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[Tschumi]

Is this thread intended to become a console war battle ground? No. Will it? Let's hope the mods' campaign of Console War eradication will shield us from the lurkers beyond the circle of light of our collective campfires.

I'll just pick your post to make this clarification:

I was basically saying a big portion of the player base (xbox fans) might be rubbishing the game out of hand purely because it's a PS exclusive (now pc), and that if one drops one's console war goggles maybe one could see the good parts of the game.

So yeah if you're not in that group you'd probably not get my point. I'll add that clarification to the OP.

I just want to point out that I don't praise the gameplay in this OP, it's more about the way they built the whole thing than how fun it may be. A few words on the central plot - but full disclosure I avoid side quests when I play this.

Horzion Zero Dawn. 2017.
Everybody should acknowledge this game for what a technological and artistic achievement it is.
(yes, I employ stock photos here, as I figure it these do look more or less exactly like the game looks as I play it, so there)
(post-everything: this has turned into a screenshot fest, sorry about that. Didn't want to make them too small or they wouldn't communicate my points very well)

<this after the bullet points were written>
So yeah, I was playing this game and finally getting into it (right in time for it's sequel) when it struck me that not enough people fall over themselves praising this bish. The game is insane, it's a colossal technical achievement with countless devoted and detailed man hours loaded into it, amazing artistic direction and creativity, supreme technology. Digital Foundry are apparently going to stop pixel counting in 2022, and I think this a great example of why that's important - what are people gonna say, lawl it's 1080p? (I have no idea what the fuck the resolution is) - forget it, the game's gorgeous no matter the resolution. I dunno about what framerate it is, but I have played Demon's Souls on 30 and 60 and this feels a lot closer to DS's 60fps mode than the 30FPS mode.

People don't want to give this game the love it deserves because that would go against the boundries we have marked out in the console war. I'm just here to hold up my hands and say: guys, it's fucking amazing, just accept it, try to play it on PC if you haven't got a PS4/Pro/5.

I dunno how to approach this, I'm gonna start with bullet points.
*note: none of these points i based on research or anything, it's all opinion, hence the tag I've given this thread.

- The game is gorgeous in many ways
Okay, let's get it out of the way. The opening zone is not exactly brain-exploding, and the water graphics were... a good try, but a bit of a fail. Nice technology, incorrectly adjusted transparency settings and colouration. Furthermore, Aloy's head is sometimes a bit awkwardly rendered - they try to keep it stable so we can read the expressions on her face, but sometimes it just comes off looking like she's got a weirdly static head on a bobbling body. And yes draw distance, LOD and haze effects hover around the 'artful' to 'awful' end of the scale in certain circumstances (that's not the whole story on them, though, especially LOD).

But I honestly struggle to find much else to pick nits about, especially considering the age of the game.

- NPC faces are breathtaking. Extremely effective skin rendering, great modelling, awesome facial capture, great lighting, I've not played many games that so directly translate the face of actors to the face of their characters. Is it technically perfect? No, but it is artistically, impressionistically, on point.

- The outfits are also exceptionally well designed and rendered. A good simple example would be the 'kind' Matriarch from the start of the game, Tee[something].

- The foliage in the world is stunning. I know even non-PS fans grudgingly praise TLOU2 for the way it's greenery renders, and that's well deserved, but Horizon Zero Dawn has achieved the post-apocalyptic look in its own way and it is every bit as amazing. The denisty, the sharpness, the animations, the stylistic additions like firebugs and sun/moonlight glinting off shoots... The red sneaking grass in particular looks like a bunch of real life grass was captured and simply pasted into the game world.
- The robot dinosaurs look fucking awesome. Don't sit there and tell me you didn't like similarly drawn dinosaurs on DeviantArt back in the 00s. They're a fantasy robot dinosaur enthusiast's wet dream. And the animations...

- The terrain that holds this foliage is stunning. See: Next subsection.

- The environments are insane

Yes, yes, the tech is aged and some areas are less awesome than others (some of the 'Bandit Camps' are a tad scratchy, remind me of Skyrim in some ways) but boy oh boy...

