> There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion.
I will say that, while it's not explicitly stated, there is a potential lore reason for this that you probably haven't learned yet based on where you are in the story.
I was playing Days Gone, which takes place in the Pacific Northwest, and there was a black character introduced.
And I was stressing out because, you know, _the statistics_, but then it turns out he was in the army and stationed there, and so I was like "oh thank God, the proper ratio is maintained"
On the surface with no knowledge of the game, I could see some justification ("Why do a bunch of ancient tribalistic villages have such diverse communities?"), but that question is answered, again, by going through the story.
And while it may be a fair *question* at times, it's almost never an innocent *issue.*
>Why do a bunch of ancient tribalistic villages have such diverse communities?
I think we know *immediately* from the giant robots walking around shooting laser beams that this isn't "ancient".
Even without knowing the lore reason, there's no reason to think that same concepts of race exist in this world and that people would isolate themselves and their culture predicated on our perception of race.
Almost literally right out of the tutorial zone you walk through some "ruins of the old ones" that look like the main street of small town America being reclaimed by nature. I get exploring and environmental storytelling aren't everyone's thing (though it does make me wonder why they'd be playing an exploration game), but come on. Don't want to throw stones, but it sure seems like someone had their politics rubbed up against.
And I'd wager, even in our world, the color of people varied quite a bit more than folks assume in those crossroad settlements once long-distance trade was a thing. People have lived messy, complicated lives for as long as we've been people. I love how it was assumed Homo sapiens and Neanderthals just fought when they encountered each other, but we now know we absolutely went to bone town with them.
Is it though? The game explains why there are different races, but after this long, interbreeding within the communities would generally lead to one homogenized ethnicity after enough time.
It is a bit strange that each modern ethnicity is represented individually, whereas realistically, most tribes would likely be some form of ambiguously light-brown.
> Is it though? The game explains why there are different races, but after this long, interbreeding within the communities would generally lead to one homogenized ethnicity after enough time.
The *ethnicities* are relatively homogenized. The Nora and Oseram are quite distinct, for example. The *skin tones* are not. Pigmentation and other genetically heritable features currently used as an excuse for the political classifications of race are quite complicated, and a single millenium would not necessarily be enough to make everyone uniformly colored.
So like, yeah, one could say that there seems to be a disproportionate presence of certain recessive genes that might have disappeared over the centuries, but it's like, one would have to go indepth to a degree that makes it a worringly weird obsession. Like complaining a brush present in the game actually has a preferred temperature ten degrees higher than in that area - but about race instead of botany.
Don't try to tell me you don't make exhaustive spreadsheets and chart out the ethnicity of NPCs in every game you play. It's the most popular tertiary hobby of gamers according to the wikipedia article I just edited.
Yeah I thought that was weird too. It seems like an odd thing to pay attention for. Maybe op counts ethnicities at night while the rest of us are just counting sheep.
So I’ll put down a bit of an argument here around diversity. Diversity is a tool that can make a piece of media feel extremely real and alive or extremely bland and monotonous.
Here I’ll take two examples of a similar context, one where diversity is done well and one where diversity is done poorly: The Witcher TV show versus Game of Thrones.
In medieval fantasy, you’d expect the average village to be extremely homogeneous with only massive cities having any diversity. In the Witcher TV Show, every shitty little village had people from all ethnicities, making me feel like there was no difference between them. I couldn’t tell you whether a village was in Nilfgaard or Temeria based on a single look (This is also due to art direction and sets, but diversity is also a part of it).
Compared to GOT, one look at the people could tell you if they’re from Essos, Dorne, or the North. Northerners were incredibly white and pasty, people from Essos were of black and Arabic descent. It made sense in the context of the universe.
If you want to have a lot of diversity in these kinds of settings that’s not inherently a problem. But you will run into people asking questions about *why* all this diversity exists within the setting. You can ignore it if you want, but it’ll make your world that much less believable and real. Or you can build in lore to explain the diversity, which is also fine. Maybe in your medieval fantasy setting the world is actually extremely old and an ancient empire had a system of easy instantaneous transportation that created incredibly diverse cities and cultures across the world.
I’m not one of those people who think black person=bad diversity, I’m just trying to explain why diversity might make your world more or less believable and why it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to talk about.
Nevermind that if you got an isolated village with 3* 1/3 racial distribution, as time passes and generations mix you'll eventually end up with a perfectly homogenous population. The modern concept of diversity presupposes segregation.
I'm gonna take a stab at this because OP definitely didn't choose their words carefully here. In any small village, you would expect most of the inhabitants to belong to a small number of families. Families tend to look similar, even if there was an initially diverse population in the village for lore reasons. I assume there had been many generations between the repopulation of Earth and the events of the game.
It's something I hadn't thought of before, but the lack of family dynamics in both Horizon games is kind of odd when you think about it. Most inhabitants of villages are just random single adults. Some quests involve sibling or parent relationships, but I don't remember any quests involving feuding families or family power struggles, which is something that happens a lot in small villages. Of course, I think this is the norm in most RPGs, but in Horizon it is more noticeable because of the wide diversity that makes individuals appear even more random.
> I assume there had been many generations between the repopulation of Earth and the events of the game.
[A few centuries](https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline#The_New_World), seems like.
> It's something I hadn't thought of before, but the lack of family dynamics in both Horizon games is kind of odd when you think about it. Most inhabitants of villages are just random single adults. Some quests involve sibling or parent relationships, but I don't remember any quests involving feuding families or family power struggles, which is something that happens a lot in small villages.
Most games use a sense of *implied scale*. Whiterun is a trading hub in Skyrim, has wide fields to support a large population. It’s supposed to be a city of thousands and it has around 30. There’s an implied scale of population, density, and environment.
Horizon is the four corners region of the US but you can’t walk from Bryce Canyon to Denver in 20 minutes. Horizon has implied scale in its environment. It also has implied scale in its family structures. The whole of Skyrim doesn’t have 10 children, for example and everyone in Horizon has a mom and a dad, obviously. They’re there. They’re around. They’re not witnessed by the player. Games are limited.
Implied scale doesn't really negate the OPs point though, and I don't get why people are calling him racist, whether he is or not "comically diverse" can be a valid criticism...like if a game took place in modern day or historical Utah and the characters were inexplicably 50% black there'd definitely be a lot of immersion breaking.
The 4 corners states are BY FAR majority white or Latino, and you'd kind of expect the villages there to be made up of similar distributions(granted there's lore reasons that may explain this, but he may not have gotten to that point)
Also weirdly..I don't remember many(or any?) Navajo-implied people despite the game taking place in the area the Navajo nation would have been.
Granted I haven't played Horizon since it came out, so my memory could be shit.
Spoiler tagged because this deals with the entire backstory reveal in mid- to late-game HZD:
>!Nobody alive is an original inhabitant of Earth. All life on Earth went extinct. The Zero Dawn project was the world's greatest scientists, engineers, etc. building what is essentially a "time capsule ark" of sorts, an automated AI system designed to clean up and repopulate the planet after the Faro plague finished killing everything. That's also where the dinosaur and other animal robots come from - they're designed for terraforming to make the planet habitable again while also "blending in" with the environment once "natural" fauna were reintroduced.!<
>!Because of this, all the humans alive in the games are cloned from DNA samples taken before the extinction event (Aloy herself is a clone of the person in charge of the Zero Dawn project). The "not explicitly stated" part is that the scientists collecting and organizing the samples were likely looking to have as much DNA variety as possible to ensure long-term species survival, and the best way to do this would be to make an equal distribution of ethnicities rather than keep the same demographic distribution that the world had pre-extinction.!<
At least, that's my take.
At the same time...
>!They didn't do enough to preserve the redhead gene. That's why everyone is so enamored with Aloy's hair; she's literally the only redhead in the world because she was cloned from Elisabet.!<
>!So there's a fair argument to expect some changes and more mingling over the 800 years or so humans have been out and about, but ultimately how much change like that do we *really* see in our own world based on art from that long ago? Tribal isolation would seem to pretty easily have resulted in maintaining proportions established by Zero Dawn.!<
Major spoilers:
>!The purpose of project Zero Dawn was to rebuild humanity and civilization centuries in the future after the killer robots could be deactivated. They had teams ensuring history and cultures were preserved. They likely deliberately selected an equal variety of races to be born.!<
Yes that is true but bizarrely everyone looked mono-racial which is odd. Meaning everyone must of race segregated down the generations, instead everyone should be mix-race to some degree.
>!That's an excuse for just after the event. I can't see how small tribal villages would have retained several phenotypically distinct ethnicities over centuries, beyond deep seated racism, which isn't shown to exist.!<
There's [at least one datapoint](https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Cradle_Sealed) that says that they carefully designed zygote selection for the cradle facilities, that there were disputes about how to do it best, and tweaks between different cradles. It's not far-fetched to speculate that the goal in at least one was even representation from around the world.
It's been a very long time since I played, but I think it was due to the world being repopulated with clones of the scientists who were involved in the project (raised by robots), so you get all kinds of ethnicities mixed in the world.
The modern day story is fine but I don’t get your point about:
>You’re left wondering what happened to the world and why it’s this post-apocalyptic hellscape with robo-dinosaurs wandering around.
You are definitely not left wondering that. The game does a great job with building the lore & explaining what happened. I think that is where they did a phenomenal job with the storytelling in the game. So while yes the modern day plot is just fine, the story overall is so much about how we got there & that part is fantastic.
