Monster Mash-- Horizon: Zero Dawn vs. Days Gone

[Music] [Music] horizon zero dawn and days gone are two PlayStation 4 exclusive open-world games that share the same essential structure and gameplay interests but diverge in completely opposite directions when it comes to presentation and pacing to play them back-to-back feels like one game flowing into another as far as hands-on the controller and eyes scanning the map are concerned stylistically though it's an experience an absolute whiplash horizon zero dawn is an ambitious lis gigantic map said in a verdant a post-apocalyptic version of America's Four Corners region fixated on boss like fights with gigantic foes singly or in small groups days gone is an elaborate small-scale map a County and a half or so of backcountry America just little south of where the game was developed in Bend Oregon which conversely focuses on huge waves of smaller simpler enemies one tells a t14 story of classic adventure with a feminine edge the other tells a more meandering tale that makes dudebro blood and violence a core part of its storytelling identity I want to talk about these games together because I'm fascinated by the way is that these two Studios working along such similar lines both brand-new zuni owned IPs both third-person open-world action titles both leaning heavily on cinematic story presentation both fixated on a particular style of monster for its gameplay could end up being so artistically divergent in the actual experience of them in the early 2000s with Grand Theft Auto 3 and Beyond open-world third-person titles began to slowly but surely replace the linear first-person shooter is the most prolific action game structure these games have a behind the shoulder perspective light inventory management a mini-map and a larger map populated by many colorful icons if you allow for the small mutation of the first-person perspective this generalized about instantly recognizable structure accounts for most triple-a games of the past half decade I don't mean that accusatorial II for example most comedy movies of the past 50 years also share a similar essential structure when you consider their pacings and how their plot arcs develop in land but investing heavily in them leads to an interesting kind of fatigue in playing these sorts of games that movies gloss over easier with their 90-minute runtimes most open world games incorporate a lot of collectible hunting sidequest another optional content to extend their length well into 40 60 80 a hundred hours depending on the title looking at the PlayStation Store the top sellers in the top critical performers of this console generation are utterly dominated by the third-person open-world structured assassin's creed origin and Odyssey Grand Theft Auto 5 Red Dead Redemption to Mad Max the new tomb Raider's and of course these two newcomers with the zombies and the robot dinosaurs glossy cutscenes spectacular violence massive environments where am i who am i what am i playing what allows this structural format to sell so many copies of so many things without blowing out everyone's patience for it if the structure is repeated again and again knee is style alone enough to build out the whole identity of a game to look at horizon and days gone together is to get a clarifying response they are the same game they are opposite games there are both at once because more than style or substance they are [ __ ] enormous games where small differences grow massive as the scope of the game plays itself out I want to start with horizon zero dawn first because it's ultimately such an extremely traditional adventure story alloy the protagonist is a teenage outcast marked for destiny but shunned from the community for some sort of mysterious transgression surrounding her birth the reason this setup is so cliche and tired is its sheer utility look at it from a world builders angle every piece of information that the player learns is also new to the character there are no expectations of relationships and histories beyond the scope of the present tense story and the perception of predestination permits the world to spin on the axis of her story and not solely distantly on its own like in real life like a good number of things in the overall design it's not especially creative in the broad strokes to set up a LOI as this sort of protagonist yet the game excels at taking those broad cliches and leveraging them to elevate the small details and really make them sing the bones of this story you've all seen before a skull and spine and hips the flesh though has a tremendous spark and confidence to its creativity Eloy herself is excellently by Ashley birch with a kind of pragmatic wonder curious and cunning but with a very blunt edge when it comes to social cues again this has a storytelling utility when Eloy asked another character a question about a town a society a belief she has no problem being slightly rude and cutting to the most pertinent question about those things it emphasizes the fish-out-of-water element of her character that provides such a platform for the player to grow out of their knowledge of the world and that same brusqueness allows her to ask the outsider questions that the player might ask why this way why not another way doesn't it seem silly to be so superstitious how much do you really know about what you're talking about horizon has a strangely balanced mashup of a world there are robot animals and eventually robot dinosaurs whose purpose is somewhat cryptic at first the world has bloomed from the grave of the old one the ruins of which are everywhere an extremely decayed it's post post-apocalypse green and lush early mysterious has posed to the sick baleful Browns and Grey's of the settings that are closer in time to the end of the world ello comes from an isolated tribe of hunters and gatherers the Norra neighboring them are the card lands a feudal society split into sun-worshipping cities under a new kinder king and a splinter shadow card a faction who still follow the old kings religious zealotry the shadow car jay is in western Utah around Salt Lake City in Cedar City the Sun kingdoms are along Colorado's western slope and the Norra hail from the east side of the Rockies around Colorado Springs a fourth civilization of Shama nests hailed from the exotic frozen lands of Wyoming around Jackson Hole those are our names for them of course all the names from the gas station maps are long gone and the pervasive mystery of the apocalypse is one of the game's strongest threads it's all buried under flowers and moss so you've got feudal fantasy elements present-day topographies and far future technology trying to coexist in narrative harmony it's a difficult tapestry of themes and elements to weave together with any coherency alloy acts like a narrative zipper you start with a teeth of the story beats in the right place you get a good foundation and before you know it the disparate halves have mesh themselves behind her with a cozy strength the strangest synergy between science fiction and fantasy is in the construction of the internal mythologies and cultural logics of the civilizations of the game the lore of the science fiction justifies explains and supports the myths of the fantasy world when Loa reaches the Nora village for the first time to try herself from the village proving you can stop at any number of little performances and presentations tied to Nora belief and culture an old woman for example who was once kind a boy tells a creation myth to children but that creation myth is all essentially cryptic foreshadowing for the audio logs and video files Loa will later dig out of the ruins which tell the real story they're the same story from different perspectives and time and knowledge the ruins of the old world are extremely taboo and nora society to go delving into them is to invite exiled from the community so little is known about the past and there's no real appetite among the menorah for learning more accept alloy of course the outsider whose curiosity cannot and will not be bound by a simple law and a simplistic understanding so you and her go out to Devil's thirst ponds and Forests among crumbling skyscrapers and you find one that you can climb up and up and up at the top of the shattered skyscraper a forgotten video log taken hundreds if not thousands of years ago from that very spot well show you the whole skyline as it was whole and gleaming it's an alien world de LOI a familiar one to the player it is exotic in both directions at once provoking a melancholy nostalgia in the player for the simple miracles of the modern age and a tremendous novelty for a Loya glimpse of something greater and stranger than she's ever known before or ever really will know there's only one other piece of media I know that tries to fuse fantasy and sci-fi into a chimera like this and it's 1983 scrawled I feel like asking someone what genre crawl falls into is kind of like a nerd Rossa Rorschach test you can learn a thing of to you by how people justify one sort of answer or another but I think we can all agree that the blend and crawl works weakly or not at all in the movie it mostly stays grounded Coenen like world but then occasionally its lasers and interdimensional fortresses and all kinds of [ __ ] nonsense this is the crawl conundrum where the more you let one sub-genre blended with its opposite the more dissonance you create and the harder it is to suspend disbelief even if magic and speculative science are just two sides of the same coin within a small span of time dissonance is unavoidable horizon though has 60 80 hours maybe of content to work with and in that time frame it dots its eyes and crosses its T's but the work of unlike dedication there are few questions in the game that don't have an expansive lore have a sci-fi justification lurking for them somewhere in the deep background of the game take the dinosaurs I mean what an absurd excess to just toss in a Mechagodzilla or two into a game that takes itself at least somewhat seriously but late in the game you find an old recording between the AI in charge of rebuilding the earth's ecosystem from the long ago collapse and its creator the AI is says that the dinosaurs make it sad that such magnificent creatures once ruled the earth and then simply disappeared why was that is that right in the era that Eloy is in the AI is broken fragmented it's in the coma of sorts it dreams and when it dreams dreams of dinosaurs I found that answer to be exceptionally satisfying so the game creates dissonance is and absurdities that seemed at first careless or cliche and then it sits there and it colors them into something much more vivid like sitting down with a grey primered Warhammer figurine and then applying paint layer by layer until it's something more imaginative and personal than plastic the game's open-world structure and pacing is what allows this transformation to take place as effectively as it does in the game the main plot if you were to only follow the main plot is not especially long instead the bulk of the world building and storytelling