Traps are strange to me - they don’t seem to fit the combat model as a whole. Are you supposed to sneak around and place them and then kite the bad guys through your trap maze? They take so long to place.
Yeah, the plot in HZD is just fantastic. There are some of my favorite storytelling moments in a videogame ever in there.
Individual moments could be fantastic. Taken as a whole, it was a bit choppy IMO, but I still dug it.
Strange, that’s not my memory of traps at all. I used the trip-wire style traps a lot.
Usually, traps are good when you’re going to be hunting some big prey, and you know what direction they’ll be coming from. Then you set up various bits of trip wires and those little things you drop on the ground (but you could place them quickly, no?) You might take 2-3 minutes to prepare, then you fire off your first volley to draw the big bad in.
Some of the larger creates are tough to take down unless you use a bunch of traps, or you have very good equipment and good aim/patience. Traps are also very good for some of the cauldron fights.
For small stuff, sure, no need to trap. But the game shines more when you see something T-Rex size charging at you (EG: Thunderjaw).
I really liked HZD - I don’t own a playstation, but I’m really looking forward to HZD2 coming out on PC.
I used traps in certain setpiece fights, but otherwise never bothered. The sonic arrow was my go-to, tripled up and upgraded it could strip all the good bits off the big nasty zoids in one shot, making them much easier to kill.
Yeah, those are more useful, from the Tripcaster or Ropecaster. I was thinking of the stationary ones that takes 3-4 seconds to set. You can’t deploy them easily in the heat of battle because they take too long.
So… 3 years later, I am no longer tired of robot dinosaurs. And I am about to finally finish the first game. I’ve been busy today:
Fast travel has been heavily used, lol.
All I have left is to apparently take a nap and do the final mission. Then onto The Frozen Wilds!
Looks like I’ll be reaching that level 30 area (DLC) at level 41 or so, does the content scale up or am I in for an easy time?
Game runs a hell of a lot better than I remember, then again this PC is only 2 years old and has a 3080ti.
@Clay did you ever finish this? I know its a big game that can burn a person out, at least it did for me for a few years. :P
I couldn’t do it. I got so tired of fighting dinosaurs. Some part of me wanted to finish but it felt like it just kept keep going forever. I think I was near the end?
Take a break for another 2 years, the desire to finish it will come back!
I don’t remember having to fight too many of the really big machines unless you wanted to. You had to in order to 100% the game IIRC.
Main story finally complete, overall it was good and I really liked the ending cutscenes. This was a fantastic game with just a bit too much robot fighting filler.
I’ve headed north now for some dlc. ;)
You know, there is an argument for skipping the dlc. Gotta stay fresh for numero dos?
Naw, I’ll wait a year or two to pick Forbidden West up cheap. :)
My playthrough of HZD in 2022 finished the game…but I skipped a bunch of side quests and didn’t even touch the Frozen Wilds expansion. I decided for story/lore reasons I wanted to do Frozen Wilds before finally taking a real shot at Forbidden West.
And…wow. Maybe I’m reading too much into things, but it feels like at some point in the back half of development at Guerilla that they decided to put a lot more effort into the writing and the voice acting. (Some of the acting in HZD, even in the main story, is just terribad, which is a shame because once you start unraveling the mystery in the story and that gets really good – and the voice acting in the recordings and holograms is fantastic – the voice acting of some of Aloys frequent companions is a big ol’ yikes.
But Frozen Wilds thus far is so much better. Maybe it’s an aberration, and I’ll get to the B-team acting and writing eventually, but man. There’s a quest in Frozen Wilds, early on, that might be one of my top 3 favorite quest lines, ever. The actual gameplay stuff you do in the quest is fine. It’s the game. But the writing in the found recordings and diaries was just so astonishingly great.
“There was this band called Concrete Beach Party. And for a second, it was the best band in the world.”
If you know, you know.
I had much the same reaction with the DLC zone. It felt likely they’d really mastered their craft by that point. I visited it about two thirds of the way through my playthrough and remember being blown away by it at the time. It wasn’t just the VA but the character animation felt so much more human, especially the facial performances, and it really pushed things above and beyond in terms of emotionality for me. So much so it was actually kinda sad for me to return to the main world for the final third, and not just because a chunk of it was set in a snowy area that was conspicuously absent that cool deformation tech present in the DLC zone.
That being said, for me the main HZD questline remains by far the most emotionally resonant part of the entire Horizon experience to date. Bits of it anyway - I’m not sure if I ever really cared that much about Eclipse and HADES. Concrete Beach Party is not far off though, definitely the standout moment of the DLC. And it did it all without that fancy pants animation tech, too. I enjoyed the small easter egg throwback to it in HFW.