Horrizon Zero Dawn worth a buy review

[Ishigami]

snip

While that certainly is true we should not forget that men also build, invented and fought for most of the stuff mankind enjoyed over its existence and that they are capable of kind deeds.
Yet that seems often ignored for a narrative. For example: In Terminator 2 Sarah lectures the engineer who's going to invent Skynet how he knows jack shit about creating stuff because he has no womb.
While the movie is good this sentiment is IMO just stupid. If you go by that logic its back to the cave...

In video games most villains are men. Most cannon fodder are also men. We accept this as it kind of reflects reality to some degree. Soldiers are mostly men and gangsters are mostly men etc.
Until a few years back this would not have been worthy of discussion.
Now it kind of is because some people started to complain about the portrait of women in video games aimed at mostly men. A killable female hooker (GTA) became outrageous while killable random dude on the street (GTA) was ignored. It's just that the same game mechanics apply to every nonessential NPC but that apparently is beyond comprehension for some people.
So of course people on the other side of the street would start to point out that it goes the other way as well. That's why there is an article that points out that HZD seems to portrait men in a mostly bad light.

Strong and independent women I think are not the problem. The problem is them being written in a way that flies in the face of the usual target audience. Men buy most core video games after all.
It became a trope that a women rejected simple curtsey help, e.g. a hand to get up, just to make the point she is strong and independent. Or how they went on to prove their credentials by randomly spouting about their mostly unlikely achievements. E.g. Years back I saw a cop TV show and the women was rejected from some mission so she flew in the face of her commissioner how she served in Iraq or Afghanistan in the military... The rejected wonder woman TV show is another example of this. Or the writing in a lot of the recent gender swapped Marvel comics like Thor...
These type of strong and independent women should not be considered a good thing because they are IMO bad writing.

Like I said I have no problem with Aloy the way she is because she is a power fantasy after all. I prefer her to Geralt in fact because while she is a bit too empathetic, considering she was shunned by her tribe for all her life, it is better bearable then the "I don't get invested at all"-attitude Geralt has 95% of his games?

 

[EternallyBored]

Dude what even? You don't care, you only play 1st person shooters of the manliest of manly variety. Just let people enjoy things.

Though I have absolutely no interest in either game, I will say that because of this, I'd be far more likely to get Nier: Automata than I would Horizon: Zero Dawn. Mainly because the story of H: ZD is preachy as all hell.

Based on the reviews and streams I have seen ... story doesn't seem to be it's strong point - at least the presentation of it; dialogue is ... awkward. Naughty Dog, Guerrilla Games is not, when it comes to storytelling.

If I get it, I will be getting it for the gameplay and visuals - the latter of which I have to say is top notch in it's genre.

There's definitely some weird dialogue bits. The only preachy esque bit I've stumbled across so far was an optional conversation with the Sun Priest, where Aloy just keeps ranting on at him about why there can't be a Sun Queen, only Sun Kings. Which wouldn't be as shoehorned in feeling if Aloy didn't live in (well next to) a society that is completely martriarchal and neither she or the Sun dude notice the gigantic obvious bit of logic.

And its really kind of sloppy with explaining her familiarity/ability with machines (and some other bits there's no real context for, like being able to ride a horse-bot when there's no actual horses and controlling bots was just discovered). You can work out that she's probably learned something from her headset thing she found as a kid, but the game doesn't really highlight it much. She just seems constantly at ease with machines and technical stuff, and knows thats it not some weird magic/demons like everyone else believes in. Though its kind of vague how much anyone in the world knows. All the tribals don't seem particularly confused when a gun shows up, despite only using bows and stuff.

That dialogue seemed fairly normal for someone raised in a completely matriarchal society to be confused about why there couldn't be a sun queen, the sun dude didn't realize the irony because the Carja see the Nora as backwards savages and their entire religion is based around the sun king being the sun's vessel incarnate so it makes sense he doesn't grasp the concept as the sun king is a literal incarnation of a masculine entity whereas the Nora matriarchs are just leaders to him and he doesn't believe in the all mother at all .

The machine stuff is admittedly shortened for gameplay purposes, same reason Link in OOT instantly knows how to ride a horse despite spending all his life in a forest surrounded by people that can't leave the forest. Aloy herself has a ton of good reasons for not buying into Nora superstition with her focus filling in the gaps, the other tribes seem to grasp to some extent that the machines are man made except maybe the Banuk, though even they seem to get it Partially, they just replace a lot of science terms with spiritualism. The oseram especially seem to grasp a lot of the truth even if they don't have all the details.

