The latest patch seemed to fix the progression issues I had been having so I was able to get back to playing last night.
I do wish I could have played it before now, though, because in the interim I played the XC3 DLC and Metroid Prime Remastered, both of which are just excellent from top to bottom, and if I'm being totally honest, I'm struggling to really get into Horizon afterward.
It just feels...janky? In a way I don't really remember the games feeling before. The camera is too pulled in, the spaces feel too cluttered and cramped in this DLC. There's too many ruins. It's just rows and rows of crumbled buildings and foliage all over them, with too many nooks and crannies to get stuck in or to mistake for something that might be worth exploring. It just doesn't feel as well designed as the areas in the main game. This is just a preference thing, but I think having there be an assumption you'll have a flying mount out of the gate really hurts exploration, and that combined with the sheer amount of ruined buildings, makes it unclear where you should even be looking for things that you should be exploring on foot, or on mount; and the layout of the actual terrain makes doing it on foot feel tedious, but doing it from the air means it's likely you'll miss lots of things.
I dunno. Again, had the DLC worked for me out of the gate, I might not have even been super aware of these things, but as I kind of expected, having to put it down till it was patched meant that I played some far better and well designed games. I've said before, I'm glad I didn't play Zero Dawn near when I played Breath of the Wild, as the space between them let me enjoy Zero Dawn in a way I know I wouldn't have if I played it at launch alongside BoTW. Knowing Tears is coming doesn't help, but hopefully I'll have finished with this before then.
Oh, also, and this is a consequence of a complaint I've had about Forbidden West since the beginning, the amount of bots I've killed in the past for upgrades is really negatively impacting my feeling on combat here, as most everything is the same enemies, and I've killed them a million times and it just doesn't feel exciting anymore. Actually more tedious than anything. Fortunately the DLC gear upgrades are relatively easy compared to the base game, but still just is an issues that compounds with the other issues I have, to lead me to not really enjoying much of what I'm playing here.
With the inevitable Horizon 3, down the road, I really hope they spend whatever necessary time to design something that keeps in mind the strengths of the series, but also is aware of the fatigue that some of their prior choices created, and incorporate that into making systems that aren't so needlessly grindy or repetitive.
Random question, hopefully answers don't really require spoilers; but some of the bot sites in Burning Shores don't seem to actually have said bot (I'm thinking of the Dreadwing site specifically right now). Is there some trigger to get them to show up? Is it a story progression thing, as I've not really progressed very far and have just been exploring. I just need some things for upgrades and was trying to farm them in the zone and not go back out to the main world, and am wondering if that's just not gonna work.
Random question, hopefully answers don't really require spoilers; but some of the bot sites in Burning Shores don't seem to actually have said bot (I'm thinking of the Dreadwing site specifically right now). Is there some trigger to get them to show up? Is it a story progression thing, as I've not really progressed very far and have just been exploring. I just need some things for upgrades and was trying to farm them in the zone and not go back out to the main world, and am wondering if that's just not gonna work.
It might be linked to story progression but if so that would be new to the dlc. That particular sight was definitely populated when I went by it but I can't remember how far into the story I was. I don't remember any bots missing while I was flying around but then again I also didn't really interact with them because of the, you know, flying.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 10
Holy fuck, the Waterwing and Bilegut enemies just 110% epitomize what Forbidden West screwed up with the game design. I have way late game gear. As in I'm out of levels to get, even the DLC levels, and I've got a full set of orange weapons, all of them are fully upgraded, and all of them are from NG+ or the Burning Isles DLC. I need some Waterwing parts so I pop over to an island where I know they're at. 1 regular Waterwing and 3 Apex versions.
What a fucking awful enemy in Apex mode. They have an absolutely insane amount of HP for their size. Seriously, one Apex Waterwing seems to have most of the HP of a regular Thunderjaw, it's fucking absurd. And they aren't damage resistant because they can't even carry a lot of armor, so it's just masses and masses of HP. On top of that, they're hyper-aggressive, will constantly try to stand on top of you, can fly, move very quickly on the ground, have a dive attack, have multiple projectile attacks, and have tracking multi-hit melee attacks that cover a huge area. They take a simply absurd amount of work to take down and they will all attack together with max aggression such that you can literally struggle to stay on your feet because you stand up from a melee attack to only get clobbered by a projectile from off-screen. The one single good thing about fighting the Waterwings is that they're hugely vulnerable to being tied down, but even then it only holds them out of the way for a bit because crit attacks, even with shooting a resonance point afterwards, do miniscule amounts of damage.
Bileguts are possibly even worse and I haven't encountered their Apex version yet. They fight in arenas that spawn enemies from eggs; these enemies fly after you and do dive melee attacks at close range. The Bilegut also summons/fires out even more of these things, so one Bilegut fight is more like a Bilegut and 12-15 annoying small enemies. Then the Bilegut itself is, big surprise, stacked with too much HP, has multiple Acid projectile attacks, has near-perfect aim, and has multiple huge mobility melee attacks (including a high leap that sprays Acid everywhere on landing on top of big melee damage).
I played on story. The combat was just too imbalanced for what I was looking for. They got too much twitch fps for the enemies and not enough tools for you to deal with that.
I think to some degree the devs fell into the content creator trap.
They see a bunch of YouTubers break combat and think they have to balance towards that, when that's not how most players play.
There's definitely a sense of "oh, you want to burn down apex's in seconds? What of you are fighting 6 at once?"
