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S2 Ep126: Red Sign Soapstone - Horizon: Zero Dawn
76 Plays5 years ago
FULL SPOILERS (major spoilers after verbal disclaimer): Horizon: Zero Dawn
Join Dave, Jake and special guest Mike as they travel to and fro hunting machine with bow in this week's episode!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
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Join Dave, Jake and special guest Mike as they travel to and fro hunting machine with bow in this week's episode!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
00:00:04
Speaker
the the
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:42
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host is always Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? Extra bad now, but we'll say OK. We'll say it's going OK. Getting better every minute. How's it going? How's it going for our other special guest? I include you in the special guest. Mike, he's looking at me like he wants to say something.
00:01:09
Speaker
No, I'm just trying to figure out when is a good time to get in on this. Yeah. That's fair. I mean, you could try something a guest has never tried, which is just silently observed the whole time. And then at like 55 minutes, you're like, yep, I agree with that point. Yeah, no, it's crossed my mind. Yeah. Yeah.
00:01:28
Speaker
That would be interesting, but at the same time, not that interesting. Right, yeah. I've definitely considered going full silent and some episodes in the past, but it really doesn't work with two people.
00:01:50
Speaker
What do you guys want to talk about? Well, I was going to say, we got to do the classic thing and we asked our guests how the fuck they know us and how they're here. Oh, that's fair. Yeah. Mike, how do you know us? So, um, yeah, we, we all went to school together. Um, I lived with Jake and his now wife for a year. Yeah, it's a good time.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It was, um, and then Dave, you are my, uh, how to put this with NSFW. Yeah. No. Okay. Yeah. So, um, I think gay homeboy is an acceptable answer, right? Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the TLDR of it. Yeah. There there's, uh, I could,
00:02:46
Speaker
I could wax poetic for half an hour about the shades of Dave's butthole. Speaking of waxed poetic, I feel like I should mention I also was working with you when you met your wife, Mike, so we'll make sure that's brought in here too now that you started waxing poetic about Dave. Everybody remembers here.
00:03:13
Speaker
Yeah, no. Mike's good people. Friend of the show, obviously, as many people are. But I would say even VIP friend of the show. We've been trying to get Mike in for an episode since roughly the dawn of time. Yeah. Yeah. Dave has been harassing me a lot. Sexually or otherwise.
00:03:36
Speaker
Uh, both. Yeah. Definitely. We're justifying the NSFW rating, explicit content tags.
00:03:45
Speaker
We don't really have a, um, a special banner that goes up on every episode, but it would definitely have the explicit content advisory. Like those music. I'm going to throw in some extra swears this up then just to be safe. I have thought about it. Speaking of though, I was thinking as like a fun little intro, I was hashing stuff out early before we actually talked about the game. Yeah. Oh, we could each share a frustrating or interesting story about our day.
Daily Frustrations Shared
00:04:14
Speaker
Hmm. Okay.
00:04:15
Speaker
Who would like to start? Because I know everybody has one. Which day? Was it today? Today? OK. Yeah, no, just a lot of work, honestly. It's not the type of work that always ends at the end of the day. I was up until 4 AM yesterday. And part of it's because I could have done stuff slightly better in the past, could optimize it a little bit more. But other things, it's.
00:04:44
Speaker
I just, you immediately have to take care of this. So it overrides your other priorities for the day and then kind of bleeds over. I think we've all had some moments like that. Yeah, I definitely had that at a previous job. Any other examples for things you guys dislike about your day?
00:05:09
Speaker
I had a spider laying on my throat while we were out walking the dog. That's terrifying. It is terrifying. So I got to spend a good half hour freaking out about that and Googling pictures of spiders, which just made it worse. That's not going to help. I'm imagining the camera zoom in, like when Peter Parker was bitten, Toby McGuire and the old, or any Spider-Man, right? There's always the zoom in on the radioactive spider, but instead you just kind of like freak out and flail about a lot.
00:05:39
Speaker
the fifth
00:05:44
Speaker
No. Okay. So what I told you was the, the quick and dirty version of it. Um, I, I felt something laying on my throat. I thought it was a blossom. So I reached grabbed and through, Oh, because there was no conscious thought, but this, it was just, Oh crap. It's a blossom. I need to get it away from me only then to realize that it was a spider.
00:06:13
Speaker
And there were many, many expletives shouted. The elderly lady with her two small grandchildren on the tennis court were not happy with me. She gave me a very dirty look.
00:06:27
Speaker
That's funny. That's actually hilarious. I didn't know how to mime. You know, I had a spider on my throat to her. Right. You just like, you kind of like raise your arms. You're just like, I'm a scary spider. And then she's just like, who is this madman? I'm just some Halloween prep, honestly.
00:06:49
Speaker
Yeah. You know, first he's swearing and now he's, you know, making the threatening gestures toward me. I'm going to call the cops. So yeah, that's, that's how my day would have ended.
00:06:59
Speaker
No. Well, I'm glad that you're not in prison. This is not a great place to be in these trying times. Or Spiderman. And also, we're going to have much better quality with you here versus you in a holding cell. Right. Could you imagine? It's like, all right, I need my phone call. And it's like, all right, we need like two minutes of audio. I just need to edit it like an hour.
00:07:23
Speaker
Or we would just take Mike's audio and splice it throughout the entire episode. Right. Yep. I need you to come pick me up. So Mike, what did you think about the gameplay? How hard was it? I need you to come pick me up. It's really, really tough. Speaking of gameplay though.
00:07:45
Speaker
We do occasionally talk about games. It's a side gig. I wouldn't say it's the main thing we do. We've been trying to move away from it for years. I mean, I don't I don't need to share mine. Yeah, that's fair. I guess tonight's game is Horizon Zero Dawn.
Introducing Horizon Zero Dawn
00:08:07
Speaker
Just kidding. What do you what you got, Dave? I was going to say jig zero fucks given.
00:08:13
Speaker
All right, just to bang it out quick, because I know we're pushing time and I feel bad for that, but it's more entertaining than anything we're talking about. I got a call today for a medication order saying, hey, it's time for you to refill, yada, yada, but we had some issues with your insurance, saying that you don't have insurance. I was like, right, because I recently swapped jobs, so my insurance from the previous job had ended, but I can't get insurance from this job until 90 days to get benefits.
