Hi everyone! Its been two weeks since launch and we have been overwhelmed with your lovely messages, comments, fan art, videos and screenshots (seriously, you guys are pros with the photomode!). Were very thankful for the interest in Horizon Zero Dawn and would love to answer any questions you might have in an AMA tomorrow!
The devs joining us on Thursday are:
Ben McCaw Lead Writer
David Ford Lead Quest Designer
Roderick van der Steen Lead Lighting Artist
Dan Calvert Character Art Director
Dennis Zopfi Principal Designer Machines
Pinar Temiz Sound Designer
Ana Barbuta QA Manager
Jessica Wyeth QA Tester
You can submit your questions here starting today! On Thursday March 16th from 4:00 PM CET to 6:00 PM CET we will get together and try to answer as many of them as possible.
Haha when I got those weapons my reaction was "welp I don't use any of these type of weapons... at all" I forced myself to use them and had so much fun but yeah,
Blast Sling is not designed to be your main damage dealer weapon, you run out of blaze pretty fast.
Fingers crossed for AT LEAST some exotic gear in future DLC along with NG+. This is one of the few games I'd be more than willing to grind it out for some sweet gear and I already put 64 hours in.
Player gear overall is blunder by GG. So little variety in model department as it's basically 1 model / weapon type across all tiers. They should have done more varied stuff and have some very hard to get unique looking stuff.
On another note, fuck fighting humans. Melee against them is horrendous and hitboxes are funky as hell. Arrows at random just passing through humans, dealing no damage.
Just realized that the convoys are kinda like the herd thing I've been mentioning for the last few pages. Didn't know that you could track a Behemoth convoy as it moves across the map.
I beat this game last night and I've been reflecting on it since. I didn't end up connecting with this game as much as I thought I was going to, but I still really enjoyed my time with it for the most part. Anyways, here what I liked and disliked:
Pros:
Robot designs + robot combat - There's not a huge amount of them, but they are pretty well done and varied for the most part. There are some missteps like the Rockbreakers,(one of the most poorly designed enemies I've fought in any game) but this is probably the most unique aspect of the game. I do think that there's room for improvement here though. I wish there were some more robot designs like wolves, bears, giant snakes, etc. After a while, I wasn't really interested in fighting yet another Longleg, Glinthawk, Watcher or Ravager. I saw every machine in the game before the halfway mark so more variety would be nice especially for the late game. Don't get me wrong though, it's nowhere near as a big of a deal as it was in something like Nioh. I also would've liked legendary versions of robots.
Robot sounds - This is basically apart of the above category, but I separated it just to highlight how good the machines sound.
Graphics - This is obviously one of the prettiest games on the market. I don't think it's quite as stunning as Uncharted 4 was at times(where I had to constantly stop and take pictures), but it's probably the next best thing on the PS4.
Aloy - Loved Aloy. Great charismatic lead. Hope she is the main character for Horizon 2 as well. GG knocked it out the park here.
Main story - Kept me intrigued from the start. Really picked up in the second half though. They did a great job here. Possibly my favorite story since The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone expansion in October 2015. I'd have to think about it some more to be sure though. You honestly don't see that many great stories in games so this is a big plus. Even Uncharted 4's story was pretty mediocre to me and many here love to praise that
Cons:
Human Combat - I'm just going to be frank here. The human combat in this game is awful. It's almost like they didn't put any effort into this aspect at all. It's just not fun in any way and it maddened me to no end at just how much human combat there was in this game, especially in the main quest.
Side Quests - Sidequests in this game follow The Witcher 3 school of design with the detective mode. The problem here is that you're just not getting the same level of writing, twists and characters in Horizon that made that type of design work in TW3. Also, the different choices that you could make were another huge component of the design of the side quests in that game which is absent in Horizon.
Cauldrons - I found the dungeons of this game extremely underwhelming. I thought they could've been a lot more creative visually, but more importantly I didn't find them engaging from a combat perspective. Take Cauldron Xi where
95% of it is fighting boring human enemies with explosive barrels littered around.
In Cauldron Sigma
you just fight mostly watchers with a few exceptions like the shell walker early on and the fire bellowback boss.
Cauldron Zeta
was just a boss room with a Thunderjaw.
Characters - I loved Aloy and Sylens, but I did not really find anyone else in the game to be very memorable or interesting. I think Vanasha had some potential, but she didn't have much screentime. It's so weird to me that in a game with a well-written main story and a big open world, there are so few interesting characters to actually meet.
Crafting/inventory/loot - I do like the mechanic where you can craft arrows on the fly in combat and it does add a bit of tension in combat, but I don't like the heavy emphasis on crafting in this game or games in general for that matter. I like crafting if it's used to do create something unique like a cool weapon, but I don't like how I have to craft just to upgrade like 8 different parts of my inventory. Many of which still feel really limited after several upgrades. The loot in this game is really unsatisfying to me and I was fully decked in purple gear very early on in the game. Making the majority of gear from that point on useless.
Music: The ambient stuff was fine, but I wasn't impressed by the soundtrack overall. It didn't have the big sweeping tracks or catchy tunes I wanted. There's about 3 or 4 songs that I liked, but yeah I don't feel that great about the soundtrack. It also hurts that many of the tracks are pretty samey. I guess this isn't really a con per se as I can see why some one would like the game's music, but it just didn't gel with me.
