Thought bubble

[yvannairie]

Playing through Forbidden West is making me think about my extremely complicated Transformers crossover I had for the previous game, and how I want to continue it into this game because Aloy's Adventures With Her Big Metal Friends was just so good and thematically fitting for what was going on with her in Zero Dawn, and is turning out to be... thematically complementary to what has so far been going on in Forbidden West.

I would like to write down the outline for the questline involving the Autobots and their base, because I do have it planned out in quite a lot of detail -- interestingly a lot of the quest design that I was injecting into Zero Dawn using that AU shows up natively in Forbidden West, which validates to me that I've got a pretty good read on Guerilla's game design :D Very delightful when your AU turns out to be mechanically consistent with the rest of the series.

Comments

[sexytronians]

I didn’t even realise it was on PS4! As soon as it’s not massively expensive I may look into getting it sooner than I thought.

Oh gosh I love this! Cybertronian’s with robot dinosaur/megafauna alts is such an awesome concept. Also the Autobots as Aloy’s proxy family is a nice idea.

That scene with Perceptor is hilarious and I can just imagine it lol.

Would the Decepticons choose the alts of the Faro plague robots? Or the robot creatures made by GAIA?

[yvannairie]

Some of them do! Knockout is a Sawtooth, Breakdown is a Frostclaw, Starscream is a Stormbird and Shockwave is a Rockbreaker. Megatron is a unique flying dragon machine reminiscent of Prime Predaking -- clearly based on GAIA machines but clearly too alien to be one of them. Just like how the Autobots are hiding out amongst GAIA's machines for safety, so are the Decepticons while they're scouting the planet out. I think the plot twist towards the end of the HFB Autobot questline is that Soundwave has reformatted into a Sunwing, and has been spying on them and their base gets located and attacked. (Also some machines that make great alts just don't strike me as particularly Autobot -- like, I can't really see Slitherfangs as anything but a 'Con machine, y'know?)

Come HFB, the new Autobots get alt forms based on the new machines, but a lot of the new Decepticons have wholly new and completely alien alt forms that fall more visually in line with the Faro/Far Zenith machines. Lots of sort of... buggy, multi-limbed, alien alts... but also just straight-up hovertanks, too. Some 'Cons keep their machine alts for vanity, but in HZD Aloy didn't fight any of the Decepticons while they're in root form, so during the rematches in HFB, they give up fighting in alt b/c Aloy is a proven threat now.

I'm not entirely sure what to do about mecha whose alts are machines that are not in the second game. Probably what I'll do is simply ignore it and be like "sure there are Sawtooths and Tramplers in the West!! We just never see them :)"