Horizon Zero Dawn was an open world action adventure game released back in 2017 and was developed by long running Sony owned studio, Guerilla Games. Most notably known for the Killzone franchise, the studio was tasked to develop a title to showcase the power and processing of Sony’s current console, the Playstation 4, and compete with Microsoft and the Xbox One. Now, Guerilla Games could have just made another linear first person shooter and called it good. Which they already did for the Playstation 4 with Killzone: Shadow Fall, but the game was negatively received due to how repetitive and unoriginal modern first shooter design was getting. They really needed a project to demonstrate the mass amounts of talent the team had accumulated over the years and that they were willing to grow up with the ever expanding video game industry. That’s when they decided to go where none of them had gone before. Guerilla was about to tackle the open world genre, which had become one of the biggest genres in gaming. Making an open world game is hard enough with all the environments and space you have to program, but making an open world that is actually good is even harder. You really have to be careful with how you set up the world and how the player progresses through it without getting bored or frustrated with the amount of exploration and activities they have to do. Top that with how other open worlds at the time like Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption were beginning to redefine the genre and you have a lot to compete with. Horizon Zero Dawn spent a fair bit of time in the depths of development hell as Guerilla Games was struggling to find a basic concept. That wasn’t until their art designer, Jan-Bart van Geek, proposed the idea of a world conquered by machines. Not as in a sci-fi robotic apocalypse, but beings made of gears and metal plating. A world where mankind has resorted back to primeval times and they would use outdated weapons to fight and possibly tame these mechanical monstrosities. It was an interesting idea and offered a unique twist on a popular science fiction trope. The team soon got to work and eventually they got an early build of the game working. A red haired woman firing away at a colossal mech using her bow. This soon led to the creation and lenghty development on Horizon Zero Dawn.
Gameplay for Horizon Zero Dawn was revealed during E3 2015 and showed a more proper build of the game. Many Playstation fans were amazed, but speculating what Horizon Zero Dawn would exactly be. Would it actually stand out and take a place in the Playstation hall of fame, or easily be forgotten for the mish mash of ideas it represented. Horizon Zero Dawn would be delayed to 2017 as the scope of the project got bigger each day, but during that time more information was revealed and it seemed like some actual thought was being put towards what should have been a generic open world with robot dinosaurs. John Gonzalez, one of the lead writers for Fallout: New Vegas, was revealed to be helping out with Horizon Zero Dawn. Helping structure the many politics and tribes, which is a great role for him since one of the key factors which made Fallout: New Vegas such an ingenious game was its politics and how they got the player thinking about their decisions and how they engaged with the world. Another big reveal was that they hired Ashley Burch to voice the main character. Ashly Burch was at the time becoming a renowned name throughout gaming culture and was genuinely well respected for her beliefs and work. Running her own comedy web series and making her big debut as Tiny Tina in Borderlands 2. There were also a ton of other video games she starred beforehand, but Borderlands 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn had to be Ashly’s most notable roles. As time went on the team got closer to completion and soon Horizon Zero Dawn went gold. Scheduled to release during late February of 2017. Everything was going well for the big launch of their new IP or so they thought.
2017 rolls around and it turns out the first quarter of the year was one of the busiest schedules the industry has seen in a longtime. Everyone who is a gamer knows that 2017 was one of the few landmark years in gaming for the many hits we saw. Within those first two months we got Nioh, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Yakuza 0, Gravity Rush 2, and more was to come. That didn’t stop Horizon Zero Dawn from being a big release at launch, but it was one Japanese company that drew the most attention in 2017. It was Nintendo and their new system, the Nintendo Switch. Along with the Nintendo Switch came one of the most anticipated games of the year. A new entry in the The Legend of Zelda series and would set new grounds for the franchise. This title was known as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild and it was the biggest launch Nintendo had seen. Breath of The Wild was showered in praise, sold millions of copies at launch, and rose to become one of the best video games ever made. Winning numerous end of the year awards and overshadowing a lot of releases which came afterwards. I was one of the few people who got a Nintendo Switch within the first two months and devoured everything Breath of The Wild had to offer. It was a magical experience, but at the time I wasn’t huge into video games and it was the only game I had.
Years have passed and I’ve exposed myself to so many titles. Including this one. Horizon Zero Dawn wasn’t a failure at launch and still managed to sell a couple million units, but it was forgotten easily underneath the storm which Breath of The Wild created. Being trampled beneath the feet of fanboys and considered a joke title. A game which came out at the wrong time. At least one week before the biggest game of 2017 and they both were part of the same genre. Breath of The Wild rewrote what the open world should be and Horizon Zero Dawn was doubted for how it’s game design couldn’t compare to the colossus. It was a tragedy to say the least, but did it mean the game was bad? No. It was incredible. The story was one of the best the year had to offer, combat was well designed and made the player adapt on the fly, the world and culture got the player invested, and there was enough interesting lore to make the plot entertaining. Horizon Zero Dawn wasn’t perfect, but it definitely was incredible at what it achieved. I first tried the game out in 2019 and didn’t understand, but upon revisiting it in 2020 and giving it a closer look I came to appreciate it more. It quickly became one of my favorite Triple A games in the longest time and one of the few open worlds where I worked towards hundred percent. I would even go far to say I like it more than Breath of The Wild. You can fight me on that opinion. Horizon Zero Dawn took basic open world design tropes and made them work again! It’s this and Ghost of Tsushima which is what Ubisoft wishes they could make, and remains a masterpiece in my opinion.
