Horizon: Forbidden West - coming to PS5

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Dom Cruise said:
Not sure I can bring myself to care about playing a game with a potato head main character, the fact that female characters can not only not be sexy but have to actually be ugly is just insane, why can't they just look normal?

None of the female characters in The Last of Us 1 were actively unpleasant to look at, hell Aloy looked fine in the first game, but now they have to look ugly.

I could have lived with it if things had stayed at 2013 or 2017 levels, but the steep decline since then is too much for me, I don't want to play as an ugly character.


Call on meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, call on me, call on meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, call on me...
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She literally has belly shirt armor
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You're The Man Now Dog said:
I've been pleasantly surprised so far.

Culture war sperging

In the very beginning of the game, you meet up with a black guy from the first game and play through the prologue with him. I was fully expecting him to find some holocron or whatever from 2020 and deliver a speech about how even though it's been 1000 years he still can't see a Tallneck without thinking about George Floyd or some shit. I was bracing myself every time he opened his mouth, ready for them to ruin the character, but they've so far managed to not bring up modern politics at all. And as sad as it is that "the writing isn't Twitter-grade racism" is a plus these days, this is the world we live in. So hey, kudos there I suppose.

I will say it's a little jarring that almost every quest NPC so far has been either black or Asian. No Hispanics or whites to be found in the Forbidden West, apparently. Also, many of the black people talk with modern day black American accents, which suggests that when they were cloned, the Zero Dawn project specifically taught black people to sound different than everyone else. Kind of odd. But I'm probably just overthinking things.

Aloy's face is weird. Sometimes she seriously does look like Nikocado Avocado, like she's been stung by a bee. Other times, she looks more or less like she did in the first game. I think they're applying a slight fisheye effect in some shots and it's distorting her face.

Gameplay sperging

The gameplay is basically the same, but better. Melee combat is a thousand times better, with combos and special attacks. In the first game melee was horrible. Now it's actually fun. More elements is always a plus, and the new "match the elements" system means you're not going to completely stop using about half the elements like in the first game.

The different robots so far feel pretty much like rehashes of the first game's robots. Instead of Watchers we have Watchers That Burrow Sometimes. Instead of Scrappers we have...I can't actually think of any difference between Scrappers and Scroungers. This may change. I'm not very far in.

The health overhaul is great, the skill points overhaul is really great, and the way healing works is so much nicer than in ZD.

Overall, it's exactly what I expected. It's HZD with multiple quality of life improvements. Good/10 Game Of The Now buy it immediately or don't whatever
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There are some white and maybe hispanics they are fewer in number but they do exist. Whites seem to fill the role of villian. Just an observation lol
 
Jasper2K said:
There are some white and maybe hispanics they are fewer in number but they do exist. Whites seem to fill the role of villian. Just an observation lol
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You have to go further out, most of the whites make up the tribe that worship the US military as ancestral spirits. They have full body paint and you do quite a few involved quests like resolving their water issues.

You have to do their quests if you want Aloy to wear body paint as well.
 
Just finished it and all but two or three side quests. Game rules. It's hard to compare it to the first one (which has the strength of the origin story stuff and a lot more cool shit stolen directly from Dinotopia) but I think the progression through the world is overall better aside from the first having a stronger intro, which is natural for a sequel.
Explosive spikes wreck fucking everything which is fun, including the final boss though which is a little unfortunate.

Dom Cruise said:
Not sure I can bring myself to care about playing a game with a potato head main character, the fact that female characters can not only not be sexy but have to actually be ugly is just insane, why can't they just look normal?
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She's a caveman bromeliad. But really, she's actually realistically attractive and the uggo meme is a retarded /v/ thing that got out of hand.
By realistically attractive I mean she has nice angles, and she's usually framed that way in conversation camera angles etc. But she's designed naturalistically and the game makes a point of showing the off angles too, which is clearly a deliberate art direction decision re: the tribal thing.
Seems kind of obvious to say but I used to be a photographer IRL and finding the good angles is an artificial process; even really pretty models can be hideous (actually they're kinda two sides of the same coin because unique beauty can be really specific) from the wrong line or under the wrong light, because real humans aren't generic anime characters or possess a face an artist has rounded every edge off. In this case they've gone for that naturalism and even played it up, but usually any time you're forced to look at her she looks nice (outside the opening cutscene anyway).

Jasper2K said:
There are some white and maybe hispanics they are fewer in number but they do exist. Whites seem to fill the role of villian. Just an observation lol
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The immediate villains for most of the game are a black dude and a brown klingon lady. Regarding that stuff there's one obnoxious crossdresser who talks twice in a particular sidequest, and a handful of gays. They did bug me because I'm oversensitised to this shit at this point; but in fairness it's not disproportionate to the number of characters you meet so I can't be too mad they did the minimum to meet the current_era videogame tax
 
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wtfNeedSignUp said:
Are there non-villainous strong males? Last game had, barring the prologue, every good man be an absolute beta.
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Everyone is less beta now, from the men to Aloy herself. She has a major attitude, but it's less of the "I am a strong woman and I refuse to have children no matter what the patriarchy wants" flavor that's so common these days and more like "My life sucks and I don't need you making it even worse", which is fitting. She's a hardass, made that way from being on her own in the wilderness for so long.

