Horizon Zero Dawn

Poneros said:
Compared to TW3 it's mediocre, but how many open world games can hold a candle to TW3? I mean in its totality. I struggle to think of any. KCD reaches some heady heights but it's clear it hasn't reached its goal (let's hope 2 does it) while TW3 does pretty much everything it wanted to do & then some. True, some gameplay aspects aren't great in TW3 but everything else is 10/10 and then even that gameplay can be modified enough such that it is great too, though that takes a bit of work (Ghost Mode etc). And even for vanilla, it got a lot better progression wise in the expansions, but it's clear the main game just progressed too fast & had too much content for how it was tuned.

If you've played Assassin's Creed Odyssey it's kinda like that a lot more than TW3, though still a bit more watered down. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game & a visual treat but it's not a great game by any stretch. Still, very enjoyable if you are into open world games.
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I don't agree with TW3 being particularly better the HZD... I was hugely disappointed by the Witcher 3, I don't think it was anywhere near as great a masterpiece of a game as a lot of people make it out to be.
To me the story was unbelievably dull, the combat was so basic that there was no challenge to the game and the despite the massive size of the world it just felt like the entire thing was just a copy-paste as it was pretty much the same thing almost everywhere you looked. For me the main story was so bad that it took me about 4 years of stopping and starting to force myself to play beyond the Skellige segment.
 
Ive never understood the hype for the Witcher series (each to there own though!), not enjoyed any of them for me HZD is better, world isn't as big but far more interesting story and the combat is allot of fun plus robot dinosaurs! :D
 
suenstar said:
I don't agree with TW3 being particularly better the HZD... I was hugely disappointed by the Witcher 3, I don't think it was anywhere near as great a masterpiece of a game as a lot of people make it out to be.
To me the story was unbelievably dull, the combat was so basic that there was no challenge to the game and the despite the massive size of the world it just felt like the entire thing was just a copy-paste as it was pretty much the same thing almost everywhere you looked. For me the main story was so bad that it took me about 4 years of stopping and starting to force myself to play beyond the Skellige segment.
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I think a lot of people would agree that the main story isn't the strongest, but it serves as a nice guide throughout the game. The real strength in the writing is in the side content & how it all fits together. It's how it helps define & make the world alive that makes it so good, in the context of an open world and how that aids immersion. So if you play it more from a 'experience the game as a linear-game following the main quest' angle, then I'd understand why you don't feel as strongly about it. It's just not that game & not how it's best enjoyed.

I'd still easily put it above HZD writing-wise, for dialogue alone if nothing else.
 
TW3 was seriously one of the dullest main storylines with absolutely terrible pacing. So much surrounding fluff and pointless segments needed to tell a very basic fantasy story.

Its saving grace were some of the sidequests, established lore and generally good dialogues (in pointless amounts) and I can easily give it 8/10 in its highest points but it absolutely doesn't deserve to be compared to every other game that's actually pretty different as some sort of standard. You could cut out half of the game and end up with an equally basic storyline but one that's at least more coherent and a lot better paced. Sidequests also run out of steam after a while because there are only a dozen or so of truly unique ones, the rest just follow the same plot twists in some variations. Still the strongest part of the game, doesn't make it an unforgettable masterpiece IMO.

It's no surprise that many games try to imitate its dialogue style as there's isn't too much else it does too well, including gameplay, and it's also based on books so it's not an original universe, they had stuff to work with. And the books still tell a better story.

HZD is not perfect by any means but it at least looked very close to what the devs had shown before, unlike a certain incredibly hyped game:p

To me, they're equal, TW3 excels at being a better dialogue simulator with good sidequests, Horizon excels at being a better game with some formulaic dialogues but still a more interesting overall story.
 