is done locally by side characters with small scope concerns and by the map itself to get from one major turn of the plot to the next you have to hunt your way across large territories with meaningful diversions everywhere a common design goal to be sure but the narrative value of the side quests keeps them varied and welcomed fewer truly from besides the tedious tracking quests and each area holds answers to the broader mysteries that the players knowledge might be able to get more mileage from than a toys like I remember the first time I realized exactly where the map was in our present tense after a long difficult boss fight against a colossal fire-breathing robot lizard of some sort and it's rather deadly robot bull companions I found myself in an angular Canyon leading down to a small ruin the walls looked familiar the hill was like a weathered staircase like seats like the seats and the walls of the Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver I hadn't seen the other vantage points yet and I was floored by all the implications that this had if this is there then that's there and I used to live over here and I guess this quest route follows the old interstate roughly so there you go the Four Corners region it's hardly one for one it's all extremely compressed and you can move from one state to another in about 15 minutes time yet that's the real thrill of this particular design and horizon the scale is pulled out enough that it gives regional impressions instead of laborious fidelity to say how long it actually takes to get out of Denver even if you haven't travelled in a region there's enough in pop culture to at least give a person a reasonable guest so that a lot of players are already familiar with the look and feel of the Rocky Mountains the painted deserts of Utah and even more specific kinds of things in imagery like the pinnacles of Bryce Canyon National Park they're disguised by the compressed scale of the map the passage of time and the liberties that have been taken with this kind of creative transformation I found these moments of recognition though to be a powerful motivator there's plenty of others though like powerful loot and genuinely fun collectibles item power is mostly teared by a plot and location you have to complete your journey east for the big-deal upgrades but this also means that if your side questing heavily you're pretty much always rich enough to buy what items and accessories you can't find I'd often use my surplus of shards the common currency to buy preposterous amounts of blaze crafting component that let me use my bomb slingshot more than the game would regularly allow letting me go places and fight it's that sometimes felt over my head in terms of character level and enemy ability their glittering metal corpses though were enough to buy more blaze and to go another round with the tough guys everything everything you choose to do no matter how optional feels purposeful and fun nothing not even the wide-open ranges feels empty unwarranted or boring around every corner a challenge a reward maybe both the map is huge yes but intimately detailed in the planning of it a law is strongest trait is her curiosity the game does well to reward it above all else in the player as well some of the most remarkable areas of the game are optional areas places that for the most part have never seen human eyes at all these are the cauldrons automated factories have endlessly repopulated the wilderness with dangerous machines the spaces are completely alien to the natural splendor of the primary game world they're equally as beautiful and sometimes as vast as those natural spaces but going from one to another is an eye-popping ly fantastic exercise in aesthetic contrasts the cauldrons act as puzzle and platforming challenges mostly little linear amazes with more in common with Tomb Raider than the game world at large at the end is always an intense small arena fight with a new or exotic kind of enemy these spaces are a glimpse of the future for this world endless machines a posthuman experience compared to them we are the animals small unimportant fragile and that's how a loin is with dexterous leaps and death-defying swings she's a mammal hanging from the trees like all our evolutionary ancestors alloy is a clever monkey certainly but her physicality in the game loops into all of its major themes where humans make their own gods and monsters but never escape their own shortsightedness fragility an animal nature here in the cauldrons alloy is a rat in the kitchen the fun part comes in when the Rattlers the cat into a trap defeats it with toothpicks and then climbs the toaster cord to raid the pantry of its most delicious tempting offers alloy simply is not supposed to triumph in these circumstances yet the different weapons never feel too weak or too powerful and allowing her to persist even the most impossible looking fights have a clear logic to getting through perseverance lock-and-key name with a wide variety of destructive tools will take down even the ancient military robots that lie buried under the sand horizon zero dawn follows in the footsteps of many other games that have made a scale of combat key to their identities notably god of war god of war especially in its older iterations would make things more cinematic by placing QuickTime events at intervals during fights taking the fight choreography out of the players hands in order to do more complex maneuvers way way outside the range of controller inputs horizon never breaks like that when those intervals in the fight happen and they do happen the robot changes in real-time like exposing a fragile cooling duct or rearing up and exposing and brittle weld so the player reacts in real time as well using the combat tools that they're most comfortable with I played around with most of the Arsenal but I never felt punished by the game for playing favorites getting into tactical grooves I found personally satisfying this total control over an encounter allows for another creative sympathy alloy in the player as hunters together you're encouraged early in the plot to play a law as the kind of character she is skilled hunters who tracks traps and ambushes probably the most important part of any combat in the game is the players opening gambit how they choose to engage and how much damage they can inflict before the machine is aware of them with care and resources you can give massive wounds to even more massive enemies completely from the shadows and then leave those shadows and a hail of specialised arrows that tear off armor and external components with a rat like this you begin to feel sorry for the cats who a law is and who the player is naturally are encouraged by the mechanics to be essentially the same person even in temperament low on small talk big on profit a stalker a mercenary a treasure hunter one side quest has he working your way up through the ranks of a hunters guild their last task has you hunting red ma a massive t-rex like robot covered it with the spears and arrows have failed hunters some Spears have tattered cloth on them that blows in the breeze I wanted that thing dead from the moment I heard about it I was not surprised by it including the boss was not a groundbreaking Lee novel thing to do but it was a long fight it was a nasty fight and when I was done I cried out my barbaric he opted to the quiet house and startled the hell out of my dogs because I too am just an animal and this game lets me let's that animal part of me run wild and free in a faraway made up place while the player dreams of regression of going back to a world of blood to fury and triumph Eloy dreams of civilization it's wonderful contrast and like the blend of sci-fi and fantasy it actually pulls off the hat trick of letting the two opposites work in concerts after an internal period of skeptical discomfort one of the game's best early choices is putting the player in a child shoes for the tutorial halo is eight or nine or so she tumbles down into an ancient ruin where she's frightened she finds a corpse too long dead to be that threatening with little device nearby which the girl into its to fit over her ear when she does a holographic world reveals itself the old magics computers either way the very first video log is a message from a father to a son sorry I couldn't make it to your birthday daddy sure does love his little big man at first a boy wonders if the ghost is talking to her but the gender difference makes her realize that he's speaking to someone not present the world is as it turns out full of ghosts but they aren't evil ghosts they're not spirits they're just people gone away and almost forgotten it's such an important tonal note to start off with no scary monsters no Cataclysm just a message from someone else in time a hand extended to a lloyd end to the player inviting them bolt into the larger mysteries at play come along come see find out as a low it gets older goes into the world and begins to unravel the science fiction lore behind the science fantasy myths things do get dire people die civilizations fall and the people behind the apocalypse are posthumously revealed yet the game never loses that strand of optimism cycles may repeat mistakes may repeat but the majority of people do fundamentally mean well the ghosts are friendly then men speaking across time to a law as a child you eventually learned that he was sequestered in that bunker after having been tapped for something called Project 2-0 Don he helped program the godlike computers that now oversee the earth that man knew that he would never actually see his son again outside his bunker self-replicating swarms of military drone robots were literally devouring the earth they used carbon as fuels so they ate the forests they drank the oceans they devoured the animals and the plants and the people in the cities they would never stop until all life was dead so while life had to die and then the AIS would awaken artificially gestate a new generation of everything of animals and people in plants all of it and begin again that is Project 2-0 Don a tacit admission of failure of having destroyed the earth more or less accidentally but completely Haloid learns about machines in the form of an old sales pitch and the ruined corporate headquarters of the faroe company a holographic display extols the virtues of the Horus class weapons platform the future of fully autonomous post-national drone warfare onboard nah no factories no need to rest no capacity for mercy call now it allows people know it by another name the metal devil its corpse lays draped across an area near old NORAD the Faro company did not sell autonomous murder machines to regular people its profits were from warfare from statecraft yet the evils that drove its profits doomed everything everyone people didn't mean to kill the earth they were just living their lives pharaoh was an abstract and besides it's not like the pharaoh corporation was breaking any laws the crime of the old ones was ignoring the monster in their midst before that monster made new ones