Morning Friends! I am going to give you fair warning that the next little bit is likely going to lead to some fairly boring morning posts. I am very much in a head down mode working my way through two very large open world games… both of which I am trying to be extremely spoiler sensitive. Example I took this screenshot and then realized that the quest dialog might be a bit spoilery and used the mosaic tool to blur it. I spent most of last night playing Horizon Zero Dawn and I’ve started moving the main story forward again. I’ve not gotten anywhere near finished with the first part of the game, but there are certain objectives I have to be in the right mood in order to enjoy. For example Cauldrons and exploring ruins are a very specific mindset, and if I want to just kill things with my bow I am going to shy away from both.
Last night was very much a night for murder as I entered the desert and had my very first experiences with the Tenakth tribe. To be honest I expected this region to be way more hostile than I have found it to be. It is not at all that different from the desert band on the other side of Meridian in the first game. There are way more dangerous dinobots roaming around but in general I know the basics of hunting them and can successfully take them down. The flyers though are always going to be the bane of my existence and ultimately I need to become more proficient with a sling in order to help drop them. I have a bad habit of never wanting to use anything other than the Hunter bow. I go through most of the game without ever swapping weapons unless I am completely desperate.
However not being a controller native player anymore… I need to rest my hands from time to time and return to my significantly more familiar mouse and keyboard gameplay. When this occurs right now my game if choice is Dying Light 2. One of the rough things about February is just how packed it has been with interesting games. In another year any one of these games might have been my sole focus for much of the month. Over the course of this month we have had:
Dying Light 2 – 2/8
Lost Ark – 2/11
Cyberpunk 2077 Next Gen 1.5 Patch – 2/15
Horizon Forbidden West – 2/18
Destiny 2: The Witch Queen – 2/22
Elden Ring – 2/25
Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons – 2/28
Now Lost Ark I threw on the list largely because it is eating up a lot of time of folks in the internet zeitgeist. For whatever reason it didn’t really click with me. Elden Ring seems to be the game that the internet is waiting for… and I am deeply interested in it but uncertain it would be a day one play. However the rest of that list are all games that are firmly placed in my wheelhouse and that I want to play… just not sure when I will get around to playing them. Destiny 2 is full of FOMO, but I am going to have to learn to play it on my schedule rather than let it dictate a schedule for me in order to reach a happy place with it. Guild Wars 2… me and this game have struggled for years and I am still trying to figure out how to play it and enjoy it but I am very interested in Cantha.
My prime non-Horizon game right now is Dying Light 2, and I am really enjoying it. It is ultimately my fear that this game is going to get missed in the mix. Essentially if you enjoyed Fallout 4, you are going to enjoy Dying Light 2. The games feel very similar in your interactions with the world and other people in it… but instead of irradiated monsters and questionable nuclear powered tech you have zombies and parkour. The world is chunked up in different zones and I have crossed the river finally into the central loop/downtown area. It also means I finally have access to a bow and the glider…. which is way the hell harder to control than the breath of the wild style glider from Horizon Forbidden West. I might need to change the keybinds because for now the process of popping it open and then stabilizing it feels cumbersome.
What has surprised me the most about this game is just how much I have enjoyed the side stories. I enjoyed Dying Light 1 quite a bit, and the main story while enjoyable was nothing really to write home about. This time around the world seems way more vibrant and while a lot of what you are doing is fetch quests, the story woven around them makes them feel like so much more. For example this is Maya and she had some bandits steal a music box from her… which is the only thing she had left from her mother. There is no way I was not going to go out into the world and retrieve it for her, even though it was quite an ordeal to actually make that happen.
In a perfect world Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West would have been spaced out far enough apart to feel like I had all the time in the world to enjoy both. Also in a perfect world Forbidden West would have launched on the PC so I didn’t need to take controller breaks. We however have what we have and are cursed with an overabundance of excellent new games. As I said for the next bit you are probably going to hear me talking about Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West as I move my way through both games. I fully expect that both are going to be upwards of hundred hour games for me to explore.
