Board 8 > Any interest in a blind Horizon: Zero Dawn playthrough topic?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Had the game for a little while but for various reasons haven't had the chance to start playing it. So maybe I'll start and keep b8 updated on my progress! Or not. Depends on if there's any interest in it. Don't expect videos or screenshots or any of that stuff, just because we have fancy technology doesn't mean I can't ignore it (aside from the fancy technology needed to make this whole internet thing work...and the PS4...I can ignore some fancy technology, okay?). Please don't spoil anything, like, for real. I know b8 is usually good about that but I've seen too many online communities where "no spoilers" is taken to mean "give everything away with hints so you can pretend you didn't spoil anything even though you did" to not feel the need to reiterate the point.

If this is a thing people would care for, I'll probably start within the next few hours. If it's not...I probably will still start playing within the next few hours, just without the whole update/discussion/commentary business and you'll never know what happened or why and it will be the greatest tragedy you've experienced in like, at LEAST the past seventeen seconds.
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I'd read 'er.
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Sure, great game
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Alright then I guess I will dance for my audience of two.

Well that was a longer and probably more plot relevant pre-title screen opening movie than I was expecting. What happened to the days of seeing the weird logos of companies involved in making the game, mashing buttons frantically to skip it already, and only then getting to the actual content? Come to think of it, this is probably better. Like, a lot better. Anyway I guess I will be playing as a girl named Aloy who presumably will stop being a baby at some point, she is cursed and raised by an outcast dude, and oh god I love snowy forest scenery in games.

Random point of interest: For whatever reason, PS2-era graphics kind of got locked into my mind as "the best" for games. I don't mean they look better than modern stuff, of course, but I think because the PS2 was the first system I actually bought (well, I was 13 so I was just saving up allowance, and my parents chipped in half as a Christmas present, but still, spent months saving up for it!), it kind of settled into my mind as being the pinnacle of what games would look like. It felt like such a jump over the PSX/N64 era, and it probably doesn't help that I've mostly focused on handheld systems since then. For whatever reason this has led to the point where on the one hand, I don't care much about graphics because everything vaguely modern looks good to me, but on the other hand...everything vaguely modern look good to me! While I can still be bothered by bad art design (something like the Citadel in Mass Effect 3 is painful to look at in places due to the overly bright lighting), I tend to think everything looks good if designed well. This is kind of random, but hell, I literally haven't even started playing yet, what else do I have to talk about?

Also...having advertising for DLC on the title screen is one hell of a mood killer. Good work, games industry! Anyway, guess I'll hit the always helpful "New Game" button and see where it goes.

edit: This game has a "very hard" and a..."ultra hard" difficulty? That's a lot of types of hard. But they sound hard so I'll be normal.
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Not that unusual

MGS typically has three hard difficulties
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Tag. I'll be reading!
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Alright, game actually gets underway as 6 year old Aloy learns how to hunt and also gets harassed by the locals who do not approve of her mysterious outcast ways. I'm sure we'll hit the point where I try to predict what the big reveal will be eventually, but for now I don't have enough knowledge to guess. Which is good, because it means I don't have to be wrong yet.

Okay actually before the hunting there was a cave that was also some ancient mad science place. I got a Star Trek comm badge that attaches to the ear and allows for PURPLEVISION. I am sure this will come in handy, though for now it's used seems to be limited to hearing audio logs and pointing out that the only object in the area I can interact with is indeed the way to open the door. Jokes aside this was a pretty creepy little area to walk through. Unfortunately I couldn't see it very well. My TV has a window behind it that faces south and thus faces the sun, and my curtains are fairly light. This results in it being a little hard to see dark areas in video games during the day sometimes. I end up having to fiddle around with brightness settings every hour or two to try to keep up.