The gun stuff seems to be part gameplay and part lore, gameplay wise they wanted you to use bows and slings rather than firearms.from the lore end they would have to make a massive jump to justify producing primitive firearms over their special payloads and weapons harvested from machines. Like how The Oseram have "cannons" that aren't really cannons at all. They understand that machines have advanced weapons and can harvest them, but don't understand how to create their own copies from scratch. That coupled with the ice,fire,electrical payloads that can't be easily machined into a firearm likely makes bows more attractive as a flintlock or firearm that could be machined with their own tech level would be completely inferior to the parts they can harvest from machines. Especially as the firearms don't seem to be regular guns, instead they are rail guns, caseless ammunition, smart weapons, or directed energy weapons, so it's not like just learning to produce bullets, they would need to understand concepts that even our society today struggles with in order to even begin reverse engineering the weapons that the machines use.

There is a gap that such a civilization would need to overcome as they can take far more advanced technology from the wildlife, so the drive to produce that technology from scratch is lessened as anything they produce would likely be markably inferior for generations as the industrial base tries to catch up with the tech they can just go out and hunt.

 

[B-Cell_v1legacy]

@ Ishigami
There really is no ideal solution, but i think the intent is to swing the pendulum in the other direction, so to speak. I think it's readily apparent after hundreds, hell thousands of years how much man has accomplished already; like realizing water is wet, it kinda goes without saying and should be appreciated invariably.

But when you think of how much trouble we seem to have learning from the darker parts of our history...it's human nature to go from one extreme to another. We as a species have difficulty finding a balance in so many facets of life. Race, religion, politics, economics, health, even identity.

Not trying to defend or condemn, but thinking that we're basically just constantly reacting to the culminations of our long, complicated existence and its legacy.

 

[laggyteabag]

So I was just scrolling through this guy's videos, and he is just this weird paranoid guy that thinks that all game critics are corporate shills.

I really cant figure out the kind of games that he likes. The problem is that he doesn't seem to know how to distinguish between features that are bad, and features that he doesn't like.

He also is quite keen on the good ol' herperbole. A game is either the best thing ever, or console trash.

<spoiler=Here is a handy Critical Miss comic that perfectly illustrates this>

He's just a bit wank, to be honest.

 

[sXeth]

The gun stuff seems to be part gameplay and part lore, gameplay wise they wanted you to use bows and slings rather than firearms.from the lore end they would have to make a massive jump to justify producing primitive firearms over their special payloads and weapons harvested from machines. Like how The Oseram have "cannons" that aren't really cannons at all. They understand that machines have advanced weapons and can harvest them, but don't understand how to create their own copies from scratch. That coupled with the ice,fire,electrical payloads that can't be easily machined into a firearm likely makes bows more attractive as a flintlock or firearm that could be machined with their own tech level would be completely inferior to the parts they can harvest from machines. Especially as the firearms don't seem to be regular guns, instead they are rail guns, caseless ammunition, smart weapons, or directed energy weapons, so it's not like just learning to produce bullets, they would need to understand concepts that even our society today struggles with in order to even begin reverse engineering the weapons that the machines use.

There is a gap that such a civilization would need to overcome as they can take far more advanced technology from the wildlife, so the drive to produce that technology from scratch is lessened as anything they produce would likely be markably inferior for generations as the industrial base tries to catch up with the tech they can just go out and hunt.

I was more specifically referencing

Spoiler

The Proving where the Deathbringer guy pulls out the minigun and kills Vala and Bast. Their reactions aren't completely off base, Vala freezes up in shock and Bast clearly doesn't have a good handle on what he's facing since he runs out into the hail of bullets. But then it just resets into the fight again and Aloy doesn't say anything about it during or after, and can even use the gun if you kill the guy without comment or difficulty. Knocking guns off machines and using them does come up later, but those machines aren't in the Embrace for them to know about (Though neither are Grazers, which is part of the ritual itself, so maybe I'm just putting too much emphasis on the tutorial area restricting enemy types)

Speaking of spoilers, I was a bit mildly annoyed that after avoiding spoilers, the skill menu gave away guns and human enemies. Especially since it does conceal the controlling machines bit until it comes up.

 

[EternallyBored]

I was more specifically referencing

Spoiler

The Proving where the Deathbringer guy pulls out the minigun and kills Vala and Bast. Their reactions aren't completely off base, Vala freezes up in shock and Bast clearly doesn't have a good handle on what he's facing since he runs out into the hail of bullets. But then it just resets into the fight again and Aloy doesn't say anything about it during or after, and can even use the gun if you kill the guy without comment or difficulty. Knocking guns off machines and using them does come up later, but those machines aren't in the Embrace for them to know about (Though neither are Grazers, which is part of the ritual itself, so maybe I'm just putting too much emphasis on the tutorial area restricting enemy types)

Speaking of spoilers, I was a bit mildly annoyed that after avoiding spoilers, the skill menu gave away guns and human enemies. Especially since it does conceal the controlling machines bit until it comes up.

