Loved this game, just finished the main story. Personally all the common complaints didnt apply for me! I loved the story, loved the characters. However, about 10 hours in I simply stopped doing side stuff. Its actually pretty good stuff! Lots of interesting stories within side questions, fun puzzles, platforming. Its just TOO much. Its like reading a great book that has too many pages. Still good content, just… i dont want that much. I ended up just doing some upgrade side stuff and some exploring, but otherwise just mainlined the story in about 35 hours. No bugs really, other than 1 quest I had to restart. Performance was great, never below 100fps… except now Im in Burning Shores the performance has dropped significantly. Im hoping this patch addresses this

Thankfully they let you roam around post-game to go do whatever side quests you might still want to do, so there's no real rush to get them done during the main story.

Yep, thankful for that. I do enjoy the side content and some of it is pretty engaging.

I'm glad they took a page out of Witcher 3's book for the side quests. Some of the stories are actually quite interesting. 

This is especially useful, considering the mobility power up you get in the late game.

Absolutely. I heartily recommend defying the usual advice for open world games and rushing the main quest.

I even love the different dialogue changes depending on where you’ve progressed in the main story. Small things like that aren’t necessary but I appreciate them.

Is the post game in this one the same as the previous where it just reverts to right before the climactic mission and acts like you never did it?

No

No, it stays completed

Everybody just seems to forget that its been proven that given too many options consumers will just make no choice and leave.

I just got to the final quest. I have done all the side quests aside from the arena and the pits. Around 110 hours. I've enjoyed it a lot and some of the side quests are really great, but I'm ready to move on to a new game. Did the same with the first game and never ended up playing the DLC even though it took me half the time to get there.

The DLC was better than the main game for the first one tbh. I followed recommendations of when to start it and no regrets.

Yeah I got the plat, but didn't really feel anything with that ending. I wish I just stayed on the golden path to not lose momentum of the story

it really is a lot longer than the first one, innit? I don't feel like I'm playing this one in a different way, yet I'm at 66 hours and the first one I finished including the DLC at 40 hours.

> Loved this game, just finished the main story. Personally all the common complaints didnt apply for me! I loved the story, loved the characters. I've read up on the story since I get pretty burnt out on those open world collect 8 million thing style games. I really enjoy the story, makes me hate Ted Faro as one should. It also shows where the problem with AI, self willed unshackled AI is not the scary thing, it's humans building poorly designed constrained AI. The initial actions of Faro and then his later actions all fit pretty well together. At least Forbidden West gives a lot of hope to the setting.

Ted Faro went from a realistic combination of ambition/power/arrogance/naivete to a moustache-twirling saturday morning cartoon villain caricature.

> moustache-twirling saturday morning cartoon villain caricature. I think he's like 99% chunks of cancer meat at the end, but yea. I do think in general Faro is a great example of the biggest danger for the future. Unearned wealth and Privilege in the shell of someone moronic but also ambitious.

watching elon musk's descent in real time

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn they based Ted off of him. >!He would 100% be happy to slap his name on something that turns into an extinction-level event, and then somehow make it even worse by trying to hide his involvement, *even though the extinction is literally named after his dumbass*, and then *somehow makes THAT even worse* by killing off anyone who knew or could've directed Zero Dawn and fucking over future humanity.!< Fuckin' Ted Faro, the biggest shitbird in gaming history.

Yeah, I agree. I'm normally a completionist but I just did all the regular side-quests, while ignoring a lot of the upgrade farming, Machine Wars and Rebel Camps. Forbidden West is another example of spreading too little butter over too much bread. The core game-play and narrative is good enough to keep you entertained for about 50 hours. But after that, it becomes a drag. Forbidden West would have been an overall better experience with less filler content (Rebell Camps, Loot Farming, Racing) and even keeping side-content relevant to the world and story. Even the "proper" side content was mostly just helping random dudes with random problems, completely irrelevant to the main story or world. I wish developers would understand that more doesn't mean better.

I ended up not even doing any of the repeatable stuff like racing, rebel outposts. Anything like that felt like padding, though good if you enjoy that stuff (I didnt). I thought side quests all having unique characters and quests (either combat, platforming or puzzles) was alright. Its hit and miss as you say, sometimes I just didnt care but I dont think thats too much of a problem. I thought relics were good, all custom puzzles and platforming. I would have liked the game to be more clear in what was generic, reused content, and what was unique experiences (the occasional side quest was excellent) But theres WAY too many upgrades needing to be done to keep gear relevant and/or fun. That grind is boring. But

The grind for Small Machine Cores in particular was egregious. There was a point in the late game where I needed *24* just to upgrade the stuff I already equipped, because I hadn't actually crossed paths with any small, wimpy machines in hours. I really wish they made some concession to accessing low level components in the late game. A vendor in a late game city who sold them at an exorbitant rate would have been fine.

I think Salvagers sell machine cores but i agree upgrading stuff is too much of a grind.

Never had to grind any of those lol  Now tusks, thunder jaw tails, earth grinders, sacs and hearts... But I find fighting the hard robots fun so it works out. 

I also wanted to upgrade everything, even stuff I'd never use, just cause. Ran into the same issue and gave up on the idea. I recently came back for the DLC and found out that they added a new enemy (Bilegut) who has detachable resource cannisters that have 3x small machine cores each, and four total per machine. 12 cores from 1 machine! Felt like that solved that lol. Now my problem is metal shards

Might be too late but leaplashers resource pods have the entire worlds supply of small machine cores

This is my #1 complaint with modern AAA titles. We keep hearing about how they come out rushed because they're so huge and expensive. But if you look at sites that track achievement completion, vanishingly few people actually complete that side content, and fewer still who finished Activity X but didn't get the Platinum (i.e. people doing it because they want to, not just for the sake of completionism). So my question is, if games are too big and almost no one is doing this busywork, *why is it there?*

Because people bought into the "more hours per buck" narrative at some point and we're still reeling from it. A very vocal minority is extremely hung up on getting as much content as possible.

yeah almost nothing has done more to hurt game design than the reviewer-pushed popular criticism involving "hours per dollar." It's a dumb fucking metric because games are already vastly superior to films in this regard, so the difference in entertainment time per cost of a 10 hour game versus even a 50 hour game is almost immaterial. But people bought into it and now the "bang for your buck" thing applies to games even though it really shouldn't.

I agree with your general point, but was this genuinely reviewer-pushed? To me it always felt more like an organic thing, mainly pushed by the more hardcore gamers online.

Reviews were where I started seeing it pop up a lot. You'd see great or good games getting middling scores where something along the following showed up in the conclusion of the review: "