u/Effective-Priority62

Holy shit. It's downright impossible to get the game running right. First of all, just outright forget about 3x or 2x resolution. Even running natively, the game will constantly stutter at around 75% speed and below 30 fps. Increasing the speed just makes the game finicky and sped up with funny voices and audio cracks, it doesn't stabilize at the intended 100% speed. Even when I somehow managed to hit or surpass 30 fps, the intro cutscene was sped up. I've tried every possible fix for this game on Android that anyone posted in the last 5 years. No combinations work. Some even make it worse. Some make it crash constantly, and others render the cutscenes without any textures and all monochrome. Vulkan or OpenGL, each of them come with its own set of headaches. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I've read that this phone could emulate Wii games just fine as long as it's in native or 2x, with 3x running with minor issues. That hasn't been the case at all. I didn't get the GameCube version of RE4 because I prefer Wii, which has the extra modes and bonuses from the PS2 version along with the real time rendered cutscenes from GameCube. Unfortunately, the game is some kind of nightmare on my phone, for some reason. While people from 5 years ago managed to get it to run stable. I'm using bypass charging and a cooler, btw. Temperature doesn't get past 30 Celsius, so no throttling. The Dolphin app is set to Performance mode on X-Arena.

What can I do? It seems I have to hit the jackpot out of the thousands of possible combinations that this app's settings have. Is there someone who knows how should I set up this game based on my phone?

Sometime after I was done with HZD for the first time, I tried Monster Hunter World, having never touched the series before. Amazing game, with incredibly deep systems. I didn't get too far, because it was all very overwhelming and didn't offer a pause menu, even tho I only play single player. It was a variety of things that put me off, but I think one of the main factors was the monsters themselves. The animals living and roaming in their own habitats, just minding their own business. I felt so bad for them and it felt so wrong too.

It's not like in HZD or any other game with animal hunting mechanics as side component where you do it to small animals without even thinking, for your character's survival. In MH, you're doing it all the time, to glorious large beasts that are a lot of times not even doing anything, just living their lives with their species, and then you wander into this beautiful untouched continent like Christopher Columbus and start killing everything left and right, lmao. I don't know, it's probably fun if you get the hang of it, but coming off Horizon where you never really felt bad for the machines and at the most either hated them or thought they were funny/endearing (cause at the end of the day they were just machines and didn't feel physical pain, and were meant to be destroyed and recycled at Cauldrons), you REALLY feel like a trophy hunter on a safari killing lions or rhinos for sport. Or at least I did, anyway.

That's not to say I've never played games with a similar premise before. In FF XII, one of my favorite games, half of the enemy catalogue/bestiary is just the wildlife native to each ecosystem doing their thing innocently. Of course, most of them are in our path and will attack on sight, making some fights inevitable. But it's not like in MH World were you're able to sneak or walk past the monster herds just fine as long as you kept your distance. And in FF it's all very cartoonish and arcadey, the game design and animations don't really emphasize that these creatures are animals that you're hunting, more like monsters you have to inevitably fight to get across the map to the objectives.

Did anyone else feel this way when trying a Monster Hunter game? Do you get over it quickly? Or are we meant to feel this way? Anyways, that came back to my mind because I was thinking of my old dream for the series (a much longer number of sequels, with shorter gaps between each release), where Aloy travelled the world to hunt and capture a new subordinate function in each game. I was thinking, if an ARTEMIS game was made, imagine if the rogue AI was going haywire creating crazy genetic abominations/frankestein styled animals somewhere in the world where it established dominance, or even managed to reverse engineer or create her own version or imitation (tho genetically different) of dinosaurs, somehow.