that they could not control then there was barely time for anything at all sorry I never got to see your birthday but daddy sure did love his little big man these are the ghosts who speak to a lie the ghosts of our better natures cut short by the malaise of a culture whose technology has wildly outpaced its humanity these original war machines the pharaoh robots are essentially the hidden demons of the world old the AI is that control them are all named after Greek gods and they all function within the domains of that pantheon it's the Gaia system that helps regulate the plants in the animals whose fever dreams are creating the robots a Festus runs the cauldrons where the machines are forged and Hades naturally as a fail-safe protocol where in the event of some sort of runaway error the world is reduced to ashes again and starts a brand new cycle out of all the sci-fi in the game I have found this borrowing from the Greek pantheon to be the least creative and satisfying the AI is whirl around in magic clouds and behave more according to the logic of the fantasy world than the details of the sci-fi lore the meatiest world building that the game does is where it begins with a religious perspective like shamanistic animism and then slowly introduces a kind of science II framework where that perspective is in some way actually validated animistic beliefs are ones where all things from men to my stones have spirits shamanism says that the spirit world can be influenced by human action and prayer through the conduit of the shaman it Lloyd doesn't consider herself to be a religious figure in any way but damn near everyone else does on account of her ability to manipulate the machine code the hidden world of the spirits Hades and the Pharaoh robots demons and Devils Gaia the absentee all mother all the prophecy all the myths are accurate on some level yet to have the AI is appear and behave so much as spirits and gods does take away from what's fundamentally exotic about them in the setting the cauldron show an artificial system that simply beyond the organic world disconnected an alien giving all these machines names the player can recognize motivations that are heroic or villainous forms that appear as magic these veer away from the opportunity to do something extra creative and emphasize how far a gap there is between human and machine consciousness to show how that gap might never be closed again if the high technology civilizations that births them crumble and falter instead you get a simple and straightforward allusion to how we create our own gods and monsters it's frustrating to have it be so on the nose when the rest of this writing is so much more nuanced and complex and the details of it take why the knowledge of the past was never preserved a huge effort was made to do so but Ted Farrow CEO of the Faro corporation and manufacturer of much of the zeroed on equipment began to slowly talk himself crazy as the world was ending outside of his bunker he began to think on all that had come before everything that had led to his creations destroying the world and he panicked he had so much guilt such a burden no one should have to bear such a burden he figured and if there is no knowledge of the past then maybe there can be innocence from it and in that innocence maybe he could be forgiven Ted Farrow is a selfish man that desire to erase his crime along with the rest of history backfired spectacularly with no context for the world the new civilization simply began making the same mistakes over again the zero Don Program ensured an incredible genetic diversity racism wouldn't be a problem anymore with a completely mixed society yet prejudice persists cruelty persists it simply finds other axes of difference to pull apart and fray around and around it goes and yet the tone of the game remains optimistic a LOI fights against those mistakes she fights for knowledge she fights for tolerance she's a force in the world and her struggle pulls things in a better direction the game is quite humanistic and showing that there's plenty of people in the world who hate her for doing so for religious regions for spiteful reasons for prejudicial reasons some on her own tribe but never even stopped seeing her as an outcast in a criminal the AI is don't need to be heroes or villains the humans do the job better I much more enjoyed the idea of these cultures projecting personalities on to the AIS rather than giving the AIS actual definable personalities Hades the big red evil orb is much less believable than say Zaire the zealot slave-trader whose casual smiling denials of his profession seem completely believable until the moment he makes his move and reveals himself to be nothing more than a smooth sociopath Gaia is a much more simplistic character by far than tearsa the sly and clever old shamaness who was a Lloyd's patron and ally in the Nora tribe while the world-building is founded on a fusion of science fiction and fantasy it is believable humanity that really holds the narrative up the backend storytelling in the frozen wilds expansion makes me slightly nervous if a sequel is going to be able to capture the same brilliance of the original main campaign the frozen wilds takes place around Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks promising bigger robots harsher environments and deeper mysteries the first two promises were fulfilled but the last one stagnates mechanically the escalation is pitch perfect the newer robots are much tougher intended for players with pete gear and at peak rhythm with the game's combat so it goes out of its way to reward that expertise were the most protracted multistage fights yet the feeling of danger and triumph and the average travelling around the map encounters are better than ever even having done all the quests in the main map nothing in the frozen wilds is effortless to kill it's hunting ground challenges are the most devious yet I don't often do bonus challenges and games but getting the Blazing Sun Awards in the main campaign was compelling to me because the puzzle like design of them getting the gold wasn't about being the fastest or the best it was about coming to understand the trick of the thing it reminded me a lot of the demolition challenges in Red Faction gorilla which are to date still some of my favorite open-world miscellany these bonus hunting grounds challenges here in horizon feature massive absurd fights where the challenge conditions that are much stricter than anything in the main campaign but working within those conditions for the fun of it for the joy of combat was worth failing a few times to get the hang of it the most interesting challenge by far is a special challenge given by a character who only appears at the end of her side quest here in the frozen wilds she asked today lloyd take down ten robots some small some massive with a very limited supply of arrows to get the gold you have to exactly understand the weaknesses and utility of the monsters in play there are ostrich like creatures that are harmless by this stage in the game but who have tanks on the rear which can be ignited detonating the middle bird like a bomb you timer shots they do a lot of the work for you you must know how to expertly perfectly skin components away from the big fellas ripping their guts out without wasting a single arrow on their titanium hides it really is a test impossible to pass if you haven't been paying close attention it's worth mentioning that I personally have been a PC person all my life and this is one of the first console games I've ever played I was shocked by how much I enjoyed it I'm not used to a controller but horizons control scheme is utterly intuitive it just felt right in my hands in my head logical and deeply satisfying in the motions of drawing the bowstring and loosing the arrow I'm new enough to even be enjoying the novelty of the force feedback in the controller I was chests goddamn delighted by the way it would shake and pulse with heavy footfalls and savage blows I found the movement in the game to be very fluid a tactile kind of joy which coupled perfectly with the mental satisfaction of the hunt and on-the-fly tactical choices it felt substantially different from action games I'd played before having not been designed for mouse and keyboard at all all that may seem basic to a lot of people but I want to emphasize the game's gradual tutorial izing of its escalating systems was so good at teaching itself that even though I had almost no familiarity with the basic controller for the game by the end of it I was happily throwing myself at the toughest challenges it had and winning on normal and that may not be impressive to anyone else but it represents a change and how I usually approach a game like this I was captivated by the world-building delighted by the themes but if you ask me what stuck with me the most I think it might be how much pure fun it is to just interact with the game on a simple moment-to-moment basis mechanically the frozen wilds are a bonus challenge level all together the expansion is perfect in that slotting in to the story though is awkward from the start it's not post climax content it takes place right before the climactic fight where Hades attacks the courage of capital with feral robots and religious zealots this placement handicaps the frozen wilds in many ways a boy can't learn anything new that genuinely changes the context of the ending she can't learn so much about silence that it takes away from him being set up as the next game's villain the plot has to run on an auxilary parallel it also sidesteps the way that civilizations had been becoming more and more advanced as the story progressed for for a LOI here the Bannu quarry errs and shamans have a similar kind of culture to the Norra even where they're different stylistically the pinoke are much more in tune with the spirit world less afraid of the machines than the Nora but by this point in the game aloy has outpaced the worldview of the buck getting to know their culture or their culture is interesting but they just borrow a lot from in a wit and Himalayan traditional styles the same way that the Nora borrow a mishmash of native-american flourishes to sell the primitivism of the cultures the game goes out of its way mostly to refrain questions of multiculturalism and sidestep they're harder bits in favor of in-universe prejudices and histories but this is a soft answer to the tough questions on a certain level this rebooted world of the four corners reframes the colonizers as the natives right down to the headdresses in the plot Pharaoh's choice to erase history and start fresh was blatantly and tempt to sidestep responsibility for his role in the apocalypse this sort of effort spills over into the more contextual elements of the game as well paving the way for the bravest brave of Colorado to be a wiry ginger woman and not you know Shoshone or a newt again this is justified in the lore of the game but the game didn't even bother to include native ruins all they would have taken was to throw in heaven weep it's right there and