I haven’t kept up with the details of HZD2 (PC gamer, I’m going to be waiting a while to play anyway!). Is HZD2 more of the same in most ways with some additional traversal options (swimming, grapple hook), or is the game structure fundamentally different?
It’s the same but IGN said the jump was comparable to AC to AC2 in their latest hands on preview but with HZD starting with a better base game.
From what I have seen it looks the same but with new items, enemy machines and some new abilities.
Perhaps HZD was the penultimate capstone on a design going out of fashion?
I learned the world penultimate when I was a child by watching Monty Python at the Hollywood bowl, where I was amazed to learn about the penultimate supper.
Not supposed to, it was level-gated so that you could finish it before but I found that the level 32 advisement was a bit optimistic, I did it after the main quest probably around low 40s and it was plenty challenging.
Re: the game in general I think it got a whole lot more right about the combat and movement and design than it did about the story, no argument there. It kept moving well and didn’t absolutely overwhelm you with do-nothing transitions and cutscenes like, say, RDR2.
I was really happy that the story in HZD came up with a somewhat reasonable explanation for why dinosaur themed robots were roaming the world. Just on that basis alone, I would give it a thumbs up. Overall I thought the story was great. Maybe it could have been presented better, but I didn’t find the story presentation any worse than it typically is in video games.
Can’t really see how they would do show don’t tell and still have it be HZD, years and years after the fact.
Yeah, flashbacks wouldn’t really improve anything. I like the sense of being thousands of years separated from the events, and just learning what happened.
There are places you can go and “see” into the past, aren’t there?
Horizon Zero Dawn vantage points can be found at various places around the map, and interacting with them allows you to take a peek back in time to how the world was before the machines took over. Once you’ve discovered each of these locations in Horizon Zero Dawn, you often (but not always) need to take on a climbing challenge in order to scale the summit, at which point your Focus can access recordings that reveal what the surroundings looked like before everything went wrong. These memories were documented by a mysterious character, who toured all of the Horizon Zero Dawn vantage points to say goodbye as the world collapsed around him.
Here’s a list:
I think the only thing I found out thru “show, not tell” is that the area in question is the Grand Canyon and surrounding area. Every other narrative points are fed to us.
I had forgot about those.
I am, I think, approaching the final third of this game. I want to write up more complete thoughts about it when I finish it, but also I want to say that I completely and totally underestimated this thing.
I started playing it when it originally released for the PS4. I enjoyed it, and meant to come back to it, but didn’t. I think I got about 5 or 6 hours past The Proving, when the world opens up.
Then I took another stab at it in 2020 when it came out on PC. Got just about as far. Again: enjoyed it, but other stuff came up.
Went back to it in the last month, and it stuck. And it stuck pretty hard, in fact. There’s plenty of clunk in this. Lots of cheese in the dialogue, cut-scenes, and whatnot.
But…now that the whole mystery is unspooling, I’m having this amazing realization. See, typically when a game or movie or TV series or even book creates this “promise” of an overriding mystery or intrigue, I end up completely let down. The solution to the mystery is either far less than what I was led to think, or worse yet is a complete cop-out on the whole thing (looking right at you, Lost) where you realize the creators were just making the whole thing up as it went along, and didn’t have a final or over-arching resolution in mind at all.
But the realization I’m having here as I enter the final act of HZD: it’s paying off every single hint, every single bit suggested by the world itself. And then some. I still don’t know exactly what Project: Zero Dawn is, but I have my guesses and if I’m even in the ballpark this will have been a bigger and more expansive “mystery” than I even dared to expect.
And I couldn’t disagree more vigorously and completely about the “show, not tell” thing. The entire game world is one big SHOW for the story and plot. There are replicating machines that cannot be killed off! There’s a lush, green, pastoral world…but see any bigger animals than a boar anywhere? Look at those ruins! I immediately picked up on Pike’s Peak and the Air Force Academy chapel, even before finding those vantage points. Which immediately gave off a ton of clues – even in the first act of the game – for what disaster befell the planet. Clues, I might add, that absolutely have so far paid off better than I’d ever expected they would.
There’s a lot that goes into story: plot, characters, dialogue, setting, among other elements. If I was to grade those four elements, however, I’d score this A, B-, C, A+. I think the characters (other than Aloy, who is wonderful) leave a lot to be desired. And the inter-character dialogue is often workmanlike to cheesy at best (the spoken word bits in the audio and holographic data points is MUCH better however).
But the plot outline so far has been about as airtight as a post- post-apocalyptic story could be, and I had come to believe that the story was going to be a weak point in this game. Rather, I think that when it comes to that plot alone, this might be one of the strongest narratives in a video game of this most recent generation. And that has completely gobsmacked me.
Sounds great! I really want to get back to it… played about 15-20 hours on PS4.