Ah, I see where you're coming from now:

Spoiler

Yeah, the Nora likely have never seen a deathbringer gun specifically, and the opening areas kind of give you an idea that the Embrace doesn't really have the bigger machines, specifically the armed varieties like Ravagers and thunderjaws, as they struggle against the incursion of Sawtooths that have been breaching their inner walls. They do seem to trade some info with people at the border, so I'd imagine at least someone like Aloy might be more familiar with the concept of armed machines and guns.

When I saw the part I generally thought it was less incomprehension of the gun as a concept so much as it was the Nora freezing up at the sight of someone wielding a machine weapon as that would likely be forbidden by the Nora religion, that and they were young and inexperienced initiates. The actual Nora braves you run into later seem used to the concept of guns, although the game doesn't really specify if its just info from outsiders or if the larger machines actually make it inside the valley and we just don't see them for gameplay reasons. As for Aloy just picking up and using the Deathbringer, yeah I would just chalk that up to gameplay, or her focus, like how she can instinctively use the corrupter device to override machines seconds after basically taping it to her spear.

As for the skills, I can see why that might be a pain if you went in blind, the overriding is a big enough mechanic that is mostly unique to Aloy alone, so I can see why they hid it, whereas guns and human enemies were all over the trailers, they likely wanted to push those to show combat variety and didn't think to make them a reveal, especially since both are revealed at the same time within the first hour of the game. Although overriding seems to come not long after.

 

[sageoftruth]

Dude what even? You don't care, you only play 1st person shooters of the manliest of manly variety. Just let people enjoy things.

Though I have absolutely no interest in either game, I will say that because of this, I'd be far more likely to get Nier: Automata than I would Horizon: Zero Dawn. Mainly because the story of H: ZD is preachy as all hell.

It is? I haven't actually heard anything about the story yet. I never thought of Ubisoft as the kind of company to produce preachy games, since being safe and cautious is often the cornerstone of their designs.

 

[sageoftruth]

He is best reviewer currently and say things professional reviewers will lose the job if they point out those flaws. I dont always agree with him for example his Doom review was terrible and complain about why its like old doom.

The best reviewer currently... the guy doing the video in the link is the best video game reviewer currently? Well skipping the uming and uhing that he constantly doe throughout his reviews, the off hand bollock laiden statements that mean nothing and moving straight on to two very key statements that render his reviewing critique as next to worthless.

'If you're a typical shallow consoler gamer'
'These games play you you don't play them'

What this guy has done is instead of reviewing the game purely on IT'S merits or FLAWS he has allowed his own pre conceived opinions of a). Console games and b). Console gamers to cloud his entire review and frankly that doesn't make him the best reviewer currently, that makes him a pretty piss poor game reviewer.

Of course their is also a vague and over powering wiff, of I am giving a poor review to something everyone else is reviewing highly that seems to be a constant theme throughout the video as he tries to mention how others have reviewed it well at every opportunity he can find.

Jim Sterling gave the game a 9.5/10 and we can all guess how much of a fuck he gives about keeping the publishers happy.

In B-Cell's defense (crosses self), Worth a Buy may actually be the best reviewer for him, provided their taste in games perfectly matches up. I think both are ridiculous in how they try to justify the universality of their opinions, but this may be a match made in heaven, provided he actually does have the exact same taste as Worth a Buy and isn't just stubbornly basing his worldview on the trash coming from the guy's mouth.

 

[go-10]

is this a new trend now?

Whenever a game gets a good score people get mad and say video games media lies and they nit pick a bunch of things they don't like and the generally praised game is actually a turd or just average fodder.

what games do these people enjoy?

 

[Catfood220]

Dude what even? You don't care, you only play 1st person shooters of the manliest of manly variety. Just let people enjoy things.

Though I have absolutely no interest in either game, I will say that because of this, I'd be far more likely to get Nier: Automata than I would Horizon: Zero Dawn. Mainly because the story of H: ZD is preachy as all hell.

It is? I haven't actually heard anything about the story yet. I never thought of Ubisoft as the kind of company to produce preachy games, since being safe and cautious is often the cornerstone of their designs.

Ubisoft didn't make this one, Guerrilla did. And to be fair, I've not found it preachy at all. Granted I don't go looking for reasons to get upset about stuff in videogame or other media I enjoy. Life is too short. But if someone went into this looking for something to get upset about, the fact that you play as a girl and her tribe is run by women, then that might rustle some jimmies. But other than that, I haven't found anything that anything that I consider preachy. Maybe I haven't played far enough yet.