And then...drum roll...tutorial on killing monsters...er, machines. Probably going to be calling the monsters a lot, sue me. We have Watchers, who walk around slowly, and Striders I think they were called? They're like cows, but with explosive canisters on their backs. So quite a bit cooler than cows. Some kid fell down and was promptly amazed at Aloy's ability to use her comm badge to see monster patrol routes. Uh, kid, these things walk slowly in a circle and stop for ages to stare off into space, I'm not sure it's really that magical. Anyway we save him, some people come along to berate everyone involved, and we get a Moral Choice! Of throwing a rock at a kid's face, hand, or the ground. Ooh, is this one of those things where people freak out and send you death threats if you don't always pick the "nice" option in the video game? I threw the rock at the kid's rock, both because it seemed a nice middle ground and also because it seemed implausibly cool.

Have to say, 6 year old Aloy is very determined. Implausibly so. I can understand the whole wanting to know why you're an outcast thing, but I feel like 6 year olds usually don't sign up in a heart beat when they hear about years of training being needed to attain their dreams. Maybe I hung out with the wrong crowd when I was 6. And then a training montage has Aloy transforming into a teenager (or adult?) out of nowhere, which was kind of cool.

Pretty good sequence, mixed tutorial and some world building/characterization pretty well. This Rost dude seems pretty cool which means he'll probably die at some point to give Aloy something to mope about and also reason to fight whoever did it. Maybe I'll be wrong, but let's be real, predicting the mentor figure will die is usually a pretty safe bet.

XIII_rocks posted...

Not that unusual

MGS typically has three hard difficulties

I'm more used to games giving their higher difficulties wackier names like Impossible or Brutal or Aggravatingly Punishing (the latter...may not actually exist)
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I didn't like Rost at all tbh

Not sure if it was the performance or his dialogue but he was a problem
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lol I think if you had left that post the way it was originally written I would have thought nothing of it, but editing it has certainly got me thinking of a few things...

His name looks like rust, and rust applies to metal, while you have rock in your name. Rock and metal are natural rivals. Therefore, that must be way you disliked Rost.
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Well, continued on for a little bit. Rost VANISHED, by which I mean he walked down the path a little so he could me that we would do something ominous tonight. Yay. But first, item collecting. I'm not straying too far off the direct path yet but I'm sure I will at some point. Needed to hunt down some mooks for materials, found a horde of them, and...promptly got killed by some sort of photon torpedo machine gun firing dog thing (a Scrapper, I think). That was fun! Now I know to be a lot more paranoid and be careful to use my PURPLEVISION to scout out the area. Enemies seem to do massive damage in this game, so I'm guessing I'll be spending a lot of time hiding in grass and on cliffs trying to poke away at things. Which...okay I'm the kind of player that finds tedious but safe strategies in games all the time so this is right up my alley!

Helping matters is the newly acquired tripcaster allowing me to make things fall down if they run at me. Found some campfires, walked through a village where everyone hates me (Aloy seems to appreciate that their lack of desire to speak to her spares her from hearing their idiocy...snarky comment, or brilliant meta commentary on annoying generic NPCS?) and generally accomplished very little. All in all a good time.

Also, there's a level up and skill system here. Anything in particular I should be looking out for that is super important or super useless? Probably going to focus on the stealth based stuff unless it doesn't actually help much.
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Okay then. Made some more progress, wasn't meaning to play for quite as long as I did but kind of got caught up in it. This may be a bit brief in parts as a result.

So first Rost took me out to some new area to fight a Sawtooth. What is a Sawtooth? Good question, I pelted it with fire arrows to lure it into a trip caster shock wire and by the time it stood up, I had depleted about 90% of its health so even though it did a lot of damage when it hit me, it was easy to finish off. We get the standard mentor "use your strength for everyone!" speech and then head off for The Proving, which sounds like a big deal. Also Rost will be abandoning Aloy forever to avoid tempting her into breaking the whole "no talking to outcasts" rule. Aloy is understandably sad and I'm understandably convinced he'll show up much later in the game to do something dramatic and then die soon after.

