Being overly aggressive doesn't cancel all the reason i listed for them being extraordinary enemies.
And in a world of piss easy AAA games i take super aggressive enemies and a slightly unfair challenge (that is always personal and can be attributed to skill issue since combat being great is the most common praise in every horizon review) over lethargic enemies that let you do all the fuck you want.
Also, You have an extremely op set of weapons and skill, without being overly aggressive the game would be unbalanced, and you have like 6 different difficulty levels to chose.
Nobody is tricked by fancy animations, we weren't born yesterday.
Games need to be fun. I dont think reviews understand what makes combat fun. You saw this recently with FF7 Rebirth. The delicate balance they cultivated in FF7 is thrown out the window with aggressive enemies, flying enemies, and a pulled back camera that makes it hard to track enemies. 93 metacritic. Elden Ring had those enemies who just would never stop attacking. Ever. I even saw the video where it shows how the AI reacts to your inputs the second you hit them. there is no delay so any time you pull out your estus flask, they will attack you without delay. Then there were those stupidly long delayed attacks that made dodging a pain. 97 metacritic.
I dont mind challenge. i have dozens of platinums and most from back when they used to require beating games on the hardest difficulty. ive beaten all souls games multiple times. dozens of times. i started with bloodborne. the most difficult of them all. difficulty can be mastered, but poor combat design is poor combat design. Elden Ring and Horizon focus way too much on creating DPS builds that take out enemies in a few hits instead of focusing on that dance of defense and offense that makes games fun. i have posted dozens of videos of me killing horizon bosses in one hit in the end game. but that was after 100 hours of farming and building up DPS.
Here is how a combat scenario typically goes in HFW:
- Enemies go aggro right away and charge.
- Smaller enemies start lunging at you with melee attacks
- You dodge them but the bigger enemies now have range attacks and they throw stuff where you would land
- you dodge around 5 to 6 times to give yourself enough time to get a shot or two in.
- 5/10 times you hit the armor for 1 damage.
- You finally get hit after saying fuck it and decide to stop dodging like a little shit, and immediately get staggered.
- now you are stuck in an animation while you try and get up as they all gangbang you like riley reid.
- Rinse and repeat.
Every single encounter is like this. 1v1 against bosses are slightly better, but there are actual combat design decisions they made here that deserve criticsm. If they werent actual criticisms they wouldnt have changed the timings on the stagger animations. let alone the frequency of getting staggered.
There is nothing wrong with making enemies more aggro, giving them range attacks and mixing in different kinds of robots for varietys sake. However, you need to give the player the tools and no more elemental types are not enough. Aloy needed a shield. A parry move. Allies like in Dragons Dogma 2 that kept you in the game by distracting other enemies. BB did this 9 years ago. Made enemies aggressive as fuck and upped the tempo but then gave you the tools to tackle them. They increase attack speeds, they let you gain your health back, they gave you an easy parry with a massive timing window. they gave you range attacks and designed bosses around those mechanics. it never felt unfair, and always felt fun. Cant say the same about horizon.
64bitmodels
rodrigolfp
Gaiff
BennyBlanco welcome. Never change. I don’t understand why you are so miserable but do what you like. You wouldn’t even know good game from bad one if you played it yourself. And yes, I will be faster than you. Forspoken is better than hfw.