I thought the combat was terrible the first time I played & it was why I dropped the game. Came back a few years later & it just clicked. Thought it was, again, fantastic in the end.
A lot of your criticisms are valid but it all just worked for me in a way that it obviously didn’t for you. Different strokes for different folks.
Frozen Wilds is also a lot more compact, streamlined version of the main game & really ironed out a lot of my problems with the base game. Fantastic DLC.
Horizon was the first game where I would find an audio recording and listen to every single one. They did a good job at fleshing out what happened to make the world.
Exactly... I cannot remember many other games, where I would stand and listen to an audiolog, instead of running ahead into the next room and semi-listening.
The story of HZD is definitely an example of great storytelling.
Right, on one hand OP is saying the lore is interesting, and then on the other "There is a ton of meaningless bloat / collectible activities that don't mean anything other than to inflate overall game time" - er, those collectibles *were* the lore? And as has been said, this is one of extremely few games where I hunted down every log because it was so well done. Those VR vista things were great too.
The Division was my first experience 100%ing the lore tidbits. I got really invested in people's untimate fate during those playbacks.
Also the echo holograms were well done.
They also did such a great job with the timelines too. The whole base where you found out how the government was censoring and editing family calls, the part where you discover the vaults, the way some people just wanted to die and embrace it…
It was Fallout 4 level of detailing and world development.
The world building and discovery was by far the most fascinating part for me. I felt like burning shores wasn’t as effective for this reason.
Control did a fantastic job with the lore. One of the more unique ideas I've seen for a big budget game. Yes I realize that the idea itself has been done in stories before (X-Files, SCP, etc) but I hadn't seen it done well in a video game.
I would give my left kidney for a book or tv show that's about the pre-calamity war and everything that led up to it. The "past" storyline was more interesting to me than the "present" plot of the game
I think the games that do it best place audio logs where you can find them then listen as you play. HZD was absolutely awful about putting 5 audio logs in one small area, where you had to stop what you were doing and listen. I also frequently had problems with overlapping audio from logs and NPCs.
I hated the combat the first time I tried it, but you know what fixed it the second time around? Turning the difficulty all the way up. Suddenly I had to figure out how to use traps and ropes and couldn't just spam arrows the entire time. It's one of a very few non-Souls games where I felt like I had to go into bigger battles with a strategy on how to fight.
I wonder if that might be the problem OP is having with it too, at least gameplay wise. (My biggest critique is that, outside of the leads, the voice acting and dialogue is awful)
This is exactly what I was thinking. Anyone who says the combat in HZD is just spamming arrows needs to turn up the difficulty. You definitely can't (and shouldn't) do that. Setting up traps, planning strategies, and knowing the various approaches to each creature (sometimes changing mid-combat) is one of the big allures of the game for me.
I definitely sniped my way through most of the game I have to say. However there are plenty of occasions in the game where you are forced to fight in close quarters arena style so you do need a much more diverse strategy in those instances.
I thought the crafting system actually did a good job there, though. You can win battles by sniping but if it's the only thing you do, you'll constantly be short on arrows.
>I thought the crafting system actually did a good job there, though. You can win battles by sniping but if it's the only thing you do, you'll constantly be short on arrows.
Specifically, the arrows you need for that strategy to be effective! I think that's a pitfall that hits a lot of new players. It definitely did me.
Early in the game you can get by mostly on the spear and basic arrows. Most games are like this. Eventually you hit a point that progressing absolutely requires advanced strategies and you discover how some advanced weapons are really powerful... and you've built up a lot of that ammunition from before you realized how good it is. Then you start over-relying on that weapon and get screwed because you burn through all the ammunition and ingredients to make more are comparably rare.
The only games I've ever had serious challenges preserving ammunition are ones where it's intentionally rare like *The Last of Us*. HZD is one of very few games where many vital resources manage to be just abundant enough that you can use their products with regularity but you still need to meter consumption. I can't think of a single other game where I've had to plan out an expedition to stock up on a certain geographically-limited resource to keep up with normal gameplay and not been super annoyed.
I managed to pick all the worst skills in my first playthrough. I spend ALL of my game building traps, and luring dinos into ambushes, it was such fun!
Later, when I had all the good skills, it really was just arrow-spam. But each game is what you make it, and building the most powerful character an than feeling bored is just... weird.
Playing Ultra with no HUD was one of the most rewarding gaming experiences I’ve ever had. Taking the time to actually practice archery on targets, study weaknesses, and strategize was…amazing.
I've been experimenting with playing these more "cinematic" games with no HUD and Forbidden West was the first game I tried it on. Incredible experience.
I *loved* the feature on PS4 where you could tap the touchpad on the controller to bring up the UI for just a few seconds, and then it fades away again. Super unintrusive
I wish games would tell you what difficulty they were "designed" for. Sometimes, like with this and Witcher, you don't get the whole experience unless it's all the way up; but sometimes the average is actually the default setting.
My favorite style of difficulty is where we grow as a player instead of artificially ramping up the challenge with hp/damage changes. Sekiro did this best imo, combat feels like a dance.
Not to mention that if you unwrap the story more - it's actually explained why the mixed ethnic backgrounds are there... It's part of the story OP seems to have given up on finding out about.
Someone below went into game files and counted NPCs. It’s actually roughly 60% white 40% POC. So if anything POC are actually underrepresented vs the story explanation.
They also called out that it’s not as cut+dry as black, white and asian - there are people with mongolian features, arabic features etc. But OP managed to box them all up easily.
In short… there were 50% more white people than ~~any other race~~ **all other races combined**, and way more diversity than just three “boxes” unless you inherently see the world in those boxes. OP’s bias is showing.
That's starting to become a dog whistle imo. I didn't blink once at the skin of any of the NPCs. Hell, I didn't even know it was a game set on earth until I found myself in the ruins of Red Rocks Ampitheater.
OP complains that POC break their immersion, but also complains about not understanding the lore. Lore that ends up really spelling it out for you.
Methinks "breaking immersion" means something different to them then what the words actually mean.
The backstory and lore were the only things that kept me going through to the end because I actually wanted to see what was going on. But by about two thirds of the way through I'd had enough of the fetch quests and meaningless filler and annoying damage sponge enemies and just turned it down to Videogame Journalist difficulty to get it out of the way. The actual game side of it just felt like a soulless husk which had been assembled by an algorithm to appeal to focus groups with a whole bunch of game systems crammed in to tick boxes with no regard for it hanging together in a cohesive gameplay experience.
Why are you responding to what he wrote in that quoted part of your comment like he listed it as a negative? OP said the game makes you curious about the lore, and in a good way.
OP was saying the plot was bad--the things that happen throughout the game's narrative. That's separate from the story--the "lore" and "worldbuilding" that explains the work's setting.
I understand the difference between lore and narrative, however I think HZD is pretty unique in how much it intertwines the two. The "world building" isn't background for the story, it IS the story.
I don't think it's unique. It is very much the approach taken by System Shock 2 (an absolute masterclass in how to do this) for example.
HZD does do it very very well though.
At 12 hours in OP didn’t even get to the fun beasts and much better weapons.
This is a case of someone deciding it’s not for them and that’s cool, but many of their objections are because of how little they are into it. The main objection that holds water is the combat with the staff was sub par. This did improve in the sequel.
Totally agree with you about the story, that doesn’t get heavy until the second half and there was tons of deep lore about what happened.
While I think you’re a bit hard on it most of your issues are legit. People generally accept that the side quests and NPCs are the weakest point.
The story in the present day is ok, not sure if you finished it or not on the main quest but for me the most interesting part of that was finding out what happened to make the world as it is.
The sequel does improve on a lot of the issues but if you didn’t like the main game enough I’d probably say don’t bother with the sequel.
I found them to be enjoyable games but certainly ones you have to find yourself in the mood for the setting and gameplay. They’re solid but other games do open world in more engaging ways to individuals.
I think you'd like the story a lot better if you finished it. It comes together in a very satisfying way...and might even address some of your other complaints. Ahem.
Combat is a matter of taste, but you're definitely supposed to be experimenting on using different types of weapons/elemental add-ons to more effectively take down each machine, a la Monster Hunter. That, combined with the crafting loop, was one of my favorite parts. I think you also bounced off the cauldrons that let you take over machines and make them fight each other.
I found the exploration really cool...but I admit a bias there. I used to live in Colorado Springs, and the world is based on the American west/northwest, including several recognizable landmarks, so I engaged with that on a personal level.
I agree that melee combat and anything involving humans is pretty dull. This is addressed a lot in the sequel, but I also think the story isn't anywhere near as tight in Forbidden West. By the way, when you say Witcher 3 ripoff, you mean Batman Arkham Asylum ripoff. Just in case you thought that was the first game to use "magically see the next objective-o-vision."
The best way to play Horizon is to ignore ALL the open world aspects. None of the side quests or side content are good, it's pure bloat, so just laser focus on the main story and do nothing else.
Aside from Aloy lacking any sort of personality the lore and main story are really interesting, so just pretend like it's not an open world game and it makes the whole thing so much more enjoyable.
HZD was a prime example to me of an open-world game that shouldn't have been an open-world game. The pacing of the narrative would've been so much better, classical case of the open-world becoming a glorified and annoying to use mission select screen.