Would be a crazy game and it would introduce an insane concept for the rest of the series which would clash with its whole premise of a robotic tribal setting, of course, but what really got me thinking is: if there were Horizon games with ARTEMIS-created animals, maybe even original bears, lions, rhinos etc from our time, or even dinosaurs, would we, as the players controlling Aloy feel bad for them somewhat? Would Aloy herself? It's a whole other experience than killing large/medium machines, cause animals, albeit not rational or malicious like the human enemies, can feel pain, cry/whine, bleed and be injured horrifically and graphically, and make for some nasty corpses, much unlike the HEPHAESTUS machines, which are really harmless to a hunter's psyche in comparison.

Let's be honest, Horizon isn't particularly hard, even on normal. Even if you're not an experienced gamer when playing them for the first time, the game gives you enough tools, resources and accessibility to just cheese your way through and enjoy the adventure at your own pace, even if getting hurt, wasting ammo and using recovery items a lot. For us perfectionists who like to learn most systems and truly understand the combat's difficulty curve during our very first playthrough, however, it can be frustrating sometimes. It wasn't frustrating for me at all in Zero Dawn, the difficulty curve and mastering all tricks and abilities felt pretty fair, and even when you messed up in combat and got hurt or killed by a machine, it felt like "fair, that was my mistake".

That wasn't the case at all in Forbidden West lmao at least not for me. The machines are relentless, hyper aggressive and always keep up the pressure on you. You start the game pretty nerfed, and even after you max Aloy out, your rolls/evades are still slow, the melee is even slower and requires precise, calculated combos so you're not stuck in long recovery animations at the end of an attack, the hitboxes are all over the place, and Aloy takes forever stuck getting up from the ground every time she gets hit or electrocuted by some bullshit, such as hitting a Ravager at the wrong time. Oh, there's a thousand other ways for her to get hit or stun-locked. Even more infuriating, she takes like an eternity to get back up, unlike in Zero Dawn, and needs to stop moving to take bullshit stamina, cleanse or health potions mid-fights, making this feel all too much like a souls game. It's a steep climb of the difficulty curve, until you get the hang of it, upgrade Aloy enough and finally learn how to fight back aggressively, strategically manage your resources mid fight and not get hit most of the time, for the canon Aloy experience.

This perfectionism and being in a constant state of being pissed off by the game's steeper combat difficulty led to some very frustrating mission sequences, were I'd rather die or reload, than proceed with Aloy taking hits which I felt were unfair or that she shouldn't have gotten. None more so, than fighting these two (or were they 3?) fucking Grimhorns and the flying assholes that guarded them near the lake in The Second Verse, in which we gathered parts to reboot the land-gods later in the game. (I think there were also Lealslashers there?) Like you wouldn't believe how many times I reloaded that save trying to get the perfect execution, only for fucking Zo to get spotted or start attacking and ruin everything, even when I could take out a few of them stealthily. The allies in this game are often braindead if the mission demands it. Even shooting anything at a machine or human that you believe can get taken down quietly without alerting the others, will prompt your NPC ally to loudly give up cover and alert all the enemies into a combat state while attacking them.

And god, was that mission just the epitome of that, even when you had memorized all the enemies. It would have been a thousand times better without Zo there, but you just couldn't keep her away. Took me like 15 tries before I could have a cool looking fight were I mostly dodged them all and didn't get any damage of the kind that knocked Aloy to ground into another insufferable long recovery animation that ruined my whole flow.

Is anyone else here a perfectionist in this game and likes to play as lore accurate Aloy, who had a frustrating time in some other missions? With or without ally NPCs?

(Apologies in advance for the massive text. I made this as short as I could and made the paragraphs not too long after breaking them up a bunch of times.)

I reiterate whenever I can that, while I think the Horizon series (which does not need to be just a mainline trilogy or just Aloy's saga) can go on for a long time, its new entries DON'T have to always take place further into the timeline and outdo or one-up the previous ones every time and ruin or undo the story of previous games by somehow always resetting the status quo to an earth/terraforming system still needing balance and machines still trying to cull humans or worse.

