Assuming there's a time skip, he could just follow through with what he said he was gonna do and GTFO before Nemesis gets there.
Seeing as Sylens also seemed keen on body modification using machine parts and we've already seen one character get a functioning prosthetic combat-capable arm, I don't think it would be outlandish for him to sustain an injury or willingly modify himself such that he gets a synthetic voicebox or something. Like a device that translates speech to an audio data format, so that he could control machines by "talking" to them? There's even some precedent for it in the the "songs" the machines of the plains people sing.
I definitely don't envy the position of the Horizon team. Having to come up with a resolution that fits with the character, satisfies fans, but is also respectful to Reddick, is going to be a difficult task.
I think I upgraded my main armour and my explosive spears fully before I just went and won the game. This was on Hard, but I do recall just going through and one shotting everything. Anything that I didn't feel like one shotting I just threw so many drill spikes into that it was just constant grinding sounds 24/7. Best thing about Drill Spikes too, is that you can easily jam them into an enemy and they will destroy them without affecting anything you're trying to harvest (if you don't just put on easy loot anyway). Another thing: A drill spike with power shot gets x5 damage on its DPS as well as the initial hit. Though I don't know if they have fixed that or not, but it leads to some extremely hilarious situations.
When you say drill spikes, do you mean impact spears? I looked through the list, didn't see anything with drill properties. Mostly impact/explosive, with some other elements thrown in.
Drill spikes are an ammo type used by certain spear throwers (scalding spike thrower, spinthorn spike thrower, vindicator spike thrower. The last one is very rare
There’s a quest that gives you one as a reward(Signal Spike) , or i believe you can buy one at Camp Nowhere
Anzekay on
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I definitely don't envy the position of the Horizon team. Having to come up with a resolution that fits with the character, satisfies fans, but is also respectful to Reddick, is going to be a difficult task.
I uh dunno how to to label this without that itself being a spoiler so if you really don't want anything spoiled about any potential future Horizon stuff then don't click?
I'm pretty sure he's known to feature in the Burning Shores DLC thanks to a tweet in mocap gear that got very quickly taken down - with how the first gameForbidden West ended I can't imagine it leaves him in a place his absence won't be missed, and being due next month it's probably too late to retool whatever they have.
Anzekay on
Switch Friend Code: SW-3944-9431-0318
PSN / Xbox / NNID: Fodder185
So I saw an interview about the upcoming DLC and I am honestly excited. One of my biggest problems with the finale of FW was
literally the most interesting thing about it, the huge machine vs. machine battle happens in the fucking background where you aren't a part of it. Well in the recent interview on the PS blog, one of the things that was mentioned was a huge battle in the DLC - obviously a Horus pumping out units from the look of the trailer - where I honest to god hope we can participate this time. That final battle would have been so epic, but sadly limitations that I am 100% putting on the PS4 probably was why we couldn't actually partake in the best part of the game.
I very much liked with that fight
is that the "local" combat machines are technically primitive compared to the swarm nanotech of the immortal folks, but they completely wreck ass because what gets summoned up are combat machines rather than general-purpose units. The nanotech may be fancy, but it just doesn't match up to war machines with centuries of refinement built by genius AI.
So I saw an interview about the upcoming DLC and I am honestly excited. One of my biggest problems with the finale of FW was
literally the most interesting thing about it, the huge machine vs. machine battle happens in the fucking background where you aren't a part of it. Well in the recent interview on the PS blog, one of the things that was mentioned was a huge battle in the DLC - obviously a Horus pumping out units from the look of the trailer - where I honest to god hope we can participate this time. That final battle would have been so epic, but sadly limitations that I am 100% putting on the PS4 probably was why we couldn't actually partake in the best part of the game.
I'm not sure how Aloy and Co. could have meaningfully contributed to that fight, aside from dying immediately. There were literally swarms of machines you generally engage solo or groups of 2-3. How would that encounter work without you just randomly exploding? How would anything you do have any impact given the numbers involved? It happened in the background because it wouldn't have been fun to be inside it.