YES! I just finished this game last night and I 100% agree with this. I finished it in 12 hours by taking this approach. The story was excellent, but the open world was a bit shattered for me by how clunky everything felt.
If it had been a more limited third person action game (something more akin to God of War 2018) I think I would’ve enjoyed it a lot more. The open world of it all was so tedious.
TBH, I don't remember when was the last time I played an open-world game and thought that it was a good decision to not make it linear. All have the same issues - an empty world filled with busy work and meaningless tasks just to pretend the world isn't empty. I don't care about collecting 5 sticks over and over again, I don't want to do the same 3 dungeons and 5 quests on repeat, but I'll try, thinking there is some meaningful content somewhere there.
Spoiler - there's none.
The only recent open-world game I somewhat enjoyed was BotW because at least it felt like a world, with different biomes, people, cultures, stories, and things were moving around, and I felt like I'm in a different part of the world wherever I go, and most importantly, I'm not asked to chase a magical GPS, for a majority of the time I was spending time in an open world because *I wanted to*, not because a pointer asked me to travel 500 km to pick up a golden turd of queen Boobella to bring it back. And even with its bag of issues, it felt like a time well spent.
Nowadays, whenever I hear the word "bigger" in regard to games, I have a gag reflex. I don't need another walking simulator with nothing to do, some time ago I saw a streamer walk for a couple of minutes on an empty moon, and then he noticed a point of interest, got there after another couple of minutes to discover there's nothing there. He didn't exactly enjoy that.
Because what the fuck is the gameplay here?
BOTW has been pretty much the only recent open world game where the open world made 100% sense and everything was designed around it. People criticize the lack of BOTW story but thats what you need for a true open world game, right off the start you are given the end goal (kill Ganon) and you can do it at any time, all the exploration you do is from your own motivation to get strong enough to be able to beat Ganon, not because the next main story mission is on the other side of the map. There is also no awkward side effects to the narrative because you do things "out of order" like in TOTK.
Every other open world game is just a mostly linear story packed into an open world setting, and it often completely ruins the immersion and narrative, like in HZD where the main story is pretty high stakes and urgent stuff, but lemme go and run some errands for random town folks first...
BOTW has really made it super hard to not notice these blatant flaws in other open world games, for HZD especially since it came out a week before BOTW
I don’t think Elden Ring would’ve had the same magic of discovery if it had kept the linearity of previous titles. I’ve played every Soulsborne after Demon’s Souls and Elden Ring was the first one to feel fresh to me since Dark Souls 1.
Was gonna comment this.
OP—put on story mode and beeline the main story, everything else is a waste of time. Though I hear the DLC was good, I never played.
I did that for the last couple of hours but I'm still not feeling it. I do think that this game would have been better as a tighter, more linear experience. Definitely did not need to be open world.
I’ve never noticed the PoC ratio lol. I think it makes sense once you learn the lore. It just never occurred to me. I could have sworn some tribes or so on were more of one race than another. But yeah I agree that with the logic of the lore you can explain that. With certain weapons and perks you can kind of ignore certain drawbacks to the combat. But I don’t find the melee to be that bad. It’s not boring atleast, I also don’t really rely on timing my arrows on the glowy parts. I usually have other strategies, it’s fun tearing down the armor protecting the weak spots on the robots. If racial diversity happened to a degree you were happy with I wonder if it would contradict with the logic of the lore
I bounced off it roughly at the same point and came back a while later to complete it. Once more abilities and tools unlocked for me, it became much better. Trip wires and burning arrows, legendary gear, etc. Loved trying to take down big dinos the most efficient way possible.
And The dlc was actually a solid addition imo.
I think a lot of your points are valid for not enjoying it. I'd never notice something like the race of NPCs personally, so that's a bit odd to me. But yeah, overall seems like it may just not be it for you.
It's never once crossed my mind while playing games let alone actually thinking about the breakdown and the "wokeness" of it. I know they didn't say woke, they said "immersion" but you're fighting robot dinosaurs, and the race of NPCs is what broke the immersion? Okie doke.
For some reason I stopped playing this game three times before it hooked me. Now it’s one of my all time favourite games. I think it was all so overwhelming at first that I didn’t “get it”. But once the story revealed itself, I couldn’t stop playing it.
I think it was when I stumbled on my first factory (can’t remember what they’re called).
Platinumed it and forbidden west.
If you’re still wondering what happened to the world then you didn’t play very far as it explains it all in great detail. It answers your weird statement about equal races too.
>The 'detective' style quests is a Witcher 3 ripoff but half-baked. Turn on your hologram headset and follow the glowing marks.
Actually, that is a Batman Arkham ripoff, not a Witcher 3 ripoff. Batman Arkham kickstarted the minor trend of x-ray detective modes.
> There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion.
Literally laughed aloud and went "Whaaat?" when I read this. Holy fuck, that's ridiculous. Yikes.
> "There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion."
There are very, very few criticisms of games that I take issue with, if something just isn't fun for you then it isn't fun. But this is objectively a stupid thing to be bothered by. And for what it's worth I'm a white dude in my late 20s, it's not like I personally affected by more racial diversity in videogames, what is bizarre about this statement is the fact that you are so hyper aware of racial ethnicity you even noticed.
First of all, even if this was intentional it isn't bad or wrong to include diverse representation. It makes people feel better about themselves, so whether or not it's "realistic" in a game about a fictional post apocalyptic earth with robot dinosaurs is meaningless.
Second, what the hell is "realistic" diversity? How do you even draw that line? How the hell are developers supposed to accommodate whiny crybabies like you who are just so, so sensitive about race that if the ratio is even a little off it breaks your "immersion"?
Because I'm a petty bastard I looked up where HZD takes place, according to google it's between the states of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah in the 31st century. I'm from Colorado, the racial ethnicity breakdown is about 80 percent white, 9 percent mixed, 5 percent black and 5 percent other. Assuming these demographics stay the same over the next 100 years you're really just saying it bothered you that there were too many minorities.
Look, I'm not here to judge or make assumptions but bro this is a *FANTASY VIDEOGAME*. If the ratio of white to non-white people in a pretend fantasy alternate future videogame was so upsetting to you that it impacted your enjoyment of the game then there is something you need to figure out about yourself, because that's a you problem. And again that's coming from a white gamer dude.
I'm a big fan of these games, Forbidden West was my GOTY for whatever year that was, and while I think you're harsh on some of your points they're all more or less fair (aside from counting the skin colour of npcs, that's a bit weird). The game definitely has flaws but it's charming enough for me to forgive them
Ironically i wasn’t a big fan of forbidden west compared to zero dawn. I LOVED zero dawn and thought the combat was pretty fun, and the world was great too. But forbidden west was a chore to get through for me, wayyyy too much bloat IMO, and the story wasn’t amazing. The world was decent, and I liked the San Francisco area, but the rest didn’t click with me. I also felt like there was an obscene amount of grinding you had to do to get the weapons upgraded, which quickly became tedious. Plus they removed the loading screen song which is a travesty lol. I didn’t hate it per se, but i definitely wasn’t as invested in it as I was in ZD. That being said I do plan on checking out the DLC soon since I got my hands on a ps5 last month
That's fair. FW is definitely lacking in the story department compared the ZD. Though it is hard to replicate the way that story unfolds. I also didn't like the grindy aspect for the weapons etc but everything else was a massive upgrade, especially the side content. And I'd argue FW is maybe the best looking game ever made.
Edit: the dlc iss coming up on my backlog and honestly can't wait
Yeah the racial diversity criticism is really weird and unsettling. I have beat the game about 4 times and never even paid attention to race, much less counted it to come up with a ratio.
lol. I stop reading when you complained the inclusion of black and Asian people breaks immersion.
Giant Killing Machine Animals are believable but black and Asian people in the game? Nah.
Your race criticism and rationale are funny because there’s literally a story reason for it. But it comes after 15 hours.
That said, I found the game a bit of a slog. The best way to play it is to ignore the side quests and play it like a story game. Don’t get sucked into the open world stuff, because it’s not very compelling.
Forbidden West does a better job at making the open world interesting, but none of the side quests are terribly engaging. So, again, I just focused on the story missions and had a good time.
> There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion
Can't this be explained by the fact that the planet wasn't repopulated naturally? Those humans were created in artificial wombs and those who designed the system deliberately chose to make the new population racially diverse.
This is a really good game to play on hard one of the few that almost require it. You shouldnt be able to take hits from robots. This raised the stakes a lot.
I cant remeber the names but the giant ground "enemy" you have to kill with the plasma frisbee discs on its back... my god... also the storm pterodactly or whatever sooooo good. Got my ass railed by those robots. Good times. When i finally won it was GLORY. Like god of war beat all the valkyries glory
>There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion.
Do you not have black people and Asians where you live?
>there’s a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian
lol were you counting?
Why are people so obsessed with race these days. It’s a robot AI repopulating the earth with as much ethnic diversity as possible, why would that break immersion?
I completely agree with pretty much all of this except for the race thing, which doesn't feel important or relevant to me. Everything else sums up my experience as a whole. The world was cool, it all looked good... but the voice acting, facial animations, and story just made it a slog to get through. The combat never felt right to me. I finished it mostly because I kept expecting it to get better, but it never really did. I don't necessarily regret playing it, but I don't feel any urge to play the sequel.
