Well, I finally got around to, and finished, playing Horizon 0 Dawn, and while the setting didn’t initially wow me, which made its first third seem kinda slow, it turned out to be a really great RPG once the story really started to unfold itself and its themes started to line up. I can definitely see why it was successful and lauded. But of course, with even the slightest whiff of monetary reward comes the inevitable extra cash-ins, and so, H0D has a downloadable expansion. The quality of the original game makes me hopeful that its add-on would be good, too, but of course, past experience has proven conclusively that that doesn’t mean much. Let’s see how H0D’s shakes out.
The Frozen Wilds: This expansion sees Aloy traveling into Banuk territory, and exploring Yellowstone National Park as she sorts out a matter of aggressive, “possessed” machines separate from the main game’s events. There’s a main quest, and several sidequests, errands, and exploration...basically, The Frozen Wilds is like a smaller iteration of the game as a whole.
The main story is...well...it’s alright, I guess. I mean...a lot of it is sort of a retread of Horizon 0 Dawn’s main narrative, with the whole malevolent-outside-entity-taking-control-of-and-creating-an-aggressive-army-of-machines thing. And honestly, it does have a bit of a weakness in that the 2 major entities who drive the plot of The Frozen Wilds forward, Aratak and Ourea, aren’t all that interesting. They’re not boring, mind you, but the best personalities of this adventure are all relegated to sidequests. Likewise, of the stories of the Old Ones’ you find in the vocal and log entries, the ones connected to the main quest left the least impact on me. Again, none of it’s bad (and that’s an accomplishment for an add-on right there, sadly), but only the very ending of The Frozen Wilds’s main story (being able to speak to CYAN) really held my attention.
With that said, the surrounding elements of The Frozen Wilds are really good! The sidequests have a lot of compelling characters who are fun to interact with--the hunting trio’s name gimmick was quite amusing, the conversations with the painter and the pipe-player were cool, the stories of Ikrie and Inatut are interesting glimpses into the Banuk culture, the payoff for finding the animal figurines is fun, the story of Concrete Beach Party was really touching and easily the equal of even some of Fallout’s best examples of posthumous log-entry storytelling, and I just absolutely loved Gildun. Getting to hang out with Gildun probably makes The Forbidden Wilds worth it all by itself. If there is any justice and joy in this world, we’ll see more of Gildun in Horizon Forbidden West, because he is honestly just great, a laugh-a-minute character who’s thoroughly, gently endearing.
I also like the fact that you can talk to CYAN at the end not only about the events of The Frozen Wilds’s main story, but also about the content of its sidequests, and even about major elements of the main game’s plot. CYAN’s conversations are a great little way to acknowledge the side content of the expansion as relevant and important to its whole, and I really appreciate that they deepen the lore of the game, and tie The Frozen Wilds more significantly to it. It reminds me of some other really great add-ons, like Fallout: New Vegas’s Lonesome Road, in that way. Likewise, the fact that once you’ve completed the main quest of The Frozen Wilds, Aratak will show up as an ally during the finale of the main game, is a good way of making TFW seem like more than just a disconnected side story to the game--while still maintaining enough distance that H0D doesn’t feel incomplete without it, which is important (screw you and your Dragon Age 2 Exiled Prince, Bioware).
Finally, there’s an element to The Frozen Wilds that I appreciate, which wasn’t really present so much in the main game: the Fallout Americana approach. 1 of my favorite parts of the Fallout series is that 1 of its core focuses is an examination, analysis, critique, and celebration of the culture, history, and soul of The United States. Each major Fallout title (besides that worthless festering colostomy bag 76) shows off the region in which it takes place, doing its best to capture the physical and emotional essence of that part of the USA, and I really love that. This isn’t something that Horizon 0 Dawn does to any great degree, past portrayal of basic ecosystems and certain similarities of its tribes to indigenous North American tribes of the past. And don’t get me wrong, that’s not to the game’s discredit; H0D isn’t Fallout, and it isn’t intended to be. It’s its own thing.