Horizon Zero Dawn is brilliant when you take the time to carefully appreciate it, and I was extremely excited for what Guerilla Games had to offer next with any possible follow up or sequel. Luckily we eventually would as in 2020 we got a huge reveal video for upcoming titles for the Playstation 5. Sequels to beloved franchises and demonstrations for what next generation hardware could do. One of these titles was the anticipated sequel for the open world adventure we loved from 2017. We were finally getting Horizon Forbidden West. It wasn’t the biggest game shown during the presentation as gameplay footage wasn’t ready, but this was one of my most anticipated games. When gameplay footage did come out my hype grew even bigger. This was shaping up to not only be a next generation experience, but one of the most heart to heart sequels ever made. A reminder of what video game sequels should be. “Horizon Forbidden West was going to be amazing,” is what I thought to myself at that moment. Then the game got delayed to a release date of early 2022 along with some other titles which didn’t get to release during 2021 and before. One of these titles was another open world experience developed by a long running Japanese studio and the most hyped game for 2022. A majority of you should know how this story wound up.
Elden Ring, the latest release by FromSoftware and a culmination of all their greatest ideas. What makes FromSoftware true geniuses within the video game industry is that they don’t fall to the latest trends or modern game design techniques. They stick to their guns and do what they think is best. Make challenging, but engaging experiences which reward players for paying close attention and using their own knowledge to push forward. They know that the best type of player is one that is constantly improving and growing stronger on their own without the help of someone else. It’s like good parenting. You could baby the child and eventually they’ll grow up to become spoiled, or you properly discipline them and they’ll become more responsible human beings. Elden Ring much like open worlds before redefining what the open world should be. No hand holding or icon on the map. Just pure freedom from the very moment you enter the first area. Coming one week straight after the release of Horizon Forbidden West.
That is where everything went wrong for Guerilla Games. Choosing to release a sequel to a game overshadowed at launch right before the biggest game of 2022. Not saying Horizon Forbidden West failed. It sold roughly around 8 million copies within the first few weeks and reception was much better than Horizon Zero Dawn. Becoming the second most widely acclaimed game of this year. A lot of people love this game. We shouldn't have to compare two drastically different products so closely to each other. This game was able to find breathing space and stand out in an already flooded genre. I still found enjoyment playing through Horizon Forbidden West after pouring more than seventy hours into Elden Ring. I found it a worthy sequel and one of the few cases where sixty dollars was worth it, but something was off this time around. I was starting to notice more problems than when I did with the first game. Horizon Forbidden West has more problems than the first game and makes mistakes which the first game avoided. Flaws that make it a less confident experience than the first game and slowly get tangled in the vines that is modern game design. Hang on. It’s not all bad though. There are some aspects to love and to fully understand what this game struggles with we need to take a closer look. This game is really hard to pick apart in a basic eighteen minute review, so I decided to talk about it in essay format. This might as well serve as a good follow-up to our last essay about Elden Ring, but I’ll attempt to not contain so many sections and make it as long. Hopefully. I didn’t want to title this game as a beautiful mess, because it really isn’t and Guerilla Games still has the passion they had the first time through. Today we’ll be talking about Horizon Forbidden West and why despite all it’s crippling flaws it's still a brilliant experience. We'll also be discussing what makes modern game design, specifically modern open world titles, terrible.
The Combat and Progression Still Works, Mostly
Let’s discuss the gameplay first, because every average gamer should know how important it is. It’s the number one reason why we purchase games in the first place. To have fun. To be fully engaged. To escape reality and take on a role we wish to be instead. Designing a functional combat system is really easy, but making a combat system that works is much harder. It’s the reason why I dropped modern shooters really quickly. Gunplay can be as great as you want, but if there is so much disruption during your combat loop then it stops feeling engaging. You stop playing frantically and begin to realize you're literally hiding behind a wall and waiting for a wave of weasels to pop over the wall over you to be shot. Doom Eternal, while a modern game, escaped those modern design trends and offered us a combat loop closer to the design of classic shooters like Quake and Blood. The same could be said about open world sandboxes and how combat works half the time. They offer you numerous tools and environmental scenarios to solve a single problem, but most likely players will gravitate towards the most simple solution because it’s the most fun option. Let’s take Far Cry 5 for instance. You can go guns blazing, sneak in and stealth kill enemies, show up with companions one of which has an attack plane, show up in an attack plane or helicopter yourself, summon the wildlife to do your bidding, and much more. These are all great and it’s nice Ubisoft gives us accessibility to such choices, but the first two options I just listed are more interesting. You actually play engagingly and when the stakes begin to rise you are forced to make due with a stressful scenario. Flying from afar with an attack helicopter is not engaging. You pick off enemies from afar and make clearing out an enemy camp more trivial. I ripped this from a DJ Cobbler video, but it was a good video and brought up some interesting points about combat design in video games. Horizon Forbidden West, much like its predecessor, attempts to avoid offering too much while providing unique scenarios to the player to keep them on their toes. Generating a fun and engaging loop for each time it picks ups.