00:08:41
Speaker
Oh, I put myself in a pickle. So I realized today I don't have insurance.
00:08:49
Speaker
But no, it's fine. There's a place you can call, at least in Pennsylvania, where you can essentially do rollover insurance, where it's still the election from your previous position just through a third party mediary. So yeah, it's still weighed on that whole drug order to go through though, so that they think I have insurance.
00:09:14
Speaker
Smile. I'm glad there's something to cover that at least though, because being completely uninsured is basically like you're pre-dead in the U.S. Yeah. It's OK. Those injections are cheap. Yeah, you know, it's not like you've been on this medication forever and, you know, needed to actually function on a daily day basis. It's fun going an extra week without it. I'm like, that's what we forgot. Life saving medicine. Yeah, for
00:09:43
Speaker
people who traditionally might not believe in evolution, if they're pushing against a lot of this stuff, they sure really do believe in natural selection. They're like, all right. Yeah.
00:10:00
Speaker
I don't know. Well, I'm glad you're glad you're both still with us, not in prison and still in the land of the living. I don't know why I said us and then I addressed both of you. I don't know. That doesn't work.
00:10:18
Speaker
Anyways, transition. Yeah, transition. This is the part where we talk about the video game. And the video game this week is Horizon Zero Dawn, as all of you literally knew by the title, unless you're listening to this on autoplay. How would you actually before I ask you guys how you describe Horizon, I want to give a little bit of backstory, because Gorilla Games made this game in 2017 is when it was released.
00:10:44
Speaker
Who are they? Nobody knows, but they made Killzone and that was the other game they made before this. They made like four or five PlayStation shooters and then they made Horizon Zero Dawn. Discuss how that makes any sense. I think I remember playing one of the original Killzones on PlayStation 2 maybe.
00:11:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think it played some. It was definitely like a different type of shooter. But I mean, PlayStation was not known for its shooters because that's not where the sticks go. That's that's quite the line. If I were to I can already pick out that line that should be like copy pasted throughout the episode at different places. That's not where the sticks go.
00:11:29
Speaker
It is something I say quite often around Dave. But yeah, I would argue that Horizon is a very different game than Killzone, although I never played Killzone, so maybe I'm very wrong. But Cover Shooter,
00:11:47
Speaker
isn't what I think of when I think of Horizon Zero Dawn. I mean, that's how I play a little bit in between mashing Dodger like a motherfucker, like it's Dark Souls. But I have unlimited stamina. And it has true iframes too, which is choice. It's good. But Horizon is an open world game, one could argue.
00:12:12
Speaker
where you play as a protagonist named Aloy who runs around fighting monsters, monsters, robots, to get parts. It's kind of the base. Here's what you're looking at on the box justification for it. And then, like I mentioned, it came out in 2017 for the PlayStation 4, which
00:12:36
Speaker
I played it like a couple years after that because I bought the PlayStation for Monster Hunter, kind of ironically, then got Horizon after the fact to continue the Monster Hunter vibe, I guess. And then recently came out for PC, came out this year.
00:12:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think like you're the one person out of the group who's played on PC. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it was something I had looked at it, you know, when it first came out and I was like, you know, Hey, that would be really cool. But can I justify buying a PS4 just for this game? It's good though.
00:13:12
Speaker
It is good. It is really good. But yeah, I mean, as soon as they announced it, I wish listed it. And then as soon as they opened pre-orders on it, I pre-ordered it and almost canceled pre-order because of issues with the game at launch. People are complaining about crashes and whatnot. Yeah, the game at launch. I did. I did. And I had exactly one crash, which
00:13:41
Speaker
was an optimal number of crashes other than zero maybe. I did see a lot, especially early. I think the reviews have improved a bit. I don't know if they've been patching it, but people did have some poor issues at launch I remember seeing. They've been doing a fair number of patches with that. I think they're on their probably fifth or sixth patch at this point and it's been maybe two months. Nice.
00:14:07
Speaker
It's good they didn't just ship it and then fuck off. That's what a lot of people were really worried about. They would port it and then that would be version 1.0 and version final. Yeah.
00:14:23
Speaker
So Horizon, and this is going to actually relate to the PC question, I think. So Dave and I both played with the controller. AutoAIM is only enabled on all, it's enabled on most difficulties except the two hardest, I think, very hard and ultra hard, I think is when AutoAIM is actually disabled.
00:14:42
Speaker
Otherwise, it gives you a little bit, as this is kind of like a tribal fantasy future game in a way. You use a bow, I would say, for most of the game, unless you guys had completely divergent play styles than I did. How did you feel about using the bow for PC? How did that feel? So I used a controller as well. Never mind. I reject my question. Yeah, I mean...
00:15:09
Speaker
It did feel like it was meant to be played with a controller because obviously it was a port from a console so it felt like the controls were designed for a controller. I will say I even with the auto aim, I often had trouble with aiming it just it felt like it was
00:15:28
Speaker
A lot of times it felt like it was just too fast. I barely moved the stick and I would be aiming 90 degrees to the right. Maybe mouse controls or mouse keyboard would have been better for aiming.
00:15:43
Speaker
I will say there's a skill tree because this has the prerequisite RPG mechanics. I'm going to make some comparisons to Far Cry through this. It has a lot in common with Far Cry, actually. I just think it's a way better game. Horizon, not Far Cry. But one of the skill trees gives you concentration, which is basically slow-mo.
00:16:07
Speaker
And I found that was pretty much essential, like to do any sort of precision aiming because the game requires that, right? Do you guys want to talk about why aiming matters in this game as opposed to some other console shooters where you could just auto aim and throw a couple guys down?
00:16:25
Speaker
I mean, like all games past the first shooter ever, enemies have weak points. So you can't just like shoot people in the foot and they'll bleed to death at the same rate as in the head. But each of these robot monsters are kind of designed like animals. But depending on the variant you'll come across, they'll have different weak
Gameplay Mechanics and Strategy
00:16:48
Speaker
points. Now they might have different weaknesses to elements as well.
