Corin Tucker's Stalker posted:

Turns out the lead writer of Fallout: New Vegas (John Gonzalez) wrote most of this game. I'm way more interested in this now.

exquisite tea posted:

Please rename the subtitle to: Hunting Robodinos in the Uncanny Valley.

I so want this game to be good!! Please don't fail me European grimdark first-person shooter dudes.

Randomzx posted:

From everything I've seen in the streams, it is literally another soulless Ubisoft-style Open World game with piss poor repetitive gameplay and ham-fisted lame story. They've really made fighting robot animals look boring.

Gumball Gumption posted:

Oh thank god I'm glad there are goons from the future here to tell me the game was always bad. Those reviews had me tricked.

Lumpy the Cook posted:

Some guy got his hands on a copy of Horizon: Zero Dawn and streamed it over the weekend and I watched it on and off while cleaning the house.

ImpAtom posted:

For someone complaining about the story you don't actually appear to have understood the story or watched the story. Like you're actively straight-up wrong here to the point you got the polar direct opposite of the actual plot point you're complaining about.

Wendell posted:

As someone who left a stream playing in my bedroom while I watched the newest episode of hit TV show Riverdale at my friend's house I can safely say this game is poo poo

IcePhoenix posted:

here's the context behind Lumpy's review


So maybe trust the people that actually played the game. Like this person!


My roommate is buying the game so I'm just going to play it after he's done with it unless the user reviews are awful (in which case I will just play more Mass Effect probably).

Lumpy the Cook posted:

Lawrence Gilchrist posted:

I'm excited for the sequel, Vista: Nadir Sunrise.

Rhaegar posted:

Was looking for this thread last night and was surprised there wasn't one until now given all the pre-release hype from past E3s.

Gumball Gumption posted:

Niche games also tend to have more drip info and weird drama around them to talk about. I honestly have no idea what this thread would be about before the game came out. I guess everyone talking about zoids?

Jimbot posted:

This game got called feminist by a couple of outlets and features women and people of color in positions of power. This game is going to have a -1000000000000000 user review score on aggregation sites, isn't it?

Wanderer posted:

The bar for "feminist" in video games is set so low as to be subterranean, but yeah. There's probably going to be some troll drama.

Lumpy the Cook posted:

the Killzone developers made an open world Ubisoft game.

Jimbot posted:

From the examples they used, it sounds like there is some really liberal writing in the game that'll piss off the "PC culture ruining everything" crowd. A low bar, like you said, but for an AAA game to even have it and not as a marketing bullet point (apparently it's pretty subtle) is a pretty big deal. At least the liberal LGBTQ industry folk I follow on twitter or get retweeted by people I follow are impressed with it, so that at least says something. Jeff Gerstmann was also really gushing about the story in the Giantbombcast this week, so it sounds like the writing is top-notch all around.

Doorknob Slobber posted:

open world ubisoft games are bad and why would anyone copy that? poo poo gently caress this game looked so cool

Scorps posted:

This game looks incredible and all the reviews have been glowing so far, I haven't played many Ubi games in general so can't wait for this. By most accounts they cribbed only the "best parts" of those games any ways and didn't just copy/paste it. Some of the reviews are calling it the best PS4 exclusive yet.

Randomzx posted:

There's a reason why most of the high score review gloss over the gameplay, they cribbed pretty much all the turn-off-your-brain stuff and other mechanics and the game still manage to be more shallow.

Randomzx posted:

There's a reason why most of the high score review gloss over the gameplay, they cribbed pretty much all the turn-off-your-brain stuff and other mechanics and the game still manage to be more shallow.

Jeff Gerstmann posted:

Zero Dawn is structured quite a bit like the recent Far Cry games. You'll level up, gain new abilities by slapping points onto a skill tree, and hunt for crafting materials that let you hold more things in your inventory. You'll happen upon a handful of bandit camps, tag enemies, and try to prevent them from setting off an alarm if you're spotted. You'll climb a few things to reveal objectives on the map, but the game manages to craft a decent take on that concept that doesn't overstay its welcome. The stealth is satisfying, though some of the options you get to handle enemies can be a little game-breaking. For example, hiding in tall grass means you're effectively invisible, provided you haven't already been spotted. Early on, you can choose an ability that lets you whistle. It only ever alerts a single enemy, and that enemy comes right over to you, where you can take them out (unless they're one of the larger machines or armored humans) with a "silent strike." That doesn't alert the other enemies, usually, so you can do it again and again, clearing out entire areas with zero risk.

Open combat is more exciting, but it can also be slightly clunky. You always have a spear, which has a light and heavy attack. After some upgrades, a couple of heavy strikes will knock an enemy over, letting you jab them with a critical strike. The ranged combat is a bit more varied, though I never felt the need to use some of the fancier weapons, like a ropecaster that lets you strap enemies down, effectively knocking them over the same way your heavy melee strikes can. Or the tripcaster, which lets you set traps for enemies. The weapons work as advertised, but the different bows and arrow types always felt like the star of the show to me.

Fighting machines, especially bigger ones, gets easier if you pay attention to an enemy's weak points. You can knock off armor pieces and components as you fight, so disabling a stalker's stealth generator will make it unable to become cloaked. Knocking the gun off the top of a big cat machine means it can't shoot at you, and so on. There are lots of bits to chip off of larger enemies, and reducing their effectiveness is a great way to survive the larger fights. You'll have elemental arrows to exploit specific weaknesses, and a type of damage called "tear" is specifically designed to help you strip the machines clean before you start moving in for the kill. This leads to a few cheap moments where you can Skyrim-hop your way up the side of a mountain, where a machine can't follow, then patiently strip off every single piece from complete safety. But, by and large, it's an exciting system that makes every shot count and ratchets up tension in the bigger fights. Of course, if fighting isn't your thing you can reduce the number of encounters by learning how to override the machines, which tames them and makes them aggressive toward your enemies. Or you could always fire corruption arrows to confuse them into attacking each other... point being, the game has some nice options that'll let you play the encounters a few different ways.

L-O-N posted:

I'm pretty sure most of the reviews praise the gameplay and say it's one of the best open world combat systems out there.

Randomzx posted:

If you consider simplistic combat consisting of shooting weak points on braindead enemies for the rare moment you actually have to aim and MMO quest designs to be 'good gameplay'.

The gameplay was designed so poorly, that even though you have 'limited' arrows for combat, you just instantly replenish all of them by crafting midcombat in menu. Stealth attacks so broken you can literally kill people right in front of others from the grass. mass effect dialogue wheel that hardly affects anything at all, randomized loot that discourages actual exploration, blatant level scaling, boring equip upgrade system of watching generic numbers go up, bloated as hell UIs and batman vision so you don't ever have to pay attention to anything at all, and empty open world that you could hardly interact with at all.

Gumball Gumption posted:

I guess it is Ubisoft backlash but that seems so weird to me. The hate on that open world style is misguided, that style is just a canvas that a good game or a bad game can be built around. Shadow of Mordor, AC: Syndicate, Watch Dogs 2, are all good games using that format.