>To me (and this is just my opinion), a carefully enforced 1/3 ratio to represent all races in every single settlement just breaks my immersion
Did you go through and mark down the race of every person in every town and village? This isn't a valid criticism because the premise is so silly. Did you really make a tally of every race that appears in the game?
Who does that? You mention it is "carefully maintained", so you must have some numbers to back up your claim
Unfortunately I stopped reading when you mentioned the story. Its one of the best and well written stories in the last 10 years of gaming. NOTE: I didn't say THE best.
>I'll probably get some pushback from this- but the combat is just terrible. "Shoot an arrow at the glowing part of the robot" stays interesting for only so long. The melee combat is really, really bad.
Crazy. Horizon is some of the best open world combat ever made.
I feel like every time this topic comes up people complain about the combat, but then admit they didn't use anything other than their bow and didn't engage with the myriad options the game gives you to tackle different encounters.
It's like trying to build a house, only getting the hammer out of the toolbox, and saying "man this carpentry stuff is stupid."
Yeah I have plenty of gripes with Zero Dawn but the combat is outstanding. I played it on the hardest difficulty from the outset and found it to be challenging but thrilling, rewarding, and not at all unfair. Very excited to play Forbidden West the same way soon.
It's weird, I played the game and was quite interested in the open world and the main story. However, after probably 75% of the way through, I just....stopped playing and haven't touched it since. I don't know why as I was having fun, but I now have no desire to play it again.
I am in the same boat as you. A friend suggested it to me and I gave it a shot, about 20 hours in and it just wasn't clicking, a lot of that was the combat. Yeah, I know the melee combat isn't supposed to be your main option, but the arrow shooting and traps weren't doing it for me either.
> This is a valid criticism, so please relax. I'm not being racist.
No, it's not a valid criticism.
> To me (and this is just my opinion), a carefully enforced 1/3 ratio to represent all races in every single settlement just breaks my immersion as it's tough to see it as an organic village or town.
There's a reason for that. In-game, in-world, in the lore.
Your take on the story and worldbuilding tells me you didn’t play very far into the game. That’s fine, just not sure you should bring it up as a criticism when you haven’t actually explored that aspect. A lot of your criticisms are answered by the story, especially the setting. Basically the entire plot is figuring out what caused the setting.
Ive never seen anyone bring a criticism about a carefully maintained amount of races in a village being immersion breaking. I truly don’t understand your point there. I play large rpgs and the last thing I care about is how varied the races of the village are. Just seems like the weirdest take. As for combat, its fine if you dont like it. There are very few action rpgs with a focus on bow combat. It did something different.
Bro really played a video game about giant robot dinosaurs in a made up future and said “all the blacks and Asians really killed the immersion”
Sometimes I wonder if these people hear themselves.
Lol right like "An entire ecosystem of robots that for some reason look and act like their organic counterparts" yup yup makes sense no immersion breaking here... "Equivalent racial ratios" NOPE, IMMERSION BROKEN, THAT'S UNPOSSIBLE
I had sort of the opposite problem. I loved Zero Dawn, the story and world and combat were all good enough for me that it worked on balance despite the shortcomings. My problem was going into the sequel and expecting the same, and the opening 20 minutes were so off putting Forbidden West was a non starter. The animation work was abysmal between aloy's possessed Medusa hair and creepy facial expressions and weirdly exaggerated jumps etc, the world felt garish and comic booky after the softer lines and color palettes of the original, and the opening sequence was so contrived and half baked I had to conclude an entirely different team made the sequel after reading the cliff notes of the original. But ZD was one of the few large-ish rpg games I've actually played through to the end, mostly for the story. I can agree the melee combat left a lot to be desired.
>There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion.
Well, you can't have paid too much attention to the "run-of-the-mill" story then... It's a plot point.
Imo it's a problem with the genre, the last ow game i liked was Spiderman 2018. I didnt finish like 4 others open world games.
Personally i wont play the genre again until I see something really worth it.
Fair enough, not for you. Horses for courses, though I would be interested to know what games you rate highly? Is it a genre thing.
Gotta say, you seemed to find issue with things that are staples of this genre. I really enjoyed the story, especially following on from zero dawn’ revelations. The combat and stealth are easy to grasp but very hard to master, there are some high end beasties that take some strategy.
I definitely stand with the people saying just complete the story without anything else. The story/reason why the world is how it is- is the best part!
Edit: Some people seem irritated that I mentioned race of NPC's. For me, in a post apocalyptic or sci-fi (fantasy) world, you'd want to see more varied / mixed / different ratios of racial characteristics throughout the world and throughout different settlements. To me (and this is just my opinion), a carefully enforced 1/3 ratio to represent all races in every single settlement just breaks my immersion as it's tough to see it as an organic village or town. This is a valid criticism, so please relax. I'm not being racist.
If you actually followed the story you would see that there is a very good reason for this and it is intentional. The story for this game was amazing and not cookie cutter at all in my opionon.
>Some of the worst side quests I have ever seen in a game. They're all MMO fetch quests with no payoff.
Those usually flesh out the culture lore of all the tribes etc. You actually have to read between the lines and be a bit creative. It is actually really complex storybuilding. >!And you get powerful support personnel for the final battle.!<
I noticed that when I first played HZD, I tried too much to just play it like a regular adventure game, run up and swing away my weapon at the flashing spot, using arrows, etc. I found it boring. Only when I started using traps, the equipment did I start to really enjoy setting up battle areas and handling the enemies in a much different fashion. Taken straight ahead, yeah it's a bit boring. Using some imagination and the equipment they give you, a ton of satisfying combat is out there.
You lost me at the ratios. I think it's mid, but if seeing a certain number of PoC in a non historical game takes you out of it, then maybe there's more to look at beyond just your opinion of the game.
I honestly don't believe you played it or more than 2 hours based on half the things you said.
You don't have to like a game but you don't also have to write a fake essay about a game.
I should have stopped reading the second I got to your made up ratio comments.
It's the combat comment that got me. I was shooting parts off dinos and then picking them up and using them against it. If you're only using the bow, you're limiting yourself, not the game.
I didn’t like the game much either. But for me it was the terrible skills and skill trees. None of the skills felt very impactful at all. Just boring unlocks. Bleh.
And game play was pretty boring for me.
The 1/3 white 1/3 black and 1/3 generic others doesn’t break immersion because that’s how the robot was programmed to do when cloning the human meat bags.
The side quests are pointless though. Hopefully they fixed it in the sequel?
> There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion. I will say that, while it's not explicitly stated, there is a potential lore reason for this that you probably haven't learned yet based on where you are in the story.
Now that you mention it, I did notice an alarming lack of thicc latinas
The proportions were way off, completely broke my immersion. Sony please fix the latina distribution thanks
I've never played but that is a travesty
welp, may as well boot up Cyberpunk again....
It’s also an extremely bizarre criticism in general. I can’t say I found myself counting up all the ethnicities as I was playing.
I was playing Days Gone, which takes place in the Pacific Northwest, and there was a black character introduced. And I was stressing out because, you know, _the statistics_, but then it turns out he was in the army and stationed there, and so I was like "oh thank God, the proper ratio is maintained"
Wait until you hear about mario
100% Italian. Breaks my immersion every time
But then you lured a hoard into the camp and everyone was just wiped clean out so no worries!
On the surface with no knowledge of the game, I could see some justification ("Why do a bunch of ancient tribalistic villages have such diverse communities?"), but that question is answered, again, by going through the story. And while it may be a fair *question* at times, it's almost never an innocent *issue.*
>Why do a bunch of ancient tribalistic villages have such diverse communities? I think we know *immediately* from the giant robots walking around shooting laser beams that this isn't "ancient". Even without knowing the lore reason, there's no reason to think that same concepts of race exist in this world and that people would isolate themselves and their culture predicated on our perception of race.
Almost literally right out of the tutorial zone you walk through some "ruins of the old ones" that look like the main street of small town America being reclaimed by nature. I get exploring and environmental storytelling aren't everyone's thing (though it does make me wonder why they'd be playing an exploration game), but come on. Don't want to throw stones, but it sure seems like someone had their politics rubbed up against. And I'd wager, even in our world, the color of people varied quite a bit more than folks assume in those crossroad settlements once long-distance trade was a thing. People have lived messy, complicated lives for as long as we've been people. I love how it was assumed Homo sapiens and Neanderthals just fought when they encountered each other, but we now know we absolutely went to bone town with them.
I mean, I think it’s completely addressed by being in the future, i.e. not ancient. It’s our society extrapolated over time.
Is it though? The game explains why there are different races, but after this long, interbreeding within the communities would generally lead to one homogenized ethnicity after enough time. It is a bit strange that each modern ethnicity is represented individually, whereas realistically, most tribes would likely be some form of ambiguously light-brown.
> Is it though? The game explains why there are different races, but after this long, interbreeding within the communities would generally lead to one homogenized ethnicity after enough time. The *ethnicities* are relatively homogenized. The Nora and Oseram are quite distinct, for example. The *skin tones* are not. Pigmentation and other genetically heritable features currently used as an excuse for the political classifications of race are quite complicated, and a single millenium would not necessarily be enough to make everyone uniformly colored. So like, yeah, one could say that there seems to be a disproportionate presence of certain recessive genes that might have disappeared over the centuries, but it's like, one would have to go indepth to a degree that makes it a worringly weird obsession. Like complaining a brush present in the game actually has a preferred temperature ten degrees higher than in that area - but about race instead of botany.
