Saturday Morning Gaming: The Debt I Owe Elden Ring
I would like to thank Elden Ring.
Way back in 2017, I played Horizon: Zero Dawn and put it down. I kept getting killed when I got in fights and that made the game decidedly un-fun. “The combat is too tough”, I said to myself.
There were a dozen other games that I wanted to play and, hey, it was *EASY* to put the game down.
Since then, I have played Elden Ring. Now I’ve returned to the game and, holy cow, I thought that the combat in this game was difficult? It’s downright *EASY*. They come out and tell you “hit this part of the dinosaur with armor damaging arrows, hit that part with fire, hit that other part with shock”. And if you just do what the game tells you to do, you’re golden.
Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition_20230422101335
Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition_20230422101327
On top of that, I’ve learned the lesson that just because a monster is there that it doesn’t mean that you have to fight it. You can just say “Wow, that’s a big monster” and move on. You can come back to it later. Indeed, you’re *SUPPOSED* to come back to it later. They put fights that are too difficult for a level 15 person right there in the middle of the map. You’re not supposed to say “Level 38? LIES!” and run in screaming your name. You’re supposed to say “Maybe I’ll try that when I’m level 30 or so.”
And you know what? When you’re level 38, like the game recommends, the game becomes DOWNRIGHT EASY. You’ve got a host of weapons that you didn’t have at level 15, you’ve got a host of skills that you didn’t have at level 15, you’ve got a host of armor that gives protection against various attacks that you didn’t have at level 15.
It took Elden Ring to teach me “Yeah, you can walk away. Come back later.”
And having done that, I’ve found that Horizon: Zero Dawn is a really good game!
If you’ve never played it, you should know that it’s free as part of your Playstation Plus subscription and is well worth your time.
You’re Aloy, an outcast-from-birth who is a member of the Nora tribe. The tribe lives in the Sacred Lands and these lands are lush and green and populated with robot dinosaurs. You learn to sneak, to hunt, and to gather resources from your mentor (who is also an outcast). You learn that you could cease to be an outcast by finishing the Youth Rite of Passage that the tribe has.
Well, of course, the Youth Rite of Passage gets attacked by a foreign tribe and the story kicks off in earnest. There are three basic storylines:
1. What is Aloy’s back-story? Why was she an outcast from birth?
2. Who is this tribe that attacked your Rite of Passage? Why did they attack? What is their deal?
3. Wait, this world is *OUR* world? It’s the year 3000-something? What the heck happened?
So you get to explore a world that you now understand is post-apocalyptic Colorado Springs (and beyond) and you have to figure out how these three different storylines are actually all the same storyline and it’s a surprisingly good one.
“Whoa. *THAT* is why there are robot dinosaurs? Man.”
And all it took to truly enjoy the game was the ability to look at a robot stegasaurus and say “I’ll come back later.”
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is the title screen from Horizon: Zero Dawn. All screenshots taken by the author.)
I also, completely coincidentally, am currently playing that because it was on a Steam sale a few months ago. I’m running around making sure I have everything tidied up before the last mission, and I quite enjoy it.
I did the DLC before doing that (After I got the best armor), and apparently, it turns out the final fight of that is actually harder than the real final fight, so I should be fine. But also, there’s no free-play after that (The game resets to right before, I suspect the game-world is going to be changed in a fairly major way.) so I’m dealing with almost everything first.
And I have to say: This game has some of the most interesting worldbuilding and mystery at the heart of it I’ve ever seen a game have. It’s really interesting because, being in the ‘modern world’, it’s trivial to guess some off the in-universe plot-twists that throw Aloy (like what’s going on with Dr. Sobeck), but still having _no idea_ where the actual plot is going, the big reveal of what actually happened.
And the worldbuilding is great, the different cultures all seem real, and all seem to be real places that human societies could evolve towards, with a ton of different analogies to real world cultures that didn’t seem to be ripping off any of them directly.
If I have one problem with this game, it’s that, at a certain point, you really do start just powering your way through it instead of being the clever hunter you’re supposed to be at the start. I recently accidentally stumbled across an uncompleted quest or two that had me going against low-level enemies, and…I can just snipe soldiers from halfway across the map and if alarms go off, I can just fire arrow them with enough mods that enough they instantly catch on fire and die from it.Report
Oh, and since you mentioned the location, that weirdly was a very funny ‘reveal’ to me, despite it not really being a secret. I hadn’t really thought about where various messages were saying I was until I did the DLC and there’s a frickin multi-colored lake, and then another lake where people are apparently washing clothes in because it’s steaming, which caused me to be somewhat confused, and then I walked through an obvious park service building and found a geyser going off in front of me, and said ‘Oh, damn, I know exactly where I am.’Report
Dude, I’m going through the underground base where they explain the name of the game RIGHT FREAKIN NOW. (My google chat dinged and it was Maribou and we chatted for a sec.)
I had a guess as to the point of the robots and I WAS 100% COMPLETELY WRONG. Holy cow, this game has some good world-building.Report
You spend the entire first half of the game learning about an inevitable apocalypse that was going to happen (and, you suspect at first, from your point of view has obviously already happened), but then you realize just how bad things were going to be in that apocalypse, the complete and utter finality of that, and you’re like ‘Hold on a second, clearly that’s not what happened, because if it was what had happened none of us would be here. So how did we stop it?’
And the answer to that question…just…wow.
Incidentally, I just beat the end of the game, and it was indeed easier than the DLC’s boss. The one caveat is you do have a timer ticking, but it’s a 15 minute timer (I think, I didn’t even notice it till 10 minutes in) and I beat it, first time, with a minute and a half to spare, and honestly I wasted a lot of time. If I were to retry that I could probably beat it in 10 minutes easily.Report
I just learned why the Apollo modules didn’t work the way they had planned.
