Review: Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn is a game developed by Guerrilla Games and published by Sony. Guerrilla Games is a sub-component of Sony, which makes the game PS4 exclusive.

The game features a tribal girl, Aloy (pronounced E-loy) and focuses on her adventure through the land, tracking down her mother and stopping many various threats and helping many people along the way., and eventually fighting a greater evil.

The one clincher about this game is that most of the game is ranged weapon based, fighting mechanical robot animals, which made it stick out when it was first announced.

The game gathered critical acclaim from many video game reviewing websites and was an extremely hot item, the game is expected to sell between 4 to 8 million units in 2017, and it highly deserves it.

Horizon Zero Dawn revolves around a few things: ranged combat, melee combat, stealth tactics, and overriding machines. Since a lot of the world is inhabited by machine animals, at a point in the game you learn how to override and turn to your side, a lot of the machine animals. If the player goes to locations that are marked "Cauldrons" in the world, they can learn to override every machine animal and give the player a fighting chance.

The ranged combat in the game revolves around using a bow & arrows and bomb-type weapons. The bow and arrow weapons have 3 separate types of bows: One being a general all purpose use bow, the second being a sharpshooter's bow with an increased zoom and damage, and the third being an "elemental" bow per se. 

The normal bow, the end tier of which is the Shadow Hunter's Bow, has generally improved arrows, normal arrows, and fire arrows. 

The Shadow Sharpshooter's Bow is again, a sharpshooting bow. It comes with arrows that can knock components off of mechanical beasts, letting you pick them up (A Ravager's plasma cannon or a Thunderjaw's Disc Launcher) or picking up mechanical components to craft different things in your inventory or to craft ammo. The next ammo for the Sharpshooter Bow is the normal Sharpshooter arrows. These do roughly 30% more damage than the Hunter's Bow's improved arrows on the Shadow version, but they take as a tradeoff, about 20-30% longer on the draw for the bow. The third type of arrows are Harvest Arrows, but at the time of this writing I have not used them, but I would assume they assist in harvesting materials from machines/animals in increased capacities. 

The next bow is the Shadow War Bow, being the elemental arrow shooting bow. The third tier of the bow shoots shock, freeze and corrupt arrows. Corrupt arrows are interesting because they allow you to distract mechanical animals at a distance by corrupting them, and having them fight the other "normal" mechanical animals that are around.

There are also sling weapons, or rather, "slingshot" weapons. The first one uses 3 elements, frost, fire, and shock. These are applied through the use of shooting medium, hand sized spheres at opponents to apply the specified elemental effect. Personally I used the frost effect a lot, because of the damage increasing effects of the frost effect. Basically frosting them up, then spamming the normal Shadow Bow arrows to pretty much 75% more damage on whatever I'm fighting. Extremely useful for fighting large beasties as well as small ones.

The second "slingshot" weapon fires exploding spheres with different properties. The first property lets you lay proximity bombs that explode when an enemy walks near it. It also tosses the enemy to the ground, for you to rush in and get a critical hit in/critical kill. You can also fire these directly at enemies to have them immediately explode for the same amount of damage, which is smaller than the other two kinds of ammo. The next kind of ammo is the normal lobbing bomb that does roughly 100-130 points of damage to a machine and is capable of knocking humans to the ground and knocking down smaller machines, and bigger machines if you're assailing them with tons of fire. The third type is sticky bombs, which, so far I have just used like normal lobbing bombs. The bombs stick to their opponents and do a mid-range of damage between the normal bombs and the proximity bombs.

There are other, specialty weapons in the game, but all in all, the weapons are a core part of the game, and extremely well done, particularly the ones that are used the most, being the bows and slings. I'll leave those specialty weapons to be discovered, wink wink.

Next, I want to talk about overriding machines. Overriding machines lets you turn a machine to fight for you instead of against you. In this unfortunately, in the beginning you can only override Watchers, which, while serve as a useful distraction, don't really do much in the way of damage, unless you somehow get to override like, 5 at a time, which is extremely unlikely. Also, your overridden machines don't follow you anywhere either, they stay to one localized area, which is a shame, because if the machines recognized who you were (minor plot point) and the game said so so they followed you, it'd be a nice way to make a small machine army. But as it stands, nope.

