#over 1:30mins of unique lines if you keep talking to him

[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.