About a year and a half ago, I first discovered the world of Horizon in the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn. I was absolutely enamored with this world. It’s so strange and primordial, yet it’s so familiar that it makes you feel like a stranger on your own planet. Horizon is the world about 1000 years into the future, in which an apocalypse has caused humanity to be reverted to tribes of hunter-gatherers. And discovering that world was an absolutely fascinating experience, which went hand in hand with the story of this game.

In this game, you play as Aloy, an outcast from her tribe by whom she was treated rather harshly all of her life. She goes on to become a hero of the people, and makes friends in pretty much every tribe she encounters while navigating a vast amount of strange, different customs and cultures. Horizon: Zero Dawn begins with Aloy’s journey as she is coming of age. This game is brilliant because we as players learn the mysteries of the world together with Aloy.

Horizon: Forbidden West continues Aloy’s story after the events of the first game. While the game has been highly praised and I greatly enjoyed playing it, for me it actually wasn’t quite the same mind blowing, and sometimes almost spiritual experience as Zero Dawn was. While gameplay has mostly been improved in Forbidden West, I have three major issues with this game. These concern the itemization, the excessive handholding, and the story.

Let’s start with the itemization: While allover, I did enjoy the UI improvements for the inventory and for managing weapons and armor, I felt that these items have become too complex in Forbidden West when compared to Zero Dawn. Weapons and armor can now be upgraded, and later in the game these upgrades requires insane resources. Furthermore, the coils / weaves to modify weapons and armor have, in my opinion, became too specialized in Forbidden West. I consider myself a semi-casual player, I play mainly for the story and I generally enjoy a lot of the other content, but I get easily bored or annoyed when gaming becomes a grind. I played this game for almost 90 hours, and I barely managed to fully upgrade my main items, whereas in Zero Dawn, I felt great itemization was more achievable.

Ironically, I found that the excessive complexity in the way items can be modified did not quite fit in with the otherwise excessive handholding in the game. Sometimes I felt like the game developers think that I must be stupid, because Aloy literally ruined every puzzle in this game for me by uttering verbal hints. I really, really, really wished there was an option to turn off these hints1, because listening to her repeating the same hints over and over again before I even had a chance to think about the puzzles myself was absolutely infuriating. This was not only the case for puzzles, but also for machines – even there, she would tell me what type of damage to use or not to use all the time. Honestly, these things are fine in a tutorial mission or something, but after that, please let me shut it off. I may be a semi-casual player, but I know how to play the game and I’m not stupid.

In the following paragraphs, spoilers for the story of Forbidden West and Zero Dawn are blurred, hover/tap to reveal. They are marked with FW and ZD, so if you've played Zero Dawn but not Forbidden West, you can decide which spoilers you want to view.

Finally, my biggest problem with Forbidden West was the story. FWThe introduction of the Far Zenith Project took away a lot of the serenity that I experienced in Zero Dawn. In Zero Dawn, you know that this is the world and that’s it. The world of Horizon is a beautiful new world, grown out of mystical ancient times that are long forgotten. Everything in this world has some kind of primeval charm to it, it’s grungy but full of art. I loved how the people of this world interpret remnants of the old world as gods or spirits. The aesthetics of Zero Dawn were phenomenal, and one of the many things why I loved this game so much. FWAnd then came the space people. Knowing that there’s something beyond this beautiful tribal world completely shifted the scope of the world-building in this universe, and suddenly everything felt meaningless to me. Similarly, introducing an entire tribe that uses focuses kind of invalidates Aloy’s uniqueness in this world.

FWFrom there onwards, the story became more and more far-fetched, and I had an increasingly hard time to deal with my suspension of disbelief. Space people… ok then, but space people that are a thousand years old? And weird-ass psychopaths? And then that nemesis thing? Needless to say, I was vastly disappointed by the main story in Forbidden West. To be fair, the story of Zero Dawn, with all its twists and turns, is very difficult to top. ZDThe game starts fairly innocent, with Aloy as a child finding her focus and giving her the ability to see the world in a different light. She uses this tool to discover not only her origin as a clone of a brilliant scientist, but also the true nature of the apocalypse that destroyed the world. This story is told in a very empathic manner. It so much fun to watch the people of this world finding spiritual explanations for things they cannot really understand, such as the mountain being Aloy’s mother. FWAltogether, this feeling is what I missed most when playing Forbidden West. I think the music also played a big role in this, which I felt was way more atmospheric in Zero Dawn.

One thing that I felt was a huge missed opportunity in both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, is the lack of linguistic diversity. Obviously, as a linguist, I would expect that different tribes have different languages. Canonically, the lack of linguistic diversity in the world of Horizon is explained because of ZDthe Apollo databases having been purged, and the cradles having defaulted to English. Therefore, all of the new humans that populated the world were raised with American English as the default language. But still, after ZD700ish years of tribal diversity evolving, it would only be logical to expect different dialects of English to evolve out of that as well. To compare, the TV show The 100 did this very well. There, a new language evolved out of English after only 100 years. In Horizon, however, everyone speaks the same flat American English, whereas I could easily imagine the Nora, Carja, Oseram, Banuk, FWUtaru, Quen, and each of the three Tenakth clans to have their own dialect of English, complete with its own unique phonological features and its own vocabulary. ZD700ish years is a very long time for language to evolve, which you will easily understand if you try to read an English text from that time ago ZD(I recommend some of the The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, they are great fun).

Unfortunately the developers seemed to have decided against linguistic diversity in order to make the game more accessible to users, using arguments such as that it will be harder for users to follow conversations if characters have accents. Personally I think that’s ridiculous, many games use accents as a stylistic tool and to improve the user experience, and a lot scientific research has been done on how the portrayal of language can influence attitudes of recipients. Linguistic diversity would have greatly improved my user experience in Horizon, because to me, everyone speaking American English is just not logical and breaks my immersion to some degree. This was also something that bothered me in Forbidden West FWonce we encounter the character of Tilda van der Meer, who was born and raised in the Netherlands (and thus one would expect Dutch to be her mother tongue). However, there was zero trace of Dutch in her accent, since Carrie-Anne Moss is obviously not Dutch. I assume the developers can explain this away with “the future”, but personally, I would have found the game more believable if she would have actually had an ever-so-slight Dutch accent.

Despite its issues, I still immensely enjoyed playing Forbidden West, especially for all the minor side quests, errands, Erends, NPCs, and some of the activities of the game. The world is beautiful, and especially more so if, like me, you’ve actually visited some of the places in the game. Exploring the sunken ruins of FWSan Francisco or Las Vegas was great fun, as well as gliding through the breathtaking valleys of FWYosemite. I spent over 80 hours traversing this world, and could easily have sunken another 20-30 hours into the gameplay if I would have had ambitions to achieve 100% completion2.

Horizon: Zero Dawn, alongside Frozen Wilds will without a doubt always have a special place in my heart. I love that world, and discovering it together with Aloy was an amazing experience. One day I will play it again from the beginning, and obviously I will also play Forbidden West‘s DLC Burning Shores, once it will be released in April. Until then, I might just continue to explore the Forbidden West, because I’m sure there is still a lot to discover in this fascinating world (and in my case, still plenty of rebels to be taken care of).