The hilariously OP Power Armor lets me tank my way through situations I shouldn't be able to survive, which can be loads of fun.

Sounds like anti-fun to me... Sammy finally got to Meridian yesterday, and she upgraded to a Shadow Precision bow, so I was finally able to see the Tearblast arrows in action, and I was left confused as to why they exist. They essentially make most enemy fights trivial, and suck the fun out of things (an entire shell-walker convoy died where it stood, where it used to be a fun encounter).
So yeh, I won't be using that bow or Power armor, I like my games fun.

I wouldn't want to have been wearing the MJIOLNIR armor during the story progression... it does suck some of the tension out of the combat. But now that I'm in "goofing around" mode, it's good fun. It doesn't make you invincible... if you get yourself into a fierce battle, you'll still end up taking damage to your health. It just absorbs the first couple hits for you. Where I am in the game, I have so many healing potions and resources to make more that I could survive just about any battle without the armor. Wearing the armor just bypasses the need to manage my consumables as much, so I can just focus on combat.

The Tearblast arrows are a bit OP against smaller enemies, but they feel nicely balanced by the time you get into some of the bigger fights late in the game. Some of the larger enemies have so much health that arrow consumption becomes a big problem. You can take down a pair of Thunderjaws using regular arrows, but at a certain point it just becomes a grind against a bullet-sponge enemy. Tearblasts still require accuracy to be used effectively, and they'll only get you half way there against larger foes. So I don't think they're OP in those situations.

This Thunderjaw vs Thunderjaw battle was pretty epic.

Have you turned a Behemoth against another? Definitely the most visually exciting fight, and a rush to be surrounded by so many flying rocks and debris.

I did, but I forgot to film it. So cool. My favorite encounter so far was the skirmish that spawned the GIF in my initial post. I was able to sneak up on a Thunderjaw and override it. A nearby pack of Tramplers saw me, and started moving towards me. "No problem"... I thought... "I've got big T with me for backup". But then I turned around and saw the Thunderjaw had run the other way to take on a pair of Ravagers. So now it was me against 4 Tramplers, in close quarters, with no cover.

I go to work on the Tramplers, setting off their huge exploding stomachs as often as possible to do group damage, while watching my Thunderjaw fight both Ravagers about 200 yards in the background. I manage to take out 2 of them when my Thunderjaw buddy rejoins the fight (after CRUSHING both of the Ravagers). Big T blows up one of the Tramplers with his disc launcher, then shoves his head straight through the 2nd one (as seen in the GIF).

My next goal is to override a Rock Breaker. If I pull it off, I'll save a video :)

Good luck. They're immune to Ropecaster shots, and are pretty much impossible to sneak up on. If you stun them with electric shots, they go underground. I haven't been able to kill one, much less override it... Then again, you have your cheat arrows and armor. ;)

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I managed to stun one of them by doing enough crit-point damage. That might be my only shot.

The hilariously OP Power Armor lets me tank my way through situations I shouldn't be able to survive, which can be loads of fun.

Sounds like anti-fun to me... Sammy finally got to Meridian yesterday, and she upgraded to a Shadow Precision bow, so I was finally able to see the Tearblast arrows in action, and I was left confused as to why they exist. They essentially make most enemy fights trivial, and suck the fun out of things (an entire shell-walker convoy died where it stood, where it used to be a fun encounter).
So yeh, I won't be using that bow or Power armor, I like my games fun.

This Thunderjaw vs Thunderjaw battle was pretty epic.

Have you turned a Behemoth against another? Definitely the most visually exciting fight, and a rush to be surrounded by so many flying rocks and debris.

My next goal is to override a Rock Breaker. If I pull it off, I'll save a video :)

Good luck. They're immune to Ropecaster shots, and are pretty much impossible to sneak up on. If you stun them with electric shots, they go underground. I haven't been able to kill one, much less override it... Then again, you have your cheat arrows and armor. ;)

My favorite past time over the past couple hours has been overriding the biggest machine I can find and getting it to fight other machines.

This Thunderjaw vs Thunderjaw battle was pretty epic.

I recorded a clip of a fight against a Storm Bird, mostly because it looks so freaking awesome.

My next goal is to override a Rock Breaker. If I pull it off, I'll save a video :)

This freaking game! :D

I haven't finished the Hunters Lodge, yet, but it's obviously going to end with hunting down Redmaw, the legendary Thunderjaw. They set that up pretty much immediately.

It got me thinking, though, about how awesome it would be for more "legendary" machines. Maybe a bigger and much stronger version of every machine type that randomly appears throughout the world.