The post Curse of Too Many Games appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Shocking to no one I have been spending a lot of time over the last several days playing Horizon Forbidden West on the PlayStation 5. This is ultimately the game that sold me on upgrading my platform, because after experiencing it on PlayStation 4… I knew I wanted to go into this game with the best possible graphics I could. This is maybe the first game to come out so far that really makes it worth shelling out all of that money for the next generation of hardware. I never upgraded to the PS4 Pro, so honestly I was going to get a PS5 regardless… but now I finally have a game worthy of that system. This morning I am going to share some of my thoughts about the game and will try my best to do so in as spoiler free of a way as possible.
At it’s core… Horizon Forbidden West is everything that made the first game phenomenal… but improved upon. There is this almost uncanny valley experience of playing this game, because it plays like I remember the first game playing… even though pretty much all of the controls are tighter and more polished. It was shocking how fast my muscle memory came back upon picking up the controller and playing as Aloy once again. This was largely surprising in part because the last time I played through Horizon Zero Dawn, it was on the PC with Mouse and Keyboard and I was uncertain how quickly I would adapt to the more fiddling controller aiming. In short there has been nothing cumbersome about the experience of adapting to it, and to be honest there are so many new abilities that finding unique key binds for them might have been their own kind of fiddly.
The moment to moment gameplay is just as satisfying as I remember it being. Each encounter feels unique because of the way that combat works, and how you are trying to strategically separate parts from your “dinobot” prey. What is greatly improved this time around however is melee combat and your spear actually feels like a completely viable option even if you aren’t going down the path of “secret stabbing”. Combat for me is a dance of trying to whittle down the herd with careful strategic hits and then finally finishing off with my spear when it is time to “go loud”. There are so many new combat combos that do interesting things like allow you to flip up into the air and leap off of a target… giving you time to get some bullet time arrows shots off while flying backwards. As a result I find it very rare that I pass up combat, even though I have an inventory full of materials that I will likely never spend.
There are so many small quality of life improvements. In the first game when it came to climbing it was essentially a challenge to find all of the surfaces that were painted yellow and then move your way across them. This time around there is a “free climb” system, which looks significantly more natural but you can also just send out a pulse with your focus to get neon yellow glyphs indicating where the handholds are located. In the first game I found myself with the desire to constantly be trying to pick up everything in the world, but my bags filled extremely quickly and after awhile I stopped picking things up… even though I probably needed some of them. Now when you pick something up and you don’t have room in your bags, it “automagically” goes into your stash and you can restock from your stack with the press of a single button. If you need a single component to get that next upgrade, you can set a job as your main quest and the game will direct you towards where you can find that component. So many little things add up to a much better experience.
One of the big differences this time around is that the game expects you to go back to places you have already been before. There is almost a Metroidvania aspect to the game where instead of gating your access to weapons… the game is giving you special upgrades that give you new ways to interact with and traverse the large open world. One of your first items that you craft is a Pullcaster, which is part hookshot from Zelda and part winch giving you new ways to ascend vertically as well as solve puzzles. Very quickly you also enter into a battle with someone that has an old world shield, that they use to glid into battle… and while you damage the shield in the encounter you can still use it as a means of traversal. As you move through the world there are various places that you find that the game indicates are a “blocked passage” that at some point you will get some item that will open up. The end result feels very Zelda like and I am curious what some of the upgrades will ultimately allow me to do.
I thought I would take a minute to answer a few questions I have gotten with some of my posts about this game.
Do You Need to Play Horizon Zero Dawn?
In the strictest sense of that question… no. The game does quite a bit of catching up to where the story was left off… but the game is going to ASSUME you played the first game to completion. This could lead to some really weird moments where characters inexplicably know you and don’t really spend any time explaining who they are. Additionally I would say that yes you should probably stop whatever you are doing now and play through Horizon Zero Dawn because it is one of the best games period. If you jumped straight to Forbidden West you would be robbing yourself of a really great gaming experience. Aloy is legitimately one of those characters that we will remember for decades to come and will be placed among the pantheon of Mario, Link, Master Chief, and Sonic etc.
Do You Need to Play The Frozen Wilds DLC?
