#hfw npcs

[robo-dino-puppy]

elisabet and GAIA

[ayaitch]

I've got delusional brain syndrome or perhaps its close cousin, fanfic is everywhere brain. As I was getting my quest from these two lovelies, I was considering Dukkah's face paint, and then wondered if I could shoehorn her story into Ikkotah's life because I will find any excuse there is to write about Ikkotah. Bear with me, but here we go.

I imagine Dukkah was a young soldier in Cliffwatch, toddling after Ikkotah and learning from him (I am one of those people who feels that Ikkotah just collects lost and alone children to raise), and she's well on her way to being a great Cliffwatch soldier.

But then! She meets Kalla at the Grove (during a Kulrut event (Kotallo's)? Some other event?) and absolutely falls in love. She's all bummed out and sad when she gets back to Cliffwatch, and Ikkotah detects Heartbreak™  and finds out that she wants to move to the Memorial Grove where Kalla is already on her way to being the Keeper of the Arena (or whatever position that is), but she doesn't want to leave Ikkotah who has already lost Chekkatah to the Memorial Grove, and she doesn't want to abandon him and leave Cliffwatch with, once again, only Ikkotah as the only soldier with any experience.

Cue Ikkotah telling her to follow her head and heart, but getting all sad that he keeps losing people he loves to their higher calling (so to speak), but then later both Chekkatah and Dukkah come back to Cliffwatch for a visit and it's all adorableness and sweet reunion from there. And Ikkotah can meet Kalla and everything is wonderful.

So.... Clearly delusional brain syndrome.

[ravenbraid]

No, trust me Kotallo, my first thought was to murder Tekkoteh too...

[cicadaknight]

i’ll be so real, nothing hits like the horizon series. i’ve played hundreds upon hundreds of hours and i still find new voice lines from npcs, details in settlements and infrastructure i never noticed. it feels so alive and captivating and i would give anything to play it again for the first time.

[horizonzerodawnaesthetic]

I noticed this fancy Carja soldier at the spire, a part of Avad's procession. The Carja may use wing symbolism more than we realize. He was the only one dressed this way.

[reenvhai]

Funny moments of Horizon Forbidden West - Part 2 of ?

The Daunt: Deep Trouble

Bonus:

[elliott6669]

NPCS: The Nora ft. Marea<3

[edgepunk]

I love games where you travel through multiple locations and the fashion and architecture is unique for each area

[notyouranointed]

[robo-dino-puppy]

the idea of home

[ayaitch]

An NPC I haven't encountered before! How many times have I played this game? I obviously need to explore more. Anyway, Emboh here is worried about his buddy Jaxx.

[padmerrie]

as much as i love hfw, the npc dialogue in hzd cannot be beat

[horizon-series-details]

So the Eclipse do make a return for the “Shadow from the Past” sidequest that can be accessed incredibly early on in the game. I was originally going to take a look and talk about the makeup of their weaponry, however they look identical to the Tenakth Rebel weapons you can see rebels in the outposts using. (See below). So instead, I decided I would point out their masks. Above, we can see the mask worn by an Eclipse Lieutenant (left) and Rayad (right), who’s rank is not said, though we can assume he’s a leader.

While to my knowledge, the Lieutenant’s mask isn’t seen anywhere else in either game, Rayad’s is, as it’s the same mask that Cultist Leaders use in Zero Dawn. Him being a leader is also almost promised by the fact that he has a working Focus, which Vezreh uses to pass on mission plans.

[xamiipholia]

Since it’s been a year since Burning Shores came out, some thoughts on Seyka:

TL;DR: Great character, really happy with her as a love interest for Aloy. They do some really interesting things with her that I never really see addressed so I wanted to talk about them.

She is tangibly shown to be much more of a match for Aloy through gameplay. Compared to other npcs, she solves things faster, does more damage, is a much more formidable melee combatant, faster climber - she even has a fucking Valor Surge using her Focus that does pretty significant tear damage to large machines like Slaughterspines. Environmental storytelling- Seyka’s skiff has at least 2-3 Tiderippers’ worth of parts, meaning she’s been out on her own killing the things to build boat motors, and she has some ambient dialogue that strongly suggests she’s fought and killed Slaugterspines before. Is some of this npc tech advancements in Burning Shores? Maybe, but it feels intentional. 

Seyka has a natural probing curiosity about the old world that for the most part Aloy’s other companions didn’t have without some significant hand-holding from Aloy to get them started, and some of her close friend (but not base team) characters just don’t have at all. I don’t mean this as a moral judgement, everyone is different and has different strengths and priorities , but it’s absolutely critical that a partner for Aloy have that kind of curiosity - it’s such a big part of her character. While she lives in this new world, she’s never going to be entirely a part of it. Like she says, she finds belonging in individuals, and not really the tribes. I don’t really see Aloy settling down in Meridian or Mother’s Heart. She needs to have a life of exploration and discovery and Seyka seems cut from that cloth too, whether she was always that way or being marooned gave her a fresh perspective.

