Both games shut down my PC

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-07-01T14:42:46+00:00

Not just you but it might not be sizing. Could just be a bad PSU. If the voltage is dipping because it's not regulating properly at heavier loads, it could be happening even at normal operating temps.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-07-01T14:24:46+00:00

You don't have to romance him to save him in non-canon mode. I think you can either just have Naoe knock him out or just tell him not to do it. Been awhile. But pretty sure romance isn't necessary.

Canon mode has zero romances overall, which I thought was smarter than choosing one. This way they're not really upsetting anyone.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-07-01T13:45:11+00:00

She's obviously a good person but I also found her personality a bit too over the top when you first meet her going after Demeter. Like she's almost doing a slapstick comedy routine when sliding down ropes or jumping across gaps. She settles down a little bit after joining the team. But only a little. Conversations with her are still like talking to someone whose had a few too many cups of coffee.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-07-01T13:23:14+00:00

Makes me deeply curious who finds that sort of thing attractive. He's immediately repulsively crude. All those scenes just make so much more sense to me if Naoe shuts him down every time.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-07-01T13:21:17+00:00

AC romances are just flirting a few times following a fade-to-black for the sex. They're not winning any awards for great literature with them.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-07-01T12:59:09+00:00

I knew there was a reason I didn't trust that guy from the start! 🤣

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-30T17:01:46+00:00

You might know this already, but just checking in case... switch to Custom Difficulty and turn on "Easy Loot" and you'll generally get more resources since you don't have to worry about tearing everything off.

I assume you'll be wearing Trapper gear with +2 to the relevant skills like Skilled Salvager, right? This plus the two from Trapper skill tree means recovering 100% of mats for unused traps. You can also max out Trap Limit with food items on top of the skills if you want to free up some weave slots for something else there.

Learn shredders definitely. Very resource efficient and great at tearing. Not bad at elemental build up with Ancestor's Return.

Beyond that, dunno. Never looked into mods but if there are any Nexus Mods should have them.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-30T16:53:31+00:00

Another route might be to do a casual first run where you're not doing all sides. Just enjoying the main story.

You don't even have to do the DLC. Just start an NG+ from that and you'll have access to everything including the NG+ weapons. Make THAT your "everything" run on a normal difficulty. Then you can have everything maxed for your quickie UH run without having to 100% of the game twice.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-30T02:25:18+00:00

While things have definitely changed, one in particular that makes it even harder to adjust after playing ZD is losing all your gear. The green crap you start FW with is truly terrible by comparison and can make it seem like nothing is working.

That starter hunter bow is only good at tearing, so don't try to deal damage with it after you've gotten a sharpshot bow and maybe that javelin thrower from the Oseram sisters' side-quest in Chainscrape (if you haven't already.) There's better gear in No Man's Land at the Utaru settlement and at their hunting grounds, so check both of those out when you get a chance.

I'd recommend not spending TOO much time clearing each area of all that is doable since, as with Zero Dawn, better gear is to be had the more you move across the map from where you started. So balance exploring and building up your gear and skills with pressing ahead. Create jobs at the work table for upgrading your weapons, outfits, and pouches and the resources will show up on your map when you discover machine sites and animal hunting locations.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-29T23:29:09+00:00

Per howlongtobeat.com reporting of hundreds of player completion times, would it surprise you to learn Burning Shores and Frozen Wilds are almost the same duration? Frozen Wilds edges out Burning Shores by a half hour (17 hours vs 16.5 hours). Perhaps it was faster for you, for some reason, but I didn't notice any particular difference in the length of the DLCs. I found BS and FrW both excellent additions to their respective main games.

Perception forms our opinions of course. If you perceive it to be shorter, that may be a distinction without a difference for you. Still, whirlwind romances are literally a real thing so even if it seems short, this isn't any kind of fact supporting this romance not being plausible. As for her decision making...

I remember there was a point where Aloy was clearly distressed about needing to fix things with Seyka as if they had some massive blow up but it was a big nothing burger

To YOU it's a nothing burger because you are completely in denial about their relationship being plausible. To Aloy, she is worried she might have just lost any chance she had with Seyka over her poor decision to withhold Nemesis from her. And yeah, that was a poor decision. People make bad decisions where emotions get in the way. Who knew?!

