Horizon Forbidden West

I play it on quality. There seems to be a thing that if you're playing it on an OLED it plays all juddery in quality. I'm not so it's all smooth. Performance I couldn't do as it's still incredibly soft with all the checkerboard rendering.

Interestingly I've read that Sony have gone all in on this and as well as the VR game, there's going to a third game as well as DLC that is specifically themed around the Monster Hunter aspect which this game is clearly inspired by.

A saw a video that adds up all the cut scenes and talky bits and it comes to 14 hours. That's my biggest criticism of the game.

Yeah, side quests had ridiculous amounts of talking, so I can definitely see it hitting that kind of time. I skipped through a lot of them and got a bit bored of pressing the skip button on a few of them.

I’m still on a 1080p tv, so it’s performance all the way.

I’ve found myself pretty frustrated with the game. The menus, inventory, skills, combat, all seem way to complicated and annoyingly inflexible. Also, Aloy seems to get stuck on every piece of scenery during combat, by which I mean rocks not even ankle-high, those twigs you collect, whatever else.

I turned the difficulty down from hard to normal and it’s a little better, but I’m definitely finding it so much harder to engage with than the first game. Little things like limiting how many potions you can hold or traps set, the weirdly difficult to decipher dpad quick menu (I MAY have finally figured out how to stop my limited potion numbers filling up with non-healing shit I can’t easily get rid of, but let’s see.) the difficulty for me is mostly that I’m wrestling with the various interfaces that have been changed for no reason, as if they asked the Windows team to help out with design.

Yep. That menu was absolute bullshit. Pretty much constantly kept it on the mount option and only used potions accidentally a couple of times throughout the game when it inexplicably changed it from summoning my mount.
Traps felt pointless as soon as you get the trapcaster.

Special moves were also a bit shit to use.

I just use the spear chucker and nothing else.

I am near the end and like others have never used a trap, a potion or anything from that dpad menu as I can't figure it out.

I also get often frustrated as she either glues herself to a ledge and refuses to jump, or walk off to her death at random. Snagging on scenery and camera behind bushes is also annoying.

So I switched to quality mode with motion blur turned off because I'm a filthy graphics whore.

All the shinies.

Yeah, when you have a reserve of like 500 berries, potions dont really feel like they are worth the busy work to make.

I am finding the combat quite shit.

I am mostly always either fighting the camera, getting stuck in scenery or both.

Using ranged attacks are usually sabotaged by robots making apparently physical impossible and utterly cheesy leaps where they go from the barely on the horizon to immediately in your face.

Once they're in your face, see camera and getting stuck problems.

Trying to be stealthy is shit because it's far too easy to get found and once you are found it's just chaos and and you just end up running like a twat.

I think the problem I have is Ghost of Tsushima did the type of combat this game tries to do just so well, this feels clumsy and shit in comparison.

Oh fuck yes. I'd forgotten about that.

You feel as if there is an intricate and interesting combat mechanic in there, but they completely ballsed it up by not apparently caring if it was any fun.

Whoever decided to have square as crouch needs shooting. My muscle memory won't ever get used to it.

That's just unnecessary, it doesn't even make sense to have that button to dismount a horse.

I'm still pressing R1 to jump in this after playing Dying Light 2 recently as well.

Oh, and this game is the best use I've of HDR I've seen. One you go into the caves or it turns to night the game looks incredible.

I’ve never seen a single fish in this game. They were abundant in the first game. In this one, there’s little “graphics” fish (in the same way there are butterflies or something) but no fish you can actually catch. Rivers and streams and bodies of water appear to be lifeless.

And yet the pouch upgrades call for all manner of fish parts. So it’s like we have extra bloat from added complication to the upgrades collectible shit, but the upgrades get stalled because there’s no fucking fish anywhere.