Horizon Zero Dawn Catch-All

Went back into the main quests, and it has started referencing to the DLC story. That is quite nice. Hope it was not just a one off.

I'm now into this game after dropping off it early on. I like that there is lots of crafting and weapons but it's just the right side of being too complicated. I keep seeing and being amazed by small details in the costumes for characters and the make up of the robots that show the care and love that has gone into it.

I'm playing it occasionally as well but I don't think I can do it as my primary game at the moment. In the end I find myself primarily focusing on character-based side-quests, errands, corrupted zones and bandit camps. I primarily like stealthing about, and I find the game accommodating enough that when I inevitably get spotted I can still be clever (against humans, at least. Machines are more gullible to traps but are pretty vicious about tracking you down).

I'm intentionally not buying maps for the metal flowers and other such things because at that point I know this game would drive me nuts and become a slog. So by ignoring a bunch of the options in there I can instead focus on items I enjoy and therefore not feel like I'm caught in the whims of a Ubiworld game.

Its not as bad as most Ubiworld games, I usually just pick things up on the way to the next quest waypoint, the only thing I kind of avoid is the corrupted zones as some of them are pretty brutal at my level.

Honestly, the collectibles weren't that bad. A couple of the Banuk figures were hard to find the starting points for the climbs, but that was probably more due to my propensity to try jumping up and over mountains like in Skyrim, rather than look for sometimes poorly-marked handholds in the dark.

I didn't mind the icons, and you can filter them off on the maps. So, right away all the different machine zones can be cleared out and that removes a ton of info. It is much like the Witcher for me where I can pick and choose what I want to see which I like. Need to find some scrappers? Turn on the machines and jump to a campfire nearby.

Yeah, I got all the maps, but picked up things marked by them on the way to whatever quest I was doing.

ccesarano wrote:

Also: don't expect any encounter to work as wonderfully as the E3 trailer. I've reached the point where I forget to use the ropecaster because mother f*ck why are you gonna put the Sawtooth's weak point on his belly if you're never gonna give me a clear shot.

I had plenty of encounters that played out just like that trailer or better. If you learn to use your tools in this game, you can do some truly incredible stuff.

I actually used the ropecaster for the very first time in the DLC, taking down a Stormbird. Stealth, overriding, and the bow - pretty much in that order - were by far my weapons of choice in Horizon, and I appreciate that the game let me play it the way I chose to without making me feel like I was hobbling myself.

I should confess to getting better with these encounters and learning to Ropecaster better. I actually took out a corrupted zone by sniping from across a stream, annihilating all but one Scrapper. As he crept across the stream, I dropped a blastwire between two trees, shot a coaxing arrow at him to get his attention, and watched as he 'sploded to death.

Was very satisfying, but it was also just a bunch of Watchers and some scrappers. I think I need to get better at jumping into my inventory and swapping gear in the menu to handle combat better, though. For example, fire arrows are not enough to overheat a Corruptor and thus should probably equip the blast sling to light him on fire and get that weakpoint that shows when he overheats to appear, because otherwise.... you're just chipping away and dodging after blasting the two big gun components off.

ccesarano wrote:

I should confess to getting better with these encounters and learning to Ropecaster better. I actually took out a corrupted zone by sniping from across a stream, annihilating all but one Scrapper. As he crept across the stream, I dropped a blastwire between two trees, shot a coaxing arrow at him to get his attention, and watched as he 'sploded to death.

Was very satisfying, but it was also just a bunch of Watchers and some scrappers. I think I need to get better at jumping into my inventory and swapping gear in the menu to handle combat better, though. For example, fire arrows are not enough to overheat a Corruptor and thus should probably equip the blast sling to light him on fire and get that weakpoint that shows when he overheats to appear, because otherwise.... you're just chipping away and dodging after blasting the two big gun components off.

When you unlock triple arrows, higher-end fire runes, and bows with 4 slots, you can absolutely set anything in the game on fire in one shot.

My dumbest fight was against two corrupted Sawtooths (Sawteeth?) on a tiny island in a lake in the jungle south of Meridian. Died and retried 10 times until I found a spot to hide in the grass and laid down every fire/blast/shock trap I had in a line between me and them, then stood up and fired at them to lure them right through that chokepoint. Amazed it worked, and that I didn't think of it sooner.

First time I shot a Behemoth was tense, too. I was severely underleveled, and it chased me through trees it snapped like toothpicks for a good 3 minutes, intent on murdering me.

I finished the proving the other night and need to get back into it.

Already annoyed with how many things there are too clutter inventory. I built one bag expansion already and created a ton of ammo, traps, etc, but still maxed inventory during the battle.