Aloy fights gigantic robotic dinosaurs using a bow and arrow on the regular
<insert Tony Stark box of scraps meme here>
We're well past worrying about realism at this point. We've got all the classic tropes here. Protagonist fights super advanced antagonist that has technology at least a thousand years ahead of her. Protagonist wins anyway.
Aloy fights gigantic robotic dinosaurs using a bow and arrow on the regular
<insert Tony Stark box of scraps meme here>
We're well past worrying about realism at this point. We've got all the classic tropes here. Protagonist fights super advanced antagonist that has technology at least a thousand years ahead of her. Protagonist wins anyway.
Aloy finds a way.
Eh, humanity got to the top of the food chain with sticks and rocks and lots of animals are a lot smarter and with better senses than the machines humanity fights; these things are retrofitted work robots, after all, and the redesigns were all from an AI dumber than humans bashing away at designs created by an AI with godlike intelligence. Plus, humans didn't come out of the creches totally ignorant; they didn't have advanced technical training, but they had a basic education of some kind.
So once somebody confronts a machine and finds out all six of its attacks and how to counter them, they can spread that knowledge and suddenly the whole tribe knows how to fight that machine. And then people can start thinking up ways to harvest the machine relatively safely since they yield things humans can use for tools but can't possibly make right now. Do they pull down the bigger stuff on any kind of regular basis? Nah, but they definitely going after the abundant smaller things for an endless supply of weather- and wear-resistant materials harder than steel that they can use to make weapons to hunt more machines.
As for the space assholes, most of them are just the ignorant rich shitbags like Musk who genuinely think they're worth something supported by a handful of actually intelligent, trained individuals. They have one outright advantage in the form of shields (which we know was also tech developed on Earth before the fall) and don't even have an equivalent of GAIA because they're too obsessed with control. They also have a tiny population such that Earth probably has a lot more actual geniuses than there are space assholes, but only a couple of them understand advanced tech. And fortunately, one of them figured out a shield counter at which point the space assholes die as easy as any other meatbag.
Which is to say, they die ingloriously fast flying face-first into a full magazine of bolts before dying at your feet.
So far I'm enjoying the game, but man, I kind of wish they decreased the amount of content and focused on the jank. Just took me 5 minutes to figure out that I was just a hair too far on the hanging ledge in IOTA so it wouldn't let me jump to the next part. There is constant lag and the contextual stuff is super finicky (as soon as you see the prompt press the button as if you or the machine moves a mm it's gone and your doing a regular attack). Yet the amount of quests I have to still do is a bit overwhelming.
Anzekay on
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0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 10
Yeah, Forbidden West definitely has a lot more sidequests than the original game. I did basically everything but I think collecting mugs and one or two other excessive tasks for the first game and ended at 60-ish hours. With Forbidden West, I wasn't even especially trying to any of the side stuff and clocked in at 80+ hours and had more than a dozen sidequests left undone.
It was one of my main complaints after 100%ing it.
It was too much and instead of making it more immersive, it ended up making you sick of this awesome world they created.
Though it wasn't just the side stuff, pointless amount of rebel camps, but the combination of the amount of gear and the amount of materials to upgrade. It overcomplicated a system that wasn't broken, and didn't actually improve it at all.
Add more gear types, sure, but there is no need for the amount there is, nor the amount of marginal upgrades requiring an amount of materials, even if you're just focusing on a handful of gear, that is just farming things to the point it is no longer interesting but rote and tedious.
Which is not to say I'm not looking forward to the dlc. I really am, I love the universe and am excited to be back in how absurdly beautiful and detailed the world is.
I still really enjoyed HFW, but it's kinda crazy how much of that enjoyment was dependent on me choosing to just ignore all the excess junk that's in the game. At certain points, I just stopped talking to NPCs that were giving side quests, I stopped upgrading my equipment (and stopped hunting random robots for their parts). It's the perfect example of how less can be more, because the less I engaged with its systems, the more fun I had.