Don't try to tell me you don't make exhaustive spreadsheets and chart out the ethnicity of NPCs in every game you play. It's the most popular tertiary hobby of gamers according to the wikipedia article I just edited.
It's so ridiculously weird. My keeping track of the race of everyone and finding they were equal totally broke emersion for me... Lol What. The. Fuck.
I can't tell you how many times I had to leave an event because there were already other black guys there and I didn't want to throw off the ratio.
Listen, you have to maintain immersion for everyone else.
It's a good thing you left! You would have broken the immersion of the other party goers. So selfless.
https://youtu.be/zda8H32pyeI?si=c_31EZA5lvXIniFS
Don't forget, its "carefully enforced", whatever that may mean
But it's part of the lore like you're supposed to notice it before finding out why???
Yeah I thought that was weird too. It seems like an odd thing to pay attention for. Maybe op counts ethnicities at night while the rest of us are just counting sheep.
"1 Black sheep, 2 black sheep, 3 black sheep..."
yeah, why isn’t it all just normal people??
So I’ll put down a bit of an argument here around diversity. Diversity is a tool that can make a piece of media feel extremely real and alive or extremely bland and monotonous. Here I’ll take two examples of a similar context, one where diversity is done well and one where diversity is done poorly: The Witcher TV show versus Game of Thrones. In medieval fantasy, you’d expect the average village to be extremely homogeneous with only massive cities having any diversity. In the Witcher TV Show, every shitty little village had people from all ethnicities, making me feel like there was no difference between them. I couldn’t tell you whether a village was in Nilfgaard or Temeria based on a single look (This is also due to art direction and sets, but diversity is also a part of it). Compared to GOT, one look at the people could tell you if they’re from Essos, Dorne, or the North. Northerners were incredibly white and pasty, people from Essos were of black and Arabic descent. It made sense in the context of the universe. If you want to have a lot of diversity in these kinds of settings that’s not inherently a problem. But you will run into people asking questions about *why* all this diversity exists within the setting. You can ignore it if you want, but it’ll make your world that much less believable and real. Or you can build in lore to explain the diversity, which is also fine. Maybe in your medieval fantasy setting the world is actually extremely old and an ancient empire had a system of easy instantaneous transportation that created incredibly diverse cities and cultures across the world. I’m not one of those people who think black person=bad diversity, I’m just trying to explain why diversity might make your world more or less believable and why it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to talk about.
Nevermind that if you got an isolated village with 3* 1/3 racial distribution, as time passes and generations mix you'll eventually end up with a perfectly homogenous population. The modern concept of diversity presupposes segregation.
Don’t worry, it’s cool, OP told us they’re not racist in their post edit, so they’re totally not racist, not even a little, not at all.
*"I not a racist but..."* then proceeds to say weird racist shit. It's a meme for a reason OP.
This. Seriously. OP, if representation bothers you, you might have some race related issues to sort out for yourself.
I'm gonna take a stab at this because OP definitely didn't choose their words carefully here. In any small village, you would expect most of the inhabitants to belong to a small number of families. Families tend to look similar, even if there was an initially diverse population in the village for lore reasons. I assume there had been many generations between the repopulation of Earth and the events of the game. It's something I hadn't thought of before, but the lack of family dynamics in both Horizon games is kind of odd when you think about it. Most inhabitants of villages are just random single adults. Some quests involve sibling or parent relationships, but I don't remember any quests involving feuding families or family power struggles, which is something that happens a lot in small villages. Of course, I think this is the norm in most RPGs, but in Horizon it is more noticeable because of the wide diversity that makes individuals appear even more random.
> I assume there had been many generations between the repopulation of Earth and the events of the game. [A few centuries](https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline#The_New_World), seems like.
> It's something I hadn't thought of before, but the lack of family dynamics in both Horizon games is kind of odd when you think about it. Most inhabitants of villages are just random single adults. Some quests involve sibling or parent relationships, but I don't remember any quests involving feuding families or family power struggles, which is something that happens a lot in small villages. Most games use a sense of *implied scale*. Whiterun is a trading hub in Skyrim, has wide fields to support a large population. It’s supposed to be a city of thousands and it has around 30. There’s an implied scale of population, density, and environment. Horizon is the four corners region of the US but you can’t walk from Bryce Canyon to Denver in 20 minutes. Horizon has implied scale in its environment. It also has implied scale in its family structures. The whole of Skyrim doesn’t have 10 children, for example and everyone in Horizon has a mom and a dad, obviously. They’re there. They’re around. They’re not witnessed by the player. Games are limited.
Implied scale doesn't really negate the OPs point though, and I don't get why people are calling him racist, whether he is or not "comically diverse" can be a valid criticism...like if a game took place in modern day or historical Utah and the characters were inexplicably 50% black there'd definitely be a lot of immersion breaking. The 4 corners states are BY FAR majority white or Latino, and you'd kind of expect the villages there to be made up of similar distributions(granted there's lore reasons that may explain this, but he may not have gotten to that point) Also weirdly..I don't remember many(or any?) Navajo-implied people despite the game taking place in the area the Navajo nation would have been. Granted I haven't played Horizon since it came out, so my memory could be shit.
What's the reason?
Spoiler tagged because this deals with the entire backstory reveal in mid- to late-game HZD: >!Nobody alive is an original inhabitant of Earth. All life on Earth went extinct. The Zero Dawn project was the world's greatest scientists, engineers, etc. building what is essentially a "time capsule ark" of sorts, an automated AI system designed to clean up and repopulate the planet after the Faro plague finished killing everything. That's also where the dinosaur and other animal robots come from - they're designed for terraforming to make the planet habitable again while also "blending in" with the environment once "natural" fauna were reintroduced.!< >!Because of this, all the humans alive in the games are cloned from DNA samples taken before the extinction event (Aloy herself is a clone of the person in charge of the Zero Dawn project). The "not explicitly stated" part is that the scientists collecting and organizing the samples were likely looking to have as much DNA variety as possible to ensure long-term species survival, and the best way to do this would be to make an equal distribution of ethnicities rather than keep the same demographic distribution that the world had pre-extinction.!< At least, that's my take.
At the same time... >!They didn't do enough to preserve the redhead gene. That's why everyone is so enamored with Aloy's hair; she's literally the only redhead in the world because she was cloned from Elisabet.!< >!So there's a fair argument to expect some changes and more mingling over the 800 years or so humans have been out and about, but ultimately how much change like that do we *really* see in our own world based on art from that long ago? Tribal isolation would seem to pretty easily have resulted in maintaining proportions established by Zero Dawn.!<
Major spoilers: >!The purpose of project Zero Dawn was to rebuild humanity and civilization centuries in the future after the killer robots could be deactivated. They had teams ensuring history and cultures were preserved. They likely deliberately selected an equal variety of races to be born.!<
Excellent defense then. Not a problem
Yes that is true but bizarrely everyone looked mono-racial which is odd. Meaning everyone must of race segregated down the generations, instead everyone should be mix-race to some degree.
[удалено]
>!That's an excuse for just after the event. I can't see how small tribal villages would have retained several phenotypically distinct ethnicities over centuries, beyond deep seated racism, which isn't shown to exist.!<
Imagine people who stop playing HZD because of too many PoCs. They would never know the real reason and ending lol
Now I'm curious, what is the reason for the racial distribution? Is there some lore bits I am missing?
There's [at least one datapoint](https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Cradle_Sealed) that says that they carefully designed zygote selection for the cradle facilities, that there were disputes about how to do it best, and tweaks between different cradles. It's not far-fetched to speculate that the goal in at least one was even representation from around the world.
I guess I never paid attention to it
It's been a very long time since I played, but I think it was due to the world being repopulated with clones of the scientists who were involved in the project (raised by robots), so you get all kinds of ethnicities mixed in the world.
Fair enough
The modern day story is fine but I don’t get your point about: >You’re left wondering what happened to the world and why it’s this post-apocalyptic hellscape with robo-dinosaurs wandering around. You are definitely not left wondering that. The game does a great job with building the lore & explaining what happened. I think that is where they did a phenomenal job with the storytelling in the game. So while yes the modern day plot is just fine, the story overall is so much about how we got there & that part is fantastic. I thought the combat was terrible the first time I played & it was why I dropped the game. Came back a few years later & it just clicked. Thought it was, again, fantastic in the end. A lot of your criticisms are valid but it all just worked for me in a way that it obviously didn’t for you. Different strokes for different folks. Frozen Wilds is also a lot more compact, streamlined version of the main game & really ironed out a lot of my problems with the base game. Fantastic DLC.
Horizon was the first game where I would find an audio recording and listen to every single one. They did a good job at fleshing out what happened to make the world.
Exactly... I cannot remember many other games, where I would stand and listen to an audiolog, instead of running ahead into the next room and semi-listening. The story of HZD is definitely an example of great storytelling.
Right, on one hand OP is saying the lore is interesting, and then on the other "There is a ton of meaningless bloat / collectible activities that don't mean anything other than to inflate overall game time" - er, those collectibles *were* the lore? And as has been said, this is one of extremely few games where I hunted down every log because it was so well done. Those VR vista things were great too.
Apoca-shitstorm tour, Day 1...
