In the end I caved, because the time seemed right to upgrade our decade old computers. After putting them together I wanted to experience a game like Forbidden West in all of its modern glory.
What was something of a problem was the initial setup. In the previous game HDR seemed to Just Work™ and look good, but perhaps that was an illusion. In Forbidden West I had to look up what the weird words even meant. Also I strongly suspect the dynamic range aspect of the whole affair is overall fairly insignificant in making the game look better, but that it’s mainly the 10-bit that comes along with it.
Horizon Forbidden West is a pretty decent if not excellent game so far, though I did get stuck in the environment a few times which I don’t think ever happened to me in Zero Dawn. For example I would be innocently swimming around underwater with as a result clipping through the edge of the level being unable to get out. (I only remembered I had an instant travel backpack available after I reloaded my save…)
One of the more annoying things it did was a few hours in, when you exit the tutorialish environment to enter the roll credits Forbidden West and it played this half hour movie instead.
In the simplest terms it’s basically the first game but even better looking, new enemies, some improvements, some questionable changes. One improvement is that surplus gets automatically sent to your stash rather than having to go breaking up parts as you’re wandering about. That was just annoying. But somehow this is coupled to being able to refill your health herbs and such from your stash while out in the wild??? (Maybe it’s 'cause I didn’t play on ultrahard or whatever but you can still die in one hit when you mess up so the difficulty doesn’t seem like it’s way too easy). I hadn’t realized this medicinal berry refill possibility at first because it doesn’t seem to make any sense.
They added swimming (notably missing from the previous game with loot frequently being unattainable). But then just every underwater cave you swim into is blocked off due to not having diving equipment yet to go deeper until you’re a third? halfway? through the game. In retrospect it might make more sense to “rush” through some of the main story to attain things like diving equipment, but I suppose it doesn’t matter too much since you can fast travel back later with campfires.
And then finally, I found the final fight(s) in Burning Shores a bit of a bore. A matter of the boss enemies being invincible except at the right time when they’re vulnerable. On the flip side, maybe it was what they wanted the final fight in Zero Dawn to be? It was good spectacle though, visually very impressive.
. As for Forbidden West, I’m still holding out. In the meantime I got Atlas Fallen, which took about a year to come to GOG. It gives off similar vibes, though I haven’t actually tried it yet. For some reason, I’m not in the mood for playing video games at the moment, even though my wishlist and backlog keep growing.
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