Especially as an adult now with limited gaming hours. I find myself needing to rush through conversations to move on to the next thing, which sucks because I love the world they created and conversing with folks is one of the best aspects.
For me the excess kinda worked. I chose to ignore a good half of it, and engaged with the stuff I found most interesting, and it actually made the world seem more real.
Like, when I choose to go to the grocery store, I could walk up to every person and ask how they're doing and offer to solve their problems and take 17 hours for a grocery trip. I don't, because I'm not insane, but I still know all these people have internal lives and stuff.
As I'm running around as Aloy, I know that everyone around me has stuff going on. I can walk up to a rando and they probably have a story to tell and a quest to offer, but I don't need to do that; I can just only walk up to the person I happen to find interesting.
Once you conquer FOMO, the excessive nature becomes kind of a bonus.
I certainly don't need that excess in all games, and I'd rather polish the stuff in there than add new stuff if a tradeoff is required. But HFW was a pretty solid experience, and if they don't mind putting in content I'll never see, I don't begrudge them.
(Incidentally, I started a replay in prep for the DLC. Still fucking gorgeous.)
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+1
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 10
The real problem with the excess of side missions was that the first game kinda trained you to do everything and doing that in the second game means a fuckload more work, but yeah, the mission count for FW is definitely meant to give you a better availability of stuff to level up from and get materials from. There's only so many weapons and armors that are worth it and doing side missions will rapidly have you out-leveling all the side missions in your area, which is sort of the only thing the game does to say "stop wasting time here, move on to other areas". But I definitely hit a point where I'd see some poor soul sitting by the side of the road pleading for help and I'd just ride on past, apologetically explaining that I'd get them on the way back.
Stop excessively engaging with our systems if you don't want to!
Honestly I was fine with the amount of content, but I'm happy to chill and take my time with games; if it takes a long time I'll be playing it for a long time, and as long as it remains fun I'm okay with that. If it ceases to be fun, I'll stop.
(I'm the edge case who 100%s all the AC games though, so I may not be the average user)
I'm the opposite, gimme more side quests, at least if they are well voiced and acted ones that actually make me care and not 'kill x number of monsters'. Let me spend more time in that world!
It's not like I'm ever going to get to my backlog anyway.
Anzekay on
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I'm all for having a shit ton of side-quests, provided that the game makes it clear which characters will give you side quests when you talk to them (and Horizon is pretty good at that). That way, when I've had enough of them, I can just stop accepting them, and I won't have 30+ unfinished quests in my quest menu at the end of the game.
The only area where I think HFW needed less was the gear and upgrading of said gear. That could use some streamlining.
But the number of side quests never annoyed me. By way of comparison, I really enjoyed Outer Worlds, but ultimately I completed every side quest in about 40 hours and was disappointed because I still wanted things to do, and there literally wasn't anything left. I much prefer the HFW system of having more available than I can realistically finish, especially given how good the game is about categorizing the various types of quests.
I wonder about the difference between HFW and Elden Ring. The latter has at least as much to do as the former, and probably more, but I've never heard anyone complain that it's too much. Even though I put 120 hours into my first playthrough and I know I didn't finish close to everything.
Is it because Elden Ring doesn't tell you where stuff is, for the most part, whereas HFW plops everything down on a map? Is it the precise quantification of the side quests that makes it seem overwhelming?
Or is it just because Elden Ring is better, so people don't mind?
Anzekay on
Would you say I had a plethora of pinatas?
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
Elden Ring and honestly all the soulsbourne games are kind of immune to criticism. The only acceptable thing to criticize is their technical performance, because if you say anything bad about the gameplay, fans will turn it around you, and how you're just mad that you suck at the game. It trains people that don't worship the games to just shut the fuck up.