Edit: Ok, I've actually read the article and all I can say is that the guy who wrote is is reading too much into things when he starts saying that Alloy is "the best" at everything and everyone else is incompetant, especially the men. To which I will say, well duh. She is the player character, the player character is usually the best at everything in pretty much every game I've played. They would be pretty shit games if the player character was utter rubbish and had to have everyone else do everything for them while they sat and watched. The problem seems to be the fact that the player character in this game is a woman. I doubt the writer would have a problem if it was a man, despite the game showing Alloy being trained to be a fierce warrior by a man. Which is just sad.

If anyone has a problem with what I said and have their fingers twitching in anger ready to write a scathing response for me. Don't bother, I won't be drawn into a argument about this. Its not worth it.

 

[sageoftruth]

Ubisoft didn't make this one, Guerrilla did. And to be fair, I've not found it preachy at all. Granted I don't go looking for reasons to get upset about stuff in videogame or other media I enjoy. Life is too short. But if someone went into this looking for something to get upset about, the fact that you play as a girl and her tribe is run by women, then that might rustle some jimmies. But other than that, I haven't found anything that anything that I consider preachy. Maybe I haven't played far enough yet.

Edit: Ok, I've actually read the article and all I can say is that the guy who wrote is is reading too much into things when he starts saying that Alloy is "the best" at everything and everyone else is incompetant, especially the men. To which I will say, well duh. She is the player character, the player character is usually the best at everything in pretty much every game I've played. They would be pretty shit games if the player character was utter rubbish and had to have everyone else do everything for them while they sat and watched. The problem seems to be the fact that the player character in this game is a woman. I doubt the writer would have a problem if it was a man, despite the game showing Alloy being trained to be a fierce warrior by a man. Which is just sad.

If anyone has a problem with what I said and have their fingers twitching in anger ready to write a scathing response for me. Don't bother, I won't be drawn into a argument about this. Its not worth it.

Ah I see. If Ubisoft isn't behind it then that looks like another reason to look forward to it. I guess I just saw the open world and a few Far Cry/Assassin's Creed-esque mechanics and jumped to conclusions there.

Cheers to another game that doesn't require Uplay!

 

[B-Cell_v1legacy]

Dude what even? You don't care, you only play 1st person shooters of the manliest of manly variety. Just let people enjoy things.

Though I have absolutely no interest in either game, I will say that because of this, I'd be far more likely to get Nier: Automata than I would Horizon: Zero Dawn. Mainly because the story of H: ZD is preachy as all hell.

It is? I haven't actually heard anything about the story yet. I never thought of Ubisoft as the kind of company to produce preachy games, since being safe and cautious is often the cornerstone of their designs.

Ubisoft didn't make this one, Guerrilla did. And to be fair, I've not found it preachy at all. Granted I don't go looking for reasons to get upset about stuff in videogame or other media I enjoy. Life is too short. But if someone went into this looking for something to get upset about, the fact that you play as a girl and her tribe is run by women, then that might rustle some jimmies. But other than that, I haven't found anything that anything that I consider preachy. Maybe I haven't played far enough yet.

Edit: Ok, I've actually read the article and all I can say is that the guy who wrote is is reading too much into things when he starts saying that Alloy is "the best" at everything and everyone else is incompetant, especially the men. To which I will say, well duh. She is the player character, the player character is usually the best at everything in pretty much every game I've played. They would be pretty shit games if the player character was utter rubbish and had to have everyone else do everything for them while they sat and watched. The problem seems to be the fact that the player character in this game is a woman. I doubt the writer would have a problem if it was a man, despite the game showing Alloy being trained to be a fierce warrior by a man. Which is just sad.

If anyone has a problem with what I said and have their fingers twitching in anger ready to write a scathing response for me. Don't bother, I won't be drawn into a argument about this. Its not worth it.

Just wanted to say you are becoming one of my favorite posters here. I actually lol'd visualizing that last paragraph.

 

[CaitSeith]

is this a new trend now?

Whenever a game gets a good score people get mad and say video games media lies and they nit pick a bunch of things they don't like and the generally praised game is actually a turd or just average fodder.

New? It has been a thing since "overrated" was first used in gaming.

what games do these people enjoy?

Call of Duty. /s

 

[CritialGaming]

I can't wait to sink my weekend into Horizon and give you guys my review. I'm super excited, and I really like writing reviews for this forum, even if ya'll hate me.

 

[Catfood220]

Just wanted to say you are becoming one of my favorite posters here. I actually lol'd visualizing that last paragraph.

Awwww, shucks. But hold the applause, I'll probably say something dumb next time.