Whoa.Report
Someone really has cemented their legacy there as ‘literally the stupidest person who has ever existed’.Report
Sorry, I meant I didn’t notice the timer until it had 10 minutes left, I don’t know whether it’s because it triggered at a certain point or whether it actually have been ticking down for several minutes and I didn’t see it.
Anyway, non obvious tip for boss fights: you not only can change weapon mods and stuff out during a boss fight, but you can also craft new ammo there, while paused, instead of trying to do it at real time in the weapon select menu.Report
The first HZD was definitely one of my “many hundreds of hours” games. Like you can drop me into a random place on the map and I’ll know right where I am. In fact, it’s one of two games I’ve gotten platinum on. It really is magnificent.
I got the sequel and never finished it. I think maybe my tastes have changed.Report
As an aside, HZD is interesting because it’s not always easy to separate “story” from “lore.” The way I usually think about it, “story” is the stuff you directly experience in game, whereas “lore” is all the background, history stuff you look up on the wiki — unless you’re the completionist type and actually find all the lore drops. However, with HZD, a lot of the lore drops end up telling a parallel story, which is just as engaging as the now-story. It’s really well done.
It’s also super annoying if you’re watching a streamer play the game and they skip through all the lore drops. It’s like, dude, that’s half the game!Report
If I had one complaint about the lore drops, it’s that they sometimes drop 3 or 4 audio logs right next to each other and you have to just stand there if you want to listen to each one.
And then, when you listen to the last one and leave the room, ALOY STARTS TALKING AND YOU HAVE TWO CONVERSATIONS TO LISTEN TO AT ONCE.
It’s batty.
Other than that, it’s awesome.Report
Right! I hate when games dump like “triggered dialog” on you and you can’t replay it and if you miss it you can’t hear it again. But yeah, it’s even worse if it plays over other dialog or during a fight or whatever.Report
Yeah, the background audio playback stuff is bonkers bad. At minimum they should stop playing when Aloy starts talking.
And I am completely baffled as to why you cannot replay them, only read the transcript.
If they really wanted all these audio logs, the thing to do would have been to queue them up and play them when nothing else is happening, and pause them when things started.Report
Aaaaand credits.
There was one thing that the game did that I absolutely *LOVE*. At the end of the game there is a boss fight. It’s the big boss fight at the end of the game. One of the things that happens right before the big boss fight at the end of the game is that you can walk around and talk to your friends and acquaintances from side quests in the game. “Hey, you made it!” “Of course! We did that side quest, didn’t we?”
And I feel warm and fuzzy.Report
Yeah, the final fight is interesting, you can waste a lot of time doing very little damage unless you notice what, exactly, you’re supposed to be doing. After I finish wrapping up some post-DLC things wandering around, I’m going to go back and replay it, see how quickly I can do it.
Oh, and speaking of the overpowered thing…they give you this crazy-good weapon for the pre-final fight when you’re fighting off a horde of things…and except for the ‘subbosses’ that really don’t do much and you hit from a distance, the machine horde was actually not that hard to take down using mostly my own weapons.
I don’t know, I was playing at the medium difficulty level, whatever that was named, but by the end of the game I was feeling was more easy…which sounds like I’m bragging but honestly it’s more ‘I don’t actually think I’m super-good at this game, I often am bad and miss things and get hit, and yet combat was often easy’.
Not only that, but I discovered, as I walked about making sure I had done everything before the last fight, was that I often had missed checking in with everyone I had talked to earlier…not the people came to the fight, they’re all standing around at the future site of the fight and easy to find, but the _other_ people. Many of them had some unique cinematic cutscene dialog thing that played the first time you talked to them after solving their problem, which I had somehow missed, as it wasn’t officially part of their quest which had been marked completed. So I basically just wandered around every settlement and talked to every named NPC, which sounds boring but really wasn’t.
Do you have the DLC? It gives you an area with a higher difficulty and some cool new weapons.Report
Yeah the DLC is bonkers, and it has the best NPC in the history of gaming.Report
I am playing the DLC now and intend to beat it this weekend.
I very much dislike the thing where you beat the game and then the save point made is 10 minutes before the final mission. I mean, of course, unless there is a VERY SPECIFIC reason that you could not continue playing the game after that final mission.
If they set that up, okay. Sure. Fine. Before the final mission.
But, no spoilers, Horizon: Zero Dawn did not meet that condition. They should have let you do the DLC after you beat the game. There was no reason not to.
I mean, I appreciate saying “We want to make sure that you start the sequel at level 0 so you have to go up all of your levels again”. Sure. Fine. Okay.
But you can do that by leaving your weapon behind at the beginning of game two, rather than at the ending of game one.Report
Frozen Wilds conquered.
Surprised at how good it was. It felt like an old-school DLC… more of the story added on rather than stuff that was removed from the story to be sold later. New and fun characters, new and fun revelations, and new and fun machines.
I am delighted that I went back to play this.Report
I started H:ZD a while back, but I didn’t really stick with it. It sits there as a game I should get back to. I think I even installed it on my Steam Deck when I got it, but I haven’t touched it. Someday. Maybe.
I did started Divinity: Original Sin. I tried it a few years back, but I didn’t really have a lot of time or a good setup to get involved in a game like that. I have only played for about an hour or so, but hopefully I will stick with it.
I also decided to really give Total War Shogun 2 a good try. Many times I have sat down to play a Total War game, but I haven’t stuck with them. I have been listening to the audiobook of James Clavell’s Shogun, and I decided it was time to really do this.Report