Horizon Zero Dawn

[Mongrel]

But did you tie any of them up by flying in circles around them with your airspeeder with your tow cable deployed?

[Büge]

My favorite thing about Thunderjaws is that every fight is different.

My favourite thing is that they're basically that Tankasaurus Rex from ReBoot

[Thad]

My favourite thing is that they're basically that Tankasaurus Rex from ReBoot

You know, that new version with Keegan-Michael Key and Johnny Knoxville takes a lot of liberties with the source material.

[Thad]

I think one of the things the game does well is...okay, remember when Arkham Asylum first came out, and the enemy AI was this really exciting new thing that seemed advanced? Like, thugs would react to things. They'd find somebody unconscious and know Batman was there and start getting nervous and behaving differently.

But after that initial excitement, the limits of the AI became clear very quickly, and you spent a significant portion of the game, and the next three games, and a shit-ton of derivative games, watching guys decide "Hey, that pile of bodies over there seems like a good place to stand."

In Horizon Zero Dawn, the things you fight are mostly robots with primitive AIs. I think that's a great touch! It's a smart decision that recontextualizes the limitations of the enemy AI by making that a key component of the plot and the environment.

Unfortunately you also fight humans in it.

[Niku]

/me whistles in the tall grass

[Thad]

But did you tie any of them up by flying in circles around them with your airspeeder with your tow cable deployed?

No airspeeder but "run in circles shooting tie lines until it falls down" is pretty much how you fight everything in this game

[Thad]

God damn, the boss at the end of the expansion is so tough he crashed my PS4 and I had to unplug it and plug it back in before I could even get it to boot back up.

[Mongrel]

God damn, the boss at the end of the expansion is so tough he crashed my PS4 and I had to unplug it and plug it back in before I could even get it to boot back up.

Which old game was it where the solution to a puzzle was to restart the console? :D

[Thad]

Yeah, I was just about to make a joke about how I hoped this was a fakeout like X-Men but no such luck, all I got was a stern lecture about how I turned off the console incorrectly.

[Thad]

It's not as bad as that time I beat Ruby Weapon and the game crashed when I tried to get back on the airship, but it's still most irksome.

[sei]

god damn it sei you found another one for your av

There will always be gremlins.

[Mongrel]

I beat Ruby Weapon and the game crashed when I tried to get back on the airship

I felt a non-zero amount of physical pain on reading this.

[Thad]

So my reward for defeating the Fireclaw is...I can go fight more Fireclaws.

Y'know what, game, nah. Going head-to-head with a Thunderjaw and just shooting it in the face with a flamethrower until it died was satisfying, but it was the kind of satisfaction where you know there's never going to be another challenging fight for the rest of the game. I could go around killing more bears, but at this point we're into the "challenge battles that aren't really very challenging and if you're OP enough to survive them then there's no possible way you'll have any use for whatever the reward is" portion of the game.

I don't think there's anything left to do but go back to the main quest path. Which I'm now about 40 levels ahead of the suggested level for. Yep, sounds like the endgame of an open-world game.

[beatbandito]

The harder difficulties do add more than just taking more and dealing less damage. On extra hard I found myself using arrow types and tactics I never had in my first playthrough. I'm pretty sure you can change difficulty mid-game. But if you still have some energy after finishing the story, going back to a harder starting area with NG+ gear could be more fun than you expect.

Unless you get back to the three ice bears fight on extra hard. That's just trying to out-bullshit the computer and blind luck.

[Thad]

I think when I'm done I'm probably going to pack it in and play something else -- maybe finish Trials of Mana, or Aria of Sorrow, or maybe go back to one of the other open-world games I quit in the middle of, or... -- but I could see coming back to Horizon Zero Dawn one of these days. Good call on tweaking the difficulty if/when I do.

[Thad]

Hearing of Lance Reddick's passing has me thinking of how good a character Sylens is.

It's been ages since we had a thread about our favorite game villains, but I think he'd go on my list. Or I suppose he's more of an anti-villain, in that he's not a good guy but he's an ally rather than an adversary.

He's a fascinatingly amoral character, and a counterbalance to Faro. Both of them are arrogant bastards with no concern for how their actions affect other people, but Sylens is motivated entirely by the pursuit of knowledge at any cost, whereas Faro ends up murdering all his scientists with the perverse justification that ignorance is innocence and future humans deserve a fresh start unburdened by the weight of the collected knowledge of their forebears.

I haven't played Forbidden West yet; waiting for a PC release. But I sure look forward to hearing Reddick in the role one more time.