And the annoying thing is that those same YouTubers seem to have it already under control, while the rest of us are left to trudge through truly obnoxious combat encounters.
The rest of us have to trudge through it. I don't want to break combat, I want to enjoy it.
They went too hard on the elemental crap which I don't recall ever being useful.
In ZD, combat was hard but you could become a master. THere was nothing more satisfying than using your slide while slowing down time to one shot one of the raptors, and while facing a T-rex robot was a challenge, you at least had a CHANCE to take the armor off it's heart and shoot the weak point. In FW I don't think I pulled that off ever, they're constantly moving so even if I got the armor off hitting the heart was difficult. It was ultimately more efficient to just hit them with every exploding javelin thing I had and watch them go down.
I think to some degree the devs fell into the content creator trap.
They see a bunch of YouTubers break combat and think they have to balance towards that, when that's not how most players play.
There's definitely a sense of "oh, you want to burn down apex's in seconds? What of you are fighting 6 at once?"
And the annoying thing is that those same YouTubers seem to have it already under control, while the rest of us are left to trudge through truly obnoxious combat encounters.
The rest of us have to trudge through it. I don't want to break combat, I want to enjoy it.
Totally. I feel the only reason tripcasters got nerfed is because of youtube videos showing people stacking 10-15 traps on top of each other so they could "one-shot" a thunderjaw. So what? It takes a lot of time to set up that many traps and it cost a crapton of resources too so it's not like it's without its cons.
I'm pretty much done with Burning shores. got the 100 percent, used the new duplication glitch (which is way harder now) to get a ton of elite coils and everything is upgraded. Only thing I'm missing is that glitched datapoint in the Heaven Cent quest. I also still need to do an UltraHard run but I'm pretty burnt out on this game so going to take a good long break and maybe do it later this year.
I liked the story overall, but it just doesn't come close to Frozen Wilds and the story of Aratak/Ourea/CYAN. DLC is also too short IMO and the tons of glitches and gameblockers makes the whole thing seem rushed out.
I played on story. The combat was just too imbalanced for what I was looking for. They got too much twitch fps for the enemies and not enough tools for you to deal with that.
Yeah, I've got enemies set to either Hard or Very Hard and it's just not fucking worth it at all. Everything just ends up a brick of HP and damage resistance.
Anyway, one thing I definitely want for the next game is for weapons to have ammo slots you can choose rather than this annoying bullshit with great weapons wasting slots on garbage ammo or ammo that is useless for your playstyle. My current Hunter bow has advanced arrows, Purge arrows, and then the third slot is utterly wasted on fucking targeting ammo. I've got a great puck-thrower with acid, electricity, and then pointless armor-stripping ammo. My spears are explosive (good because they're relatively resource-cheap), advanced explosive (good because they give me a juiced-up explosive option when I need it), and worthless fire spears that take like... 8 spears to set a medium enemy on fire. Being able to pick a "damage" ammo type, an "elemental" ammo type, and "special" ammo type would help out so much with wasting space on ammo types you will never use.
Heck, give us whole upgrade trees for weapons. Don't stick me with a high-stat Hunter bow that wastes bonuses on armor-breaking or long-range damage, let me pick the correct bonuses.
EDIT: Yeah, moving to Normal enemy difficulty is the way to go, the difficulty balance above that doesn't just jump off a cliff, it zooms down like Wile E. Coyote on skates and wearing a rocket. At Normal, having a stack of top-level gear makes you a proper powerhouse; line up a good opening shot on most medium critters and above and it's going to hurt. At Hard and above, high-level gear makes you marginally adequate and you're also forced to use elemental attacks in basically every single Apex fight outside the beginning critters. Fights become utterly dull slogs at high level, particularly since the very aggressive enemy movement combined with arrow travel times and weak points being really small in Forbidden West makes hitting weak points very unreliable even with Concentration running. And don't even get me started on shit like potions and food, I absolutely fucking hate micromanaging shit like over business like regenerating health and shields or having ability-based buffs.
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+4
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
edited April 10
I am avoiding this thread to avoid spoilers, but I just had to pause in the Post-Gemini interlude, and I needed to comment.
I really am loving the story, and it is a natural extension of this word... But... Really? Varl? That was your "meaningful sacrifice" play to show things were serious and shit was going bad?
It was obvious in Zero Dawn and the beginning of Forbidden West that he was attracted to A lot. So him suddenly being attracted to Zo was odd, but I figured it was just another step in Aloys growth. I also noticed the Base dialogue rarely had the two interacting.
Then I prepped for Gemini. I didn't pick up on it at the time, but Varl kept talking about his future with Zo, and how they were going to spread teachings, all that. It was obvious the distractions wouldn't work, and it was just a question of if Sylens would betray them or not.
So then... Well, of course the trope of a sacrifice happened. Tokallo told others to run, but not Varl? He had actually witnessed their ability first hand! But no
.. he just gets offed.
It feels lazy to me. Just... Pointless stakes raising. Sigh. We'll see how the plot goes, but... He was her oldest friend through all this. He already lost his sis and almost his mom. And he didn't even get to go out like a badass... Instead to Elon musk wannabes who are playing with cheat codes.
... Ah well. At least what happened to Ceo felt good. Even if we have yet to see Faros body...
Edit: I'm through the Wings of the Ten now.