- The city ruins are incredibly rendered. The lighting (again, hugely successful) filters through the gutted buildings, which Aloy can explore just as far as her jumps and incidental ledges carry her. The overgrowth, lit by the lighting de jour, gently caressed by the wind, completes the effect. Chef's kiss.
- The way the terrain undulates, darkens, brightens in heartbeat-like lockstep with the pacing of your playthrough is truly something special. In late afternoon you scurry down a slope to the foot of colossal ruined skyscrapers, as you pass beneath their feet the night closes in, now the green of firebugs and the moonlight, refracted through whisps of mist, frames your progress through a catherdral of godrays, with the distant creepign menace of robotic eyes prowling through the underbrush.

- The rural lands contain superfluous details. Shrubs of every shape and size, secondary and tertiary trees; vistas; outcropings; streams; mudslicks; fields and copses of trees. The various resoruces you can pick are all well rendered and colourful, easy to tell apart and satisfying to yoink.
- As suggested earlier, the LOD isn't as jarring as it could have been. Okay, yes, sometimes things scan into being remakably close to Aloy (mudslicks, in certain areas, for one) but in general the amoung of pop in you'll actually notice, while you're running around, is remarkably limited. I guess they worked out some pretty nifty smoke and mirror tricks to achieve this effect, but it's just another example of art and creative applications of tech winning out on sheer big-ball rendering.

- Aloy and the robot's animations are incredible
Okay, it's hard to be quite so effusive with the efforts of some of the supporting cast - one of the three matriarchs has annoyingly static sleeves that don't obey gravity in the early hours of the game, for instance, and some of the cut scenes that take a close look at Aloy's enemies the Carja show up some gently simplistic moves on their part... but:

- Again I return to praise for the technology of the game. How many games have full half a dozen different animations for Aloy running? And three or four more for Aloy descending? She trips on god-damn tree roots for pete's sake. She doesn't run in a straight line but kinda meanders in the direction you're pointing... Yes, her head bobbles slightly in cutscenes but in game play it's generally pretty well stuck to her body and the way her body navigates incidental obstacles is just incredible. It's the kind of thing you don't notice, but really aughta - they put in huge amounts of effort. I swear, Aloy has like 2 different ways of squatting.


- Aloy's attacks perfectly warp around and bend to meet enemies in satisfyingly crunchy ways. There's a real percussion to the combat, timing plays a role almost as much as a Dark Souls or God of War - even slightly moreso perhaps as H:ZA enemies don't stagger reliably when hit.
- The dinosaurs. They're just incredible. They have such weight to them, their attakcs are frantic but savage and hella intimidating when you scale them up a bit. Even the simplistic Watchers, little raptor-like guard robots, have a striking leaping karate-kick attack that really freaks you out the first time they heave themselves, bodily, at you.


- the story is hella worthy
- I'm not gonna go into this, too much, I'll just say that I rerolled in this game maybe 5 or 6 times trying to get into it (just about managed it this time, I think) and I got to know Aloy's foster father Rost quite well over those attempts and, well, the story works. With him. Like it elicited an RL reaction from me.
- you really hate peeps. You hate the intolerant wankers among the Norda (Aloy's people, for lack of a better group) with their cheap sneers and innuendo, relying on shitting insults about something they don't understand to feel better about themeslves (read: GAF's politics forum) The Carja radicals are also detestable - their first introduction has so set me against them that I've yet to seek out help from anyone in taking their bases apart headshot by headshot, stabbed back by stabbed back, yet. Fuck 'em. This game really riles you up and gives you a very stylish way of reaping vengeance upon a fool. I only wish I could have killed Blondie from the intro scenes myself.
- The whole general plot about accessing, breaking down and understanding the complex past the world, the way the old earth fell apart, is like nitrous oxide for the engine of my game power.

I could go on, I've probably missed things, I just wanted to give this game the shoutouts it deserved, the heady praise it deserves.

Thanks for your time.

 

[Y0ssarian]

Yarp

 

[Guilty_AI]

Honestly one look at the map while my sister was playing was enough to put me off from it. It made me tired just seeing all those icons.

