2 hours ago, Matthew Birdzell said:
I felt HZD did combat amazingly. I LOVED it. The whole experience is by far one of the most polished games I've ever played. Don't know where you got all the bugs from; I got one, maybe two or three the entire 83 hours I've put into the base game and Frozen Wilds DLC. Also a big fan of Aloy. Sure...she's a bit light on character development here and there. But that wasn't the big point. Its her journey of self discovery that I thoroughly enjoyed. Especially the final scene before credits roll. Its beautiful in my opinion. Made me cry a bit. And the best quote is in my signature.
Loved the setting, loved the detail and effort in the lore...though its confusing to align it all. I'm getting there.
I agree about the character animations. They are quite stiff in dialogue branches. Cutscenes are very, very good for the most p
As for the writing I found it solid. Some dialogue is too heavy in exposition and the plot can get a little confusing. But not often I thought. I consider it one of the best games I've ever played all around. Though I see you're not quite on that level. I understand. If it had those areas ironed out I'd consider a 9.75/10.
That discussion probably would warrant its own thread but let me make a more indepth comments on my critique of HZD shortcomings:
The combat system fell flat for me for one big reason: the dodge-roll. Its a clunky patch for the fact that against the real enemies of the game, the only one that really count, the big bad machines, a block move would probably be either completly unrealistic (differences of masses involved and all), and look horrible animated.
Against one or two enemies, dodge-rolling was just a little bit annoying at times. You constantly lost track of your enemies and wasted time re-aquiring the correct heading in the short time window you had to fight back, so often times I found myself stringing together duck rolls until I finally got track of the enemy quick enough to make an attack.
Against a multitude of enemies, it was a big chore. Not only were you constantly forced to evade, enemies would now also attack from multiple headings, so keeping track of them all was even more essential. Every time you duck-rolled, you risked rolling into the attack of an enemy you didn't saw before, or loosing track of 3 enemies that were just standing in front of you.
Adding a block button, even if only effective against human enemies, would have ironed out that point big time.
Then there was the tendency to get stuck on scenery with every dodge roll. Not so much a problem in the open world segments, especially cauldron boss fights had the nast habit to a) force you into close combat as you had no ledge or higher ground to snipe from because the fight was story event triggered and the story event locked you into a combat arena, and b) this arena had a ton of scenery sticking out at the fringes that made you get stuck on when you wanted to roll around the fringes to get away from attacking enemies. Lost many lives to rolling away from enemies in cauldron fights, trying to keep track of them, and then getting stuck on some unseen piece of scenery at the exact moment the boss enemy charged me.
The damage system is clever, don't get me wrong. But with the upgrade system being kinda basic, and clearly not well balanced, I feel damage mods, and subsequently fully damage boosted weapons oftentimes are a better option than stringing multiple elemental effects together. I only found use for the elemental arrows (apart from fire) for the big baddies that would consume too many of the expensive sharpshooter arrows else... or blasting them with the hunter bow would take ages.
The fire system on the other hand is extremly OP... I never even bothered with aiming for the heatcore weakspot against corrupters, they go down against fire arrows so quickly. The glint hawks, annoying as they are, are easy prey once you find out fire will trigger them falling to the ground.
A lot of the more specialized weaponry I found either useless or subpar. Might be me...
The AI is.... often subpar. Not because enemies do especially stupid things. But its easy to see the strings they are attached to and abuse them. Which is a good thing for me because I hated the combat system for close combat.
Example: The pseudo-Boss fight were you catch up with the Oseram that spies on you early in the game. Typical combat bowl. Two corruptors down there, and some human scum. Well, at that point didn't had so many damage mods, and could have meant a lot of dodge rolling.
So I decide to take out the enemy snipers on their elevated positions first, which, thanks to them being high up, is not spotted by other enemies. Then I search the fringes for the bowl for small ledges, and sure enough, there is one I can jump my way up to. Now the whole fight becomes a piece of cake. Minutes later all the enemies are killed, and I haven't taken damage without a single dodge roll.
Human enemies don't jump... as far as I have seen until now at least. And they certainly will not be able to execute the elaborate jump maneuvers needed to get to places you are not expected to go as player. The corruptors probably could jump so high. But there is no room to land there for them... so the AI will not be able to jump up to the ledge. You are invincible up there thanks to the ledge giving you cover against shots, and nobody is able to attack you with close combat attacks. The AI has no answer to such dirty tricks.