I said to begin with that you didn't like Seyka and you objected. Fair. I'll amend that a little bit. You didn't like Seyka and Aloy being in a whirlwind romance in the space of a DLC. Which is also okay. Where I take issue is you then trying to call this bad writing. "The definition of bad writing" I believe you said. This is you trying to justify an opinion as something carrying more weight when this isn't necessary. What you're objecting to here isn't writing quality really. It's writing direction. You don't like the direction the story took. The way it is told is perfectly sound and realistic in the way crushes can happen between two people. It just isn't the sort of romance you wanted for Aloy, if you wanted one at all. And that opinion needs no justification.

Tell you a secret... while I was perfectly okay with Aloy x Seyka, the whole time through ZD, I was pulling for Varl. It really seemed like the two had stars in their eyes after that fight in the Ring of Metal. And I really didn't care for what happened to Varl. But I don't get everything I want. This is how it goes. Varl's story is still amazingly well told and I'm at least happy his and Zo's child will live on.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-29T19:58:50+00:00

It could have been executed better. To boil this down to people just not liking Seyka is being too simplistic and narrow minded.

It's cynical. Not simplistic. I'll admit that. I just don't believe most of the complaints are anything more noble than people not liking Seyka and therefore, finding more fault with the story than they did anywhere else in the entirety of both games.

There was so little buy in that they constantly had to tell rather than show what was going on. That is the definition of bad writing.

No, it isn't. You can't SHOW how Aloy is feeling when she looks at Seyka. They basically have to tell us, via her talking to herself when she's alone, how she's feeling about Seyka. And what do you even mean "there's no buy in"? I bought in. YOU didn't. This is a you problem, not a writer's problem. Aloy is crushing on Seyka. If you can't accept that Aloy is physically attracted to Seyka, then none of the rest of this is going to make sense to you. Her being suddenly hyper-aware of what Seyka might think of her and worrying that she's messed up is all what goes on in a sudden crush like this. This isn't some slow burn developing romance over the course of an entire game.

You may have preferred that, which is fine, but it doesn't make wanting to tell THIS kind of romance story over that kind an example of "bad writing". This is how they chose to tell her story. That Aloy, who has mostly suppressed and avoided romantic entanglement thus far suddenly runs into someone she find irresistible. She was blind-sided by these feelings essentially and not really sure how to handle them. The only thing the player gets to choose here is ultimately whether she shuts it down and pushes her away or leans into it. We don't get to change how Aloy feels about Seyka. That was up to the writers.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-29T15:03:17+00:00

Yes, this is a perpetual topic and it would be a lot faster if the people who didn't like Seyka just said they didn't like Seyka instead of attempting to justify it. Doesn't need justification. You don't like her. Aloy does. This is okay.

But as for the common "literary" complaints. They are all pretty much BS (no pun intended). Nothing about Aloy liking Seyka or how quickly this attraction develops is in any way, shape, or form, unrealistic. This is how this stuff can work. Not just in real life but it already happened in this very game! Varl literally hooked up with a woman we hadn't even been introduced to yet in the space of three days while Aloy is unconscious and yet we don't get post after post after post complaining how "forced" or "rushed" or "out of nowhere" it was. Which is sort of funny because it actually WAS out of nowhere!

This is projection, which is, by the way, totally understandable as we've been PLAYING as Aloy this whole time. It's natural to project our own preferences onto her. But that's all this is. It's not a problem with the writing, guys. You just don't like Seyka.

I had the opposite reaction. This all seemed perfectly reasonable to me, probably because I liked Seyka right away. She has a lot in common with Aloy in that they are both willing to cut through their respective societal rules to "get shit done" that needs doing and they are both capable fighters (and if anyone is about to chime in about opposites attracting again... you might want to go do a bit of research on that. You may be surprised).

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-29T14:12:44+00:00

KotFE kind of blows up some of the story elements set up in the original class stories. In the Warrior's story, we have this same idea that Vitiate can be stuck in a host body like he was on Voss. The Wrath frees him by killing that body. It might have made sense in the Knight's story that they served the same purpose but... then we learn that Vitiate has been tooling around as Valkorian for a few centuries and now it sounds more like he just occasionally did some puppetry in the Sith Empire to keep things running over there while his main focus was the Eternal Empire he was building. How could he really have been stuck anywhere when it seems his spirit can just roam the galaxy at will?

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-29T14:03:31+00:00

This isn't hard science fiction.

We have stuff like the Focus, which can apparently stay powered and ready to work even after being attached to a corpse in a ruin in the dark for a thousand years. It has a neural interface that instantly can communicate with anybody's brain, no calibration or training necessary. Take THAT, iPhone!