00:16:51
Speaker
But if you use their weakness, especially in a weak point, it will deal much more damage. And when you have limited resources on the go for making projectiles and ammo, it's just a lot easier. But sometimes they're like very small hit, very small markers for the weak spots. So if you have that slow-mo time to kind of aim and line up the shot, it's a lot easier. Because again, I'm rolling like a motherfucker.
00:17:21
Speaker
By that, do you mean that you played pretty quickly or are you trying to, did you also play really stealthfully? I'm super stealthy. Like all games, I start out using stealth and then when that goes to shit, rolling like a motherfucker. It's very hard to go back into stealth unless you go far enough away to the aggro and then you can re-approach, which I've also done as well.
00:17:45
Speaker
I will say, speaking of the stealth system, so I went back and I was going to make a new game to play this, a new save. But I saw that new game plus was an option off of my previously completed save. And I'm like, I'm going to tap that because I feel like using my basically cheat code items from my full clear, essentially the first time, or close to full clear. And holy crap, going back to the stealth system, I don't think I've played any other
00:18:14
Speaker
like third person possibly accepting MGS5, open world game that has an actually workable stealth system like Horizon. You can like lose monsters by just circling a rock because they'll like lose track of you. They'll search for you. They'll look around the rock, but the game doesn't cheat.
00:18:36
Speaker
and be like, Oh no, the player's over there. Go get the player. Right. Yeah. Like the one spotted forever seen. Yes, exactly. Um, yeah. It was nice that there were, um, a fair number of options provided to you for even just, um, you know, they're, they're, you could stun the robots and as they fall down, you know, you could run away or, um, you could tie them down and run away. Um, yeah.
00:19:03
Speaker
Yeah, it wasn't just you had to sneak around the other side of the rock or you just had to run until they de-agro'd. There were definitely options that you could use mid-combat and then decide, oh, I really need to get out of here.
00:19:15
Speaker
There was arguably coming back to the game for New Game Plus, like too many options for me because I got my entire like purple, very rare tier set of weapons. And I'm like, I can only use three of these at a time or whatever. So or four, I guess. And I was like, I can't remember which of these are primaries and which are like secondary situational things.
00:19:40
Speaker
I think the ice flamethrower is secondary, so I put that one off. Never got that far. It was a DLC weapon. I didn't get a chance to try the DLC, but once I find something that works, aka an arrow to somebody's head, that will be my go-to strat. There is some melee combat in there as well. You have a stave.
00:20:04
Speaker
Which is pretty useful. You have like light attacks and then strong attacks. It's the stick. A glaive? Reminder. Glaive. To use the stick voice line here. Sticks don't go there. I can count on one hand the number of times that I intentionally use the spear as a weapon.
00:20:29
Speaker
There's never even like a panic option for you? It was mostly accidental, yeah. Oh, I really mean to subdue this robot and oh, I accidentally swing my spear at it every time. It definitely is better with upgrades. So when I started New Game Plus, I picked Ultra Hard because I was looking through the difficulties. I looked up online and I was like,
00:20:57
Speaker
Does this basically make the game unplayable? If not, I know I'm like the character super twinked out, has really good gear. I don't want it to be like a complete walk in the park. And melee is actually really strong once you have the tree maxed out. Pretty much any light machine you can knock to the ground with one heavy attack, which you can almost always reliably get off with a dodge first. So dodge the attack, heavy attack, machines on the ground, finish it with a light attack.
00:21:27
Speaker
Or the advanced strat is if it's knocked to the ground, stabbing it with the kind of impalement bonus attack always makes it recover from its stun state. But if you hit it with a heavy attack first, it's still in its stun state, and then you stab it for the light attack.
00:21:44
Speaker
And you could just get a crazy amount of bonus damage. Yeah. It's can be really strong against smaller enemies. Um, obviously with some bigger enemies, you have much more shit you have to deal with. Cause again, they're giant robots modeled off, off of like giant animals or dinosaurs. So like saber tooth Robo or T-Rex Robo or giant crocodile or like sandworm.
00:22:11
Speaker
There's a whole host of bullshit you come across. They're all really fucking cool designs. One thing I love about it is the cool design juxtaposition of ancient times, spear and bow, giant fucking robot. Yeah. There's something, and this honestly leads into later game reveals and things like that, but the
00:22:38
Speaker
The vibes I got from the game when I was playing through the first time was like, this is a fantasy game. Like, yeah, I'm fighting robots, but it's a fantasy game in a tribal time and I'm fighting robots.
00:22:51
Speaker
And then the game starts to give you these snippets of the old world, the machine world, stuff like that. And you're like, great, it's a fantasy game where there was an apocalypse. And they continue to give you that drip feed until they start giving the big reveals later. I'm going to have another spoiler disclaimer, even though it's probably in the description, before getting there. Because I actually want to talk story. I do want to talk story on this one.
00:23:21
Speaker
But I love the I love the setting I You can compare this to Far Cry primal almost like one to one for most of the gameplay mechanics actually You can like tame creatures and you can ride them around and you have a bow and arrow and it's an open world game and there's challenges like the like hunting challenges and things like that but horizon feels way better to play and
00:23:47
Speaker
I agree with the past a minute and a half. Um, Mike, did you find yourself doing more of like the exploration or the taming or do you, did you see yourself more as like hunter or gatherer? Like what was your play style when you can't, when you approach this? So yeah. Um,
00:24:11
Speaker
I mean, it sounds like you guys went pretty heavy on, you know, uh, the, yeah, the abilities that would help you in combat. Um, whereas I went down, I think exclusively the right hand side of the tree, which was, uh, gathering and taming. Um, right.
00:24:28
Speaker
And I spent far more time, far too much time doing every side quest that I possibly could. All the side quests, all the errands, finding as many collectibles as I could in an area before moving on. So I didn't have to come back. I'm now learning there are collectibles. I didn't even realize you could do errand. There's a character in the game named Eren.
00:24:59
Speaker
I mean, it's a good game for it though. It is. You can get lost in the world. Yeah. And there's always going to be one more just beautiful vista that you're going to be like, oh, this is nice. And then you come across it again and you're just completely awestruck again because it just... Yeah.
00:25:21
Speaker
It's a couple years old, but even picking it up and playing it again, it's fucking gorgeous. Yeah. And even like the in-game character models, you feel like you're having like a nice dialogue between two people and that the writing seems fairly authentic. Like what would the character say in the situation?