The game basically takes what made the Monster Hunter series work and removes all the bits that make Monster Hunter annoying to play. A majority of the enemies you encounter while venturing through the world are colossal mechs and they come in a variety of flavors. Strong mechs tend to have more health, durability, and weaponry to fire away at the player. In a majority of games you would wail away at the monster using a melee weapon, but here it doesn’t work. Your melee weapon does very little damage and is only good for knocking off weak brittle components or pushing a smaller creature over to its side. The game doesn’t place an emphasis on melee combat and it’s apparent, because melee combat feels clunky and there’s no proper targeting system to make focusing on a singular point easy. What happens when melee combat isn’t the goal? You place a focus on ranged combat. Now this should have had mixed results. Fighting machines with arrows sounds like a much weaker and less satisfying solution, but somehow it works brilliantly. No longer do you wail away at the enemy, but instead try to find weak spots to strike. Chipping away at their armor and removing plating to reveal spots where it hurts most. If you pressure a machine enough then they might enter a staggered phase. Opening a few seconds to perform a critical strike. This works pretty well for a combat loop and becomes more interesting as you face bigger beasts. They tend to have more weak spots, but their smaller and harder hit. They flail around the battlefield at quick speeds and this isn’t like other open worlds where you can tank blow after blow. Even in the normal setting enemies still hit like trucks.
You will get knocked around like a ragdoll and your health bar can be knocked down within a matter of minutes if you are not careful. The weak spots on enemies can be found quicker if you scan them with your focus, but this can often be a risky move. It takes time to scan and when they are charging at you at full speed you want to move out immediately. Sometimes you don’t even need to scan them as some enemies make it very easy to spot their weak points. Glowing with a vibrant color and reacting with specific sounds whenever you shoot them. Enemies also tend to have elemental weaknesses as well and compared to Monster Hunter they have explosive reactions when you hit them with the element they are weak to. Causing enemies around them to take damage and potentially get instant killed. This is especially useful when you are facing a huge group of smaller machines alongside the big one and need to cut them all down quickly to remove stress and prioritize the bigger foe. Targeting weak spots is heavily encouraged against powerful beasts, because they’ll be carrying guns which you can use against them. These guns have a pretty limited amounts of ammo and leave you heavily exposed, but they are offered as an award during combat.
All the weapons you use have specific firing times and range, but you’ll want to have numerous of them at once. A single weapon won’t possess all the damage types you need and some weapons do more elemental damage than others. This not only gets the player to switch between their arsenal, but experiment and come up with interesting strategies. Set up an explosive trap and rather than wait for the enemy to trick it you can instead shoot it yourself. Use a sharpshot bow and blast away their plating, and then follow up with acid arrows from another bow. Release a series of explosive frost bombs or throw an explosive javelin close to your enemies. It’s all your unique stuff and it’s enough to keep the player engaged. Technically Monster Hunter is the better game to a lot people, but I prefer Horizon because at least the monsters don’t run off and you have to chase after them. Transforming a good fifthteen minute fight into a long, repetitive, and annoying fifty minute fight.
Now one thing Horizon Forbidden West as well as the previous game falls victim to are skill trees. Rather than have a unique stat system and investing into the build you specifically want you instead unlock points to put into a collection of perks. These perks range from new combos to new skills you can perform during combat. Skill trees in any video game are usually a mess. It can take awhile to unlock a skill you actually want due to branching paths, and half the skills you won’t even use due to how simple it is enough to use basic attacks. However, Forbidden West has a skill tree I actually like and solves the problem which other skill trees have. By making it satisfying to unlock new perks and traits. There are six skill trees now and each of them invest into a particular playstyle. One skill tree is invested in melee combat and another is invested in ranged fighting. There’s a skill tree for stealth, forging of traps, effective recovery, and hacking beasts to fight by your side. The stat boosts you unlock greatly affect the power of your character, and there are now skills that can be performed with specific weapon types. Offering different rates of fire and sometimes easier ways to chip away at a beast. To match the number of skills the developers have to shower the player in skill points for each quest they complete, but I did find myself spending more of them at once now. It feels a little more like a traditional RPG now. Growing stronger with the more experience you gain and eventually gaining enough power to face a strong foe you weren’t able to force before. The only downside is that it is possible to unlock every skill tree trait and stat with enough playtime, and you’ll basically become good at everything which is something you want to avoid in an open world game. I still prefer traditional stat leveling and scaling though like with Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Fallout: New Vegas, because you can feel your character and the gear they utilize improve since they are gaining the knowledge in that specific field or category. Maybe with the next game they could do something like that.
Another point I do want to bring up is healing and why for the most part it’s fine. In my last essay about Elden Ring, when I discussed healing I stated that a lot of designers don’t realize how important it really is. Not only does health display how many more hits you can take before death, but predict how long a player will likely last in a fight. That’s why healing is so important, because not only is it a recovery or increase to how many hits the player can take, but allows them to continue fighting onward and extend the amount of time they can continue fighting. Horizon Forbidden West and its predecessor has a decent solution to healing. Throughout the world you collect medicinal berries and they are stored within your pouch. You carry ten berries at a time and extra berries are stored within your pouch. Whenever you are injured you simply press up on the d-pad and your character slowly heals. Your berry pouch empties as your health restores and it stops once you reach maximum health again. There’s also a feature where if you take damage while healing it continues to refill your health in return for sacrificing more berries. This is a pretty good feature to have in a game where you are constantly being bombarded by colossal foes. It means you can’t be kicked out of the healing animation, because you initiate it rather than having to wait for the character to stop and perform the heal. Extra berries can be pulled out when you are empty, but during this case you sacrifice leaving your character exposed for a couple of seconds. However, a majority of battlefields will have medicinal berries scoured about. Meaning the player won’t be utterly screwed since a natural healing resource is always provided for their convenience. All of this is really well set up. Now what makes this healing system flawed? The problem comes later on in the game when the player is offered the ability to craft health potions. Inventory space is limited for potions, but this space can be upgraded and the resources to craft potions aren’t that rare if you are constantly picking stuff up. All it takes is some medicinal berries and wild meat from animals. At some point the game will start dumping a handful of potions onto the player. The developers worried that the player will struggle in the next combat scenario, so they stock them up with as much recoverable health as possible. This not only removes the purpose of finding resources to craft health potions, but removes the purpose of berries as potions are now a convenience. Eventually the game starts stashing berries within chests meaning you get a jack ton of potions and berries without looking for them. This is where the healing system falls apart, but it’s still an exceptional system. It’s better to adapt on the fly than having regenerating health.