The story i saw didn't inspire much confidence in me either, from some weird stories in side-quests to the plot straight out of some teenager drama i saw in the start.

 

[Tschumi]

Honestly one look at the map while my sister was playing was enough to put me off from it. It made me tired just seeing all those icons.

The story i saw didn't inspire much confidence in me either, from some weird stories in side-quests to the plot straight out of some teenager drama i saw in the start.

eh, sounds like u saw a snapshot of it and decided u didn't like ur sister's game

 

[tommib]

Sorry my dude. Game’s aesthetics do nothing for me. I tried it several times. Constantly fell asleep. Tsushima is so much more interesting and beautiful. I know it’s a massive success for Sony and the sequel is going to be really big, like real big, but I’m really not their target audience.

 

[Guilty_AI]

eh, sounds like u saw a snapshot of it and decided u didn't like ur sister's game

nah, i already had seen the beginning of the game on youtube to see if the story was any appealing, it wasn't. The map filled with icons was just the last stab that made me decide not to play it for good.

 

[Raekwon26]

I don't understand that title at all.

 

[AV]

I expect a really great looking, solid 8/10 game which is what I got with the first. I'd platinum it if Elden Ring wasn't coming out a week later.

People getting caught up about resolution and framerates are quick to forget that EVERYONE who played the first game at launch played it at 30fps and that the vast majority of people played it at 1080p, and we liked it just fine.

Honestly one look at the map while my sister was playing was enough to put me off from it. It made me tired just seeing all those icons.

Mixed bag. Quantity-wise it looks much worse than it is, 50 hour platinum for me if I remember correctly. Certainly not Ubisoft level bloat at all. Quality wise a lot of the side quests are good but most of the collectibles feel like nothing.

 

[Banjo64]

It is a looker, but the use of fog to disguise the PS4’s lack of rendering power was glaringly obvious. That’s the good thing with a cross-gen sequel: we’ll hopefully get double the framerate on PS5, alongside greater draw distances and LOD.

 

[Guilty_AI]

Mixed bag. Quantity-wise it looks much worse than it is, 50 hour platinum for me if I remember correctly. Certainly not Ubisoft level bloat at all. Quality wise a lot of the side quests are good but most of the collectibles feel like nothing.

The side quests i've seen also put me off. Or rather, i guess what put me off the most was Aloy herself.
She felt like such a bland character, like the writers couldn't make up their minds about what kind of person she was going to be so they just made her a generic reactive character. The choices don't help either, if not make things worse.

Gameplay looks fine enough, but when i'm not invested in neither the world nor the characters i know i'll just grow bored with the game eventually, especially with how story-focused it is.

 

[Gameplaylover]

I don't get the dramaqueen thread title. The game looks very good, no question, but it also has several flaws.

 

[winjer]

This game was not some overlooked graphical gem. It got a lot of praise, be it on the PS4 or the PC.
And tons of people took amazing screenshots and share it through out the internet. Including in this forum.

 

[Tschumi]

I expect a really great looking, solid 8/10 game which is what I got with the first. I'd platinum it if Elden Ring wasn't coming out a week later.

People getting caught up about resolution and framerates are quick to forget that EVERYONE who played the first game at launch played it at 30fps and that the vast majority of people played it at 1080p, and we liked it just fine.



Mixed bag. Quantity-wise it looks much worse than it is, 50 hour platinum for me if I remember correctly. Certainly not Ubisoft level bloat at all. Quality wise a lot of the side quests are good but most of the collectibles feel like nothing.

The side quests i've seen also put me off. Or rather, i guess what put me off the most was Aloy herself.
She felt like such a bland character, like the writers couldn't make up their minds about what kind of person she was going to be so they just made her a generic reactive character. The choices don't help either, if not make things worse.

Gameplay looks fine enough, but when i'm not invested in neither the world nor the characters i know i'll just grow bored with the game eventually, especially with how story-focused it is.

for the record, as with most games, i'm only doing side quests that pop up on my way to story quests, i'll only max everything out if i'm that far into it... i don't need side quests to be all up in this game

 

[RoboFu]

I mean. It’s no leap like the matrix demo, but if thats what gets you excited .. I’ll back you up.

