Is That an Open World in the Horizon?

I completed Horizon Zero Dawn a couple of months ago. It's not very typical of me to play plot-driven AAA adventure games but I feel that it's good to keep up with the genre every now and then. The previous similar titles I've played are Batman: Arkham Knight and Grand Theft Auto V. Because these kind of games have many features in common, the thoughts I present below are only partly about Horizon and partly about the whole genre.

I try my best not to mention anything that would spoil the main plot of the game, or much anything else. Still, be wary if you're sensitive to revelations.

Horizon Zero Dawn tells the story of Aloy, a young outcast in a futuristic sci-fi world where mankind is living in small tribes close to nature and large mechanical beasts roam the wilderness. Aloy has two motivators for her adventure; to find out about her origin, and to find out why the previously manageable machines are growing more aggressive.

One theme I want to bring forth from my experience with Horizon Zero Dawn is how it suffers from a conflict between mechanics and content. By mechanics I mean systems that drive the game's combat, economy, leveling and other numerical aspects. Content on the other hand is the creative side, the plot, the characters, how the world presents itself.

Visual Presentation

The visuals are stunning. Especially the scenery. I had to pause the game on many occasions just to fire up the Photo Mode and take a screenshot of what I was seeing. Terrain varies from snowy mountains to thick jungles. There's a nice balance of mechanical and natural things. The robots, old ruins and new settlements blend in nicely with wild nature, the landscape and even some weather effects. It was pleasing to run in the game world just because of this visual grandeur. The scenery screenshots here are not from cutscenes but the actual graphics that you see when running in the game world, fighting, scavenging and completing quests.

It's not a funny joke after all?

I do want to point out facial animation, though, because it has recently been a hot topic when Mass Effect 4 came out. I'm not an expert in facial animation by any means but based on the little I've seen it's a very difficult area of game graphics. Horizon Zero Dawn doesn't completely clear it either. There's not much open criticism about it except for this article on Twinfinite. The most jarring facial expression in Horizon Zero Dawn that I saw was Aloy's heartfelt laughter (see screenshot on the right). To me it looked more like a queasy grin and jumped out as inappropriate to the context.

Some of the acting of support characters in cutscenes is delightfully vivid and rich. The greatest highlight for me was Erend. Also Petra stood out positively. The success of an NPC is built not only on voice acting but also on the physical acting through motion capture, how the character is presented visually, how the dialogue is written, and so on. For Erend all this seemed to come together the best, though afterwards I can't point out any particular place where he shone like the star that I feel he is.

Part of Erend's charm surely is in his sense of humour.

Petra is one of the Oseram, a tribe that stood out to me as Tolkien's dwarves.

Main Story and Side Quests

The main story revolves around an interesting sci-fi future where mankind has been reduced to the equivalent of stone age but with some very high-tech aspects remaining around. The fascination of advancing the plot in Horizon Zero Dawn is to find out an explanation to this setting and to understand Aloy's origin. This I found to be one of the strong points in the whole game. The main story and the setting are well presented through cutscenes, audio logs, pieces of text and the landscape.

On the other hand, Horizon turned out weak in numerous side quests. What really bugged me was how good and evil are all treated as binary concepts everywhere. A man is identified as good when he does a good thing. Who opposes him is evil. Evil can be killed. When evil is removed, good can continue doing good things. These moral concepts are on the level of the original Wolfenstein 3D. I expect better writing from a game that has otherwise such high production values.

To be fair, this is the first story-based game for the developer, Guerrilla Games. They had a lot of learning to do to evolve from their earlier FPS titles (the Killzone series) to the mix of open-world and story-based adventure of Horizon Zero Dawn. This behind the scenes video reveals that they had to hire new people to work on the quest content which was a completely new area for them.

Happy Happy Joy Joy

Everything happens too easily for Aloy. She's supposed to be an outcast from a faraway tribe that's looked down on. Yet, wherever she goes she's quick to win people over. If NPCs are not on her side from the get go they comply to let Aloy get her way in nothing but a few lines of dialogue. It's not even a thing that the player has to accomplish by choosing the right things to say. Most of the dialogue is linear.

