#hzd daytower

[robo-dino-puppy]

inatut

[horizon-forbidden-memes]

Please tell me I'm not the only one who killed the Corruptor near Daytower with no issue but got slaughtered by the Stormbird immediately through the Sundom gates at least six times. Even stealthing couldn't save me!!!

[thunderjawsandlightning]

Niloy November - Day 3: Fire

"Not my first firestorm", he'd told her, amidst the flaming buildings of Meridian Village and the Royal Maizelands. Behind him, the fire was raging – thatched-roof buildings going up in a crackle, upright timbers shivering beneath the roar of the flames, spitting embers that were crushed underfoot by both devil-machines and men.  Aloy gave pause for a moment, letting loose an arrow into the breast of the Longleg, before Nil stabbed into its wing-vents, downing the machine.  Shouting at her to go on ahead, to the path that called her further forward– and then she was gone, her hair whipping behind her, a wave of red disappearing into the fire.  The inferno was almost a beast unto itself, the heat whipping up gusts of air that prickled Nil’s skin and searing his eyelids as his eyes whipped around the battlefield, ever alert for a new enemy.  

The last time he'd been in a blaze this fierce, the sky had been choked black with smoke; the air filled with screams and war-cries of Nora Braves, and the clattering crash of a Carja gong and the sonorous call of a war-horn to signal maneuvers to the soldiers rushing down into the fray.  As the tall grasses and the triangle-shaped huts burnt in such a fury that made even the rocks ripple in waves, Nil could vaguely recall standing at the base of the ridge, the heat wafting up and licking across his face and snaking over his armour.  It was his first time in foreign lands, and the excitement and fervor of the skirmish began to take hold in his body.  The blood pounding in his ears, so loud it seemed to drown out the roar of the fires; a keening cry in his veins to stab-slash-parry-cut as Nora warriors emerged from the smoke with clubs and spears upraised.  

And after, in the calm and the quiet, Nil wiped his sword clean, seeing his own blood-spattered reflection in the blade.  As he stared at his own steely-eyed reflection, he became aware of a sound, reaching past the slowing, thundering tempo of his racing heart.  A ringing in his ears that would not stop, nor could the shivers that now washed over him quell the fire in his veins.  More, his body seemed to whisper to him.  More.

[bluejaybytes]

just reached daytower. genuinely obsessed w this game now

YESSSSSSSSSS the power of getting through Daytower and to the rest of the game... unstoppable. Though hilariously as someone born and raised in the desert (Not reeeeally any of the states HZD takes place in, MAYBE a small snippet from Arizona but really not much), I love when games do these big "Look at how pretty our scenery is" moments for them because its like. Well you're not wrong they ARE beautiful but also This Is My Backyard

[ayaitch]

Daytower at dawn.

With the Balahn fanart I've seen lately, I wanted to go back and visit him for a nice picture, but apparently he disappears at some point. I am just at the final battle in HZD, so I like to think he heeded the Sun-King's call for all hands on deck and is in Meridian somewhere to help. While nursing my disappointment, I got this shot.

[theyloy]

[gaiasnewdawn]

[forbiddenwestern]

Sooo I’m playing HZD again from the beginning (no NG+) and I’m LOVING it

[h0riz0nstuff]

High Angle on Daytower in the Snow

[blogquantumreality]

A beautiful shot of Carja from the hill below Daytower in Horizon Zero Dawn.

[longleglens]

Daytower

[rayless-reblogs]

glitter

[hzdtrees]

Valleymeet

During my first playthroughs (and a half) Valleymeet was the place where Aloy met a few people belonging to other tribes, a bunch of machines in rather aggressive combinations, and I met a lot of pain.

I’d spent a lot of time exploring the nooks and crannies of the Sacred Land before I even considered making my way towards Daytower, but when I did, I was not prepared for what was waiting for me along the way. There are rather vivid, unpleasant memories tied to the lake past Hunter’s Gathering, since naive, new to HZD’s controls player-me (I do rather poorly when new to a game and take quite some time to learn, so even on lower difficulties I regularly run into problems) saw those two Sawtooths beyond that bridge on the right side of the lake and thought it would be a good idea to shoot them. Both. At once. With a million of Scrappers at my back.