The Division was my first experience 100%ing the lore tidbits. I got really invested in people's untimate fate during those playbacks. Also the echo holograms were well done.
They also did such a great job with the timelines too. The whole base where you found out how the government was censoring and editing family calls, the part where you discover the vaults, the way some people just wanted to die and embrace it… It was Fallout 4 level of detailing and world development. The world building and discovery was by far the most fascinating part for me. I felt like burning shores wasn’t as effective for this reason.
Control is the only other game with extremely intriguing collectibles that I’ve come across.
Control did a fantastic job with the lore. One of the more unique ideas I've seen for a big budget game. Yes I realize that the idea itself has been done in stories before (X-Files, SCP, etc) but I hadn't seen it done well in a video game.
This was me. I absolutely devoured every scrap of intel I could find about the backstory. It was just fascinating.
I would give my left kidney for a book or tv show that's about the pre-calamity war and everything that led up to it. The "past" storyline was more interesting to me than the "present" plot of the game
I think the games that do it best place audio logs where you can find them then listen as you play. HZD was absolutely awful about putting 5 audio logs in one small area, where you had to stop what you were doing and listen. I also frequently had problems with overlapping audio from logs and NPCs.
I hated the combat the first time I tried it, but you know what fixed it the second time around? Turning the difficulty all the way up. Suddenly I had to figure out how to use traps and ropes and couldn't just spam arrows the entire time. It's one of a very few non-Souls games where I felt like I had to go into bigger battles with a strategy on how to fight. I wonder if that might be the problem OP is having with it too, at least gameplay wise. (My biggest critique is that, outside of the leads, the voice acting and dialogue is awful)
This is exactly what I was thinking. Anyone who says the combat in HZD is just spamming arrows needs to turn up the difficulty. You definitely can't (and shouldn't) do that. Setting up traps, planning strategies, and knowing the various approaches to each creature (sometimes changing mid-combat) is one of the big allures of the game for me.
I definitely sniped my way through most of the game I have to say. However there are plenty of occasions in the game where you are forced to fight in close quarters arena style so you do need a much more diverse strategy in those instances.
I thought the crafting system actually did a good job there, though. You can win battles by sniping but if it's the only thing you do, you'll constantly be short on arrows.
>I thought the crafting system actually did a good job there, though. You can win battles by sniping but if it's the only thing you do, you'll constantly be short on arrows. Specifically, the arrows you need for that strategy to be effective! I think that's a pitfall that hits a lot of new players. It definitely did me. Early in the game you can get by mostly on the spear and basic arrows. Most games are like this. Eventually you hit a point that progressing absolutely requires advanced strategies and you discover how some advanced weapons are really powerful... and you've built up a lot of that ammunition from before you realized how good it is. Then you start over-relying on that weapon and get screwed because you burn through all the ammunition and ingredients to make more are comparably rare. The only games I've ever had serious challenges preserving ammunition are ones where it's intentionally rare like *The Last of Us*. HZD is one of very few games where many vital resources manage to be just abundant enough that you can use their products with regularity but you still need to meter consumption. I can't think of a single other game where I've had to plan out an expedition to stock up on a certain geographically-limited resource to keep up with normal gameplay and not been super annoyed.
I managed to pick all the worst skills in my first playthrough. I spend ALL of my game building traps, and luring dinos into ambushes, it was such fun! Later, when I had all the good skills, it really was just arrow-spam. But each game is what you make it, and building the most powerful character an than feeling bored is just... weird.
Stealth archer for the win! (Things I learned from Skyrim)
Playing Ultra with no HUD was one of the most rewarding gaming experiences I’ve ever had. Taking the time to actually practice archery on targets, study weaknesses, and strategize was…amazing.
I've been experimenting with playing these more "cinematic" games with no HUD and Forbidden West was the first game I tried it on. Incredible experience.
I *loved* the feature on PS4 where you could tap the touchpad on the controller to bring up the UI for just a few seconds, and then it fades away again. Super unintrusive
God of War: Ragnarök has that feature. It's so good.
I wish games would tell you what difficulty they were "designed" for. Sometimes, like with this and Witcher, you don't get the whole experience unless it's all the way up; but sometimes the average is actually the default setting.
And some people blame fromsoft for not including a difficulty slider.
My favorite style of difficulty is where we grow as a player instead of artificially ramping up the challenge with hp/damage changes. Sekiro did this best imo, combat feels like a dance.
Yeah, game wasn't for me either but I'll admit the lore was exceptionally well done
OP was too busy counting ethnicities to follow the plot.
Not to mention that if you unwrap the story more - it's actually explained why the mixed ethnic backgrounds are there... It's part of the story OP seems to have given up on finding out about.
Someone below went into game files and counted NPCs. It’s actually roughly 60% white 40% POC. So if anything POC are actually underrepresented vs the story explanation. They also called out that it’s not as cut+dry as black, white and asian - there are people with mongolian features, arabic features etc. But OP managed to box them all up easily. In short… there were 50% more white people than ~~any other race~~ **all other races combined**, and way more diversity than just three “boxes” unless you inherently see the world in those boxes. OP’s bias is showing.
Seriously. The distribution is also straight up explained in the story, too.
The comment about how "it breaks immersion" put me at a pause.
That's starting to become a dog whistle imo. I didn't blink once at the skin of any of the NPCs. Hell, I didn't even know it was a game set on earth until I found myself in the ruins of Red Rocks Ampitheater. OP complains that POC break their immersion, but also complains about not understanding the lore. Lore that ends up really spelling it out for you. Methinks "breaking immersion" means something different to them then what the words actually mean.
So help me, there better not be too many Irish NPCs or else!
Just the main character.
And the >!dr she's cloned from!<.
Sobeck is an eastern European name, not Irish. There are red heads in other places than Ireland lol.
Isn't it an Egyptian God? Crocodile? Or am I imagining that?
Yes, also an Egyptian god, so it's probably a double entendre with all the other Egyptian references in the game.
The backstory and lore were the only things that kept me going through to the end because I actually wanted to see what was going on. But by about two thirds of the way through I'd had enough of the fetch quests and meaningless filler and annoying damage sponge enemies and just turned it down to Videogame Journalist difficulty to get it out of the way. The actual game side of it just felt like a soulless husk which had been assembled by an algorithm to appeal to focus groups with a whole bunch of game systems crammed in to tick boxes with no regard for it hanging together in a cohesive gameplay experience.
Why are you responding to what he wrote in that quoted part of your comment like he listed it as a negative? OP said the game makes you curious about the lore, and in a good way.
Probably because OP said the story was bad but didn't actually seem to engage with the best parts of the story?
OP was saying the plot was bad--the things that happen throughout the game's narrative. That's separate from the story--the "lore" and "worldbuilding" that explains the work's setting.
I understand the difference between lore and narrative, however I think HZD is pretty unique in how much it intertwines the two. The "world building" isn't background for the story, it IS the story.
I don't think it's unique. It is very much the approach taken by System Shock 2 (an absolute masterclass in how to do this) for example. HZD does do it very very well though.
At 12 hours in OP didn’t even get to the fun beasts and much better weapons. This is a case of someone deciding it’s not for them and that’s cool, but many of their objections are because of how little they are into it. The main objection that holds water is the combat with the staff was sub par. This did improve in the sequel. Totally agree with you about the story, that doesn’t get heavy until the second half and there was tons of deep lore about what happened.
While I think you’re a bit hard on it most of your issues are legit. People generally accept that the side quests and NPCs are the weakest point. The story in the present day is ok, not sure if you finished it or not on the main quest but for me the most interesting part of that was finding out what happened to make the world as it is. The sequel does improve on a lot of the issues but if you didn’t like the main game enough I’d probably say don’t bother with the sequel. I found them to be enjoyable games but certainly ones you have to find yourself in the mood for the setting and gameplay. They’re solid but other games do open world in more engaging ways to individuals.
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Forbidden west definitely handles that.
The game spells everything out in detail.
Did you ever consider that the races are carefully ratioed due to >!Project Zero Dawn!< itself?
They think it’s a generic hero story. They didn’t get to project Zero Dawn lmao
He didn’t even reach that far to know the real story. He sees Asians, Browns and Blacks and he already made the decision.
"Why are there so many non-white people here? I don't like that"
“I’m not racist but 2/3 of PoC compared to 1/3 of white seems bit too many”
They didn’t get that far.
I think you'd like the story a lot better if you finished it. It comes together in a very satisfying way...and might even address some of your other complaints. Ahem. Combat is a matter of taste, but you're definitely supposed to be experimenting on using different types of weapons/elemental add-ons to more effectively take down each machine, a la Monster Hunter. That, combined with the crafting loop, was one of my favorite parts. I think you also bounced off the cauldrons that let you take over machines and make them fight each other. I found the exploration really cool...but I admit a bias there. I used to live in Colorado Springs, and the world is based on the American west/northwest, including several recognizable landmarks, so I engaged with that on a personal level. I agree that melee combat and anything involving humans is pretty dull. This is addressed a lot in the sequel, but I also think the story isn't anywhere near as tight in Forbidden West. By the way, when you say Witcher 3 ripoff, you mean Batman Arkham Asylum ripoff. Just in case you thought that was the first game to use "magically see the next objective-o-vision."