The biggest issue with combat is crafting which is a huge staple in open world games now. The player must be provided resources to collect while exploring the world and those resources must be given purpose outside of selling them to a vendor. In Horizon Forbidden West you can craft ammunition during combat to keep up the pressure which is great. It means I don’t have to worry about running out and running to a station to craft more. It’s super convenient and the game will always provide you resources to craft the most basic arrows and elemental shots. However, it’s everything else about crafting that makes it super annoying. Finding the time to craft more arrows and bombs during combat can get repetitive due to how the max carry capacity is twenty, and can be awhile until you find the resources to increase the amount of arrows you can have at a time. Opening up the weapon wheel and selecting the ammo type you want can get repetitive as well. Especially if you have numerous types and the wheel becomes a jumbled mess. Might as well talk about crafting traps and potions. Before you just had to open up a menu to craft potions and traps, but now you have to craft them while a fight goes on. I get that the developers wanted crafting to be in real time, but it disrupts how much you can do at once during a fight. It’s made even worse when you are flipping through a huge row of items trying to find the potion or trap you want. You can rearrange the items displayed and remove stuff you don’t want, but for items that have none left they are still displayed. This is bad. When an item is completely used up then it should disappear. You don’t want it to remain, take up space, and make it harder to search your inventory during busy fights.
There’s also upgrading your gear and weaponry using the salvaged resources you collected from machines. It’s supposed to be like Monster Hunter and how you need to hunt down the materials to grow stronger. In Horizon Forbidden West the grind to find these resources is less of a slog, requires less grinding, and it’s much easier to get what you actually need. It is still annoying though, because what you are basically doing is fulfilling an elaborate shopping list just to get one upgrade for your armor. Not saying having a fully leveled up piece of equipment is needed to beat the game. You can still beat the game using an early game piece of equipment, but it’ll probably be harder especially against late game bosses and enemies. We can all agree crafting sucks no matter what game it’s in and whatever game popularized deserves to be ridiculed. That’s all about the combat and progression for now. Annoying at times, but i’s still really fun and more enjoyable than most third person combat in your average action game. Now let’s move onto the other big entrees of Horizon Forbidden West.
World Design, Exploration, and The Interference of Modern Game Design
The real treat of an open world game is of course the open world. The place you’ll spend the next dozens of hours exploring. Scouring parts of the land for every location and outstanding landmark your eyes happen to land upon. The open world is brilliant, bright, vast, and is easy to get lost in. Yet, making an actual interesting open world to explore is difficult. You can have as big of a world as you want, but if the world doesn’t have that many engaging activities to do and standout landmarks to discover then it can quickly fall apart. Then there’s the opposite way around where there’s tons of content to find, but so much that you feel kind of discouraged for doing anything because the rewards you get are meaningless or it turns into a mindless grind. There’s just too much emptiness or too much bloat. Horizon Zero Dawn had a moderately designed open world to explore. It wasn’t the best open world, but it was intriguing. There was enough interesting stuff dotted around the map, but not so much that it felt cluttered. The developers knew how to space out content, so the player wouldn’t be constantly bombarded with quests and side activities. That way they could focus and be reminded of the main plot. There were townships and villages which reminded the player of human life, and the robots who roam the wild felt natural to the world. They roamed around freely and had specific habitats like real world animals.
That and the way you progress through the world. You start off in the southeast portion in the snowy plains, but afterwards you start journeying north. Slowly getting exposed to new creatures and more lively environments. Rebel camps, hunting grounds, and the Tallnecks which offer a twist on the stereotypical open world towers. A lot of open world games have towers where once you climb to the top you reveal more of the map. You get a visual field of the area and see where things are. However, climbing towers got annoying and eventually this simple design trope was seen in a lot of games. When Horizon Zero Dawn came out it changed how the map revealing towers worked. These tall giraffe-like machines circled around an area infested with other killer machines, and the challenge wasn’t figuring out how to climb the tower but figuring out how to get onto it. You have to dash around these areas, avoid machine fire, and find a structure capable of reaching some climbable part of the Tallnecks. It was an interesting spin to a modern trope and here in Horizon Forbidden West they expand it. Some Tallnecks won’t be walking in circles. They’ll be hidden in places you won’t expect and be part of other questlines. Now the goal is not figuring out how to get onto them, but how to set them free so that you can activate their map scanning technology. It’s a great idea executed well. So the southeast portion of the map is a good introduction area, but by the time you reach the northwest corners of Horizon Zero Dawn you start to face real challenges. More challenging foes begin to appear including these boss mechs which take numerous arrows to beat. More missions begin to open up to the player and they encounter the many tribes and factions outside of the Nora who were their home tribe. It’s unraveled at a great pace and the player never feels overwhelmed with information as more exposition and opportunities are dumped into their face. How have things changed since Horizon Zero Dawn to Forbidden West?