This game has so much potential to go farther than it actually did with things like this. I saw a post on /r/Horizon about perhaps taking the idea of Cauldrons even deeper, with Grazers gathering resources in the world, the supply machines transporting those resources to Cauldrons, which produce new machines. Attack too many machines in the territory of a Cauldron, and it'll start churning out bigger and stronger machines, with the player able to interrupt this by taking out the supply chains (either destroying the convoys or the Grazers and Scrappers that are gather resources), or even starving the Cauldron so it shuts down completely. This could serve as a way to open up supply lines and trade routes between settlements or something--I'm not exactly sure what the gameplay purpose for it would be, it's just a neat idea.

This game really sparks my imagination in that way, but on the flipside, I wonder if things like that might be a mistake. I think a huge strength of Horizon is the ways it holds back. It's a really tight game with no bloat, and I wonder if a sequel might screw that up by trying to add too much, too many new ideas.

I think the idea of "legendary machines" being added into the world could be a fun piece of DLC. I'm certainly a fan of that type of challenge. The Legendary ship battles in AC4 Black Flag were fantastic :)

I haven't finished the Hunters Lodge, yet, but it's obviously going to end with hunting down Redmaw, the legendary Thunderjaw. They set that up pretty much immediately.

It got me thinking, though, about how awesome it would be for more "legendary" machines. Maybe a bigger and much stronger version of every machine type that randomly appears throughout the world.

This game has so much potential to go farther than it actually did with things like this. I saw a post on /r/Horizon about perhaps taking the idea of Cauldrons even deeper, with Grazers gathering resources in the world, the supply machines transporting those resources to Cauldrons, which produce new machines.

I mean, the machines do pretty much do that (Grazers > Shell-backs > Cauldron > More Machines), and it'd be neat to be able to track the process, but yeah, maybe an understanding is better than grinding for an objective.

Restraint is key.

Attack too many machines in the territory of a Cauldron, and it'll start churning out bigger and stronger machines, with the player able to interrupt this by taking out the supply chains (either destroying the convoys or the Grazers and Scrappers that are gather resources), or even starving the Cauldron so it shuts down completely. This could serve as a way to open up supply lines and trade routes between settlements or something--I'm not exactly sure what the gameplay purpose for it would be, it's just a neat idea.

This game really sparks my imagination in that way, but on the flipside, I wonder if things like that might be a mistake. I think a huge strength of Horizon is the ways it holds back. It's a really tight game with no bloat, and I wonder if a sequel might screw that up by trying to add too much, too many new ideas.

Yeah, that's always one of the reasons that game sequels often don't grab me the same way (that, and over-streamlining). I thought that shadow of War would suffer from that, since they built it completely around the Nemesis system, which was a surprise hit in Shadow of Mordor, but after watching the gameplay video of SoW, I'm pretty stoked.
Also, Dead Space 2 pulled it off perfectly, so we'll see...

It got me thinking, though, about how awesome it would be for more "legendary" machines. Maybe a bigger and much stronger version of every machine type that randomly appears throughout the world.

This game has so much potential to go farther than it actually did with things like this. I saw a post on /r/Horizon about perhaps taking the idea of Cauldrons even deeper, with Grazers gathering resources in the world, the supply machines transporting those resources to Cauldrons, which produce new machines. Attack too many machines in the territory of a Cauldron, and it'll start churning out bigger and stronger machines, with the player able to interrupt this by taking out the supply chains (either destroying the convoys or the Grazers and Scrappers that are gather resources), or even starving the Cauldron so it shuts down completely. This could serve as a way to open up supply lines and trade routes between settlements or something--I'm not exactly sure what the gameplay purpose for it would be, it's just a neat idea.

This game really sparks my imagination in that way, but on the flipside, I wonder if things like that might be a mistake. I think a huge strength of Horizon is the ways it holds back. It's a really tight game with no bloat, and I wonder if a sequel might screw that up by trying to add too much, too many new ideas.

The game seems cool. I'd like to know the ending.

So this video doesn't capture the quality of the storytelling, but if you're interested in a high-level plot summary, it does a decent job of covering the major lore and plot points.

I couldn't agree more.

My only issue is the way in which the story is presented. I don't mind because the story is compelling enough, but being basically locked in a room having the listen to audio logs for 30 minutes or more at a time isn't exactly a good way to go about it, I don't think. Like I said, it doesn't bother me because I typically really enjoy reading lore and listening to audio logs. And I guess technically they're all skippable if you don't care, but you really wouldn't get much of the story if f you don't hunt those things down.