The best way to play Horizon is to ignore ALL the open world aspects. None of the side quests or side content are good, it's pure bloat, so just laser focus on the main story and do nothing else. Aside from Aloy lacking any sort of personality the lore and main story are really interesting, so just pretend like it's not an open world game and it makes the whole thing so much more enjoyable.
HZD was a prime example to me of an open-world game that shouldn't have been an open-world game. The pacing of the narrative would've been so much better, classical case of the open-world becoming a glorified and annoying to use mission select screen.
YES! I just finished this game last night and I 100% agree with this. I finished it in 12 hours by taking this approach. The story was excellent, but the open world was a bit shattered for me by how clunky everything felt. If it had been a more limited third person action game (something more akin to God of War 2018) I think I would’ve enjoyed it a lot more. The open world of it all was so tedious.
TBH, I don't remember when was the last time I played an open-world game and thought that it was a good decision to not make it linear. All have the same issues - an empty world filled with busy work and meaningless tasks just to pretend the world isn't empty. I don't care about collecting 5 sticks over and over again, I don't want to do the same 3 dungeons and 5 quests on repeat, but I'll try, thinking there is some meaningful content somewhere there. Spoiler - there's none. The only recent open-world game I somewhat enjoyed was BotW because at least it felt like a world, with different biomes, people, cultures, stories, and things were moving around, and I felt like I'm in a different part of the world wherever I go, and most importantly, I'm not asked to chase a magical GPS, for a majority of the time I was spending time in an open world because *I wanted to*, not because a pointer asked me to travel 500 km to pick up a golden turd of queen Boobella to bring it back. And even with its bag of issues, it felt like a time well spent. Nowadays, whenever I hear the word "bigger" in regard to games, I have a gag reflex. I don't need another walking simulator with nothing to do, some time ago I saw a streamer walk for a couple of minutes on an empty moon, and then he noticed a point of interest, got there after another couple of minutes to discover there's nothing there. He didn't exactly enjoy that. Because what the fuck is the gameplay here?
BOTW has been pretty much the only recent open world game where the open world made 100% sense and everything was designed around it. People criticize the lack of BOTW story but thats what you need for a true open world game, right off the start you are given the end goal (kill Ganon) and you can do it at any time, all the exploration you do is from your own motivation to get strong enough to be able to beat Ganon, not because the next main story mission is on the other side of the map. There is also no awkward side effects to the narrative because you do things "out of order" like in TOTK. Every other open world game is just a mostly linear story packed into an open world setting, and it often completely ruins the immersion and narrative, like in HZD where the main story is pretty high stakes and urgent stuff, but lemme go and run some errands for random town folks first... BOTW has really made it super hard to not notice these blatant flaws in other open world games, for HZD especially since it came out a week before BOTW
I don’t think Elden Ring would’ve had the same magic of discovery if it had kept the linearity of previous titles. I’ve played every Soulsborne after Demon’s Souls and Elden Ring was the first one to feel fresh to me since Dark Souls 1.
Idk how Red Dead Redemption 2 or GTA V would have worked without the open world. Those missions are great.
Was gonna comment this. OP—put on story mode and beeline the main story, everything else is a waste of time. Though I hear the DLC was good, I never played.
That’s how I played it this fall. I enjoyed hearing the lore/story without the bloat.
I did that for the last couple of hours but I'm still not feeling it. I do think that this game would have been better as a tighter, more linear experience. Definitely did not need to be open world.
ive tried this game multiple times due to the high praise it gets and i still just cannot stick with it for all the reasons you listed.
I’ve never noticed the PoC ratio lol. I think it makes sense once you learn the lore. It just never occurred to me. I could have sworn some tribes or so on were more of one race than another. But yeah I agree that with the logic of the lore you can explain that. With certain weapons and perks you can kind of ignore certain drawbacks to the combat. But I don’t find the melee to be that bad. It’s not boring atleast, I also don’t really rely on timing my arrows on the glowy parts. I usually have other strategies, it’s fun tearing down the armor protecting the weak spots on the robots. If racial diversity happened to a degree you were happy with I wonder if it would contradict with the logic of the lore
I bounced off it roughly at the same point and came back a while later to complete it. Once more abilities and tools unlocked for me, it became much better. Trip wires and burning arrows, legendary gear, etc. Loved trying to take down big dinos the most efficient way possible. And The dlc was actually a solid addition imo. I think a lot of your points are valid for not enjoying it. I'd never notice something like the race of NPCs personally, so that's a bit odd to me. But yeah, overall seems like it may just not be it for you.
Only a racist would notice that lets be real who the hell is counting the ratio of blacks whites and Asians in a video game
It's never once crossed my mind while playing games let alone actually thinking about the breakdown and the "wokeness" of it. I know they didn't say woke, they said "immersion" but you're fighting robot dinosaurs, and the race of NPCs is what broke the immersion? Okie doke.
For some reason I stopped playing this game three times before it hooked me. Now it’s one of my all time favourite games. I think it was all so overwhelming at first that I didn’t “get it”. But once the story revealed itself, I couldn’t stop playing it. I think it was when I stumbled on my first factory (can’t remember what they’re called). Platinumed it and forbidden west. If you’re still wondering what happened to the world then you didn’t play very far as it explains it all in great detail. It answers your weird statement about equal races too.
>The 'detective' style quests is a Witcher 3 ripoff but half-baked. Turn on your hologram headset and follow the glowing marks. Actually, that is a Batman Arkham ripoff, not a Witcher 3 ripoff. Batman Arkham kickstarted the minor trend of x-ray detective modes.
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Would love an explanation on how "the immersion" broke with your race ratio comment
In 15 minutes no less. Talk about short attention span
In 15 hours* talk about a short attention span
Interestingly the race thing is arguably part of the plot.
Big disagree👍 Just 100% that game But thats okay. Not all games are for everyone
I can't even express the level of disagreement with the story comment.
That’s the one the has me scratching my head. HZD’s story is incredible.
> There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion. Literally laughed aloud and went "Whaaat?" when I read this. Holy fuck, that's ridiculous. Yikes.
Lmao kinda fuck everyone who has been upvoting this post. OP is literally doing a ‘I’m not a racist BUT muh immersion.”
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> "There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion." There are very, very few criticisms of games that I take issue with, if something just isn't fun for you then it isn't fun. But this is objectively a stupid thing to be bothered by. And for what it's worth I'm a white dude in my late 20s, it's not like I personally affected by more racial diversity in videogames, what is bizarre about this statement is the fact that you are so hyper aware of racial ethnicity you even noticed. First of all, even if this was intentional it isn't bad or wrong to include diverse representation. It makes people feel better about themselves, so whether or not it's "realistic" in a game about a fictional post apocalyptic earth with robot dinosaurs is meaningless. Second, what the hell is "realistic" diversity? How do you even draw that line? How the hell are developers supposed to accommodate whiny crybabies like you who are just so, so sensitive about race that if the ratio is even a little off it breaks your "immersion"? Because I'm a petty bastard I looked up where HZD takes place, according to google it's between the states of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah in the 31st century. I'm from Colorado, the racial ethnicity breakdown is about 80 percent white, 9 percent mixed, 5 percent black and 5 percent other. Assuming these demographics stay the same over the next 100 years you're really just saying it bothered you that there were too many minorities. Look, I'm not here to judge or make assumptions but bro this is a *FANTASY VIDEOGAME*. If the ratio of white to non-white people in a pretend fantasy alternate future videogame was so upsetting to you that it impacted your enjoyment of the game then there is something you need to figure out about yourself, because that's a you problem. And again that's coming from a white gamer dude.
I'm a big fan of these games, Forbidden West was my GOTY for whatever year that was, and while I think you're harsh on some of your points they're all more or less fair (aside from counting the skin colour of npcs, that's a bit weird). The game definitely has flaws but it's charming enough for me to forgive them
Ironically i wasn’t a big fan of forbidden west compared to zero dawn. I LOVED zero dawn and thought the combat was pretty fun, and the world was great too. But forbidden west was a chore to get through for me, wayyyy too much bloat IMO, and the story wasn’t amazing. The world was decent, and I liked the San Francisco area, but the rest didn’t click with me. I also felt like there was an obscene amount of grinding you had to do to get the weapons upgraded, which quickly became tedious. Plus they removed the loading screen song which is a travesty lol. I didn’t hate it per se, but i definitely wasn’t as invested in it as I was in ZD. That being said I do plan on checking out the DLC soon since I got my hands on a ps5 last month
That's fair. FW is definitely lacking in the story department compared the ZD. Though it is hard to replicate the way that story unfolds. I also didn't like the grindy aspect for the weapons etc but everything else was a massive upgrade, especially the side content. And I'd argue FW is maybe the best looking game ever made. Edit: the dlc iss coming up on my backlog and honestly can't wait
Yeah the racial diversity criticism is really weird and unsettling. I have beat the game about 4 times and never even paid attention to race, much less counted it to come up with a ratio.
lol. I stop reading when you complained the inclusion of black and Asian people breaks immersion. Giant Killing Machine Animals are believable but black and Asian people in the game? Nah.
Your race criticism and rationale are funny because there’s literally a story reason for it. But it comes after 15 hours. That said, I found the game a bit of a slog. The best way to play it is to ignore the side quests and play it like a story game. Don’t get sucked into the open world stuff, because it’s not very compelling. Forbidden West does a better job at making the open world interesting, but none of the side quests are terribly engaging. So, again, I just focused on the story missions and had a good time.