a nod to the idea that Denver is not the first great city to die in the American West would bring even better resonance to the themes of cyclical nature's on top of doing better service to its aesthetic influences game is confidently creative enough to push through those issues and flush out a meaningful game world with compelling characters societies and dilemmas anyway the escalation is such a major part of that a LOI becoming involved in the drama and intrigue of feudal era characters suits her better as her power grows where she has seen less as a demigoddess and more of an intensely talented freelancer from a faraway place putting a LOI back into a tribal context after that feels a little dissonant by this point most players will have likely in the shield weaver armor reward for a game long collectible quest before this armor halo i had to switch gear from situation to situation the armor dramatically changes this rhythm giving you enough of a refillable damage buffer that he can be hugely more aggressive than it was safe to play as earlier in the game the pinoke have local craftspeople with new armor sets that alloy can by giving bonuses far above armors of main campaign but you'd have to go back to the old rhythm I didn't want to I was a shield person now ello and I came to the frozen wilds for the hunt but the old ways felt very limited and quaint after the things we had already seen and done in the escalations both narrative and mechanical of the main campaign horizon zero dawn is approached to arranging and structuring its content on the open world map let's the mechanical tactical side of the game take huge priority in the play experience boys characterization and conversation comes mostly in small asides observations and the occasional praise or scorn she's mostly just inquisitive she asks her questions her and the player both learn something conversation over the frozen wilds is much more about the bulk then about alloy and then again it's much more about fighting excellent giant meandering fights than it is about the brook for example the pigment collectables all over our special die is made from local flora and the chromatic pools of the Yellowstone Caldera you have to walk all over the map from remote and desolate mountain peaks to the ruined boardwalk around the geysers along the way you'll find exposition and characterization it is a long game so you're still looking at a full novels worth of dialogue but you're looking at much more interacting with the open-world I've played all the fallouts the Far Cry is Skyrim Mad Max Dragon Age Inquisition dozens more I've played what likely totals into thousands of hours of open-world games and here I was playing these maps with a completionists fever it felt fresh it felt new perhaps part of that was playing a console epic for the first time but the large majority of my enthusiasm was simply for the game world and its systems Eloy is not my favorite protagonists that I've ever played I think she's very likeable and works perfectly for the game she doesn't pull the weight here it's the open world curation there are a few collectible quests you can buy maps for them besides and available quests are marked on the map at a distance small quality of life conveniences keep the flow of content moving no one map item besides the cauldrons takes over 15 minutes and many quests and map items usually take less than 5 to explore in finish the maps compressed scale allows you to completely finish a region and move on to a new one in just maybe a half dozen hours time the sense of progression is constant the act of making that progress is satisfying even or especially in the repeatable loops of combat and crafting each task and quest feels grounded in the region's local locality collectibles are in places of special scenic significance or near a particularly challenging mix of robots quests are tied to small narratives casually realistic NPCs nothing nothing at all feels like it was put there to waste my time even the most optional minutiae is there to bring the players attention to something that the developers were obviously proud of some landscape or Vista that was obviously weeks coming together the broadly optional nature of most content in horizon zero dawn means that the game scales well with player interest for those who wanted to live in the world for a while the game can accommodate 60 hours or so of rambling curiosity for those who have less patience or less interest in the storytelling the game could absolutely wrap up and 25 to 30 hours of just back-to-back missions it's good either way and this approach to an open-world game I was in control of the pacing I was in control of the game length and even if I hadn't have liked a LOI at all as a protagonist she isn't as much of a focal point of the game as it is the thrill of hunting giant robots from the comfort of my couch at home I expected much the same from days gone to my surprise that sense of control that sense of personal freedom could be quite evaporative horizon zero dawn couldn't be a more traditional hero's journey kind of deal yet a lot happened the story is fast-moving an epic in scope days gone to my extreme surprise is a slow burn character study with a character who simultaneously much more natural than alloy and also much more irritating days gone is a game I found to be equally as ambitious as horizon but also one that struggled to find its identity and footing much more obviously the problems all come back around to deacon st. John the scruffy antihero of the game structurally narrative Lee and tonally he throws more wrenches into the gears of the game world than he ever turns on his bike the present-day zombie apocalypse is a tired setting and days gone attempts to find its identity more in depth of detail than scope of setting the setting needs no introduction in fact no setup or escalation from myth to lore so the story begins in the middle two years after the apocalypse in deacon and his buddy Boozer are hunting some fella along an old Deschutes County Road there are zombies and Angry Men and other angry men who just need killin just about the first thing you do is discover and burn a body of a murdered friend like alloys Friendly Ghost this is a tone setter days gone is gonna be a gory pessimistic ride and we're only gonna get gnarlier from here for a horror fan like me that's actually a pretty good promise I've seen my share of zombies let's just cut to the heart of it and that would be a great jumping-off place except the sequence is heavily scripted and it keeps going and going and going and going deacon and boozers linear first day of gameplay takes the better part of an hour with no open-world elements in play at all besides the landscape they hunt a guy down they look for a bike part they run into trouble each of those is a 20-minute task in itself another 20 minutes are spent realizing the nice motorcycle you've had in the linear sequence is junked and you'll have to begin again at the bottom so you meet the town leaders all the shopkeepers you have introductory conversation rooms will the shopkeepers and that's another 20 minutes and then then you're off for a limited number of icons and a limited number of times before you need to progress the story again you see the biggest perhaps most significant difference between zero dawn and days gone isn't a Lloyd versus deacon it's that all of horizon side content can be accomplished in almost any order with only a few story quests in between regions the story takes you through fast so the player can do the lingering on their own that's in horizon days gone ties the majority of its side quests to progression in a main story that stretched out to seem bursting length sure technically you could take out the hordes right away but you'll need to scavenge and craft for hours and any decent gun is locked behind factional progression bars that missions only fill maybe 5% in a go it is not reasonable to tackle much of the content until you've already passed the 20 hour mark in the story for me the part of the game where it actually asks you to go after hordes and marks them with health bars and map markers didn't appear until I had been playing for 60 out of 80 hours it'll have to do two maybe three story missions in between the side missions I'm walking from time to time all of this is to protect beacon from the player moving too far too fast away from where the designers want beacon to be in the plot on the map and in terms of relative power and horizon a Lloyd took a back seat to the players whim in days gone the player takes a back seat to Deacon script to do the kind of close character study plot the game wants to do is it odds with the fundamental check listing impulses that drive engagement with the game's mechanical elements so when I say Deacon is at the heart of the problems I don't just mean what he says and what he does I mean that structurally Deacon is given more importance than the game world and he never lets you forget it either with horizon I would sometimes forget about a Lloyd her motivations and mine aligned without words we were hunters out there was prey off we went conversations lasted as long as I cared to the questions were optional Deacon never shuts up not ever not even when you're just out and about he has a constant stream of consciousness whereas some kind of gruff force knight or I Roenick thing to say in any given situation this is an 80-hour game i am given a lot of situations so this constant stream of alternate whispering or yelling quickly becomes utterly exhausting this would actually be less frustrating if the game world wasn't so beautiful instead the landscape of this world is an incredibly scenic for simile of Oregon I actually moved to bend the month that I've been finishing this video I live right in the heart of the same mountains and rivers and volcanic fields that the developers do the same landscape they put in this game their love for the land is the brightest burning candle in the entire project this part of Oregon really does have snowy mountain peaks and dry desert valleys within an afternoon's drive of each other it can accomplish a real diversity of landscape while maintaining a tight almost lifelike scale some of its distortions are apparent when you realize they've made crater lakes wizard island just about as big as Lapine for plot reasons and shrunk larger towns down for convenience but the interplay of forest desert and byway is nothing short of a love letter to Oregon moreso than even a far cry 5s hope County the game world is incredibly successful at establishing a pervasively grounded sense of place it's more Oregon than Hope County was men was Montana and hope County was pretty damn Montana all the way around I moved to bend in real life because this kind of nature is something I want in my daily life so much more than I could ever get in Seattle a mountain those woods for hours days gone leaves you with a rough condition for all that beauty you can go anywhere in these hills you please from snow-covered mountain pass to dusty gas stations