Horizon Zero Dawn

I just started playing Horizon Zero Dawn. I've basically finished the tutorial sections and done a couple of the side missions. I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far; I love the aesthetic with the beautiful scenery and the strange robots, the story is very intriguing so far and it's being told very well. I'm not completely sold on the Farcry-like crafting system, and the experience/skills system looks a little bit light for something that otherwise feels like an RPG, but they should be fine.

The game controls well, though I wish I could remap a couple of functions, Specifically I would like to put roll on a shoulder button: if I'm rolling it's probably to avoid a charging enemy, in which case he's probably not in my screen anymore and I will need to spend time finding him again. With roll on a face button I have to stop controlling the camera while rolling, if it was on a shoulder I would be able to track the enemy while rolling, which would be much better. I've been saying this for more than ten years now: there's simply no excuse not to allow the player the ability to remap his controls any way he pleases. I'm thinking about picking up one of those fancy controllers, perhaps I'll be able to remap the controls that way if I do plunk down the cash for one.


So... Rost has just sent Aloy off to find some stuff, and there seemed to be something bothering him. Now there's any number of things that it could be, but for some reason I have this strange suspicion that he's going to die, and he knows it. He mentions that there's something he hasn't taught her, and for some reason I just keep thinking it's a lesson that requires his death. Probably paranoid, but it's hardly unusual for writers to kill a character in order to provide motivation for the protagonist and/or free them up to go on a solo adventure.

Only one way to find out I guess.

Other days

I work in a very small team. Our project manager just left this week, which leaves our team very diminished and without guidance or direction.

The Khador forums, which I enjoy a great deal and visit five or six times a day, just closed down yesterday and might not be going back up.

I just got a phone call from my family a few minutes ago telling me that our cat just died.

Yeah, I just.... whatever. At this point it feels like nothing is going anywhere. I have neither direction nor motivation right now.




EDIT:
I needed some electrical connectors for my (currently non-functional) CNC machine. I went to the only shop that I knew to sell those kinds of things, that has been around for at least a decade (if not two decades or more). It had closed down. It was there the last time I was in the area a few weeks ago, but now it's gone. This really has been a time of things just going wrong. Not everything of course, but quite a number of things big and small have either suddenly gone wrong, or their slow decline has come to a head. At least that's how it feels.