(Jun 4th, 2021, 07:31 PM)Moonface Wrote:

That and it would look really bad on Sony if they kicked Cyberpunk off their store for not working very well (although it was more due to CDPR putting the refund ball into Sony's court without even asking for permission) to then release a first party game that also doesn't work well.

Apparently the climbing is a lot less restrictive this time around too. Another interview (or maybe it was the same one as the other stuff) said the climbing is more free, so I'm hoping that means something similar to Assassin's Creed where if something is a climbable surface it doesn't require exact handholds to do it. Also let Aloy grab ledge edges regardless of markings, because it irked me so much in ZD when she wouldn't scale something that was shoulder height just because it lacked a handhold.

• New Game+
  Replay through the entire game with everything from your first playthrough, including endgame gear.
  
• Performance Mode
  Performance Mode is receiving improvements to increase visual fidelity with revamped Temporal Anti-Aliasing.
  
• Transmog
  Customize the cosmetics of your equipped outfit to take on the appearance of any other owned outfit, allowing you to keep the stats you want while looking stylish in the forbidden west.
  
• Respec Skills
  Freely reset your skill points and redistribute them at any time in the event you put your points into the wrong thing, or maybe you just want to test something else out without grinding for the skill points first.
  
• Ultra Hard Difficulty
  If you played Zero Dawn, you know exactly what to expect here. Ultra Hard is available to choose for New Game+ so you do not need to start a fresh playthrough to experience it.
  
• New Weapons and Trophies
  Need more reason to revisit the forbidden west? A brand new set of trophies and weapons are available to earn so you can keep things fresh and challenging in your New Game+ playthrough.
  

Guerilla Wrote:

Our creative vision for the Burning Shores is an ambitious expansion which will take Aloy to the ruins of Los Angeles. It’s an overgrown and fractured city that can be fully explored via the water and flying on the back of a Sunwing. A massive machine threat lurks in its shadows – a huge challenge that Aloy must overcome by using all of her skills and abilities. To achieve this grand vision technically and creatively, we’ve made the difficult decision to focus all our efforts on making an incredible experience exclusively for the PlayStation 5 console.

• The game has a couple of settings that I really appreciate that I haven't seen other games offer. The first is an option to disable the animation for pickups, which I absolutely love because you have to constantly be collecting resources in the world to keep your supplies stocked, so it gets tedious sitting through animations every time you pick up wood or plants. The other option that I didn't use but found to be unique was the choice to disable tinnitus sounds, which I'm sure is a very appreciated choice for those who hate that noise.
  
• Facial animations have been vastly improved over Zero Dawn. I've noticed the odd in-game dialogue scene where lip syncing was massively off, but it was because for some reason the animations weren't synced up correctly to the dialogue delivery. Skipping a couple of lines helped somewhat in bringing it back as it forces the game to skip forward in both animations and speech, and today is also the first time I've seen it happen so it might just be a random bug that happens for some reason. Nobody looks stiff anymore though, which was a big problem in ZD.
  
• I utterly adore the presumably main villain (Regalla) even if I've only seen her in the one cutscene where the game introduces her to you. I'm really excited to see more of her once I start progressing the story.
  
• There is a much wider range of weapons this time around, and weapons are no longer limited to just being X weapon in Y category where you just constantly upgrade X to unlock new ammo types for it. For example, in Zero Dawn there is only one Hunter Bow, and you unlock Fire and Tear arrows for it via upgrades. In this game, I've come across at least six different Hunter Bows, with each one focusing on a main arrow type and then also offering a secondary arrow type, so you have to constantly be managing your equipped weapons to best handle each situation you come across. In ZD, you could put most of the games weapons into the weapon wheel and the only choice you really had to make was what to pick if two weapons shared an ammo type. I much prefer this games approach where I have to consider things regularly versus loading up my weapon wheel and not touching it very much.
  
• It's been a while since I played Zero Dawn to fully remember everything Aloy says and does in that game, but I'm loving her character in this game so far. She has such a zero-fucks-fight-me-bitch energy when it comes to dealing with characters that rub her the wrong way and just goes straight to the point of saying what she thinks about them. The way she yells at Regalla to come down and fight her in the first cutscene gives such "Are you not entertained?!" from Gladiator vibes. XD
  
• The number of machines in this game is crazy compared to ZD. I've only encountered a few machines so far, but the compendium for them all is stupidly huge by itself and then each entry also has variants inside it, so there has to be like 40-50 or more of these things in this game. I like that the developers expanded on the machine variants from the first game which only had a couple of machines come in different forms.
  
• Climbing is no longer limited to indicated handholds in a limited number of places in the world and this is such a huge improvement. Cliffs that you can climb are full of different routes and they get highlighted by your focus, instead of being indicated by handholds that look out of place or just ugly, and Aloy can finally climb up any ledge that she can reach with a jump. In ZD she would never climb ledges unless they had a marked handhold for her to use which was infuriating, especially since I went to that game from BotW which was total freedom for climbing.