 

[ACESHIGH]

Its the other way around. I found it to be VERY overhyped due to being an exclusive. Thoughts confirmed once I played on PC. Good game and all but folks acting like these games are head and shoulders above third party AAA games...

Graphics are great, but so are in Ubisoft games of the same style. The game brings nothing new to the table other than the setting and robot dinosours. Melee combat is stiff as fuck and so are character animations and voice acting. Water looks like jam and I can go on.

I enjoyed the game, because is a harmless AAA open world one with a good story... but it is not the second coming of Christ.

 

[Guilty_AI]

for the record, as with most games, i'm only doing side quests that pop up on my way to story quests, i'll only max everything out if i'm that far into it... i don't need side quests to be all up in this game

Still kinda meaningless when i don't like the character herself. I can 100% feel its the kinda of game where i'd create sarcastic monologues in my head in hopes to make whats happening on screen feel more interesting, thought unfortunately this works better with silent characters.

 

[existensmaximum]

It's a great game that's close to being one of the greatest in my opinion. The detractors for me are: bland and forgettable side quests as well as some NPCs and supporting characters, half baked stealth/infiltration.

Other than that.. Just wow. Everything else is close to perfection for me. Very original ideas and technically it's mind-blowing for the console.

The Cauldron missions were so much fun and I loved many of the challenges and activities as well. The animation is also some of the best I've seen.

 

[Chukhopops]

Yeah cause nobody ever gave praise to HZD’s graphics, you’re right OP it has been « robbed » of it.

In reality the big issue with the game is it came out around the time Breath of the Wild was released and it feels really dated compared to it from a gameplay / open world design point of view.

Edit : also half of the story is great (the Zero Dawn part), the other half with the tribes I really couldn’t care for.

 

[ssringo]

 

[Graciaus]

I got more enjoyment reading the story summary than actually playing the game.

 

[arvfab]

it feels really dated compared to it from a gameplay / open world design point of view.

So boring is "new"/"innovative"?

 

[Matt_Fox]

I admire Horizon Zero Dawn but I don't love it.

The environments and the mechanical dino-style monsters are great but as others have said the main character and her tribe really fall flat. Aloy seems to have been designed from corporate mind think - give a girl a bow and the demographic will lap it up (tired trope from Pixar's Brave, Chronicles of Narnia, Hunger Games, rebooted Lara Croft, etc).

I actually think the game would be better if they ditched almost all the story elements and just made it a more mysterious survival journey through the post-apocalyptic world, and let the player's imagination fill in the blanks.

 

[Punished Miku]

The game has issues, but looks great graphically. I'm playing it right now.

Pros:

• Looks very good graphically. Honestly looks like a PS5 game in some parts.
• Movement has weight and feels pretty good most of the time.
• Story main quest has some interesting elements at times.

Cons:

• Excessive item collection. I've never picked up this many sticks in a game, and disliked the act of doing it this much. Just picking up enough herbs to fill up your healing pouch can take like 20 plants.
• Crafting, RPG elements, and leveling up add nothing significant to the game. It adds to a very constant sense of grind, and overly inflates the difficulty of some of the enemies.
• The camera is pulled in so insanely close on Aloy at all times that you can literally hardly even see what is happening peripherally. Walking around in the first major city, you can hardly even see. 99% of the time I'll be walking around in the wilderness and get a notification that I just discovered a campfire, and I look around and literally can't even see it. Even with the Focus search on. After a minute or so I will notice the campfire icon.
• Everything you need to see in this game is highlighted in neon, because there is not great organic visibility in the gameplay or quest design. You'll follow Witcher-vision feet, and look at purple neon blobs for clues in most quests.
• Side quests so far haven't been great, with some oddly comic voice acting at times and shallow stories. But they're just side quests. Not a deal breaker.

