Horizon Forbidden West: Gameblogging

[owlmoose]

In my writing goals post for the month, I said I was going to try and do some gameblogging for Horizon Forbidden West, but I've discovered that I'd rather be spending my free time playing the game than writing about it. Also, it's hard to easily mark spoilers in a post about an open world game, because just naming a main quest doesn't signal what sidequests might be mentioned in there, or vice versa. And even just the name of the main quest we're working on right now is spoilery for anyone who has played the first game but not the second. But the primary thing I want to talk about now isn't really plot related, it's more about the environment, and it's spoiled by both the box art and the trailer, so I feel pretty safe in talking about it. Still under a cut, thought.

Although it quickly became clear that most of the world of HZD was set in what used to be Colorado and Utah, and the DLC was set in Yellowstone, that's not a part of the US that I know very well. But we've always known that HFW would be heading to San Francisco, so I've been super curious to see how much of it I would recognize. Once we got into the Lowlands, first for Demeter and then to find Faro's Tomb (I laughed out loud when we saw the quest name; good work, pun-loving game writers), I started scouring every ruined building, natural landmark, and bit of coastline to try and figure out where we were supposed to be. And I was getting a bit frustrated with feeling like I didn't quite understand what and where everything was... until we found the tallneck among the ruins of Oracle Park (or whatever it was named by the time the world ended). And suddenly, I knew exactly where I was. Like Aloy, I have a real fondess for the tallnecks -- they're my favorite type of sidequest -- but I have to say that nothing quite prepared me for the joy of riding a tallneck literally two blocks from my house.

We're now doing the relic ruin in downtown SF (I couldn't resist checking it out before heading for the next step in the main quest); the building strikes me as vaguely familiar, but I'm not certain of that. It got late enough that we needed to quit before finishing the ruin or doing any more exploration, but I look forward to running around the area a little more and seeing how the geography has been reimagined.