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Horizon One Dawn

Sarcasmorator

Same as I ever was
(He/him)
So I'm just about to finish up Horizon Zero Dawn and I'm excited for Horizon One Dawn a.k.a. Forbidden West even though I don't have a PlayStation and will probably have to wait until it comes out on PC or something! Here's where I think the story is going based on the plot of the game and the HFW trailer:

-Ted Faro is behind the unshackling signal in some way, possibly uploaded himself as an AI or created his own
-Sylens will become an antagonist, possibly aligned with whatever Faro has become
-One of the other GAIA subordinate functions is responsible for the red plague, maybe Demeter
-Hephaestus will be encountered more directly but not destroyed (possibly reasoned with/overridden to be less aggressive)
 

Gaer

chat.exe a cessé de fonctionner
Staff member
Moderator
Hey I'm doing the same thing! I didn't click your spoilers but I'm on the mission Deep Secrets of the Earth, and have done all of the sidequests and errands available.

I've also decided when to do the Frozen Wild expansion area, according to the internet the ideal place (that has all of the dialogue options etc) is a couple missions after my current one which is The Mountain That Fell.

I'm really hoping that the new game kinda... does more with the open world design. My biggest issues have been unintentionally comparing it to BoTW and Assassin Creed Origins and Odyssey -- which I know isn't entirely fair.

I'm hoping for a larger world, and a lot more uses for machine parts (I'm still lugging around all sorts of materials despite having bought everything possible). There's nothing to buy after a certain point, and I'm very much not enamoured with the loot box design. Especially for things like completing the collections.

I'd have to say that's my biggest complaint about the game -- random loot boxes suck. It seems especially superfluous in a single player game that lacks micro-transactions. Though of course, having real money loot boxes would be significantly worse.

Everything else has been pretty fun! I love the characters, and the story has been neat to follow and I've somehow managed to avoid spoilers, despite starting the game four years after release.

I have a feeling the game will come out on PC somewhat quickly, though we'll be getting the PS5 version at this point.[/ispoiler][/ispoiler]
 

Sarcasmorator

Same as I ever was
(He/him)
You're barely behind me in the main questline! I just finished that one, though I did the Frozen Wilds a little while ago, before crashing the Focus network. I came back at level 54 or so and have just plowed through everything since (though I actually decided not to engage most of the Eclipse in Nora territory and found a way to sneak up to the Thunderjaw without fighting the Faro bots).

The interesting thing to me about it vs. BotW is that they were developed at the same time and released very close together, and they have a LOT of concurrencies without cross-influence. The sequel has a parachute for Aloy though!

I kinda like the loot boxes, if only in that when I'm full of something in inventory I can keep it in the box (I have one with like 6 rocks in it, very handy when I'm too lazy to pick up one I've thrown, and some others with extra traps), and they're functionally similar to treasure chests you might find in a different kind of RPG, like NWN. I disassemble most of the mods I find, but I'm never short of the ones I want, so random selection is OK with me.

As I'm at the very end of the game I think I'm going to just sell a bunch of lenses and hearts since there are no more merchant mysteries that I might need them for. I have been absolutely chockablock with everything I need almost the entire game (except blaze, always running low on blaze), since I prioritized harvesting perks in early leveling. I need to see if I can buy back an extra spear damage upgrade I sold a while ago, though, because I just got a second slot in mine.

Have you figured out what the merchant selling stuff like dirty baskets is for? Seems like useless stuff. EDIT: Oh wait, looks like you trade them to a different merchant for mystery boxes, but I am way past needing mystery boxes.
 
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Gaer

chat.exe a cessé de fonctionner
Staff member
Moderator
Yeah more mystery boxes.

In terms of random loot, this is where I think AC Odyssey really shined.

All of your rewards in game is randomly rolled gear. It can be broken down into resources, and there is always a chance you get something really neat.

More importantly, the random loot unlocks gear skins for dress-up. And as an avid FFXIV player, I can tell you that the only End Game is Glamour.

Since the different models in Odyssey could be made of different materials, it really added a lot of nuance in glamour options. Even if I wish there was more.
 

