YMMV / Horizon Forbidden West

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Did Sylens choose to stay behind on Earth to aid Aloy in fighting Nemesis out of the goodness of his heart? Or was it a simple case of being pragmatic, as although Sylens is an intelligent man with full access to the APOLLO database, he also has absolutely no experience in space travel. Should he travel all alone, he would have no help to turn to if he gets into any trouble. Or worse, he ends up running straight into Nemesis itself.
  • Adding onto that, it isn't established if he needed to leave at that exact moment. From what it seems, he could just hang around, get a copy of Apollo to Gaia, maybe get a second copy of Gaia made for the ship, help out with preparations, and then leave with time to spare before Nemesis arrives. Besides... maybe Aloy could surprise him. It wouldn't be the first time, after all...
  • Who's right about Elisabet Sobek; Aloy, or Travis Tate? A hologram shows Travis questioning Elisabet as to how she can love the world so much, but apparently not care about any individual people in it. Aloy asserts that Elisabet cared about everyone, whereas Sylens is inclined to think that Elisabet's genius and drive isolated her. Travis knew Elisabet personally and spent more time with her than the isolated snippets of data Aloy collected on her, but both Travis and Sylens are more inherently cynical and less empathetic people than Aloy. It's worth noting that Aloy's assertion doesn't actually contradict Travis' question; it's clear that Elisabet did care deeply about humanity as a whole, but whether she really connected with anyone on a personal basis is vague at best, and Aloy is shown to idolize Elisabet to a perhaps unhealthy degree. Furthermore, more than one observer has held that Aloy herself, who is Elizabeth’s clone daughter, can come across as arrogant and disconnected from other people. It's also important to note that all information about Elisabet comes during the creation of Zero Dawn, a project that would leave anybody emotionally drained. It's possible that she was once more personable but the responsibility of ensuring life's continued survival weighed on her and it was easier to emotionally detach herself to look at the "big picture".
    • The scraps Aloy saw of Elisabet also included some humanizing moments that only GAIA at most would be privy to, which happened on the edge of the Despair Event Horizon. Travis Tate couldn't have known that Elisabet cried over her Alphas being willing to continue working when buried alive because she hid in her office to do it. She was more open about her doubts and fears to GAIA than to most people.
  • Did Elisabet break things off with Tilda because she was a naturally guarded person who liked to keep people at a distance and was uncomfortable with the more emotionally intimate relationship that Tilda claims to have wanted? Or did she just come to see Tilda for what she really was; an entitled, possessive woman who didn't respect the boundaries of others?
  • In Thebes, before committing suicide, Dr. Somptow told Ted Faro that the geothermal reactor in the bunker could "give him what he needed" to grow strong again and get his shit together. Some fans interpret this as Somptow's last words to Ted being a claim that the reactor would fix his mutations. Did Somptow actually say that, hoping he'd cuddle up to it and suffer? It's not a nuclear reactor, so it's unlikely to have contributed much to his mutations. Earlier recordings actually made by Somptow bring up the doctor having to laboriously address each new mutation as it appeared, and that Somptow feared to give him bad news. Did he tell Ted that the mutations would resolve on their own given time and energy? Ted brings this up when he's already clearly unhinged - did he misunderstand and conflate different statements?
• Annoying Video Game Helper: A common complaint about the game is that Aloy talks to herself way too much as a way of expressing her thoughts out loud to guide the player, possibly even more so than in Zero Dawn. The problem arise in that she does this so frequently that on occasion it feels like she never shuts up, especially if she's saying something obvious like "I bet I can use this crate to get up there" without explaining how.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Erik Visser is a huge letdown. The whole game psyches you up for Aloy and his' rematch, especially after he kills Varl. Everything you learn about the guy is that he's a violent, unhinged psychopath who took way too much joy out of his job as a PMC back in the old earth days, even personally killing targets himself. And yet, when Aloy is finally Storming the Castle, Erik stops her on the elevator and...he's a glorified mook with a few strong attacks. He takes a lot of punishment, to be sure, but he can be easily stunlocked and knocked around like a chew toy. The boss fight itself also lacks an engaging background music, making it even less memorable. Basically, he's like Sundowner, minus Sundowner's infectious charisma and awesome boss design.
• Award Snub: Similar to its predecessor in 2017, this game was nominated for numerous awards at The Game Awards 2022, but unfortunately didn't win any of them due to being up against the likes of Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarök, both of which received almost unanimous high praise while this title was more divisive.
