Good Morning Friends! I am still very much enshrined in my current play-through of Horizon Forbidden West. At this point I am somewhere between 40 and 50 hours into the game and still have so many little side objectives to finish. There are some that I don’t really look forward to like the hunting grounds… largely because I hate gimmick fights. Then there are others like the Tallnecks that I have just been avoiding because it slows down the action as I try and figure out how to jump up on top of them. I need to focus on completing those however because generally speaking a whole slew of things that I didn’t even know about open up. The story continues to be super interesting and while on some level it mostly just feels like I am playing Zero Dawn, there are so many general quality of life improvements.
It was one of these that started a twitter thread yesterday. Something that Horizon Forbidden West does that I adore is that it puts a little thought bubble exclamation mark over the head of any of your companions that have new dialog options. Something that I have always found exhausting about RPGs in general… and most specifically Bioware RPGs, is the need to keep checking in with your crew to determine if you can make any forward story progress with them. Essentially the old adage is that after every single quest you need to run around and talk to everyone, just to make sure nothing has opened up because you certainly do not want to miss it. With Horizon Forbidden West not only do you get an indicator that there is something new, but you also get an indicator on the specific dialog tree you can find the new information.
I had a friend try and share his frustrations with this style of mechanic twice, only to end up deleting the messages. Essentially it went down to something like this… that he hated to see MMORPGs bleeding over into single player games. So it made me think, is the lasting impact of the MMO the quest giver? Since the advent of World of Warcraft it has become ubiquitous to see an exclamation point over something and immediately translate that into “they have a quest for me”. Personally I adore this because it gives a universal language that makes it easier and more efficient to navigate the world. However I think it largely comes down to which side of a discussion you are on. I am very much on team “Efficiency and Better Communication” with the player.
Then I think there is the opposite side of that coin which is team “Mystery and Immersion”. This team tends to dislike obvious quest markers out in the world because they draw them away from the immersion of living in the game world that they are playing. This is also the team that loves Diegetic Interfaces in games, where when you click on a screen the menu options appear on the in game screen and not some popup that happens in your heads up display. A lot of times this sort of player might prefer to turn off the HUD entirely to allow for only in world queues to guide them. Based on the two deleted attempts at a comment, I am guessing my friend falls in that camp, which is a perfectly reasonable way to play the game. Personally in truth… I think both options should exist and often times when a game does not support them… I install mods that give me back my better visualization elements.
This however got me thinking, and I firmly believe that the true legacy of the MMO is not the quest giver system, but instead the codification of color coded loot systems. In 2020 I wrote a piece attempting to divine the origins of these systems. While there has been quite a lot of shifting over the years as to what color means what rarity, we have more or less stabilized on a specific standard moving forward. The more games that I find myself playing, the more I am seeing this exact scale repeated over and over. Currently I am playing Horizon Forbidden West, Dying Light 2, and Lost Ark and in all cases the scale is alive and well.
Grey – Junk
White – Base Rarity
Green – Common
Blue – Rare
Purple – Epic
Yellow/Orange – Legendary
It truly is staggering just how common this loot system ends up being in modern games. This sort of thing has happened over the years with different systems and arriving at a “solved” state. Prior to the early 2000s for example, there were some wildly different solutions to how to do three dimensional movement in a video game. Then almost as if at once, we coalesced upon a standard for how third person movement in a video game should function. Similarly over the years we have arrived at what appears to be the best solution to easily giving the player visualization that an item you just picked up, might be better than the item you were previously using. I personally think this is a positive thing, but poor team immersions is going to ultimately find the walls closing in on them as we get better visualizations.
The other lasting impact of the MMO that I have seen starting to trickle into other sorts of experiences is that of the Item Level. Ultimately every single item created in a game has some sort of item budget, that denotes how many attribute points are granted by using it. For years this was an opaque system, but that did not mean it was not there. World of Warcraft, and more specifically the modding community created a way to transparently visualize this number and give a reference that this item had a larger item budget which was quantifiable. That did not necessarily make that item better, because some stats mean more than other stats, but it did assign some numbers to an obtuse system. It is very weird to see this same concept being applied to otherwise single player experiences. It is not necessarily a system I would have carried forward, because it can be the source of bullying, but I guess anything that helps a player better interpret the value of gear is not completely awful.
So I am now curious. What other systems have you seen trickling out of the MMO space into Single Player games? Drop me a line below and lets talk about whether or not you find them good changes.
The post Legacy of the MMO appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I’ve talked about this before, but some weeks back I moved my two main consoles… the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 downstairs. The theory being when I finish working from home for the day, I need a shift in my surroundings which is why I have been spending so much more time downstairs. Now I get this is how almost everyone plays console games already, but the primary reason why this was never the case is because for me… I never felt like I could monopolize the television. Yesterday was the first real negative ramification of my decision, and reminded me of why I kept them in my office up until this point.
My wife has been a follower of Grey’s Anatomy since the show first went on the air in 2005, and is religious enough of a viewer that she used to have post show calls with friends to talk about the episode. So if I am downstairs on a Thursday, then the television is going to be tuned to ABC for a block of watching the Seattle Fire Department show and then Grey’s Anatomy immediately following it. All I really wanted to do last night was pick up where I left off the previous evening with Horizon Forbidden West, but alas for sake of marital bliss… I had to be in the same room as the very loud and obnoxious musical score of a show that loves to kill off its doctors. Granted this is completely fair play given that I have subjected her to the Walking Dead for a similar amount of time.
Since yesterday was Elden Ring day and it is apparently the new hotness… I figured maybe this was a sign for me to dip my toes into it. I played about an hour last night and I am not sure if it is really a game for me or not yet. I’ve never really attached to a Dark Souls game, and so far Elden Ring is no exception. There was also something weird going on performance wise. I am playing on PC, and I had more than a few moments of the game freezing on me. If this happens at the wrong moment… like on a boss or mini boss… it pretty much spells your doom. I might wait a bit for a patch before diving in further because apparently I am not the only one with more than enough system to handle the game experiencing similar freezing.
Instead I spent my night returning to Dying Light 2, which I am still enjoying greatly. One of the things that I do not love about the game however is that you can’t just pick a single faction. You are forced in the story to keep dealing with both. I do not love the Peacekeepers at all, and I very much do not like Renegades. However there is no real way to flip certain territories to your faction of choice. There will always been certain territories that are claimed by one faction or another. I would prefer to paint the entire map yellow, but that does not appear to be in the cards. There are certain territories that are neutral by default, and those you can flip in a specific direction. This is not stopping me from handing every power plant over to the survivors however. I have a feeling that I am just about to be forced into a situation of doing something awful… in order to save my own skin. We will see how it plays out in the end though.
The post A Night of Second Choices appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