Melee combat is alright, nothing special to write home about in my opinion. Honestly they could have done a much better job with it if people like CDPR can come up with flowing sword forms in The Witcher 3, they could have done better with spear forms. But, the melee combat serves its purpose which, in the end-game, is purely to try and knock down robots so you can tie them down, or freeze/stun/set them on fire, or just wail on them with your spear. Unfortunately during the game you can't buy upgrades for your spear, you earn one upgrade through a side quest (I believe) and the last "Epic" upgrade through the main story quest. For most of the game you are stuck with a low damage melee weapon, and even then the end spear does pitiful damage compared to your ranged weapons, so people should be sticking with ranged unless they're feeling ballsy.

And an RPG game like this wouldn't be complete without dodge-rolling.

Also, the game features a talent tree to up your skills. Assisting you in fighting enemies, being stealthy, or crafting items/crafting large amounts of ammo at one time, etc. I'm not going to list every talent here (though, I could) but suffice it to say every talent in the game has a role to play, and you can also get every talent, which is a good feeling to see a maxed out talent tree.

[Too late for this review so I'm publishing as is unfortunately. 10/10 game though, buy it! Especially if you love third person RPGs!]

Summoner's War

I fucking hate begging pricks for YT asking for access to other people's accounts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/summonerswar/comments/5c8le6/looking_for_players_willing_to_help_me_out_in/

Here's the text from the post:

Whats up guys ! I know this will look scammy as fuck but i thought I'll give it a try :) I'm a small youtuber and recently started to make some summoners war videos with my brother, maybe you have even seen a video from me being posted here. Long story short I want to do a summoning video with some more accounts like those mass summons from YDCB or JewBagel. the problem is since i don't really have a big audience noone would ask me to summon for them so I have to do it the other way around :D I just hoped that maybe I can find some people here who are willing to trust me and want to help me out in growing my channel :) If you are one of those kind souls just write me a PM so we can discuss everything :) Here is my Channel if you are interested:[removed]

btw : if this post is against the rules please tell me so i can delete it.

tl;dr: Titel says it all :P

And here's my reply:

Dude I wouldn't let Jewbagel summon on my account or anyone else. He is able to buy his own scrolls and gems on his own account, he gets hundreds of thousands of views which means he is rolling in $$$ along with every other popular SW YTer out there. All of those YTers don't need other people's accounts to do "summon shows", they make a decent bit of money. If I got as many views as any of these people you bet I'd be buying frieaking scrolls and shit out the ass for content for YT for my channel.

Just save up mystical scrolls until the end of the month and do like 1 video a month man. (minus other SW news of course I suppose) idk probably like 20 scrolls a month if you're farming DB10/GB10/NB10 or whatnot.

The reason I'm nitpicking is because it is extremely rude and crude to ask for access to other people's game accounts. Just because Youtubers do it doesn't mean random people on the internet will give you access to their accounts that they've worked on for a couple years now. We don't know you, why would we let you know our account information? For all we know you could be a korean farmer baiting for accounts and changing them when you get the information for them?

There's absolutely no point to it, I don't get it. I've seen summoning videos from other SW YTers and I'm just like what is the point? There isn't any.

Think about it. Would YOU give me your account information for a "summonfest" if you didn't know me and I was some random person on Reddit? Probably not. Especially if you were sitting on like 10k in crystals or something, I definitely wouldn't.

Sorry for being a dick, I just hate posts like this because TYPICALLY (not saying you OP, I have no evidence besides this post which is weak evidence) people who are begging for stuff like this for YT have no common sense and are used to shit being handed to them.

7 Days to Die breaks concurrent player record!

So recently the newest update for 7 Days to Die came out, Alpha 15.

It's a pretty good update, a lot of bugfixes and some mechanic changes, as well as a lot of recipe changes, making the game slightly harder. This was ONLY on PC however, as I found out The Fun Pimps actually sold their IP to another company to put the game on consoles. I can only assume they're getting royalties from it, which they really deserve for making such a good game.

However, I did find out today that at one point over this last weekend (October 7th - 9th I guess) there were about 22,500 concurrent players of 7DTD and made it into the top 20 on Steam's charts. Hopefully this made more people take notice of the game and pick it up.