An example of this is when Aloy reaches a hunting club of sorts. She faces their leader, Ahsis, who is a selfish man and an outright racist and sexist who clearly holds deep contempt for the lowly outcast that Aloy is. He tells Aloy that she's "stinking up our lodge, pestering your betters." When Aloy expresses her wish to join the club I expected the man not to pay any attention and just keep Aloy out of the club by force, withdrawing out of reach behind a large group of supporters. What actually happened was that Aloy and Ahsis engaged in a light one-on-one verbal bout where it only took a couple of witty comments from Aloy to convince Ahsis to let Aloy prove her worth. This was a complete waste of a decent dramatic setup. Ahsis could have been a strong antagonist to Aloy but he was reduced to a silly little man in seconds.

Even Ahsis, one of the most condescending persons, gave in after a few lines of dialogue.

There are errands where Aloy has to deal with thieves and other lowlives. The pattern of side quests became clear all too soon: there are no bad endings. When a thief has stolen a precious item it will be returned to the owner at the end of the quest. Not only does the wrongdoing get righted in a peaceful way but the thief himself often turns out to be quite a sympathetic character. It's as if the writers tried to evoke in the player the feeling that "Aw, I thought this guy was evil but he's okay after all. Everyone's actually really nice. Couldn't we all just get along?" And so Aloy tends to end up helping not only the crime victim but also the perpetrator. If someone dies in a quest it often conveniently happens so that the guy was either "evil" or chose to die as an atonement for his past actions. There are just no compromises to be made. There are no meaningful choices for the player, and these small storylines didn't present settings that I'd believe to happen in any normal society.

No, Kindiv. Please stick to what you started and ignore the happy plotline!

To be fair, there are also dramatic losses that are not happy endings, at least in the main story. In fact after the first few hours of gameplay I was already comparing Horizon Zero Dawn to Game of Thrones. It's not a fair comparison in the end, however, as most things turn out well in Horizon.

Open World vs Story

Balancing how the player spends time in the open world playground and in the main plot seems problematic. Perhaps a dozen hours into the game I thought the main plot was about to end. I didn't want to finish the main content so soon, so I purposefully spent the next dozens of hours roaming the lands completing side quests. By the time I was mostly done with the side quests that I could find I continued with the main plot that I expected to end within one or two more missions. But it didn't. In fact I was only a fraction into the main storyline content. The story pushed the game forward a bit and refreshed how the world felt by fleshing out certain influential factions. That could have been good had the pacing not failed so massively for me.

I actually felt like I failed at feeding on the stream of missions. It was like I should have been playing the main story missions more evenly instead of spending so much time exploring the world. Rationalizing my feeling, I think it's Horizon that failed at presenting its content in a way that doesn't feel like a puzzle of arranging the gameplay pieces into a sequence so that the player gets a maximal amount of entertainment out of it. It feels kind of wrong to play a lot of the side quests because as Aloy advances in skills and gear and the player advances in play skill, fighting becomes more routine activity and quests throughout become more trivial to complete. The more I play the more the world reduces from a fascinating, lush and exciting experience into a bare set of mechanical systems that I manipulate with precision to reach desired outcomes.

The failure was that my experience of the game was divided between first doing a lot of mechanical completionistic errands and then jumping into scripted set pieces. These are two very different modes of play. The former encourages exploration (though only in a narrow sense, I'd say) and the latter is mostly about consuming a predetermined story through text, audio logs and cutscenes. Exploration is typically paced with small cutscenes, short dialogue, and throwaway characters, while story consumption is formed from AAA cinematic content littered with forced combat scenes and small tasks like acrobatic rock wall climbing and simple logic puzzles.

An example of a forced combat scene is when Aloy faces one of the main antagonists in combat. She's thrown into a small courtyard that has no exits. The enemy is standing there with a handful of henchmen and a bunch of evenly spaced explosives. This setup rules out stealth play altogether because there are no places to hide. The explosives are a clear aid to combat as Aloy can blow them up at a distance. The henchmen attack Aloy first and they are relatively simple to take down first just because they have a lot less health than the boss itself. Fighting the boss is limited to melee combat. Arrows just don't damage him. In fact the boss (a mere human) blocks arrows using nothing more than his bracer! Even heavy weapons are ineffective against him even though they cause massive damage to huge armored machines. All these limitations are in strong contradiction to the open world aspects of Horizon. In the wilderness you can be stealthy or direct, you can engage enemies in melee or ranged combat, and you can choose to kill everything or just avoid physical conflict. In this particular boss fight you are forced to kill directly in melee.

This gun should pierce steel armor as thick as the man who just ignores its effects.

