Horizon Zero Dawn violates the Hippocratic Oath of game design

I think of Borderlands 2 here. Everything is in audio form, but you get to listen while you walk or drive to the correct destination, and the audio seems to last the exact length of your transit time. It feels like they tuned them that way, and I appreciate the end result.

This is a little unfair. jsnell said reducing her to just a chick with a bow is insane, not that you’re insane for making that statement. I know that seems similar, but what he’s expressing is incredulity towards the reduction of her character, and using a common expression to convey that, not actually saying you’re insane for saying this. I know it’s a subtle difference, but I feel you’ve purposefully misinterpreted him and are now repeatedly using the misinterpretation as a cudgel.

(I haven’t played the game, I have no horse in this fight, and I’m otherwise enjoying the back and forth of opinions here).

Jeeze, no, Borderlands 2 had the worst audio log design, in that frequently you’d get instances of an audio log playing to be interrupted by some quest giver starting to prattle on because you are in the general vicinity of something, to then have a fight break out with all the enemy call outs, and on top of that certain items talked as well. I think I hit a point with 5 different voiceovers going on at once.

Hehehe

Wait this game is about a bunch of adults forcing children to kill each other for sport and as a means to suppress opinions that differ from those in charge… ? Boy did i read the reviews of this differently.

Given that Lara Croft was doing that exact sort of climbing over a decade before we met Altaïr and has continued to do it well into the present day, yeah, I’d say that’s fair.

Yeah, that seems to be it. To me the Elisabet Sobeck plot line basically is the story of the game. Ignore that, and what remains is obviously far less interesting. I needed to get the next bits of that. I didn’t particularly need to know what was up with the creepy but sensitive pseudo-Aztec blood emperor this time.

(This is why I’m not very optimistic about a sequel. The trick that made H:ZD so effective simply can’t be repeated.)

If someone tells me the story of Horizon: Zero Dawn is derivative that tells me they either don’t understand the word “derivative” or don’t understand the story of the game at all. If there’s one constant with the story it’s the writing’s ability to defy expectations.

I can’t even believe the comparisons to The Last of Us. Ellie and Joel are a perverse portrait of the way endless hardship has mangled their humanity. Aloy and Rost are basically altruism incarnate in a world where humanity is ascendent.

You have got to be kidding. You’re just bringing up differences from the obvious source material to support your point that…well, frankly, I’m not sure what your point is. Gnashing your teeth at someone who didn’t like a game as much as you did? Somehow proving that I’m wrong? Whatever point you’re trying to make, bringing up differences to somehow demonstrate that the game isn’t derivative shows implies a basic lack of understanding between the verbs “derive” and “equate”.

For instance, if I say “Horizon Zero Dawn’s horseback riding isn’t like The Witcher’s horseback riding because it’s a robot horse!”, you’d presumably realize that’s a ridiculous assertion. Similarly, if you think Guerrilla Games isn’t aping Hunger Games because “they’re not trying to kill each other for the amusement of others”, then you’re setting an awfully high bar for what you consider derivative. Which is also setting a low bar for what you consider original writing.

Look, if the main character worked for you, that’s great. But the writing doesn’t magically become good for me because you think giving Action Bow Hero Chick #207 red hair is some sort of master stroke of originality. Redheads are a trope.
Aloy isn’t a written character so much as a set of tropes engineered to appeal to us nerds.

Also, you’re trying to hold up as a plus some of the game’s clumsy writing for motivation, characterization, and character development. So, yeah, the relationship between Ellie and Joel is different from the relationship between Eloy and whatever the guy’s name was because Horizon Zero Dawn is poorly written. Seriously, you can sit through those cutscenes without cringing?

I’d love to talk about the game, and I tried to open the conversation by asking people what they liked. Some folks have done that, and that’s cool. I appreciate reading those perspectives. You don’t see me embarking on a point by point rebuttal of what they wrote, much less accusing them of not playing the game, or dismissing their opinions as insane. Some people get really sensitive when you don’t like something they like, so they just cut straight to the “you’re insane” approach to discounting your opinion. That’s where you can tell the conversation isn’t really going anywhere.

I mean, heck, even if E/Aloy works for you, you can’t dispute she’s the latest in a tradition of action heroines with a bow. Whether she’s a good instance of it is certainly a matter of opinion, but to claim that it’s “insane” to compare her to Lara Croft, Katniss Everdeen, and Merida is just content-free namecalling.

-Tom

[quote=“Brad_Grenz, post:68, topic:129887, full:true”]
If someone tells me the story of Horizon: Zero Dawn is derivative that tells me they either don’t understand the word “derivative” or don’t understand the story of the game at all.[/quote]

Don’t forget option c) they might just be crazy!

If you had put a gun to my head, I wouldn’t have been able to remember that was that dude’s name. That’s how much of an impression the writing made on me. And don’t even get me started on the Kiefer Sutherland looking guy.

-Tom

Fortunately, for freshness and originality, there will be a Far Cry 5.

Except that they are totally different. Literally the only thing in common is that there is some sort of competition between teenagers. Seriously, that is literally the only thing which is similar between those two examples. One is a battle Royale, where children are forced to compete to the death in order to remind their homelands of subservience to the capital, and amuse and entertain the citizens of said capital… The other is a foot race, observed by no one and entered voluntarily as a rite of passage in a tribal community.