Speaking of audio logs. Did you know that the Vantage Points tell a second story besides the part that you hear?
If you open them up in your Log book, under the transcript of the part that you listen to is more insight into the guy's life and relationship with his mother and stepdad. Worth a read.

Also, the only instance that I was annoyed with in regards to audio logs was when we were infiltrating the Eclipse camp, and there are six or seven separate audio logs in Helis's tent. If they had been scattered around I don't think I would have minded as much (similar to the "know your enemy" logs in Borderlands 2), but the fact that you had to sit there during a point where you're being told to hurry, feet from the next section was slightly irritating, since I wanted to get on with the mission.

I couldn't agree more.

My only issue is the way in which the story is presented. I don't mind because the story is compelling enough, but being basically locked in a room having the listen to audio logs for 30 minutes or more at a time isn't exactly a good way to go about it, I don't think. Like I said, it doesn't bother me because I typically really enjoy reading lore and listening to audio logs. And I guess technically they're all skippable if you don't care, but you really wouldn't get much of the story if f you don't hunt those things down.

I find this approach pretty risky, because it can very easily become tedious. I think they got away with it in this case because the story is good enough to care about, and they also spread those areas out just enough that I'm eager for another info dump by the time I find one.

For me, it worked out that I had found enough logs to have a fairly complete idea of the sequence of events that we're trying to uncover, but there are just enough gaps that I'm looking forward to exploring the world and tracking down the ones I've missed. And there's something very fitting about that, now that I've finished the story. It feels like the kind of thing Aloy would actually do.

MJOLNIR

My only issue is the way in which the story is presented. I don't mind because the story is compelling enough, but being basically locked in a room having the listen to audio logs for 30 minutes or more at a time isn't exactly a good way to go about it, I don't think. Like I said, it doesn't bother me because I typically really enjoy reading lore and listening to audio logs. And I guess technically they're all skippable if you don't care, but you really wouldn't get much of the story if f you don't hunt those things down.

Wow. WOW. What an ending! I think they did an excellent job of drawing all the plot lines together in a climactic and satisfying way. Surprisingly poigniant, too. They slowly, patiently build on the emotional weight of the situation over the course of the entire game, and by the end I found myself caught off guard by how invested I was.

All told, I finished the game at about the 48 hour mark. I'd hit max level (50) somewhere around 40 hours. I've got all but 2 of the trophies, which I'm looking forward to finishing up.

What a game.

Walking through the Grave Hoard last night hit me in a way I wasn't expecting. Listening to (and reading about) the hope that the folks had about Zero Dawn, even as their defenses fell and they sacrificed themselves, only for it to become clearer and clearer that Zero Dawn was not what they thought it would be... That they were all just sent to slow down the meat grinder... It was kind of sad.

I still don't know what Zero Dawn was (although the fact that Sobeck was given an Orbital Launch Base to use kind of hints at it), but judging from everyone's reaction so far, it probably didn't account for the survivors, and considering the report on environmental damages already suffered, Earth wouldn't be too hospitable for a good while.

This is how a mystery should be written. Breadcrumbs are there, and the truth slowly sinks in, rather than being a plot twist revelation... Really good stuff.

All told, I finished the game at about the 48 hour mark. I'd hit max level (50) somewhere around 40 hours. I've got all but 2 of the trophies, which I'm looking forward to finishing up.

What a game.

Also, the heck is a Tearblast arrow? I'm assuming they're the purple ones on the Heavy bow (which I don't have, it's Ropecaster, Tripwire, Sling, and regular bow for me).

Oh man, you're missing out. They're arrows that don't deal damage to machines, but they blast parts off of them. Taking on a Thunderjaw? Two well placed Tearblast arrows, and now it doesn't have disc launchers anymore. Glinthawk? One shot and now all its armor is gone. Ravager? One shot to blow off its cannon. Basically they're effective for stripping machines of all their armor and weapons. I pretty much start every engagement by hitting big machines with a couple of them. They don't seem to do anything to the corrupted machines though.

I'm currently rolling with the Shadow Hunter Bow, Lodge Warbow (for Freeze and Shock), Shadow Sharpshot Bow (for Tearblast and Precision arrows), and then I switch up the Lodge Ropecaster, Shadow Tripcaster, and Lodge Blastsling as needed.

I hit 31 hours of playtime last night and just finished The Grave-Hoard quest last night. That Deathbtinger fight was intense.