Redmaw and musings on potential sequel ideas. *No spoilers* (Gaming)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Sunday, March 12, 2017, 04:07 (2822 days ago) @ cheapLEY

I haven't finished the Hunters Lodge, yet, but it's obviously going to end with hunting down Redmaw, the legendary Thunderjaw. They set that up pretty much immediately.

It got me thinking, though, about how awesome it would be for more "legendary" machines. Maybe a bigger and much stronger version of every machine type that randomly appears throughout the world.

This game has so much potential to go farther than it actually did with things like this. I saw a post on /r/Horizon about perhaps taking the idea of Cauldrons even deeper, with Grazers gathering resources in the world, the supply machines transporting those resources to Cauldrons, which produce new machines.

I mean, the machines do pretty much do that (Grazers > Shell-backs > Cauldron > More Machines), and it'd be neat to be able to track the process, but yeah, maybe an understanding is better than grinding for an objective.

Restraint is key.

Attack too many machines in the territory of a Cauldron, and it'll start churning out bigger and stronger machines, with the player able to interrupt this by taking out the supply chains (either destroying the convoys or the Grazers and Scrappers that are gather resources), or even starving the Cauldron so it shuts down completely. This could serve as a way to open up supply lines and trade routes between settlements or something--I'm not exactly sure what the gameplay purpose for it would be, it's just a neat idea.

This game really sparks my imagination in that way, but on the flipside, I wonder if things like that might be a mistake. I think a huge strength of Horizon is the ways it holds back. It's a really tight game with no bloat, and I wonder if a sequel might screw that up by trying to add too much, too many new ideas.

Yeah, that's always one of the reasons that game sequels often don't grab me the same way (that, and over-streamlining). I thought that shadow of War would suffer from that, since they built it completely around the Nemesis system, which was a surprise hit in Shadow of Mordor, but after watching the gameplay video of SoW, I'm pretty stoked.
Also, Dead Space 2 pulled it off perfectly, so we'll see...