Personally there are a few games which left me very dissappointed, after hyping myself up for years in certain cases.
Divinity Original Sin: turns out I prefer more streamlined, less packed games (love Pillars of Eternity) and that coop play in a CRPG stresses me out.
Wasteland 2: I actually managed to finish this one but secretly I admit I was hoping for a better Fallout which I didn’t really get. New Vegas did the cowboy theme much better.
INSIDE: while the design was cool, it was just a ton of boring, easy puzzles in comparison to LIMBO, its predecessor.
As someone who just played horizon zero dawn and wound up loving it, what was your issue with Forbidden West?
I know at the beginning of Zero Dawn I wasn’t really digging the story, and it unfortunately took a while to get better, but when it did it was really good. I was glad the mechanics were enjoyable for me or else I wouldn’t have stuck around long enough
The biggest issues have already been mentioned by others but I’d just like to add - there’s a lot more climbing in Forbidden West, but the mechanics feel a lot worse (to me anyway). I found the climbing in HZD boring but serviceable; in HFW it just feels awful, Aloy never does what I want her to do and I regularly plunge to my doom for unknown reasons. Also the pullcaster (basically a grappling hook) is super clunky to use and adds essentially nothing gameplay-wise, just some random superfluous interaction points. It feels like there might have been some cut content there.
I enjoyed Zero Dawn quite a bit - the hunting and fighting mechanics in particular - but Forbidden West is kind of a sidegrade at best. It just feels like a sequel for the sake of a sequel.
Forbidden West’s story is a bland and predictable after coming from Zero Dawn. It feels cheap. They introduce tge bad guy early on, and while the characters are all trying to figure it out, it’s really obvious to the player.
There’s a lot more interaction with Aloy’s friends, which is fine on its own, but they also brought in the main hub trope, where all your friends gather at the base and you keep going back home after every mission. It makes the game feel a lot more like a level-based game than a real open world game.
Where ZD would have you go from A to B to C to D, FW makes you go A-B-A-C-A-D-A.
There are some other criticisms, but these are the ones that bothered me. That’s not to say it was a bad game, but I don’t have any desire to go back and play it again like I did with HZD.
The issues I had with Horizon Zero Dawn continued in Forbidden West unfortunately.
The only thing that I loved were the graphics and that was it sadly.
I really liked Zero Dawn because it was new and the story still had to be unfolded but after that magic is gone, it’s for me – just another open-world game.
Thank you, I appreciate the response and insight. Hopefully they can iron out a lot of these problems for future titles