I wonder what purpose did the open world part of Horizon serve. I felt a strong contradiction in the two halves of my playthrough, the open world half and the plot half. These two halves were united in the presentation by sharing the same setting and characters but considering the game mechanics they could have been two different games. I don't think leveling up, unlocking skills, finding new weapons or learning ways to deal with the machines had anything to do with following the plot. They are actions that suit the open world play and give a sense of achievement and progress in the otherwise mostly unconnected side tasks. Following the plot, however, required me to literally stop playing the game, at least from the perspective of combat mechanics, inventory management and other drivers of the open world. Advancing the main plot involved me reading text, listening to audio and following cutscenes. Think about it! The player operating these plot-carrying devices does not in any way go together with the actions that support open world play.

I'm not sure it makes much sense to put a linear main plotline and an explorable open world in the same game even though it is very common these days. I see these two components almost contradictory. Because developing the content for a plotline is very costly for the developer the plot must practically be linear. A linear plot doesn't allow the player to explore. Yet exploration is a core tenet of open world games. I suppose that many AAA games want to be open world because it's a trend.

Players probably expect to see the words "open world" somewhere in the marketing material of an AAA title or otherwise the game will feel limited or outdated. I have to admit that also I personally think less of a game that doesn't give me some kind of freedom to roam the land. At the same time I'm often disappointed when I experience the free roaming in practice. It's often implemented with simplistic mechanics which the player can quickly spot behind the (usually excellent) presentation. I also have to admit that I have very much enjoyed completely linear plot-driven games such as The Wolf Among Us and Gone Home even though I was initially somewhat reserved about them.

A universal game trope: seagull shit stains on rock wall denotes a climbing task.

What comes to the open world of Horizon, there's very little actual exploration in it. Relevant quantities (experience, cash, difficulty) are presented clearly in numbers, quest goals are clearly marked locations on the map, points of interest are evenly scattered on the map, the traversable area is clearly defined. Everything that you can do has a singular possible outcome: completion. There is not even an option to fail. At best you can ignore a task (which still allows you to complete it later) or you can die (in which case you will resume a previous save point and try again). There are no secrets and mysteries anywhere other than what relates to the main plotline. All of the side content is just a safe playground with categorized activities sprinkled around evenly. This here is a zone of machines that you can kill. This here is a zone of humans that you can kill. This here is a wall that you can climb. Yay? Nay. That part of Horizon that is called "open world" and even "role-playing" is technically a set of checkboxes. The presentation is just a lot nicer than in the average tax form.

I recall that early in the game when I stepped forth from the starter area to the bigger world, it did feel exciting. Even though I ran along a road I was being careful. Every once in a while I felt the need to stop and look around just to make sure that no huge machine was going to attack me. And sometimes they did! I got my ass handed back to me a few times. It was exciting because it felt like a non-trivial challenge and because I didn't know what to expect. It didn't last for too long though.

Fighting

Fighting in Horizon Zero Dawn is interesting. Before I get into it, let me tell a little bit of background first. I've played World of Tanks a lot. Shooting tanks is always compelling because there is a multitude of details that affect the outcome of a battle. Most importantly, it matters where you hit the enemy. The thickness of the armor of a tank varies wildly from spot to spot. The front of a tank often has the thickest armor but there are also certain weak spots like the lower front plate or commander's cupola. If you hit thick armor your shot won't penetrate and has no effect on the enemy. If you do manage to penetrate the armor you will inflict plain damage but there's also a chance that you hit some critical component inside the tank such as the radio or the engine. For example damaging the engine will slow the tank down, and destroying the fuel tank will set the tank on fire.

Horizon's fighting mechanics is similar to that of World of Tanks in this respect. Aloy uses mostly ranged weapons and the machines which are typical opponents have armor plates and critical components. Destroying critical components will produce varying effects such as setting the machine on fire, dropping a useful part on the ground, or even causing a massive explosion. I really like this complexity as it gives the player multiple optional subgoals on the way to reach the final goal of destroying the enemy. At least on paper.

