Horizon Forbidden West's Cauldrons, Tallnecks Are Great Examples of Unique Repeat Content
There's a common refrain that Guerrilla Games' Horizon franchise has the unfortunate tendency of releasing its open-world titles just before groundbreaking entries in the genre. In 2017, Horizon Zero Dawn launched a week before The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and earlier this year Horizon Forbidden West launched a week before Elden Ring. While many feel the latter titles overshadow Aloy's adventures, there's good reason Guerrilla has become a top PlayStation developer.
Forbidden West is a strong evolution of the formula established by Zero Dawn, even if many have decried it for taking the approach of an objective-stuffed Ubisoft series like Assassin's Creed. It's certainly easy to point toward FromSoftware's encouraged freedom with The Lands Between as antithetical to Horizon Forbidden West, but that also downplays the way Guerrilla improves upon many of the «checklist» objectives in its sequel. Aloy's treks into Caudrons and up Tallnecks are particularly good case studies for how to make repeat objectives unique enough to feel fresh.
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Horizon Zero Dawn is a relatively compact adventure, with Aloy's journey to discover how the world of the Old Ones ended broken up by repeating, almost copy-and-paste activities. She encounters hunting grounds with three timed challenges meant to teach the player, bandit camps to clear out, Tallnecks that act as map revealing «radio towers,» and more. Cauldrons are one of the biggest side activities, allowing Aloy to delve into giant factories so that she can unlock the ability to override more machine types.
In Zero Dawn Cauldrons were aesthetically and mechanically identical in most respects, presented as cavernous metallic
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