western AAA games vs asian AAA games
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Horizon is possibly the most astroturfed IP in existence. I have never met a real person who was a hardcore fan. At best, I hear "It's alright. Robo dinos are cool."
It's sad, because it could have been cool. Just ended up being mid tier at best.
If it was made like 5-10 years prior with way fewer diversity hires and affirmative action mandates then it could have been a really cool game. Unfortunately it just looks like a generic Ubisoft action game with an interesting aesthetic.
Basically. I love the idea of the setting, but the execution was not ideal.
I made a post semi recently, but basically it had a lot of potential, and failed to live up to it due to mechanical failings, cringe girl power shit/lefty narratives, etc etc and ended up being more mid tier at best.
Far as I keep hearing the game itself is a lot of "pretty good, wish it had more to it (like more dinos)" while everyone constantly talks about its characters and story which is the weakest part of it.
Like, a game where you shoot giant robo dinosaurs in an open world should be the biggest fact of any game. Instead they want to talk about the dumpy ginger lead.
The characters and story are really weak, and the voice acting sounds like it was all individual lines read from a single sheet of paper without any context to the larger conversation. And of course the moral ends up being "man bad, woman good". The gameplay was decidedly meh with only a couple of fights really standing out. The fact that the "tribes" are all 90s cartoon-level diverse is really immersion breaking.
Unfortunately this applies to most open world games. I'd describe its main rival (BotW) similarly, though that one has great writing and characters to make up for it. What it comes down to usually is if those fights are good enough to justify everything in between, travel, prep, grinding to get to and beat them.
Which, based on the words of people I know who don't get into the political side of these things, the game did succeed at.
one thing that also annoyed me. The handholding in the very basic puzzles the game had.
Stand still for more than a moment and she will start monologing about "maybe i should do this this and this"
Of course modders fixed it because there is no option to disable it in the menus.
The first horizon sold a ton because it was (and still is) one the most visually impressive games ever made. It was the PS4 game to get if you wanted to show off the power of your shiny new next-gen and/or OLED HDR TV. Next to the technical disaster that is bloodborne, Horizon looked at least one whole generation ahead.
But the story was mediocre. And the main character was kind of unlikeable. And the gameplay was typical Ubisoft-tier open world slop. So while a lot of people bought it, I don’t think a lot of people loved it.
Then the sequel released, and the sales were way down. Story was worse, Aloy was strangely uglier and bordering on insufferable, gameplay was stale and outdated. Graphics were still amazing, but the rest of the industry caught up.
TLDR: Horizon’s “success” as an IP was a bit of a mirage. Right place, right time, heavily promoted, but now subsequent releases are flopping. There will always be the Sony ponies who swallow an average console exclusive and pretend it’s steak, of course.
The real question is what would sales have looked like if Aloy were modeled even 30% more attractive with a different, more likable personality. Undoubtedly, the IP would be more popular and probably ascendant as opposed to declining.
This is the impression I got from the players. Amazingly beautiful aesthetic and a very interesting concept, with mediocre to bad everything else. It hasn’t really stuck around in popular science fiction, except for the giraffes with radar dishes that I think act as map/item revealers, which is a nice concept that fits in well with the design of the world.
The Lego game is fun.