Some thoughts. **Long, with some Witcher talk** (Gaming)

by cheapLEY , Thursday, March 02, 2017, 14:02 (2612 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

Note: This ended up being much longer than I anticipated. TL;DR is that I really like Horizon. It's really fun and engaging. Comparisons to The Witcher 3 are more appropriate than I thought, but not in the ways I expected. It's better than TW3 in a lot of ways, but not in any of the ways that make TW3 so engaging for me.

I'll echo everyone else that I think Horizon is just terrific. It's really hitting all the right notes for me at the moment. People often talk about "open world fatigue," and I've even found myself suffering from it myself. Except, I'm becoming increasingly certain that it's not a real thing, and that "open world fatigue" simply means the game isn't a well-designed open world.

Horizon adds basically nothing new or groundbreaking to the open world formula. It has a huge map. It has towers to climb (with a neat twist that everyone is probably aware of at this point). It has tons of collectibles, it has crafting, fast travel, mounted travel, etc, etc--it has it all. What makes the game notable and special, is that all those things actually work together, make sense within the game world, and are designed with a sense of care and purpose that we don't normally see.

The real highlight of the game is the combat, I think. Bow combat is pretty similar to what we've seen before in the new Tomb Raider games, but I think it feels better. There's a sense of fluidity, speed, and agility in this game that seems pretty rare. Most of the combat really is just shooting a bow, but with all the different ammunition types and enemy weaknesses (and some other weapons), it doesn't feel repetitive. It seems totally possible that a player might get caught in a loop of tackling every encounter the same way, but the options given by the game have certainly pushed me to experiment quite a bit. There is one particular ability that seems completely broken. When hiding in tall grass, you can whistle to pull enemies and stealth kill them as they approach. Pretty standard stealth game stuff. But the ability will only ever pull one enemy at a time, and the enemy AI (particularly the human AI) is pretty dumb and will basically ignore the huge pile of corpses that you're collecting and continue to walk right towards you. I also wish melee combat was better. It really feels like sort of an afterthought, and they definitely want you to primarily use the bow. Melee is fine, but it's just light/heavy attack with your spear, and it's not really engaging or fun, I don't think.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the looting and crafting loop in the game. I hated the system in the Far Cry games, wherein you hunt random animals to craft upgrades. This has a mixture of that for crafting more carry capacity for basically everything in the game, along with a constant need to collect parts to craft arrows, potions, and other expendable supplies. That sounds absolutely awful on paper, I think, but I've found it incredibly engaging and it adds a sort of weight to preparing for combat and ensuring that you're ready for a variety of situations.

The story is a particularly neat surprise for me--I wasn't expecting it to be anywhere near as engaging as it has been. Or maybe intriguing is a better word. It's too early to tell whether it's "good," but it's certainly keeping me interested. The world they've built here is interesting and compelling to a level I definitely didn't expect.

Technically, the game is gorgeous. It's not quite Uncharted 4, I don't think, but it's pretty close, and with a considerable large scope, it's certainly impressive, with a few caveats. Character models range from nearly Uncharted 4 good to deep into Uncanny Valley creepiness. Lip syncing is basically always laughably bad, and voice acting ranges from really good to very bad. So by no means not a perfect game.

Comparisons to The Witcher (LONG)

So, alright, here it is. We all know I love, love, love The Witcher. It's easily my favorite game of the last five years (note: not what I think is the best game, just my favorite). I sort of blocked out all the reviewers making comparisons between Horizion and The Witcher 3, if only to save myself the disappointment when it inevitably wasn't true. Well, I was only slightly wrong.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is almost nothing like The Witcher 3, predictably. However, it's still closer than I anticipated, and the comparison is perhaps a bit more apt than I anticipated. Besides the obvious (They're both huge open worlds, so we have to make the comparison, right?!), they both do some of the same things, just in different ways.

The biggest one that sticks out for me is preparing for fights. The Witcher 3 tries to give you the experience being a Witcher: investigating a monster attack, determining the culprit, and using the Bestiary (and past experiences in the game) to prepare for a fight--brewing health potions and stat boosting decoctions, creating and applying the correct oils to your silver sword, going in armed with knowledge of a monster's weakness to certain signs. The early game succeeds in this, but nothing quite lives up to the first big monster fight--the Griffin in White Orchard. It's a story quest that you can't skip, and it's set up in a way that has you traveling all over the are investigating an attack, finding the Griffin's nest, determining what it is, and then finding ingredients to use as bait (which leads you to a small sidequest that encourages you to brew your first health potion). It's an absolutely brilliant set up and presentation that I don't think the rest of the game quite matches, despite it's best efforts.

