Those are two different characters.
Dangit. They do look a lot alike. Okay, here’s actual Avad from the first game (according to the wiki):
So much closer to his original model, but I stand by the much more ridiculous headgear comment.
This post sequence just broke my heart because I LOVED Nil, he was my favorite character in zero dawn and I was so hoping he’d show up in this game and I thought this was confirmed…alas given his storyline, I highly doubt it
I see that it’s getting review-bombed by the usual gamer crew.
The art production quality is all over the place in this game. As you said, the character models are fantastic. Their animations are almost as good. The world itself is gorgeous and lush- that moss shader they use is probably the best I’ve ever seen, and the materials guy on the game I’m currently working on is hard at work trying to reverse engineer it.
The VFX, though? Holy hell, they’re bad. They didn’t even try on the fires- they just use the same looping sprite on every campfire and bonfire. They’ve got some sort of flat steam/smoke jet effect that’s used in several places (notably when a cauldron initially opens), and it’s just so… awful. I may be spoiled by using Niagara in UE4.25, though.
They take away my lure whistle AND make the machine parts disappear when I kill them? Ugh. It’s like the game WANTS me to actually have to play it and not just stealth kill every living thing
If you change the difficulty setting to “custom,” there’s a mode called ‘easy loot’ that doesn’t force you to detach parts before the kill if you want to loot them. I don’t feel even a little bit bad for using it.
Can I do this mid-game? I looked all around the settings and couldn’t find this at all, but I also remember making some custom setting when I started like constantly showing me the handholds
Yes.
Accessibility → Difficulty
Set the difficulty to Custom.
That will open up a bunch of granular options. One is called Easy Loot.
Am so getting this for my birthday:
Have now finished the main questline. Still lots of sidequests, pits etc to do. And I’ve not even played Machine Strike yet, beyond the tutorial in Chainscrape, nor taken part in the races.
3 more years to PC port…
After a few dozen more hours, reaching maybe the halfway point of the game (I don’t get to play much, so I’m taking it slow), this early impression is more or less bearing out.
That said, the new melee combos are fun. Whacking a guy, then jumping onto his chest and launching myself up and away and shooting an arrow back at him from midair, is pretty spectacular. There’s a bunch of these, and they add a lot of variety to the first game’s “light swing, heavy swing, rinse and repeat.”
There’s also some practical value: If you and an enemy are whacking away at each other, the less varied your attacks, the more quickly the enemy will adapt and start to parry or dodge. The enemy AI in a general sense (searching, flanking, group strategy, etc.) is okay, but it’s actually pretty good in a melee context; if you’re predictable, each enemy fighter will learn and adjust.
You don’t need to use the combos. You can get by without them. But mixing up your attack style prevents enemies from adapting, and makes you much more effective.
On another topic, I’ve run into a few minor bugs, but a couple of nights ago I hit a big, very weird glitch that I’ve been chuckling about ever since. Here’s the scoop (details obfuscated to minimize spoilers):
There’s a side errand where a local mucky-muck asks you to go find someone. When you arrive, they’re hiding from a big machine. Halfway through the fight, another big machine randomly shows up.
After several tries, I managed to kill the first machine, and then turned my attention to the second. I got in a couple of good hits and bought myself a minute to regroup … and the second machine left. Just headed off, into the distance.
At first I thought, hey, cool, I scared it away, so that must be it, I’m done. But no, I was still standing there with the quest objective, which I was unable to complete because something went janky with the AI’s logic and the target machine decided to GTFO.
There was a nearby campfire, so I tried a hard save and reload. That fixed it. Still, it was a pretty hilarious WTF? moment.
The melee pits in the various Tenakth cities are basically extended melee tutorials. The last one goes into some pretty complex maneuvers - you can chain the combos together in ways I wouldn’t have expected. It’s actually a surprisingly deep fighting system.
One bug I’ve hit - My melee spear just totally stopped working for a main questline boss fight where melee was a big part of it. I managed to get through it just with ranged (thank Gaia for the Warrior Bow!) but it persisted after that and I had to reinstall the game to fix it. The controller was working fine, all other R1/R2 functions worked fine, just not the melee attacks.
I’m not a photo mode person, but I paused the game while Aloy was coming up from some water and had to screenshot it. I used one of the in-game post processing filters to make it pop a bit, but this is pretty much exactly what my paused screen looked like. Unbelievably gorgeous game.
LOL. I just started playing Zero Dawn on PC.
A little weird playing as a girl though. Especially the awkward conversations with some of the goofy male NPCs.
“Yeah…so that’s…not gonna happen…”
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O-- “My eyes are up here”
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“Just fix my bowcaster and shut up”
Slight update - got it, built it, it is awesome!