Not by much and that’s fine if you still enjoy the beauty of the universe. Horizon Forbidden West has some of the most stunning visuals and graphics I’ve seen within an open world and the environments really do make use of next generation technology. They released this game on the Playstation 4, which is the console I played on, and I’m stunned to see that Guerilla Games got the game to work when it was clearly designed to run on next generation hardware. One critique I have is that Horizon Forbidden West isn’t as stable as the first game. Textures would fail to load, sometimes the world goes transparent, and at launch this game had huge framerate drops which made it impossible to run across fields with lots of swaying plants and wildlife. Guerilla did patch most of the framerate drops out with recent updates and they continue to do so with future updates. The world is livelier than ever, and thanks to advanced lighting and shading the changes between night and day are utterly more jaw dropping. How is the world to explore? Well for the most part it’s great, but it feels off this time around.
There’s a lot more “stuff” and this can be for the better or worse depending on what type of gamer you are. You either have fun with the endless hours of content you have, or annoyed due to the bloated open world you have to grind through. I found both while playing this game. There's a lot more enemies dotted around the map and now it feels like they were placed to flood the world rather than make it feel natural. You can’t walk a couple feet without being harassed by local wildlife. There’s also a lot more Hunting Ground, Rebel Outposts, and townships dotted around the Forbidden West. Which is fine I guess. You don’t want them placed in such a linear way that the player can just make a quick b-line to them. Occasionally enemy ambushes by raiders and rebels can occur, or you may encounter marching on a patrol. It feels natural, like it was plotted out despite being randomly generated. However, the difficulty of these encounters can change drastically and this may lead to being killed easily while exploring. However, this does mean you have to react fast and consider whether it’s a fight you’ll survive or one you need to escape from. There’s more sidequests, errands, cauldrons, and more content than the first game. More content comes to a fault though. The goal of Horizon Forbidden West was to create a bigger and more ambitious game which the developers achieved, but what they fell to was stereotypical open world bloat. Having to flood up the open space with so much content, but you can see the highs and lows in content. You have a brilliant world with moderate content.
Traversal has also been improved in Forbidden West. Some surfaces that aren’t painted or have yellow railing can now be climbed onto which allows you to traverse up rocky mountains. There’s a new piece of equipment which allows you to form a shield of light and glide across long distances until you touch the ground much like the paraglider in Breath of The Wild. It means you don’t have to walk across fields so much and aren’t just limited to the ground. Plus horse mounted travel kind of sucked due to how clunky horse controls. Another new addition is underwater traversal and there’s cool loot lying at the bottom of deep ponds and lakes. There are more cave systems, more hidden secrets, and passageways that can’t be opened up unless you have late game story equipment and hide really good loot. Exploration is great, but the game doesn’t do as good a job letting the player discover places on their own compared to Outer Wilds or Elden Ring. In those games you had to discover hidden caves and secrets without the help of a guide or icon on the map. Maybe Elden Ring just spoiled me, but I think the reason I didn’t enjoy exploring Horizon Forbidden West as much as I wanted to was because of one specific factor. How it sat down at the tea table with modern video game design, and I want to dedicate a bit of time to discussing why modern game design kind of sucks. What it has done for the progression and mission design of Horizon Forbidden West along with other modern open world games.
Here is some quick history you should all probably know. Back then during the 1980s and 1990s not many video games had tutorials, guides, or objective markers designed in them. They were vague, didn’t always give the best descriptions of where the player should go next, and some games allowed players to wander into high leveled areas and get their asses kicked immediately. These games were more punishing due to their nondescript nature, but that’s what made these games work quickly with a lot of people. Video games back then weren’t so heavily focused on guiding the player through a cinematic rollercoaster. The emphasis was on fun and engaging the player through challenges. Letting them master the mechanics, figure out how an enemy or level works, and rewarding them for figuring the problem out. You truly felt like a genius back then when you figured what the developers wanted you to do. Guides did exist for video games in the form of printed novels, but they were often pricey or sold with collector’s editions. Gamers from the 1990s grew up with the mentality that every problem can be solved on your own. It doesn’t matter how hard the challenge is or how long it takes, but it can be solved eventually by cracking away at it. You know the phrase, “It doesn’t take a genius”, and it is still prevalent today. You can have skill, but some skills don’t require so much to obtain. All it takes is experience.
Modern game design has strayed away from offering the player no guidance. Developers have learned from the past and want their players to have an easier time settling into the experiences they have made. They’ve created tutorials, pop-up text, quest logs, objective markers, reminders, and so much more. There is so much guidance in video games today and not all of it was for the best. Video games became more restrictive of what the player could do and started making it obvious how to solve problems that were once mysteries. They started to lose their charm and the reward for overcoming challenges was lost. Games began insulting the player’s intelligence with the amount of handholding. I try not to look down on people, because they could be going through harsh living conditions and the best way to help them escape is by easily settling them into fantasy. The video game. However, no one should have to be shown directions on exactly what to do. No one should be told what the attack button is, because the player should be able to find it by pressing buttons. No one should be restricted on what actions they can do because this limits creativity and experimenting with the mechanics. You play a video game to escape the orders and repetition cycle of life, but here you are following orders and a cycle. What are a couple of cases where the handholding design of Horizon Forbidden West ruins the experience?