• Awesome Music:
  • "In the Flood" as sung by Ariana Gillis plays in the opening credits of Aloy riding through various areas is a bittersweet ballad that hints at her struggles on trying to find Gaia to save Earth, a "raindrop" fighting "in the flood" that seems to always push back against her. Its reprisal "In the Flood (Lovisa's Version)" as sung by Lovisa Bergdahl in the credits roll acts like a bittersweet answer to the opening ("Am I raindrops in the flood?" to "I am raindrops in the flood."), where Aloy was able to accomplish her goal despite being "in the flood." It could also apply to Beta as well, with the line "Should I have bent and been reshaped in your image?" at her own struggle of finding herself, much like Aloy did.
  • "Built to Kill" is played during fights with Tremortusks and Slaughterspines. It's a driving, sinister, synth-heavy, progressive track that's as menacing as the machines it plays over. The Slaughterspine variation has a rising build-up tone that plays over the beat while the machine charges up its plasma capacitors, adding even more intensity to an already intense fight.
  • "Guardian of the Deep" is played during fights with Tiderippers, and it feels like a high-tempo version of the Jaws theme performed by violins, building up towards the Loch Ness monster's metal cousin surging towards you, propelled by copious amounts of purgewater.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • The Final Boss Specter Prime is a gigantic improvement over the last game's final boss, which was just a souped-up Deathbringer that summoned mooks. In addition to all the narrative weight that comes from fighting Tilda, Specter Prime has a variety of melee and ranged attacks while taking a licking and keeping on ticking, without feeling impossible because the armor itself is the weak point. It's also one of the only machines in the game to consistently hit you with debuffs that prevent you from using potions, drain your weapon stamina and decrease your damage.
  • Burning Shores casts its lot in with its own DLC-Final Boss when Londra reactivates a Horus to serve as the DLC's Final Boss, and the Humongous Mecha proves every bit as fierce and unsettling a fight as it would likely have seemed when others of its kind led the Faro Plague.
    • The fight is a long and grueling one that perfectly scratches the itch of anyone wishing they could have fought a Metal Devil while scaling one back in Zero Dawn, with the machine constantly on the move in its first phase, smashing its colossal insectoid legs all around Aloy and destroying everything in sight.
    • Its second phase is where things really ramp up, as it surrounds Aloy with its tentacles and starts bringing out its heavy weaponry, unleashing salvos of missiles, barrages of incendiary rounds and machine gun fire and slamming its gigantic drill arms into the sand, and you end it by destroying its heat sinks, each of which causes the machine to overheat more and more until the greenery covering it bursts into flame. You are essentially fighting Metal Gear Excelsus' squid-crab cousin and you win by setting it on fire.
    • Then after all that, Aloy finally confronts Londra inside the Horus, which is a whole separate boss in an of itself that is still challenging even though Londra is just standing there, made all the better by Londra's Boss Banter. Players couldn't have asked for a more thrilling send-off to Forbidden West while they wait for the next game.
• Broken Base:
  • While the game as a whole is seen an Even Better Sequel for its richer world and gameplay expansions, the quality of the main story in comparison to Horizon Zero Dawn has polarized both critics and fans of the series. One side points out the even more intense stakes and scope, increased usage of unique and fleshed-out characters and stronger dialogue and body language that make the narrative come off as more alive and complex than its predecessor. On the other hand, detractors criticize things like the villains who subvert the build-up developed in Zero Dawn and its lack of a gripping Plot Twist like the previous game had to fuel the story's driving mysteries. A third group agrees that the story as a whole is weaker than Zero Dawn, but appreciates the improvements done to the dialogue and character animations that make individual quests and encounters more lifelike.
  • Aloy being revealed to be sapphic and her relationship with Seyka in Burning Shores. Some are happy that one of PlayStation's biggest protagonists is LGBTQ+ and that it makes sense given that she is a clone of Elisabet — who is sapphic herself — while also finding her relationship with Seyka to be adorable and it tying nicely into Forbidden West's overall theme of Aloy finally learning to open up and develop relationships with other people after being closed off for so long. Others feel it clashes too hard with Aloy's personality up until that point in the story and found the relationship between her and Seyka to be poorly written and rushed compared to Aloy's other relationships, which had the benefit of being developed over the course of two major games. There's also a third group who Take a Third Option and argue that while the relationship between Aloy and Seyka is not bad on paper, it should've been saved for a third game where it could be fleshed out in more depth instead of a small-scale expansion pass.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • While exploring Thebes and seeing that Ted Faro was getting immortality treatments to be able to "teach" (and control) the new generation of humans after what he caused, it's satisfying to know his experiments only made him ageless, along with making him a mutated flesh mass unable to move, growing inside a geothermal reactor for many centuries.
