After nearly 100 hours played and a year of my life, I think I’m finally done with Horizon Zero Dawn. I originally started playing in back in 2020 and it was one of the first games I played on Twitch, but the performance was lackluster and I got into an argument with one of my cats while live on Twitch, got embarassed about it, then got distracted by other things in my life.
I returned to the game when they released a performance patch that nearly doubled my frames per second, and the game went from being an ok looking game at 40-50 fps to a fantastically gorgeous game running at 80-100 fps with HDR (though only in 1080p still, I didn’t want to tax my laptop too much). The story is extremely tightly written and the voice actors and facial animators were both at the top of their game. If it weren’t ineligible for 2021’s game of the year, this would be it for me, it’s just that good.
There are however a few things that I hated, namely any of the flying creatures, I could never figure out how to handle them appropriately. Also, those hunting grounds / trials were difficult to figure out exactly what they were wanting from me at times, I did a couple of them upwards of 10 times before I realized what I was supposed to be doing.
Neither of those distracted me from how much I loved this game. The soundtrack, the day/night cycle, the gentle breeze as it passed over the grass fields I was hiding in from a massive T-Rex looking robot, it was all glorious.
We’re very much aligned here. I originally played this one on the PS4. It was my personal game of the year. Might be my favorite game of the PS4 era. That or RDR 2.
I had the same complaints as you as well. For the flying creatures, tethering them to the ground was about the only thing I could get to work right. As for the trials, well, I ignored them after getting frustrated on a few of them.
I also finally figured out that tying them down was the only real answer, except the giant Stormwind ones were nearly impossibly to tie down for some reason. I was able to finish all the trails except for the one in the Frozen Land DLC, it was one of the last things I unlocked and I wasn’t going to finish the game with that level of frustration. Instead I killed a couple Ice Bears / Fire Bears with Aratuk, which wasn’t fun per se, but it wasn’t frustrating at least.
That day/night cycle in HDR was absolutely amazing, so pretty.