It’s not derivative at all. It shares virtually nothing in common. If it is based simply on the fact that both involve competition with teens, then the hunger games is derivative of a soccer match.

It’s totally cool that you don’t like the game as much as me, but this particular line of criticism seems weak.

Dude, red hair is a color of hair that some people have. If it had been brown, you’d be saying, “she has brown hair… LIKE KATNISS!”

Her having red hair isn’t some master strike of story telling… It’s just hair.

I didn’t care much about the sci-fi story, which I thought was derivative, but I got pretty fascinated with the lore surrounding the various cultures in the world–their histories and governments and religions. Schisms and how their geographies interacted with the roaming technology to produce complex cultural backstories. (Meg Jaynath was part of the writing team, and I think it shows.) I would read a novel set in this world. I generally didn’t have a problem with the voice acting (Ashly Burch ftw!) or cutscenes or even audio logs, but clearly ymmv.

Regarding Aloy, I think she’s derivative in approximately the same way that every wisecracking/badass male protagonist (i.e all of them) is. What makes Aloy seem bland is not that she’s derivative; it’s that she’s pretty earnest and serious. I’m trying to think of a male video game protagonist who is as earnest as she is, and am drawing a blank despite naivety being an easy way to make a character an audience surrogate. I’m not sure if that means anything, but it suggests that the characterization is actually pretty strong; it’s just not a particularly compelling one.

…but that’s literally the core defining premise of the Hunger Games. If that’s not there, it could certainly be derivative but I have no idea why your go to source is the Hunger Games. It would be like talking about how a movie is clearly derivative of Armageddon with no imminent apocalypse or last-ditch rag-tag team attempting to stop it against all odds, or The Omen with no evil little kid.

Screw you, man. I wrote a bunch on why the game worked for me. You’ve chosen to engage with none of that, and instead keep on repeating your misreading of a common colloquial phrase. Which is fine, you’re under no obligation to respond to anything in particular. But please don’t try to rewrite history like that, and pretend that my only contribution to the discussion was to call you insane. (Which I didn’t even do).

Obviously you like the game exactly as much as you like it, that’s not the discussion. My problem is that calling it “derivative” is lazy criticism when all the examples you can come up with are so weak. And this is actually different from things like writing or pacing, which are much more subjective. If the story and characters really were that derivative, there should be some compelling examples.

What we get instead is “X in H:ZD is like Y in another game”, where X and Y share a single superficial attribute. “Rost is just like Joel”. No, Rost is nothing at all like Joel. “The Proving is just like the Culling from Hunger Games”. No, basically every single aspect is totally different. You’re claiming with a straight face that the hair color is derivative.

@matt_watkins Any particular recommendations? Like I said in my first post, I would genuinely love to have a look at anything that does things similar to the scifi parts of this story.

Perhaps Tom need to broaden his horizon with all the women out there who are fearless with bows and arrows… lots to choose from.

I could probably find a list for games too because it seems to be the go to weapon for female characters in movies, games, television and books.

Sure, here are some novels with similar themes: beside the obvious, like Canticle for Leibowitz, check out Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, and Peter Watt’s Rifter’s triology, particularly the middle novel, Maelstrom.

If you think that, you have a thing or two to learn about big budget entertainment and tropes. And I’ve written enough on the topic, so I’ll just have to accept your insult that my criticism is “weak”. I feel the same about your criticism of my criticism; it’s mind-boggling to me that someone would find controversial the easy criticism that Horizon is derivative on so many levels. But I guess I’ll take weak over insane.

Excellent point, Matt. But for an example where this actually works – because good writing – what about the Tomb Raider reboot? Lara’s progression from naive to moderately naive to hardened-enough-to-have-nowhere-to-go-in-the-godawful-sequel is what I suspect Guerilla thought they were doing with A/Eloy.

Boom.

[quote=“Nesrie, post:76, topic:129887”]
Perhaps Tom need to broaden his horizon with all the women out there who are fearless with bows and arrows… lots to choose from.[/quote]

Great link! I can’t tell if you’re using it to agree or disagree with me, but it makes my point just fine. In fact, looking at some of those, I’m not sure I appreciated how hoary the Action Heroine With Bow trope is.

-Tom

Thanks! I’ve and liked read most of that list, will keep an eye out for Station Eleven. I’m not sure I really see the deeper parallels on most of the list, outside of the concepts of a pre- and post-apocalypse. I guess in a sense one could say that Canticle and (the first 2/3rds of) Seveneves are about things like continuity and preservation knowledge, while the story of H:ZD is about the mysterious lack of both. But then that’s almost the opposite thing.

Interestingly Starfish is one of my all time favorite books, but I never actually thought of Maelstrom as a pre-apocalyptic story. Because it’s really about Lenie’s revenge, and finding out that she had even better reasons to burn it all down than initially appeared. Maybe it’d read differently with Starfish as mere background.

Well I don’t know that I agree with the comparison to Hunger Games as a whole but there seems to be this weird connection between a lot of people thinking “strong woman” and handing her a bow. I guess a question is though… if it had been a gun or throwing axes, would you have felt differently about it?