As soon as I came to terms with that lake and its machine population, I decided to take the other turn up at the Hunting Grounds and see where the road leads. This brought me to what is one of my most hated and most loved areas of the entire game: the wind farm area, and the downed aircraft beyond. The broken, rusty remnants of the turbines in the light of the eternal full moon, with the occasional Sawtooth patrolling in between, was a view I could stare at for hours out of the safety of the red-tipped bush I’d hidden in. Also, but not only, because I didn’t dare to come out for a while. After all, there was a Thunderjaw ahead and it had just made spectacularly short work out of a couple of bandits. Surely now that it was done but barely warmed up, it would want to get rid of even more pesky humans that dared to tread on the ground it was patrolling. What if it spotted me?

The very first time playing, that was the point at which I turned around and took the long route back towards that lake, and vowed to never set foot into that valley again. I accidentally passed through it on my way to the Banuk camp up north, as the game’s pathfinding system doesn’t care about your personal preferences, but I just kept running before anything of note could spot me.

It took me until my NG+ playthrough, and then later again on PS4, that I actually took the time exploring the area, looking for datapoints and appreciating the scenery. Since NG+ starts you with all your experience, skills and equipment, I also took the time to knock at Dawn’s Sentinel’s gates before having been to Daytower, which resulted in the guards sending me to their superiors over at the other gate since they were under orders to not let anyone through. It’s a minor thing, but since the wind farm area is basically guarded by a higher-level enemy with the Thunderjaw roaming the lands, and while you can sneak past it, or even kill it while you’re low-level if you know how, I was delighted to see there was some dialogue addressing the issue of the closed border. For some reason, I’d somewhat expected the fort to simply be empty since you weren’t exactly supposed to end up there yet.

[firjii]

Meridian in HZD really is a brilliant use of visual scale because yes you’ve been to villages and even Daytower by that point in the game, but there are relatively few walls before you reach the city. There are a couple of gates and there are ruins, but everything else is visually pretty open. Even walled Nora settlements don’t really seem truly separated off from the world because either you can peek over the fences or glance through them. Carja forts like their walls and gates and tall vantages, but most of them are kinda just…randomly there, and some are easy to miss unless you happen to pass by.

And then you get to Meridian and it’s on the biggest. frickin. hill. they could find. Buildings are multilevel and decorated purely for decorative purposes (don’t get me wrong, the Nora like color and decoration and stylized things but it’s kinda incidental to function sometimes). There are lots of stairs and alleys. It’s frequently confusing to navigate - I have probably about 200 hours invested into various playthroughs and still get extremely lost there half the time. They have elevators. They have some sort of shit going on with waterways and maybe even basic hydroelectricity. They have crop land and a port. Even by IRL standards, it’s reasonably big.

And idk just as a player the first time you see it, it’s such an effective way to make you feel small and out of place. Imagine going from “living in a wee little hut and literally only allowed to interact with a couple of people for the first 18 years of your life” to “yikes there are like 100 people and no privacy at this party” to “WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL, WHY DOES OLIN LIVE IN SUCH A BIG HOUSE, WHAT EVEN ARE BUILDINGS.”

[hzdphotomode]

I’m scrolling through the notes on my phone looking for something and I came across “HZD Live notes”. I completely forgot about them and they only go as far as Makers End and then the notes stop sadly. They’re under the cut and the words in bold are like explanations/todays thoughts. There’s also a lot of cursing so be warned

-IS THAT A MACHINE GUN WHAT

-I don’t even know what happens during the proving really. Everything happened so fast. I was racing and then there’s a bunch of deer Dino robots and I had to get a canister or something. And then I was a brave! Yay! Then everybody died. Fuck.

-Corrupters are fucking dICKS

-okay riding the strider (?) is actually fun even if it’s SLOW AS FUCK (havent yet figured out how to make it go fast)

-I have so many sticks and such little inventory (i’m a hoarder in video games okay?)

-Tall necks are fun to ride

-so much land to cover... such a slow ass horse

-sure I’ll raid this camp with you Nil. Don’t know why, but sure!

-Clearing the camps were fun, tried my best at stealth. Didn’t really do well.

-the metal ring was fucking hard ok terrible at stealth

-god mothers crown is so far away- IF ONLY I HAD A FAST HORSE

- *thirty/forty minutes after getting the override component* figures out how to make the strider go fast by looking it up

-CAULDRONS ARE COOL!! THIS IS WHERE ROBOTS ARE MADE!?