While I'm still upset, at least they treated it respectfully. The themes keep coming back to death and life and all that, especially with Tilda... who I swear is going to try and make me a trophy in her collection. And I am sure that saving Regalia is going to end up being a mistake, but I kinda had to after saving that Oseram from the first game.
Flying is every bit as fun as I was hoping it would be. Shame I can't really do combat beyond EMP bomb stuff, and it's a bit wonky how there aren't perches near the base. But that's okay.
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He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 10
So a couple things. For the Wings of the Ten, just look at the chief. And look at the plane hanging over his throne. And come to realize and accept, in your innermost person, that the chief has dressed up his head to look like a fighter jet. Why? Because Horizon games must have the best hats.
Anyway, in regards to Varl
they were telegraphing that death clear from whatever world the Zenith originally ran to, it was hard to get much out of that event when you see it coming from so far off.
My big issue is not that it happened, but they really should've done more with it. Varl knows he can't hurt the guy, so have him talk the guy into turning off his shield and having a real fight. Of course the guy still cheats, but Varl knows he's going to cheat and is just buying time for Aloy to recover or for, frankly, anything to happen. It would've been hugely better to give Varl some kind of actual agency and actual impact on the story because, as it stands, he literally dies for zero reason other than what's-her-name doesn't make a move yet. If she'd acted thirty seconds earlier, she could just as easily have saved Varl and Aloy. Hell, probably could've taken Beta too. Then the Zeniths would still have GAIA, but they would be missing both people who could actually do anything with GAIA.
Oh god, I'm glad it's not just me having trouble with the enemies in the DLC.
I was doing a side quest and ran into a flock of waterwings and was like "oh cute, robo-pelicans!" and lined up a braced shot from stealth, which is my trademark opening move, and it didn't even dent its HP total, and I knew then I was boned.
With the main game, the beefier enemies looked and felt like they should be beefy. A Watcher is small and weak, a ravager is bigger and scarier, a slaughterspine is huge and fucks your shit up. It makes sense.
It does not make sense that my level 45 ass is getting handed to me by pelicans.
I dropped it down to Easy and that brings it more inline with how I think it should feel, but it just feels off. The new scenery is gorgeous, though, and I like the characters thus far.
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apparently the HP for Waterwings is super high for some reason. saw a few people on reddit complaining about it. Dunno if it's another case of devs overcompensating in their combat balancing again or what.
Anyway, one thing I definitely want for the next game is for weapons to have ammo slots you can choose rather than this annoying bullshit with great weapons wasting slots on garbage ammo or ammo that is useless for your playstyle. My current Hunter bow has advanced arrows, Purge arrows, and then the third slot is utterly wasted on fucking targeting ammo. I've got a great puck-thrower with acid, electricity, and then pointless armor-stripping ammo. My spears are explosive (good because they're relatively resource-cheap), advanced explosive (good because they give me a juiced-up explosive option when I need it), and worthless fire spears that take like... 8 spears to set a medium enemy on fire. Being able to pick a "damage" ammo type, an "elemental" ammo type, and "special" ammo type would help out so much with wasting space on ammo types you will never use.
I never felt there was anything wrong with how Zero Dawn did it. green/blue/purple tier of weapons/armor, where the next tier just offered more ammo types and you had all (or almost all) types at the max tier. Way too many weapons and armor in FW that just never got used and too many weapon types that were more or less useless or got heavily nerfed in FW.
If there was anything wrong with how HZD did it, its that it was ridiculously easy to just skip the blue tier entirely because once you get to Meridian, you can go from green to purple directly.
Oh god, I'm glad it's not just me having trouble with the enemies in the DLC.
I was doing a side quest and ran into a flock of waterwings and was like "oh cute, robo-pelicans!" and lined up a braced shot from stealth, which is my trademark opening move, and it didn't even dent its HP total, and I knew then I was boned.
With the main game, the beefier enemies looked and felt like they should be beefy. A Watcher is small and weak, a ravager is bigger and scarier, a slaughterspine is huge and fucks your shit up. It makes sense.
It does not make sense that my level 45 ass is getting handed to me by pelicans.
I dropped it down to Easy and that brings it more inline with how I think it should feel, but it just feels off. The new scenery is gorgeous, though, and I like the characters thus far.
Ran into that last night when I was exploring the map some more, 3 apex and 1 regular took forever to bring down, didn't expect them to be as tanky as they were. Took longer than taking out a Tideripper...
This waterwing talk is making me really glad that I just snuck in, overrode one, and then a cut scene triggered as I heard the rest start screaming at me.
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This waterwing talk is making me really glad that I just snuck in, overrode one, and then a cut scene triggered as I heard the rest start screaming at me.
That's what I did for that part, had to go back later for upgrade mats
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 10
I definitely feel like they way overtuned the Waterwings specifically because people had already figured out how to blow up the big critters in short order and Guerilla feels some bizarre need to prevent people from stacking the deck to make fights short.
Which is so bizarre that they overcompensate on some of this stuff, yet the final bosses of both main games (not DLC) are quite easy and it's not like they retuned that. It's not like we're going off to some secret part of the map to engage in optional hard core combat content for a shiny or another trophy or something. Granted the only reason you really need to engage in repeated combat with water wings is if you want to upgrade all of your gear but that's all within the normal gameplay loop Of course you could argue that it is all optional since there is plenty of other legendary gear that you can get that doesn't require waterwing parts.