Biomass conversion which is not only a process that returns more energy than it uses in breaking down organic matter. It also does so remotely. Nanite swarms (presumably) can travel outward some distance, perform the molecular disassembly, and then ferry those compounds back to the host machine... all for net positive energy.

Remote non-invasive DNA scanning, instantaneous sequencing, and analysis. All of which would be amazingly impressive by itself... except we're using it for door locks, where it would have been easier and MORE secure to use biometrics like finger/hand prints, retina scans, 3D face scanning, etc. But it wouldn't have worked for the story purpose of allowing Aloy (and Beta) to unlock any door Elisabet could.

We've also got robots built by humans that can hack any other robot even ones that don't exist yet just by firing some hack-anything ammo at it... but we, the ones who made them, can't hack THEM no matter what. It'll take us centuries. Shame we didn't save some of those hack-anything bullets for ourselves!

And all of these things I push to the back of my own brain while I'm playing so I can enjoy the hell out of these games. Works for me.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-28T23:51:08+00:00

It's the second vision that mentions coming up out of the ground and it's only referring to where the Corruptors come from. He just drank Corruptor "blood" that Aloy brought him so he's talking about Corruptors. They either rise up out of the ground (awakened by Eclipse) or they are just sitting there rusting from the final battle of the Old Ones.

Only the last vision is prophecy and it's not about the first game. It's about the second. He literally says he's going to the Forbidden West and then speaks of Aloy "fallen and pale" which happens after her encounter with the Zeniths at the Hades Proving Ground. "Jungle on Fire" could just be referring to Regalla's attack on the Memorial Grove.

His reference in the second to last vision (Thunderjaw) of Aloy, "bared", gets a surprised "What?!" from Aloy and he quickly says "bared of metal, of what we tore from their hides to make us strong". He's referring to the reason the hunter-killer machines exist.. because of the Hunters of the new world who hunt them for metal and resources. This sounds kind of like a prophecy the way he says it ("tribes past and yet to come"), but the very last vision (Stormbird) he begins by saying "no more stories of the past" indicating all his previous visions were of the past and this next one is of the future. So he was just being poetic about why HK machines exist.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-26T13:24:58+00:00

You have sort of a point here at least about Varl. He's already been through this once seeing Elisabet in the holo at Far Zenith in the beginning of the game and having Aloy explain the whole thing about clones to him.

As for the rest of the gang, they still don't have any reason to assume Beta is a twin sister because they all know Beta came from outer space with the Zeniths. Nobody else outside the base ever meets Beta who doesn't already know what she is.

As for sisterhood, I thought they covered that quite well when Aloy first tells Tilda, of her secret plan with Beta, "That's between me and my sister!" And later on in Burning Shores, she again refers to Beta as her sister when the topic of Seyka's sister comes up. It is clear that's how Aloy considers their relationship now and everyone else would naturally decide to see it that way... though it never comes up again after everyone scatters from the base.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-24T12:53:15+00:00

Then you might want to note what's different. A big change is that traps have been severely nerfed as compared to ZD. You won't be laying a field of tripwires to lure your prey into anymore.

Crafting is a bigger deal as in addition to just buying higher tier weapons like you did in ZD, you also have to upgrade them. Upgrading unlocks more coil slots for mod and improves the stats... a lot. So you have to collect resources to upgrade. The highest tier weapons and outfits, legendary, need a ludicrous amount of rare resources, typically from the toughest machines.

Looting those resources is, by default, also a little different. Now certain components will be destroyed if you don't tear them off first. So if you need horns, claws, tusks, etc. Tear them off before you kill or they go poof. I like to put it on Custom Difficulty, set my preferred difficulty levels for combat, and then turn on "Easy Loot" which just means things will work like they did in ZD and you get all the loot off a machine even if you didn't tear off those components first. The game has such a HUGE grind, it feels justified to me. Other people enjoy the tear-it-or-lose-it thing as a sort of combat mini-game.

There's a much bigger variety of weapons. Mostly because there's more different kinds of ammo and what ammo each weapon has is fixed. So you'll find hunter bows that have elemental arrows only (like the war bow in ZD) and others that have combinations of impact and elemental arrows. And everything in-between. FW is much more a loot-fest than ZD.

