You’re rarely doing the same thing twice, even if some of the mechanics are the similar (inspect this item and follow this trail). Though the individual stories are not crazy compelling in many of these missions, the gameplay always takes unexpected turns. And the third just has you yelling at some tribal elders to let the poor people worship, without resorting to combat at all. Another is in a swamp with robo-crocodiles that makes for an entirely different sort of fight. One site is on top of a plateau infested with Glinthawks. In one mission where you have to go somewhere and effectively “clear three zones” to let individuals worship at holy sites, it’s handled far differently than it would be in a normal open world game.

It does not have a ton of side quests, but the ones it does have are practically all fully voiced with their own cutscenes and individual stories. Horizon Zero Dawn pretty much ditches this idea entirely. You can play through the entire game, get every skill perk and max out your XP, and there will still be dozens of “side quests” for you to complete, all without a shred of story to them, many of them copy and pasted from one another (free these hostages, escort this truck). I’ll use Far Cry as an example for this because I think there’s no worse offender of a game filling up a map with “stuff to do” than that series.

Horizon zero dawn map large