But your post makes me wonder if I would even see the same things in it that you’re admiring, this kind of environmental world-building and the details of the mysterious events that lead up to it… I’m not sure my gamer-brain is up to the task. This might be due to the gap of time between these information reveals (often days or weeks) or just that I usually assume video game plots are junky and not worth my attention or retention.
I think games like RDR2 thrive on shorter stories within the larger narrative scope, 1-2 hour quest-lines that I can play through in an evening that offer a satisfying beginning, middle, and end. (Maybe HZD has that also?)
But I do like Aloy. And her bow was fun. Plus those robot dinosaurs. I GOTTA GET BACK TO IT!
I actually wanted to type up something similar regarding the whole “show vs tell” thing, the backstory for this game is an absolute masterpiece and a real standout in gaming. I honestly can’t think of another title that even approaches it. Most post-apocalypse backstories start and end with ‘nooks! coz of OIL!’, little more than an excuse for the setting whereas here it’s practically the raison d’être for the entire experience; you aren’t a huntress, you’re an archaeologist. Every step you take on that journey you get ‘shown’ something.
It’s not just that it reveals what happened, but that it really hammers home the cost of it. The desperation. The bit with the Grave Hoard where you’re reading soldiers’ messages to their families - only to realise the messages are AI generated because they were all fucking dead and the generals are doing everything to prevent total panic in the remaining population in order to keep them fighting. But the game doesn’t exactly spoonfeed that realisation to you. Tragedies all the way down.
HZD wasn’t just the backstory, of course, and Aloy’s ‘present day’ tribulations just… weren’t as interesting. Like you say, the characterisation is somewhat weak for characters you directly interact with. It speaks volumes that a year on I can remember the main characters during the apocalypse, their motivations and the consequences of their actions a lot more than anything to do with the bad guy other than that he was dressed in black. It takes awhile for the archaeology side of things to get into full swing too. I can’t blame people for walking away prior to delving into that sorta nonplussed as to why anyone would care about the writing. I do think they did a much better job with that in the DLC area though.
Oh, I’m no great noticer of stuff, by any means. I think when I first played the game and little kid Aloy is in that first bunker in the tutorial, I saw one of the data recordings talking about how the “Wichita salient” had collapsed, and I was curious about the setting and googled it. And duh. Mountains. Deserts. Plains. Canyons. Duh, Chris.
But let me put another context into this: two of the craziest moves from the late 1980s - early 1990s era that I’ve ever seen are The Rapture, with Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, and Miracle Mile with Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham. And both of those are “end of the world” movies. And in both movies you’re wondering as the climax builds…they’re not really gonna go there, are they?
And then instead of pulling back, director/writers Michael Tolkin (Rapture) and Steve DeJarnatt (Miracle Mile) just stomp on the accelerator and abso-fucking-lutely GO THERE.
And in both those cases, the characters and dialogue get a little clunky and cheesy. And some of the acting performances aren’t up to what the lead characters are supplying. But with both movies, you feel like Tolkin and DeJarnatt had an absolute, wide-eyed sincerity in the over-the-top apocalyptic stories they wanted to tell. And there comes a point in those films where as a viewer you kind of have to decide, am I in, or am I out? And if you’re out, OK. Move along to something else. But if you’re in? Fuckle the buck up. Here we go, right over the falls in a barrel.
And the plot of Horizon Zero Dawn absolutely feels very much like that. The cheese and some of the maudlin-ness of some of the present-time plot resolutions in Aloy’s story can be a bit much. But the unraveling of the mystery of what happened to civilization, and who Aloy is is just A plus plus.
I think I saw Miracle Mile? Maybe? I retained nothing. (I used to make fun of my dad for that kind of thing… now that I’m 50, I GET IT, DAD!)
Given all this, ideally, I would want to jump in for 60-80 hours of just HZD and nothing else so I could properly appreciate and complete it. A boy can dream…
You need to finish this game! Elden Ring FOMO be damned!
YES!
So much this. :)
I actually just played the Grave Hoard bunker last night, and I’m playing it and I realize “Holy shit. This is crushing me.” Like not only do those soldiers feel the tragedy of “I’m never seeing my wife and family again” but also “This really is the end of the world, probably.” And the voice work in those (and the writing in the email/memo/report snippets) is so well done, that when I got done with it I was just “Ok, Imma go look for collectibles for the next hour or so and try to process all that.”
Ahhhhh crap. I was thinking about maybe giving Frozen Wilds a skip, but maybe not.
Personally, i couldn’t finish Frozen Wilds while i powered through HZD with enthusiasm to see the whole story. I think because it felt like it was far more concerned with the present then the past, and it felt like an expansion “for the hard-core fans”, because it’s rough tough and stompy, and i stalled out at some point.
I was really happy they came up with a semi-plausible reason for dinosaur robots.