I'm undecided on the combat. I honestly can't tell if it's good or bad yet, and I've been playing for about 8 hours. Sometimes it is pretty fun, and sometimes I find that the enemy hit tracking feels weird and that enemies do an insanely over-inflated amount of damage (I probably haven't grinded enough). The encounter design isn't great, as you mostly approach packs of enemies in large fields and stealth hack one, then hit and run on everything else.

I started out very into it, and the more I've played, my enthusiasm keeps decreasing. I think I will be skipping most side quests at this point, and trying to mainline the story. There's some story elements I'm interested in, and Aloy as a character is actually fairly likeable at times.

I read so many comparisons to Breath of the Wild in 2017, and I have to say the games could not possibly be any more different from each other.

 

[Tschumi]

Still kinda meaningless when i don't like the character herself. I can 100% feel its the kinda of game where i'd create sarcastic monologues in my head in hopes to make whats happening on screen feel more interesting, thought unfortunately this works better with silent characters.

i've heard it suggested that it's because she's a bitter outisder who has developed skepticism about the animistic interpretations of the technology only she can really understand of her people, as such i think it's actually right in line with her character's story, and can dig it ^_^

 

[Tschumi]

I started out very into it, and the more I've played, my enthusiasm keeps decreasing. I think I will be skipping most side quests at this point, and trying to mainline the story. There's some story elements I'm interested in, and Aloy as a character is actually fairly likeable at times.

i shoulda mentioned in my op that i'm basically ignoring side quests, because in the past they got in the way of me enjoying the game... i'm enjoying it this time just exploring and following a coherent story

 

[Boss Mog]

I'm playing through it now and I'm not sold on it yet after a few hours. One thing that specifically bothers me is the art direction. The colors all seem washed out and faded with a heavy focus on brown hues; I don't care for it, especially after being blown away by Ghost of Tsushima's visuals with colors that really pop. The melee combat is atrocious too, very floaty and sluggish. The voice acting is a real issue as well while most of the main cast does a decent job (not the best though), a lot of the side quest NPCs are just awful; like they grabbed a bunch of randoms from the office. I went into it not knowing that it took place on Earth in the future after the collapse of society, but once I found that out, I was in disbelief at how unrealistically they designed their tribes and society in general. It's all PC and very woke which would obviously all go out the window if mankind truly went back to living like that. I'm not sure If I'll manage to finish it or not, I'm gonna try, but this feels far behind other Sony exclusives ( Spider-man, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima) in all aspects, including graphics.

 

[Bonfires Down]

I don’t think I’ve seen a single person say that the game looks bad or even mediocre. The visuals are unanimously praised.

The gameplay etc on the other hand has been rightly criticised.

 

[Chukhopops]

So boring is "new"/"innovative"?

Would you really argue that there is more to do in the HZD open world than in the Zelda one, and more ways to interact with it?

Plus it’s a point that was mentioned in pretty much every review of HZD when it came out.

I really enjoyed it for the combat and the old world story but it was lacking in the open world aspect.

 

[The Cockatrice]

I gave it a 7.5 or something like that when I played it on PS4. Sure it looks great but Far Cry with robot dinosaurs just did not do it for me that much. World was boring, story peaked at the mid-game twist and then took a nose-dive to utter garbage towards the end which soured my experience of it. The clutter of boring shit to do on the map did not help much either. Combat also is hit or miss and while fighting the bigger threats was nice, the smaller ones are just eh.

 

[Utherellus]

Console warring had nothing to do with it.

World felt static, non-interactable and non-immersive. It lacked depth.
Game was more of graphical blockbuster showcase, rather than immersive open world experience.

That the way it was and there is no way around it.
After all it was studio's first open world action with RPG elements. Completely different genre shift.
There was no way Guerilla could deliver better than what we got.

Let's leave HZD to the place it belongs and hope that sequel will fix those aspects.

 

[Punished Miku]

Honestly one look at the map while my sister was playing was enough to put me off from it. It made me tired just seeing all those icons.

I was shocked at how excessive the icons really are. Then luckily I found out in the options you can turn almost all of them off. After turning off like 90% of them, I could finally notice where cities were on the map.

 

[arvfab]

Would you really argue that there is more to do in the HZD open world than in the Zelda one, and more ways to interact with it?

