Daft

I sunk a solid amount of time into this over the weekend. Here are a few initial impressions. The Good Combat. It's a lot of fun. I thought I'd hate the weapon durability thing but once you accept it, it kind of just works. I do wish there was an item like a Whetstone that let you either repair your weapon pre-breaking or allowed you to up its durability a bit. While I appreciate weapons breaking forces you to switch up your play...I don't quite buy it; I end up just using anything and everything because the difference between a spear and a two-handed broadsword is...neither vast, nor a cause to change how I really play. The visuals. Forgetting the immersion-killing frame-rate drops, it looks good. The art style does wonders to cover up how sparse the detail often is. But having come off Horizon on a Pro, I feel like its a great looking game in-spite of the hardware, not because of it. The world. The interplay between all the game systems is superb. It's a lot of fun using the lay of the land to your advantage. The exploration. I feel like this could be a double edge-sword, but it's worked for me. When I stumbled across the thing in the spoilers below I was in awe. The food. Cooking is fun. I think it's much better implemented than in FFXV. The Bad The opening. It's a real damp-squib of an opening. Probably the worst opening of any Zelda game in memory, bar Skyward Sword which tutorial-ed me to death. The music. It's just not doing anything for me. The game is too...quiet. The world. As much as it works mechanically, narratively the world is dull. Before even meeting the uninteresting characters or being introduced to the over-arcing story, the world feels...empty. On the way to Kakariko Village, there's a little fire, with some equipment under a bridge. Any other game might have something to read, like a piece of a diary. There might be something scrawled on a wall. The item position might suggest something about that place. But there's just nothing there. Similarly, there are ruins everywhere, but they're never to realise any story, they're just...things that occupy a space. The dudes sitting at the end of each shrine...none of them have anything interesting to say (I think they all literally say the same thing). Why couldn't they impart some kind of lore? So it overwhelmingly feels like I'm playing a game and not role-playing a story.

I stopped playing Fallout about 15 hours in. There was something strangely not compelling about it.

Play Horizon while we're all playing it.

Completed it. So much to talk about. The story, what happened, where it's going. What they could add. One thing I'll say before going into spoiler territory is, it's been a very long time since I played an endgame that was this smooth and enjoyable. There was no dumb Uncharted 2-like end boss. There were no random quicktime events (*cough* Uncharted 4 *cough*). In fact, from the beginning to the end, the game didn't dip in quality at all for me. It just kept building; everything I learned and everything I did just filled out this bloody wonderful tapestry. In terms of gameplay and narrative it's one of the most laser focused games I've played – it might not do anything revolutionary but what it does do, without hesitation, it does better than everything else. I really didn't think Guerilla Games had it in them. Sony have owned this studio for 12 years now and it has finally paid dividends, this is a game worth of Naughty Dog. Now onto spoilers...

Mass Effect is going to lose out. After I'm done with Horizon, I'm going to give Zelda a go hopefully. And then Persona 5.

Bias to what?

Soooo...I wasn't as close to the end as I thought. Got a few more things to do. I did however get the Power Armour thing...which is making everything a bit of a breeze (which I'm enjoying).

I'll get one in a year or so. It's not cutting edge technology so I'm not seeing anything new in that respect. The longer I wait the more games there will be, the better idea I'll have of the support it will actually get and there's a chance the price will come down to something reasonable. I'm kind of waiting for Pokemon...

@Choze are you allergic to spoiler tags or something? I think I've got to the final mission. Going to do it tonight. Can't wait.

Jesus, no. I need a palate cleanser not an acid bath to the face. I'm looking forward to starting Zelda properly too. Like I said there are a couple things I simply do not like but hopefully I'll get over them. I definitely get the impression that the good outweighs the bad.

@Hero\-of\-Time When I took the photo I was like...holy shit. This game is pretty but this is something else. What if I'd arrived at another time of day? What if it had been raining?! Or a sandstorm had blown in? What would every other mission in the game look like at other times of the day? And I had like a mindsplosion that was... this moonrise felt virtually unique. Something so easy to miss that seeing it felt damn special. That feeling was probably helped by the fact that I wasn't looking for Erend, I just stumbled across him fighting some Watchers. The whole thing felt so wonderfully emergent. But it wasn't emergent in the way Witcher 3 is, where the modular structure of missions and quests kind of all interplay superbly, it was because I'm so completely pulled into the world in Horizon that it felt like genuine serendipity that I found him; at that moment, in that place. It's weird. I do wonder how much Zelda will suffer because of my experiences with Horizon. The crappy controls and the weapon durability were big red flags for me but now I think what I might have found magical about it is going to just feel...childish. I'm definitely going to have to play something in between because I won't be able to avoid comparison otherwise.

Can anyone tell me how far through I am?

It's basically free content for every game, not sure why anyone wouldn't want it. I love that my Trophy List is a permanent record of the games I've played across three consoles. It's awesome. I think I got my first platinum like 7 years ago now. And I can see every game I've played since and a lot before.

QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL QoL!!!

I have to use about 5 ropes (probably more actually) with the ropecaster to topple anything big.

It looks a tad rough around the edges (....fucking hell, what doesn't after playing Horizon?) but it looks like a load of fun. I can't wait to get round to the first and then this.

I've not bought a slingshot yet. Is it worth it?

Nice shout. The compass was bugging me a bit.

I spent most of yesterday evening getting machines to fight each other. It's so much fun. I did an Override on a Snapmaw and all hell broke loose. As it was taking on another Snapmaw a second one turned up and started firing from a distance and then across the water a Watcher noticed shit going down...by which point I'd noped-out to a distance away to watch and cackle manically. Then I got one of those Sawtooth motherfuckers to take on a couple of those Big Bird mother fuckers.

I'm sure they still don't care.

Override one of them and get them to fight it out. Simple.

80K is great. Sure it could have been more but it's a good number and more importantly it's build on a solid piece of hardware. There's no especially naff concept to sell. I see good things coming.