Game world: First off, I'll say that the game world is very pretty, but exploration wasn't very engaging in this game. Not much to find or do in the world. Other than the hunting trials, the game felt like a string of combat arenas stitched together. I also think that we fight robots in the open world a little too frequently. Wish there was less robot density. It also annoyed me that building in this game only existed as a facade and you couldn't actually enter them. I expected more cities than just Meridian and even Meridian was disappointing. There wasn't much to actually do there despite the great visuals and it felt pretty lifeless. Game should've had some fun minigames as well.
Overall, I think the biggest takeaway here is that HZD is a super solid foundation for a franchise and Horizon 2 could potentially be really special now that GG has some experience with the genre. I'd probably give it an 8 and it will definitely be in my top 10 at the end of the year.
Edit: I forgot to add that I'd love a meaty expansion or 2 similar to Hearts of Stone or Old Hunters, but I guess that's unlikely.(?)
I imagine that sony and GG had to mostly wait and see how the game would do before they truly greenlit anything given it was a semi risky new IP.
given the timing of when the ps5 will come out, I feel like an expansion DLC is decently likely to come to horizon as horizon 2 would likely line up best as a ps5 game so they will likely want to keep the franchise fresh with some big DLC, and then likely a year after the ps5 comes out launch horizon 2 taking good advantage of the new console.
Well I guess I was a bit off in thinking I was near the end. Got a few new side quests and it looks like still some more of the main story to go.
For side quests, will they show up on my map by themselves or do I have to visit everything town on the map? There's a few towns I haven't been to yet.
it's the biggest new IP launch on the ps4 in the UK (beating out no man's sky)
beyond that I don't think we have gotten good details.
sounds like some annalist at some point projected it to sell 4-6 mil this year
and 6-8 mil lifetime most likely.
for other meaningless ways to talk about sales...
in comparison to uncharted 4 and last guardian on ps4 ratings...
last guardian has 1388 ratings on NA psn
uncharted 4 has 20993 ratings on NA PSN
horizon normal edition has 4017 ratings and deluxe has 1677 ratings on NA psn
final fantasy 15 has 5291 ratings on NA psn.
I think ff15 sales just recently crossed 6 mil.
we know uncharted 4 did 2.7 mil in the first week so obviously horizon sold less than that.
at the same time it is also obvious that sony didn't expect horizon to sell as much as it did because it ran out of stock on amazon for a while.
it's the biggest new IP launch on the ps4 in the UK (beating out no man's sky)
beyond that I don't think we have gotten good details.
sounds like some annalist at some point projected it to sell 4-6 mil this year
and 6-8 mil lifetime most likely.
for other meaningless ways to talk about sales...
in comparison to uncharted 4 and last guardian on ps4 ratings...
last guardian has 1388 ratings on NA psn
uncharted 4 has 20993 ratings on NA PSN
horizon normal edition has 4017 ratings and deluxe has 1677 ratings on NA psn
final fantasy 15 has 5291 ratings on NA psn.
I think ff15 sales just recently crossed 6 mil. we know uncharted 4 did 2.7 mil in the first week so obviously horizon sold less than that.
at the same time it is also obvious that sony didn't expect horizon to sell as much as it did because it ran out of stock on amazon for a while.
They become alert after the 1st strike, so hide behind rock, and wait for them to go back to their yellow state, they should go back on route where you can jump on the rock again and strike them above. Remember - they can't be in red alert state, has to be stealthy done
Gawd, trying to watch Fraser play this on VGA is impossible. He enjoys the gameplay but he skips over so much dialogue. I was just skimming and he still hasn't hit the revelations part of the story yet. Ugh, Just gonna keep skipping until he gets to those parts.
Just finished the game and got the platinum too, my top contender for GOTY so far. I absolutely loved the story, I'd love to see a TV series based on this universe I think it would be fan-fucking-tastic.
Gonna read through the spoiler thread tomorrow to see what other people think of the story bits but I absolutely loved pretty much everything about the campaign, the way it got built up, and the main 3 or 4 characters. A great, great job by everyone involved.
Game was so good I just sat and let the credits finish out, haven't done that in a while.
Just finished the game and got the platinum too, my top contender for GOTY so far. I absolutely loved the story, I'd love to see a TV series based on this universe I think it would be fan-fucking-tastic.
Gonna read through the spoiler thread tomorrow to see what other people think of the story bits but I absolutely loved pretty much everything about the campaign, the way it got built up, and the main 3 or 4 characters. A great, great job by everyone involved.
I really think Sony has a nice IP with this that they could use for other types of media. Like for real. That's how well done I thought this story was.
Just finished the game and got the platinum too, my top contender for GOTY so far. I absolutely loved the story, I'd love to see a TV series based on this universe I think it would be fan-fucking-tastic.
Gonna read through the spoiler thread tomorrow to see what other people think of the story bits but I absolutely loved pretty much everything about the campaign, the way it got built up, and the main 3 or 4 characters. A great, great job by everyone involved.
Game was so good I just sat and let the credits finish out, haven't done that in a while.
Not that I'm complaining tho, I'm not interested if its not dynamic, I probably have better pictures than a static theme like the sad one that came with the pre-order.
Not that I'm complaining tho, I'm not interested if its not dynamic, I probably have better pictures than a static theme like the sad one that came with the pre-order.