I only fought a few of them to make sure I had at least one of every part so that the duplication glitch took care of the rest and got me everything I needed and I genuinely wonder what was harder, if learning the intricate jumps and techniques to get past the invisible walls of the arena ....or farming a bunch of waterwings and bileguts over and over and over if I had went the non-glitch route.
I dropped the difficulty to easy and now the combat isn't grueling, but it's still tedious. Any battle with a bilegut is just an obnoxious slog of staring at a screen full of frog butt and acid splashes while roboflies buzz around you and bathe the screen in red. It's not hard, but it's also not fun.
The story is great, though. I love the dynamic between Aloy and Reyka.
I got a little misty eyed when Reyka ran off after learning about Nemesis and Aloy was like, "Oh no, i have to fix this!"
Aloy made a friend! For realsies!
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I'm up to I think the last main quest in the DLC so of course it's time to wrap up the side quests. I know it's been said before plenty of times, but the mocap and voice acting for these characters that you only come across once or twice are pretty much better than main characters in almost any other games.
Also after playing Call of the Mountain I keep stopping in random places in the Burning Shores and looking around for hidden warning beacons to shoot (which are the main collectible thing in the VR game).
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Switch Friend Code: SW-3944-9431-0318
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+4
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
edited April 10
Just beat the main game!
I'm gonna be digesting/chewing on that for a bit, I think. I really enjoyed the story and where it went, though the final mission got.. extremely repetitive. I think it's just because of the machine variety.
I watched the whole credits, for some dumb-ass reason. I should've stopped after the voice credits. I think I was curious to see if they were going to patch a shout-out to Lance Reddick, but maybe that's in the DLC. I'm sure it will also have a 40 minute long credits sequence.
On the ending:
Nemesis makes perfect sense. It was hinted at by Ted Faro's fate, and a lot of stuff about the Zeniths didn't add up. I'm kind of sad they dropped the whole "2nd kernel for GAIA" angle, because honestly I could see Sylens fucking off with APOLLO and helping Aloy remotely. I didn't exactly catch which subroutines were missing when GAIA was reactivated - one is Hades, of course, but I'm not sure if it was APOLLO or a different one missing. She definitely hadd HEPHESTUS, so either that was a mistake or he'll be under control by the 3rd game.
I do have to chuckle, though. The plotline of this game is like 100% a mirror of Twilight Imperium, the board game. In that, the ancient emperors (called the Lazax) basically rotted away, until they were annihilated by humans. However, a super-smart scientist and his cult realized they were going to die, so he fucked off to a remote planet. Obsessed with prolonging their life, they started doing more and more cybernetics until they were more machine than organic. Eventually, they returned as the "L1Z1X" to "Take their rightful place." Except... in the intervening time, a bug in a piece of software warped into a malicious code, creating what is called the Nekro Virus - a pretty much unstoppable nanite plague that has followed the L1Z1X back to the galaxy.
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He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
Yeah I'd recommend anyone who finds the combat tedious, or even if you don't and just find the grinding tedious; drop that difficulty down to Story and turn on the option to have loot stay regardless of destroyed components.
It absolutely isn't worth the frustration of farming it "correctly" (hell, dupe it, who cares?) because of poor design decisions (that I feel confident in calling such, given that they dramatically reduced requirements for DLC upgrades), just to be held to some arbitrary difficulty level.
It's the same thing I recommend to anyone playing the Xenoblade games, if they go in on the maxing out or 100%'ing stuff. Drop the difficulty for the farming. If you want to prove to yourself that you can do the harder difficulty, go at it, set it up for the boss or whatever. But when you're killing the same UM for the 100th time chasing a drop, or here in Horizon killing a Slaughterspine for the billionth time for enough Apex Hearts? Who cares if it's Hard or Story, you want the thing, why torture yourself.
And the Ultra Hard difficulty is there for folks who want to put their skills to the test and not be tempted to turn it down. But honestly, I think anyone who does Ultra Hard without it being a NG+, is at best insane, and might want to reconsider how you treat yourself.
I've been watching speed running videos because I want that achievement, but I'll be damned if I'm going to intentionally play the whole game on UH. I'll do like I did with ZD; 100% everything, then "speed run" (being not a speed runner, I'm lucky if I can do it in twice the time of an actual runner, but it's still a fraction of the time it'd take me normally) the max difficulty achievement. Did it with Spider Man, etc too. The only hitch is that there's an achievement for getting everything in a NG+ also, and I don't want to earn all that at max difficulty, so at the very least I'm gonna have to do the game again in NG+, but I'll most likely be doing it in Story mode, and I've already got everything I need for the upgrades, I just need to actually earn all the stuff. Whether or not I actually "complete" it in a NG+ is questionable. Though, it could very well be I could do so and make it to Burning Shores faster than they'll put out a patch fixing the Aerial missions, so that might be how I get that achievement.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 10
There's a wide, wide gulf between something like HFW's highest difficulty and, say, the highest difficulty of DOOM '16. The former is a huge fucking grind that requires very particular setups and weapons to maximize damage and minimize grind, but there's still going to be grind. The latter was fucking brutal at highest difficulty, but enemy health was left virtually untouched and if you're good you can still rip and tear through rooms full of enemies in short order, no grind at all and with a variety of setups.
Something like the enemy aggro is what should've been adjusted per difficulty level, not HP or damage resistance. Make the easier settings put enemy aggro at sub-HZD levels, Normal at the same level, and higher difficulties crank it up to what HFW normally sits at. Do some damage adjustment, make fights allow more enemies attacking, but just fucking don't turn them into piles of HP and call it a day.