At first my answer was going to be no here… but again Horizon Forbidden West assumes that you have played everything from the first game to completion, including the DLC. The very early game did not appear to be drawing heavily on the DLC at all, so I thought folks were going to be safe here. However a sequence of events that happened recently in my play-through of HFW… tells me that the game is absolutely going to delve into the impact of the events of Frozen Wilds. It is going to be beneficial to have played through that content so you can walk into Forbidden West knowing some things. That is about all I can say there without delving into spoiler territory.
Should I Just Wait for PC?
I think ultimately this is a question you are going to need to answer for yourself, namely whether or not you have access to a PlayStation 4 or 5. Roughly 3 and a half years passed between the release of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 and its eventual release on PC. Now there are a bunch of things in play there, specifically that Sony was not really habitually releasing first party titles on the PC in 2017. Since then they have been more focused on getting games on the PC, but doing it extremely slowly. Example we still do not have the Uncharted collection out on PC even though it has been announced for almost a year that it was going to be a thing. I would expect a two to three year wait here, with the bare minimum being a year of platform exclusivity on the PlayStation. If you feel like you can wait, then by all means it will almost assuredly end up releasing on the PC at some point. Being completely honest I am probably going to buy it when it comes out again and play through it again.
Do I Need a PS5 or is my PS4 Good Enough?
This game is phenomenal on the PS5 and the graphics just look so damned good in brilliant 4K HDR. However if you have not taken the leap to 4k, or don’t even really care about it… I cannot see how you would not still have a good experience playing this on the PS4. I linked a Digital Foundry video comparing the PS4 and PS5 versions of the game and honestly… I am pretty impressed that they managed to make the game look as good as they did for the previous generation. If it were just a case of going to the store, plunking down some money, and walking away with a PlayStation 5… then maybe I would say wait it out until you can pick one up. However that is not even a reasonable statement because in the current situation we have found ourselves in for the last two years… it is bordering on impossible to reliably get one without overpaying by a large margin. I think players who choose to play this on the PlayStation 4 are going to have a perfectly enjoyable experience.
I am roughly twenty hours into the game and I am guesstimating that I have maybe seen a fifth of the game world… maybe even less? Sony estimates that I am 21% through the game, and recent events have lead me to understand a bit more about the path before me. I could be completely wrong though and it ultimately will depend on how much fiddling about and trophy chasing that I end up doing in the end. This is probably easily going to be a hundred hour game for me, so expect me to probably talk quite a bit more about it in the coming weeks. For this first post however I wanted to share some of my initial thoughts and try my best to keep things spoiler free.
The post Horizon Forbidden West Impressions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Tonight we talk about how constructed Kamigawa is a challenge and how effectively there are only so many viable decks that you can build. From there we talk about Vampire Saviors a game that Bel griefed Ashgar with and he has been playing at length. Grace discovers Chronicon, a game that we would consider the perfect diablo clone… if it had reasonable graphics. Finally we dive into a long discussion about our earlier feelings about Horizon Forbidden West, a game that has in large part consumed most of the cast since its release on Friday. There is a weird diatribe about dpads and the importance of a good one as well as a quick blurb about how Psychonauts does not maybe hold up as well from a representation of mental health aspect.
On Tuesday we got the big “Next Generation” patch for Cyberpunk 2077, and last night I finally got around to popping my head in to play with a few new features. Cyberpunk was easily my favorite game of 2020… but that was largely because I was playing on the PC with a pretty beefy system. If you had the bare minimum of specs or were on one of the consoles… your experience with this game was significantly different. Essentially I had the privilege of a great experience, but I know that for most people… that was not the case. With this patch however I am hoping the rest of the world can start to get the experience that I had.
To be honest it isn’t like CD Project Red had been slacking on updates because the game was already significantly different from the one that released a year and some roughly fourteen months ago. This is essentially the thirteenth patch that we have gotten from the release of the game. Not all of them added significant features, but in truth quite a few of them were rather lengthy. This one however seems to add more new systems and features and places the game on what seems to be extremely sturdy footing. If you want to check out the full list of changes the patch notes can be found here.
