don't have to do anymore and the game doesn't direct you to any. You stumble across them on the map and the map is so huge and filled with icons I didn't realize thats what the icons stood for until I got to a point in the game where I had to fast travel everywhere because quests make you travel hundreds of miles all over the place. This game alone made my wish I upgraded my PS4 to a SSD hard drive. Halfway through the game I found myself fast traveling all over the place to save time traveling, but that meant loading screens constantly.

Ropecaster is the the best weapon in the game. I wish the game would have emphasized this. Every enemy in this game will leap 40 feet directly into your face destroying half your life bar. Not too difficult when its just one or two small robots, but you get some big ass ones in there and you try to run away, draw your bow, get slapped to the ground and then the next one hits you right after and then a third enemy spews fire at you.. it becomes straight up infuriating. But then you bust out the ropecaster that does no damage.. shoot 3-5 binding ropes at an enemy and they get anchored to the ground... and they'll stay anchored to the ground for like a solid minute unless they take a good chunk of damage. And theres no limitation to how many enemies can be ropecasted.. Got 3 enemies? Ropecaster them in different spots then run up to one and focus your attacks on it. As long as you have enough wire in your inventory to keep making ammo for it, you can keep almost every enemy in the game locked down. And the ropecaster is one of the very first weapons you can buy in the game. You just have to buy stronger versions of it as the game progresses.

Also, there is an unlimited fast travel pack you can buy for incredibly cheap, like an animal skin and a few shards. No more having to make fast travel packs. But the game doesn't emphasize that its a thing, its simply sold by merchants near a specific city at the bottom of the same generic list of stuff every merchant in the game sells.

Mounts are fun, but it can be annoying as they give away your location to enemies, but they are also great for not caring about that and just running past everything to open up more of the map.

Theres alot of skills that seem pointless to unlock, but the best ones are shooting additional arrows, tinker, initial mount skills, hoarder and increased slow down time while aiming weapons.

Modifications are amazing and the game doesn't even have a tutorial for them. Equip mods. Don't worry about using them you will be swimming in them by the end of the game. Except for purples. Got a bow, and the damage feels weak.. equip a mod that does +38% damage. Thats significant and the game doesn't even emphasize it. wtf. By the end game all my weapons had 3 mod slots each and all had things like like "+48 damage" +42 damage +15% fire damage" "+41 damage +15 tear".. It makes the weapons significantly stronger.

Anyway, its a great game. A bit too many side quests, but props for the developer for having every character fully voiced considering the large amount of characters in every side quest introduced.

The DLC is interesting so far, but god damn these enemies are ridiculous. Its like every other enemy is as strong as a major boss fight from the initial game. wtf.

Overall I've had a fun time but I was eventually getting bored with the sidequests. Like I said before I focused too much on doing those, my OCD kicked in whenever I saw them on the map. lol. I forgot to say, the sidequests are basically for leveling up. You could technically run through the entire main quest line, but as the main quest line continues it'll show the recommended level to continue. Basically thats where the sidequests come into play. You're only level 15 and the next main quest is recommended 20, do some side quests. I think theres as many side quests as there are but to give the game more diversity and fill in the map. The map is huge and its really interesting to explore.

I had a great time and the plot was amazing. I'm looking forward to a sequel.

The DLC Frozen Wilds was enjoyable although a bit frustrating with some of the new enemy units. As the story progresses it becomes more clear how to defeat them, but over all... f*ck Scorchers.  The story was good and some of the details of the plot from the main game are fleshed out more. It also leads into the sequel as well.