Are there people who are irritated by the excess of content in HFW, but not by the amount of content in ER? Or are the people who are irritated by one irritated by both?
I'm legit curious.
Anzekay on
Would you say I had a plethora of pinatas?
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
If I'm irritated by the gear system, it's mostly because they all look different and unique at a glance, and in my head that makes me want to collect them all and upgrade them all so I have options. Options I will never ever flex, but I have the option. But there's so many items, and they're so similar to one another, it doesn't seem worth it to do that. Meanwhile to bring it to Elden Ring, that has a bazillion weapons, yet I don't feel compelled to upgrade every last stinkin' one. I am compelled to hoard them, or at least hoard the best version of every weapon time. Again for options that I will never actually use, but they're there.
I think it's also hard to shake the mentality of the first game. Where I just stuck with the starting gear for as long as humanly possible until I could simply buy the best purple gear, and then I never had to worry about weapons for the rest of the game. Here I see a green bow and I think... do I really need that, or can I just soldier on until a better blue or purple comes along? And that's probably a real dumb thing to do with the way the game is balanced now.
Anzekay on
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
Are there people who are irritated by the excess of content in HFW, but not by the amount of content in ER? Or are the people who are irritated by one irritated by both?
I'm legit curious.
I would say that your initial hypothesis is likely close to explaining it. Much of what Elden Ring succeeds at - and what partially differentiates it from preceding Souls games - is the way its expansive and minimally explained nature enables the player to feel like they dictate the journey and its outcomes. Which due to the immense amount of Content can be incredibly varied between one player and the next.
Whereas the Open World Ubisoft model of hyper-annotated maps marked with Developer Approved Areas of Interest can feel overly prescribed and thus grates at our belief that we, the holder of the Controller, are actually in control. Even if, ultimately, we have just as much or as little control as we do in Elden Ring.
If I'm irritated by the gear system, it's mostly because they all look different and unique at a glance, and in my head that makes me want to collect them all and upgrade them all so I have options. Options I will never ever flex, but I have the option. But there's so many items, and they're so similar to one another, it doesn't seem worth it to do that. Meanwhile to bring it to Elden Ring, that has a bazillion weapons, yet I don't feel compelled to upgrade every last stinkin' one. I am compelled to hoard them, or at least hoard the best version of every weapon time. Again for options that I will never actually use, but they're there.
I think it's also hard to shake the mentality of the first game. Where I just stuck with the starting gear for as long as humanly possible until I could simply buy the best purple gear, and then I never had to worry about weapons for the rest of the game. Here I see a green bow and I think... do I really need that, or can I just soldier on until a better blue or purple comes along? And that's probably a real dumb thing to do with the way the game is balanced now.
I wish there was more customization. The Carja Shadow one looks boss, but the perks are not how I play the game. Seems the Utaru ones are more up my alley but hate the look.
Fighting MongooseI don't think you realize just how rich he is.In fact, I should put on a monocle.Registered Userregular
edited April 10
I didn't mind the never ending side quests in HFW. I thought it was a beautiful, interesting world with a bonkers plot and I wanted to spend time in it.
I'm a gear collector. I love grabbing unique and cool looking gear just for fun. I don't care in the slightest about achievements, my trophies are unique equipment. My Borderlands characters vaults are filled with weird, unique crap. Same with Cyberpunk. Crazy talking gun? Sure I'll carry you around for a bit.
HFW was a bit challenging in trying to upgrade it all, but managing to lay a perfect trap and hitting perfect shots so as not to damage key components was exhilarating.
I didn't know about turning off the critical component option thing until about 3/4ths of the game so I just finished without it.
But they fixed that with the appearance option. I go with the Carja Shadow one or the starting one.
Say whaaaaaaat! How the hell did I not see this in front of me lol. Need to back track and get that sweet ninja looking one now. Should go great with this new 2 legged mount I got
But they fixed that with the appearance option. I go with the Carja Shadow one or the starting one.