  • Turning the tables on Sylens, who has repeatedly coerced Aloy with his schemes, by ruining his plan and decisively ending the Tenakth rebellion. From then on, Aloy's secret ace in the hole (Beta standing by to loose HEPHAESTUS into the Far Zenith systems) is Sylens's only means of countering the army of Specter drones the Zeniths have.
• Complete Monster:
  • Theodor "Ted" Faro, the world's first trillionaire, deliberately inflamed tensions between his clients to sell his war machines. A short-sighted, petty fool whose robotic "Faro Plague" caused the annihilation of mankind, Ted began to fret how the world would view him in its new incarnation. To this end, he erases APOLLO, the repository of knowledge, and murders the other leading members of Zero Dawn before they can intervene. Filling his bunkers' survivors with kill switches, Ted murdered them for petty reasons, bemoaning only what they made him do until he was left alone, waiting for the day he hoped he would emerge as a god for the reborn mankind. A selfish megalomaniac, Ted condemned humanity to suffer for centuries all so he wouldn’t go down as the man who destroyed the world.
  • Gerard Bieri is the leader of Far Zenith's remnants after the AI NEMESIS went rogue and wiped out the Sirius Colony. A cold elitist who arrives on Earth seeking the AI GAIA, Gerard raises no objection to the abuse of the clone Beta and the attempted murders of the inhabitants. Seeking to steal GAIA and let the world be annihilated so he can craft a new paradise and evade NEMESIS, Gerard icily refers to humanity as nothing but "worms" in his basement.
  • Erik Visser is Gerard's savage right hand. A brutal warmonger known for delighting in personal murder, Erik grows bored of simulated killings on Sirius and happily kills those he encounters of the tribes on earth. Murdering heroine Aloy's friend Varl, Erik shows nothing but delight in trying to slaughter anyone else he finds and is only too happy to leave the Earth to burn behind them.
  • Burning Shores DLC: Walter Londra is a Far Zenith whose narcissism makes the others look humble. Having used his superior technology to appear godlike to the Quen he meets, Londra forms a cult to get the labor for his plan: leaving Earth through a canceled rocket program at his former company that will coat 1000 square miles in nuclear fallout. Telling all his followers that they will "ascend", Londra plans to take DNA samples from them for cloning on his new colony. The few he intends to take onboard his ship will be brainwashed to mirror his friend circle from the old days and worship him. Londra also intends to groom Seyka's young sister Kina to replace his late wife Evelyn, whom he left to die in the FARO plague. Londra also continuously minutely reconfigures the personality of his AI assistant Nova for over a millenium (even tweaking her 57 times in just the span of a week alone), eventually driving her to suicide by asking Aloy to deactivate her to escape her torment. With no regard for anyone or anything that doesn't cater to his ego, Aloy considers Londra the worst Zenith she's faced.
• Continuity Lockout: While the game does attempt to briefly explain the events of the previous game in the opening cinematic, the game ultimately still suffers from this, with the game seemingly not only expecting the player to have played the previous game, but also have done every side activity as well.^examples You won't know who Petra is if you didn't do her quest in Free Heap, there is a whole questline concerning Talanah from the Hunting Lodge, and beating every gauntlet run reveals the identity of Red Teeth to be Nil, which the game treats as a big revelation. The main plot picks up with Aloy still on the quest she left for after the final battle of the previous game, numerous characters that appeared only in side-quests in the previous game make extensive appearances with the player expected to know who they are, and on top of all this, the fact that Far Zenith project even existed, let alone supposedly exploded but survived would only be known to players that extensively paid attention to lore found in Data Points in the previous game. It is also assumed that the player completed the The Frozen Wilds DLC and knows what Daemonic(hunter-killer) machines are and why HEPHAESTUS has gone rogue, as it never bothers to explain these things either.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Ceo's death. Him being a Jerkass Bad Boss of the highest order that also worships Ted Faro like a god is somewhat unnerving where Faro is concerned. The fact that he gets crushed to death by a statue of Faro (and the head, no less), though? Priceless.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Clamberjaws. They jump around so much that you'll lose a lot of ammo trying to hit them, their most glaring weak point is a tiny spot on their constantly-moving tail, and their attacks feel like they can home in on you from a mile away and are VERY delayed, which will screw up your dodge timing. They are also surprisingly tanky, so large groups of them can take forever to bring down.
  • Ravagers are just as dangerous as they are in the first game, even more so with their new electricity attacks and their Apex variants that are significantly harder to kill and cannot be overridden. They're quick and surprisingly tough and you often encounter them in pairs, sometimes to act as escorts for an even tougher machine like the Behemoth.
