Early game feel and side quests

[Magic A. I.]

There may be some minor early game spoilers here, but I tried my best to avoid them.

So by now I've been to most of the locations that were revealed by the very first Tallneck. I didn't do the lvl10 main quest yet, nor that other lvl10 quest that requires me to go slightly further west.

I was never given a quest to find Utaru shrines, but I've found two: one of them has a spot that Focus marks as "dead body", but there's no body there. I never got a quest to go there, so the interactible body didn't spawn. In fact, the entire Utaru tribe gave me only a single quest despite the fact that I found three of their settlements and was denied entry to one of them without it prompting a quest.

I was given the dreaded Drowned Hopes quest and wasn't able to open the first box in the Sunken Wreck, but during my exploration I've found all the other locations from that quest and heard several dialogue lines from Aloy that broke both quest sequence and immersion. I'm going to restart the game now, because I can't continue to play like that.

I found several black boxes with recordings and when I found the first one (2nd slot in collectibles) I thought that it was another story order broken, but it turned out that the 1st slot was part of another recording chain. Whew. I also found the location of the third black box by climbing an allegedly "unclimbable" cliff next to the 2nd drone, but I was only able to access everything there except the actual tiny room with the black box because of the metal flower.

I found two drones, but never received the quest to find them. Thankfully, unlike the Drowned Hopes quest, this didn't break the sequence. Fought that machine next to the 1st drone and found it easier and more enjoyable to fight than Leaplashers.

I did the Utaru town quest in the north and discovered that Forbidden West also has some NPCs who are just as stupid as Nora NPCs from the first game. The entire town defense battle reminded me of the Epic NPC Man in a bad way. Such cringe.

I climbed all the mountains by jumping and gliding whenever there was no conventional way to get there (including the one in the Daunt) and got plenty Greenshine Slabs. I explored along the edges of the map and discovered that it is the "turn back or I'll reload" message that stopped me in each direction rather than terrain. I found a path behind the northern rebel camp and followed it, but was stopped by the same message before reaching the structure in the end.

Finally, I've been to the Mu Cauldron and found the locked "I wonder what's behind it" door, but didn't find a way to open it, even though I found and shot two of the corresponding symbols on the walls.

I also figured out that the constant crashes were mainly caused by Steam Achievement progress notifications and they can only be disabled globally with the "Show Notifications: Never" setting in Steam. So here it is. My experience with this game so far.

[Nihil]

Yeah sadly a lot of activity and quests in this game are designed in a way that you are locked out of them even on early game territories because you need to backtrack to them later or very late on in the game. I don't like this approach neither. because it breaks the immersion of a continual adventure and gives the feeling of grind.

Also how the dialogues are implemented is very bad.
First of all Aloy is kinda annoying. She is commenting everything which happens around her. And even spoiling some of the possibly interesting puzzles by telling us what to do or look for like we are some sort of mentally challenged babies. And as you wrote, it happens often that when something happens, she starts commenting on it, but then it gets interrupted by an other line of hers.

And the most annoying thing I noticed which never happened in the first Tallneck territory, but started occuring more and more un Tanakh territory, that if you press "space" to skip a dialogue line/sentence, it is skipping the entire conversation. It is even more infuriating when you can't repeat that conversation. Why?

[5tyle]

What I did was, download a Ng+ save this way I don't have to deal with backtracking stuff. Free to explore however I like

[Magic A. I.]

Originally posted by Nihil:

And as you wrote, it happens often that when something happens, she starts commenting on it, but then it gets interrupted by an other line of hers.

No, you are thinking of a different issue. What I wrote about was how she says something along the lines "This is the location those coordinates I found mentioned", but I never actually found any coordinates because there was no way to progress in the quest far enough to get them (missing tool needed). The game sees the quest has started (Drowned Hopes) and thinks that if I found a location on a map (opened the box in Sunken Wreck) then it must've been the quest that led me there. But obviously I couldn't open the box that early in the game and found the location without any coordinates simply by exploring a question mark from the Tallneck's data. So it is from this lines of hers I found out that Drowned Hopes in fact has not one but four locations to visit. Because Aloy told each time that we are there thanks to some non-existent "coordinates". I never heard her interrupting her own lines though.

[Magic A. I.]

Originally posted by 5tyle:

What I did was, download a Ng+ save this way I don't have to deal with backtracking stuff. Free to explore however I like

That is called cheating.

[joridiculous]

You have to follow the main story to "unlock" a lot of things, do that. You need special tools, many side quest want trigger before "time". Quite a few locations want trigger , but Aloy can still give some dialog. etc

[Hydra_360ci]

Originally posted by Magic A. I.:

Originally posted by 5tyle:

What I did was, download a Ng+ save this way I don't have to deal with backtracking stuff. Free to explore however I like

That is called cheating.

I call it... why bother paying for the game and playing it at all..