Still, it’s kind of neat that The Frozen Wilds represents a Fallout-esque treatment of Yellowstone National Park! While not nearly as in-depth as a Fallout title would get, TFW seems to be taking a similar approach in its portrayal of and appreciation for Yellowstone--the posthumous logs are specifically related to the setting, the area is clearly designed with an intent to show some appreciation for North America’s wilderness, the main quest and some of the sidequests are founded on the signature geology, fauna, and physical ecosystem of the area, the most notable new machines of the expansion are based on arguably the most iconic animal of the North American wilderness, the bear...
Hell, even the choice to use the Banuk as the focal tribe of this expansion is thematically tied to the heart of Yellowstone National Park. The Banuk, after all, are largely defined by their spiritual respect for the machine creatures of their world, and the machines in H0D are sort of the stand-ins for natural animal life. As the predators, primary vehicles of ecosystem recovery, and prey to be hunted in Horizon 0 Dawn, the machines are thematically far more the animals of the world than the actual flesh-and-blood critters you encounter. So the fact that the Banuk are the stars of The Frozen Wilds is, I would say, a neat thematic tie to the setting, because the Banuk’s philosophies and beliefs of reverence for the machines are, ultimately, similar to the very foundational idea of Yellowstone National Park--conservation of and appreciation for the natural wildlife of North America.
So, The Frozen Wilds feels like a light, but very artful and elegant, tribute to and celebration of Yellowstone National Park and the spirit behind its existence, and I really like that. If Fallout: New Vegas's Honest Hearts DLC (which featured the Grand Canyon) had been much better, I think it would've looked quite a bit like this. Really, this expansion is like I got a tiny nugget of some of Fallout’s best qualities, and it’s a precious gift in these times of Bethesda bungling. I kind of hope we’ll see more of this approach in the upcoming sequel.
Oh, yeah, 1 other thing that I applaud this expansion for? It’s more of a personal thing, but I’m really happy to finally see some major piece of media actually paying some attention to the Yellowstone Caldera. Because, like, it is just me, or should we really be more concerned with the fact that there is a supervolcano hanging out a few feet under the middle of the USA, just waiting to blow, that could goddamn END OUR CIVILIZATION? How the hell doesn’t this come up more frequently in pop culture? All we have to do to avoid like 60% of apocalypse scenarios is just make the choice NOT to be giant dicks to each other, but by all means, writers of various mediums, keep focusing on nuclear wars and genetically engineered virus outbreaks and so on, and ignore the seething ash-and-arson armageddon currently bubbling beneath our toes that we’re doing basically goddamn nothing about!
Anyway. The Frozen Wilds is a solid, high-quality expansion, and even if its main event isn’t especially anything to write home about, the sum of its total parts is a respectable piece of work. Now, originally it was, to my understanding, sold for $20, and I do take a bit of issue with that, because I’m pretty sure you’re only gonna get about half of that many hours out of it, maybe 15. You should never be expected to spend more dollars than you’ll get hours out of an add-on, in my opinion...but The Frozen Wilds is good enough that one could reasonably argue that it’d still be worth that much. And it’s an irrelevant concern nowadays anyway, because as of this moment, it is, to my understanding, sold for $10 if you buy it through the Playstation store (and it’s automatically included with H0D if you buy the game for the PC, or buy the game new altogether through Playstation). $10 is definitely a fair price, so The Frozen Wilds gets an enthusiastic thumbs-up from me.
Well, that was nice! It’s an all-too-uncommon treat to find a high caliber add-on, and one that’s actually priced appropriately. This was just the sort of pleasant change of pace I needed after the crap of the last couple games with Downloadable Content (Deus Ex 4 and Fire Emblem 16) I played. I’ll be sure to savor this experience for as long as I can...
...because my next add-on rant will be about the DLCs for Pokemon Generation 8.
Fuck.
Wednesday, August 18, 2021
Horizon 0 Dawn's Expansion
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To my knowledge, the game itself is only available for purchase on PSN as the complete edition with DLC for the past few years, so anyone going in as a new player will have this content built-in with their $20(non-sale) purchase. Just throwing that out there to unnecessarily complicate your price value metric.
ReplyDeleteSlight change in the rant to reflect this; thanks for letting me know, sir.
DeleteThe Playstation Hits version of Horizon Zero Dawn, available in stores and from the PSN, also comes with The Frozen Wilds. The game is often on sale, too, so the entire game and its DLC is often available for $10 on the PSN store, and Sony actually offered the game for free a few months ago. Whether it's for the PS4 or PC, Horizon is available in its entirety for a great price.