Yeah, early on prioritize hunting animals for their skins so you can upgrade bag space, after that it stops being really an issue.

I spent one evening just maxing out carry capacity, and then basically never had to worry about juggling inventory again. Whenever I'm in a place with a merchant, I sell all resources that have no use other than Selling For Shards and Trading With Merchants, or that I have more than five slots of.

Getting some of the animal skins/bones can be pretty tedious, though, since they're randomized. I killed one hell of a lot of raccoons just to get one raccoon bone.

I was worried about selling "trade with merchants" after that early quest gave me a new weapon for a lens.

How long is the buyback period?

Didn't want to lock myself out of a trade for nice armor or weapon by selling rare parts. Should I be concerned with that?

I've just done my first Cauldron. I was expecting some kind of bog standard arena fight. That was way more than I was expecting. It gives a lot more depth to the game (no pun intended.)

So glad I'm into the game now. I was worried that I'd bounced off it.

So. I'm a little late getting the DLC because of Civ6, but I'm nearly all the way through it. I'm a teensy bit disappointed because there were only three or so new machines and they're not particularly interesting ones. The first one interests me the most currently. The second one - I'm not entirely sure it's a "fair" machine.

I played the game on Ultra Hard up until the Trials. I was having trouble with strategy at that point and just wanted a silver, so I bumped it down to Very Hard and I felt like I liked the game best like this with my current equipment (no Adept weapons).

Spoilered for new DLC machine content:

Spoiler:

I haven't encountered a quest with a 2 Frostclaws, but I did just complete one with 3. It's a bear of a fight. Haha.

The trouble with the homing attack isn't that it follows you - lots of machine attacks kind of do that. The trouble with it is that you can't tell it's coming your way if you're not directly looking at the Frostclaw, so it can be a very nasty surprise. So the way to deal with it (and Frostclaws in general) is to use terrain to break line of sight so you're only ever in the sight of one Frostclaw. It is possible to permanent disable this attack by destroying the Frostclaw's center body panel.

The mainline quest with 3 Frostclaws specifically involves two climbable terrain features that you can use to break targeting and to target Frostclaws with advantage. They're similar to the Behemoth site near Oseram territory with similar features. On Very Hard, they take a lot of damage from a Fire-modded Hunter Bow.

ccesarano wrote:

I'm playing it occasionally as well but I don't think I can do it as my primary game at the moment. In the end I find myself primarily focusing on character-based side-quests, errands, corrupted zones and bandit camps. I primarily like stealthing about, and I find the game accommodating enough that when I inevitably get spotted I can still be clever (against humans, at least. Machines are more gullible to traps but are pretty vicious about tracking you down).

I'm intentionally not buying maps for the metal flowers and other such things because at that point I know this game would drive me nuts and become a slog. So by ignoring a bunch of the options in there I can instead focus on items I enjoy and therefore not feel like I'm caught in the whims of a Ubiworld game.

I'm not entirely sure how much you like the boss battles in Megaman, but I felt like this game was kind of like that, in 3D. By far the main draw in this game for me was the machines and the overland map that functioned like a giant hunting arena. I'd sometimes play five minutes with no goal other than to execute a specific plan I'd thought up against a particular set of machines in a specific machine site.

The game's stealth is enjoyable enough, but I feel like it's the machine combat that really sets this game apart from any other game. The entire overland map isn't so much an elaborate menu for choosing missions as it is the setting for the mission itself. The composition, location, number, and disposition of machines at every location on the map is distinct and offers a unique challenge. Even the "blank" areas are intentional, giving you room to run away, set up an attack, or execute an ambush against a convoy.

I also imposed a self-limitation of never changing outfits or weapons while I was actively being attacked. This rule gives each set of weapons I choose a specific function or specialty.

Here's Aloy chasing down and dispatching a herd of Tramplers in Oseram Freebooter territory. The site was specifically selected because of its flat terrain and mix of machines. Perfect for machineback hunting.

Stele wrote:

I was worried about selling "trade with merchants" after that early quest gave me a new weapon for a lens.

How long is the buyback period?

Didn't want to lock myself out of a trade for nice armor or weapon by selling rare parts. Should I be concerned with that?

Nope. You want metal shards and you want lots of it. If it comes down to it, you can just purchase the part you need for trade with a rare parts merchant in Meridian. It'd cost more, but you'll get it guaranteed. The "rare'' purchasable weapons and armor in HZD are easy to acquire. It's the mods that can be tough.

Oh yeah, forgot how fun corruption arrows are. Those are gonna come in handy on ultra hard. If you can't get around a tough fight, turn them all against each other until there's one weakened enemy left.

Yeah, love those arrows. In the DLC most enemies are sadly immune.