Personally I just think the gameplay looks fun - bringing down the robo-dinosaurs looks like it would hold my interest. If it has a good or passable story etc. then that's just a bonus :)

As for Witcher 3 - I really enjoyed it, but I agree that a lot of the gameplay elements could have been done better (I believe there is a patch made by one of the devs that tweaks a lot of gameplay things to this end; e.g. stops you being able to just Quen-spam your way through any fight... makes it so that the various oils and potions and things are actually significant and worth using, and so on)
 
Poneros said:
I think a lot of people would agree that the main story isn't the strongest, but it serves as a nice guide throughout the game. The real strength in the writing is in the side content & how it all fits together. It's how it helps define & make the world alive that makes it so good, in the context of an open world and how that aids immersion. So if you play it more from a 'experience the game as a linear-game following the main quest' angle, then I'd understand why you don't feel as strongly about it. It's just not that game & not how it's best enjoyed.

I'd still easily put it above HZD writing-wise, for dialogue alone if nothing else.
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I think I'm mostly in the same boat as Amatsubu.

For me the way they handled the side quests and lore started off good but after a while it fell apart and didn't really add much of anything interesting, after a while half of the side quests just lost their charm and I totally lost all interest. The only part where the game excelled for me really was the dialogue, but that means it for me it was just a really good dialogue simulator and not a great game in my eyes.
I tried hard to like it but it just didn't click with me as well as the previous two games did.
uncle_rufus said:
Personally I just think the gameplay looks fun - bringing down the robo-dinosaurs looks like it would hold my interest. If it has a good or passable story etc. then that's just a bonus :)
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It's extremely satisfying when you take down some of the really big ones for the first time, you can cheese a lot of the combat but if you play it properly some fo the fights are crazy... plus is possibly got some of the most stunning visuals of this generation.

The story itself is pretty good, it's delivery could have been better but I'd say it's written in a way that encourages you to want to learn more.

Just hoping there's no issues with the controls on the PC version.
ic1male said:
Me too. I expect it to be about £29.99.
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My bet would be on it being around £34.99 at launch, any higher than that and I think I'd have to either wait or see if a store like GMG have a discount code.
 
Back to the game in question, I'll totally buy it and enjoy it at 60fps with sharper visuals just to enjoy the graphics and combat again, especially that I didn't complete everything on PS4.
 
I did 100% complete the game and expansion on PS4 Pro, but I would still buy it and play it again in 4k/60 with HDR.

Hopefully it will have some of the engine upgrades from Death Stranding as well, so it'll look even better.
 
Someone needs to make a video/article of how console exclusives are actually made. All the coding has to be done with PC tools so does that mean every console game has a PC build which can run on Windows? I know it gets copied to a devkit for optimization and stuff during the end phase.
 
i bought a ps4pro to play this game...... bought the dlc for it as well... and have played for about an hr

i guess i will double dip and buy on pc to never play it on 2 platforms :D
 
ic1male said:
Someone needs to make a video/article of how console exclusives are actually made. All the coding has to be done with PC tools so does that mean every console game has a PC build which can run on Windows? I know it gets copied to a devkit for optimization and stuff during the end phase.
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Yeah, it would be very interesting to see a behind the scenes from a console developer about what goes into the process of translating a console game to a PC game.
I'm assuming a big part of it is probably going to be troubleshooting any potential issues with the endless hardware variations, making sure that there's no particular hardware that causes crashes... even with games specifically made for the PC, I've lost count of how many times I've seen a game crash due to it not liking a piece of hardware.
uncle_rufus said:
I wonder why they're putting this on Steam and not EGS?
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I'd say they've gone with Steam because it has the highest user count by a huge margin.
As for not also going onto EGS, we can only speculate but my initial guess would be that EGS did their usual thing of wanting to pay to get exclusivity and that offer didn't appeal compared to the potential number of new fans for the console's library of games.
 
suenstar said:
I'd say they've gone with Steam because it has the highest user count by a huge margin.
As for not also going onto EGS, we can only speculate but my initial guess would be that EGS did their usual thing of wanting to pay to get exclusivity and that offer didn't appeal compared to the potential number of new fans for the console's library of games.
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Bingo! (I was being facetious by bringing it up in the first place :p but your answer is spot on)
 
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