Agreed. HZD always felt like a game that was built around a story premise first and foremost, which sort of makes sense as that studio had never done a game like that before.

I remember an interview where they were struggling to shift gears from Killzone and looking for new ideas from among their staff when one of their devs pitched HZD's premise. As a result, they approached making an open world action adventure game as complete noobs. This doesn't excuse any of the poor design decisions. I was hoping they'd learn from their mistakes in FW, but they instead made the open world part somewhat better and then forgot to keep the focus on the main quest and characters in the process.

[–] GriffinClaw@lemm.ee 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

This. So much this.

Also, the one incharge of side quests needs a bloody promotion. The side quests quality in Forbidden West was overall as good as the MAIN quest quality in Zero Dawn.

The quest themselves (minus a few misses), the voice acting and mocap, the POLISH. swoon