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Horizon Zero Dawn |OT| The Land After Time

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Dahbomb

Member
I played this game at a friend's house for like 4 hours straight.

I am actually surprised that this game wasn't reviewed higher by the review journalists. This game would've been showered by 10s like a few years ago. It's exactly the type of game that wins GOTY by the media at large.

It's a complete package for a single player AAA game in terms of quality and really does puts every open world by Ubisoft to shame. I also think it beats games like Tomb Raider by a mile too and that game got a ton of great reviews as well.


Story actually doesn't suck donkey balls.
Graphics are like... witchcraft. I don't know how all of that is possible on the PS4.
Sound design is phenomenal.
Game play doesn't suck for open world, there are actually some tactics/strategy to hunting down the bots.
Actually some RPG stats to take care of.
Side quests don't suck ass.
Game is actually hard on the higher difficulty levels (was playing on Very Hard, definitely not a joke).
There is enough to do in the open world and doesn't feel super empty/barren.
No framerate drops, performance has been solid.
Voice work, animations and general mocap has been top notch.


I have been playing games for quite a while and I can say that from my time playing this game, I haven't found an egregious fault with the game. The faults are pretty minor and honestly bordering on nitpicking if I bring them up... like the water effects aren't up to snuff with the rest of the visuals and some random collision glitches/bugs that you run into in these open world games.
 
just played the opening, i loved it. 7 year old Aloy is such a cool character. but Fuck that little shit throwing rocks at me. wanted to throw it back at his head but didnt want to disappoint Rost so dropped the rock.
 
Can't play the game. Just can't fucking play the game. When the game installed the hard drive went ducking crazy loud. Turned the PS4 off, turned it on again, wouldn't boot. Turn it off again, tried safe mode, PS4 STILL wouldn't boot up.

Only when I removed the game disc and started the PS4 again did it boot up, but stuttering. Insterted the game again, hard drive went crazy again and game kept stuttering.

What the fuck!

Edit: turns out someone let the cat into my room, she got up into the drawers my PS4 was, she decided to play there and pushed my fucking PS4 to the ground. Nobody in my family decided to tell me until they saw me angry as fuck.

Fucking dam it.

Damn man that fucking sucks.
 
Pulled an all-nighter last night before having to run some errands, but spent a good 5 hours of non-stop gaming. Loving it so far, and reiterating what most members have been saying, the story is very very engaging. I don't want to put the controller down, and just want to keep playing for as long as I could.

Aloy as a character was very well designed. The way she was mistreated by the others and struggled to be recognized made her feel more human compare to other protagonists. And the fact that regardless of how she was treated, she still approach others as if they have never done anything wrong to her. Also, if you're in the early area, talk to some of the villagers, you will see how disparaging they are to her.

Some tips to the newcomer.
- Be aware that your bags have limited space and your resources can fill up really fast. Each resource item take up a space in your resource bag.
- You can collect thousands of wood, but for every 250, it takes up one bag space. Same with other items but with lower amount.
- If you come across a vendor, make sure you check out all the weapons and outfits, and see which one you would like to purchase. There are items that require a certain loot items in order to be obtained. Get the items you need and sell the rest for more shards. Your resource bags will fill up really fast with the loot items.
- There's really no need to go to the snowy mountain area on the bottom left of the map if you're still in the beginning area. I wasted about 30 minutes trying to explore the whole thing, but there were only woods and herbs.

Can't wait to delve into the game again tonight.

Same here played all night..... you can upgrade your bags and slots to hold items. They don't specifically tell you to you just have to look in the crafting menu. Life becomes much easier running around after upgrading space for weapons, outfits, resources, traps, potions, arrows so on and so forth.

Especially arrows. So far I can hold 60.
 
Can't wait for the answer or non-asnwer.

Also everyone, talk to the priest early on when you get the chance and talk to him till you get the choice: "Sun-Queen", I found it a funny conversation that has him kind of falling over himself to explain why there hasn't been one.

I love that dialogue with the sun priest, it's hilarious
 
So I'm only about 20 minutes and WOW. Just wow. From the very first screen of the game I have been truly stunned by what I'm looking at. It's giving me goosebumps. This is on a standard PS4 too. How am I supposed to get through this game when all I want to do is slowly walk around and stare at everything?

It feels like we're now playing the now infamous Killzone bullshot trailer from back in the day.
 
So I'm like 6 hours in and just realized now that if while sprinting you press the crouch button (square) you slide. Can't be the only one that figured this one out late! And man those animations. Sweet Jesus.
 