out in the valley to mossy glades by the river that would be equally at home in horizons posthuman ecosystem but you have to go there with beacon st. John and he does not believe in comfortable silences he is going to scream mutter his way through whatever situation you find yourself in even when you're just exploring the worst offender is radio transmissions from Copeland who runs the first camp you go to he's a libertarian so long after he's faded from the actual narrative he sticks around in the script with these radio rants that go on and on about how with lots of zombies but no government we are finally free and some retroactive conspiracy theorizing for flavor they are intrusive and while you can skip them it'll just keep trying to play the same one over and over so you might as well just let it happen and hope for a longer interval before Copeland chimes in again that's not the worst part the worst part is when one rant is over another begins now Deacon yells back at the radio there is some kind of design assumption that the player will be on the bike when these transmissions come through so every response Deacon yells to overcome the bike engine noise even though he's not speaking to anyone besides himself in the game world even though there usually isn't any engine noise and you're not even on the bike he's just yelling at the radio man like I remember my grandfather doing after enough whiskey cokes and that's the thing about beacon he is actually quite realistic in all the dumbest ways a law was a little over the top the chosen warrior woman extremely brave extremely smart extremely agile deacon is just like a biker dude he's dude he's got a bike biker dude my father-in-law ran with friends not unlike deacon and Boozer back in his day and the way characters tell stories and the kinds of stories they tell check out with that kind of experience that I've seen but deacon has an uncanny resemblance to one of those old friends of my father-in-law who was more on the periphery I had this car that I was gonna sell to the junkyard but he said he wanted it so I just gave it to him come to find out he'd taken the license plates off sold the car to the junkyard himself and then racked up three stop light camera tickets in my name by swapping his license plates out with the ones from the car I gave him when I confronted him about this he apologized said I was his bro and he didn't realize about the tickets and then he offered me a quarter pound of weed Deacon st. John is that guy from the way he smirks to the way he dresses to the attitudes he has he's fundamentally selfish and kind of stuck at a certain age wearing backwards ball caps of 30 and still doing the same old [ __ ] he's been doing since he first started raising in his teens Deacon's character arc is excruciating ly slow at the beginning he's especially mercenary in spiteful the game pushes the antihero angle by leaning heavily into brutal violence as a problem-solving tool but not against women mostly unless it's like for a sidequest or something like that beacon has a weird inconsistent chivalry that actually isn't that far removed from what I have seen and my father-in-law's aging Wolfpack all of them are wife guys to the core talking about how they go to any lengths to protect their women protect their family protect their homes from slights and dangers talking about how important is loyalty always my woman this in milady that but it's a kind of devotion that also makes room for an if you can read this the [ __ ] fell off t-shirt they mean well on some level but they're much too busy high-fiving and doing the deep rumbling dad chuckle to examine their most basic assumptions Deccan chivalry is rooted in that high fivin atmosphere not as much about the actual principle of a thing so much as having something to be morally superior about when out with the boys deacon kills plenty of women during the game when they shoot first it's only in dialogue where he's such a gentleman so it's no surprise that deacon is a wife guy to the whole first half the game a good forty hours he goes through a process where he thinks she's dead realizes she might not be and then finally gets confirmation that yeah actually she did die it is a tremendous amount of running back and forth in the game space to accommodate this emotional back-and-forth for the character his optimism and pessimism ride the tides of those emotions the sure he is that his wife is dead the more violent Amin beacon gets more he thinks there's a chance at reuniting with her the more he remembers himself it's fine enough of a plot beat but the beat just goes back and forth like a narrative ping-pong ball for hours on hours I'd rather just be killing zombies but I can't unlock the good zombie killing tools until beacon is done with his mood swings I can't play the side missions until enough melodrama has transpired to unlock them this is in open world sure but I spent most of the game feeling trapped in a linear tube with a net flow original series after all this back and forth the game pivots to a completely new set of communities a new villain a new map and reveals that hey psych his wife was alive the whole time at this stage deacon actually begins growing his character in something roughly approximating an actual arc begins to take shape but this is 40 hours deep in the game I didn't need 40 hours of sad angry Deacon to appreciate a pivot to a wiser perspective what can't be learned about deacon from the hour-long tutorial can be learned pretty much just by looking at the guy I know Deacon already we've met not only have we met but I know all this [ __ ] is just seeds and stems anyway in a lot of ways I do actually blame Netflix for the narrative shortcomings of days gone I've become intensely skeptical of trying new shows because they all share certain script writing trends that are more about audience retention than narrative pay off Netflix recently did a show called another life which contained about an hour and a half of good sci-fi an hour and a half of good character work and seven hours of characters treading water and being disagreeable for no good goddamn reason other than to be [ __ ] starters and stir the pot for another episode I wanted so much to like it but by the final episode I realized that most of the sole purpose is just to get me to watch next season with the tantalizing offer of actual plot advancement forever dangled just out of my reach days gone is divided roughly into three parts with that same goal they're not acts each takes tens of hours and has heaping gobs of dialogue to provide a smokescreen for how little is actually happening their seasons essentially meant to be binge watched from season 1 episode 1 to season 3 episode 10 the first season establishes the setting the second establishes the cast's third ditches all of that for a new cast a new map and starting the player at the bottom again for one more ride to the top days gone is possibly the worst paced open-world game I've ever played during what makes up the second season of the plot I was pretty sure that the game was almost over except so little had happened 40 hours in you're still 40 hours away from a climax and then there's epilogue content and a sequel teaser does it ever justify this length no no it does not and the intro could have told you that everyone is so familiar with the zombie apocalypse format that you can pick it up in the middle of a story two years deep into zombie world and not be lost at all if the back season of the game is actually the best we could have just as reasonably begun the story there at the part where Deacon actually begins to exhibit change or a little before that perhaps everything before the third season is more or less treading water as far as urgency is concerned or dangling plot threads is Sara alive dead yes no maybe now definitely no or absolutely yes what fills this narrative void is days gone stabs at world building its communities side cast the first seasons main concern for the player is upgrading their motor bike while Boozer tries to recover from an injury this takes nearly two days of actual play time if you're playing eight hours a day meanwhile you have Copeland's camp and then Tucker's camp like the civilizations of horizon each is its own culture for the main character to discover and contrast themselves with the maps killed though means that these necessarily have to be smaller than whole little fiefdom though just a few dozen people in each camp is all you get Copland as I've mentioned is a libertarian so his camp is all about the theoretical freedom of having the shackles of big government finally broken but if you don't use that freedom to defend the camp and work you're out it's a sad collection of platforms up in the trees deikun dislikes it there because Copeland is always trying to convert him into a believer and a loyalist and Deacon just wants to be a free bird more interesting is Tucker and an older woman who's been a rancher in the pre apocalypse she's a very Oregon sort matronly and severe with a lot of country grit she and deacon get along so much better than him and Copeland at first the Tucker's camp quests are actually skillful in slowly slowly showing Tucker's despotic side how her farm is in fact a forced labor and there's just no way around that don't work get beat deacons a problem solver he's useful so he gets the nice Tucker not everyone is so lucky this kind of character development I like but a lot of Tucker's interactions are purely functional go here do this kill these folks get paid repeat deacons character mutters and grumbles his way through doing jobs he complains about four people he doesn't like money is made upgrades and weapons are purchased eventually the game tells you that you've done enough upgrading that you get to drive to the next part of the plot there are side puzzles to do like stealing upgrade objectors from the FEMA I'm sorry Nero checkpoints from under the nose of hordes but not really many there's collectibles defined but not much compelling reason to you can't fight the hoards effectively yet you can start taking them on in season two but in this opening bit Deacon is too weak as weak as the initial impression all of this gave me there is a single branching choice in days gone where the package of drugs you get from man you're hunting in the opening tutorial hour can go to either Tucker or Copeland's camp the glimmer isn't actually moral or narrative it will never be mentioned again and they're both pretty bad folks when you get down to it instead do you personally want to put a few thousand extra roll of loyalty points into the camp where you get gun upgrades or the camper you get motorcycle upgrades it's not even a significant amount you'll have to grind those loyalty points up for hours to unlock two sometimes three things per loyalty level out of only three total levels the pool of stuff that you're unlocking in the game is small indeed especially when it comes to bike upgrades where I had expected a lot more customization options considering your bikes importance and