We get into Mother's...Heart I think is the town? Hard to keep track of all this Mother's Stuff. The guy we saved earlier is a merchant now and made us clothes that the dialogue specifically mentions fit perfectly...not sure I want to know how he knew the right size. There's a big scene that introduces some crazy sun worship tribe who apparently were insane until their king killed the previous one. Now his people are out there preaching peace and reconciliation. So...these guys are going to be the villains at some point, right? Anyway, spoke to some dudes after, one of whom has a comm badge (called a Focus but fuck that) and is shifty as hell, the other who seems to be a travel agent for Meridian, capital of the Carja sun dudes. He gives a nice speech, delivers some backstory and probably wants in Aloy's pants at some point. Then we go light a lamp that flies...a lamp. That flies. You know, in a game where machines are animals and also suddenly going crazy, that shouldn't stick out as unusual, but it does. Aloy bickers a bit with rock toss kid from the intro (gee, who would have guessed that the kid who had a name in the prologue would reappear), makes friends with some girl and then sleeps.

Onto the Proving! Where we fight some robots. And the asshole guard guy is an asshole. And asshole kid Bast is an asshole. Okay guys, settle down. We take a shortcut to win! Yay! And then the woman does a fake out when she says an outcast can't win and then says OH but Aloy isn't an outcast now! Hooray! Then she dies! Not hooray! Bunch of crazy cult dudes attack, leading to a big fight where everyone that's not Aloy dies. Some big dude nearly kills Aloy, then Rost reappears! Huh, earlier than expected. Why was he up there anyway? Big dude seemingly takes an arrow to the face without much harm, which is certainly something. He stabs Rost, they blow up the mountain to kill us, but Rost shoves Aloy off a cliff to save her. It's a good thing she's a video game character or that fall would have been fatal. Also big cult dude said something about facing the sun so he's probably involved with the sun dudes.
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Aloy is taken into the mountain by the Matriarchs (Teersa seems nice, Lansra is a jerk, and Jezza...exists) and discovers a lot of stuff. She was found inside the mountain, the mountain the Nora tribe worships has a high-tech door inside it, Aloy resembles some woman and the mountain door likes them both but not quite enough to let her in. She gets made a Seeker, AKA someone who can go anywhere and do whatever she feels like. So basically, officially a video game protagonist. We also find out the cult guys wiped out a bunch of Nora dudes sent after them, and also that they have some ability to control the machines. Well, given we found out earlier that the machines have been getting more aggressive as the years go on, that certainly sounds like something that might lead to the main plot.

Speaking of controlling machines, a machine that can control other machines shows up to lead an attack on the town! This thing, called a Corrupter, was kind of annoying, it does a huge leap attack that should be easy to avoid but since there are tons of NPCs for it to target, it constantly goes for them and as a result I end up running directly into the path of its attack because I think it's aiming for me when it actually isn't. Still won the fight without any deaths, but it got a tad close. We got something that might be able to control machines in some way for ourselves, but that will wait for tomorrow, as will testing out the new "Sharpshooter" bow I bought. Next destination is apparently sun dude central. Hmm, maybe they won't be the main villains after all? Pretty early to go there if they are. Still expecting the cult guys to be tied into them somehow.

Having fun so far. Almost got the hang of the controls, I keep jumping instead of dodging or doing melee attacks instead of shooting because I forget it takes two buttons to shoot stuff here, but those mistakes are getting less and less frequent. Hate the whole L3 to sprint thing though. Surely R1 could be sprint and light vs heavy melee attacks could be tap vs hold R2? Would feel so much better...oh well.

Next time on Panthera Plays Horizon: Zero Dawn: I have no idea but it will probably involve PURPLEVISION.
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Yeah it really starts to pick up now
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Might be able to find some time to play soon, or maybe I'll get sidetracked by supper and put it off until later.

