Unless you’re trying to decide how to spend money. I like Horizon. All I was saying is that, dollar-for-dollar, get Witcher 3 now and Horizon when the price drops.
Depends on what you want out of a game really.
On the contrary, I’d say it’s a pretty meaingful endeavor. Videogames don’t exist in a vacuum. You can have a far richer discussion when you consider them in context. For instance, the open-world experience has many different variables, but it has just as many consistent elements: traversal, progression, exploration, freedom, variety. You think developers don’t compare these elements to other games? Why shouldn’t players? Horizon Zero Dawn wants desperately to be The Witcher 3. It isn’t. That’s worth discussing.
I suspect part of it is that people can get really defensive when you call something derivative. As if an experience is somehow only as valuable as it is unique.
-Tom
I did not realize I was opening up such a can of worms.
So, here’s the type of game I like, or, rather the games I’ve enjoyed the most: The Uncharted Series, Both Tomb Raiders, and the Last of Us. So, I guess exploring type games.
I didn’t get very far into Witcher 2, but that doesn’t mean much. My completion rates on PC games is very low. That said, if I was playing it on the console and hit the Kayran fight I probably would have thrown the controller out the window. I had a hard time remembering that I needed to use the silver weapon against some monsters. Usually, this was because of a long break.
I’m more of a fan of ranged combat games, but that isn’t a deal-breaker.
I think the thing for me against Witcher 3 is also the thing that it has going for it: Its scale. That said, for $30 I can get a ton of content and probably a game that will keep me occupied for a very long time.
I’m probably going to end up getting both.
This is the only game that’s tempting me to get a PS4.
I mean there’s definitely things in all three that are similar like I said, but the strength/focus is very different.
HZD has a skill tree, but TW3 has a much larger one as it leans more towards the rpg side. Zelda is mostly about gear and using abilities in creative ways that you earn in the first few hours and much less about a deep story than the other two.
There’s acres of differences in every facet. They might all have huge areas to explore, but they are certainly extremely different. To me it’d be like comparing a roguelike to Final Fantasy just because they both have gear and skill trees, but effectively play nothing alike.
I suspect we get defensive when a lot of us REALLY enjoyed Horizons, and in the game of the year thread said it was the best one, keep having a few people comparing it to Witcher 3 and saying that is the better game.
They are not like each other, as others have pointed out, as I see it - One is an RPG, with great storylines and poor combat, and this is an action adventure, with great combat, and mediocre story.
Both games are massive and include exploration, but other than that, they cater to wildly different audiences.
The constant “witcher 3 is the better game” nagging is beginning to feel like…what’s his/her name that kept popping up in ever thread, saying “I can tell you really want to talk about Mass Effect”, and then proceeded to talk about that instead of whatever game the thread was about.
Personally, I enjoyed Horizons a lot more than my several tries to get through Witcher 3.
huh - re-reading this, I think maybe I’m grumpy this morning.
You’re not kidding. I’ve gotten lost in that scale more than once. I love that it’s so big, but it’s like sitting down to watch a TV show that ran for six seasons of 12 hour-long episodes.
Are you saying Horizon and Witcher 3 “play nothing alike”? That seems like a strange claim to me. If you consider open-world games as a whole, and start to break them into subsets, seems to me Horizon and Witcher 3 would be in the same subset for quite a while. Which is, to my mind, one of the nicer things you can say about Horizon. If you’re going to imitate, imitate the best!
You think so? Maybe I’m projecting, but it seems to me anyone who plays one is pretty likely to want to play the other. I think the biggest obstacle to a shared audience is Sony rather than anything about the gameplay.
Aw, c’mon, there’s no reason to characterize someone’s stated preference as nagging. The games share a lot of similarities, so it’s going to be natural that people will express a preference. I don’t think it’s ever intended as nagging.
-Tom
I’d say, yes that HZD and TW3 play nothing alike. HZD has very responsive new-Tomb Raidee-esque controls and is firmly an action adventure with firm roots in ranged gameplay.
TW3 is generally much more melee oriented in both equipment and in the enemies you face.
There are certainly similarities in some of the traps and tracking, but combat plays out extremely differently by design.
Edit - response to Tom. On mobile and must have hit the wrong button.
Based on this post I think you will enjoy Horizon more. Horizon has a fair bit of modern Tomb Raider in its DNA if one is being reductive it’s sort of a mashup of TR and Witcher, but with generally better combat than both.
Yeah. I am going to wait for the price drop, though. Or the inevitable Game of the Year edition that has the various DLC.
I was going to order Horizon on Amazon for $30, but it ships in “2-4 weeks.” Maybe they need for them to fall off a back of a truck.
There’s a lot more to those games than how combat plays out. And even then, I see quite a bit of similarity. But more to the point, it’s odd to me that you’re so dead set on taking away one of the best metrics of Horizon’s quality: that it’s strongly influenced by The Witcher 3.