00:25:39
Speaker
Oh, yep, they're mad about that thing from before. They're not going to let it go. That makes sense. It seemed very fitting and it was easy to get immersed into the game world because it felt real. Yeah.
00:25:54
Speaker
You actually brought up the dialogue system and this is another time you can make a comparison to a worse game that had similar features. Like there are several times, I'm trying my hardest not to accidentally call the protagonist Senua by the way. I don't know why that is.
00:26:10
Speaker
But it's Aloy. There's times when Aloy is interacting with someone and it'll give you the choice between a logical response, a emotional response slash compassionate response and like an aggressive response.
00:26:27
Speaker
literally the exact same things that Mass Effect Andromeda did, admittedly later, I believe. But Dragon Age 2 also had very similar systems. But the difference is a lot of games implement those multiple conversation options, and then the character seems schizophrenic.
00:26:49
Speaker
Um, as a result of that, if you pick different things like fallout four is another good example of a character, you can just go off the walls. Uh, if you pick different options, um, but one thing I love the next day, yeah. Um, Aloy is grounded regardless though. Um, there's core parts of her personality that exist regardless of which of those options you pick. And so it turns into, this is how I'm responding to this one thing, not
00:27:19
Speaker
Aloy is a sociopath, right? And the responses that they'll have for those different options, again, fit the dialogue. But it's not like it'll have deeper ramifications down the line. It's not if you say, hey, what you did was fucking shitty and I hope you die for it. Later on, they're not going to be like, so what about that thing you said? I still kind of have... It's more of
00:27:46
Speaker
If they're a logical person, they'll still respond logically, but they'll talk to your point, specifically. Were there any characters that like- Well, remember that. No, it's definitely not a telltale experience. Were there any characters that like really stood out for you guys?
00:28:03
Speaker
Besides what I think is just written really well and really cool. Do you want to answer immediately, Mike? Uh, cause if not, I have, I have a jump in. Yeah. I mean, I, I know this is going to be a, be a controversial take on this, but I, I honestly, I thought Aaron, um, who you meet very early on. Um, I thought his entire story arc was, was basically a throwaway. Um, it just, it felt like,
00:28:31
Speaker
You see him pop up all over the place, but it never felt like he was necessary in most of the main, at least the main story missions. He has this whole side quest arc where you can find out a lot more about him and what's driving him. But if you don't do that, it kind of feels like his place in the story is almost inconsequential.
00:28:56
Speaker
He stands out because very early on, you kind of get this unfavorable feel about him because he's fairly misogynistic towards the main character. And then later on, he redeems himself. I think like
00:29:14
Speaker
Uh, he's a really good character study for this type of game and Horizon does this. Um, uh, they do the hero's journey, right? Like in a lot of ways, but, um, errand is the outsider.
00:29:30
Speaker
to your tribe, and admittedly, Aloy is also an outsider to her tribe, but even more so, in that she doesn't necessarily understand his motivations, so that's where some of that suspicion can come from. Aloy's really straightforward, and I don't mean that in a bad way. She just speaks her mind 100% of the time, because she is an outcast. She's a bad bitch.
00:29:57
Speaker
Um, but I think his purpose mostly in the story is to one drive things forward. He's someone who's not openly antagonistic to her that also pushes her to leave, um, the starter area, right? This is when you get the quest that takes you out of the starter area. Basically. Um, I mean, I feel like with a lot of other characters too, like Mike's point, he's just kind of another example of a flawed person.
00:30:27
Speaker
Like a lot of these people will have sides to them. Nobody's like the pure savior where they can do no wrong. Um, and even like one of the main antagonists who's definitely an evil piece of shit, like you, you get to understand their motivations at least. So they're a little more rounded, but like for Aaron's story specifically, I don't know.
00:30:54
Speaker
if it was needed as much. I feel like because this is such an open world game, you don't have as many interactions with key characters unless you come to these key moments. But it felt more like you could come across him in a vast wasteland journey. It's not necessarily an ally, but a friendly face role.
00:31:18
Speaker
I mean, I would make the argument that the game actually essentially has no main characters besides Aloy. There are some interesting characters, but most of them you don't spend that much time with. There are some exceptions, obviously, especially as you accelerate to the end of the game. Characters like Silence.
00:31:41
Speaker
But I don't think that I think most of the time these characters are just there to either push Aloy in a direction or show an aspect of her personality. Or just allow her to flex, basically, by being like, she's got all the answers and she's going to smash her way through the situation.
00:32:00
Speaker
Also, to your point about Aloy being an outcast, obviously, that's a big part of her motivation as a character. She's technically not from the tribe. They always treat her like shit, like everybody. So it feels really good to flex on them later, like, hey, remember when you were being a huge piece of shit? Fuck you, by the way, for that. Yeah.
00:32:23
Speaker
This is the perfect time, I think, to have the official spoiler disclaimer, because it's impossible to go too much further without stepping all over that. So if you're sold, go play the game. It's on two consoles. One of those is a PC.
00:32:41
Speaker
That being said, yeah, Aloy is called Motherless by the members of her tribe, right? Because prior to the start of the game, I guess she's found as a baby inside this heart of the mountain.
Aloy's Story and Setting
00:32:57
Speaker
by the matriarchs of her tribe and there's a split where some people think she's a curse and some people think she's a blessing and the reality is not really either. It's just that classic tribal fear of the unknown but like so many people are almost trope levels of
00:33:20
Speaker
You're an outcast piece of shit. You're not one of us. I don't like you and I hope bad things. I hope you trip on rocks and scuff your knee." And then later you're like, they're like, oh, I'm really sorry about those things that I said because I was wrong. I was like, yeah, yeah, you were.
00:33:36
Speaker
I mean, so I would actually argue that's not even the case because when she leaves, it's because these matriarchs are allowing her to. They make her a seeker so she can go out in the world and no location is taboo to her. Basically, this is a video game. Go play it. Here's the reason. But when she comes back and all this tragedy has been befallen them, they name her Anointed. They literally give her a religious title. They're like,
00:34:05
Speaker
like the mother or whatever her name was is like guiding your hand and Aloy rejects that too. She hates that they rejected her and she hates that they now revere her without ever getting to know her.