Have to decide whether I want to do some side quest thing I stumbled across, go collecting stuff to upgrade my carrying capacity of various things or move on with the story. Or just aimlessly wander until some machine comes around a corner and murders me, that sounds like a plausible outcome too.
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Minor update: Did some side quests. Met some dude who wanted me to save his daughter and retrieve a spear, and tracked down some crazy dude who was temporarily exiled. Both helped by the power of PURPLEVISION allowing me to see footsteps and blood. I wonder if there was a way to botch the conversation with the crazy guy and fail the quest because of it? Because that's not what happened but I must admit, it's hard to resist picking the "he's a danger to others" option in reference to the guy who is rambling about spirits compelling him to hurt people.

I think every single time I tried to use the tripcaster and bait enemies into its wires, they just sat back and shot projectiles at me instead or just stood around doing nothing. Suddenly this thing is not so useful...oh well. I'm glad I took the skill that lets me drop down from ledges without making noise when I land, getting good mileage out of climbing rocks and slipping down behind a machine to wipe it out quickly. Should be even better when I get the actual drop down attack instead of relying on dropping down and then using the regular silent take down.

Also found I can ride a Strider if I sneak up on it now, but I'm not sure how valuable mecha-ponies will really be in a game where getting caught in the open seems like a very bad thing.
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They're useful for getaways, especially later

Also just really handy for traversal
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Yeah man. Amazing game and I'm partial too it because some of the vantage points are right where I live
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Has that ever resulted in you being afraid to go to the grocery store for fear of a machine eating you?
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Panthera posted...

Has that ever resulted in you being afraid to go to the grocery store for fear of a machine eating you?

Not necessarily but I do consider it as a possibility from time to time
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fortybelowsummer posted...

Yeah man. Amazing game and I'm partial too it because some of the vantage points are right where I live

That's so cool man. I really liked how I slowly figured out where it was set and the little hints you get about it.
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Speaking of, a hint about the backstory was reached just now...!

So we picked off with our intrepid hero Aloy getting lost and shooting at (and missing more than I'd care to admit) random animals in the hopes that their meat may prove to be of value. That sucks so let's skip past it. Reached the gate and something silly happened - I approach from the top of the ridge, so I could look down and see the gatekeeper Varl fighting a Corrupted Sawtooth. I figured hey, I'm up here and can shoot it safely, but that doesn't work. Turns out it's a scripted event where they fight until you get there, at which point the machine dies, but since I didn't realize that right away I got to see Varl trading hits like a boss. Badass Varl sends me to find War Chief Sona, his mom, who apparently is also a badass. So I set out to find out what happened to the war party she led on a quest for revenge.

Came across a little settlement on the way, picked up some sidequests along the way, some of which I may even finish at some point. Found the site of the ambush where the war party wrecked the hell out of a bunch of machines before going down, met a guy who was a messenger from Sona. How convenient! He gave me directions and I crossed the river into some ruins that definitely don't look like the decaying carcass of a modern city, no sir. Also found a "datapoint" that talked about some legal drama in 2063. Gee is this set in the future of Earth I would never have guessed. I mean, besides the fact that the whole trip to the ruins Aloy takes as a kid kind of already made it obvious. It would be more surprising if it didn't turn out to be the case! Speaking of those ruins Aloy went to as a kid, I stumbled across them again. Is there any point to going through them again? I'd check on my own but that place was kind of big to go through for no reason.

I also bought a war bow somewhere along the way so I can shoot shock arrows now. Scrapers officially less of a problem now that a zappy thing to the bum neutralizes them in short order. Between that and using fire arrows to make Grazers explode and take everything nearby down with them, I think I am officially beginning to have the slightest clue what I'm doing. Maybe some day I'll be able to go more than twenty seconds without using PURPLEVISION to assuage my paranoia...well, maybe not.
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Get the ropecaster as soon as you can, it's way more useful than it initially seems.