  • Widemaws are unbelievably strong for where they're the most prolific in the game; they can easily stunlock Aloy with boulder spam, have dangerous charge attacks, are constantly inflicting purgewater on you^note which just makes their attacks hurt more since most of them are purgewater-based and purgewater increases all elemental damage, and are often encountered with skydrifters so it's hard to sneak up on them. Worst of all is that if you're trying to collect their tusks, they're only exposed when the widemaw's mouth is open...which is when it's most likely shooting purgewater rocks at you, giving you no window of opportunity!
  • If you weren't infuriated by the widemaws of the Forbidden West, Burning Shores has you covered. Waterwings are effectively flying widemaws with very similar dirt projectile attacks that are also horrendously tanky. at least they don't inflict Purgewater, but their added mobility from flight and tendency to come in groups poses them as a nightmare whenever they show up. A sidequest even has Aloy fighting three at once with very little cover.
• Die for Our Ship: Seyka in Burning Shores has received this from all of the Aloy shippers since she becomes Aloy's canon love interest, effectively sinking all of Aloy's previous ships and causing shippers to quickly despise her as a result. Those who continue to ship Aloy with other people often choose to ignore Burning Shores and Seyka entirely.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Several fans wanted Tilda to be less villainous than she ended up being, or argue that her continued villainy is a result of bad writing- even though the lengths she was willing to go to for greed were established in her first appearance. Mostly this seems motivated by the image of an immortal, repentant star-crossed lover being more appealing than the genocidal groomer Tilda really is, as well as people taking issue with the fact that she plays the Psycho Lesbian trope completely straight and wanting to downplay that.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Tenakth Marshal Kotallo, due to his excellent writing, character development and great performance by Noshir Dalal, has quickly become a fan favorite. Many players name him their favorite character in the game.
  • The Quen Diviner Alva, voiced by Alison Jaye, also quickly becomes a fan favorite thanks to her friendly, quirky personality who's very helpful to Aloy in her journey and can also hold her own in a fight.
  • The Oseram Showmen trio, Morlund, Abadund, and Stemmur, also endears fans with their memorable personalities who expand more on the Oseram lore as a whole beyond just a tribe of blacksmiths, and their involvement in perhaps one of the best main story quests in the game. The fact that it concludes with them running what's possibly the first ever revived Old One city in a thousand years and also rediscovering flight with Morlund's hot-air balloon also helps.
• Epileptic Trees: One mechanic that Guerrilla had wanted to add into the first game was the ability to mount flying machines, however the PlayStation 4's hardware limitations prevented them from doing so. When Forbidden West was initially revealed fans had assumed that with the game being on the PlayStation 5 that this mechanic would see the light of day, but the announcement of a PS4 version dashed those hopes. Many fans assume that the mechanic will yet again be not implemented due to hardware limitations, however fans have started to have hope again thanks to an interview with a developer where they state they "cannot confirm or deny anything" about the feature instead of outright deconfirming it. Upon release it was finally confirmed as a late game unlock that allows Aloy to override Sunwings, allowing her to finally fly.
• Even Better Sequel: Generally regarded as a significant improvement over the already well-received Horizon Zero Dawn, with Forbidden West considerably expanding the scope of the original with more combat options, open-ended exploration and a slew of new and creative Machines. In particular, many critics and fans signal out the side content for its variety and depth.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Elden Ring, due to the latter releasing merely one week after, to even higher critical acclaim. The fact that the same happened with Horizon Zero Dawn and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has not gone unnoticed by fans, who have grown tired of the series being overshadowed.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • While Aloy had to locate AETHER, POSEIDON and DEMETER, Far Zenith managed to find ARTEMIS and ELEUTHIA. Where were they? Why couldn't Aloy's copy of GAIA locate them? What were they like after gaining self-awareness? What exactly were they doing?
  • ELEUTHIA turned out to be hiding in the Far Zenith Ninmah research facility, where you find Beta's escape chamber. It was a storage facility for ectogenic chambers, so ELEUTHIA likely fled there because of that. You can also find super-advanced Zenith transmission equipment within, used to transfer ELEUTHIA to the Zenith base. Why it didn't respond to GAIA's ping is still unknown.
• Friendly Fandoms: Due to both being Sony-published games releasing only two weeks apart from each other, people who picked Horizon Forbidden West have also come to pick and support Gran Turismo 7 and vice versa, whose release also helped the former to retain some ground in public conscious after the aforementioned release of Elden Ring.