That being said, I've played the game twice and the DLC once, so clearly I still enjoyed the game.
I didn't exactly catch which subroutines were missing when GAIA was reactivated - one is Hades, of course, but I'm not sure if it was APOLLO or a different one missing. She definitely had HEPHESTUS, so either that was a mistake or he'll be under control by the 3rd game.
Ending:
It's HADES and HEPHESTUS missing.
Clockwise from the top it's: AETHER, POSIEDON, MINERVA, the two empty spots, ELUTHIA, DEMETER, ARTEMIS, APOLLO.
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Nobody remembers the singer. The song remains.
+1
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
I didn't exactly catch which subroutines were missing when GAIA was reactivated - one is Hades, of course, but I'm not sure if it was APOLLO or a different one missing. She definitely had HEPHESTUS, so either that was a mistake or he'll be under control by the 3rd game.
Ending:
It's HADES and HEPHESTUS missing.
Clockwise from the top it's: AETHER, POSIEDON, MINERVA, the two empty spots, ELUTHIA, DEMETER, ARTEMIS, APOLLO.
Ahhh, I confused ARTEMIS and HEPHESTUS due to the animal iconography. My bad, thank you!
Chairman Meow on
He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
The final battle of Burning Shores and the resolution thereafter is perfect, no notes.
That's how you do a fucking final boss.
I only have one problem with the boss fight, and it's a narrative issue
I get that the implication is that the Horus has been inactive for a thousand years and is likely decrepit to some degree (though given the technology implied in their creation and what they can produce autonomously, that doesn't make a ton of sense, but I can roll with it).
But if the overheating thing was a way to have two people take one out on their own, and it's a fairly glaring flaw, how did the military might of the entire world not manage to figure that out? Anyone who even vaguely knows anything about engineering, or who has ever just drilled a hole in metal, would think of that solution and if those people could come up with developing ultra advanced AI's in a very short period of time, surely they could have created some sort of heat based weaponry to overload the cooling mechanisms in the machines and taken them down without letting the whole world burn.
And I get that large swaths of the worlds militaries had been transitioned to the machines and that was part of the problem with fighting back. But again, two people with bows and arrows, took one down.
Anyway, it's all stuff that I'm sure can be handwaved away, or that you're not supposed to think too hard about in the first place. It was a good fight, and I'm glad it was an actual fight and not just an extended chase scene as I feared it might be. So they won a lot of points there.
The final battle of Burning Shores and the resolution thereafter is perfect, no notes.
That's how you do a fucking final boss.
I only have one problem with the boss fight, and it's a narrative issue
I get that the implication is that the Horus has been inactive for a thousand years and is likely decrepit to some degree (though given the technology implied in their creation and what they can produce autonomously, that doesn't make a ton of sense, but I can roll with it).
But if the overheating thing was a way to have two people take one out on their own, and it's a fairly glaring flaw, how did the military might of the entire world not manage to figure that out? Anyone who even vaguely knows anything about engineering, or who has ever just drilled a hole in metal, would think of that solution and if those people could come up with developing ultra advanced AI's in a very short period of time, surely they could have created some sort of heat based weaponry to overload the cooling mechanisms in the machines and taken them down without letting the whole world burn.
And I get that large swaths of the worlds militaries had been transitioned to the machines and that was part of the problem with fighting back. But again, two people with bows and arrows, took one down.
Anyway, it's all stuff that I'm sure can be handwaved away, or that you're not supposed to think too hard about in the first place. It was a good fight, and I'm glad it was an actual fight and not just an extended chase scene as I feared it might be. So they won a lot of points there.
It's already crippled. My take on it was that all the overheating and the heatsinks are the final emergency backup systems that are used when everything else isn't working. Ordinarily it'd have multiple other systems to avoid leaving itself vulnerable like that, and probably a bunch more weapons to defend itself (the EMP bombs would do a good job crippling anything that gets close enough to threaten it, and if it had used one fighting Aloy, suddenly she'd have been without the vital air support distraction).
And also an entire army of Deathbringers and Corrupters would be surrounding it. Imagine fighting the Horus with half a dozen Deathbringers and fifty Corrupters fighting back.
From logs, the humans had come up with strategies for taking a Horus down, but it all took too long and used more ammunition than they could afford it to. In the time it took them to take down a Horus the swarm could have built one and a half Horus's to replace it, so it was always a losing battle.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 10
Don't forget that the self-replicating Horus equipment was not the ultimate top-of-the-line war machine stuff, it was simply the best self-replicating line of war machines. Heat issues were consistent with everything but, typically, they just totally overwhelm an enemy with unstoppable numbers anyway so who cares if there are overheating issues?
The gear that was driven by humans actually seemed much superior, but it simply didn't matter because ten replacements were built for every single drone destroyed
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I do wish I could have played it before now, though, because in the interim I played the XC3 DLC and Metroid Prime Remastered, both of which are just excellent from top to bottom, and if I'm being totally honest, I'm struggling to really get into Horizon afterward.