Say whaaaaaaat! How the hell did I not see this in front of me lol. Need to back track and get that sweet ninja looking one now. Should go great with this new 2 legged mount I got
Did you think that all those youtube clips of Aloy wearing the popular Carja Blazon outfit was because that armor has the best stats? (Except now with transmog, it can have the best stats).
Damnit. Decided to start up HFW again with a lull and before the DLC and I forgot the save was UH on a first playthrough. Loaded into the game and decided to "relearn" on some Leaplashers. Went online to see damage and health modifiers on this mode after too much death and good lord, enemies have 3X the health and damage resistance.
Now having to decide whether to restart a 30HR save (just around the "base" in the story) because that is insane and I want to enjoy the game on this new television and sound setup.
. . .seriously though 3X AND a pretty severe damage to enemies penalty. That's crazy and exactly how I hate difficulty done. I honestly should have read up on this earlier after the snake fight. The Plainsong Cauldron was easily one of the most infuriating things I've experienced in a game.
Ended up restarting and while I wished I could have just turned the difficulty downto VH (where I am at right now), I'm glad I'm starting over because so far it has been EXACTLY what I thought UH was: one or two shot machines, that go down with proper gear. Like it is night and day. A good example: the Scrounger fight in the caves at the beginning. On UH, I almost tore my hair out, having to get a proper setup while trying to take down the Burrower in the first phase, and then - desperately - trying to build up elements on the Scroungers when they entered the fight.
The game just isn't balanced for a first playthrough at this difficulty, and while there is some Dark Souls level of enjoyment when you "win" the teeth gritting to get there (and just how pitiful weapons that SHOULD be good at their level on a proper difficulty, still feel unsatisfying after spending time to upgrade them). I upgraded my Hunter Bow before the cave and was sniping off components left and right. It felt good, but also that things could turn at any minute.
. . .really wish they had put more thought into the "locked in" difficulty of UH beyond "You probably want to do this on NG+" and not on a fresh save. But, it is rare that I've found a game that actually knows how to do these modes properly.
The nature of UH difficulty coupled with both the trophy for doing it in NG+ and the rewards you'd get for doing so, yeah the whole idea screamed "balanced for second playthrough". So it was weird they'd let you do it on a fresh save.
Their whole reward system though is screwy. First I have to beat the game. Then I have to beat the game again on Ultra Hard. And then my reward for a third playthrough... is just cosmetic face paint? Even if I wanted to play through a whole third time... it's just face paint. That's a lot of barriers for such a tiny reward.
Anzekay on
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
I literally cannot remember the last game I played where the difficulties were actually balanced. It is so fucking hard to do, and the vast majority of the time the devs just don't bother. Here, you do less damage, the enemies do more, and they have more health. Even on the two most recent Doom games where I played on the harder difficulty, it's still the same thing. And don't even get me started on the PS3 and 360 games with difficulty trophies/achievements. Fucking asshole devs.
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Seeing as Sylens also seemed keen on body modification using machine parts and we've already seen one character get a functioning prosthetic combat-capable arm, I don't think it would be outlandish for him to sustain an injury or willingly modify himself such that he gets a synthetic voicebox or something. Like a device that translates speech to an audio data format, so that he could control machines by "talking" to them? There's even some precedent for it in the the "songs" the machines of the plains people sing.
When you say drill spikes, do you mean impact spears? I looked through the list, didn't see anything with drill properties. Mostly impact/explosive, with some other elements thrown in.
There’s a quest that gives you one as a reward(Signal Spike) , or i believe you can buy one at Camp Nowhere
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I uh dunno how to to label this without that itself being a spoiler so if you really don't want anything spoiled about any potential future Horizon stuff then don't click?
PSN / Xbox / NNID: Fodder185
I very much liked with that fight
<insert Tony Stark box of scraps meme here>
We're well past worrying about realism at this point. We've got all the classic tropes here. Protagonist fights super advanced antagonist that has technology at least a thousand years ahead of her. Protagonist wins anyway.
