Horizon Forbidden West (2022)

Some more bugs I’ve encountered during my play through:

• We all know Aloy directs the player to complete specific actions giving the player no space to discover things on their own. However, Aloy also frequently describes what you need to do after you’ve completed it. I suppose this is because I’m a few steps ahead of the game given a lot of puzzles and quest actions are fairly generic so it’s easy to speed through them if you’re familiar with similar games
• When revisiting sites of completed quests Aloy will repeat quest specific dialogue that is clearly being triggered by location cues despite that contextually the dialogue no longer makes sense.
• During one specific quest line Aloy identifies the purpose of an Utaru shrine at the start of a quest, then half way through the quest says this appears to be a shrine of unknown origin and significance, clearly dialogue that should only be triggered if you discover the location before being assigned the quest.
• On a salvaging quest that requires you to override a Bristleback, Aloy starts the quest saying “Runda said only a Bristleback can find the missing items. That shouldn’t be a problem.” Moments later when you locate the quest related Bristleback that you need to override, Aloy says “There must be a cauldron somewhere where I can learn to override these machines.” This is despite the fact that the Bristleback override is unlocked in a main story quest that is a prerequisite to accessing the area where this salvage quest can be picked up.
• Periodically enemy machines that are alerted to your presence freeze in spot and don’t search for you and never return to their patrol route even if you hide from them for an extended period of time. The only solution is to aggro them again in the hopes you can lose them and reset their alert status.
• Other times machines that alerted to your presence will continue searching for you endlessly because their alert timer never counts down.
• Occasionally after successfully completing an arena battle the countdown timer continues and the end of the battle is never triggered even though the machines are dead. This forces you to abandon the fight because the fight otherwise never ends. This is a problem if you’re completing some of the harder arena challenges, especially on very hard.
• There is one particular pit fight challenge that fails regardless of the fact that you correctly execute the required attack combo. Abandoning the challenge then triggers a win. This was a serious pain because I executed it correctly several times, was told I failed multiple times and then succeeded only when I abandoned the challenge.
• Enemy rebels often bug out and run through dialogue that indicates they’ve seen you yet act like they haven’t. Sometimes enemies will shout at you as if they see you hidden in tall grass, but don’t actually attack you.
• Companions will contact you by focus only to be cut off mid sentence by some unknown and undetectable conflicting trigger.
• Encountered a Stormbird in San Francisco that you cannot aggro. You can shoot it down and kill it without it ever acknowledging you are there.
• The game still exhibits several graphical issues on PS5 including sudden colour palate changes or the screen turning black for a few milliseconds.
• Aloy mentions her stash less than before the last patch, but it still happens far too often.

Ugh, this game is frustrating. I've started collecting broken moments in Horizon Forbidden West, and I have a handful to share so far.

For some reason, and I haven't played the first game recently enough to recall if this was a problem in that game as well, Aloy has a lot of trouble with basic climbing. Not only is navigation clunky, with Aloy often moving in any direction other than the one you want her to move, she tends to get stuck a lot. Here's a fun clip of a time that she just bugged out on a standard cliff face:

And here is a short clip from today where Aloy simply refuses to grab a low level handhold on a cliff face, post patch 1.06. This one is new and I don't know if it was a bug present prior to the patch or if it was introduced by the patch:

Here is a clip of Aloy gliding into an opening on the side of a mountain outside Gaia's location:

And finally, this one has been bugging me since launch and something patch 1.06 was supposed to fix. Good news, it isn't fixed. Enjoy watching my Charger stop and get stuck on the very difficult train of a slight incline along a marked path:

It would all be pretty funny if the game wasn't so bloated and dull. I'm pretty sure I'm getting too old for AAA game design aimed at the widest audience possible. It just doesn't tick the boxes it used to.

Having spent nearly a week playing Horizon Forbidden West the following quotes from Malindy Hetfeld’s Eurogamer review really resonate with me:

• I can recognise and appreciate that Guerrilla made attempts to address some common criticisms of the first game. However, in most cases these intended improvements don't actually improve a lot.
• The variety of weapons would ideally mean that players have the freedom to use whatever weapon they like best, but too many of them are expensive, or sold in unlikely places, to make that happen. I can't speak for the higher difficulties, but the fact that I just didn't need most of the new additions is part of why a lot of them felt like stuff, rather than useful new tools.
• Forbidden West feels like a game that wants to be more than the original was, but in reality it can be played with the same skill set and items from its predecessor, and does not feel worse for it. So why are they there?
• Food, which you can forage for and have someone make for you at a settlement, and a stash for items Aloy can no longer hold on her person, are two more new additions I didn't really know what to do with. Both are prime examples of RPG elements lifted from other games that just won't work in the context of Horizon. The world is so full of all kinds of stuff I didn't feel the need to access my stash. Usually I just didn't know what was in there, having forgotten how many times the game told me "pouch full, sent to stash". And, left with no easy way to check unless I wanted to travel back to a settlement and take a peek in there myself, it was easy to ignore.
• in Forbidden West, I don't think enemies have become smarter - they still overwhelmingly remain standing in the same spot while you shoot at them, and tend to shoot the wall beneath you whenever you're in a slightly elevated position.
• Forbidden West successfully manages to undermine most of what was interesting and fun about Zero Dawn's story, because the deeper you look into things, the more you get confronted with pseudo, sci-fi fantasy stuff that even in a video game is difficult to take seriously - and oh, does it want to be taken seriously
• As a woman with African roots, it was also startling to see Zulu face paint in the game being treated as a cosmetic, something you can get at a settlement for shards, as if it were fun Halloween makeup - completely removed from its cultural significance. As a result of all this, Horizon Forbidden West is still evidently not a game that has anything of interest to say about its apocalypse, brought about, essentially, by a few Silicon Valley idiots, other than "look how pretty these holograms are". It's a game that exists to be looked at.
• While Forbidden West is not a difficult game to understand, it acts like it is. Aloy will narrate your every move, and I mean every move ("I should scan this." "I fell off and need to find my way back up"), robbing you of all agency to discover anything for yourself. Characters will explain the same issue over and over, but feel like empty, quest-giving shells otherwise (also a frequent criticism of the first game). And again, there's the lingering sense of borrowing without meaning, without understanding the original context of what's being borrowed.