00:34:21
Speaker
Um, which I think is awesome in a character. She's just like the people she gets most along with are the ones that are just like, let's just go do something. Right. We're not going to criticize you. Um, or look too much. You're like, you know, a normal fucking person. Exactly.
00:34:39
Speaker
Which we did all benefit from. No, yeah, definitely. It was nice, at least early on in the story, there are a couple interactions that you have with people that do come into play. I think very early on, there's a little kid that throws a rock at you and you can choose to
00:34:57
Speaker
Depending on your reaction, you can choose to throw the rock back at him or not throw the rock back at him. Dave's just like stoned the child. You have no audio proof of that. I knew what Dave's decision was in that particular one.
00:35:21
Speaker
before you leave the tribe, you enter the proving. And one of the people that you're going against in the proving is the kid that threw the rock at you and you have the choice to not throw the rock back at him. They give you a rival. Yeah. And
00:35:44
Speaker
Dave, you through the rock, you probably saw a scar on the kid's head. I think every choice probably led to the kid having a scar on his head. I'm wondering if- I don't remember all of the interactions there, but probably.
00:35:58
Speaker
New Game Plus actually starts as adult Aloy. They skip the whole kid thing. So I didn't actually get to re-experience that. But there's another kid when you're first learning how to be stealthy, sneak from grass to grass. There's a kid you rescue and then that character comes into play later on.
00:36:22
Speaker
When you go to the proving, they thank you, although they should. He's a weaver, right? He is. He's a shopkeeper, yeah. So the whole being an outcast, nobody can talk to you. I spit at you because you are not one of us. It was
00:36:45
Speaker
an interesting design choice and how they still chose to put characters into the game, at least in the very early on that shouldn't have talked to you, but they still talk to you. It made it feel a little bit more relatable, I guess.
00:37:03
Speaker
Yeah. I feel like you're gonna be drawn to those characters as well because, oh, they're not being a piece of shit. Oh, they provide utility by like, they can actually make armor and provide that to me. We're going to have a good relationship.
00:37:16
Speaker
I was just going to say regarding that kid, the rival after the proving, so he's a douchebag through the whole thing. He shoots your trophy, so you have to grab another one. Once you get to the end of it, and you always finish first and become a brave or re-inducted to the tribe,
00:37:36
Speaker
Um, uh, the, there's an attack on the proving major plot point, whatever bunch of people die. And, um, the point that sticks out with me is that kid, that rival, that jerk is over on the other side, hiding behind rocks in cover. And, um, you and I think Vala is her name, this other person who was running in the proving you talking to me like the night before.
00:38:00
Speaker
are like, are you with us? Shouting out to this kid. And this kid's just like, yes, I'm with you. And I love that moment because to Dave's point, like the bad guys in quotes are believable. And in this case,
00:38:17
Speaker
He is your rival. He was your rival until literally a larger threat was raised and now he's just a member of your tribe, right? He's like, I'm not like full evil. I'm not 100%. I'm not going to go like kick a puppy, right? He's like, we're being attacked. I'll help you fight them. And he does for a while.
00:38:38
Speaker
Yeah, he dies, right? From what I recall. Yeah, he dies running out to try to save Vala or whatever her name was after she gets gunned down by the first chain gun you see in the game. Again, bows and arrows. Surprisingly early, you get to see a chain gun. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't think this was that kind of game, but I guess so.
00:39:05
Speaker
Yeah, they kind of use that to illustrate like, oh, your petty squabbles don't actually matter that much. Because constantly throughout the game, they're like, hey, you thought sabertooths were scary? Nope. And then they'll show you like a bigger threat each time. So it's cool to see even like people from other tribes you explore unify with you. It's like, hey, that shit out there is fucking spooky, right? Yeah, let's let's hang out.
00:39:35
Speaker
Yeah, Alo is incredibly powerful, and it continues to get more and more powerful throughout the game as your gear gets better, but they're constantly introducing more difficult encounters or situations or things to change the scope of the story, which is what I loved.
00:39:54
Speaker
I wanted to mention the reveal, basically, for me. Because I don't remember exactly when it hit me, but I remember being absolutely gobsmacked, I think is the word, when I realized that this was Earth. This is alternate future Earth.
00:40:17
Speaker
But this isn't fantasy world, like 2033, whatever it is, you know, it's earth. After, um, inventing, um, they were nanites or like a nanite swarm, basically gray goo, essentially in the Pharaoh swarm. Yeah.
00:40:37
Speaker
You said you played the game a lot, Mike. Did you jump into this story? Did you get invested in those logs and diaries and stuff like that? Yeah, I found as many as I possibly could. I'm pretty sure I found them all and listened to them each time and read all the text messages.
00:40:57
Speaker
I especially enjoyed, um, all of the, the video dialogue. So the African, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Focus basically had to climb to a high point and, um, you would be able to see like a still image through your focus and you would hear somebody's like audio dialogue. Um, yeah. But basically describing a life before everything went bad.
00:41:26
Speaker
The metal world. Yeah. They called it. You know, talking about, you know, going to concerts and doing drugs and a little bit of everything. It's weird for us now too, right? In current year.
00:41:43
Speaker
Again, with the juxtaposition, it's really cool to have this current society in the game describe what would be our essentially modern day society, obviously a little bit more advanced, in such a way of myth because that's the only way they know how to explain it. They don't really have any knowledge of it outside of we see these metal things from time to time. We don't know what it is. We make up these reasons for why it exists and why it's there. Yeah.
00:42:12
Speaker
I just I like it. Yeah, it was it was the tearing down the wall between our future and society and this fictional games future in society that blew my mind because I thought it was completely I thought it was 100% fantasy.
00:42:28
Speaker
And it really isn't, but you don't find that out until significantly into the game. And you mentioned you spent a lot of time looking for the collectibles, the journals and stuff like that. How did you feel about the justification for what actually happens in the game compared to our reality? Because that was a high point for me.
00:42:52
Speaker
I realize it's a high-scope question, but I'm thinking more like the transition point between us plus 100 years or something like that and everything that happens in the game. Because for me, I got out there and I was like, there's robot dinosaurs all over the place. What is this fantasy game? And then they spent a stupid amount of time filling in all those blanks between I work in an office and there's robot dinosaurs outside.
