Horizon Zero Dawn was released in 2017 exclusively for the PlayStation 4 console and ended up being one of the most successful new IPs of the generation. Horizon Forbidden West is set to release sometime this year, and from what can be gleaned from the trailer, it definitely looks like it could be a worthy sequel. As one of the biggest games coming out for the PS5 generation this year, it needs to be. Horizon Forbidden West will take Aloy to the West Coast of the United States, where she’ll face new tribes, machines, and shoulder the weight of the world once again.
Despite the overwhelming success of Horizon Zero Dawn, it did have a few shortcomings. No game is perfect, but there are five specific things that Horizon Forbidden West needs to improve upon if it wants to blow the original game out of the water. The sequel is one of the most highly anticipated games of 2021, and improving these things from the original game would go a long way towards making sure Horizon Forbidden West lives up to the hype.
Aloy’s climbing skills almost rival Nathan Drake, but the climbing mechanics in Horizon Zero Dawn are very simple: find the yellow handhold and tilt the joystick to keep going up. Climbing never had real stakes because Aloy doesn’t really fall, she mostly moves on her own, and there was never much questioning where to go next. It was always pretty straightforward and felt like it could have added more to the gameplay.
In Horizon Forbidden West, players are hoping that Aloy will be able to climb everything, Assassin’s Creed style, without having to look for the yellow handholds. Being able to climb everything would add a lot of opportunities for exploration, which is already a huge focus of the game. In addition, eliminating the bright yellow visual cues would make the world seem a little more natural. Horizon is known for its stunning visuals and art direction, but the handholds are a small detail that takes away from the overall impact. In the Horizon Forbidden West trailer, Aloy is seen climbing a rather imposing mountain, so hopefully, the inclusion of that shot was meant to hint at improved climbing mechanics in the game.
Aloy is a fast runner and has the ability to override machines, which she can then ride. She can get where she needs to go with or without a steed, but running gets old and the available mounts aren’t always worth the effort. There are only a few machines that Aloy can ride, and players have to keep hunting down and overriding these specific machines if they don’t want to run or fast travel. As a result, the mechanical steeds weren’t utilized as much as they could have been and didn’t contribute much.
Players are hopeful that in the sequel, Aloy will be able to ride more machines than before. It would also be exciting if not all those machines looked like horses. Fans have been asking for the ability to mount a wider variety of machines, including flying ones. It would be amazing if Aloy could ride the Pterodactyl-inspired Sunwing that was featured in the trailer. Riding will almost certainly be an element of Horizon Forbidden West because Aloy rides past the ruins of the Golden Gate Bridge in the trailer, but hopefully it will be more impactful.
Horizon Zero Dawn utilized “flash points,” where players could choose which side of Aloy’s personality to express in a given situation. Aloy is compassionate, intelligent, and strong-willed, so these moments gave players the opportunity to personalize their experience just a little bit. Those options would result in different dialogue as NPCs reacted, but they didn’t change any outcomes. Apart from choosing to kill or spare Olin- which doesn’t even change that much- there aren’t any meaningful choices in Horizon Zero Dawn.
Allowing players to make impactful decisions has become a huge part of open-world RPGs. Big titles in the same genre like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Cyberpunk 2077 all implement dialogue and action-based choices that can change the available missions, relationships with NPCs, and the ending. Horizon Zero Dawn was great without letting the player customize their journey much, but Horizon Forbidden West should let players take the lead a little more.
In the first game, the primary focus was ranged combat. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’ll be exciting to experience Aloy’s bow and arrow with the PS5’s DualSense controller, but Aloy also had a powerful spear that allowed her to override machines and use all of…two attacks. If players ended up too close to a machine, they could hack at it with either a fast or slow spear attack, but that was it. Melee combat didn’t really exist in Horizon Zero Dawn.
Guerrilla should keep the primary focus on Aloy’s trademark bow and arrow combat, which was amazing in the first game, but it would be nice if there were a few more options for melee combat. It would add a whole new layer to Horizon Forbidden West’s combat system and give players who prefer close-range combat more options. Every machine in Horizon Zero Dawn needed to be taken down differently, and adding a couple of machines that require a melee approach would be refreshing. It’s nice to change it up sometimes, so hopefully Forbidden West can add to the combat system without taking away any of the elements that worked in the first game.
Even the most amazing games can be brought down by an unsatisfying final boss, and unfortunately, Horizon Zero Dawn didn’t deliver in the last act for a lot of fans. The final encounters featured a unique human boss and an exciting battle against an army of machines, which was great, but it should have led up to an epic new machine. The final boss in Horizon Zero Dawn was a Deathbringer, which would be scary if Aloy hadn’t already fought several of them. It was especially disappointing because the game spent a lot of time teasing the Metal Devil.
Metal Devils are the largest machines that exist in the Horizon Zero Dawn universe. They were the leaders of the Faro Plague that wiped out humanity, and their ruins can be seen protruding through mountains throughout the map. Aloy rides past a sunken one in the Forbidden West trailer as well. If fans don’t get to fight a Metal Devil in Horizon Forbidden West, no matter how great the rest of the game is, it might fall short of player expectations. The final boss is one of the most frequent criticisms of Horizon Zero Dawn, so hopefully Guerrilla took notice and made it a point to end Horizon Forbidden West with a bang.
Horizon Forbidden West will release for PS4 and PS5 sometime this year.
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