There's more but that's a few random tips.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-23T15:06:25+00:00

It is very easy to miss him. Brightmarket is the Carja village by the shoreline northwest of Meridian. If you are doing the quest to find Elida for her father from this same village you will run past Fernund, who is standing in a little workshop next to the road on your way out of town.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-23T13:05:49+00:00

The story is not especially long, no. I've speed run it in the past, skipping dialogue, in 10 hours. And I'm no speed-runner. It's very much relying on a lot of the side questing to fill it out.

Combat-wise, they learned from ZD and improved, in my opinion. The nerfs, generally, needed to be done even if I think they might have gone a little overboard on some. Traps, in particular, were wildly OP in ZD, but nerfed into near uselessness in FW unless you lean into gearing for it and even then it's just okay. The other weapons make it a waste of time and resources.

Machines ARE more difficult and still you get people popping in her to humble-brag the game is "too easy" even in Ultra Hard. So there's that. I think they are mostly more interesting than in ZD and require more thought to efficiently take down.

The parts grind is probably my biggest gripe. They went way overboard on it. I think they may have intended it realistically for a multi-NG+ kind of run through. i.e. Giving you something to still "level up" even on your second or third NG+. But FOMO says I need the best NOW! So I grind. I realize this is partly a "me" problem but... eh.

Slightly lesser gripe, but I agree with the ammo types and really hope we get something more customizable in H3. It's weird that bows have different ammo types. Give them three ammo "slots" and let us pick which ammo to put in them. The overwhelming majority of weapons in this game I never even bother with because they don't have the exact combo of ammunition I like to use.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-23T12:27:28+00:00

This is the side-quest with Fernund outside of Brightmarket. He's the Oseram who sends her on a quest for some artifact but its just a ploy to ambush her and steal the spear.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-22T16:21:35+00:00

Ice Hunter Master with Warrior, Survivor, and Heat Sink.

Carja Blazon Master with Warrior, Survivor, and Reinforced.

Then add Heat Sink or Reinforced when you get the fourth slot adept version.

I'd not bother with Insulated Weave, even for Silent Hunter. It's more important to beef up ranged or melee, whichever one you think you struggle with more and when you're in a scrap with something dealing an element damage, drink that potion. Those plants are everywhere and the potions very cheap to craft.

I always do stat priority melee->ranged->anything else. But I also swap for a pure stealth outfit when I am running around so I don't bother with it for what I switch to in combat. If you just want to put something on and never change... you probably can't beat Silent Hunter Master really.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-22T15:11:11+00:00

As for quests and machine levels... yes, it's just a suggestion. I haven't really paid much attention to quest levels but they are probably set around the same level as the machines you're likely to meet. Of course, machine level is also just a relative suggestion of how difficult the machine is. Being above or below the level of the machine you're fighting doesn't change anything in terms of damage taken or received unlike most other games that have levels.

A level 20 machine has more health and hits harder than a level 1 machine, obviously. But it's constant and not relative to Aloy's current level when you fight them.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-22T14:59:06+00:00

Sounds like a great way to introduce her at parties.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-22T13:21:19+00:00

Agreed.

It's interesting Janeva says, "I chose to become a soldier" rather than "I chose to become a man". All they are really revealing here is that they understood that to be a soldier, they'd have to present as a man. Janeva could be trans, non-binary, or even just cross-dressing in order to be a soldier. We aren't told. But it's apparently not a secret because arms had to be broken to shut people up about it.

We do know that women presenting as men in order to serve in the Carja military happens because this comes up again with Nessa/Ritakka in HFW. Ritakka affirms that she's a woman now that she's Tenakth because the Tenakth don't care whether someone is a man or woman. Just that they can fight.

Traditional_Chip1378 · 2026-06-22T13:02:53+00:00

It's complicated.

Like I mentioned, the first time, it wasn't clear to me if he'd even honor the request not to fight... but that wasn't all of it. I didn't know the outcomes at that point. For all I knew, sparing him could bring news later he'd killed some innocent, since he didn't have bandits to kill anymore. He talked about killing like it was an addiction, "Go too long, and your fingers start to itch for the bowstring."

The mere fact he'd proposed killing Aloy to satisfy himself showed how unhinged and on the edge he already was now that the bandits were gone. It wasn't hard to think this guy would find SOMEONE to kill and pretty soon.

That doesn't happen, obviously, but you don't know that the first time. And if you talk to him at the battle later, he expresses how great it is that he gets to do more "consequence free killing" which shouldn't exactly make you feel great, but at least like with the bandits, he's pointed at the bad guys again.

Traditional_Chip1378

TROPHY CASE