It just feels...janky? In a way I don't really remember the games feeling before. The camera is too pulled in, the spaces feel too cluttered and cramped in this DLC. There's too many ruins. It's just rows and rows of crumbled buildings and foliage all over them, with too many nooks and crannies to get stuck in or to mistake for something that might be worth exploring. It just doesn't feel as well designed as the areas in the main game. This is just a preference thing, but I think having there be an assumption you'll have a flying mount out of the gate really hurts exploration, and that combined with the sheer amount of ruined buildings, makes it unclear where you should even be looking for things that you should be exploring on foot, or on mount; and the layout of the actual terrain makes doing it on foot feel tedious, but doing it from the air means it's likely you'll miss lots of things.
I dunno. Again, had the DLC worked for me out of the gate, I might not have even been super aware of these things, but as I kind of expected, having to put it down till it was patched meant that I played some far better and well designed games. I've said before, I'm glad I didn't play Zero Dawn near when I played Breath of the Wild, as the space between them let me enjoy Zero Dawn in a way I know I wouldn't have if I played it at launch alongside BoTW. Knowing Tears is coming doesn't help, but hopefully I'll have finished with this before then.
Oh, also, and this is a consequence of a complaint I've had about Forbidden West since the beginning, the amount of bots I've killed in the past for upgrades is really negatively impacting my feeling on combat here, as most everything is the same enemies, and I've killed them a million times and it just doesn't feel exciting anymore. Actually more tedious than anything. Fortunately the DLC gear upgrades are relatively easy compared to the base game, but still just is an issues that compounds with the other issues I have, to lead me to not really enjoying much of what I'm playing here.
With the inevitable Horizon 3, down the road, I really hope they spend whatever necessary time to design something that keeps in mind the strengths of the series, but also is aware of the fatigue that some of their prior choices created, and incorporate that into making systems that aren't so needlessly grindy or repetitive.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
It might be linked to story progression but if so that would be new to the dlc. That particular sight was definitely populated when I went by it but I can't remember how far into the story I was. I don't remember any bots missing while I was flying around but then again I also didn't really interact with them because of the, you know, flying.
PSN:Furlion
Though, it would be awesome if you could use that to your advantage to farm some dreadwing parts
I'll just have to continue a bit and stop getting so side tracked.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
What a fucking awful enemy in Apex mode. They have an absolutely insane amount of HP for their size. Seriously, one Apex Waterwing seems to have most of the HP of a regular Thunderjaw, it's fucking absurd. And they aren't damage resistant because they can't even carry a lot of armor, so it's just masses and masses of HP. On top of that, they're hyper-aggressive, will constantly try to stand on top of you, can fly, move very quickly on the ground, have a dive attack, have multiple projectile attacks, and have tracking multi-hit melee attacks that cover a huge area. They take a simply absurd amount of work to take down and they will all attack together with max aggression such that you can literally struggle to stay on your feet because you stand up from a melee attack to only get clobbered by a projectile from off-screen. The one single good thing about fighting the Waterwings is that they're hugely vulnerable to being tied down, but even then it only holds them out of the way for a bit because crit attacks, even with shooting a resonance point afterwards, do miniscule amounts of damage.
Bileguts are possibly even worse and I haven't encountered their Apex version yet. They fight in arenas that spawn enemies from eggs; these enemies fly after you and do dive melee attacks at close range. The Bilegut also summons/fires out even more of these things, so one Bilegut fight is more like a Bilegut and 12-15 annoying small enemies. Then the Bilegut itself is, big surprise, stacked with too much HP, has multiple Acid projectile attacks, has near-perfect aim, and has multiple huge mobility melee attacks (including a high leap that sprays Acid everywhere on landing on top of big melee damage).
What a total pain in the ass.
PSN:Furlion
They see a bunch of YouTubers break combat and think they have to balance towards that, when that's not how most players play.
There's definitely a sense of "oh, you want to burn down apex's in seconds? What of you are fighting 6 at once?"
And the annoying thing is that those same YouTubers seem to have it already under control, while the rest of us are left to trudge through truly obnoxious combat encounters.
The rest of us have to trudge through it. I don't want to break combat, I want to enjoy it.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
In ZD, combat was hard but you could become a master. THere was nothing more satisfying than using your slide while slowing down time to one shot one of the raptors, and while facing a T-rex robot was a challenge, you at least had a CHANCE to take the armor off it's heart and shoot the weak point. In FW I don't think I pulled that off ever, they're constantly moving so even if I got the armor off hitting the heart was difficult. It was ultimately more efficient to just hit them with every exploding javelin thing I had and watch them go down.
Totally. I feel the only reason tripcasters got nerfed is because of youtube videos showing people stacking 10-15 traps on top of each other so they could "one-shot" a thunderjaw. So what? It takes a lot of time to set up that many traps and it cost a crapton of resources too so it's not like it's without its cons.
I'm pretty much done with Burning shores. got the 100 percent, used the new duplication glitch (which is way harder now) to get a ton of elite coils and everything is upgraded. Only thing I'm missing is that glitched datapoint in the Heaven Cent quest. I also still need to do an UltraHard run but I'm pretty burnt out on this game so going to take a good long break and maybe do it later this year.
I liked the story overall, but it just doesn't come close to Frozen Wilds and the story of Aratak/Ourea/CYAN. DLC is also too short IMO and the tons of glitches and gameblockers makes the whole thing seem rushed out.
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Yeah, I've got enemies set to either Hard or Very Hard and it's just not fucking worth it at all. Everything just ends up a brick of HP and damage resistance.