In practice fighting is largely trivialized after getting the hang of the game. In the early tutorial gameplay sequence, our mentor says "You must learn to avoid [Watchers'] gaze if you are to survive in the wilds". A few hours into the game it becomes clear that watchers don't pose a serious threat to Aloy. All it takes is one arrow in the right spot or a couple of swings of the spear and a curious watcher turns into a convenient handful of metal shards (currency) and a couple of crafting ingredients. As the game progresses and Aloy gathers more powerful weapons and acquires handy skills also many other machines become simple to kill. Even stalkers which in the game's lore are nearly mythical beasts that are seriously dangerous can be taken out without any special cunning; just bash them on the head repeatedly or bathe them in fire. I feel like the game wastes another great opportunity when the mechanics of combat don't match the game world lore.

Where World of Tanks succeeds over fighting in Horizon is that player-controlled tanks are very evenly matched. Most of the time you can't win a battle by standing still and firing repeatedly in the general direction of the enemies. There is a little bit of power progression within each tank but in battle it's wise to assume that every opponent is maxed out to some degree. If you're not maxed out you'd better lay low and engage only in easy opportunities. In World of Tanks you need to respect the opposition. In Horizon the respect wanes as soon as you realize how powerful you really are, leaving the player roaming arrogantly wherever she pleases.

An example of how even difficult fights can be trivialized is how I cleared a corrupted zone that was occupied by two Rockbreakers. They are huge machines that burrow like moles. My first couple of attempts were doomed because the machines like to dive underground to avoid damage and then dive back up right under me. I realized that this fight was one that I couldn't win by brute force. After a little wiggling around I realized that the moles would not follow me outside their zone. So I walked across the invisible zone border and shot a million arrows at the Rockbreakers. For most of the fight I could just stand still and keep firing arrows. Occasionally the machines would throw a stream of rocks at me but that was easy enough to dodge. I felt like I cheated the game but I also didn't feel compelled to find an alternative fair strategy. The fight was broken to me and all that remained was to get it over with. It reminded me of my earlier encounter with a snow troll on Skyrim's Throat of the World.

Not all fights are trivial. The above fight with a Thunderjaw is an example of how some fights can be genuinely challenging and take good use of the complex features of Horizon's fighting mechanics. It's essential that this fight happens in confined space, ruling out the cheat-like invisible border tactic I used with the Rockbreakers. To minimize incoming damage I try to take out some of the Thunderjaw's components. Towards the end of the fight I'm mostly trying to hit the weak spots that have been exposed under armor plates that have fallen off by explosions. Throughout the fight I also have to do my best to dodge the machine's attacks. Given my dodgy dodging skills, it's good that I'm carrying lots of health potions. :-)

Climbing

Climbing is visually stunning and the stunts Aloy pulls are probably impossible in real life. Yet it's practically impossible for the player to fail at climbing. Aloy never loses her grip and the player's role is only to spot the parts of the wall that can act as grips and push the controller stick in that direction. Most of the time the only problem is to find where the climb is supposed to start. Once you get the first grip you can pretty much complete it by just pushing in right the general direction (mostly up) and pushing the jump button at times. I found it jarring that climbing was impossibly difficult for Aloy but dead simple for the player. I was left wishing for more coherence in the difficulty levels.

Let's make a provocative comparison. Horizon Zero Dawn's climbing subgame vs. Frogger.

Horizon Zero Dawn climbing subgame (Guerrilla Games 2017)

• Push controller in the direction where you want to move.
• The goal is to reach the top of the climbing trail.
• Lush lifelike 3D presentation.
• You can not fail because only safe moves are allowed.
• There are no environmental hazards.
• There are no bonuses.

Frogger (Konami 1981)

• Push controller in the direction where you want to move.
• The goal is to reach the top of the screen.
• Ascetic mechanical 2D presentation.
• You can fail by not timing correctly.
• There are moving obstacles like cars to avoid.
• There are moving safe areas like logs you have to travel on.
• There are random bonus flies to collect.

Both Frogger and the Horizon climbing subgame have similar controls and similar goals. Frogger has more involved mechanics which I claim allow for more versatile and engaging play experience whereas Horizon's climbing subgame is barren in mechanics but engages the player in its presentation. I wish there was a game that combined the lush presentation and compelling mechanics.

More about Open Worlds

Horizon Zero Dawn in its attempt to be an open world game misses two important points of an open world game: Exploration and Influence. Exploration means giving the player the possibility of finding out meaningful and surprising things. Influence means that the game world reflects the player's actions and lets the player feel like he's changing things and the things that he does are meaningful.