00:43:21
Speaker
Yeah. Um, especially as the story was building, um, I kept saying to Dave, you know, I think this is where the story's going. I think this is where the story's going. And when I got to the big reveal that, you know, this is us, you know, how many hundreds or thousands of years in the future. Um, yeah, it, it felt a little too real almost. Um, just,
00:43:53
Speaker
I did have to stop playing the game for a couple of days because I needed to process that, oh crap, this game's three years old, but it's just a little too much like real life right now and I don't need that.
00:44:10
Speaker
Yeah, I was literally listening to a podcast less than an hour ago regarding this guy who's going to be talking about his AI company and how he wants to design a type of social network between AI and humans to give humans a
00:44:30
Speaker
not a dark mirror or a black mirror, but just like a way for you to communicate and kind of just express yourself, but like have something listen to you and give you that social validation.
00:44:45
Speaker
So yeah, it's something that we as programmers think about a lot of technology can advance really fucking quickly. So it's like, where is it going to go? So you have theories like the singularity, you have games like Grey Goo.
00:45:03
Speaker
Which is basically what happened in Horizon, right? It is a Grey Goo story of they're like, hey, we made self-replicating swarms. They're like, all right, that seems like maybe a sort of bad idea, but there's this off switch, right? And they're like, we disabled the off switch. And you're like, that's not good. It's actually bad. They eat biomass. What? Yeah, to reproduce, to make more of themselves.
00:45:31
Speaker
I can't recall exactly if the swarm turned off its own off switch. They couldn't get the codes to turn them off, I remember. No, I think the design was they didn't want to have it so they could be hacked by some other organization and just turned off because I think part of the intention was to have peacekeeping robots. Right.
00:45:51
Speaker
So they didn't want to have a backdoor. Yeah. And then the trick here was they lost the ability, as we said, to turn off the pharaoh swarm, which started being called the pharaoh plague. And they're like, all right, not a big deal. Some people are going to die or whatever. We'll hold them off. How long would it take to crack the encryption on these codes? And they're like,
00:46:16
Speaker
too long, the earth will be wiped clean of life before the codes are decrypted. And the military is like, yeah, yeah, that's bad. So they started Operation Enduring Freedom, I think it was called.
00:46:31
Speaker
which was basically the cell, we have a super weapon. We're going to wipe out that swarm. We need you guys to take up arms and bias time. And there was no super weapon. It was just like bias time so we can finish the backup plan.
00:46:48
Speaker
Um, which was again, a bunch of AIs cause AIs are awesome. And the form of like a Gaia is what she was called in all caps. It, I guess, and all of her sub processes. Yeah, essentially the plan was to recreate the world where you'd have something like a terraform, something that could create life, AKA in the form of those robot monsters, robot wildlife, you see a way to like essentially respond humans.
The Backstory and Ted Faro's Betrayal
00:47:18
Speaker
So I think they weren't material. Yeah. Essentially. Yeah. They were cryogenically frozen. I think there was, there was like the alphas were the people who were the last really brilliant people who were formulating all of this. And then they had a bunch of like human genetic samples that were going to be used to reseed the human race.
00:47:43
Speaker
Which one was it? I think it was Apollo was the, yeah, let's put everything into a database. Oh no, something went wrong with the database. Drop tables. Yeah, it was Ted, Ted Pharaoh, actually the guy who also the guy who made the original plague and then was one of the alphas in this like final bunker.
00:48:03
Speaker
was like, oh no, I wiped out Alpha. Humans would make this mistake again. So instead, we're just going to reset them to tribal times. Also, all of you guys are being suffocated. To elaborate on that slightly, with the whole plan of repopulating the world, the initial plan was to reeducate everybody so that you didn't lose thousands of years of human advancement. But Ted's theory was, oh, they're going to get back and repeat the same mistakes, even with that information.
00:48:33
Speaker
We don't want them tainted by our sins. So he fucking nuked everything and then also killed those people. Thanks Ted. Nobody really likes it. No one really likes it when Ted talks.
00:48:52
Speaker
But yeah, I love the idea of the subprocesses because I'm like a huge nerd. And the fact that it's like, oh no, we have processes that are named after these Greek gods. And then one of them is named Cyan. That one bothered me a little bit. I was like, there's more Greek gods you could have used here. I don't think Cyan is a Greek god. Cyan is actually a CSS god. That's true. Everyone's favorite color.
00:49:18
Speaker
And that's where you can get some of these hints. There's cauldrons all over the world, which I loved. They're basically mini dungeons, relatively linear areas you can work your way through within all the mechanics of the game, but with a boss fight at the end. And then, boom, you get more decryption codes. And you can play the game like Mike wants by hacking everything.
00:49:47
Speaker
I did all the cauldrons because, hey, who doesn't want to tame a T-Rex? They're freaking great. Probably the most satisfying thing in the entire game was taming a T-Rex and then making a flight another T-Rex. Just gods of the movies all over again.
00:50:06
Speaker
Were they like the Thunderjaws in the planes or the plateau area? Yeah. There was one specific area in the dead center of the planes where there were two Thunderjaws just wandering the same area. And if you tied one down and tamed it, then you got to have a very, very nice battle take place. Very short, but very nice battle.
00:50:30
Speaker
I love some of those enemy designs too because I realize I'm jumping all over the place here. We went to story and back to enemies. But Thunderjaws, they deploy drones that can fire lasers at you unless you disable their drone launcher or their sensor or something.
00:50:46
Speaker
And like they have disk launchers, you can blast off of them and then pick up and fire like a crazy person. Oh, yeah. A lot of enemies had like essentially PC you could pick off like that to disable functionality or like Jake said to like take off a fucking gun. Yeah. So sometimes if you took out like a media monster, you took a gun off of its leg, you could then shoot a bigger monster and it's really fucking cool.
00:51:10
Speaker
Cuz again, you're running around with a bow most of the time. So when you have the option for like advanced gun tech, oh Yeah, also half the time like you're fighting people That's true. Yeah, there's a lot of like bandits and rogue
00:51:29
Speaker
camps essentially. Because a lot of your antagonists are going to be actual people. The monsters for the most part of the machines are just kind of out there. And the ones that are aggressive that spot you will try and kill you. But the ones that aren't will run away because they're like robo deer.