The tutorial is the first and best example. A lot of gamers know that tutorials are often terrible. They drag on longer than they should and some games don’t even offer you the option to skip it. This is especially bad when you are doing reruns of the game and know the mechanics well. You just want to get kicked into the world already, but the game wants to see if you remember how to do certain things. I guess it makes sense when you haven’t played the game in a really long time, but imagine if it’s just for a short game or a game you play constantly. Red Dead Redemption 2 has the perfect example of a tutorial gone wrong. It does a good job introducing you to the gang and setting you up for the rest of your adventure, but it’s a two hour slog to learn how the world works. The game teaches how to ride your horse, fire your gun, sneak around, hunt animals, address individuals, loot corpses, loot cabinets, eat food items, walk and run, and maybe even learn how to pick up your hat after it gets shot off. This is too much and some of this could have been figured out by yourself. The tutorial of Horizon Forbidden West is close to this runtime. The game teaches you how to fire your bow, climb the terrain, interact with surroundings, sneak around, stealth attack enemies, craft items during combat and at work stations, scan enemies for their weak spot, and use elemental weaknesses. This is fine for new players coming in, but imagine those who poured a wealthy amount of time into the first game and just want to start. They can’t. They have to go through an almost two hour introduction sequence and then they are dumped into the world. There’s no way to skip this especially on future playthroughs. Most likely Guerilla will offer the option to skip the intro if they add in a New Game Plus mode, but this doesn’t justify the length of it. The tutorial also pits you against a boss enemy, but does a bad job at showing what a boss enemy is capable of. It’s a scripted fight where it’s impossible to lose. The boss sits there and is wide open to attack. The boss enemies you fight later on are flailing about and attack you whenever they can. This is not only a tutorial which lags on longer than it should, but also a tutorial that sets low expectations to any upcoming challenges in your journey.
The hand holding design of Horizon Forbidden West drastically affects the progression and quest design. You choose your next objective and you get both an icon on your radar to follow. This is terrible game design. Rather than let the player roam the environment freely you instead have to point them towards the solution. You remind them of these reminders constantly and eventually they will be conditioned to look at the radar or map rather than the world in front of them. The world you spent hours programming and carefully designing. There is the option to turn the radar and reminders off and play without them, so I do respect Guerilla offering the choice here. You can experience this game much like a totally free open world like Outer Wilds or Elden Ring. However, unlike these two, Horizon Forbidden West doesn’t have standout landmarks. There’s nothing that really drags your eye and gets you to memorize the map and environment. Making it impossible to get to important places or trigger the next quest objective unless you play with the reminder and radar. Which is fine, again.
Final complaint is quest design, but that’s pretty explanatory with how I just gave the description that dotted lines and icons on radars are bad design. Instead we’ll be talking about quests where you basically play detective. Analyze a scene and locate the tracks of the killer or machine. This could have opened up a variety of quests that reward the player for analyzing small details. Taking in the little knowledge provided, piecing together a puzzle, and arriving at a solution. One of the closest comparisons given to Horizon a lot is that it follows a similar design philosophy of The Witcher 3. If you have been sleeping under a rock then you should know that The Witcher 3 is one of the most well acclaimed games of all time. For its beautiful world, characters, writing, and choices offered to the player. I kind of hate The Witcher 3. Okay, hate is an extremely strong word. I can understand why The Witcher 3 appeals to so many individuals, but it doesn’t click for me. The opening hours weren’t great and every time I attempted to pick it back up I soon dropped it, deleted it off my Playstation 4, and moved onto another game. It has the exact same design tropes a majority of modern video games have and I think it was due to its popularity that a lot of open worlds follow the hand holding philosophy now. You have quests which expect you to perform actions in a specific way, landmarks bloated across the map and none of them really offer much, and a crafting system that is complex but is meaningless. However, The Witcher 3 had these missions where you were tasked to investigate a crime scene and track down the killer. The way they work is that you activate your Witcher Sense, bloodstains appear, and you follow a dotted line. This is where the mystery of open worlds got screwed up! Rather than be an actual mystery they instead point the solution immediately and highlight the clues to the scenario. Sadly, Horizon Forbidden West does the exact same thing, but now they not only have the dotted line but they have characters to point you towards the solution. Staying info to keep you focused. I get it’s an important investigation, but if you quiet down I could focus more. This really is quest design gone wrong and it’s sad that player experimentation and freedom has been limited. The exploration and progression of Horizon Forbidden West struggles underneath the pressure of modern game design, but if you can block all these problems it’s still a fun world to explore. The side activities are still fun and if you can ignore the many guides and reminders the game throws at you there are fun segments to be found. Segments which are engaging and hype you up to see what happens next. I may hate modern open world design, but I still had fun nonetheless.
A Good Story That Bruises Overtime (Spoilers)
The best description which I can give the story of Horizon Zero Dawn is that it was a tremendously written story that was moderate on the surface. To many the story was forgettable and boring, but if you actually pay attention to the plot you realize there is more to it. The plot of Zero Dawn is an experimental tale and if it’s anything I love to hear experimental stories rather than ideas that have been repeated over and over. Especially if these stories follow the science fiction genre. The rest of this section will be spoiling the plot for both games, so if you’re someone that hates spoilers then get out. Maybe even play both games and then come back. Horizon Zero Dawn told the origins of Aloy, a female huntress who has been banned from her home tribe since birth. The opening doesn’t explain why at first, but we soon figure out why. Aloy was raised by another banned member named Rost, and it was due to his kindness and willingness that Aloy was able to spend the rest of her life training for a ritual that could possibly let her back into the tribe. During this training she also stumbles upon some ancient ruins. A laboratory which once belonged to the old ones. The world of Horizon is an apocalyptic one, but it’s not entirely full of gloom and misery. The environments are lively and teeming with plantlife, but machines which take on the form of animals roam freely. Some machines are friendly, but others attack on sight. It is said that the old ones, the generation from hundreds of years before, created these machines and are worshiped as gods by surrounding tribes. Some wish to understand their knowledge so that they can tame the wilds, but others wish to get away as far as possible as such knowledge could corrupt the minds of the weak. Aloy has been looking into the old world since she was ten and has been fascinated with what knowledge could bring.