The good side of this is the endless options you get (most of the time) to take out enemies. Rigging doors with mutliple layers of explosive tripwires boosted with damage mods, baiting enemies to come look for you by killing some humies, and then watch the lemming train of humans and machines blow up has something strangly satisfying, even if it is again not very hard to pull off. It just relies on the right positioning.
In the end it was a net negative for me because the uncomfortable damage mitigation system made me avoid close combat and choose the sniping / ledge jumping and sniping / trap laying route after the early game cheat of silent striking enemies became less effective against bigger machines and bigger groups of humies.
Sure, at some point I found a way to live with the dodge rolling if I was forced to use it:
1) Make sure nothing blocks your way to the rear
2) When an enemy attacks you, always only roll straight back so the screen stays focused on the enemy that just missed
3) counterattack
4) rinse and repeat
... it still felt clunky. Like all close combat systems tacked on to shooters since the start of time. It felt like a dev with shooter expierience trying to tackle something they clearly lacked expierience in. Which as far as I know is pretty much what happened.
EDIT: Now I did get the Nacon Pro Controller later on when I was able to get it cheaper, and did try the dodge roll with the Paddles, thus being still able to control the screen, thus able to track enemies while dodge rolling. Sure enough, it made the keeping track part easier. You still got stuck on unseen geometry you rolled into because your screen was centered on the enemy, not the direction you rolled to. At least if you didn't always first check your escape route before focusing the enemy again and making the dodge.
And then you need to train your hands to play with paddles.... I couldn't 100% get used to it until now, to be honest.
Aloy looks cool. She has the right attitude at times. Her backstory IS interesting.... but I never felt like I watched a real CHARACTER in story sequences. She felt like the typical "empty vessel" western RPG character with a forced story to make her more of a real character.
Its the one thing that made me always prefer JRPGs over Western RPGs... I prefer seeing deep and cool dev generated characters than creating my own character and roleplay as such in a classical western RPG. But aloy KINDA tries to be both at the same time, and falls flat of it because of that. At least for me.
I would have preferred if the dev would have picked one of the 3 different "character options" for the player, and then expanded upon that. Made her an aggressive anti hero character, or a really compassionate emotional character, or the intelligent clever character. Because the player should have the illusion of character progression option through the dialogue system, the character feels flat oftentimes.
As a positive example: I felt like Aloys character came forward strongest with her interaction with Nil, which at the same time is the strongest and most consistent NPC for me. Not least of it because the uncanny NPC animations fit Nil perfectly - those dead eyes and creepy smile is exactly how I envisage a psychopath like him to look.
Here Aloy takes a side, and clearly expresses how she feels. She feels determined, and pragmatic at the same time, going along with the creepy psychopath while clearly telling him how much she dislikes his creepy worldview. That is the aloy I would like to see more of. Not stupid dialogue options which have no meaning. And actual, drastic binary option that, while not having a lasting effect on the game really, allows you to really deepen that story of the two characters for better or worse.
EDIT: Oh, and an additional nitpick for me is how the characters seem to fall "out of cahracter" as soon as technology is involved. Aloy seems to understand WAY too much of the old technology, and accepts some things way to quickly. While I do enjoy a intelligent character for once that can count 1+1 together for once and comes to logical conclusions quickly (for example that the machines seen in one of the archives under different names are the machines she has met before), sometimes it feels like she is a Mekboy Ork in WH40k: born with an innate understanding of technology coded into here genes 
A lot of the characters do not feel like belonging into such a tribal and primitive society... at times it looks like the artist tried their best to recreate a fantastic world in all its tribal and post apocalyptic glory, but the writers either couldn't come up with story lines that fitted the fantastic look of the characters, or couldn't be bothered to / didn't had the time. And it felt like the farther I got into the story, the less the story would bother with that. While the beginning in the Nora lands was still full of this character, other civilizations in the game felt way more inconsistent. Culminating in the weird shadow carja. Evil mofos, that let you roam their lands at will. And salute you when you travel through their settlements. OK. Well. I really don't know what to make of them.
The bugs... as said, most of them are off the trodden path. To be honest, they are not THAT bad, mostly funny. Gives you a feeling of the gargantuan task of creating such a big game world and then bugfixing it. There probably never was enough time to fix them all, and they did a good job at catching the most obvious one in the main areas.
The only one that comes to mind is a lightmap bug, where at nighttime in a village a torch was baked into the lightmap, but the model of the torch was either removed without the lightmap being updated, or the model of the torch wasn't added (if the lightmap was baked with proxy lighting). It made me chuckle a little bit, but nothing game breaking.
