Morning Friends! I am going to give you fair warning that the next little bit is likely going to lead to some fairly boring morning posts. I am very much in a head down mode working my way through two very large open world games… both of which I am trying to be extremely spoiler sensitive. Example I took this screenshot and then realized that the quest dialog might be a bit spoilery and used the mosaic tool to blur it. I spent most of last night playing Horizon Zero Dawn and I’ve started moving the main story forward again. I’ve not gotten anywhere near finished with the first part of the game, but there are certain objectives I have to be in the right mood in order to enjoy. For example Cauldrons and exploring ruins are a very specific mindset, and if I want to just kill things with my bow I am going to shy away from both.
Last night was very much a night for murder as I entered the desert and had my very first experiences with the Tenakth tribe. To be honest I expected this region to be way more hostile than I have found it to be. It is not at all that different from the desert band on the other side of Meridian in the first game. There are way more dangerous dinobots roaming around but in general I know the basics of hunting them and can successfully take them down. The flyers though are always going to be the bane of my existence and ultimately I need to become more proficient with a sling in order to help drop them. I have a bad habit of never wanting to use anything other than the Hunter bow. I go through most of the game without ever swapping weapons unless I am completely desperate.
However not being a controller native player anymore… I need to rest my hands from time to time and return to my significantly more familiar mouse and keyboard gameplay. When this occurs right now my game if choice is Dying Light 2. One of the rough things about February is just how packed it has been with interesting games. In another year any one of these games might have been my sole focus for much of the month. Over the course of this month we have had:
- Dying Light 2 – 2/8
- Lost Ark – 2/11
- Cyberpunk 2077 Next Gen 1.5 Patch – 2/15
- Horizon Forbidden West – 2/18
- Destiny 2: The Witch Queen – 2/22
- Elden Ring – 2/25
- Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons – 2/28
Now Lost Ark I threw on the list largely because it is eating up a lot of time of folks in the internet zeitgeist. For whatever reason it didn’t really click with me. Elden Ring seems to be the game that the internet is waiting for… and I am deeply interested in it but uncertain it would be a day one play. However the rest of that list are all games that are firmly placed in my wheelhouse and that I want to play… just not sure when I will get around to playing them. Destiny 2 is full of FOMO, but I am going to have to learn to play it on my schedule rather than let it dictate a schedule for me in order to reach a happy place with it. Guild Wars 2… me and this game have struggled for years and I am still trying to figure out how to play it and enjoy it but I am very interested in Cantha.
My prime non-Horizon game right now is Dying Light 2, and I am really enjoying it. It is ultimately my fear that this game is going to get missed in the mix. Essentially if you enjoyed Fallout 4, you are going to enjoy Dying Light 2. The games feel very similar in your interactions with the world and other people in it… but instead of irradiated monsters and questionable nuclear powered tech you have zombies and parkour. The world is chunked up in different zones and I have crossed the river finally into the central loop/downtown area. It also means I finally have access to a bow and the glider…. which is way the hell harder to control than the breath of the wild style glider from Horizon Forbidden West. I might need to change the keybinds because for now the process of popping it open and then stabilizing it feels cumbersome.
What has surprised me the most about this game is just how much I have enjoyed the side stories. I enjoyed Dying Light 1 quite a bit, and the main story while enjoyable was nothing really to write home about. This time around the world seems way more vibrant and while a lot of what you are doing is fetch quests, the story woven around them makes them feel like so much more. For example this is Maya and she had some bandits steal a music box from her… which is the only thing she had left from her mother. There is no way I was not going to go out into the world and retrieve it for her, even though it was quite an ordeal to actually make that happen.
In a perfect world Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West would have been spaced out far enough apart to feel like I had all the time in the world to enjoy both. Also in a perfect world Forbidden West would have launched on the PC so I didn’t need to take controller breaks. We however have what we have and are cursed with an overabundance of excellent new games. As I said for the next bit you are probably going to hear me talking about Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West as I move my way through both games. I fully expect that both are going to be upwards of hundred hour games for me to explore.
One of the nice things about single player games is that, as long as you can avoid spoilers, they generally just get better over time. For example Dying Light 2 had a fair share of issues on the PS5 at launch so I set it aside and I’m sure when I come back to it in a few months it will have had those issues patched and maybe some QoL updates or even some additional content.
For now I’m focused on my replay/play of Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West on the PS5, and Elden Ring on the Xbox, once Friday rolls around. Probably main focus will be on Aloy for quite some time, though.
I’ve sadly given up on Destiny 2 because I feel like if you don’t play it consistently you just lose access to things you were enjoying. I am still kind of “meh” on Lost Ark and have never resonated with Guild Wars. So I think I have a plan though March isn’t too much better with Ghostwire Tokyo and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands both coming out.