There's so much more left to discover before the world ends... Let's Play Horizon Zero Dawn

I really like Blameless Marad. He seems… clever.

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CW: Torture

21 lpz

We head off to Pitchcliff to meet Marad’s agent in order to hopefully find Dervahl’s hideout. With our newfound information, we head off to mount a rescue attempt to get Ersa back.

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Man I gotta say this game has some real impressive facial capture/animations going on.

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And we’re back!

22 lpz

It’s time to get back to Meridian to stop whatever Dervahl has planned!

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23 lpz

There may have been some divisiveness over whether or not to save Olin, but it definitely feels like the right thing to do to go save his family. And luckily, he gets to tag along to do… whatever it is that he ends up doing, including losing all interest in the rescue attempt.

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24 lpz

It’s about time for the next Cauldron, so let’s see what this one contains!

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A bit of a note about this and all future episodes of this Let’s Play:

Simply put, I’m switching the format of the videos from subtitled to voiced commentary. Subtitling these videos has been a monumental undertaking that has been getting harder to do with each video, and it’s kind of easy to see how this was the video that made me stop and realize how much work the rest of this LP would be.

Subtitling videos requires me to go through and essentially re-edit a video several extra times to make sure that there are no typos, that the text is readable (no game overlays/subtitles interfere with its placement), that the text is up long enough to be read, etc.

So, with all of that said, I’m switching back to voiced commentary, which I’m just so much more comfortable with at this point. One thing to note about the episodes of this LP that are already out there:

I’m going to be replacing those videos’ subtitles with voiced commentary at a later date just to keep everything all consistent, but the videos themselves aren’t going anywhere. I’ll put a link up on one of the first posts in this thread so that they aren’t lost, but as I go along, I’ll just be redoing them. The videos will basically just be me repeating much of the subtitles, but I just want to redo them to have a consistently-formatted LP.

Thanks for being patient with my erratic upload rate for this LP, but hopefully switching formats will fix that!

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In the meantime, let’s tackle a huge chunk of this game’s side quests in one fell swoop as we clean up much of Meridian. (Pay no attention to some really bad lip sync that I couldn’t really begin to fix.)

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i was worried you had moved on to other projects and i’m glad to see more. whatever you want to do, whatever is most convenient and comfortable for you is A-OK. it’s your time you’re spending after all. i just wanted to say i appreciate you showing this game to us.

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Oh yay, I’m glad this is still on. Thanks for your time, I’ve been enjoying the LP a lot.

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26 lpz

What could have been so bad that it caused a global civilization to collapse?

Hopefully, we’ll find out some answer to that question at Maker’s End.

I’m planning to do a timeline/plot summary video much later on, so if details about the game’s story seem a little scattershot, I’ll try to lay them out more clearly then.

Also, one of the documents we picked up doesn’t really need a lot of explanation, but it’s so indicative of the kind of person that Ted Faro is that I wanted to put the full text of it here:

Spiritual Summit

FROM: Ted Faro
TO: Paula Vassara
SUBJECT: Spiritual Summit
Paula,

Recent events have sharpened my perspective, and I think that I, and FAS in general, have been neglecting the spiritual side of things. Not under any specific religious framework, of course, but in a more general sense, as in not giving enough thought to our shared values, hopes, and aspirations for the afterlife. I’d like you to reach out to religious leaders of every stripe with the intention of scheduling a conference soon. Very soon. I’ll have more thoughts about the agenda later, but for now, let’s put out some feelers and see if we can lock something in. Make it a big tent - no kooks, but anyone with a credible audience. Let’s go deluxe - make it clear we’ll spare no expense.

Thx
Ted

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27 lpz

We’re getting a bit of a clearer picture of what happened to the old world, but we’ve gotten few answers and many more questions. Who knows what we’ll find at the Grave-Hoard.

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28 lpz

The Eclipse sure have been a pain, and we haven’t really taken the fight to them all that much, so let’s rectify that and blow up their stuff!


29 lpz

It’s also time for another bestiary episode as we take a closer look at Bellowbacks, Broadheads, and Longlegs!

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Maybe someone should tell that Sylens guy that people are more likely to do what he wants if he isn’t awful to interact with. You’d have to call it social engineering or social-hacking or something but SV’s been dead for a while so perhaps calling it something new would work.

Or just telling Aloy all she needs to know to accomplish her objective. Telling underlings what the situation is, what they are doing and what they are expected to be accomplishing is basically organizational potty-training. And knowing that Hades / AI terminal was right there might have encouraged her to duck a little more.

Also I guess Hades has a weird light / nanite body thing that can only crawl up wires.

How far through the base game are we at this point?

Also do you ever plan on showing off the map? It would be neat to get some perspective on how far we’ve traveled.

We are about 50% through the game. There are still plenty of major story beats that are coming up, but according to the in-game progress menu, it says we’re at about 57% total game completion.

And it’s interesting that you bring up the map, since we’ll see it unveil in the next episode as I get the remaining Tallnecks. We have traversed a large majority of the map, but there’s a bunch of places in the middle of Carja territory with smaller settlements or no sidequests that we haven’t really hit yet, but we will.

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30 lpz

After running around the map for the last couple of videos, today we’re going to slow down and… run around the map.

But this time, we’re overriding the remaining Tallnecks to uncover the rest of the world!

And once that’s done, we’re going to tackle another Hunting Grounds since we haven’t done one of those in a while.

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“You won a blazing sun on your first attempt? Congratulations! You won a blazing sun on your first attempt? Congratulations! You won a blazing sun on your first attempt? Congratulations!”

I can’t wait to see how many attempts it takes for me to get Blazing Suns in the DLC’s Hunting Grounds on Normal. You will definitely not be hearing that phrase anymore, that’s for sure!

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31 lpz

We’re still going with sidequests, so here’s about an hour more! These are mostly ones that I skipped in Nora territory because they wanted us to go deep into Carja lands to complete them, so this is a little bit of clean up before the next big story beats come up.

(And Behemoth fights may be coming sooner than you think…)

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32 lpz

Today, we sweep up the last of the bandit camps, meet an old friend, and hunt down some escaped criminals. Things don’t exactly go as planned for at least a few people.

We’re also introduced to a new character named Janeva, who I believe isn’t handled poorly, but rather awkwardly. Instead of trying to define exactly what felt off about the conversation we have with him, I found an article written from a more informed perspective that elucidates better how I feel about the situation.

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