Exploration is ruined, as in many other similar games, by giving a map with clearly marked borders. When I started Horizon for the first time, after the first tutorials when I was given the chance to run around in the world the first thing I did was to open the map. It's what I like to do in open world games as a first check how the game deals with spatial exploration. What I saw was a clearly marked border that denoted the play area. What it tells me is that the game very much dictates where I can go and which routes I can travel. Strict world border in itself doesn't mean that spatial exploration is ruined but I've learned to take it as a telltale sign. Later into the game when I had explored much of the world, I opened the map again and saw the map littered with very evenly spaced points of interest.

Adventure and exploration suffer when content is distributed like peanut butter on toast.

The fact that the points are so evenly placed is another sign to me that the game's design doesn't (or didn't, as at that point I had already gone through most of the content) cater for surprises. The world is designed for consistent delivery of content. It's a compromise where the next "interesting thing" is never too far away, meaning that the player won't have to wade through contentless space, but also that the things are not that interesting because they can be expected and they repeat a handful of patterns. I want to borrow good argumentation from Paul of Strat-Edgy Productions. He argues that open world content is better tied to the world in natural ways instead of sprinkling templated points of interest around the map. I haven't tried the Gothic games yet but they're on my to-play list now.

Back to Horizon Zero Dawn and the second important point of an open world game, influence. Influence is ruined because the most I can do in the world map is to clear out missions. I got the feeling that nothing in the world goes any different no matter what I do. The closest resemblance of influence that I have in the game world is that either I do things or I don't. And not doing things means not playing the game, so it really boils down to having no choice. Even though I can roam around freely and talk to whoever I want and in whichever order I want, there is no meaningful choice anywhere. Anything I can do has only a singular outcome, completion. In a few dialogues there are three options where the player can express personality to a limited degree but random sources confirm that even those don't have a deeper effect on how events in the world turn out.

I understand that branching storylines are very costly to implement and that dynamically generated content is only wishful thinking in AAA games due to how difficult it is to craft an algorithm that produced quality content (after all, quality content takes a team of intelligent humans a lot of time and effort). I think Horizon does well with its story and it's a very enjoyable game altogether.

What's that there? I must find out!

One example that I remember about exploration and influence in Horizon is that one day as I was roaming the wilderness I saw a large body of water. It's unusual, so it naturally caught my full attention. Looking at the horizon (ooh, is that a pun?) I saw buildings. On the map I saw that I hadn't yet been there because the area on the other side of the lake was covered in map fog. So I set out to explore the place expecting to find something interesting. Swimming across the water was no problem, so soon I beached at a pretty empty looking settlement. I climbed some stairs and finally my head-up display showed enemies nearby. They were human. Okay, first of all how did Aloy know they were hostile? That's one immersion-breaking factoid that relates to the annoyingly binary good/bad distinction throughout the game. Enemies are enemies and you recognize them on sight as do they recognize you as a threat. Anyway, I proceeded to kick their ass. No problem there. Their watchtower was weird, though. I found nothing in particular. I felt like the place was missing something. There was nothing else to do so I proceeded onwards.

Much later I was completing a side mission about a young couple that urged me to go explore the watchtower I had cleared out later. I arrived there the same route as before. The same hostile humans were resurrected at their post. Okay, that was a bit weird, but hey, it's a video game and machines spawn endlessly around the world anyway. So I killed all the hostile watchpeople a second time. This time the watchtower had something I hadn't seen before. It was an NPC who happened to be the next waypoint in the side quest I was on. The situation cried lost opportunity right in my face. Lost opportunity of letting the player discover side quests through exploration and letting them influence the world by acknowledging the actions they have taken at important locations.

Imagine this hypothetical game: You could roam the land and stumble upon a watchtower. You'd meet some people inside. Maybe they'd be really wary of who you are. As you couldn't prove that you're one of them and not a spy, they'd try to seize you. Maybe you'd let them or maybe you'd just fight them. Either way, you'd eventually end up in a cell in the tower where you'd meet this other prisoner. He'd tell you the story of the young couple. The story would take off naturally as you stumbled upon its pieces. Could we have this one day?

Why I describe the lack of exploration and influence in Horizon as something being "ruined" is not an intention of blaming Horizon for failure but a lament on the level of modern game development. I take Horizon as a fine specimen of the AAA story-based adventure games. Its shortcomings are challenges to any current game developer. The problems are difficult to solve. I want developers to keep trying and I do believe that little by little game mechanics can advance to a level where exploration and influence are better represented.

-Ville