The "real" bugs outside of the trodden patch where mainly visual too. you know, stretched terrain polygons where there probably was a pixel error in the heightmap up at a cliff on a map border, weird lighting bugs around cliffs, rocks Z-Fighting with the Terrain at some point, terrain becoming invisible at some point of the map. You have to hunt for them really to find them. Or be the biggest coward when it comes to fights and always scan the terrain for invincibility ledges before starting a fight, and thus travel along cliffs and the map border a lot 
The game breahing bugs where mostly getting stuck... again, when trying to reach areas you are probably not meant to reach. sometimes you get stuck between rocks... Nothing I can really complain about.
This all mostly shows you that such a big game world will ALWAYS be too much for any dev to get 100% bugfixed.
What did more interfere with my gameplay was that the game often did a bad job job of fencing you in. Which is good and bad at the same time... good, because it allowed me to "cheat" my way around many fights that I wouldn't have enjoyed much. Bad, because that made these fights extremly easy. The fact there ARE invincibility ledges in the game I don't think are really that much of a feature. I think its mostly a result of the dev not wanting to limit what Aloy can do with her jump ability, and a very generous system for what she can still stand on. Apart from actual vertical cliffs you can climb about any mountain in HZD (which became a more enjoyable time waster for me than actually engaging in combat)...
This allows you to find "invincibility ledges" for almost all the major fights in the open world. I cleared all the corruption zones this way, and almost all the bandit camps.
The most extreme case was two teeth. Travel up to the "Sabertooth peak", and jump down the mountain in the general direction of the two teeth bandit camp. You will find a ledge just above the camp where you can see ALL the bandits in the camp, and hit most of them all the time. Add to that you are in hunter bow range, and the ledge is deep enough to let you duck back into cover should you be spotted once (and given you have the camo suit, you almost never will be). Took me mere minutes to take out the camp without moving once, and only getting shot at once.
Now, these are not really "bugs" per se. I just don't think this was intentional gameplay. You could say emergent gameplay like this is the result of the open world design, and its a pick-your-own-gameplay thing. Clearly it made the game better for me.
But while looking for these spots, and discovering my joy in ingame mountain climbing I found that the devs use about 3 different systems of fencing off the map borders. Sometimes you can reach the actual border and hit an invisible wall. Sometimes actual geometry block of the border (whih I think is the most preferable option)... sometimes you reach a part of the map where there is still plenty of space to travel through, but a message will tell you to turn back or you will be sent to the next save spot. And if you continue, the game makes true of that threat.
Feels like the devs really struggled with building the world, and there was never enough time to really finish it off in a coherent fashion. Again, hardly gamebreaking, still interesting.
As to the animations: I think we can agree on that. Maybe the reason why it bothered me so much is because so much of the story interactions ARE side quest cutscenes, which reveal the bad NPC animations for the not so important characters. Some of which do not even have a real close up body LOD. That detailed (if badly animated) face on that plasticky body not meant for close ups... kinda creepy.
Again, most of the the open world side quests should probably have been left without all the animated cutscenes. They feel cheaply done at best, creepy and uncanny at worst. A more simple VO system would have told the story just as effective (given the doll like NPC animations do not really convey emotions that well), and might have saved time and money to polish some other parts of the game more.
The main story event cutscenes though are an entirely different story, as are Aloys animations. Boy, do I love that player character from a pure visual standpoint. Such a cool character.
If I sound harsh with the game at times, lets just say its "tough love". BECAUSE I love the setting so much the downsides irk me so much more. I really WANT to love the gameplay. I somehow found enjoyment in it, just in a different way than I THINK the dev wanted me to. I really WANT to care about all those characters in this fascinating world. Its just so many of them feel lackluster in a world which feels so alive else. Like dolls at the worst of times, both because of visuals and mediocre storywriting.
Again, I generally love the overarching backstory. It sometimes feels less epic in game than the concept makes you believe it should feel. Again, I feel like the open world concept and the need to ground all the events in the game world feel like they hamper the great effort of the backstory.
But really, apart from improving the combat system somewhat, balancing the upgrades more, ditching the dialogue system and making aloy a stronger character instead, and either fleshing out the NPCs and giving them better animations and a close up body, or ditching the side quest cutscenes altogether, there is not much I could nitpick the game for. I think this is one of the best games I have seen in the last few years. The 7/10 for me personally mostly comes from the mentioned "tough love". The bar is set so high by the backstory and setting that what would be solid systems in other games don't do this one justice IMO.