As a young adult she proves herself to the tribe and is allowed back in, but it all comes to a halt when the tribe is attacked and it is revealed a group of cultists possess the same old world technology which Aloy uses. Rost comes in to save Aloy, but dies in the process. It soon becomes Aloy’s goal to venture out of her homeland, discover other tribes and assist them, and defeat the cult which killed Rost. However, she stumbles upon more old world ruins and discovers logs of a person similar to her. Aloy is a genetic clone of Elisabet Sorbeck, one of the smartest minds on earth and the spearhead to the Zero Dawn project. Through these discoveries Aloy learned that the company Elisabet worked at developed machines designed to protect mankind. Something went wrong in their coding and they unlocked the ability to grow and reproduce by absorbing biomass and natural resources began to run out quickly. Mankind was facing a disaster which could kill them and there weren’t any easy solutions. That’s when Elisbet came up with Zero Dawn, a plan to revive mankind even when all natural resources are gone. New humans will be born using DNA of the old world, and new machines in the form of animals would be designed to cultivate the environment and restore plant life. It would take hundreds of years, but it was designed to work thanks to an AI they made to guide the project. GAIA, an intelligence made up of several other programs to keep these animals in check. Another problem rose during this time. One of the scientists working within Zero Dawn was afraid of what could happen. Would the next generation be prepared to wander the wilds? Could they handle the knowledge of before, but repeat the same mistakes and let all the disasters happen again? Could they even take disasters of pre-apocalypse events and witness the ideologies and visions of wars before? I forgot his name, but this man soon jammed a stick in the Zero Dawn project, whipped out key officials who were supposed to keep things on track, and never allowed the future generation to discover their own knowledge. Dooming mankind even more.
Aloy learns the mistakes of the past and from there we see her develop. Trying to live up to who Elisabet was and bring justice to the world. Helping those around her and doing whatever she can to make the world a better place. Understanding the tribes, their politics, and giving them what they want without balance being lost. Aloy is a determined warrior and by the end you feel happy when she reaches her goal. When she brings peace. She started at rock bottom, a poor slump, but worked her way up and became a great person. It’s what every person should aim to be. Hardworking, kind, and diligent even during the most stressful occasions. It’s why she’s one of my top five video game characters. It’s her journey which made her significant and memorable
Forbidden West takes place a few months after the events of the first game. A deadly rot has begun to spread throughout the land and kill whatever platlife there is. Crops are dying and the food supply is running low. Aloy has been attempting to find a cure to stop this rot, but none of the clues she has been tracking has led closer to a solution. She’s getting ready to give up, but she eventually discovers a location related to Elisabet Sorbeck. A place that could possibly contain a copy of GAIA, the program designed to help reshape the world during a disaster such as this. However, she finds the copy missing and that it lies in the Forbidden West. A place the Oseram had tried to explore, but failed due to surrounding tribes being hostile to outsiders. Aloy decides to go to the Forbidden West, but along with her are Varl and Erend. Two of her closest friends who want to assist Aloy on her dangerous journey. Aloy does find a copy of GAIA, but invaders from another world show up to attempt to stop her. They came flying in from space and possess technology severely advanced from the old world technology. I’m not joking this happens. They are known as the Far Zeniths and their goal is to wipe out life on earth and refit the world in their image. Along with them is another genetic clone of Elisabet, and she is simply named Beta. They keep her as a slave, but Aloy sets her free and together they both work to reassemble GAIA and help the surrounding wildlife. The game does a splendid job building the world and universe from before. It sets an interesting premise, but as time went on the plot of Forbidden West transformed from intriguing to questions of the choices they made in writing.
For one, half the game is spent hunting down fragments of GAIA and plotting out what advanced location you’ll be exploring next. The stakes rise, but nothing really interesting comes from this. You are basically fulfilling a shopping list and it’s not a particularly interesting shopping list. Second, the Far Zeniths are cool and all but they are not utilized that well and due to their small appearances they aren’t established as thorough antagonists. Making them feel shallow for beings who serve a huge purpose in the universe. There’s enough to make us understand or sympathize with their actions, which is fine yet I’ve been saying this phrase a lot throughout this essay. We need villains with complexity and background rather than just, “They are the villains.” Third and foremost, the ending felt unsatisfying and just leaves you wanting for more. Obviously Guerilla Games plans to make a third Horizon, but the major plot really should have ended by now. Do we really need the Sorbeck plot to go on longer than it should? Couldn’t we have dealt with the looming threat at the end with a couple more hours of gametime and more time at the writing board? I think the reason why Horizon Zero Dawn was a better story was because it was to reveal the origins of what would become a hero. Building their character and getting us to care. Seeing the friends they make and how they play a significance to their adventure. Horizon Forbidden West serves as a follow-up and it does it well, but we have seen everything interesting in the first game. We saw the best that the plot of Horizon could provide. Now we’re just seeing more, but now with unnecessary add-ons stapled on. I like the bits where Aloy makes new friends. Companions have really interesting backgrounds and the quests you follow alongside them help build character. The plot is more focused on the relationship Aloy has with these individuals. She quotes, “I feel alone”, near the start of her adventure and this story is supposed to remind Aloy that she isn’t alone in the ruined world. That’s great…. until you remember the amount of people supporting her from the first game. A lot of them reappear in Forbidden West and they act really nice when around Aloy. You begin to wonder to yourself, “Was she actually alone or isolating these individuals around her?” It’s quite stupid to be honest with you, but it is still great that they try to explore this theme of loneliness in Forbidden West.
