Horizon Zero Dawn's Sidequests Are More Important Than You Think

There is nothing wrong with having a comfort game. To be honest, we all have them. They are the games that we can return to time and time again because you enjoy them. We could be playing new stuff or tackling our ever-growing list of “games I am going to start soon”, but this? This feels right. For some it is a millionth game of Apex Legends, for others, it is creating havoc on the stress of Los Santos in GTAV. For me, that game is Horizon Zero Dawn. There are a variety of games that I like to use to unwind but none of them quite hit the spot like it.

My (high-key) obsession with the game may partially be the reason I can replay it over and over without getting bored. However, the interesting thing is this, the more I play HZD, the more I notice that the way you replay it can completely change the game experience.

To be fair, out of all of the people you could keep hanging out with for hours on end, Aloy is a pretty good choice.

Hear me out here. The first time you play the game, I would strongly suggest that you spend as much time as you want exploring the environment and taking on the side quests as they pop up. By doing them alongside and intermingled with story quests, you get to experience a really well put together narrative where you meet some amazingly fleshed out characters during Aloy’s journey.

You can hardly blame someone for coming back to HZD. JUST LOOK HOW COOL ALOY IS!

I recently replayed the game again (this is about my 10th time to 100% complete it, don’t judge me) and, this time, I went straight through the main story without touching any of the sidequests. For me, it changed the entire feel of the game and the story seemed a lot darker than it had done previously.

The first playthrough made me see Aloy as a young woman who was initially searching for vengeance against the killers at The Proving, only for her to discover that the world was a lot bigger than just her problems. She found that across the land there were problems and challenges many folks were facing and that in most cases, she was one of the few people who could, and would, help them. The people she met along the way helped her to grow and many of them even became her good friends (not you Sylens).

Pretty sure this has a lot of the markers for actually missions and quests turned off too…

The arc of Aloy as a character is different if you miss these seemingly unimportant map-filling, checkmark side-quests. She becomes less of a character who is learning about the complexity and variety of the world around her and becomes more of an angry young woman who is shoving her way through it to get the answers she desperately desires. In some ways, playing the game in this order shows the true desperation of Aloy, looking for answers about her past and justice for what has happened. However, the writing of Horizon means that even in a playthrough where you collect every nick-nack, that desperation is always there, but by missing out on some key moments of growth and self-discovery suddenly you get to see the true pain she is experiencing. It reinforces her lifelong isolation and distance from a society that cast her out and shows how much she feels compelled to make things right. 

Aloy’s self-growth is not the only part of the game that changes if you go straight through the storyline. When I played the game without doing any of the side quests many of the key characters were painted in a really different light by the end of the game. 

You Erend, I’m starting to come around on you… and it is only 94% because of your mutton chops.

The biggest character difference to me was not actually Aloy herself, but Erend. A brief summary is that Erend is the Captain of the Vanguard in Meridian, he took over from his sister Ersa and he is quite frankly one of the best NPCs in the game. His attempts at flirting with Aloy when they first met soon give way to a genuine friendship and respect between the two of them as you spend more time around him and helping him. 

However, if you skip the “main quest”, “Field Of The Fallen” and just focus on the mandatory story quests from the beginning until you need to do “The Looming Shadow” quest, their relationship changes*.

 It seems as though Erend is almost just pretending to respect Aloy in order to win romance points with her, similar to how he was when he first met her and stated she wasn’t like other Nora with the romantic subtlety of a large brick. You miss the entire arc where you learn that he really does respect and admire Aloy and how she seems to respect him too. Instead of being a supportive ally, he feels like a guy that can’t take a hint and won’t stop hitting on you. 

However, it isn’t all bad if you play Zero Dawn like this. If you play through the story first you get to unlock all of the good weapons, learn all about the machines and their weaknesses and you get to make multiple modifications to your items to upgrade them. This includes the Shield Weaver Armor if you find all of the Power Cells before diving into sidequests.

If your armour is glowing blue techno-stuff and your enemies’ armour isn’t glow-y at all it really isn’t going to be a fair fight.

Then if you go back and do all the side activities at the end you’ll feel like a true bow and staff-wielding hunter-badass. And if you are any bit familiar with the game I probably don’t need to tell you that the Shield Weaver Armor makes the game infinitely easier and can save you a lot of time when fighting big machines. While, yes, I do get the appeal of taking on big machines on the hardest difficulty without the armour (I’ve done it too and it’s a great feeling to defeat a Thunderjaw like that) but honestly, who doesn’t want to destroy a robot-t rex in seconds flat?

As a person who plays Horizon Zero Dawn on repeat, having the Shield Weaver Armor makes it more fun because I can focus on other things apart from staying alive. Often, I find myself making my own challenges such as how many arrows will it take for me to knock this component off? Or how quick can I clear out this bandit camp? It’s a great way to extend your game time and change how you play it.

Tangent aside, the point is that if you play the story and get all of the good stuff then you can breeze through the side-quests afterwards, and that can be neat in its own way. The feeling of these sidequests doesn’t change too much if you play them right at the end though. I think the only thing that does feel different about them is that they become a lot easier and you do kind of feel a bit like a hero,  helping locals and stopping big baddies with ease.

Do you see what we did here?

Using this gif?

“totally new light”?

…

We thought it was clever

I think the overall experience you get by replaying Zero Dawn this way highlights just how important sidequests are in a game and how much they quietly contribute to the overall narrative. The real lesson here is even if a game does have a guided order to play it in, you can always choose to try to go against it and if it works, you’ll see your favourite game in a totally new light.

*Note: You eventually have to do “Field Of The Fallen” to be able to progress past the latter mission, but it changes the order of Aloy’s and Erend’s interactions.