Sarcasmorator

Same as I ever was
(He/him)
Ending movie spoiler

The triangle of flowers surrounding Sobeck's body suggests that the metal flowers littered around the world surrounded by the same flowers are tributes to her from Demeter, rather than just seed dispensers.
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
Reading your thoughts on the story of the game, I hope the sequel begins with a recap of what happened because most of it isn't ringing a bell
 

Sarcasmorator

Same as I ever was
(He/him)
Well in short:

-GAIA was the big AI running the terraforming show, and some mysterious signal turned her subordinate routines into AIs of their own 20 years before the game starts.
-One of them, Hades, tries to fulfill its purpose and end all life on Earth again; Aloy stops it
-Another, Hephaestus, starts building deadlier machines to cull the human population because people are hunting the terraforming models too much; Aloy stymies this effort, but doesn't find Hephaestus itself, and it still has control of some manufacturing facilities
-Sylens is a ruthless and self-interested fellow who captures Hades after the credits and begins to interrogate it, and is shown in the trailer for HFW directing followers of some sort in the capture and corruption of machines
-Ted Faro (aside from causing the end of the world with his self-replicating death robots) sabotaged the educational part of the Zero Dawn project and killed the people in charge of ZD, and we don't know what happened to him later. He had backdoor to the project (which is how he killed everyone). He seems the most likely person to have had both a stake in things going wrong and the ability to make them do so, and seems like the kind of person who'd spend decades of isolation figuring out a way to make himself immortal.
-Demeter is in charge of plants and the red plague in the HFW trailer looks like it is spread by a plant.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
Linking to the earlier Horizon ZD thread, which also includes some post-game/sequel speculation.

Including this bit from me:

The big question that remains is, the glitch that woke up HADES/sent it haywire/led to all this was said to have come from an unknown outside origin. What could that possibly be? the only people, groups, or culture with advanced enough computer technology to understand the system, much less hack or interfere with it, was old-world. We don't know exactly what all is out there, since the game covers a very small area, but it doesn't seem too likely that there's a tribe or shaman of this world that did it, unless they found old technology that they could awaken - but what old tech would that even be? Nor do I think Sylens had anything to do with it, since he couldn't even get into a lot of the more secure ruins, much less compute with them.

(Side question, wtf is up with Sylens at the end and leading into the sequel, anyway?)

Unrelated, my girlfriend read a forehead-smacking revelation that I also had somehow missed. It didn't escape my notice that there was some Egyptian theming going on with machine names - Khopesh, Scarab, and Horus; as Zero Day approached, Ted went into lockdown in his own "pyramid" in Thebes, too. Nor did it escape my notice that triangles were a big motif for Ted's company, although I somehow completely failed to put 2 and 2 together and realize, duh, they're not triangles, they're pyramids. That's not the "oh god dammit" one, though. The "oh god dammit" one is that Faro sounds like Pharoah. Can't fuckin' believe I missed that. I mean, that's the whole point of it all.

Anyway, that wasn't unrelated at all, because if Faro has this obsession with ancient Egypt and sees himself as a Pharoah, he's probably tried to "mummify" himself somehow. Maybe that's preserved in the afterlife, but I wouldn't be surprised if he uploaded himself. Or, one other possibility, Sylens mentions offhandedly that one of the technologies the old world had was cryogenics - mummification may involve having literally preserved himself.

I mean, he seems like an obvious candidate, gigantic piece of shit that he is. (I almost hope it's him because I would very much enjoy killing him.) But also, I'm not sure what motive he would really have. Even when he wiped Apollo (that absolute motherfucker), he did so in the ostensible hope that the reborn future would live better lives and not repeat their (his) mistakes (lol what an idiot). And he always did seem truly regretful at how horribly he had fucked up. I don't know why now, he would decide that he'd rather reactivate HADES and burn it all back down to the ground. I mean, I guess 1000 years of being an AI or unfreezing can "drive someone crazy" or something but that feels cheap. Another AI? Aliens? The Texan asshole ? I dunno, I'm sure the sequel will explore that more, even if not entirely conclusively.

I really hope PS5s are more available by the end of the year because wanting to play HFW on PS5 but not wanting to wait so long when it's also out on PS4 and deciding what to do is going to be terrrrrible. (Although the same goes for Elden Ring and that comes out a month earlier, so.)
 

Sarcasmorator

Same as I ever was
(He/him)
Ah, I couldn't find an older one! Thanks. I even posted in there months ago but forgot about it.

My thinking with Faro is that, if he is responsible for breaking Gaia, then as with the Chariot glitch itself, he didn't explicitly intend for Hades to try and destroy everything again. It's a side effect of him not thinking through the implications of his actions. But whatever actual intent he had is also probably not any good. He was regretful, yes, but in a corrosive, self-pitying way that made him jealous of Sobeck "getting to be the savior and the martyr all at once" or whatever his line was. Guilt turned to bitterness turned to destruction.

I hadn't caught the Faro/Pharaoh thing and had figured the triangle motif was related to the AIs' geometric construction style (as in the Cauldrons and Spire) but that makes a lot of sense, good eye there.
 
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Gaer

chat.exe a cessé de fonctionner
Staff member
Moderator
The only descriptor you need for Ted Faro is “tool”.
 
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