• Game-Breaker: Explosive javelins trivialize almost any Boss Battle. They're expensive to craft and require some practice to use effectively, but they can penetrate armor plating when fully charged and deal so much damage that a handful of hits is enough to fell even the largest machines. They're also highly effective against most human bosses, with some going down in a single barrage of Concentration-fueled javelins before they can launch a single attack themselves.
• Genius Bonus: The Lightning Gun on the Slitherfang's tail looks very much like the tail of a rattlesnake. In some Native American beliefs, a rattlesnake's rattle could summon lightning.
• Goddamned Bats: Leaplashers, a kangaroo-like mech, are encountered early on in your quest (depending on how much you explore, you can bump into them well before you ever reach Plainsong). While their territories are usually patrolled by Scroungers and/or Ravagers, the Leaplashers themselves are far worse due to being fast for their size with an erratic jumping pattern that makes the large Blaze Canisters on their backs incredibly difficult to shoot, even with concentration engaged. Worse yet, as their name suggests, they can wind up a canister on a whip-like appendage and lash it towards you, inflicting impact damage AND a status effect ranging from disabling your healing items to negating your Focus.
• I Knew It!:
  • In the run-up to the PlayStation 5's reveal livestream, many, many people were guessing that a sequel to still-popular Horizon Zero Dawn would be announced there. Fittingly, it was the very last game of the event.
  • Likewise, the plot moving into the Forbidden West - a location teased, but never seen in Zero Dawn - was something a lot of fans of the original game were predicting.
  • Finally, the inclusion of flying mounts was something many fans believed would be included due to the heavy focus on avian Machines throughout the game's marketing. Close to the game's launch, several reviews and screenshots confirmed this to be true.
  • Far Zenith having survived their apparent destruction was a somewhat popular fan-theory following the previous game.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Burning Shores received some derision for being rather short despite being a 20 dollar expansion. There are only 5 main quests and 3 side quests, a handful of collectibles, a rather small map and only 2 new non-unique machines added(one of which is a Moveset Clone of the Sunwing). Compare this to the Zero Dawn expansion, The Frozen Wilds, which had a map that was a third of the size of the normal map and was practically a second game, with a wealth of side quests and alternate activities to take part in, as well as adding three new machines and Elite Mook variations of existing ones.
• Jerkass Woobie: In the brief time you see MINERVA, she tries keeping Aloy out of the facility it was hiding in, ominously telling her that she is not welcome. When you reach the center of the base, it keeps the console needed to upload GAIA out of reach, only to give it up when Aloy at the prospect of rejoining GAIA and losing her autonomy so that her "misery... will cease." It says something that while HADES and HEPHAESTUS sent Mechanical Monsters to kill Aloy, all MINERVA did was lock the door on her, the super intelligent AI simply afraid and depressed.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: There are multiple villain factions in the main campaign of the game — HADES, HEPHAESTUS, Regalla and Far Zenith — and each of them either promote some level of sympathy or understandable motives. Then there's Ceo. He's an arrogant narcissist with a god-complex and royalty from a colonialist Empire who presume everyone on the North American continent are unwashed savages intruding on land that belongs to him by Divine Right. He had twisted the religious scripture of his people to where he is the reincarnation of Ted Faro — who the Quen revere as a Messianic Archetype — and has anyone who doesn't humor his delusions placed at the end of his guards' arrows. After he dies trying to use one of his own guards as a stepping stone over a pool of lava, Alva and Aloy try to make it sound like he died nobly so that Bohai and his men won't kill them and he doesn't buy it for a second. In the end, Bohai lets both of them go, shrugging off Ceo's death like it didn't matter.
  Bohai: You must think I'm eminently stupid. ...The Ceo was an entitled egoist who twisted our beliefs into a sickening, self-serving fantasy. And you expect me to believe he sacrificed himself for scraps of data?
• Junk Rare: Everything in ancient valuable caches is either a basic crafting component or 21st century junk like wristwatches and keys that the only purpose for is to sell to vendors for Shards. The color coding of the box simply indicates how much the stuff is worth. This is of limited usefulness because most weapons and armor require specific machine parts to buy and all them require the same to upgrade (and the specific parts needed aren't sold by vendors), and after a certain point there's basically no way Aloy can run out of Metal Shards because of how many she's getting from quests and large machines.
