The side quests were tied to your overall level, meaning if you were overleveled, you could unlock quests to battles that were only explained way later in the main quest line. Also the Frozen Wilds expansion made more sense if you did them BEFORE the final quarter of the main story line, but the missions themselves were of a higher level than the endgame boss.

Regarding the main quest line, while its quality is noticibly much higher in Zero Dawn than the later game Forbidden West, the way they were structured meant that f you unlocked the extra dialogue (from talking to certain NPCs) out of order, the whole script felt a little jarring.

Tldr: the quest system of Zero Fawn needs a fuckton of polish, not the graphics

[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Agreed. HZD always felt like a game that was built around a story premise first and foremost, which sort of makes sense as that studio had never done a game like that before.

I remember an interview where they were struggling to shift gears from Killzone and looking for new ideas from among their staff when one of their devs pitched HZD's premise. As a result, they approached making an open world action adventure game as complete noobs. This doesn't excuse any of the poor design decisions. I was hoping they'd learn from their mistakes in FW, but they instead made the open world part somewhat better and then forgot to keep the focus on the main quest and characters in the process.

[–] GriffinClaw@lemm.ee 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

This. So much this.

Also, the one incharge of side quests needs a bloody promotion. The side quests quality in Forbidden West was overall as good as the MAIN quest quality in Zero Dawn.

The quest themselves (minus a few misses), the voice acting and mocap, the POLISH. swoon

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