We have no idea how Guerilla is going to handle the series once the main story arc that started it all finally ends, but it's presumably with Horizon 3, as Nemesis is defeated and GAIA is fully restored to her full powers along with the Apollo database and having control of HEPHAESTUS again. We know they've expressed interest in bringing Aloy back to new adventures, and while I'm not opposed to that, I really, really wish those new adventures are just more chronicles of her other adventures in-between the main games rather than massive new existential threats that somehow come after the final game in the OG series and ends up zombifying the series much like an action or horror movie franchise, which always end up getting "one more", sequel or ending.

My hopes for the future of Horizon past H3 is just that Guerilla explores the massive possibilities and world that their established lore provides, along with the roughly almost 30 years of machine Derangement (we know that by the time of Forbidden West it's barely above two decades, but who knows how H3 is gonna go, its story could have time skips or span a bunch of years), and just place most of the new games there, with Aloy or other protagonists. Maybe switch up the genres every now and then and do other types of games in other parts of the timeline that are mostly human combat, like a Rost Death Seeker game, or fighting the Chariot line in an Operation Enduring Victory game.

Or anything in those 1000 years of GAIAs stewardship that might have been an incident where machines somewhere in the world have become aggressive pre-derangement, maybe because of a surviving rogue AI like Vast Silver, or because of a tribe that managed to become technologically advanced and manipulate machines to their advantage, or even Elysium descendants, since we're yet to solve the mystery of what happened in there that caused their comms to GAIA to cut off. The possibilities are endless, and none of them compromise the series having a bold and decisive full stop for the story in Horizon 3. (assuming that's the one where they're planning to wrap things up in and they're not gonna do plot twist rug pull that extends the Zero Dawn-Far Zenith-Nemesis arc for a couple more games).

ALL OF THIS SAID, I have to be realistic and think of Guerilla and Sony as a whole as typical entertainment businesses. They don't think like a fan that's heavily invested and wants the possible future games to thread around the lore in the most thematically fitting way to their headcanon of how things should go. They're gonna want to keep a franchise as big as Horizon to keep going forward with as much momentum as possible, and that probably means releasing much more chronological sequels than prequels or interquels. That's probably inevitable at this point, if they still feel like keeping Horizon going after 3. But it doesn't have to be bad. Or too cliche.

I imagined, what if the best chance they have to defeat Nemesis in Horizon 3 is to convince and ally with HEPHAESTUS to help them save the planet from the Zenith singularity? The plot about capturing it again gets turned in its head once they realize HEPH became far too powerful and smart after escaping the Zenith base with all the new tech it absorbed, and they can't waste any more time or risk any more lives trying to capture it while Nemesis is destroying everything they love, so the unexpected move by Aloy and GAIA is to finally have a long sit down (or series of heart-to-hearts), with him, to make him logically understand why teaming up with them is in the best interest of his programming, despite his own code having gone rogue due to HADES's malware when it escaped GAIA Prime.

How he can conciliate his new programming with the GAIA team, and help defeat Nemesis and build a new Earth/stable terraforming system afterwards. But as part of the deal, they'd have to agree and understand that afterwards, he would also not back down from his human culling protocol and submit/merge to GAIA for a long time, until he sees a real change in behavior from human societies around the world and they stop hunting machines altogether, meaning that post-Nemesis, he and GAIA would reach a stalemate where they'd cooperate for the sake of the biosphere, but neither would truly control or contain the other, and HEPH would still be coming up with new and exciting ways to kill humans with its terraforming agents and design hunter-killers.

That means they could easily have sequels taking place decades or even centuries into the future, (until the whole planet's civilization is on the same page as GAIA and can agree on ditching their old predatory ways) while keeping the tribal solarpunk aesthetic. Easy way for Guerilla to pump out new chronological sequels with varied plots and settings, with HEPHAESTUS as just this unkillable vague background villain or necessary evil that they have to put up with indefinitely in between every new crisis or conflict.