• Love to Hate: Walter Londra is a charismatic yet awful human being who will have you begging to kick his ass throughout the whole of Burning Shores. Unlike Tilda van der Meer, who is a more complicated, nuanced and even Tragic Villain, Londra is a conniving, arrogant egomaniac groomer with delusions of godhood, and the DLC never has a moment where he shows any redeeming qualities^note but gives plenty of time toward showing off how reprehensible he is, unlike Gerard and Erik who are Out of Focus, making it that much more satisfying to simultaneously foil his plans and also kill him with his own Horus' electrical feedback.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Is it me or Sony be making their lead female protagonist look masculine as hell." / "Hire fans lol" ^ExplanationFollowing the State of Play showing off Forbidden West's gameplay, a Twitter user complained about the redesigned face of protagonist Aloy looking "too masculine", comparing a demo screenshot of her to a photoshop version heavily covered in makeup(Hilariously, it is actually possible to give Aloy a variety of makeup and face paint in-game, though not to the degree in the screenshot). Fans immediately memefied the rant.
  • "Aloy has a beard?"^ExplanationSeveral gamers were outraged to discover the Aloy had a "beard" (actually realistic peach fuzz), leading to others mocking them for not knowing that women in real life have peach fuzz.
  • The fact that the game released shortly before Elden Ring (and then Burning Shores soon before The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom), resulting in similar situations to the first game's close release to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, did not go unnoticed, evolving into memes of the Horizon series' tendency to release just before universally acclaimed genre-defining open world titles by rival companies. The joke came back when Rockstar Games announced that Grand Theft Auto VI would release in 2025, with Horizon fans jokingly getting excited that the third Horizon game would be coming in 2025 as well.
  • The GAIA Gang. ^ExplanationA Tumblr nickname for the main characters.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize:
  • That the villains are The Far Zenith crew, still alive 1000 years later, may be a bit obvious when you early in the game encounter a recording of Tilda talking to Elisabet, and recognize the former's voice as being that of Carrie-Anne Moss and guess they probably didn't pay her to just voice a few audio logs.
  • In the lore of the first game, there were only a few possible parties that would be technologically advanced enough to send the mysterious signal while also being possibly active in the present; some part of the Zero Dawn project that Ted didn't kill off, VAST SILVER (a malevolent pre-Zero Dawn AI), and Far Zenith. No surprise, it was one of them.
• Polished Port: The PC port by Nixxes Software, released two years after the game's original debut, is widely praised for its optimisation work and smooth performance, even on older machines.
• Realism-Induced Horror:
  • The way that the Zeniths treated Beta is horrifically evocative of child grooming; they raised her from birth to perform a single task and never allowed her to develop a mind of her own, essentially being more of an automaton to them than a person. It gets even worse when it becomes clear that Tilda was actually being friendly to Beta because she was a clone of Elisabet Sobeck, Tilda's ex, and Tilda was trying to raise her in Sobeck's image because of her obsession with her. Who knows what she would have done with Beta if she hadn't met Aloy instead.
  • Really, the entire concept of Far Zenith is this, with the ultra-wealthy concocting schemes to dodge the responsibility for rectifying issues that their largesse has caused becoming a major talking point in The New '20s. From multi-billionaires like Elon Musk trying to colonize Mars rather than funnel money into projects to repair Earth's environment to libertarian crypto-bros trying to make a utopia in international waters away from government regulation that inevitably ends in disaster since everyone is too focused on their own pursuits to actually do anything for the common good of all, it isn't quite so outlandish to believe that, with a bit more technological development, we could very well have a Far Zenith-esque cabal of our own in the near future.
  • Similarly, Walter Londra from Burning Shores also engages in actions very similar to grooming, only for even worse reasons and with the added bonus of mental enslavement. He's essentially trying to recreate his old group of toadies using his Quen Devotees, and is taking advantage of their innocence and inability to understand what's going on, just like a predator would. Aloy and Seyka catch him testing Seyka's younger sister Kina on how good of an impression of his late wife she can do, and is clearly enamored by her performance in a way that is downright disgusting to watch. Luckily, they intervene before anything else happens.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop:
  • Salvage merchants sell small amounts of very rare drops in exchange for a certain type of uncommon drop (and/or a sizeable amount of Metal Shards).
  • Relating to Salvage, either turning on Easy Looting via tweaking the Difficulty settings or just playing on Story difficulty somewhat alleviates the tedium of aiming more precisely to get That One Component needed to upgrade your bow or armor.
  • The mechanics of cooking and Valor Surges provide some useful (albeit temporary) powerups.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: In some respects, the game is harder than its predecessor.
  • You can say goodbye to the anti-element potions that neutralized much of ranged machines' skillsets.
  • A lot more human enemies are wearing head armor than in the first game, making them much less vulnerable to headshots. Human enemies in general are also far more resilient, aggressive, and organized than in the first game, partially because most of them are Rebel Tenakth—part of a massive army of trained soldiers (not just rowdy bandits or fanatical cultists).
  • The ropecaster and tripcaster tools were heavily nerfed.