Aloy finds a way.
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
Eh, humanity got to the top of the food chain with sticks and rocks and lots of animals are a lot smarter and with better senses than the machines humanity fights; these things are retrofitted work robots, after all, and the redesigns were all from an AI dumber than humans bashing away at designs created by an AI with godlike intelligence. Plus, humans didn't come out of the creches totally ignorant; they didn't have advanced technical training, but they had a basic education of some kind.
So once somebody confronts a machine and finds out all six of its attacks and how to counter them, they can spread that knowledge and suddenly the whole tribe knows how to fight that machine. And then people can start thinking up ways to harvest the machine relatively safely since they yield things humans can use for tools but can't possibly make right now. Do they pull down the bigger stuff on any kind of regular basis? Nah, but they definitely going after the abundant smaller things for an endless supply of weather- and wear-resistant materials harder than steel that they can use to make weapons to hunt more machines.
As for the space assholes, most of them are just the ignorant rich shitbags like Musk who genuinely think they're worth something supported by a handful of actually intelligent, trained individuals. They have one outright advantage in the form of shields (which we know was also tech developed on Earth before the fall) and don't even have an equivalent of GAIA because they're too obsessed with control. They also have a tiny population such that Earth probably has a lot more actual geniuses than there are space assholes, but only a couple of them understand advanced tech. And fortunately, one of them figured out a shield counter at which point the space assholes die as easy as any other meatbag.
Which is to say, they die ingloriously fast flying face-first into a full magazine of bolts before dying at your feet.
It was one of my main complaints after 100%ing it.
It was too much and instead of making it more immersive, it ended up making you sick of this awesome world they created.
Though it wasn't just the side stuff, pointless amount of rebel camps, but the combination of the amount of gear and the amount of materials to upgrade. It overcomplicated a system that wasn't broken, and didn't actually improve it at all.
Add more gear types, sure, but there is no need for the amount there is, nor the amount of marginal upgrades requiring an amount of materials, even if you're just focusing on a handful of gear, that is just farming things to the point it is no longer interesting but rote and tedious.
Which is not to say I'm not looking forward to the dlc. I really am, I love the universe and am excited to be back in how absurdly beautiful and detailed the world is.
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Like, when I choose to go to the grocery store, I could walk up to every person and ask how they're doing and offer to solve their problems and take 17 hours for a grocery trip. I don't, because I'm not insane, but I still know all these people have internal lives and stuff.
As I'm running around as Aloy, I know that everyone around me has stuff going on. I can walk up to a rando and they probably have a story to tell and a quest to offer, but I don't need to do that; I can just only walk up to the person I happen to find interesting.
Once you conquer FOMO, the excessive nature becomes kind of a bonus.
I certainly don't need that excess in all games, and I'd rather polish the stuff in there than add new stuff if a tradeoff is required. But HFW was a pretty solid experience, and if they don't mind putting in content I'll never see, I don't begrudge them.
(Incidentally, I started a replay in prep for the DLC. Still fucking gorgeous.)
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I never went back to help them.
Honestly I was fine with the amount of content, but I'm happy to chill and take my time with games; if it takes a long time I'll be playing it for a long time, and as long as it remains fun I'm okay with that. If it ceases to be fun, I'll stop.
(I'm the edge case who 100%s all the AC games though, so I may not be the average user)
It's not like I'm ever going to get to my backlog anyway.
PSN / Xbox / NNID: Fodder185
The only area where I think HFW needed less was the gear and upgrading of said gear. That could use some streamlining.
But the number of side quests never annoyed me. By way of comparison, I really enjoyed Outer Worlds, but ultimately I completed every side quest in about 40 hours and was disappointed because I still wanted things to do, and there literally wasn't anything left. I much prefer the HFW system of having more available than I can realistically finish, especially given how good the game is about categorizing the various types of quests.