Anyway, one thing I definitely want for the next game is for weapons to have ammo slots you can choose rather than this annoying bullshit with great weapons wasting slots on garbage ammo or ammo that is useless for your playstyle. My current Hunter bow has advanced arrows, Purge arrows, and then the third slot is utterly wasted on fucking targeting ammo. I've got a great puck-thrower with acid, electricity, and then pointless armor-stripping ammo. My spears are explosive (good because they're relatively resource-cheap), advanced explosive (good because they give me a juiced-up explosive option when I need it), and worthless fire spears that take like... 8 spears to set a medium enemy on fire. Being able to pick a "damage" ammo type, an "elemental" ammo type, and "special" ammo type would help out so much with wasting space on ammo types you will never use.
Heck, give us whole upgrade trees for weapons. Don't stick me with a high-stat Hunter bow that wastes bonuses on armor-breaking or long-range damage, let me pick the correct bonuses.
EDIT: Yeah, moving to Normal enemy difficulty is the way to go, the difficulty balance above that doesn't just jump off a cliff, it zooms down like Wile E. Coyote on skates and wearing a rocket. At Normal, having a stack of top-level gear makes you a proper powerhouse; line up a good opening shot on most medium critters and above and it's going to hurt. At Hard and above, high-level gear makes you marginally adequate and you're also forced to use elemental attacks in basically every single Apex fight outside the beginning critters. Fights become utterly dull slogs at high level, particularly since the very aggressive enemy movement combined with arrow travel times and weak points being really small in Forbidden West makes hitting weak points very unreliable even with Concentration running. And don't even get me started on shit like potions and food, I absolutely fucking hate micromanaging shit like over business like regenerating health and shields or having ability-based buffs.
It was obvious in Zero Dawn and the beginning of Forbidden West that he was attracted to A lot. So him suddenly being attracted to Zo was odd, but I figured it was just another step in Aloys growth. I also noticed the Base dialogue rarely had the two interacting.
Then I prepped for Gemini. I didn't pick up on it at the time, but Varl kept talking about his future with Zo, and how they were going to spread teachings, all that. It was obvious the distractions wouldn't work, and it was just a question of if Sylens would betray them or not.
So then... Well, of course the trope of a sacrifice happened. Tokallo told others to run, but not Varl? He had actually witnessed their ability first hand! But no
.. he just gets offed.
It feels lazy to me. Just... Pointless stakes raising. Sigh. We'll see how the plot goes, but... He was her oldest friend through all this. He already lost his sis and almost his mom. And he didn't even get to go out like a badass... Instead to Elon musk wannabes who are playing with cheat codes.
... Ah well. At least what happened to Ceo felt good. Even if we have yet to see Faros body...
Edit: I'm through the Wings of the Ten now.
Flying is every bit as fun as I was hoping it would be. Shame I can't really do combat beyond EMP bomb stuff, and it's a bit wonky how there aren't perches near the base. But that's okay.
Anyway, in regards to Varl
My big issue is not that it happened, but they really should've done more with it. Varl knows he can't hurt the guy, so have him talk the guy into turning off his shield and having a real fight. Of course the guy still cheats, but Varl knows he's going to cheat and is just buying time for Aloy to recover or for, frankly, anything to happen. It would've been hugely better to give Varl some kind of actual agency and actual impact on the story because, as it stands, he literally dies for zero reason other than what's-her-name doesn't make a move yet. If she'd acted thirty seconds earlier, she could just as easily have saved Varl and Aloy. Hell, probably could've taken Beta too. Then the Zeniths would still have GAIA, but they would be missing both people who could actually do anything with GAIA.
But Varl got completely chumped instead.
I was doing a side quest and ran into a flock of waterwings and was like "oh cute, robo-pelicans!" and lined up a braced shot from stealth, which is my trademark opening move, and it didn't even dent its HP total, and I knew then I was boned.
With the main game, the beefier enemies looked and felt like they should be beefy. A Watcher is small and weak, a ravager is bigger and scarier, a slaughterspine is huge and fucks your shit up. It makes sense.
It does not make sense that my level 45 ass is getting handed to me by pelicans.
I dropped it down to Easy and that brings it more inline with how I think it should feel, but it just feels off. The new scenery is gorgeous, though, and I like the characters thus far.
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I never felt there was anything wrong with how Zero Dawn did it. green/blue/purple tier of weapons/armor, where the next tier just offered more ammo types and you had all (or almost all) types at the max tier. Way too many weapons and armor in FW that just never got used and too many weapon types that were more or less useless or got heavily nerfed in FW.
If there was anything wrong with how HZD did it, its that it was ridiculously easy to just skip the blue tier entirely because once you get to Meridian, you can go from green to purple directly.
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Ran into that last night when I was exploring the map some more, 3 apex and 1 regular took forever to bring down, didn't expect them to be as tanky as they were. Took longer than taking out a Tideripper...
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Like someone tipped over a mechanical bull and duct taped a bunch of oars to it.
Just back off, you wet floppy bastard, and let me get a fucking shot in.
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I sniped it from a cliff, it's stupid water wheel couldn't get me from all the way up there!
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PSN / Xbox / NNID: Fodder185
That's what I did for that part, had to go back later for upgrade mats
Destiny Profile : http://www.bungie.net/en/Profile/254/7028016
I only fought a few of them to make sure I had at least one of every part so that the duplication glitch took care of the rest and got me everything I needed and I genuinely wonder what was harder, if learning the intricate jumps and techniques to get past the invisible walls of the arena ....or farming a bunch of waterwings and bileguts over and over and over if I had went the non-glitch route.