The biggest problem with the concept that causes it to break down, is the way potions, bombs, and oils work. You must find recipes throughout the world for every potion, bomb, and oil. Then you must find recipes for the upgraded versions. I went for a long time without finding essential recipes--my first time through the game, I never found the upgraded health potion. As a result, none of these items can be absolutely necessary for a fight, which I think could have been a neat mechanic that really forced the player to prepare for a big monster. Instead, blade oils just add a damage boost to a particular monster, and monsters have a weakness to a certain sign, but are still vulnerable to all of them to some degree. The game doesn't force you to engage with those mechanics. The other problem is that once you craft oils, potions, or bombs, you have those items forever. Resting will regenerate your supply of all of those items, provided you have alcohol (which is so common that it might as well not even be a requirement). This is convenient for the player, definitely, but it destroys any sense of having to prepare for a fight. Once you've found a good portion of the recipes in the game (which can take a long time, or no time at all, if you explore quite a bit), you no longer have to prepare by finding ingredients or brewing potions. You simply rest and refill the ones you have.

Now, compare this to preparing for fights in Horizon. It doesn't have a system anywhere near as deep or involved, and, so far, there hasn't been any equivalent to preparing for a specific type of monster. Every mechanical beast has specific weakness, but so far I haven't found any quests that equate to The Witcher's monster contracts that would encourage you to prepare for one specific fight. Instead, Horizon just encourages you to keep stocked up and prepared for anything. You must stay stocked up on sticks and metal shards for arrows, along with specific machine parts to add to those for specialty arrows and ammunition that do elemental damage. The plants you collect work as healing items, but you can also use them with some other things to create better health potions, and some bombs and other things. So you must constantly be crafting arrows, specialty ammunition, health potions, bombs, etc, as you use them or want to have them. It is both less complicated, more constant, and better at making the player feel like they are genuinely preparing for a fight or just a voyage into the wild. The Witcher's system is engaging at the beginning, when you must constantly find recipes and ingredients, but once you have many or all of those, you never have to engage with it again. I suspect Horizon will become a bit like this towards the end, when the player has huge bags for resources and ammunition that allows them to go longer and longer without having to craft refills, but even so, there's no automatic refills as found in The Witcher.

The two comparisons most have seemed to make are in world design and story/lore. These are the areas in which I don't think Horizon even comes close to The Witcher 3. Horizon is beautiful, and is more impressive looking than TW3 are first glance, and technically is probably more impressive. The world design (and by that, I mean a combination of the map, environmental design, player paths, routes through the environment, etc) is very, very good. Absolutely top tier, I think. But I still feel like it doesn't match TW3. I think TW3 is as close to a real world as video games have ever come. I don't know how else to describe it--walking around The Witcher 3 feels like walking around a real place. Most, I think this comes down to attention to detail. They really nailed it, I think. There are subtle details everywhere--stone stairs worn realistically from years and years of use, incredibly realistic landscape with thought given to water flow and erosion. I'll embed a video at the bottom that highlights that stuff extremely well. Horizon is an impressively designed world, but it feels very much like a video game space, I think. At a quick glance, it looks impressive and real, but the edges are much more visible, I think. Cliffs and rocks look great independently, but they feel like they've been placed to create a playspace more than to create a realistic world, and it's much the same for everything in the world.

Story and lore is a similar situation, I think. Horizon's is very good (or, like I said, intriguing, at least). It's certainly deeper than the surface level Far Cry type story than I was expecting. I genuinely want to learn about the tribes and cultures and societies of the people in the game. I definitely want to know more about the old world and what happened, and the game does a wonderful job of presenting that stuff through it's collectibles. Guerrilla certainly gave all of that quite a bit of effort. Again, it's just not as deep or engaging as TW3. I think that's an unfair comparison, in the end, though--The Witcher 3 has the benefit of being based on a series of books and two previous games.

This has become an absurdly long post, so I'll stop there. You all know that I think The Witcher 3 is a very special game, and I still have a hard time putting why that is into words. I think Horizon might be a better game. At the very least it's a tighter game. It's almost sort of a Witcher-lite, in many aspects, I think. But when I'm done with Horizon (and then probably Mass Effect), I'll certainly be diving back in for a fifth play through of The Witcher 3.

So, just a few videos here. They're long, and I don't expect anyone to watch them. It's ACG over on YouTube. I really like this guy's reviews, just as an FYI for people that seek out video reviews of games. But he also does these videos, called Walking the Walk, in which he spends 40-60 minutes, typically, walking around a video game world, showing off it's tech and design.

The first one is for The Witcher 3. This video is a very good look (by no means a comprehensive one) at the attention to detail in the design of The Witcher 3. As I said, it's long, I can see that most people would find it boring to just watch some dude walk around a video game world. I encourage you to watch it if you're interested, and to at least scrub through it a bit and see a few things as an example of what I think makes the TW3 so good.

The second video is the same thing for Horizon: Zero Dawn. I haven't watched it all yet, but I noticed it was there when I was grabbing the link for the TW3 video, so I figured I would just add it here given the subject. I'm eager to watch it this evening, though. Maybe he'll show me some things I haven't noticed and give me a greater appreciation for what Horizon got right.

The Witcher 3:

Horizon: