u/BravoMike215

1. Give us the ability to attack other flying machines with your mount machine's claws while flying around in the air. So this way, we have more ways to attack rather than just using the bow and arrow which definitely isn't always suitable for the fast movements of aerial combat. So this would look more like two birds of prey grappling and clawing each other in the air while falling to the ground as they attempt to win before they run out of air time. Its a very high risk high reward tactic.
2. Also, maybe we can jump off our mount to fall towards the opponent's flying mount and do a melee grapple over the control over the new flying mount. Maybe a series of quick time event like block, attack and counter mini-game on the enemy mount almost like what happens in Ghost of Tsushima during 1 vs 1 duels maybe? You know what they say. If you can't kill the mount, then go for the rider.
3. Since you can't obviously can't always perfectly dismount right over the enemy's mount during the heat of combat, maybe we could get the ability to grapple to, from and between multiple flying machines because as Aloy already has a grapple mechanic introduced in Forbidden West.
4. Maybe there could also be a mechanic to slingshot ourselves with a grapple via our mount using the centripetal force of the grappling rope via our mount going spin spinny thing on us so we can be propelled outwards by letting go of the rope in order to either reach enemy mounts or to do stealth air insertions into the enemy base from outside their perimeter. This would totally make sense as the increase in flying mounts would mean the that the enemy camps would also start having some sort of anti-air weapons and emplacements. So this helps prevent unnecessarily risking our mount while also helping avoid Aloy just flying overhead and sniping enemies with sharpshot bows with impunity. You can also simplify the mount forward sling Aloy boosting by maybe just having our mount turn and kick us forward or whack Aloy with its tail to propel us towards our destination while dismounting in air. The next two ideas would probably be super unpopular.
5. A rideable jet engine propulsion type flying machine with still membrane wings, maybe call it a "jet"wing that use thrusters for flying and maneuvering around alongside its wings.
6. Along with the jetwings, regardless of whether they're a "jet" type or not, give the flying mounts some sort of guns, bombs or missiles that maybe you can order in order to give the flying machiene to shoot their "guns" and "missiles" making it somewhat closer to low octane Ace Combat than Pandora's Avatar. I feel like the machines having guns is part of the reason why Guerilla only lets us ride mounts that don't have guns so if we can have mounts with guns then that would allow us to be able to ride much more type of mounts. Maybe a Thunderjaw might be too much but it would be nice to be able to ride Ravagers and Bristlebacks.

In fact, I watched the aerial mounted combat gameplay of the Avatar video game and it was the most boring uninspired thing ever. It only works because of super dumb enemy AI.

The following is the conversation between me and my friend. I've formatted this post in a way that in instances where the texts in quotation marks are of my friend, whereas my thoughts and replies to him are in a descriptive form outside of quotation marks.
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Two problems can be solved at once if the game does 1 thing differently, okay 2 things maybe. Remove the hunting ground from Nora lands (pre-daytower/carja land) Either give something (activity I mean) NORA specific or nothing at all. The game has more than enough content. Keep the hunting grounds an activity in Carja lands, so meridian and all around. Instead of making the hunting grounds a checklist to get all medals for the lodge sling, ropecaster, etc, get each ground to give 1 highest upgrade weapon once you get 2 gold medals out of 3 trials. That way the hunting grounds aren't a checklist you complete to get a redeemable ticket that you take to lodge but rather an activity that gives a direct rewards while also providing the necessary space to test out the newly obtained weapon instead of just forgetting it after checking the stats."
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I told him that the game might have problems but the hunting grounds aren't one of them.
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The hunting grounds feel like checklists u can't deny that. Even if I could return after being higher level, the problem is that it shows u that "u only got this while u could've got this" . That results in me repeatedly trying to get the best medal until I get it.

Also the trial specifically trials you on stuff you currently have. Most of the harder trials aren't even about damage. There's very little to level up in them. Even if you're supposed to stop and return later as a higher level, there's nothing in the game stopping you from trying it over and over again. If you get silver you'll feel like doing it more times until u can get the gold. Do you not feel like that? Are you telling me that most people playing the game don't feel that?"
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I mentioned to him that he didn't suffer from similar impulses in Armored Core 6 and Sekiro.
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"That's different. The next thing is already presented, and occupies the spot where your already finished mission once was. Meanwhile the finished mission is in the repeat mission category (at a different place altogether). It's a difference in presentation. Genichiro is presented at 3 different points in the game. First at the start, then in the middle and then at the end. You can technically keep fighting him from the idol as a memory but that's you going out of your way to fight him rather than talk to kuro/emma who are waiting to talk to you. In horizon nothing is waiting for you, you're still in the hunting grounds and you don't have anywhere to be."
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Lastly, he also went into and completed the DLC just after finishing the "point of the spear" where Aloy avenges the defeat of the Nora war party with Varl and Sona in the Metal Ring stadium. He had never even made it to the Day Tower or entered Carja lands before encountering and completing the DLC. The man never left the Banuk lands even once after discovering and entering it before he even entered Carja. Despite me telling him to leave the Banuk lands and enter Meridian several times during that period.
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"I think one of the main reasons the story felt like it had no pull wasn't actually because the story had no pull but rather because the world and gameplay had no pull. The game reveals all it's cards way too early. The deathbringer and rock breaker are the only enemies that I hadn't encountered early. Blame the DLC for spoiling the rest of the game.

The different types of collectibles? Same throughout nora land and beyond nora land, and meaningless/uninteresting text on top of that. Hunting ground, cauldron, bandit camps, there's nothing new post daytower. The one thing that could've made exploration worth it, machines, were spoiled by the DLC."
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Here he complained about the uselessness and monotony of collectibles like metal vessels, metal flowers and banuk toy figures etc and that the "flavour text" that some of them provided were not even useful at all.

I would love to see even more weapon types in the third game. First mainly to do with melee because I've begun to find the spear incredibly monotone despite the "combos" because enemies get badass stuff like aztec style obsidian ripper swords, axes, etc but all Aloy has is the same spear from the first game.

Clubs, Axes, Spears, Longswords, Shield Swords, Shield Spears, Hook Swords, Sabers, Cavalry Swords, Horse Lances etc would have been amazing.

Aside from that I would also love to see either crude blackpowder smoothbore muskets or electromagnetic railgun smoothbore muskets that still shoots small iron balls. To balance out their high damage capacity, you would need to reload them before the battle and once you fire them off, it would simply be unfeasible for you to reload it for the entire battle unless you stun the enemy. Either that or you can go with either a single long barrel musket / carbine musket or you can go with 4-6 pistols which allow you 4-6 shots without reloading but at the expense of inferior range and damage.

I also think that not being able to have all the ammo types on the weapons of the same category (sharpshot with knockdown arrow vs sharpshot with tearblast etc) also contributed to the excessive amount of weapons of same category in Forbidden West so maybe being able to choose your own ammo for the weapons might be a valuable addition in the sequel. After all the weapons have their own traits so that would prevent some weapons from being too OP with ammos not intended for them while still giving players flexibility and freedom.

Also while personally I didn't have much trouble with Aloy's durability in the second game as I was changing my armour every 5 mins to best suit against certain type of enemies whether via stealth bonus or melee resistance, ranged resistance or elemental resistances. Plus there's also valor surge like Toughened. Others, have however mentioned that they thought Aloy was too much of a glass cannon so I also I think the addition of a shield would make Aloy less of a glass cannon for them. Like I'm so goddamn jealous when I see enemy brawlers with sunwing shields while we can't. And I also adore their clubs, power hammers, and ripper swords.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a "gun/musket". The weapon being a heavy slow loading medieval arbalest ballista is fine too.

The discussion was initially about how I don't like a large variety of weapons for the sake of variety. Its better to have fewer amount of weapons if all the different weapons are, are merely stat chances that doesn't chance how you move, aim and fight as well as the circumstances of when you use them.

I brought up the example of Dead Space where different enemies are better fought with Laser Cutter, Line Gun, Pulse Rifle, Force Gun etc. Then moved convo to Metro 2033 where long ranged enemies that doesn't move frequently are best fought with snipers, high mobility enemies with rifles and if they're very close, simply nothing beats shotgun. Then lastly I shifted the weapon variety discussion to Horizon where even if there are 3 bow types, one is a sniper, another is an elemental and the last is a quick shooter etc. Rattler and Slings are obviously so completely different from bows that they add even more play variety than just 3 well differentiated bows.

He believes that games with ranged weapons don't have variety because:

"due to the very nature of every weapon shooting projectiles, hitting enemies at long range is harder than hitting them close up even if you are using sharpshot arrow
at least they added tickler (rattler) and the close range shockwave weapons for the sake of adding variety

breakpoint arrow or sharpshot arrow takes out enemy fastest regardless of range
a sniper is a shotgun at close range if u can aim, and a true shotgun needs high damage that rattler doesnt have, rattler is like a tickling weapon"

While he hadn't played the former 2 games, he had played HZD on my recommendation. I mentioned to him he deliberately made the game mono-tone and boring for himself by simply using nothing else other than freeze sling, sharpshot bow, hunter bow and even the humble but great spear, completely ignoring the super fun shadow rattler etc and the following is his reply:

"As for why I never even tried out the upgraded rattler after I got it, there were probably multiple subconscious reasons lurking in my brain.

1. My first use of base rattler against watchers wasn't very good, the watchers twirl and have idle non-attack movements which often results in not hitting all pellets. A shaprshot arrow to the eye kills them easily in far less time.
2. The game doesn't provide any easily accessible testing grounds for when you unlock the weapon (or it's upgrades). This means looking at the description and stats is all you do for the time being.
3. The weapons consume ammo, even if a negligible amount. Due to my hoarder mentality, this opposes the idea of experimenting and testing out the weapon.
4. Because you have multiple weapons equipped at all times, you end up quickly switching to your main weapon before engaging, you may have seen this in my videos. I switch to (and craft) my correct arrow almost every time when running up to the enemy. So even with the new weapon equipped I end up not using it (even by mistake).
5. The game doesn't have any skills for rattler, sometimes a bit of flavour is needed to persuade someone to play something that is not "the meta" this game doesn't do it at all. There's no flavour text for anything either.
6. spear, especially spear heavy attacks takes too long and most enemies attack faster"

His non-precision weapons suffered greatly because he never used the spear which means he never knocked down machines with melee or stripped off their armour plates. This forced him to always just freeze slings 100% of the time to ignore armour rather than stripping them off which made the game even more boring and same samey for him.

I also pointed out to him that he doesn't feel that sharpshot bow is a sniper because he barely used concentration at all aside from jump concentration which isn't good for sharpshot, to which he replied:

"u trigger concentration at the last moment and shoot, kinda like quick scoping but still not as close
also remember that i used jump concentration most of the game
simply because jumping did the quick scoping for me, and i didnt have to wait for concentration bar to fully fill up
instant time slow on demand instead of waiting for a bar"

then he mentioned how arrows in his games were super inconsistent because they were phasing through enemies and weaving all over the place, I believe this was mainly due to him playing in 120+ FPS and not enabling aim assist which I told him to enable over and over again:

"and even then the arrows sometimes phase through enemies, standing enemies, so at that distance sniping with any bows including sharpshot is useless"

I sent him some vids of people sniping with sharpshot bows which he didn't do

"ive never been able to hit shots like that, my game wouldnt hit those shots believe me

also here the arrow is definitely more accurate than in HZD, and gravity where? i dont remember for sure but I think at that range sharpshot bow has arrow drop due to gravity

HFW might be a much better game overall but due to HZD I dont even want to give it a chance

also why are they not running towards aloy
last i checked, sharpshot bow is useless after 1 shot because enemy will run towards u, after the first shot the second one would result in them chasing me

aim assist reminds me, this guy is probably playing with aim assist
thats how he hit the horn on the machine while the machine was moving and from that distance"

This also reminded me that he never took my advice of stealth sniping 1 shot at a time towards a large machine's components while hiding in a bush and waiting for the yellow alert state to reset before letting loose the next arrow.

All in all I'm posting my friend's grievances to see whether they're legitimate warranted issues faced by many other players or if he simply had severe and extremely bad luck when it comes to playing and enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn.

The discussion was initially about how I don't like a large variety of weapons for the sake of variety. Its better to have fewer amount of weapons if all the different weapons are, are merely stat chances that doesn't change how you are supposed to aim, change how you move while using them and ultimately how you fight as well, as the adaptation of the circumstances of when you should use them.

I brought up the example of Dead Space where different enemies are better fought with Laser Cutter, Line Gun, Pulse Rifle, Force Gun etc. Then moved convo to Metro 2033 where long ranged enemies that doesn't move frequently are best fought with snipers, high mobility enemies with rifles and if they're very close, simply nothing beats shotgun. Then lastly I shifted the weapon variety discussion to Horizon where even if there are 3 bow types, one is a sniper, another is an elemental and the last is a quick shooter etc. Rattler and Slings are obviously so completely different from bows that they add even more play variety than just 3 well differentiated bows.

The following is the conversation between me and my friend. I've formatted this post in a way that in instances where the texts in quotation marks are of my friend, whereas my thoughts and replies to him are in a descriptive form outside of quotation marks.

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He believes that games with ranged weapons don't have variety because:

"due to the very nature of every weapon shooting projectiles, hitting enemies at long range is harder than hitting them close up even if you are using sharpshot arrow
at least they added tickler (rattler) and the close range shockwave weapons for the sake of adding variety

breakpoint arrow or sharpshot arrow takes out enemy fastest regardless of range
a sniper is a shotgun at close range if u can aim, and a true shotgun needs high damage that rattler doesnt have, rattler is like a tickling weapon"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While he hadn't played the former 2 games, he had played HZD on my recommendation. I mentioned to him he deliberately made the game mono-tone and boring for himself by simply using nothing else other than freeze sling, sharpshot bow and hunter bow, completely ignoring the super fun shadow rattler and even the humble but great spear etc and the following is his reply:

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"As for why I never even tried out the upgraded rattler after I got it, there were probably multiple subconscious reasons lurking in my brain.

1. My first use of base rattler against watchers wasn't very good, the watchers twirl and have idle non-attack movements which often results in not hitting all pellets. A shaprshot arrow to the eye kills them easily in far less time.
2. The game doesn't provide any easily accessible testing grounds for when you unlock the weapon (or it's upgrades). This means looking at the description and stats is all you do for the time being.
3. The weapons consume ammo, even if a negligible amount. Due to my hoarder mentality, this opposes the idea of experimenting and testing out the weapon.
4. Because you have multiple weapons equipped at all times, you end up quickly switching to your main weapon before engaging, you may have seen this in my videos. I switch to (and craft) my correct arrow almost every time when running up to the enemy. So even with the new weapon equipped I end up not using it (even by mistake).
5. The game doesn't have any skills for rattler, sometimes a bit of flavour is needed to persuade someone to play something that is not "the meta" this game doesn't do it at all. There's no flavour text for anything either.
6. spear, especially spear heavy attacks takes too long and most enemies attack faster"

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His non-precision weapons suffered greatly because he never used the spear which means he never knocked down machines with melee or stripped off their armour plates. This forced him to always just freeze slings 100% of the time to ignore armour rather than stripping them off which made the game even more boring and same samey for him.

I also pointed out to him that he doesn't feel that sharpshot bow is a sniper because he barely used concentration at all aside from jump concentration which isn't good for sharpshot, to which he replied:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"u trigger concentration at the last moment and shoot, kinda like quick scoping but still not as close
also remember that i used jump concentration most of the game
simply because jumping did the quick scoping for me, and i didnt have to wait for concentration bar to fully fill up
instant time slow on demand instead of waiting for a bar"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

then he mentioned how arrows in his games were super inconsistent because they were phasing through enemies and weaving all over the place, I believe this was mainly due to him playing in 120+ FPS and not enabling aim assist which I told him to enable over and over again:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"and even then the arrows sometimes phase through enemies, standing enemies, so at that distance sniping with any bows including sharpshot is useless"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I sent him some vids of people sniping with sharpshot bows which he didn't do

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"ive never been able to hit shots like that, my game wouldnt hit those shots believe me

also here the arrow is definitely more accurate than in HZD, and gravity where? i dont remember for sure but I think at that range sharpshot bow has arrow drop due to gravity

HFW might be a much better game overall but due to HZD I dont even want to give it a chance

also why are they not running towards aloy
last i checked, sharpshot bow is useless after 1 shot because enemy will run towards u, after the first shot the second one would result in them chasing me

aim assist reminds me, this guy is probably playing with aim assist
thats how he hit the horn component on the machine while the machine was moving and from that distance"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This also reminded me that he never took my advice of stealth sniping 1 shot at a time towards a large machine's components while hiding in a bush and waiting for the yellow alert state to reset before letting loose the next arrow.

All in all I'm posting my friend's grievances to see whether they're legitimate warranted issues faced by many other players or if he simply had severe and extremely bad luck when it comes to playing and enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn.

I also have several more of his grievances in the comments below.

I would love to see even more weapon types in the third game. First mainly to do with melee because I've begun to find the spear incredibly monotone despite the "combos" because enemies get badass stuff like aztec style obsidian ripper swords, axes, etc but all Aloy has is the same spear from the first game.

Clubs, Axes, Spears, Longswords, Shield Swords, Shield Spears, Hook Swords, Sabers, Cavalry Swords, Horse Lances etc would have been amazing.

Aside from that I would also love to see either crude blackpowder smoothbore muskets or electromagnetic railgun smoothbore muskets that still shoots small iron balls. To balance out their high damage capacity, you would need to reload them before the battle and once you fire them off, it would simply be unfeasible for you to reload it for the entire battle unless you stun the enemy. Either that or you can go with either a single long barrel musket / carbine musket or you can go with 4-6 pistols which allow you 4-6 shots without reloading but at the expense of inferior range and damage.

Additions:

It doesn't necessarily have to be a "gun/musket". The weapon being a heavy slow loading medieval arbalest ballista is fine too.

I also think that not being able to have all the ammo types on the weapons of the same category (sharpshot with knockdown arrow vs sharpshot with tearblast etc) also contributed to the excessive amount of weapons of same category in Forbidden West so maybe being able to choose your own ammo for the weapons might be a valuable addition in the sequel. After all the weapons have their own traits so that would prevent some weapons from being too OP with ammos not intended for them while still giving players flexibility and freedom.

Also while personally I didn't have much trouble with Aloy's durability in the second game as I was changing my armour every 5 mins to best suit against certain type of enemies whether via stealth bonus or melee resistance, ranged resistance or elemental resistances. Plus there's also valor surge like Toughened. Others, have however mentioned that they thought Aloy was too much of a glass cannon so I also I think the addition of a shield would make Aloy less of a glass cannon for them. Like I'm so goddamn jealous when I see enemy brawlers with sunwing shields while we can't. And I also adore their clubs, power hammers, and ripper swords.