I don't recall a main quest with 3 frostclaws. Wonder if there is some randomness in there, or changes in a path.
In ultra hard they really didn't care much about my fire-modded bow. Nor did line of sight stop their ground spikes attack. Robecaster stopped them from doing their attacks for some seconds each time though, so that worked, but an extremely expensive strategy in wire ressources.

Horizon Zero Dawn : Tree Destruction

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I'm quite happy with these photos I took after getting back into the game. Originally posted them in the digital shutterbug thread, but I think they are interesting enough to go here too.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Finally getting back to Horizon: Zero Dawn. Here are my latest photos:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/ESwBsr4.jpg)


IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/oLuZHZw.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/bgZto5O.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/1bcBBwo.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/JqbRYfw.jpg)

Getting more of a hang for the machines and the DLC now.

Shadout wrote:

Yeah, love those arrows. In the DLC most enemies are sadly immune.

I don't recall a main quest with 3 frostclaws. Wonder if there is some randomness in there, or changes in a path.
In ultra hard they really didn't care much about my fire-modded bow. Nor did line of sight stop their ground spikes attack. Robecaster stopped them from doing their attacks for some seconds each time though, so that worked, but an extremely expensive strategy in wire ressources.

I feel like they're compensating for some balance oddness with both the Ultra Hard mode and the DLC. Each on their own is fine. The reason I started the DLC on Ultra Hard was because I was playing around on UH in the base game. Once I got into the DLC, the reduced elemental power of your weapons on UH and the increased elemental resistances of enemies when they're Daemonized combines to make the enemies essentially immune to elemental weapons, even when they're supposed to be weak to it. I noted this especially for the Daemonized Scorcher. On Very Hard, they're extremely reasonable, especially once you got your hands on a Champion Bow. On Ultra Hard, they're bullet sponges. Takes forever to take them down.

I think Guerilla compensated for the effect by reducing the number of Frostclaws on Ultra Hard in that encounter and also just reducing Frostclaw HP and their damage to Aloy when they occur with other enemies.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the DLC in general. It's more HZD, so yay, but basically invalidating Corruption Arrows right out feels like a kludge. The new bows are insanely powerful. The new weapons are so strange that I haven't figured out what they're even for.

The Scorcher seems like it would be okay on Normal or Hard (not a spoiler - it's the very first machine you see in Frozen Wilds). But it shakes off Frozen pretty fast on Very Hard, and unreasonably fast on Ultra Hard. In addition, if you disable its attacks by removing parts, you leave it nothing but its charge-at-you Ignition Boost attack married to hyper awareness and aggression on Ultra Hard. So at the last it just constantly charges you, which is not particularly interesting or fun.

On the other hand, both the Scorcher and the Frostclaw are slow enough that a full gallop can pace them and Ignition Boost is easy to dodge by simply going perpendicular to the Scorcher. So they're interesting machines to hunt on machineback. Though I can't imagine too many players doing that.

Thought one of the limitations of Ultra Hard was that you couldn't change the difficulty?
Makes sense they adjusted difficulty of som encounters in UH, can't imagine fighting 3 frostclaws.
Can only agree about the Scorcher, that one was way too aggressive.

One of the things I wanted in vanilla HZD was some sort of endgame challenges that demanded the user of a wider array of weapons and armors.
The DLC does not exactly get there, I still didn't use most of the non-bow weapons, but at least the game did try to offer more specialized enemy types. I certainly were more concerned about stacking the right mods in weapons/armors than in vanilla.

Never got around to try the new bows actually. Didn't had the mats for the one I was most interested in (Sharpshot Bow).

tuffalobuffalo - you should send those along to the publisher, I'd bet they think they were cool

Rahmen wrote:

tuffalobuffalo - you should send those along to the publisher, I'd bet they think they were cool

Thanks! I wish they did a weekly photo contest. That'd be cool.

Crosspost from Video Game Deals thread:

Stele wrote:

Horizon Zero Dawn is $20 at Amazon again. That's the BF advertised price at a few places, but go ahead and grab it early if you want.

I must be getting so close to the end. I started mainlining it this month in an effort to finish, but the end is still dragging out a bit longer than I thought it would. Not a problem, but I'm anxious to check off the "finished" box. Really digging the story stuff towards the end!

Sidenote: I probably mentioned this earlier this year, but seeing Geralt disguised as a villager everywhere is hilarious. I wonder if they grabbed that voice actor on purpose as a bit of a joke.

There's your problem! It'll only take a while, sir.
IMAGE(https://www.dropbox.com/s/b0tffpe3tzn5r0k/Horizon%20Zero%20Dawn%E2%84%A2_20171120111402.png?raw=1)

So many targets, so little time.
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