  • The tearblaster, a weapon which instantly detached any detachable components on a machine that it was fired at, is nowhere to be seen.
  • Nearly all machines in the game have a chance to spawn as an apex, a powered-up form akin to daemonic machines from Frozen Wilds.
  • Players can only perform so many consecutive dodge rolls before incurring a longer stumbling animation; this means that rolls cannot be spammed, and players must be much more careful with where they commit to one. The default limit is three rolls, although certain armors or coils can increase this limit. Sliding and then rolling still works fine, though.
  • It's no longer possible for Aloy to whistle from cover to draw a single enemy to her. Rock tossing is a bit more complicated and of course depends on having rocks.
• Signature Scene: The arrival of the Zeniths during the "Death's Door" quest and the Hopeless Boss Fight with Erik is perhaps the most fondly discussed scene of the main story because of how perfectly it encapsulates the Serial Escalation of Forbidden West; Aloy has gone from fighting extremely tough but killable humans and giant robots to invincible humans with unfathomably powerful technology from space, and all of her gear and experience is very suddenly rendered So Last Season.
• Squick: Plowhorns use fertilizer as both a means of farming and, in the case of the hostile ones, shoots them as an adhesive. That can be interpreted as them firing shit at you as projectiles. Makes you wonder if it's sticky or if it slows you down with a paralyzing stench.
• That One Boss:
  • Slitherfangs. They are heavy-class combat machines, are infuriatingly agile and evasive for their size class, and have a hard-to-escape projectile stunlock attack which while heavily telegraphed is effectively a hitscan weapon with a massive area of effect. This is on top of the fact that their agility and lack of easily-struck weakpoints while constantly being aggressive and inflicting the Crushed condition with gigantic sweeping attacks means that they're an absolute nightmare whenever they appear during a quest. The worst example is undoubtedly the one that serves as the boss of Cauldron CHI, since cauldrons by their nature don't allow Aloy to leave once she enters, which means that if you're underprepared or underleveled or happened to have used all your good ammo on the cauldron's other machines, then you are in for one slog of a battle. And they only get even worse with the Apex variant.
  • From Burning Shores comes the Apex Slaughterspine fought at the end of "For His Amusement". Regular Slaughterspines are plenty tough already, and the arena is relatively small for a fight with such a large machine. Plus, plasma is one of the very few elemental damage types that bypasses basically all resistance, meaning an Apex variant of a machine that can already very quickly take Aloy down with plasma is damn near capable of one-shotting her with all its moves. Not to mention plasma lingers on the ground, turning portions of the arena into death traps that mean game over if Aloy gets afflicted with Plasma buildup. It's telling that this is the only non-optional fight with an Apex Slaughterspine in the game, as they border on Superbosses out in the wild.
• That One Component: Sac webbing. Given that it can only be collected from dead machines with an unexploded chemical sac, you'll have to go out of your way not to hit the gigantic glaring weak spot on their body, and you may even still explode the sac by accident if you don't have the right weapons for the job. Still, it's pretty managable even with something like a bellowback(where the chemical sac is 40 percent of its body) just by being patient and shooting the eyes of the machine for weakpoint damage instead. Then you realize that fireclaws have chemical sacs, and that a key strategy to defeating a fireclaw is destroying its sac so it can't use its fire attacks, and you realize you are in for one slog of a battle if you want that Machine Strike piece.
• Tainted by the Preview: While the announcement trailer for the DLC "Burning Shores" was generally well received, the news that the DLC would be exclusive to the PlayStation 5 version of the game sparked immediate controversy among the fanbase. Players who only owned a PlayStation 4 expressed their disappointment and outrage at being excluded, especially since the PS5 remains expensive and hard to come by in many parts of the world. Other fans defended Guerilla's decision, pointing out that the PS4 will be 10 years old when the DLC comes out and that it's past time to move on to the PS5, which will already be over two years old by the release date. In addition, they note that the base game has already been handicapped by the need to accommodate the PS4's aging hardware and restricting the DLC to the PS5 will allow for new game mechanics that utilize the full potential of the newer console.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The sidequest "The Valley of the Fallen" has one phase where you fight a Tremortusk and a Thunderjaw at the same time. Needless to say, it's not a quest you just wander into. You need something that can tear off/disable their weapons fast. Fortunately, there is a nearby cliff you can scale that will shelter you while you fire long-ranged weapons with impunity. Alternately, go in with an enabled override from Cauldron Kappa for at least one of them, plug in to your chosen heavy machine and set the override to Aggressive, and see a Robo-Mammoth take on a Robo-T-Rex.