00:51:49
Speaker
Speaking of bandits and killing people, how far did you guys get with Nils... Neil? Nils? Nils questline. N-I-L. Did you see it to the completion? I finished it, yeah. Yeah. Did you finish it? I didn't choose to fight him, no. Okay, gotcha. All right, that's fine.
00:52:10
Speaker
I'm trying to remember who Neil is. I can't comment. So before you find your first bandit camp, he's just kind of on there in the road, so you're likely to run across him. There's a guy who's clearly from the Sun Kingdom from Meridian with some nice tattoos under his eyes, very symmetric, visually appealing. And he's like, hey, see that smoke over there? Meet me over there. And after you talk to him, he's like, I like you.
00:52:38
Speaker
then you can run over and go through a bandit camp with him and if you get like detected he'll help you kill people or try but he continues to do this for basically the rest of the game
00:52:53
Speaker
Um, and he has, he's a sociopath. He has a passion. And that passion is murdering people. There was, you can actually ask him like, um, why don't you like go out hunting robots? And he's just like, they just don't look the same when they die. You're like, Oh, okay.
00:53:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's a man committed to his craft, I guess. Yeah. Did you guys enjoy fighting people more or robots more? My short answer is robots for actually being able to use your toolkit more and people for stealth.
00:53:43
Speaker
Yeah, I would say it was more difficult to fight people than it was to fight the robots. That's fair.
00:53:54
Speaker
never seem like, once you get to a certain point with your kit, taking down a large enemy is no problem at all. Counterpoint tanks continue. Well, I mean, you just have to know what you're doing, get good, all that. I know. But yeah, when you're going through one of these bandicamps or
00:54:16
Speaker
Any of the story missions where you're actually fighting humans, you've got 30, 40, 50, and they can swarm you pretty quick. Yeah. So you're almost forced into stealth. More headshots. More headshots.
00:54:30
Speaker
precision arrows. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. It gives you more bo zoom in when you use those arrows, which is hilarious. Yeah. Don't know how that works. I'll take it. I really do like the the camp layout. Because like Jake said, the map is very much like Far Cry. You have outposts. You have campfires, which are safe checkpoints. Sound
00:54:54
Speaker
and you have like these other things. So if you're somebody who likes to explore and kind of check things off of a list, it's very visually satisfying to do. Also, as far as visuals, the game kicks ass at indicators. So if you're in tall grass, tall grass is always like topped with like red and you know that's tall grass and you'll be hidden in it if you're crouched because you have red hair.
00:55:17
Speaker
Yes, that is. Oh my God, is that why? Yeah. Fuck. That's so cool.
00:55:26
Speaker
I want to be mind-blowing. I'm going to finish my sentence and then go suck on my thumb and lay my head on a pillow. God damn. The other thing I was going to say, the visual indicators and other games I've done is for climbing services are always yellow. So if you're not sure where to go and you look up, you might see yellow top little handholds or just things you can grab to say, hey, you can climb here. Instead of just randomly moving around the analog stick going, where do I go?
00:55:54
Speaker
Yeah, that design, the readability also extends to the monsters. A lot of them use Blaze as a fuel source or something that they're gathering. I don't recall exactly, but it's used in a lot of craftables and things like
Combat System and Weapon Customization
00:56:07
Speaker
that. But it's explosive while it's on the monsters, and it's always in these tubes with its yellowish, greenish glow. So if you see that on a monster, you immediately know, oh, I could bust out my flame arrows and ignite that.
00:56:22
Speaker
possibly make it explode and do like a bunch of damage to this creature. Hit him in the glow sticks. Yeah.
00:56:31
Speaker
Yeah, completely. The other thing about this game is I realized I have to move my chair slightly closer to the projector because I can't read the text all the way back. Oh my god, dude. At the old apartment, that was always my issue. I'm just like, I'm just going to guess what they're saying. Or listen, I guess. I'll be the other kid. I do it on mute because I'm a pure gamer. That's fair. That's fair. Getting Netflix on the other screen. Yeah.
00:57:01
Speaker
No, I think I don't even know what else to say about this game. It's freaking great. I have compared it to Far Cry and Monster Hunter. And in some ways, I really think Monster Hunter could learn a lot from a game like this as far as reducing this instanced game design in particular.
00:57:30
Speaker
Horizon feels really good to just run out, hunt a bunch. Be like, when you're going to buy gear, you have to not only trade in scrap pieces, metal, which is like the currency, but also some monster parts or some creature parts. So it can incentivize going out and be like, I'm going to hunt specifically for that because I want that sick bow and I need this creature's parts to do it.
00:57:54
Speaker
And it doesn't feel bad. It gives you like a legitimate reason to go out and do the fun activities in the game. And I love that. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, talking about weapons, um, how far did you, I know Jake, you said you, you got to the purple tier, you know, everything. Um, how close did either of you get to getting the lodge weapons?
00:58:18
Speaker
Um, where lodge weapons, the ones with like some electricity on them, it was purple, but there's a little bit of, it was like, yeah, it was like a white and gold or the icons were a little bit, uh, same shape, different coloring. Um, I think I might've got one. Yeah. There was a whole quest line for the lodge, right? Yeah. So for the, for the lodge, you had to do, you basically had to complete all of the lodge challenges at
00:58:46
Speaker
Basically get max rank on them. So you had to get right three sons on all of the challenges And getting gold on some of those was was really difficult. Oh, yeah, but I went back and looked at the stats on those weapons and I mean, there's a minor bump over The the purple tier, but it was nice that you know, you didn't have to get those weapons right and I mean judging by
00:59:13
Speaker
Dave's blank stare, he didn't even know that they existed. I didn't even know a red hair stealth, man. Yeah. It was nice that they made that design choice that if you really wanted to push yourself and get through these challenges and get the best possible gear, you could do that, but it absolutely wasn't required.
00:59:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really good blend of people who just want like a low barrier of entry to I want to fuck around in this game and explore. Cool. You can do that. I want to complete the game and have a lot of objectives to do. You can do that, too. This is this game isn't challenging enough for me. I need more. So you have hard challenges like that or going into new game plus.