Btw, if anyone's got a really active server with a community that works together, I'd love to join. Steam tag is Setari666 on Steam with the panda with guns image.

But yeah, I thought this was really cool and I wish The Fun Pimps much more success with their game and hope they don't ditch it in lieu of another project, I'll say that much. Like a lot of other developers -_-.

Remember to check out my Youtube for the latest and greatest games! http://www.youtube.com/c/SetariM

New Video! [WoW]

Gonna start posting my new videos here as well so here goes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Uea3WXiTE

Come watch!

Sorry!

Hello all!

I apologize for not posting any updates about ANYTHING, been trying to get life sorted out as best I can.

However, I am always uploading videos on my Youtube channel at  this link here so I'm still active. I also write some Steam reviews that I'll probably start posting here as well, if I remember. 

Again, I apologize for no content for long periods of time. I'll start trying to keep up.

[Random] Small Rant: Turtle Rock at work on new IP. I'm not convinced.

Fuck Evolve and L4D and anything else in that vein of games. Evolved was THE grindiest piece of crap game I've ever played in my life that was NOT fun because the Beast won 99% of the time because of AFKers and incompetent players, and L4D is a BORING game with no unlocks and just random hordes of zombies and shit. I remember getting the first L4D with my buddy and let me tell you we were psyched for that shit. After one day of playing we played it for a few hours the next day and then did some other stuff instead of playing.

This dev studio needs to take some tips from other games releasing this year before they release some more garbage. I got L4D2 for FREE and still won't touch that shit. I got into the Evolve BETA AND got the game for free and it's still crap.

This studio is the most disappointing people. I'd rather play in Photoshop and have more fun than ANYTHING from this studio. Fuck not even Photoshop, PAINT.

CDPR saying Farewell to Witcher fans.

At the end of The Witcher 3's Blood & Wine expansion, there is a screen that reads this:

It reads:

"Phew, that's a lot of people, right?"

"So, now that we've been properly introduced, we'd like to thank you one last time."

"Blood & Wine is the end of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. We wanted to call it "Sweat and Tears" or "Damn We'll Miss This," but we couldn't. However, as a studio, we've already embarked on other adventures (we promise you'll hear about them soon!), and Geralt will always have a special place in our hearts. And we hope he'll have a special place in yours."

"Thank you for playing, thank you for supporting us, and thank you for spending your hard earned money on our game."

"We hope you had fun."

"Love,"

"CD PROJEKT RED"

I haven't gotten to play the Blood & Wine expansion yet, or the first DLC for that matter, but holy cow this game. I played through the game twice (Not even NG+! Just started a new game again for the fun of it) and I don't regret anything about buying this game. In fact, I may do a more in-depth review of the game or the game's story in the far flung future whenever I get a chance to sit down and do it. But reading that image made me feel so empty inside. Like... when you beat a game and realize that, that's it. It's done. There's no more gameplay or story to be had, you've experienced all of it. And it's just... it makes you feel proud that there's a company out there who is able to stick to their guns and really let the people of the world know that there are still good game developers out there who stay true to their visions for a game, and don't let the vocal masses on the internet sway them.

I feel like I want to cry so badly. That such a good game could be over. I just want to to go on forever, but it can't, of course. I want to mourn the loss of development for such an epic game. And I know people use epic in bad ways, but this game truly deserves the title of "Epic game".

You guys at CDPR are fucking awesome and I will be purchasing anything you guys ever make as soon as possible. I'm just one person out of billions on the planet, but you have one more eternal fan and I hope that means something, just a little bit. Love you guys, you're the best.

And I urge anyone who hasn't picked up at least The Witcher 3 to buy it, along with The Witcher 1 and The Witcher 2. If there was ever a studio that deserved your money, this is the one studio that does, 100% of the time, no doubts about it.

There will never be any other games as good as The Witcher games, and I feel like CDPR has set an unreachable bar for any game development team out there. Nobody will be as good as the CDPR team and that's something they should be damn proud of.

Original Article and Photo from PCGamer: http://www.pcgamer.com/the-witcher-3-is-still-being-patched-despite-devs-heartfelt-farewell/?utm_content=buffer4e683&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=buffer_pcgamer