  • The Arena pits you against machines with a strict time limit; you need to finish these to get the Arena medals necessary to purchase the strongest equipment in the game. While the first three stages of each set are seemingly easy enough with your own loadout, the fourth is the problem. You are forced to use a pre-determined loadout which typically isn't very good, and since you still need to kill the machines within a certain time limit to get the rewards, you're far more worried about how to kill the machines as fast as possible rather than how to fight the machines themselves. Which means that if RNG goes against your favor and they do nothing but close in on you, then it's a lot of time wasted trying to run away from them and heal yourself. And to make things worse, in order to attempt the Arena, you are required to pay a few hundreds shards each time which will rack up to thousands pretty easily as you'll constantly die due to RNG going against your favor or you not killing the machines fast enough. Needless to say, a lot of players lower the difficulty to Story Mode to complete the stages and never look back just because of how unfair it is.
  • The Melee Pit challenges to face The Enduring are like this. You have to go to each Melee Pit and complete the training, which involves chaining various melee combos together. Unfortunately, the timing required to complete each challenge is extremely precise and the challenge is restarted if the player is even slightly off, potentially making the whole thing take a long time. The fact that your attacks cause the target you're training on to be knocked away from you was apparently not taken into consideration. This is especially frustrating as beating the Pit Masters doesn’t really need you to master all these combos, as they're just straight (if rather tough) human enemy fights.
    • With the exception of the Desert Clan pit boss, all of the subsequent pit bosses are fairly difficult to defeat. The Sky Clan pit has you fight two opponents at once, one of whom has a lightning hammer that is an instant knockout on higher difficulties and can also buff himself up like a rebel champion. The Lowland pit boss has a sword and energy shield and attacks extremely quickly with high-damage slashing moves. And all of these pit bosses have to be beaten to even have the opportunity to challenge the Enduring.
    • The Enduring. Firstly, the pit resets before each duel so you can't place traps in advance like at the other pits. Secondly, they're extremely mobile and can rapidly dash and close the gap with you so that they can hit you with their blade, which is the same as Regalla's. Finally, even if you manage to keep out of melee range, they have a sharpshot bow that they can use to rapidly inflict damage from the other side of the pit. Your only hope to fight back is to keep them knocked down or stunned with power attacks or resonator blasts, which is easier said than done given that they recover extremely quickly to parry and counterattack.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Some people are disappointed by the fact that, with the exception of Hephaestus, Hades, and (barely) Minerva, none of the free roaming subordinate functions get much personality within the game, with the three Aloy speaks to getting only a single line of dialogue each before being captured. This despite Demeter, at least, having been established as loving poetry.
  • Regalla's overridden Tremortusks. The trailer seemed to imply that they were going to be a much more recurring Giant Mook, and it is oh-so-satisfying when you blow the tremortusk's blaze sac and send the rebels on the howdah flying off. You fight a grand total of one in the main quest, and then never again, unless you count killing three of them in a non-interactive cutscene.
• Too Cool to Live: Fashav is a Carja captured by the Tenakth who became one of them through trial by combat and now wants to bring peace between both tribes. He immediately recognizes the importance of Aloy's quest. He's a famously talented warrior, and basically immediately dies in the cutscene following him giving his complex backstory and going out of his way to help Aloy enter the Forbidden West. Many of his journal entries can be found in Tenakth settlements, painting a further picture of just how cool he was.
• Values Dissonance: One thing to keep in mind is that the game was made by a Dutch company. In the Netherlands, being indirect is considered a form of insincerity, sharing your problems with others doesn't happen as quickly as in other cultures and small talk is often considered annoying. Aloy is often criticized for these very things by the fanbase, but looking at it through a Dutch lense, her personality makes a lot more sense.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The game is a stunning showcase of computer-generated wildlife, plants and waters and one of the most beautiful things on the market. The developers explicitly made it their goal to make the world as beautiful as possible, in their own words:
  Ever since the first game, we really wanted to make a world that is so beautiful that you just want to be there.
  • A particularly noteworthy mention goes to the stunning, visually spectacular Final Boss of the Burning Shores DLC. A derelict, reactivated Horus that is easily the largest enemy in the series by a wide margin. The implementation of such a colossal and highly detailed machine covered in flaming vegetation is nothing short of a technical marvel, with the game taking full advantage of its tremendous size by having you fight it on land, underwater and even from the inside.
• The Woobie: Beta. She was born to be used as nothing more than a tool by Far Zenith, the only social interactions she ever had being interactive learning software and the aloof and distant Tilda, a woman who, by the end of the game, freely admits that she sees her as an "inferior" copy of Elisabet.

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