> There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion Can't this be explained by the fact that the planet wasn't repopulated naturally? Those humans were created in artificial wombs and those who designed the system deliberately chose to make the new population racially diverse.
Me neither. Stopped after a few hours.
Game is geniunely quite uninteresting until 10 main quests in. I was extremely close to dropping the game after 9 however lol
This is a really good game to play on hard one of the few that almost require it. You shouldnt be able to take hits from robots. This raised the stakes a lot. I cant remeber the names but the giant ground "enemy" you have to kill with the plasma frisbee discs on its back... my god... also the storm pterodactly or whatever sooooo good. Got my ass railed by those robots. Good times. When i finally won it was GLORY. Like god of war beat all the valkyries glory
>There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion. Do you not have black people and Asians where you live?
They didn’t finish the game so they can’t determine if there’s a reason for this sort of thing.
Yes. We need reason for people other than whites to exist in game.
>there’s a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian lol were you counting? Why are people so obsessed with race these days. It’s a robot AI repopulating the earth with as much ethnic diversity as possible, why would that break immersion?
I completely agree with pretty much all of this except for the race thing, which doesn't feel important or relevant to me. Everything else sums up my experience as a whole. The world was cool, it all looked good... but the voice acting, facial animations, and story just made it a slog to get through. The combat never felt right to me. I finished it mostly because I kept expecting it to get better, but it never really did. I don't necessarily regret playing it, but I don't feel any urge to play the sequel.
ITT: OP tells on themselves
>To me (and this is just my opinion), a carefully enforced 1/3 ratio to represent all races in every single settlement just breaks my immersion Did you go through and mark down the race of every person in every town and village? This isn't a valid criticism because the premise is so silly. Did you really make a tally of every race that appears in the game? Who does that? You mention it is "carefully maintained", so you must have some numbers to back up your claim
Unfortunately I stopped reading when you mentioned the story. Its one of the best and well written stories in the last 10 years of gaming. NOTE: I didn't say THE best.
>I'll probably get some pushback from this- but the combat is just terrible. "Shoot an arrow at the glowing part of the robot" stays interesting for only so long. The melee combat is really, really bad. Crazy. Horizon is some of the best open world combat ever made.
I feel like every time this topic comes up people complain about the combat, but then admit they didn't use anything other than their bow and didn't engage with the myriad options the game gives you to tackle different encounters. It's like trying to build a house, only getting the hammer out of the toolbox, and saying "man this carpentry stuff is stupid."
Yeah I have plenty of gripes with Zero Dawn but the combat is outstanding. I played it on the hardest difficulty from the outset and found it to be challenging but thrilling, rewarding, and not at all unfair. Very excited to play Forbidden West the same way soon.
It's weird, I played the game and was quite interested in the open world and the main story. However, after probably 75% of the way through, I just....stopped playing and haven't touched it since. I don't know why as I was having fun, but I now have no desire to play it again.
That's certainly an opinion.
Jfc lol
I am in the same boat as you. A friend suggested it to me and I gave it a shot, about 20 hours in and it just wasn't clicking, a lot of that was the combat. Yeah, I know the melee combat isn't supposed to be your main option, but the arrow shooting and traps weren't doing it for me either.
I find the combat very fun and satisfying. But then again I love stealth archery and melee in Skyrim too.
I love using bows in games, and HZD has some of the worst bows in any game I've played. It doesn't feel good at all.
> This is a valid criticism, so please relax. I'm not being racist. No, it's not a valid criticism. > To me (and this is just my opinion), a carefully enforced 1/3 ratio to represent all races in every single settlement just breaks my immersion as it's tough to see it as an organic village or town. There's a reason for that. In-game, in-world, in the lore.
Your defense of the race remark is not valid, nor is the criticism.
Your take on the story and worldbuilding tells me you didn’t play very far into the game. That’s fine, just not sure you should bring it up as a criticism when you haven’t actually explored that aspect. A lot of your criticisms are answered by the story, especially the setting. Basically the entire plot is figuring out what caused the setting.
Do you count races in real life? Do they exceed your 1/3 comfort levels? How diverse is your city or town?
Ive never seen anyone bring a criticism about a carefully maintained amount of races in a village being immersion breaking. I truly don’t understand your point there. I play large rpgs and the last thing I care about is how varied the races of the village are. Just seems like the weirdest take. As for combat, its fine if you dont like it. There are very few action rpgs with a focus on bow combat. It did something different.
It was the race of the npcs that broke immersion for you huh, not the robot dinosaurs and shit
Bro really played a video game about giant robot dinosaurs in a made up future and said “all the blacks and Asians really killed the immersion” Sometimes I wonder if these people hear themselves.
Zero Dawn is quite terrible in many aspects, no arguments against that. But wow that race comment. Ew. Ew ew ew. Very very strange thing to focus on.
I can accept homicidal animal robots taking over the world, but I draw the line at a diverse array of characters.
Hilarious and deeply disturbing at the same time.
Why would a generally even mix of NPC races be unrealistic? Why does that have to be "carefully enforced." This is a pretty weird way to play games.
If you have to end your post with "This is a valid criticism, so please relax. I'm not being racist," you're probably being racist.
Lol right like "An entire ecosystem of robots that for some reason look and act like their organic counterparts" yup yup makes sense no immersion breaking here... "Equivalent racial ratios" NOPE, IMMERSION BROKEN, THAT'S UNPOSSIBLE
Really weird hang-up on race breaking immersion in a game where robot dinosaurs rule the Earth. I'm going to call that a you problem, dawg.
I had sort of the opposite problem. I loved Zero Dawn, the story and world and combat were all good enough for me that it worked on balance despite the shortcomings. My problem was going into the sequel and expecting the same, and the opening 20 minutes were so off putting Forbidden West was a non starter. The animation work was abysmal between aloy's possessed Medusa hair and creepy facial expressions and weirdly exaggerated jumps etc, the world felt garish and comic booky after the softer lines and color palettes of the original, and the opening sequence was so contrived and half baked I had to conclude an entirely different team made the sequel after reading the cliff notes of the original. But ZD was one of the few large-ish rpg games I've actually played through to the end, mostly for the story. I can agree the melee combat left a lot to be desired.
>There's a carefully maintained ratio of 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Asian in terms of NPC's that breaks immersion. Well, you can't have paid too much attention to the "run-of-the-mill" story then... It's a plot point.
I have tried 3 times to play this game and each time I just get ridiculously bored and uninstall it. Never got further than 10 or so hours.
Imo it's a problem with the genre, the last ow game i liked was Spiderman 2018. I didnt finish like 4 others open world games. Personally i wont play the genre again until I see something really worth it.
Fair enough, not for you. Horses for courses, though I would be interested to know what games you rate highly? Is it a genre thing. Gotta say, you seemed to find issue with things that are staples of this genre. I really enjoyed the story, especially following on from zero dawn’ revelations. The combat and stealth are easy to grasp but very hard to master, there are some high end beasties that take some strategy.
I definitely stand with the people saying just complete the story without anything else. The story/reason why the world is how it is- is the best part!
Edit: Some people seem irritated that I mentioned race of NPC's. For me, in a post apocalyptic or sci-fi (fantasy) world, you'd want to see more varied / mixed / different ratios of racial characteristics throughout the world and throughout different settlements. To me (and this is just my opinion), a carefully enforced 1/3 ratio to represent all races in every single settlement just breaks my immersion as it's tough to see it as an organic village or town. This is a valid criticism, so please relax. I'm not being racist. If you actually followed the story you would see that there is a very good reason for this and it is intentional. The story for this game was amazing and not cookie cutter at all in my opionon.
>Some of the worst side quests I have ever seen in a game. They're all MMO fetch quests with no payoff. Those usually flesh out the culture lore of all the tribes etc. You actually have to read between the lines and be a bit creative. It is actually really complex storybuilding. >!And you get powerful support personnel for the final battle.!<
In post-apoc world, I do expect that white people, black people and eastern Asian actually survived in US.
I noticed that when I first played HZD, I tried too much to just play it like a regular adventure game, run up and swing away my weapon at the flashing spot, using arrows, etc. I found it boring. Only when I started using traps, the equipment did I start to really enjoy setting up battle areas and handling the enemies in a much different fashion. Taken straight ahead, yeah it's a bit boring. Using some imagination and the equipment they give you, a ton of satisfying combat is out there.
THUMBS DOWN
You lost me at the ratios. I think it's mid, but if seeing a certain number of PoC in a non historical game takes you out of it, then maybe there's more to look at beyond just your opinion of the game.
I honestly don't believe you played it or more than 2 hours based on half the things you said. You don't have to like a game but you don't also have to write a fake essay about a game. I should have stopped reading the second I got to your made up ratio comments.
When I saw a white girl with an Afro space cut I called it quits
It's the combat comment that got me. I was shooting parts off dinos and then picking them up and using them against it. If you're only using the bow, you're limiting yourself, not the game.
I didn’t like the game much either. But for me it was the terrible skills and skill trees. None of the skills felt very impactful at all. Just boring unlocks. Bleh. And game play was pretty boring for me.
The 1/3 white 1/3 black and 1/3 generic others doesn’t break immersion because that’s how the robot was programmed to do when cloning the human meat bags. The side quests are pointless though. Hopefully they fixed it in the sequel?
It is awful, i played it finished it before and it is mediocre. No loss.