One of my final complaints with Forbidden West has to deal with Aloy and how she is treated in this game. In the first game I saw her as this bravely morally driven woman who was willing to help out no matter what. Now she’s just kind of an asshole. She’s always fixated on her goal to save the world, but whenever people ask her for her help she sounds like she just wants to deal with the problem quickly. She seems uninterested in the world and doesn’t want to learn what is going on even though by listening she could quickly adjust or find alternative solutions to current political conflicts. Not saying Aloy’s performance was bad or emotionless. Ashly Burch did a great job and she still nailed her role yet again, but some more expression could have been put in. Especially now that Horizon Forbidden West has better facial animation. That’s not the only problem really. Aloy is uninteresting, but surrounding characters and the universe are more fun to learn about. The world building is great and Aloy is still a seeker of knowledge even during bad times, but if your side characters who pop up for a few seconds are more interesting than the main protagonist then there is a problem. These all sound like huge complaints, but what I can tell you is that I understand why Aloy acts the way she acts in this game. She is stressed out. She knows that another world ending event is about to happen. These surrounding tribes keep asking her to do some stupid task for them. Problems that could have been solved with a peace treaty and discussion, and it drags out the process even further. She’s just fed up with the frustrating new world she is thrown into. Aloy in Forbidden West isn’t the worst character in the world. She’s still an interesting protagonist and her journey towards fixing GAIA is still engaging. She’s just stoic and it isn’t for the best/ There is a way to do a stoic protagonist right though and one character specifically comes to mind for me. That character comes from one of the most divisive open worlds ever made.
Sam Porter Bridges is a broken man. He delivers packages across a ruined America and isn’t really praised for risking his life everyday against the BTs which can tear him limb from limb. He’s one of the hundreds of couriers out in the deserted world and if he were to die then he could easily be replaced. Sam is forgettable, but for some reason he is fine. He’s fine with his repetitive lifestyle. He’s fine with knowing he’ll die someday. He’s fine with how the apocalyptic world works, but deep down he’s not emotionally well. His child and wife died in a terrorist attack and he was miles away. He was unable to save his family. He blames himself for their deaths and ever since then he hasn’t been able to talk to anybody about these events. People who possess conditions like him sympathize, but Sam denies it. He denies it not because he’s a broken man, but because he doesn’t believe he deserves it. He thinks he is a terrible person and if he were to have another family he’d have to witness another loved one die again through mistakes caused by him. He believes he deserves to be alone. One day he is given a BB, which are machines used to power BT detecting technology, and from there he begins to form a connection. This is a creature that can be replaced easily if it were to die, similar to him. It has tasks which it repeats every single day and must repeat this cycle. It’s alone and never honored just like him. The BB starts to form its own personality and thoughts, and Sam names it Lou. After the child he once had. Your connection with the BB grows as the game progresses and by the end the BB has grown weak. It’s about to die. You see Sam take it out of its jar and cradle it back and forth. Giving it CPR and trying to bring it back to life. This has been the longest time since he was happy. Since he had a family and wasn’t alone. You’re just crying that Sam gets a happy ending and luckily he does. Sam is stoic throughout the entirety of Death Standing, but you feel for him. You understand why he is the way he is and you wish he wasn’t alone in a ruined isolated world. That is an example of the stoic protagonist down right.
Closing Thoughts
Horizon Forbidden West didn’t exceed the original and that’s alright. Not every sequel has to outlive the original and can just serve up as a decent follow up for fans who simply want more. I think the reason why video game sequels are getting harder to make now is because developers are worried about what the fans actually want and feel pressured to do more than they really should. How do you succeed upon a product that was already well acclaimed? It may be the reason why The Last of Us: Part 2 was such a huge bomb at launch. It was experimental and that is what I appreciated about it, but the fans who weren’t pleased were a result of how it had to live up to the high standards of the first game. Horizon Forbidden West improves the gameplay of the first for the most part, has some outstanding visuals and art direction, and the world was bigger and teaming with more content to discover. Other aspects like the writing, the progression, and how the last few hours became a grind was due to how in exchange for making a bigger world the quality of content became more divided. Am I disappointed with this game with how much I’ve complained thus far? No. If you carefully read this review you would have seen I had a lot of positive points to make and that overall my experience was great. I enjoyed my time with Horizon Forbidden West and would recommend it to anyone who was fans of the original. The content matches the sixty dollar price tag and I would choose it over a majority of Triple A open world games out there now that the genre is being butchered alive. It came close to being a perfect sequel and maybe that was enough. If I were to give this game a review score, which I am going to, this would be an 8.5/10 which is still pretty good. I’m really forgiving whenever I score a huge video game, because I know deep down the developers just wanted to make their players happy. Horizon Forbidden West did make me happy at times, so that’s good enough. I just hope if Guerilla Games ever makes a third game they will learn from this and improve. Don’t go too harsh on yourself and I'll see you in possibly the next five years when Horizon 3 comes out.
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