Seyka did risk death using the focus and decided to do it anyway- in Rheng’s notes he calls for capital punishment for her. The threat is never *too* present but honestly I think that’s a broader critique of the series and pretty consistent with the writing of conflicts in Horizon. I agree they could have played up the dramatic tension a bit, but this is a person who weighed the risk of a military execution by a totalitarian state and immediately decided it was worth it to save her sister and others. I think Aloy can intimately relate, given what she went through for Beta.

Even though it’s a DLC, she has a TON of screen time, probably comparable to Kotallo in HFW, and Horizon does SO much storytelling through gameplay and ambient dialogue. I think she’s given a LOT of narrative space to breathe. She’s also has her own musical cues and leitmotifs that do a ton of foreshadowing work through the DLC - in terms of musical cues and framing she’s very associated with the acoustic guitar, and the flute melody in ‘Her Sky, Her Sea’ has for Aloy and Seyka the same function that ‘It Can’t Last’ does for Ellie and Dina in TLOU2 - next time you play Burning Shores, listen for it. That and the guitar cues from ‘The Idea of Home’ and ‘For His Entertainment’ do a lot of emotional work. It’s great stuff.

Okay and lastly- YMMV on this one - I’ve def talked about it with friends before but I don’t think I’ve said it on Tumblr. I’m a firm believer that meta narratives and the way that stories are situated and created in our own world matter and that art deserves to be taken seriously and dissected. I love Horizon, but it, and Aloy as a protagonist, are absolutely drenched in white savior and colonial storytelling tropes. Every time I play Frozen Wilds, all I can think of is Jack Sparrow going “and then they made me their chief”. There’s a lot of iffy stuff in the games, as much as I absolutely love them. We’ll have to see how H3 goes, but Burning Shores is MUCH better about this and honestly Seyka is a huge part of it. The story centers itself on a queer woman of color who is pretty tangibly presented as Aloy’s equal with her own strengths and weaknesses throughout the story and takes the lead just as often if not more than Aloy does, which I find really refreshing. It doesn’t entirely fix Aloy’s white savior issues but I think it’s a really good move for the narrative that continues the themes found in HFW about community and connection.

Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds (2017)

[semperintrepida]

Been taking a break from writing to replay Horizon Forbidden West—with the hope of actually finishing it this time around—and damn, this game is such a mixed bag of strengths and flaws. I like it quite a bit but it's a disappointment compared to its predecessor.

(This will be a spoiler-free offering of thoughts about the game.)

The opening storyline is so, so frustrating in how it undermines Aloy's exceptionalism at every fucking turn, an especially egregious blunder in a story where Aloy must be exceptional for certain plot beats in the later acts to hit with their intended impact. (Ask me sometime how I would rewrite the opening act of HFW to give Aloy the respect Elisabet Sobeck deserves.)

Story aside, the other frustration I have with the game is the combat system, which took the beautiful purity of the first game's bow-and-arrow based combat and made it overly complicated and fussy. Just give me bows, a few simple traps, and some specialized bow-like weapons (like the tripcaster). I don't need a machine gun, a wannabe melee combat system, or a fucking skill tree. A skill tree? You're telling me that Aloy is not already one of the most accomplished archers and huntresses on earth? That she somehow forgot how to place more than two traps in the field at a time? Needlessly dumb.

The draw in Horizon has always been the arrow versus the machine, cracking the puzzle of machine behavior and weakpoints. It's not dumping points into melee and healing so Aloy can tank a direct swipe from a Thunderjaw's tail. (We saw how that approach worked with Redmaw in one of the best moments in the first game!)

All the new machines are sick as fuck, though, especially the big boys (and girls or whatever).

Which brings me to the things HFW does well. Very rarely do I come across writing that makes me care about new characters so quickly, but HFW manages it with remarkable frequency. Sidequest NPCs are often so immediately memorable and compelling that even though I'm trying to focus on the main questline, I keep getting sidetracked wanting to help them out.

As in the first game, certain characters come to prominence in the story, some even choosing to join Aloy in accomplishing her mission. These characters are written and performed beautifully. They feel like real people with their own motivations, alive and distinct.

I love how HFW tells us more about the Utaru and Tenakth, who are mentioned but barely seen in the first game. The Utaru experience is uncomfortably close to listening in to a board meeting of my local hippie granola grocery co-op—are the Utaru all from Marin? I ask this fondly—while the Tenakth... Well, let's just say they're a fabulous surprise.

Guess I had a lot to say about HFW on a Sunday morning! 😅 I'll close by summarizing my experience of the game in a pithy line: After my first attempt at playing HFW, I didn't remember any of the story but I sure remembered the people Aloy met along the way.

[elliott6669]

Vanasha 1/?