Also keep an eye out for datapoints because a lot of the interesting story bits are tucked away in those.
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What does a ropecaster even do? I haven't bought one yet, the little movie they show makes it look like it just slowly knocks things down from close enough range that a sneak attack (or silent strike or whatever they're calling it here) could have taken most/all the enemy's health away anyway
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Ropecaster ties the robots down with...ropes

It's handy to have
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Panthera posted...

Is there any point to going through them again? I'd check on my own but that place was kind of big to go through for no reason.

Yes, if you explore you can break through a barrier you previously couldn't, and there's an item in there that can be used to unlock something good later
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I'll have to remember that next time I'm close enough to that place to not need a seventeen week detour to get there
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Get dat Golden Fast Travel pack mang
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XIII_rocks posted...

Ropecaster ties the robots down with...ropes

It's handy to have

This. And if you slap a bunch of reload mods into it you'll be amazed at how fast you can put out ropes.
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Or maybe it's handling mods, it's been a while.
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I don't know what a golden fast travel pack is but it doesn't sound very purple.

Moving on, came across a giant...giant. Tallneck. Yeah. Climbed that thing, hacked it for whatever reason, climbed to some Vantage thing to find out more stuff, came across some data points that talk about how history apparently featured some flooding and a lot of people dying. Then I tracked down Sona, found out she's kind of annoying, and we slaughtered a camp full of people. That does tend to serve as a good bonding exercise. Found out the bad guys apparently have a stockpile of blaze canisters all locked up in one place at their base for safety purposes. That sounds like a useful thing to blow up at some point.

Huh, that was a short update. Guess I wasn't playing all that long. Didn't die this time at least!

...if I were to shoot that Tallneck, would it ignore me or annihilate me in hilarious fashion? No particular reason I ask, just...curiosity...
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You cant shoot the Tallnecks. I personally never used the ropecaster because it makes fights too boring
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Get the golden fast travel pack pretty quick too
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So I continued on and went to a new settlement to get some side quests and information. Killed some boars to retrieve a ring (ew), destroyed some machines, had a grand old time. Except for the part where I shot a Sawtooth and it came after me followed by another one I hadn't seen. That was a little dicey, but luckily they seemed to not want to chase me too much so I picked them off one at a time. The AI in this game is really weird, sometimes they charge the moment they spot you, sometimes they just turn around and run away even when they're up close. Anyway, I'm supposed to attack the cult base next but I'm clearing out their scout camps first. One down, two for...probably tomorrow night!

Also discovered some additional data points/audio log type stuff. Humanity went to the moon in the past, apparently. Watch the backstory end up being that the moon was terraformed into being habitable and we're actually on the moon! Except I doubt that guy in this topic could live on the moon...or could he...?!

This tiny update brought to you PURPLEVISION. There are some things in life that can't be seen. For everything else, there's PURPLEVISION
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Oh right, forgot. Cleared out a bandit camp with the help of a guy named Nil. He seems like a pretty nice guy, aside from the part where he hunts bandits instead of machines because it's just not satisfying for him if his targets can't feel pain and fear. Okay maybe he's not such a nice guy, but we sure as hell wiped out some other not so nice people. Getting that sharpshot bow or whatever it's called was the best thing to ever happen to me, feels good to have actual damage output on arrows.
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Awkward triple post here but I forgot to mention it earlier, in the ruins Aloy goes to as a kid one of the audio logs mentioned someone thinking about taking a trip to Machu Picchu. I found that amusing because just last week my father told me he's planning on taking a trip there later on this year. Not the most commonly referenced place in the world, and yet there it was coming up twice in a matter of days.
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Pretty common!

Also Nil is great. One of my favourites
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Love Aloys interactions with Nil.
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You are now tracking this topic.
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Encountering Nil was always great.
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Oh man you guys have totally given away the fact that Nil, who was obviously set up to be a recurring NPC I will see again, is indeed a guy I will likely see again some time. I do not know how I can go on with this amazingly clever plot twist ruined for me.

This is a joke
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Yes but only if you do that thing that I did that you may not end up doing.

Kidding, you can read it. There is one reaction I do look forward to, though.