HeWhoWalks

Gold Member
just played the opening, i loved it. 7 year old Aloy is such a cool character. but Fuck that little shit throwing rocks at me. wanted to throw it back at his head but didnt want to disappoint Rost so dropped the rock.

33033855631_ebd368c07a_o.png
 

VanWinkle

Member
How are the shadows so good? Despite how good UC4 looked, shadows were an area that could have clearly been improved. But these look PERFECT!

So I'm like 6 hours in and just realized now that if while sprinting you press the crouch button (square) you slide. Can't be the only one that figured this one out late! And man those animations. Sweet Jesus.

I did slide once but I didn't realize how I did it. Thanks for the info!
 
We REALLY need an option to just lock Aloy's position to the center of the camera (when not aiming), it feels so awkward to control when it decides she needs to be all the way at the edges of the screen.

Other than that, having a GREAT time.
 
So I'm like 6 hours in and just realized now that if while sprinting you press the crouch button (square) you slide. Can't be the only one that figured this one out late! And man those animations. Sweet Jesus.
Not 6 hours but lol yea it happened by mistake and i was like...Holy shit. Slow down time added to it...Soooo good
 

antitrop

Member
So I'm like 6 hours in and just realized now that if while sprinting you press the crouch button (square) you slide. Can't be the only one that figured this one out late! And man those animations. Sweet Jesus.

Gotta get the upgrade that makes it automatically go into "arrow-time" when you slide.
 
just played the opening, i loved it. 7 year old Aloy is such a cool character. but Fuck that little shit throwing rocks at me. wanted to throw it back at his head but didnt want to disappoint Rost so dropped the rock.
I hit the rock out of his hands. :p

It showed that Aloy was not going to stand for it but she wasn't going to play tit for tat either.
 

Slaythe

Member
I played this game at a friend's house for like 4 hours straight.

I am actually surprised that this game wasn't reviewed higher by the review journalists. This game would've been showered by 10s like a few years ago. It's exactly the type of game that wins GOTY by the media at large.

It's a complete package for a single player AAA game in terms of quality and really does puts every open world by Ubisoft to shame. I also think it beats games like Tomb Raider by a mile too and that game got a ton of great reviews as well.


Story actually doesn't suck donkey balls.
Graphics are like... witchcraft. I don't know how all of that is possible on the PS4.
Sound design is phenomenal.
Game play doesn't suck for open world, there are actually some tactics/strategy to hunting down the bots.
Actually some RPG stats to take care of.
Side quests don't suck ass.
Game is actually hard on the higher difficulty levels (was playing on Very Hard, definitely not a joke).
There is enough to do in the open world and doesn't feel super empty/barren.
No framerate drops, performance has been solid.
Voice work, animations and general mocap has been top notch.


I have been playing games for quite a while and I can say that from my time playing this game, I haven't found an egregious fault with the game. The faults are pretty minor and honestly bordering on nitpicking if I bring them up... like the water effects aren't up to snuff with the rest of the visuals and some random collision glitches/bugs that you run into in these open world games.

This comes after both Witcher 3 and Uncharted 4.

Standards are higher !
 

eizarus

Banned
Been playing for around an hour, but so far I've literally not even completed the first quest. I've given
Grata her prayer beads and the meat
and just been enjoying the aesthetics of the game. God damn, the level of graphics is unbelievable. The prologue was lovely.
..I need this. I've been doing it manually
It also applies to jumping too. I've had some sweet kills with it.
 

nOoblet16

Member
Played for about 8-9 hours so far and am already near the end of the game with only 5 quests remaining. I thought this was suppose to be an RPG with RPG length main quest or Zelda length adventure game. You barely have any quests set in cities/towns/villages.

I like the story but I feel like they should have dwelled a lot more into the current stuff with tribes and all than the past tech stuff wrt. story. Also not enough side quests, lots of errands though (basically all the fetch quests like stuff have their own category)
 
This shit started off good but now it's getting great. Goddamn I'm loving the story thus far. :D

yeah, it didn't even feel like an open world game at times, and I don't mean that in a bad way, usually in open world game, you got great linear opening/intro of the game before the games open up, but after that, the story start to lose focus in favor of the open world. but so far in Horizon, the story felt like a great linear game like Uncharted. you want to keep playing because you want to see what happens next.

it's amazing.
 
wait dumb question is the campfire save thing on all difficulty levels? i started on hard.

Also for all the talk of the kind of uncanny valley faces and such it's actually surprisingly good for an open world game. leagues better than anything bethesda will do with elder scrolls and fallout.
 

VanWinkle

Member
This comes after both Witcher 3 and Uncharted 4.

