Horizon Zero Dawn, The Aloypreciation Thread Options

[SubRosa]

So I bought the Horizon Zero Dawn Complete edition from Gog about a year ago, as it was eventually ported from the PS to the PC. I finally started playing it a few days ago.

I am hooked. It has been a lot of fun. The story is very strong, and really draws you in. It often feels like a film or prestige (i.e. expensive) TV series. You are given the character of Aloy to play, and follow her through her hero's journey. There are a few opening sequences from her childhood, where you learn that she is an outcast from birth, and is treated pretty shoddily by the regular people in her tribe. Then you fast forward to her young adulthood, as she prepares to compete in her tribe's hunter/warrior competition. Succeeding means that she will no longer be an outcast, and might get some answers about her mysterious origin (no one knows who her mother was). Then, stuff happens...

The world-building is really strong. The game developers make the tribe and its customs come alive. They draw very heavily from both hunter-gatherer societies in general, and Native Americans in particular. Then they add in some post-apocalypse for flavor. As Aloy I came across an elder giving a history lesson to the children that was fantastic. It gave the entire backstory of the world, as seen through the tribe's eyes.

Basically in the Before Times, humans had an advanced, industrial society. They built machines to serve them. If you have read or watched any science fiction, you know what happens next. The machines tricked the humans, rose up, and destroyed their society, and nearly wiped them all out. In the end the machine overlord was defeated. But humanity was sent back to the stone/iron age in the process. The machines are still out there too, roaming around on their own doing their machine things. But they are no longer driven by a single will to exterminate humans.

The machines are one of the things that drew me. They are robots that mimic life forms, mostly. You can see ones that are basically bulls, others that are antelope/ostriches, others that are big cats, etc.. Plus a few are just cosmic horror monsters. But most look and act like wild animals. People even hunt them in the same way, and scavenge parts from them to use in crafting. So in a way it is kind of a bow and arrow hunting sim, but you are hunting robots.

Some nuts and bolts. The game feels a lot like the recent Tomb Raider games. It has a lot of climbing, and jumping, and running along ropes, and other parkour stuff. How you do it is a lot more streamlined and easier to do, with much less specific button pushing. For example, you don't have a push a button to hang on to a ledge, you just do it automatically. If you jump and catch a zipline, you just press the forward movement and jump key. Then you automatically catch the line and slide down without doing anything else. The same with running across posts. If they are near to one another, you don't even need to use the jump key. You just push the forward button and Aloy goes from post to post.

So simple is good.

The save system is exactly like it is in Tomb Raider. You have to find a campfire and activate it. That is the only way you can save. The game also creates autosaves are certain points during quests. Though it is not clear when it does so. But at least that means if you get killed during one, you might not have to go all the way back to the start again. I really, really don't like this. I cannot understand why they don't let you save anywhere, anytime, like we have been doing since the original Castle Wolfenstien over 30 years ago.

There is a lot of loot, and a lot of crafting. You can find or buy weapons and armor. Then you can craft ammo for your bows or slings or tripewire casters. They come in different varieties, like fire arrows, frost shot, electric wires, etc... Each element has a different side effect, such as electricity briefly stuns enemies. Weapons and armor also have upgrade slots, which you can plug items called coils into for bonus effects. You can loot them from machines you kill.

It is a somewhat open world. Once you are past the basic tutorial sections and really start playing as an adult, you are given access to one region of the world map. You can explore it at you leisure, do side quests, etc... But to get beyond it you have to advance in the main quest. At a certain point you are allowed to leave the starting zone, and you go on to the next one. So it is not like an Elder Scrolls game where you can immediately go wherever you want. Again, it feels more like a Tomb Raider game, where you are going from zone to zone. I am not sure if you need to advance the main quest to open every zone yet or not, as I have only gotten to the second one. There are about 6 or 7 in total.

The combat is very exciting, with a focus on bows, though you always have a spear as well, plus can use other weapons. But it starts out at least very bow heavy. Which I like. The machines have both unique components as well as armor plates that you can shoot off with precision shots, which are not that hard to make actually. Doing so weakens them significantly, so it is better than just blasting at them in general. They also often behave like animals, so they will get spooked and run in herds. You can use some strategy, and set up tripwires in advance where you think they will run, then circle around to the other side and start shooting. Then they will run straight into your traps. I like a game that rewards thinking like that.

It's easy to get killed. You don't have a whole lot of health. Healing is down by collecting medicinal plants that go into your healing bag. You press a dedicated button, and you get healed. It is not instant, but a steady increase over several seconds. There is only a limited number of medicine plants you can carry at one time, so in a long fight you can run completely out and be unable to heal anymore. Or you can take so much damage so fast, there is no time for the regular healing to work. There are healing potions that you can use as well, which are instant however.

The skill/perk system looks a lot like Assassin's Creed Odyssey. You buy each with experience points, and they give you bonuses in things like sneak attacks, scavenging, and the like. I am not really thrilled with the ones they offer. ACO has three perk trees with very specific types of skills, one for bows, one for melee, and one for sneaking/assassination. Horizon Zero Dawn has them sort of just scattered around at random. There are a bunch of perks for spears, but not really a lot for ranged weapons. Which seems odd, as this game heavily favors the slow, careful, hunter style over being a melee brick.

You can fast travel, but it uses resources called travel kits that you can buy or craft. So you are limited in doing it. There are mounts you can get as well. As you go through the game, you learn how to hack certain machines, and you can then use them as mounts. It did not feel very well implemented however. There are separate keys to speed up or slow down, which you have to go back and forth between as you move. Which is clunky. Even Oblivion and Skyrim did it better, where you just push the forward move arrow, and you moved forward. Stopped pushing the key, and your horse stopped. Plus a sprint key to go faster.

I found some mods that improve things. The main one is Gameplay Tweaks and Cheat Menu allows you to save anytime, anywhere. It also has a bunch of other tweaks you can use, like skipping the opening logos, etc... A caveat, you have to have the very latest version of the game for it, and I do mean the very latest. I had to use Gog Galaxy and update my game through it, rather than the offline install files, which it turns out are not the latest game version.

Remove Fall Damage helps a lot.

Ammo and Inventory Carrying Capacity Upgrades boosts how much stuff you can carry. This is a blessing. Because I forgot to mention, you start out only being able to carry 20 arrows. That is not nearly enough. I would often use half my arrows on a single enemy. Sometimes I had to literally craft more arrows in the middle of combat because I ran out. Increasing that made the game a lot more enjoyable, as I was not stopping to craft arrows constantly.