-what is that? (glinthawks)

-WHAT IS THAT (more glinthawks)

-WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT STOP ATTACKING ME DAMNIT (stormbird)

-birds are FUCKING ASSHOLES

-I ONLY WANT TO EXPLORE STOP HURTING ME

-okay the robots past the carja lookout thingy are ASSHOLES (i still get tense every time I leave Daytower for the first time in play throughs)

-Meridian is a bitch to navigate but beautiful

-Ersa nooo! I feel so bad for Erend

-why am I just now figuring out that you hit x for the parkour stuff Jesus Christ

-Ted faro building looks like stark tower

-also, Ted, these things never go well

-the background music for the main menu is fucking sick

[celesticidal]

hzd cornyx au snippet

One night, some few weeks ago, deep in the throes of sleeplessness and also the hzd replay I never want to end, a plot bunny came to me and whispered thus: imagine a story in which Nyx is a Nora outcast, fresh to the Sundom and entirely out of his depth.  And then the unrepentant thirsty in all ways part of my brain was like aw fuck yeah, and also Cor is a Carja Hawk with a history of losing his Thrushes who does his hunting alone these days and then it just rolled downhill from there, really. I’ve got a half-running start to it with only a vague idea of where it’s going, but I figured I’d throw the beginning out there!  Trying to write Cor’s character outside of that super-regimented canon position of his, without sacrificing the qualities that I feel make Cor Cor, has been the most challenging part of it, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Anyway, here’s wonderwall the first several paragraphs:

Cor can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he's seen a Nora in the wild, often little more than flickers of lighter color at the edge of the treeline, figures just a little too large to be animal in the tall grasses.  As a boy, out at Hunter's Gathering, he'd spoken to one of their braves as they'd huddled near one another in the fragile warmth of a blazing campfire to wait out a terrible snowstorm -- at least he'd tried to, though he'd quickly learned his curiosity was no match for the hulking warrior's reticence.  Once, Cor had imagined all Nora in just this way.

The Nora curled around himself on the red rocks, here in the early morning shadow of the Daytower isn't particularly hulking.  A man -- maybe Cor's age, maybe younger, beneath the purple swell of bruises and scrapes marring what Cor can see of his face.  A crust of blood tracking from nose and mouth, pooled and dried on the sandstone.  More scuffing along the length of a bare arm, fingers spread, reaching out towards nothing at all.  A quiver half-full of arrows, fletched with blue-tipped feathers and bound with some sort of sinew strapped to the Nora's back, but no bow.

A short distance away, the campfire has long burned out.

Dead as the brave on the ground, Cor thinks morbidly, and wonders why it is a Nora might seek out this miserable death so far from his sacred lands.

With nothing better to do in the moment, Cor studies the scene.  No tracks around the body; Cor judges, then, by the scrapes on skin and scuffing on rock, that the Nora had been thrown.   A glance further down the slope, toward the sluggish river reveals the scattered carcass of a snapmaw, and Cor glances at the body once more before heading in that direction.  Not the killer -- no, he's seen plenty of Carja caught between the jaws and claws of those machines, and the Nora is far too … complete for that.

The road bears the old tracks of a machine convoy, and, over that, the distinct footprints of a patrol, but Cor pays little attention to either as he vaults the raised stone wall edging the sandswept, worn down cobble, dodging clumps of cactus as well as hand-sized shards of armor plating and shorn components littering the ground.  A pair of watchers lie in the sand only paces from one another, shot down by Nora arrows.  The snapmaw carcass is likewise studded, and while Cor initially takes their number as a sign of panic shots or simple inaccuracy, he realizes quickly enough that there is strategy in the placement.

The Nora, he recalls, hunt machines for their components above all else and, true to form, not a single canister is damaged.  The lens of the machine, along with a series of various cables and cores and braiding and machine viscera Cor couldn't begin to name, are arrayed near the imprint of hands and knees, next to a simple but well-crafted lance.  The machine's chest cavity has been prised open, and its heart dangles from a few frayed wires -- obviously, this had been the Nora's real prize when he'd met his end.

A few moments later, Cor comes across the deep gouges in the sandy earth -- tracks to mark the passage of a trampler's hooves, spread wide enough to suggest the thing had been at a full charge.  The remains of a primitive bow, shattered in the massive, uneven bowl of one of those gouges, seems to tell the Nora's story plain enough.

Alas.

Curiosity sated, Cor leaves the carcass and its assorted trophies behind, returning to the dead warrior.  He crouches down, pushing at a shoulder to turn the body on its back --

-- the Nora groans pitifully, breath rasping wet in his chest and whistling out through a shattered nose.

Ah.  Not so dead as he'd first thought.  In this, Cor considers himself grateful to be wrong.