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The story is great, though. I love the dynamic between Aloy and Reyka.
Aloy made a friend! For realsies!
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
Also after playing Call of the Mountain I keep stopping in random places in the Burning Shores and looking around for hidden warning beacons to shoot (which are the main collectible thing in the VR game).
PSN / Xbox / NNID: Fodder185
I'm gonna be digesting/chewing on that for a bit, I think. I really enjoyed the story and where it went, though the final mission got.. extremely repetitive. I think it's just because of the machine variety.
I watched the whole credits, for some dumb-ass reason. I should've stopped after the voice credits. I think I was curious to see if they were going to patch a shout-out to Lance Reddick, but maybe that's in the DLC. I'm sure it will also have a 40 minute long credits sequence.
On the ending:
I do have to chuckle, though. The plotline of this game is like 100% a mirror of Twilight Imperium, the board game. In that, the ancient emperors (called the Lazax) basically rotted away, until they were annihilated by humans. However, a super-smart scientist and his cult realized they were going to die, so he fucked off to a remote planet. Obsessed with prolonging their life, they started doing more and more cybernetics until they were more machine than organic. Eventually, they returned as the "L1Z1X" to "Take their rightful place." Except... in the intervening time, a bug in a piece of software warped into a malicious code, creating what is called the Nekro Virus - a pretty much unstoppable nanite plague that has followed the L1Z1X back to the galaxy.
It absolutely isn't worth the frustration of farming it "correctly" (hell, dupe it, who cares?) because of poor design decisions (that I feel confident in calling such, given that they dramatically reduced requirements for DLC upgrades), just to be held to some arbitrary difficulty level.
It's the same thing I recommend to anyone playing the Xenoblade games, if they go in on the maxing out or 100%'ing stuff. Drop the difficulty for the farming. If you want to prove to yourself that you can do the harder difficulty, go at it, set it up for the boss or whatever. But when you're killing the same UM for the 100th time chasing a drop, or here in Horizon killing a Slaughterspine for the billionth time for enough Apex Hearts? Who cares if it's Hard or Story, you want the thing, why torture yourself.
And the Ultra Hard difficulty is there for folks who want to put their skills to the test and not be tempted to turn it down. But honestly, I think anyone who does Ultra Hard without it being a NG+, is at best insane, and might want to reconsider how you treat yourself.
I've been watching speed running videos because I want that achievement, but I'll be damned if I'm going to intentionally play the whole game on UH. I'll do like I did with ZD; 100% everything, then "speed run" (being not a speed runner, I'm lucky if I can do it in twice the time of an actual runner, but it's still a fraction of the time it'd take me normally) the max difficulty achievement. Did it with Spider Man, etc too. The only hitch is that there's an achievement for getting everything in a NG+ also, and I don't want to earn all that at max difficulty, so at the very least I'm gonna have to do the game again in NG+, but I'll most likely be doing it in Story mode, and I've already got everything I need for the upgrades, I just need to actually earn all the stuff. Whether or not I actually "complete" it in a NG+ is questionable. Though, it could very well be I could do so and make it to Burning Shores faster than they'll put out a patch fixing the Aerial missions, so that might be how I get that achievement.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Something like the enemy aggro is what should've been adjusted per difficulty level, not HP or damage resistance. Make the easier settings put enemy aggro at sub-HZD levels, Normal at the same level, and higher difficulties crank it up to what HFW normally sits at. Do some damage adjustment, make fights allow more enemies attacking, but just fucking don't turn them into piles of HP and call it a day.
That being said, I've played the game twice and the DLC once, so clearly I still enjoyed the game.
Took out a Thunderjaw and a Slaughterspine together faster than I took out a flock of Waterwings.
Very normal, much balanced.
I do like that they fixed the upgrade progression, though. Much much better.
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It's HADES and HEPHESTUS missing.
Clockwise from the top it's: AETHER, POSIEDON, MINERVA, the two empty spots, ELUTHIA, DEMETER, ARTEMIS, APOLLO.
That's how you do a fucking final boss.
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I only have one problem with the boss fight, and it's a narrative issue
But if the overheating thing was a way to have two people take one out on their own, and it's a fairly glaring flaw, how did the military might of the entire world not manage to figure that out? Anyone who even vaguely knows anything about engineering, or who has ever just drilled a hole in metal, would think of that solution and if those people could come up with developing ultra advanced AI's in a very short period of time, surely they could have created some sort of heat based weaponry to overload the cooling mechanisms in the machines and taken them down without letting the whole world burn.
And I get that large swaths of the worlds militaries had been transitioned to the machines and that was part of the problem with fighting back. But again, two people with bows and arrows, took one down.
Anyway, it's all stuff that I'm sure can be handwaved away, or that you're not supposed to think too hard about in the first place. It was a good fight, and I'm glad it was an actual fight and not just an extended chase scene as I feared it might be. So they won a lot of points there.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
And also an entire army of Deathbringers and Corrupters would be surrounding it. Imagine fighting the Horus with half a dozen Deathbringers and fifty Corrupters fighting back.
From logs, the humans had come up with strategies for taking a Horus down, but it all took too long and used more ammunition than they could afford it to. In the time it took them to take down a Horus the swarm could have built one and a half Horus's to replace it, so it was always a losing battle.
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The gear that was driven by humans actually seemed much superior, but it simply didn't matter because ten replacements were built for every single drone destroyed