So I haven't played Horizon Zero Dawn in a little while. Happens that there isn't much to do. I didn't really want to buy thegame and play it because it was only going to last so long. 30-50 hours and that's it. Nothing more to do. I could platinum the game but can't be bothered to look for the last few objects. Plus I mean why bother?
Instead it's back to looking through all these articles. Seems that Guerrilla Games are happy to share that they invested a tremendous amount of effort to make the game realistic. But not really realistic.
I noticed it right away when I started playing it. That they expect the player to pay attention to every detail, because they did. They made the game pretty. At least that 20% directly built by artists and that other 80% built procedurally but still looking great.
BBC-Realism they call it. Best graphics in a video game ever.. I might be biased because the game isn't on PC but.. maybe. They certainly had the intention of HZD being the prettiest PlayStation game. There just isn't that much competition lately despite what the PS4 is capable of (or perhaps because of what it is capable of). Ratchet and clank, Uncharted, Tomb Raider.. I'd sooner just not point out the short list of contenders.
Good thing they got it right because that other open world game, even though it is much larger, Mass Effect, is getting shredded.
But since I refuse to play it.. I shouldn't be talking about Mass Effect.
While taking a quick break from Ark, and still wishing the dino animations and AI could hold a candle to the machines in HZD, I saw a few movie trailers and caught this one for Alien Covenant. Reminded how Ark could have been a Space Colony game. Giving the player some other thing to look forward to when they got technologically advanced enough.
I can't say I'm a fan of the Alien franchise but like Horizon Zero Dawn (and Mass Effect) there's science lurking in the background.
The concept of sending out a ship to colonize a new world and all that (especially when some advanced intelligence was there before) is appealing. In Horizon's case it's more about birthing life on Earth.
I love that the game's makers decided that the best way to re-create the world in the game that was devastated by a machine plague, is exactly the same way they built the world for the game. They have tools and let the tools do most of the work for them.
Ark gives some of those tools to the player and allows the player(s) to make up the story. But unfortunately we aren't given control of the world at any point. Which is sad but wtv.
But HZD for whatever reason is single player and has this grand story that requires that players invest time to get through that story and jut agree that they can't control the world.
I'm bitter that there's no such freedom for the player to affect the world as we can in other games.. due to that story no matter how good it is. And it IS really good.
But then again... even as good as it is.. I wonder what else could have happened or how god-like Aloy could have become after coming back out of the mountain with her end of days armor (and railgun).
One of the first articles after the game's release talked about the removal of guns.. or how they'd thought about having guns but decided that wasn't the game they wanted to build. Claws eyes out. Having railguns in the story then is a vicious tease.
I've heard people remark about the game (very few discuss the actual plot) that maybe it is for the better that the new humans that appeared are forced to think for themselves. The few living creatures out there (that couldn't be expected to provide enough genetic biodiversity to re-culture the earth) created by the Gaia AI before it blew itself up.. don't amount to much.
Did Gaia Nuke herself hundreds of years ago? It seems so because automated systems released Aloy as some kind of fail-safe. Why then does it take Hades hundreds of years to catch up on destroying the world with impunity?
And as much as I love them, the machines aren't really that special as in how do they fit in to a healthy world. Are they supposed to keep being pumped out by the cauldrons even after everything is cleaned up? They have functions related to de-polluting the land water and air, but again I don't understand how life is expected to work around them. At some point the cauldrons should stop producing them or move on to pumping out more living creatures no?
Something like the game gets in the way of the story, that got in the way of the game.
The game needed to have a story to drive the player through exploration of the world created by Guerrilla, based on real places on Earth. Lovely really because they hit all the marks they intended to and exceeded what they needed to do considering how other games now pale in comparison.
BUT it's kind of a mess.
1 dude ended up trashing the world and killing billions then robbing those that would come later from the knowledge that ultimately led to the untimely demise of those billions of people.
I'd almost consider Gaia's efforts a failure because it seems too poor an effort. Sure there are plants and shit, and ignoring that the game is static due to the story requiring the player to progress.. nothing happens while you're playing. Like Guerrilla was happy with the world they built and decided they didn't want the player to be able to change it.
The what? tens of thousands that Project Zero Dawn's Gaia AI managed to pump out did manage to create relatively self sufficient factions.. but to what end? Gaia was aware that they were at odds with each other. Killing each other. Which Sylenz even points out. They are better off without that AI then no?
I don't mean to fault the game for the story and the too-perfect world that Guerrilla built... I'm just wondering what the game would have been like if it wasn't so obvious from the outset to the player than you're still on Earth and it is a post-apocalyptic setting. And if the player had at least a little more control over the sandbox. And why there's no obvious reason why you don't see where the animals come from but there are several factories for the machines all over.
Because it's a video so.. because Guerrilla said so. :/
The whole bit about the Nora religion popping up because they had access to this relic of the past. The whole bit about all the machines (and then Killer Robots) everywhere.. That doesn't stop the new batch of humans, released way too early, from figuring out how technology works. It wouldn't be long before they developed weapons of mass destruction and AI and got that whole death spiral cycle started again.