HZD's writing was very Saturday Morning Cartoon, where everyone was a one dimensional excuse to drive the plot forward, so most of the men (and women) acted like victims to be saved by Aloy. And to be fair, that is literally what they are, but good writing should obfuscate that, not highlight it. In HFW, they do a better job of making these characters feel less like damsels in distress and more like actual people who just have a problem that needs solving.

At the point where I am, the game seems to be going really heavy on subverting cultural expectations, and I mean that in the actual sense. Sylens, the mysterious black guy from the first game, is currently the main antagonist, and the secondary antagonist is some insane black woman who seems to be genuinely evil. I fully expect both of these to be reversed and it'll turn out they had to merely pretend to be evil in order to take down the actual villain, who is a white man, but if this doesn't happen I'll be seriously impressed.

But I'm not kidding myself. We both know that if a modern game had a white person taking down evil black people there'd be 7000 opinion pieces crying about it and Cat Party would have already posted them.
 
You're The Man Now Dog said:
But I'm not kidding myself. We both know that if a modern game had a white person taking down evil black people there'd be 7000 opinion pieces crying about it and Cat Party would have already posted them.
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Ironically the Nikkado Avocado incident means that wokers would be hard pressed to criticize the game even if it is based, since they can get accusations of wrongthink (ie, the Nostalgia Chick incident).

I'm getting cautiously optimistic about the game, but it'll be a long time until I consider buying it considering stuff like Elden Ring are a few days away.
 
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Psyduck said:
Yes but are there any tranny sex scenes like in GOTY nominee TLoU2?

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There's a scene where you get some head...
to and incomplete Tallneck and finish building it and then ride it up a lift out of a cauldron and you emerge into the morning sunlight, it's probably one of the more memorable puzzles in the game.
 
Dom Cruise said:
Not sure I can bring myself to care about playing a game with a potato head main character, the fact that female characters can not only not be sexy but have to actually be ugly is just insane, why can't they just look normal?

None of the female characters in The Last of Us 1 were actively unpleasant to look at, hell Aloy looked fine in the first game, but now they have to look ugly.

I could have lived with it if things had stayed at 2013 or 2017 levels, but the steep decline since then is too much for me, I don't want to play as an ugly character.
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You're such a degenerate coomer and porn addict.
 
big ups liquid richard said:
You're such a degenerate coomer and porn addict.
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As I said, the female characters in the first Last of Us did not at least make you go "what the hell am I even looking at?" like Abby in The Last of Us II.

If things had stayed at 2013 levels I could have lived with it, but SJWs always keep doubling down.

Maybe the final game isn't too bad, but in some pre-release materials for Forbidden West, Aloy did have that off putting factor not unlike Abby.
 
You're The Man Now Dog said:
At the point where I am, the game seems to be going really heavy on subverting cultural expectations, and I mean that in the actual sense. Sylens, the mysterious black guy from the first game, is currently the main antagonist, and the secondary antagonist is some insane black woman who seems to be genuinely evil. I fully expect both of these to be reversed and it'll turn out they had to merely pretend to be evil in order to take down the actual villain, who is a white man, but if this doesn't happen I'll be seriously impressed
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lol nope, Sylens remains a hilariously colossal cunt for no reason who was secretly planning on letting everyone on earth die to become king of the starmen, and the Klingon lady literally just wants carnage and you get the choice to either execute her or make her serve you and die fighting some robots to make the last mission easier. Which ironically was Sylens' goal for her.

Sylens' dickishness makes me laugh every time
 
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How's the open world bloat in this one? I can't really remember how it was in the first one, but if it's a ubisoft style orgy of collectibles and dull sidequests I can safely give it a miss.
 
Johnny Treason said:
How's the open world bloat in this one? I can't really remember how it was in the first one, but if it's a ubisoft style orgy of collectibles and dull sidequests I can safely give it a miss.
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Already answered but it's fine in that respect. The closest thing to collectibles are a dozen or so optional survey drones/ruin artefacts where the (genuinely fun) puzzles are their own reward.
The sidequests are pretty much all nice little substories in their own right, not quite Witcher-tier but better than average. Stuff like facepaint and weapons/armour come from these, but merchants sell equally good gear.

I guess there's also black box audio logs (which sometimes have trivial puzzles) you can sell and crystals which are more like exploration rewards you trip over as you play rather than collectathon shit. In the case of the latter you might only need a handful to upgrade your favourite weapon, and it even lets you set a custom quest that takes you straight to the nearest one if you need more. That also goes for animal materials needed for upgrades which directs you to the nearest hunting ground which I thought was a great feature.
 
elzaw said:
I thought the main villain is a lesbian?
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Only in like the last five minutes of the game (she's the "surprise" final boss, not a main villain).
Tbh weird the series goes so long before having an enemy motivated purely by wanting to fuck Aloy in retrospect
 
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