One of the most significant changes is to the way that driving works in the game. Suffice to say that driving… especially with WASD on a keyboard felt awful. There were a number of tweaks that you could make to your configuration to make it manageable, but it always felt like you were riding a thin line between being in control and sideswiping an entire district full of people. I managed to win all of the racing mini-games with a keyboard… but it was a constant challenge. Now things are just easier and the turning radius of your vehicle feels way more sticky and less likely to side out of control. This also means that I am going to have to essentially unlearn the behaviors that I have been using to account for the awful system, but it is very much a welcome change. Your vehicle feels like it has more weight to it and acceleration curves have been adjusted to account for this, and braking feels more significant.
Something that players have been begging for since the release of this game, is a way to legitimately change your the appearance of your V. Sure modders have sprung forth to fix this problem, but now it is super simple to change your appearance at pretty much any time. When you look in the mirror in your apartment you will now see an option to dive into the appearance modification interface, with unfortunately fem/masc body/voice/genitalia options being locked. I am guessing there are too many quest decisions locked to the gender options that it would be challenging to shift that mid save. However this should solve some of the issues of folks who created a V, thought they looked cool… then had one or two features that ended up bugging the hell out of them while playing the actual game. My first Masc V absolutely had this problem, where the lighting in character creation was wildly different than that of the game and I did not love my chosen appearance.
What I spent most of my time playing with however was the housing options. I am a sucker for housing in games and I am so glad to see Cyberpunk 2077 actually fleshing this out a bit. Firstly you can take your original apartment and give it a makeover by choosing one of a handful of preset styles. I would have rather had something where we could actually decorate the apartment ourselves… but this is at least something. I chose the Neon Sands theme for my original apartment which gives it a sort of neon yellow and mauve appearance with new textures being applied to the carpet and accent wall panels. I dig it quite a bit and fits my Nomad Fem V that I was last playing.
There are four new apartments added to the game. The cheapest of these is Northside in Watson and it has an Arcade cabinet and feels very small and cozy. The next would be Japantown/Westbrook and it has more of an Asian themed vibe and weirdly feels sorta like a hotel room. The next one would be Corpo Plaza in the City Center, and it feels a bit like the room you send the spider bot through in Konpeki Plaza. The most expensive and the one I went for is the Loft apartment which is located in The Glens just down the street from the Coyote bar in Heywood. One of the things I dig about the Glens apartment is that you have this really cool entrance with someone watching the door and a vending machine.
The apartment itself is this gorgeous loft with three levels. The main floor has the kitchen, pool table, and entertainment area. There is a small loft area that has a library and from what I can tell there are no intractables there. Then the big loft includes the bedroom and bathroom.
Here is another shot of the loft from the bedroom level and the views out of the city are phenomenal. One of the nice things about apartments is that all of our stashes are linked which means you will always have access to all of your gear regardless of which one you duck into. You can of course purchase ALL of the apartments but that would be pretty cost prohibitive until late game. I ultimately plan on doing this with my current play-through of the game, because why the hell not.
One of the cool things I noticed is that a bunch of the objects are have unique interactions. For example you can attempt to play pool… fail to hit the ball into the pocket and then flip off the table. You can turn on the television and instead of just having to play random things… you can actually flip between what appears to be three unique channels. A number of things give you buffs for example if you take a shower you get a refreshed buff that regenerates health during combat up to 60% for an hour. If you make a pot of coffee you get the Energized buff that gives you +25% max Stamina and +30% stamina regeneration for an hour. If you sleep in your apartment you get the rested buff which increases skill experience by 20% for an hour and regenerates any missing health.
There a ton of other changes including item cost balancing and an increase in credit gains… as well as a number of new weapons added into the game. My focus however was on the housing systems and trying to determine if driving actually worked well. I am sure I will explore some of the other changes over time. Essentially if you had been sitting on the fence about Cyberpunk 2077… this might be a time for you to check it out. If you have a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X/S you can also check out the game for free right now as they are running a trial. It seems like you download the full game and then are put on a 5 hour timer to get as far as you can within that time. If you like it, you can purchase the game and carry the save over, if not you can uninstall it and move on with your life but I believe the save will stick around in case you ever change your mind.
The post Big Cyberpunk 2077 Update appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
