That's genuinely provocative, because it means that there's a much more elaborate storytelling machine working behind the graphics. Instead of placing switches on every quest that keep environmental cues turned off until you trigger them, the Guerilla team left certain elements on. It feels like a radical departure from the traditional approach of "don't put anything out there that will confuse the player." Instead, there's just enough lying around that you can be delightfully perplexed.
Those general impressions are takeaways from some very short, cut-and-dry side quests I'll review here. Yes, they're pretty straightforward as replicas of things Guerilla created for Zero Dawn. But I still find it remarkable how much more texture there is to these side-quests compared to their precursors.
Side Quest #7: The First Vista Point
Nothing will ever outdo the "planet of the apes moment" for me when I got to the first vista point in Zero Dawn and realized I was standing on the site of my alma mater at the Air Force Academy. After that, I was totally sucked into a personal "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego" meta-game with the vistas and the worldbuilding, so I didn't know if Forbidden West would continue that tradition.
It totally continues the tradition and improves on it.
In Zero Dawn, all you had to do was get near a point, obtain the signal ping, go to the location, turn on your focus, and voila, there's your geographic landmark. Here, it's a bit more of a quest. In part one, you get a partial image of the vista. After that, you have to look around for the place where the image was taken to get the full thing. I found it pretty fun to have to use my own intuition and perception of the geography to help the focus along. For someone who likes to explore maps like me, it's a really fun little distraction. I wasn't as thrilled with the result, since the image wasn't of some major site in the U.S. I hope other ones refer to more culturally significant landmarks.
Side Quest #8: A Bigger Boom
Iiiiit's an errand. I don't know if there's really a way to make the "go find a thing, kill it, and bring me back some of its parts" sequence seem less monotonous beyond not making the player do it so often. But after killing a thing so a guy could cook you some food, killing a thing so you can get a new weapon is at least a little more enticing.
What really spurred me to get to the end of this one was the dialogue between the two inventors, Delah and her sister, Boomer. There was a ton of nuance stuffed into these characters. They exhibited idiosyncrasies in their behavior and speech, interacted like real sisters, and showed some authentic individuality. That's a lot to pack into a brief space for a mission intro, but hats off to the writer and the voice actors for this one. The time I had with them was as good as some scenes between Taystee and Poussey in Orange is the New Black. These people were not treated as one-offs, and even if they are one-offs, I appreciated their humanity.
Side Quest # 9: Tallneck Site
I know, I know, I know. This is way down the road, both on the map and the timeline, from the previous two, but it fits with the overall theme of this post about how small elements add up to big things, so I'm putting it here.
In Zero Dawn, tallnecks were really just easy little climbing exercises that gave you some advance orientation to the local map area. They don't have an extremely strong connection to the world -- geographically or lore-wise-- but they're aesthetically cool and they have a good use. If the first tallneck site in Forbidden West is any indication, then they've grown up significantly. You have to clear the site of a few machines patrolling it, then negotiate a combo puzzle-climbing obstacle around a giant radar tower to get high enough to mount the tallneck. The thing that especially drew my interest is that this tallneck was patrolling an area reminiscent of the Very Large Array in New Mexico. There were even a couple of background lore entries around the radar antenna you climb. Overall, what was once a non-sequitur map reveal dressed up as an obstacle dressed up as a machine is now an element of the game that offers challenge, a bit of unspoken adventure, and world-building nuggets.
Overall, it's evident that the quests team at Guerilla did way more than just expand the categories of quest management in the menu. Everything is a little richer. There was a strong appreciation for how details add to atmosphere. Without doing anything huge to turn the game world on its head, they put in a lot of little extras to make the player feel consistently rooted in the world.
The same goes for the side quest "shadows of the past," which I'll get into on my next post.