And even after playing the game through twice it is still confusing. Did the Nora develop from those people that had to leave Facility because it had run low on resources? then that couldn't have been 1000 years into the project. So what happened in the hundreds of years after that happened and the incident that freed the sub AIs?
I feel a little bad because everything in the story and logs should make that timeline clear. :/
Either way humans are let loose on the world without knowledge of the past. That was taken away from them.
But that should have been up to them anyway. That's the argument Sobeck should have made. One that could have been supported by the way they built the AIs in the first place. They should have been able to intervene if it was obvious that humans were getting too destructive. At least provide them with the option of knowledge the same way it was offered to Aloy.
But maybe Gaia was just too young and didn't have time to figure out how to build enough natural things with genetics. Hundreds or one thousand years later though. How is everything possibly still so primitive. Not the human tribes, but the systems.
Again.. messy.
AI these days can brute force evolution in simulations which do replicate success at tasks which took billions of years for living creatures to master. I'd imagine that with all the processing power at Gaia's disposal, which is sort if implied by the complexity of the decryption they needed just to get that master key decrypted to defeat the Evil Killer Machines.
One should ask what even started the plague? Is whatever started that plague still around and caused the incident that brought sentience to the sub-AIs including Hades?
There's a doubt that Ted Faro did it all. The doubt coming from wiping Apollo.
That 100 year gap makes me wonder how many cycles, hand offs, did Gaia and Hades go through? Doesn't Hades have an advantage because everything Gaia creates Hades can then control?
Dunno, but it is all food for a sequel or DLC.
In the meantime, I wonder what the game would have been like had Gaia being better.
If the game was built to showcase VR lets say. If there were more plants and animals and it all seemed like Eden.. not just a new version of Earth. Properly super real.
But when I say animals, I mean the game does say that Gaia did improvise. Over 1000 years for some reason instead of making large animals, Gaia just kept making regular sized ones. Only after the incident do bigger things finally appear.
Why do they even look like machines at all?
Wouldn't it have been more impactful for the game's story and player immersion for the creatures, at least at first, to be life-like?
If it had been just man vs nature, or still Woman vs Nature until you figured out oh shit, there are machines in here, that main story thread of Aloy knowing more about the world, the machines, the ancient history of the metal world while the Nora played with sticks and fire, and Carja did their bronze age stuff.. Guerrilla's BBC Realism theme would have been even easier to sell.
Would the larger beasts have been easier to sell as full skinned animals versus theme park machines?
So I looked for a timeline for HZD's story.
Through both playthroughs even though I was exploring the world as much as I could.. I did miss a great many datapoints out in the world. The timeline filled in the blanks for these missing text and audio datapoints and does help to make sense of the timeline. But it doesn't paint a very good picture for the centuries that Gaia wasted doing god knows what.
It almost feels like in the couple of decades after Gaia nuked herself Hades did much more with the Hephaestus cauldrons than Gaia managed in centuries. Sure Hades was piggybacking on her work but it made it much easier for Hades to push deadly machines into the world. The timeline sucks then because even if Gaia had made more biological machines the humans would have adapted to them being that they were already used to the dangers of the wilds. They weren't refined enough or too timid to just be overwhelmed by killer robots. It took the plague robots to really start the process of wiping them out.
So again.. if Gaia was aware of Hades' capability for wiping out life on Earth with the plague robots (though I'm still not clear on if he's supposed to use the plague robots to do that versus just turning all the robots 'evil') it almost feels like she'd make that process a little harder by making her green robots too goody-goody. Something like Hades makes all these bigger more badass robots.. where are Gaia's big badass robots to fight them? Either way life gets wiped out why not have some epic battles?
Meanwhile, still looking through the timeline.. there seems to be a gap between the time the earth should have been able to support life and the time the people incubated in the facility got expelled. There's no Hades interference to explain why that facility failed.
There's also little explanation why Gaia failed to accomplish much at all in those 8 or so centuries before the incident that released the sub-AIs.
And the most baffling gap is that period between the cradle facility failure and the claimed earliest point at which humans could survive on earth. It is a period of decades.
Since Gaia was fully functional at the time it's like she must have rushed to get sustainable systems ready and I suppose goes to explaining why everything is so half-assed.
Up to that point in the story it felt like there had been a few cycles, hand-offs between Gaia and Hades but it isn't clear any of those hand-offs actually happened due to the issues Zero Dawn encountered. Given that humanity got booted out and Earth might as well have been made just habitable enough.. it should have taken a few centuries for those few of tribes/nations to build up on relatively geologically stable, high land.
Then since they were at least provided with a rudimentary education and have access to all kinds of junk to salvage..
They'd most likely end up living like some human cultures on Earth now. Having access to technology even if you weren't explicitly taught how to use it doesn't really matter. It wouldn't take long to develop a similar technologically rich society.
Except that even given centuries according to the story.. that didn't happen. Sadly the game doesn't give any good reason why that might have been. :/