Plus it’s a point that was mentioned in pretty much every review of HZD when it came out.

I really enjoyed it for the combat and the old world story but it was lacking in the open world aspect.

For me personally, BOTW was one of the most dull and boring open world I ever experienced. Sure you could do more stuff, but more doesn't meen better.

 

[k_trout]

I loved the first 4 -5 hours then got the openworlditis i usually get from open world games

 

[Guilty_AI]

i've heard it suggested that it's because she's a bitter outisder who has developed skepticism about the animistic interpretations of the technology only she can really understand of her people, as such i think it's actually right in line with her character's story, and can dig it ^_^

This isn't nowhere near enough of a reason to go around the world fighting giant machines and risking her life. The story seems to imply she's going around to "look for answers" which is a rather gamey motivation, the kind of stuff writers do just to drive the plot forward. And the fact she doesn't have any real defining personality either makes her feel even blander and generic

It'd be fine if this was a bonafide RPG a la Fallout New Vegas where you literally control every aspect of the character, but it isn't.

 

[rodrigolfp]

Everybody should acknowledge this game for what a technological

Considering what the shitty Jaguar APU can do, maybe yes. Considering what technology could do to the game, nope.

 

[Aion002]

It is beautiful, the map is pretty, the animations are great and fighting dinosaur robots is fun.

But everything else for me is terrible, specially climbing... After Assassins Creed and Zelda BotW, having an "Uncharted" type of climbing in a open world game is disgusting for me.

Same shitty climbing that Ghost of Tsushima has... Fortunately in Tsushima I loved everything else and I can stand the climbing.

I also disliked the characters, both personalities and appearances, the western tribal theme also bored me, since I never really liked that.

The collect a ton map design ripped off from Ubi is also a terrible thing for me.

Initially I enjoyed the game, but the more I played the more I disliked, including the art style.

But yeah.... Technically it is amazing.

 

[Sosokrates]

I think its the opposite, its overhyped.
Its still a good game, but nothing special. Its good points comes from combat and enemy design and variety, combat is really fun, some of the best controls in any 3rd person action and its easy to look like a pro with the special moves which slow down time and stuff. I also love when u press crouch while sprinting aloy will slide into a crouch. Theres some epic big combat moments when you and npc allies have to take down villages, its to bad there a load of tedious, just killing dinos in rather generic locations and circumstances.

Visually it was nice , but playing it recently on PS5, there are some really ugly textures. The lighting, color and foliage is great though.

The story and missions have to much filler, there needs to be about 50% cut from it.

 

[Punished Miku]

I don't understand that title at all.

He's just planting a flag in the ground and declaring an opinion. Labeled it as an opinion too. Just something to get a debate going.

 

[The Alien]

Sure...the game looks great. Tried playing it after putting in 200 hours into AC Odyssey and just couldn't do it. Aside from Odyssey, felt HZD was cobbled together from better games that came before it.

Im cool with people liking it. It's a helluva exclusive. Im fine with all that. What I dont get is the continuous blowjob threads like this demanding adulation.

 

[Tschumi]

This isn't nowhere near enough of a reason to go around the world fighting giant machines and risking her life. The story seems to imply she's going around to "look for answers" which is a rather gamey motivation, the kind of stuff writers do just to drive the plot forward. And the fact she doesn't have any real defining personality either makes her feel even blander and generic

It'd be fine if this was a bonafide RPG a la Fallout New Vegas where you literally control every aspect of the character, but it isn't.

i'm happy to be exchanging takes, u don't have to change ur mind, but i just wanna say that for me, considering that she'd been shunned/bullied/ignored until her late teens, that she'd always wondered about her mum, that she kinda understood technology more than anyone else and could tell that there was a world of electro caves where she could seek out an endless stream of interesting information, i dunno her desire to get away from her backwards tribe of intolerants and go find answers rang true with me.

i empathise with her personality, wronged and bitter, wry, yuppers

 

[Calverz]

Lmao what?! I’d say it got too much adulation!