Also ropecaster is/was awesome. I ran around with two bows (for different ammo types) and a ropecaster and I crushed all things.
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I don't think I'm getting any play time in tonight but should be able to play a fair bit tomorrow. There was a question I was going to ask but now I've entirely forgotten, so...uh...how about those machines...

Oh. I bought maps for some random collectibles and vantage points, which is handy. Is there eventually something similar for the other random data points scattered across the world or will I be forever on my own in regards to those?
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just chiming in to say that nil is a fascinating character, although i have to admit that it probaby has more to do with the va's performance and the facial animation in my case. those two things really sell the sociopathy!
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I just want to say thanks for this topic. I have redownloaded the game and plan to pick up basically where you are now lol.
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Hooray for providing motivation!

Speaking of, I kind of derped away my opportunity to play this morning/afternoon, and...okay so I play Monster Hunter World and it has some stuff becoming available/returning today and that might take up some of my time. And then it has something new coming on August 1 and that will also be a distraction. What I'm saying is...fuck it I might spend an hour or two on World tonight but there will be an update to this playthrough, I'm the type who once distracted never gets back to something so I'll make sure I do not get distracted
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Panthera posted...

Hooray for providing motivation!

Speaking of, I kind of derped away my opportunity to play this morning/afternoon, and...okay so I play Monster Hunter World and it has some stuff becoming available/returning today and that might take up some of my time. And then it has something new coming on August 1 and that will also be a distraction. What I'm saying is...fuck it I might spend an hour or two on World tonight but there will be an update to this playthrough, I'm the type who once distracted never gets back to something so I'll make sure I do not get distracted

Well my buddy just bought me ghost recon gold edition so I'll keep you playing I'd you keep me playing lol.
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Alright, continuing on with my mission to destroy some cult camps...

...and that didn't go very well. So this second camp has, in addition to a million dudes and three corrupted Scrappers which would be a handful to begin with, a brand new machine called a Glinthawk. Which are brutal. They can shoot a freeze projectile that takes almost half my health that also forces me to stop trying to shoot them because your walking speed is too slow to get out of its area of effect. And it can shoot five of them in a row fast enough that even with Concentration there's barely time to get a shot in between their attacks. And they can also just fly off and do a bombing run. And generally fly around so fast that shooting them is impossible because the camera moves slower than they do. And dive bomb occasionally, which isn't even an opening to melee most often since they overshoot by a mile and stay too high up mostly. And they are supposedly weak to fire but ten fire arrows don't seem to have done anything and their weak point is tiny and also even the precision arrows barely take a noticeable piece of their health bar away.

And then another one showed up.

Taking a brief pause to think before I pick up again. I honestly am not sure how I can deal with these things alongside every other enemy, even one of these on its own seems tougher by far than any other entire enemy group has been. And I'm pretty sure I can't use traps or the tripcaster on them since they fly. Unless maybe the ropecaster can accomplish something but I can't help but feel it probably can't since that would be really cheesy. These guys feel like I just walked into an area in an RPG intended for characters much higher level, even landing a ton of shots with fire arrows and several precision arrows, some of which looked like they hit the little freeze container, didn't even bring the damn thing to half health.
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Ropecaster is specifically very useful against flying enemies.

Glinthawks are easily the most annoying enemy in the game.

If you nail them with a couple fire arrows (enough to ignite them) they'll usually have to land and you can do whatever you need at that point. Get triple arrow or whatever it's called ASAP, that helps a lot.
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Ropecaster seriously works on these fuckers? That seems so weird. Like, logical, but not video game logical. Stuff like that never works on anything that would be particularly useful to use it on!

I don't think I ever saw this thing land for any stretch of time, but maybe it flew off to do it. It's possible I was accidentally crossing paths with both of them and just not noticing <_<
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Oh yeah and tearblast arrows (my personal favorite) can cause them to explode and freeze everything around them if you can nail the freeze canister.
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