the mechanics in the marketing so the mechanical progression is slow the narrative progression is slower while you're running errands for Copeland and Tucker you learn about a third camp Lost Lake controlled by some fella named Iron Mike deacon pissed him off somehow and was banished when boozers infection becomes too severe Deacon risks going to Lost Lake anyway this also would have been a fine place for the story to actually begin Iron Mike isn't a villain he's a big old softy he didn't want Deacon around because Deacon is surly violent and driven by child or self interests we you know kind of legit for a community leader to object to iron Mike is one of the first genuinely completely likable characters that we meet in the game but he's soon joined by a good handful of others Lost Lakes characters are by and large written exceptionally well Ricci particularly I don't think I've ever seen a motion-capture invoice performance in a game that was so casually believable before not because she's especially deep or notable but because her personality is so concrete and effortless actress Nisha moon she at every turn avoids the melodrama that the game falls into so often by simply reacting to things in a way that seems human and real Deacon's role his main character his endless external internal dialogue the way he's always yelling to no one and as he's going about his business model the naturalism of his personality by making his artificiality as a game character to apparent wiki though only shows up from time to time to deliver good dialogue help solve a problem and leave she's always a welcome presence the games only stumble is how it walks back a little of her character towards the end she's in a relationship with the camp's doctor Abbey and the majority of the game she's deacons friend and not a romantic interest a lot of Ricky's appeal as a character is her contrast to deacon she has community where he rejects it she's collected where he's hot-headed she sees a future where he burns down the church he got married in because the past makes him real mad all the time this being the apocalypse though everyone has trauma Deacon could do better than he's doing Ricky encourages him to be that person then the game shoehorns in some last-minute romantic tension that doesn't even narrative ly matter because by that point of the story they're actually like two hours away from finding out that his wife has been alive the whole time actually for serious this time letting Ricky be straightforward friends with deacon would have been the most naturalistic choice Deacon is kind of broken and wildly immature that's his deal and Ricky trying to get him to be a little bit better to himself and others is most of the arc for the second season Ricky finding that damaged cute in the end after all is just a disappointingly cliche way to play that out especially knowing that any sexual tension would be negated the moment he started being bite guy again deacon doesn't much grow as a character in season two but where season 1 wallowed in his cynicism this part of the plot begins to challenge it he also barely interact with Tucker and Copeland for the rest of the game at this stage the first part was a lengthy prelude to this where the actual storytelling begins why put up though with such purposeless meandering mandatory slack in the narrative momentum well with binge series where a full season drops at once there is kind of a caked in assumption that all the juicy bits are in the last two episodes people will tolerate all sorts of digressions if you continue to dangle a promise of a payoff sometime at some point and hey dayz gun does get better noticeably markedly so but by the time you're done with the first season's content horizons map would be like half over by now with many times the amount of actual narrative ground covered the whole aesthetic of days gone is grounded in the era of 4k proprietary streaming shows from shot composition and cutscenes to the idea that there is a monetary incentive to tease the plot out into as long and flat a noodle as possible this is occasionally a strength but more often four days gone it is a critical weakness probably the most interesting moment of characterization for deacon is also the most frustrating the gangs of crazies who attacked Boozer in the first hour the rippers are on the border with Lost Lake there is an uneasy peace Iron Mike just wants his community to grow and prosper and focus on the zombie problem the rippers want to tear everything apart do drugs and spread suffering it takes hours to reveal but Deacon and Boozer are essentially responsible for the representants years ago as part of his MC there was another member of the club who fell out of favor he had gotten a massive back tattoo of the club emblems and when he was kicked out he couldn't wear those colors anymore so the motorcycle club leader asks Deacon and Boozer to hold the guy down while he blowtorch the tattoo away they nearly tortured that guy to death way before civilization collapsed at the makeshift shrine to Sarah that Deacon has made another place to monologue at he says he never told Sarah because he knew that she would see him different yes she would so did I it was the first bit of storytelling that used the pessimistic grid of the world in a way that had heft beacon wasn't just a lovable loser he was a legitimately bad dude the suffering he was complicit in turned the victim of that crime into a hardened hateful person the whole Ripper cult is just taking advantage of the doomsday situation for this one dude to play out his fantasy of making others suffer the way that he had suffered to encourage them to go out and do the same thing that he's doing the burdens given to Boozer were just a shadow of what they had done already to someone else in the past before the zombies the thing is this climactic revelation has bearing on this seasonal climax only we aren't as an audience meant to hold beacon permanently accountable for it he's such a goof he's trying to be better the next season of story moves on from end abandons this beat completely and Sarah never does find out we're meant to be happy that they're getting back together at last let's just gloss over how she probably wouldn't have married him if she was aware of how he did torture a guy that one time this is part of a pattern of setting up a strong pitch and then swinging for it with a plastic wiffle bat backtracking on a choice that would be bolder if it played out the way they set it up in the first place like Copeland's radio broadcasts I don't like him but I like even less beacons high-volume rebuttals they seem to be they're too politically balanced the game's dialogue Copeland can't just be Hannity Deacon has to be there too as a combs too fair and balanced at all Ricky can't just be a friend she has to be a romantic interest for what seems like nothing more than passing flattery towards the player beacon can't be an actual antihero we got to walk that back to the point where Sara wants to be around him Iron Mike can't be both kind and strong he also has to be gullible to the point where his empire is undone by a man named Skiz Oh who clearly used to spend his days selling cell phone accessories from a small cart days gone could have been better had it been Boulder instead it's softly backtracks within the comfort of its seasonal episodic format the whole shift and player perception of beacon that the Ripper plotline brings about is noting that the game feels it can't actually fix and gloss over with a few long flashbacks and a puppy I'm not saying I didn't appreciate the puppy but the game cannot distract me that easily from its own story beats all this vile you're killing zombies or as the game would have it freaker's the difference is proprietary and stylistic the freaker's eat and poop that's a difference they make these strange nests and you can actually track hordes by the trail of blood and [ __ ] they leave behind they're alive they just happen to otherwise look and function exactly like a traditional zombie the living enemy aspect in some of the marketing material is used to talk about how these are dangerous mutations in the virus is an evolutionary force etc the ad work refused to recognize that this too is a widely used some be template the mutations in days gone are completely identical to those in left for dead the long haired screamer mutation the big muscly tank mutation the acid spitting lurker they're all here and that's fine it's the same template and dying light - it'll be the same template in a zombie game ten years from now it's just an excellent mix of creatures what I'm confused about is why they're trying so hard to push freaker's over zombies as a meaningful distinction in the first season you're mostly only fighting small groups and some of the mutations it's fine it's serviceable action gameplay but it doesn't have a distinctive mechanical identity to it yet while the plot is spinning its wheels so is the monster designs there is one significant day's gun specific innovation in zombie gameplay and that is the hundred strong fast-moving hordes they have cycles of hunting and rest where they'll retreat to some kind of cave or nest during the day and then Roman gigantic packs at night fighting a horde is absolutely exhilarating by far the funnest thing to do in the whole game you can start to do it anytime you've got weapons capable of doing crowd damage like light machine guns and explosives like horizon the most important part of the fight is the opening gambit if you hunt them in their nests during the day you can lure them through choke points but then after your initial explosives go off and hundreds more continue to stream out of the cave entrance it gets a little sticky taking them on as they're roaming in the moonlight lets you set up multiple ambush and also try to find a firing advantage on them taking out hordes is worth quite a few points of experience loyalty currency in fact these fights are the quickest way to actually advance the brutally slow on locks the fights are Bailey controlled chaos beacon can spring just slightly faster than the mob which is like a tidal wave of angry flesh coming after you gunned down 20 zombies here you jump down a cliff you try to kill a few as they tumble down the slope after you until there's too many of them again your run your reposition over and over and over until you're down from too many - a lot - a few - just the last couple of bastards that you can take on with a baseball bat I started to do these hordes towards the end of season 1 when I realized that the side quests and main quests don't actually provide enough loyalty points to get to the maximum trust I'd need to checklist a lot of the other stuff here is the major design fumble with all of that the hordes are not an official side activity until halfway through season 3 the very end of the game you don't get the greatest horde killing tools like napalm molotovs and big ol jugs until then if I had waited until the story told me to go after hordes I would have had to play over 60 hours