00:59:55
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So they do a really good job of having something for everybody, something for the whole family. Yeah. There's a little something for everyone. There's even a difficulty where it describes the difficulty level as, okay, you just want to listen to the story. You really don't want to have to fight too much. Or if you do fight, you don't really have to worry about dying or anything.
01:00:17
Speaker
I can't remember the old analog sticks. Yeah. I can't remember. Sorry. Can't remember the default, like what the max difficulty you can go into from the start. I think you can start off max difficulty. Really? Yeah. I think you can jump into ultra hard or whatever it is at the start. Because people were saying that they were doing that before getting to new game plus. Right. Okay.
01:00:47
Speaker
And it reduces, I realize we're basically at time, but I don't care, because this game's really good. The max difficulty doesn't feel trashy. It reduces the damage you deal to like 70%, I think, and enemies deal like 150% damage to you, something like that. But we were talking about weak points, and that's literally it. If you go into New Game Plus, and you have really good weapons, and you hit a weak point,
01:01:16
Speaker
Like that creature is dead. You shot like a watcher in the eye. It's still dead. Right. So it just incentivizes playing the game like with tactics and to your strengths and with your gear and stuff like that, which is something games don't always do with difficulty. Yeah.
01:01:36
Speaker
Sometimes they're bullet sponges, the division. Hades. He was talking about the AI. He was talking about the AI. But yeah, no, I got to stop because the game's like legitimately good. I will say to ruin your life right now, here and now, Mike.
01:01:57
Speaker
New Game Plus introduces a higher tier of gear. So you can start getting like purple gear with three slots, or no four slots, I think instead of three. Yeah. I'm imagining the slots are just holes. They're Diablo sockets. That's what they are.
01:02:18
Speaker
No, it's it's super fun to specialize your weapons. You're just like before I like put some different modifications to diversify my bonds. And I was like, no, all bonds, all stocks are going to Tesla. And like I have a lightning bowcaster thing that's just max out the lightning bar.
01:02:37
Speaker
Yeah, it feels good to be able to customize your stuff a lot. And like, obviously at a point, like the texture, you can just max the whole thing out. So it really does come down to your customization loadout. If you're fighting like a specific type of monster or monsters and you were like, Oh, I need some fire defense, equip that shit.
01:02:54
Speaker
Or just use the exact same gear the whole time and dodge a lot. But your armor matters a lot. You can change your outfit and it'll have like, this is your stealth armor. Here's maybe your anti-corruption armor. Here's your anti-electric armor in case you're fighting like an electric phoenix, which I remember being an enemy. Or you can just use the same armor all the way through like I did. Yeah.
01:03:22
Speaker
See, you can do that until you unlock all of those DLC stuff, and then you've got one suit of armor that causes you to regenerate health like your Mr. Halo, and one suit of armor that gives you an overshield like your Mr. Halo.
01:03:37
Speaker
Yeah. Jake actually was playing Halo for this recording. I'm ready for a future episode when we talk about Halo. I'll be like, so you bust out your bow, right? Anyway. All right. Any closing thoughts on this kick-ass game? Obviously, Jake's a big fan. I think I'd be in that camp as well. It does many things correctly, and it is very good.
01:04:04
Speaker
Yeah, no, I'm in that camp as well. I probably, I wish I would have picked it up sooner, but definitely glad I came to PC and I spent way too much time playing it. Yeah, I didn't spend too much time playing it. But for the people who are interested in PC, you only had that one issue, you'd recommend it overall? Yeah, yeah, I only had one issue. I think by this point, it's probably been patched and
01:04:33
Speaker
have a pretty stable experience with it. That's good. That's good to hear. I'm glad a lot of ports die out because the developers never really fix them. So it's good that they're actually paying attention to it, as we would expect from the renowned developers of the kill zones here. Well, maybe we can talk about this again when a Horizon Zero Dawn 2 comes out. Yeah. And maybe we're on the trailer?
01:05:01
Speaker
I don't actually. Is there a second game coming out? There's something I think shown at E3 for Trident Zero Dawn 2. Forbidden West. Westworld. I'll mention to see more about it, but I mean, I can't imagine they'll fuck it up. I mean, I wouldn't hate a Horizon Zero Dawn Westworld. It would be pretty good.
01:05:28
Speaker
It's just going to be like Call of Juarez or whatever it was rebranded. It's going to be Red Dead Redemption, but some of them are just robots. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah.
Comparisons and Recommendations
01:05:40
Speaker
No, great game though.
01:05:41
Speaker
Totally, totally hyped for it. If you like games in this space, I also recommend it. It's basically up there with Witcher 3 and GT, not GTA, not GTA, but crap, MGS5 for me.
01:05:57
Speaker
as some of the, honestly, the best open world games you can play. I mean, realistically, it is basically GTA, just with bows and robots instead of cars and hookers. Yeah, I'm always pulling people out of robots. We should try to do this more, like reduce the reliance on comparisons to Dark Souls, to which the podcast is named, and increase the reliance on comparisons to Grand Theft Auto.
01:06:27
Speaker
All right. Well, if you have other games that we could compare. Oh, you know what? Before I say that, thank you to Mike for showing up as a guest for this. Thanks for having me. We're always happy to have good guests that are vetted and clean. You may sound like we haven't vetted our other guests.
01:06:49
Speaker
You might want to wait on the listening stance. How many people actually listen to this episode before you call me a good guest? I mean, we don't look at them. It's for a self-help decision, mental health decision. We don't look at our stance. I occasionally inflate them. I'll multiply them by 10 and then I send them to Dave and we're like, we're doing fine. And I was like, I don't even know these 10 people.
01:07:18
Speaker
from the one time we listened to it to make sure that it actually went live. No. But really glad to have you on. Podcast goal accomplished. We've been looking forward to it for a long time. I think our Red Science soapstone episodes are honestly some of my favorites. So keep them coming, people.
01:07:38
Speaker
Keep sending in your applications. Yes, exactly. So we can vet them, stay clean. And as always, you could send those applications in to our Gmail at soapstonepodcast.gmail.com or you could join the discussion on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.
01:08:05
Speaker
Now, Mike, you say have a good night as well. Oh, I say have a good night as well. Yeah. Have a good night.