Standards are higher !

I wonder what it would be like if this game came out after Dragon Age Inquisition and before Witcher 3. Would it have scored higher? (I'm sure it would have.) Would Witcher 3 have maybe even scored a little bit lower than it did? It's hard to tell.

I'm not sure this game would have been as good as it is, though, if it had come before Witcher 3. I think that likely pushed them to make a better game from a narrative standpoint.
 

Kalentan

Member
yeah, it didn't even feel like an open world game at times, and I don't mean that in a bad way, usually in open world game, you got great linear opening/intro of the game before the games open up, but after that, the story start to lose focus in favor of the open world. but so far in Horizon, the story felt like a great linear game like Uncharted. you want to keep playing because you want to see what happens next.

it's amazing.

That's a good way to put it. I agree!
 

Stiler

Member
Can someone tell me:

Early game (but major spoiler, do not read if you are still the starting area).

After you proving and everything that went down, afterwards you are told that Rost was buried at his home where he raised you. So I figured I'd go up there before setting out into the world for Aloy to pay her respects and when I go there I don't see any grave site or anything, am I missing something or did they overlook this??? Seems like a fairly major thing to just not have, especially since they tell you about it....

Also is anyone else getting like some really weird colors in dark areas? Like I get this:
yZEs3cU.jpg


Seems to only happen in like buildings and things, it doesn't look like that when it's outside and dark or anything.
 

Spoo

Member
Love pretty much everything about this game but the combat.

The combat is not very fun. Everything else is so good :\ Like, 10/10 great, but the combat to me feels very boring; damage-sponge enemies aren't particularly cool, and the AI is so... ugh. It's so frustrating how close it all is to being amazing.

Really happy for everyone who is enjoying it so far. All of my friends who are playing it are having a blast. I'm the only one who can't get into the combat :\
 
Just played what I would call the first "boss fight", and man is was actually pretty tough on normal. Also the story fucking books, I didnt think would get so much so early in the game.
 

bubumiao

Member
Played for about 8-9 hours so far and am already near the end of the game with only 5 quests remaining. I thought this was suppose to be an RPG with RPG length main quest or Zelda length adventure game. You barely have any quests set in cities/towns/villages.

Are you playing the same game everyone else is?
 

Renkax

Member
This is the only game so far that it's showing the HDR unavailable :( Ratchet and clank had HDR And it's all good but this horizon doesn't show it :( what do I do?!
 

bubumiao

Member
This is the only game so far that it's showing the HDR unavailable :( Ratchet and clank had HDR And it's all good but this horizon doesn't show it :( what do I do?!

Did you update your firmware recently? Maybe you need to turn HDR back on in your TV's settings?
 
This game looks absolutely fantastic on the Pro, I was floored. I'm mainly playing this as a somewhat linear experience so far, the story is so good that it makes me not want to beat the bush. The world begs to be explored, but the story so far is so intriguing that I just keep wanting to see what is going to happen next. Gameplay is also super solid, love the bow and different trinkets you can use to hunt the machines down.
 

LuuKyK

Member
Is it me or the Freeze Bomb kinda sucks? I don't really see the point of using it so far, the enemies take too long to be affected be it. Burning seems much more useful.

Played for about 8-9 hours so far and am already near the end of the game with only 5 quests remaining. I thought this was suppose to be an RPG with RPG length main quest or Zelda length adventure game. You barely have any quests set in cities/towns/villages.

I like the story but I feel like they should have dwelled a lot more into the current stuff with tribes and all than the past tech stuff wrt. story. Also not enough side quests, lots of errands though (basically all the fetch quests like stuff have their own category)

Unless you are playing on easy, not exploring, not doing sidequests and not engaging in conversations that seems rather... weird. Isn't the average time of completion 30 hours?
 
Glad to see that you actually get fucked up on Very Hard.

For people who've played a fair bit, how high does your level get? I'm trying to figure out what to invest in. I really want the tinkerer skill so that I can re-use some of the very rare mods I have but I'll need to put in another 5 points there and it seems like I'm gonna need a bunch of the stealth stuff for QOL
 
Glad to see that you actually get fucked up on Very Hard.

For people who've played a fair bit, how high does your level get? I'm trying to figure out what to invest in. I really want the tinkerer skill so that I can re-use some of the very rare mods I have but I'll need to put in another 5 points there and it seems like I'm gonna need a bunch of the stealth stuff for QOL

I don't know that there is a max level. Trophies for up to level 50. I am about 26 hours in and level 40 I think (done a lot of side stuff). You'll certainly be able to unlock the whole skill tree.
 
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