of the game before experiencing the thing that makes the gameplay unique over other zombie titles and the way I did it I took out well over half the hordes without the tools that make those fights the most fun it's not just the narrative that's a pacing disaster the mechanical arc is just a mess as well of course that's because the mechanical progression is artificially stunted by tying it to the plot progression horizons progression was tied to nodes on the landscape both the plot and mechanics you didn't have to be at a certain point of the game to do the hunting lodge challenges you just found the lodges and you did them and then you received your awards advancement was constant any direction you go here in days gone constant progression would allow the player to vastly outpace inside content where the game wants them to be in story content so progression is stretched out and rationed by the end of season 2 though it is possible to have raised trust to maximum levels and have found unlocked all of the good stuff it feels like the end of the game at that point the only place left to go what capito I don't know essentially zero the player out and make them start from the beginning again but surely they wouldn't be that cruel wouldn't they would season three has moving down towards Deschutes County militia territory around Crater Lake and the Horde infested no-man's land around us 97 and Colt iron Mike says for reasons more mechanical than personal the deacon is not allowed back until his business is concluded all those characters all those progression bars you're gonna have to leave them behind and start at zero with two completely new communities full of supporting cast you're looking at dozens of more hours of days gone I eventually came to like this part of the game more than what had come before it but I cannot emphasize enough how utterly disheartening it was to find myself in this situation after having gone to wild excessive lengths to do what I felt was a reasonably completion has passed at the previous seasons of content I looked at the map and then I immediately just put the game down for an entire week coming back to it I liked the new structure and the new characters a lot the militia is run by an old mustachioed guy with delusions of grandeur so you know right away he's gonna crack up spectacularly later on it is very later on though there are many hours where he seems like a decent enough leader and his descent into madness is satisfyingly gradual the rest of the cast is as believable and likable as the Lost Lake folks the best character of all is the biggest surprise Sarah beacons wife the game actually writes her and the sequins with a lot of patience and skill it's been two hard years since that last saw each other and Sarah cannot pretend that they're the same people they were then so they go through phases of getting to know each other first where Sarah is skeptical of deacon and vegan has really mad at her about that in other where Sarah starts getting close to him professionally going on runs together getting to know each other for who they are now what they've been doing in the apocalypse and then after a surprisingly believable amount of time and dialogue they start flirting again and the marriage resumes to win back Sarah Deacon has to become part of the community the way she has deacon grows as a person because he realizes that as he is he's actually kind of off-putting he can't keep going the way he has and expect to have her stick around Sarah for her part is smart and capable she says independent is rickie and has a lot going on in both her in her life and in terms of how she's faced to the apocalypse opposites attract so even though Deacon is kind of ridiculous person law at the time seeing how serious Sarah is with her profession and flashbacks and dialogue made me believe that she would choose someone like beacon as a break from that side of herself even though Sarah's presence for over half the game has been as a melodramatic touchstone for deacons guilt and regret this sudden turn of having her actually show up as a robustly written character redeems a lot of it of all the things I expected from the game landing its romantic subplot was definitely not one of them the Colonel's degrading mental state and deacons healing relationship with Sarah happened in a pleasing parallel getting beacon a reason to stay while everyone else is becoming increasingly worried if maybe it isn't time to leave couple this with the maps improved content distribution where side content is unlocked rapidly and hordes are everywhere mechanical pacing is finally approaching the endgame so days gone stops trying so hard to control for progress you can hit max everything and it'll be fine you won't get too far ahead hours 60 to 80 is some of the most zombie fun I've had since dying light and it's got better script writing and dying life in that bracket as well days gone season three is where it's at and it's completely inaccessible without slogging through the game's more mediocre iterations of itself eventually predictably the unhinged militia attacks Lost Lake Lost Lake Strikes Back with help from the camps of season one loser sacrifices himself heroically and then the game walks that back to this is a good enough place to leave things but days gone doesn't leave them there at the climax that it's made for itself it has a tracker built into the menu that keeps track of your storylines and there have been quests hanging at like 92 percent complete for dozens of hours did you miss something nope you simply need to play three days worth of epilogue content every day one of those dangling plot threads is finally resolved first it's a funeral for Iron Mike God rest his plaid patterned heart second it's Lisa's plot line she's a girl that beacon found living alone and all of his attempts to help her backfired over the course of the game he sends her to Tucker but Lisa doesn't care for forced labor very much he sends her to last lake and she runs away then the rippers mutilator now she returns as a motorcycle drifter just like 'deacon is this closure is the setting her up as an important companion for the sequel I don't know the final Apple epilogue bid I have seen described as a secret ending but it's not secret the game wants you to see it after all it has to do with the series wide to plot and not just this season all game long interacting with Nero the shadowy Disaster Response agency Deacon spies in the opening hour was mostly just passing the buck on saying anything substantive there was a revelation that Sara worked in the lab where the frequent infection was developed but you see that revelation coming from so many miles off that you're just twiddling your thumbs impatiently by the time it arrives nothing much about the viruses really said beyond tutorial izing like oh no this mutant has a weakness it's just a dangling thread who knew what what will happen what does it all mean it's obvious early on that the seasonal story format is going to keep avoiding concrete answers because then that would reveal a course of action the game does not want a course of action it wants a consistency of engagement but now you're at the very edge of the scripted content all that's left is to mop up hordes if you're into it they need something to hook you for the next big content drop the next seasoned binge so here the scientist who's been helping you who had been in a hazmat suit the whole time takes his helmet off to reveal bum bum bum ba they are all infected at the secret facility and they're conscious there are a new race of sentient monster people with helicopters and machine guns so now it all clicks into place what is the difference between Africa and a zombie a zombie can't shoot guns in the sequel this is just the foundation for a new IP like horizon it's ending by revealing its next villain days gone was an introductory chapter to the actual story human militias versus mutant governments with an established ensemble after all that season three had done right this was doing me wrong in a real way resin zero Dawn's main problem with a potential sequel is that it had explained perhaps too much and was too self contained a sequel will have to rummage through that lore that's left after having already answered many of the most pertinent questions about its world days gongs world is its characters and it's good when they behave in humanistic ways this late-game revelation suggests a deeper dive towards melodrama days gone and zeroed on are so similar in so many ways but in the end the experience of them is completely divergent I don't necessarily feel that days gone was a waste of time I did love many things about it and it's a massive game for a small studio to have produced but it certainly didn't respect my time the way horizon did and that has more to do with structure than with script writing horizon remembers that in an open world the main character is the player who ever that player is inhabiting days gone is all about beacon and he was an unreliable man to have trusted with so much thanks for watching this video and all the videos I do are supported through the crowdfunding website patreon I'd like to take a moment to thank by name some of the people who are currently supporting at the $10 or more level a month people like Alex Henson Zachary Ziemba Leigh O'Neil Zach Millington Tyler Robinson nobody Dirk Walt Walt rule low Beyonder Brandon boat Matthew Mason Edward - clicking Andrews galacon Sean Josh doing Brian Koppelman David Carlson Jacob Siegelman Alex Williams Ron jib a comfy that Ethan Kasich Eddie Burton Sonique Carol Henderson Lucas kilogauss key Nick called Hamilton koribo Phil Jake maids Dennis Clark Eli Oberg mass world war two freak organ mold Alexander leister Qumran division Igor Bob uke Lara's breakin Brian Hill Thunder O'Brien Aegon Dean Jared Myers Henry's Larsen Kevin ciao Anthony bar dil Tim Dobbs Dodson's are asbjorn Bowl Cavell Cavalia Cavalia Peter Flint Vance Norden Falls Jeremy McQuaid in Glasgow William Robert Dana's took care Ryan Schneider lars n bar Anderson Gabriel Holland Manu Weidman Matthew Sutton Erin Alba toad heart Adam Howard Elijah King Jesse Wilkinson Oscar line string Peter reduce key Stephen Wang juju beans Alexander Romanov sigh cold beans s involve Hercules Johnson acquaintance Pike man Endre pega pega gear Shawn Webber reg Merlin's Benjamin valerian robot ghost Elisha Nelson my love Connor me Cobra Ralph rainwater well twin Ralph rainwater there you are sorry about that Leighton Cardin Linus knellman pilot Jeffrey D Flannery ties are of the Kerry John Cegavske Jacob Macmillan Kim Winston Dominic Carla max barrows max Cohen tinfoil pancakes deep Travis Houston Oscar Spangenberg Tom painter John Anderton ensign Maktoum Saeed Al Maktoum Jared a Hicks James Gray will Dobbins Sebastian tyranny Patrick McGranahan well-tempered clavier Taylor F been Wellard Ellison April Andrew up Lenore Sasha oh yeah squid lures kale 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Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 184,871