One of the most important unifying factors of the games you mention there is story. Namely, quality of writing and characters. Horizon is godawful in that respect. The gameplay is solid, but it’s an incredibly dumb storyline comprised of a slurry of stuff from other games and movies. If you care at all about storyline, writing, and characters run – don’t walk – directly to The Witcher 3 and given Horizon a wide berth.
-Tom
I guess I just don’t really see any influence that you’re referring to.
Almost every single weapon in HZD is ranged. We start with a character as a child instead of a grizzled old veteran. There’s active stealth type skills and gameplay along with a much more vertical approach to design due to the extreme mobility of the character. The main currency is also a crafting material. The world of HZD is firmly rooted in technology rather than actual fantasy/magic.
So far aside from having a huge world, quests and npcs who talk I can not think of any real significant similarities honestly.
Uncharted and The Last of Us have nothing to do with exploration. I’ve enjoyed them all to some extent but you are on rails the entire time. Every door is locked or barricaded except the one you have to walk through to advance the story and the platforming comes down to finding the one loose pipe in the room you can climb onto and then holding the left stick while the animations kick in. The set pieces are amazing and the action is good to great depending on which game you’re talking about, but they are not exploration games.
The Witcher 3, Horizon and Ubi’s open world games all have the same problem with exploration: they tend to just lay everything out on the map for you. There’s little need to explore the unmarked parts of the world so you’re just going down a checklist. I try to turn the map icons and quest waypoints off for the games I really enjoy to avoid that kind of OCD behavior. I’ll even turn off the minimap when I can. That worked out well in W3 because there are so many interesting side quests and bits of lore spread throughout that world. Unfortunately, Horizon doesn’t allow you to turn off the map markers (or at least it didn’t at launch, that may have been added since) so the sense of exploration is diminished quite a bit, but I still enjoyed roaming around and learning how to fight all of the different combinations of enemies the game can throw at you.
The only game of this type I’d really call an exploration type game is Breath of the Wild, and that’s because it is designed from the ground up to be about exploration above all else. The story is interesting but minimal. Yeah you’ll fight Ganon eventually, but first let’s see what’s on the other side of that rock. I also love that BotW has no Witcher sense/Detective mode/Focus vision that you’ll inevitably use to follow glow in the dark footprints to an enemy camp. That quest type always feels like such a crutch to me. As if the developers are saying “We know this place isn’t interesting enough for you to explore on your own so we’re going to lead you through it.”
I think my point is: play all of these games! They’re all great and they all have a different focus. You’ll have a hard time convincing me that any big open world game does a better job with world building, characters and quest design than the Witcher 3. And even if Horizon borrows a bit from TW3 when it comes to combat (I guess?), that’s fine because it has a fantastic variety of enemies that are as much fun to watch as they are to fight and the best bow and arrow combat in any game I’ve ever played. I spent much of the first 30 hours in that game just wandering around fighting things and ignoring the story. And if solitude and exploration is your thing you just can’t beat Breath of the Wild, a game I’m still playing after 180 hours because the story is just a formality, exploration is just as rewarding after you beat Ganon as it was before and that massive world will keep you busy for months.
That is an interesting observation, that too a certain degree I can’t refute.
In terms of Last of Us, yes, definitely the story and I think Naughty Dog stands out in that regard. However, for Uncharted and Tomb Raider what I enjoyed more than the story is the gameplay type. Some puzzles to solve, ranged combat, a few jumping things.
That said, buying both games is how we know this will end.
I got Shadow of Mordor and Mad Max as part of the Playstation Store Summer sale. So for right now, my order of games is:
- Take another try and Diablo 3 and see if it sticks
- Mordor
- Mad Max
By then the Uncharted Stand Alone pack will be out, and I will get that.
More likely than not, I will get W3 next. It’s a good deal at $30 for everything. When HZD drops to that price with the DLC I will grab it.
Many of us would strongly disagree with Tom’s take on the story for this one, as evidenced in the other thread.
Win win!
I really want to get back to Mad Max at some point. Now there was a unique take on open-worlding!
-Tom
Huh? i don’t know how one can argue Horizon is derivative and Mad Max is unique. Max adheres to many of the standard open world tropes (towers, faction ratings, target marking,etc) with Batmanesque on foot combat. You do do a lot more driving though than typical.
I’ll concede the point as soon as you show me another open-world with car combat even remotely approximating what Avalanche did with Mad Max. It’s a remarkable bit of unique game design work.
In other words, it’s an open-world game? You don’t say. :)
That’s actually kind of charitable. Since the combat in Batman is a (the?) fundamental component of that series, it’s very well developed. But the foot combat in Mad Max is weird. I understand why it’s in there, but it’s almost apologetic the way Avalanche drops it in from time to time. It’s like they know you’re just going to want to get it over with. The equivalent of a pee break on a road trip.
“Okay, everyone, stretch your legs now, I’mma pull over for some quick hand-to-hand combat.”
-Tom
Indeed - the story in both Shadow of Mordor and Mad Max are certainly no better than in Horizon.