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Topic	transience's video game topic 49: look over the horizon, a lot of games are nier
iiicon 03/06/17 4:13:17 PM #283:	I finished Horizon last night. I enjoyed my time with it, but it's not what I expected. It invites comparisons to grander games, like Fallout New Vegas (due to the pedigree of the writing team behind Horizon) or The Witcher 3 (due to pre-release interviews where the devs talked about inspirations, and the game has at least one direct Witcher reference I discovered), and those comparisons are unflattering. Those games are leagues ahead in world-building. The way major character arcs fade in and out of the background, reflecting the politics of the world, revealing interesting information about people or places, and how all this often begins with a rather innocuous start is exhilarating. It makes the world feel alive and each new encounter a chance for discovery. Horizon doesn't have that. The world doesn't react to you, it serves you. It's dry, empty, save for the enjoyment that comes from looking at all that's around you. What the game does accomplish is something I think soft sci-fi does so well: put a human face on larger-than-life problems. The way Aloy's story is told alongside the story of the end of the world is consistently engaging. Each mystery unearths another mystery waiting for an answer. There are times when you're two steps ahead of Aloy, and I wish it played with this dramatic irony more (at all), but it wasn't frustrating. The audio and video codecs you find along the way do a better job of establishing the setting and characters than the people you meet out in the world. From a gameplay perspective, I wish there was more to do - and I mean that in a good way. The game does a good job of creating fresh scenarios for each combat encounter, so while I'd like more robot dinosaurs, I was satisfied with what the game had. On hard, each fight has to be taken seriously. It's easy to be overwhelmed by enemies, and you need to conserve your resources for the larger encounters (special robot dinos, dungeons, major story beats), so encounters have a bit of risk/reward to them. I updated my album of Horizon screenshots with two dozen more pictures. Spoilers: the game is still pretty in the second half. http://imgur.com/a/IehS7 --- ICON: You don't have to be afraid of the pain inside you. <cite>iiicon posted [p:874513007] in transience... [t:74986814]...</cite> <quote>I finished Horizon last night. I enjoyed my time with it, but it's not what I expected. It invites comparisons to grander games, like Fallout New Vegas (due to the pedigree of the writing team behind Horizon) or The Witcher 3 (due to pre-release interviews where the devs talked about inspirations, and the game has at least one direct Witcher reference I discovered), and those comparisons are unflattering. Those games are leagues ahead in world-building. The way major character arcs fade in and out of the background, reflecting the politics of the world, revealing interesting information about people or places, and how all this often begins with a rather innocuous start is exhilarating. It makes the world feel alive and each new encounter a chance for discovery. Horizon doesn't have that. The world doesn't react to you, it serves you. It's dry, empty, save for the enjoyment that comes from looking at all that's around you. What the game does accomplish is something I think soft sci-fi does so well: put a human face on larger-than-life problems. The way Aloy's story is told alongside the story of the end of the world is consistently engaging. Each mystery unearths another mystery waiting for an answer. There are times when you're two steps ahead of Aloy, and I wish it played with this dramatic irony more (at all), but it wasn't frustrating. The audio and video codecs you find along the way do a better job of establishing the setting and characters than the people you meet out in the world. From a gameplay perspective, I wish there was more to do - and I mean that in a good way. The game does a good job of creating fresh scenarios for each combat encounter, so while I'd like more robot dinosaurs, I was satisfied with what the game had. On hard, each fight has to be taken seriously. It's easy to be overwhelmed by enemies, and you need to conserve your resources for the larger encounters (special robot dinos, dungeons, major story beats), so encounters have a bit of risk/reward to them. I updated my album of Horizon screenshots with two dozen more pictures. Spoilers: the game is still pretty in the second half. http://imgur.com/a/IehS7 --- ICON: You don't have to be afraid of the pain inside you.</quote> ... Copied to Clipboard!
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