Horizon Forbidden West [PS4, PS5, PC]

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Complete Edition rated in Singapore
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If they can just improve the LOD pop-in the next game (maybe loading pop-in as well) that would be a nice improvement along with better lighting. The DLC has some weird lighting shifts as you move around the landscape. Plus when a cut scene kicks off it has its own time of day lighting, so it suddenly shifts from one time of day while playing to another time of day when a cut scene plays, bizarre.
 
I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for PC specs. Can I run it without upgrading or is a game finally coming out that I really want to play that I can't.

Hrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm!
 
Started my second playthrough some days ago (I´ve finnished burning shores). I think Im enjoying it more on my second playthrough (thats often the case with me for some reason).

The bad:
*Some of the dialogue and characters are bad, cringy, not very belivable at all and really anoying
*Some aspects are overly complicated. In the first game you had for example hunter bows. Each new level of the bow you found gave you access to one more type of ammo for that weapon. One part of your weapon wheel was dedicated to the hunter bow. In this game there are so many versions of the same type of weapon even on the same level (for example common). One can shot regular arrows and acid arrows, another one acid and fire, but not regular. So you have to have two slots in the wheel for hunter bows, or constantly go into your inventory and swap weapons. It also seems like the ammo for the higher level weapons need more resources for the same type of ammo. How is this fun?
*Different elemental versions of same type of machine: an acid one, a fire one etc. Once you learned which weapons, which ammo types to use on each machine you dont want to learn that again. The apex versions are fun, but the different elemental ones slow the flow of the game.
*Too much busy work: Too much looting and shooting 100000 cute helpless animals to be able to carry 4 more arrows. And only one in 20 rabbits have any bone in them. Each weapon you get (and there are alot of them) all need some rare machine parts to be upgraded. Fighting the machines is fun, and I get its fun if there are excuses to fight them, but this just seem to artificialy increase the length of the game, which is unnecessary.
*Bandit camps are still boring

The good:
*The world is incredibely beautiful, varied and rich. The design of Meridian and its surroundings is still the high part for me, but Fordbidden West have lots of very memorable locations as well.
*I like the story, it cant recreate the mystery of the first game of course, but I like the even more sci fiy route they went with
*The machines are so freaking awesome, and so is fighting them. Freaking awesome!
*Both main and side missions seem so much better this time around. From what I remember the side missions in the first was basicly talk to npc, follow purple trails, kill some machine, dialogue, end. These mission more often have unique locations crafted, are alot more varied, and from what I remember have story lines which continue from side mission to side mission. It makes world feels more alive and rich.
*The tallnecks puzzels/missions are alot more varied this time around.
*All the explosions, particle effects and animations you get as feedback when you hit weakpoints etc really makes the combat more fun.

The game is much more fun if you use different strategies and different weapons on different machines, learn their weak points and which tacits work. If you´re just bouncing around shooting arrows and healing it isnt near as fun.
I got a little tired after a while the first time I played it, wonder if that will happen this time too, or maybe I wont feel a rush to finish and I might learn tactics for all the different machines this time around.
 
This game is relatively fine. Like with AC Valhalla the budget is too big, there's a big smattering of features like cooking and that dumb not chess side game that aren't interesting or fun but are there because they had the budget.

Stick with the main activities and questline it's a perfectly solid story heavy action RPG.

The one complaint I have with enjoying the pretty world is that Hogwarts Legacy ruined pretty much all open world games for me in the specific case of scale.

Once you wander around an open world that's actually relative to real world scale it's hard not to have an itch at the back of your head bugging you that the "scale" of all these other games are cheated to hell and back. That you're really in an incredibly tiny toy world, that all the trees are way too small, that you went from an arid desert to a snowy mountain in the span of a few city blocks, that as good as the artists are and hard as they're trying you're just in a theme park when you could instead be in a place that feels way more "real" even experienced through some player character running around in it.

Overall I feel like it's fun, but has hit a wall in budget and scope that an increasing number of AAA open world games have hit. Their budget is bigger than they know how to properly use, the scope is more ambitious than they can actually convey, and shrinking some things down could not only save money but bring tangible improvements to these games. I'd have happily ditched cooking entirely to have the controls be a little more elegant than "hold L1, tap triangle, press R1". I'd much rather ditch the dumb side game and have some of the less polished side quests get more love.
 
Dont really agree with you on the scale of hogwarts I could fly from one end to the other in less than a minute.

Not precisely what I was getting at.

It's not that the map was huge. It's that the trees are actually scaled correctly to humans, standing multiple stories high where most games the trees might be 4 meters high. Hogwarts has a tiny valley meant to be a tiny valley. The school itself is correctly scaled to humans, relative to other open world games it would be several "cities" stacked atop each other. Here it's just a single big castle, they aren't trying to cheat nearly as much and I found that made it a lot more fun to wander around in.

Actually, a visual demo, first Forbidden West's map: Remember each color on it is an entire biome, the middle of the map is supposed to be an entire nation, filled with towering mountains, etc.

Glenn_van_driel-hfw-collectors-edition-map(1).jpg

Next, this is Hogwarts Legacy's map correctly (more or less) scaled to Forbidden West's map. This is supposed to be some small valley in Scotland, there's no cities, 1 tiny mountain, there's exactly 1 village really:

Glenn_van_driel-hfw-collectors-edition-map.jpg
We can see the one single tiny mountain in the entire Hogwarts map, the whitish grey lump on the center left, takes up most of what's supposed to be an entire mountain range in Forbidden West. The Label near the upper center, with the Hogwarts crest, is Hogwarts, one castle and the castle grounds. It's on a similar scale to the "ruins of San Francisco" you can see on the left island on Forbidden West. In Hogwarts one castle is equal in size and scale to the ruins of a major city, buy they both have human protagonists.

That's what I mean by scale. 95% of open world games cheat to hell and back, the ruins of an entire city are no more a city than a few square blocks. But Hogwarts doesn't, and it's really a different experience, at least to me.
 
Hogwarts is a theme park, just like every other game.
It just happens that the world of that theme park is a lot smaller.

Going from the Acropolis to Piraeus port would take you more than two hours on foot, yet in AC Odyssey it's more like a minute.
If the scale of the game were to be realistic, it would either be a walking sim, or a completely different game.
The scale is realistic where it makes sense, and miniaturized where it doesn't, and the reason is most of the times, gameplay related.
 
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Yeah it does. It was bothering me too in many dark closed environments. Question though, what other open world games of this quality and scale use RGTI?

Quality is not a term I would use to describe this game to be honest. I'm actually quite dissapointed with it visually after all the hype it got for graphics.

The only thing it has going for it is the sheer amount of foliage on screen, the rest of the game is nothing special to me.

If Metro Exodus can do it at 60fps on consoles I'm sure it should be able to quiet easily on PC.

I suppose it just depends on how much work is required to get it embedded in to the engine.
 
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