Rufous

You can check out my initial impressions of my first few hours here:https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/168644-horizon-zero-dawn/75034628 (slight technical spoilers, no story spoilers)For everyone excited to play this, like I said before, you're gonna have fun with this one. Is it a perfect game? Of course not. Every game has its flaws. The fun factor trumps most minor flaws you'll notice as you play. After diving into the mechanics a little more, I thought I'd share a few quick tips to get you up and running.1. Play your first few hours on Normal mode, just to get a feel of the combat and mechanics. As ACG mentioned in his review, higher difficulties break down to simple mathematics, more damage taken / less health revival from potions, no real increase in enemy AI.2. Silent Strike. Silent Strike. Silent Strike! I cannot emphasis the importance of this skill, especially if you plan on diving into stealth. It's a life saver, when you see groups of 5 or more enemies walking around. Enemies detect by sight and sound (you'll know how much noise you are making by how sets of parenthesis you see around your eyeball marker (very similar to Skyrim's enemy detection eyeball when you enter crouch mode). 3. Use Focus to track and hunt as much wildlife as you can, early in your game. Foxes, turkeys, raccoons, boars. fish (you can't attack while swimming, so you'll have to shoot fish from land) and so on. Each weapon you obtain has it's own carry pouch for ammo, and you'll want to upgrade your Carry Capacity for each as early as possible. What's cool about Focus is, once you track targets, you can turn off Focus and the target will remain marked. Think of Focus like VATS in Fallout games. Click it every once in a while just to see your surroundings. Focus even detects through walls and you can use to highlight a few corpses you might have missed after rolling around the battle field.4. At least in the first main area, try to complete all side quests and errands before advancing the story. By then, you'll know what's the last quest of the first area before moving on. Check your quest inventory for quest rewards. You'll hear most quest givers calling out for help as you traverse the sandbox. Enemies respawn for more money (metal shards), crafting / trading parts. Eventually, you may get tired of the back and forth backtracking in the same area, but you'll at least want to reach level 7 so you can have a decent build for newer enemies introduced as you advance the story.5. Check all merchant inventory for free treasure chests. Many merchants will have a free sample chest full of goodies for you to take. Which is another reason why you'll want to upgrade Carry Capacity asap.6. Make sure to revisit the very first area of the game from the "tutorial" level. You'll know what I mean by then. You will find a massive amount of goodies all over the place and be able to smash through a few walls, that were previously inaccessible areas with obvious goodies, (when you first assume control of Aloy, you'll see some glowing objects behind some blocked off paths, but there is no way to reach those objects until the real game begins). You'll know what I mean by then, just make sure to check your world map.7. Forage and harvest plants as much as possible and don't feel the need to spend all skill points as soon as you get them. Check out all skills (everything has a sample movie showing you exactly what they do), continue playing to see what's coming up next and then choose skills to adapt to new situations. The last thing you want is to think "damn, I should've saved some skill points and waited to take THIS skill!" Lol! Eventually, you can get all skills in one playthrough, according to the trophy list, but it still makes since to think about your early build.That's about it for now. Anyone else with tips to share, feel free to add on.