I am playing Horizon Zero Dawn and haven’t gotten to the first main event, but it gives me this feeling like if I upgrade all my equipment now it might be for nothing. I know that is not the case, I looked it up, but what are some games that are the worst offenders? One I can think of is Aerith in the original FF7.
Shadow is the last one I need to finish in this series.
I got burnt out because I 100% the first one, and like 90% the second one in like a few months. Started the third and realized I needed a break from the genre.
Shadows has the same issue as Dragon Age Inquisition called “Get out of the Hinterlands” except you need to just get out of the city. Once you stop trying to get every shiny buable on the map and progress the story the burn out goes away. There’s so much back tracking you can do 1-2 things on the map each visit and you’ll get everything rather than spending 10 hours upfront. Same applies for AC Valhalla.
I adored to death the first 2 and 100%'d them.
The gameplay in Shadow is very much further refined/improved, but my lord it was such a disappointing story. Worth noting the underlying dev and writers changed, and it was very noticeable. There was some level of “wonder” and “holy shit” throughout the first 2 and I got invested into the gameworlds - the third never captured that and I couldn’t care less about the characters or exploring the map. That and the payoff to Trinity felt very similar to Spectre in the Craig Bond films - set up to be grand and mysterious in scale but underwhelmingly boring cartoon villainy when revealed.