 

[Punished Miku]

i'm happy to be exchanging takes, u don't have to change ur mind, but i just wanna say that for me, considering that she'd been shunned/bullied/ignored until her late teens, that she'd always wondered about her mum, that she kinda understood technology more than anyone else and could tell that there was a world of electro caves where she could seek out an endless stream of interesting information, i dunno her desire to go find answers rang true with me.

i empathise with her personality, wronged and bitter, wry, yuppers

It's convenient, but I also liked it. Reminds me of my favorite episodes of Stargate SG-1 where they stumble into religious societies and just use science to figure out things they never picked up on. The game is kind of a fun atheist fantasy, which I didn't expect. I hope the story sticks close to that element, since that was the most interesting part for me.

At the beginning she has some clear personality, shunning tribal laws and superstition.

 

[tommib]

Lmao what?! I’d say it got too much adulation!

We finally agree on something.

 

[Guilty_AI]

It's convenient, but I also liked it. Reminds me of my favorite episodes of Stargate SG-1 where they stumble into religious societies and just use science to figure out things they never picked up on. The game is kind of a fun atheist fantasy, which I didn't expect. I hope the story sticks close to that element, since that was the most interesting part for me.

At the beginning she has some clear personality, shunning tribal laws and superstition.

This is actually a good point which i hadn't properly realized before. It also explains why i can't see eye to eye with it, I find really hard to swallow this kind of "enlightened protagonist" plot, especially when its derived from some science x religion notion - regardless of which side is being treated as the enlightened one.

 

[Kuranghi]

Replaying it right now and something I never appreciated before was how much better it looks with HDR, in some scenes even with HDR the lighting looks blown out or weird sometimes and I think "is this some QA HDR issue?" and I switch back to SDR and it looks so fucking flat and crap I can't believe the difference. Also just the lights of robo's, fires and other glowing stuff is just superb. I think you really need a good HDR (ie FALD LCD or OLED) telly to appreciate it fully since the best HDR moments are during high contrast daylight scenes and low average picture level + super bright highlight moments.

Its the exact same with Ghost of Tushieima, fucking beautiful games.

 

[Ellery]

I have been in love with Playstation all my life. My top 20 games are probably 50% Playstation exclusives or games that initially launched on a Playstation console and TLOU2 is my all time #1, but I personally don't feel like Horizon was deprived of any additional love. If anything I feel like the Playstation hyped carried Horizon a great deal.
For me personally it is just another open world game that feels mostly okay, but ultimately bland and repetitive and lacks soul. After the first 10-15 hours I rushed through it because the side quests, dialogues etc. were just too boring for me.
Graphics, animation and some aspects of the combat feel pretty good.

I am not trying to say Horizon is a bad game, but for me personally it was just another 7/10 but in a Playstation dress.

 

[ANDS]

I have a hard time believing one of the most critically and commercial successful games of the last generation suffers from a "lack of due. . ."

 

[Tschumi]

Replaying it right now and something I never appreciated before was how much better it looks with HDR, in some scenes even with HDR the lighting looks blown out or weird sometimes and I think "is this some QA HDR issue?" and I switch back to SDR and it looks so fucking flat and crap I can't believe the difference. Also just the lights of robo's, fires and other glowing stuff is just superb. I think you really need a good HDR (ie FALD LCD or OLED) telly to appreciate it fully since the best HDR moments are during high contrast daylight scenes and low average picture level + super bright highlight moments.

Its the exact same with Ghost of Tushieima, fucking beautiful games.

Ahh lol bro maybe I'm also getting my mind blown by HDR without realising it

 

[Warnen]

always felt lacking to me compared to Naughty Dog’s efforts. Not bad by any stretch but not the best on the system.

 

[Tschumi]

Sorry my dude. Game’s aesthetics do nothing for me. I tried it several times. Constantly fell asleep. Tsushima is so much more interesting and beautiful. I know it’s a massive success for Sony and the sequel is going to be really big, like real big, but I’m really not their target audience.

For what it's worth, i failed to get into it like 6 times and only started to really appreciate it when i decided to just entirely ignore side quests unless they really bit me in the face but it's all good