I wonder about the difference between HFW and Elden Ring. The latter has at least as much to do as the former, and probably more, but I've never heard anyone complain that it's too much. Even though I put 120 hours into my first playthrough and I know I didn't finish close to everything.
Is it because Elden Ring doesn't tell you where stuff is, for the most part, whereas HFW plops everything down on a map? Is it the precise quantification of the side quests that makes it seem overwhelming?
Or is it just because Elden Ring is better, so people don't mind?
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Are there people who are irritated by the excess of content in HFW, but not by the amount of content in ER? Or are the people who are irritated by one irritated by both?
I'm legit curious.
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
I think it's also hard to shake the mentality of the first game. Where I just stuck with the starting gear for as long as humanly possible until I could simply buy the best purple gear, and then I never had to worry about weapons for the rest of the game. Here I see a green bow and I think... do I really need that, or can I just soldier on until a better blue or purple comes along? And that's probably a real dumb thing to do with the way the game is balanced now.
I would say that your initial hypothesis is likely close to explaining it. Much of what Elden Ring succeeds at - and what partially differentiates it from preceding Souls games - is the way its expansive and minimally explained nature enables the player to feel like they dictate the journey and its outcomes. Which due to the immense amount of Content can be incredibly varied between one player and the next.
Whereas the Open World Ubisoft model of hyper-annotated maps marked with Developer Approved Areas of Interest can feel overly prescribed and thus grates at our belief that we, the holder of the Controller, are actually in control. Even if, ultimately, we have just as much or as little control as we do in Elden Ring.
I wish there was more customization. The Carja Shadow one looks boss, but the perks are not how I play the game. Seems the Utaru ones are more up my alley but hate the look.
I'm a gear collector. I love grabbing unique and cool looking gear just for fun. I don't care in the slightest about achievements, my trophies are unique equipment. My Borderlands characters vaults are filled with weird, unique crap. Same with Cyberpunk. Crazy talking gun? Sure I'll carry you around for a bit.
HFW was a bit challenging in trying to upgrade it all, but managing to lay a perfect trap and hitting perfect shots so as not to damage key components was exhilarating.
I didn't know about turning off the critical component option thing until about 3/4ths of the game so I just finished without it.
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Say whaaaaaaat! How the hell did I not see this in front of me lol. Need to back track and get that sweet ninja looking one now. Should go great with this new 2 legged mount I got
Did you think that all those youtube clips of Aloy wearing the popular Carja Blazon outfit was because that armor has the best stats? (Except now with transmog, it can have the best stats).
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
Ended up restarting and while I wished I could have just turned the difficulty downto VH (where I am at right now), I'm glad I'm starting over because so far it has been EXACTLY what I thought UH was: one or two shot machines, that go down with proper gear. Like it is night and day. A good example: the Scrounger fight in the caves at the beginning. On UH, I almost tore my hair out, having to get a proper setup while trying to take down the Burrower in the first phase, and then - desperately - trying to build up elements on the Scroungers when they entered the fight.
The game just isn't balanced for a first playthrough at this difficulty, and while there is some Dark Souls level of enjoyment when you "win" the teeth gritting to get there (and just how pitiful weapons that SHOULD be good at their level on a proper difficulty, still feel unsatisfying after spending time to upgrade them). I upgraded my Hunter Bow before the cave and was sniping off components left and right. It felt good, but also that things could turn at any minute.
. . .really wish they had put more thought into the "locked in" difficulty of UH beyond "You probably want to do this on NG+" and not on a fresh save. But, it is rare that I've found a game that actually knows how to do these modes properly.
Their whole reward system though is screwy. First I have to beat the game. Then I have to beat the game again on Ultra Hard. And then my reward for a third playthrough... is just cosmetic face paint? Even if I wanted to play through a whole third time... it's just face paint. That's a lot of barriers for such a tiny reward.
PSN:Furlion