Keywords: Horizon: Zero Dawm, Days Gone, Critique, Review, Analysis, Comparison, PS4

Id: yt7c8yXiuJk

Length: 80min 50sec (4850 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/feartheoldblood90]

Oh thank goodness, new Noah Gervais content. I love to put his videos on in the background while I do other stuff, and I worked my way through every one of his videos.

[u/TchitcherinesLEPDE]

From what he's saying Days Gone is suffering from LA Noire syndrome where you create a linear gameplay experience and then put it in an open world because why not

I wonder if the problem could have been changed from switching genres somewhat, a Metroidvania as opposed to an actual open world

[u/datlinus]

While playing Days Gone, I sometimes wondered if the game could've been better if it was reworked in a different setting. I kept thinking something similiar to Far Cry 5 - afterall, the crazy militia is already in place, right? The most interesting and enjoyable aspect of Days Gone, for me, was the tension between the factions, so I wouldn't have minded more biker gang stuff either.

It's not that I dislike zombies, in fact, I love zombie games in general, but Days Gone's pacing is very frustrating and in my opinion it stems in large part from the fact that the game's setting and dynamics are, well, very familiar. It often feels like that I've already played parts of the game, or have seen certain story beats.

[u/canad1anbacon]

Horizon Zero Dawn is my favourite game of all time. Im playing through Days Gone right now, and it seems to have taken a lot of design inspiration from HZD

Its not as good of a game, partcularily on the technical/polish side, but its strong points are very similar to HZD's

• an open world full of enemies that will absolutely fuck you up if you are not smart, and are genuinely terrfying early on

• Limited stat based progression. Succeding in combat is more about learning the mechnics, aquiring new tools and skills, and using those tools and skills intelligently.

• enmies do not scale and have the same stats through the game. Extremely important for engaging progression

• huge variety of ways to approach every combat senario

[u/DrKushnstein]

What’s weird is I went from Days Gone to HZD and found myself liking Days Gone more... I know crazy, right? I’m not too far into HZD but they throw so much shit at you so fast and it feels so difficult to tactically go through an enemy base and kill people one by one without being noticed. Some of my favorite parts of Days Gone was wiping out an entire encampment with out anyone noticing. I enjoyed Days Gone way more than I thought I would.

[u/[deleted]]

As much as I like Horizon: Zero Dawn on paper, as a concept, I generally did not enjoy actually playing it. Don't get me wrong, the gameplay mechanics were solid and the general feel of the game was great. Sadly, they missed the mark rather wide in terms of atmosphere. You have this beautiful world, interesting creatures, and even some great concepts for human tribes but the writing and (especially) the voice acting really let it down. The dialogue is just not very engaging and does little to immerse you in the story or setting.

To kinda explain myself better, let me use another franchise as a example. In the Mass Effect trilogy, every alien race has specific speech characteristics that make it sound entirely non-human. When you talk to Garrus, he doesn't sound human. The writers made sure that his race doesn't quite talk like a contemporary human. The voice actor adopted a certain demeanor that reinforces his otherworldly roots. Like aliens in Star Trek or Star Wars, the Mass Effect Trilogy's aliens felt alien.

It is when we get to Andromeda that we start to see where I am going with this example. In contrast to the original trilogy, Andromeda feels like its supporting voice cast was recruited from the local coffee shops and the director handling the voice actors seemed to take a entirely hands-off approach. As a result, you end up with aliens that have vocal processing but their phrasing and even various very obvious accents and speech styles come through too much. The aliens in Andromeda don't really feel alien at all. They look alien and their voice is processed to kinda sound alien but how they spoke, their inflections, and even their accents were too human and pulled me right out of it.

Horizon has that problem. You are supposed to buy into this idea that you are interacting with a very different set of cultures than the ones we are used to but when you actually talk to them, the voice acting sounds about as exotic as the person taking your order for a coffee in the morning.

Thankfully, Days Gone did not have this issue. The voice acting talent was on display and scenes played out in a natural way without feeling like you are hearing a poorly directed voice actor recite some lines.