ReplyDeleteHowever, while I played through Horizon and enjoyed it, I did not play through The Frozen Wilds; I simply began the DLC and have not finished it. By the time I tried the DLC, I'd played Horizon around 60 hours, and I was tired of it.
Lastly, Horizon is another one of those games, like every game in the Zelda series, that I do not view as an RPG. But whatever, it's a fun game, and it's worth talking about.
Slight change in the rant to reflect this; thanks for letting me know, sir.
DeleteYou know, a friend of mine was surprised that I counted H0D as an RPG just a couple days ago, and I was very surprised that anyone would not. I know my personal views on RPGs are laxer than most, but it never even occurred to me that a game with a standard, relevantly prominent experience-and-leveling system, whose combat is based on variable numerical damage values that pop up as little white numbers when you hit stuff, with a traditional HP system, and which is definitively story-based, could even be debated as a part of the genre. Questioning my inclusion of things like Zelda and Startropics I get, since they lack clear gameplay system markers of the genre, but H0D got all the usual suspects of RPG mechanics.
Horizon is definitely closer to being an RPG than the Zelda games, in my view, as Horizon has many RPG elements in it.
DeleteAs for why I don't really view Horizon as an RPG, it has a lot to do with many of these RPG elements appearing in other genres. Skill trees and levelling systems appear in all kinds of games now, like God of War 4, the new Spider-Man and Tomb Raider games, and the Batman Arkham series. What these games and Horizon have in common is that the point of levelling up is more to gain new abilities than it is to make the character stronger, in general (although, yeah, Aloy's HP increases a bit in Horizon, and the player can purchase health upgrades with skill points in the Batman games). I don't really associate levelling systems like those in Horizon with traditional RPGs due to this distinction, where the emphasis is on gaining abilities rather than getting stronger. In cases like Horizon, I view the experience system as a fairly superfluous RPG mechanic; if the point is getting abilities, abilities could just as easily be unlocked by completing in-game tasks, instead, like in a Zelda game. In Horizon's case, I primarily obtained experience points by doing side quests and completing the main story, anyway, so why not just make finishing those unlock abilities to reduce the player's time in menus? If I remember right, finishing the Cauldrons in Horizon upgrades Aloy's moveset, and the same could have been done with other quests.
I think I'm mostly just splitting hairs on the definition, as these distinctions are quite small. Still, to me, a game like Horizon is noticeably different from other games like Secret of Mana, Mass Effect, and Tales of Berseria, the latter of which I all see as definite RPGs.
HZD is probably gonna be my next open world game, I've been meaning to get around to it for awhile. On a different note, have you played many of the Atelier Franchise? I saw Atelier Iris mentioned in your music lists, but a casual check of your sidebar shows no posts on the series. I am rapidly approaching 100% completion of the Dusk trilogy, and have greatly enjoyed it. If you find the franchise as a whole too light, the Dusk trilogy has a bit more serious setting, in an impending-apocalypse-that-is-still-a-little-distant kind of way.
ReplyDeleteSo far, Atelier Iris has been the only 1 of the franchise I've tried yet. No particular reason for that, I think (although I strongly disliked Lita), just not a franchise I had much interest in after the initial dabble. Doubtless I'll return to it someday, though.
DeleteSomeday is better than never! I'll mention that Iris is considered the last of the "Old Atelier", and everything since then is the "New Atelier", as renascence in the franchise. Just take this as a vote to play one of the newer games in the series sometime. I'm sure you have had Mana Khemia recommended to you before- that is categorized as mainline Atelier Franchise, despite lacking the nomenclature. https://barrelwisdom.com/blog/atelier-series-guide is a good suggestion of where to start.
DeleteOh, I figured Mana Khemia would have just been something related to it, not actually part of it. Shared character of Pamela, but not actually part of the same franchise. I've played Mana Khemia 1, so yes, I've played more than 1 game in the series. It was decent.
DeleteI'll throw Atelier Ryza 1 on the ol' wishlist, and we'll see what happens. Which will be nothing for a while, most likely, but sooner or later I'll get it and play it.