On June 11, Sony held its PlayStation 5 reveal event and showed off several upcoming PlayStation 5 titles. After many months of rumors about it, Horizon Forbidden West, the official video game sequel for Horizon Zero Dawn, was finally announced. Now, it has a chance to fix one of the more unfortunate flaws of Horizon Zero Dawn: the melee combat.
Anyone that's played Horizon Zero Dawn knows that it has a fantastic melee system. It's responsive, fluid, and above all, makes every hit — even the ones that don't connect — feel satisfying to throw out. It also does a perfectly good job of showing off Aloy's expertise with a spear, and how her training and hard work left her with a skill second to none in her generation.
That said, the game's melee combat could be better. Compared to what the rest of Horizon's combat system offers, it's incredibly linear and limited, which is a shame because it has such a perfectly good foundation. So what can be done to put it on par with the rest of Aloy's weapons? A few things actually.
Allow Aloy to Modify Her Spear As Soon As She Can Her Other Weapons
The Spear received so little love in Horizon Zero Dawn that players couldn't modify it in the game's vanilla version. It was literally the only weapon in Aloy's arsenal that had this limitation as everything else could be customized freely to adapt to the player's needs. It took the launch of the Frozen Wilds DLC for this to much-needed change.
Horizon Forbidden West needs to make sure to avoid this. Since Frozen Wilds didn't release until November of 2017, it took eight months after Horizon's initial release for Aloy's primary weapon to receive one of Zero Dawn's most fundamental features. It shouldn't take a DLC release — nor such an extended amount of time — to be able to do something with a single weapon that Aloy could do with her others without issue.
Allow Aloy to Obtain More Spears Skills
Horizon Zero Dawn did allow Aloy to unlock skills focused on the Spear as she leveled up, but most of them only activate under specific conditions. For example, Aloy can only use the "Strike" set of Spear skills — Silent Strike, Strike From Above, Dismount Strike, etc. — when she's in a specific position in accordance to her enemy. These skills also cater to a stealth-based playstyle, not melee. The skills she gets for the Spear that happen to be non-conditional also get outdone by other weapons. For instance, Precision and Precision + allow Aloy to knock armor off of machines more easily with her Spear. But the TerraBlast Arrow from the Sharpshot Bow does this job better as it pretty much strips machines bare — and from a safe distance.
Horizon Forbidden West needs to give Aloy more Spear skills that don't lose out to Aloy's other weapons and cater to the "up close and personal" combat style. One way to do this would be to give the Spear skills that are unique to it, and the Knock Down skill is a good starting template for this. Knock Down gives Aloy the chance to knock enemies over with her Spear if she strikes them with a Strong Attack. When knocked over, enemies are in a "downed" status and defenseless to the players' follow-up attacks. The Spear is the only weapon in the game other than the Ropecaster that centers on this mechanic, and unlike the Ropecaster, it has other skills that can help it capitalize on this state, such as Critical Hit.
If Forbidden West can help the Spear revolve more around this tactic, it would make it a much more unique and useable weapon. The game can also add Skills that adjust and evolve Aloy's Light Attacks, making them more likely to proc the Stong Attack's Knock Down if Aloy consistently lands them. It could even do things like make Light Attacks more potent if the player starts with a Strong Attack or vice versa — adding universal abilities like getting a free dodge while low on health, would help the Spear out, too.
Allow Aloy to Obtain More Spears
Just like in the modifications department, the Spear is the only primary weapon in Horizon Zero Dawn that Aloy can't obtain different versions of. The Bow, Tripcaster, and Slingshot all avoid this problem, so they don't suffer from feeling stagnant like the Spear does. To give some context to this, players can only upgrade Aloy's Spear one time throughout the game. They get the upgrade by completing a side quest called "In Her Mother's Footsteps," which turns the Spear from Uncommon to Rare. This side quest is one of the earliest available in the game, and because of that, the upgraded Spear quickly becomes outclassed by nearly every other weapon.
The only other way players can obtain a more potent means of melee combat is through Sylen's Lance. But the opportunity to get this weapon doesn't happen until "The Mountain That Fell," story mission, which only takes place near the end of the game. Overall, the interim between the upgraded Spear and Sylen's Lance is too long and only hurts the Spear more. This time gap causes the Spear to fall to the wayside in favor of other weapon classes because it doesn't adapt to the game's difficulty curve. The fact that the Spear can't be modified as much as the other weapons only exacerbated this problem. Even after the Frozen Wilds DLC allowed modifications, the Spear had one less mod spot than other weapons of the same rarity.
Forbidden West has a few way ways it can go about fixing this issue. For starters, the game has to put the Spear on the same level as the Bow, Tripcaster, and Slingshot. It can do this by giving the weapon more modifications and active skills like previously discussed, but it could also allow Aloy to obtain and build different types of Spears as the game progress. For example, Forbidden West could make every Spear a variation of Sylen's Lance. In Zero Dawn, Sylen's Lance is the only weapon that allows Aloy to deal Impact, Tear, and Elemental damage in a single hit. The Lance itself focuses on Shock damage, but there's no reason there can't be spears dedicated to Freeze, Burn, and other elements.
And these spears could do more with the element as they increase in rarity. A Very Rare Shock Spear can damage surrounding enemies through arcing lighting, making it useful for crowd control. A Very Rare Fire Spear can cause blast damage to send enemies flying. It can also burn enemies to make it more useful against bigger foes. A Very Rare Freeze Spear can immobilize enemies more efficiently, giving Aloy time to switch from a melee style to stealth or range.
Another way the game could go about Spear variety is by having Aloy build her own Spears based on the machine enemies she kills. Aloy has already canonically updated her Spear into something unique by fitting it with technology from slain machines, so while the method may be a bit more complex to pull off, it does make sense.
All of these power-ups seem like a fair trade since melee is the riskiest form of combat Aloy has, especially in Horizon Zero Dawn's harder difficulties like Very Hard and Ultra Hard. Using melee in the latter difficulty is especially challenging since enemies can outright one-shot Aloy if they catch her slipping with it. Hopefully, Guerrilla Games just does something to put melee combat on the same level as stealth and ranged in Forbidden West — regardless of how it decides to do it.
Horizon Forbidden West is in development for the PlayStation 5.