Let’s Chill with the 3 Hour intros, yeah?

Three hours.

Three. Hours.

My wife and I booted up Horizon: Forbidden West around 9PM and did not reach a campfire we could save at until after midnight. We normally play until 11-11:30 anyway, so it wasn’t that late, but when we were already tired and just wanted an easy way to turn in for the night, this was not a good start to the game.

Thankfully, we were riding the high of having just finished Horizon: Zero Dawn the night before and wanted to jump right into the next one – and we had a pretty good idea we would like the new one based on loving the first, but this is still a nearly deal-breaking experience.

How can I say that when we are going to keep playing the game anyway? Because it was a repeat deal-breaking experience for HZD.

I bought Horizon: Zero Dawn Complete Edition in December 2017 and started it for the first time in 2018. I wanted to see how this highly-regarded game looked on my fancy new PlayStation 4 Pro in all its 4K glory and experience what everyone was talking about.

Unfortunately, I didn’t make it far.

When the lockdowns hit in 2020, I was looking for games to play on the TV and tried booting HZD up again. Same situation, the annoying 6-year-old Aloy section and seemingly endless dialog was just never what I was feeling in the moment.

Fast forward to 2023. My wife and I are starting all kinds of new games together again: Assassin’s Creed, Red Dead Redemption, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Horizon: Zero Dawn.

We made it through the childhood section, but felt too trapped in all the dialog that came after that once we finally felt like we could save and leave it (before the section with The Proving, which people also apparently don’t like replaying) we didn’t revisit the game for another year. Thankfully towards the end of 2024 we revisited the game, managed to pick up right when actual gameplay took off and wound up putting more than 50 hours into it across 2025 and finished the first week of 2026.

But it still took four attempts, four sessions of forcing ourselves to try and sit through a really off-putting multi-hour start to the game before we could actually get started and enjoy it.

This is an all-too-common trend with these AAAA story-focused games, especially on the PlayStation side of things. Super long, dialog-heavy intros that feel more like the pilot episode of a binge-oriented Netflix television series rather than the start of a video game. The same issue plagues God of War (2018) and is a huge reason I’ve still never finished that game. I made it much further into the game on my original playthrough, but any time I’ve gone back and tried starting it over, that first hour or more of slow walking, constant chatting “movie mode” makes it a miserable experience.

I love replaying my favorite games, but I do not consider God of War (2018) or Horizon: Zero Dawn to be replayable games in almost any capacity. Which kind of… sucks. They both have great stories and enjoyable combat loops once you’re into the game – but I’m a busy dad with a never-ending backlog. If I’m going to replay a game, it’s not going to be one where so much of my time is wasted and spent on these kinds of intros.

In fact, since my wife was the primary controller-holder for our Zero Dawn playthrough, I was originally excited to take our save file into New Game+ to speed through with all the carried-over unlocks and gear, and just get to play around in the sandbox. But while I have learned that you can skip the childhood section at the start, there’s still a significant amount at the beginning that you can’t skip through – and I’m not sure that’s a good use of my time.

With Horizon: Forbidden West, the developers clearly learned some things from complaints about the first game to leverage in the sequel (or felt like they didn’t need to build up anywhere near as much “investment” in the story). The game gives you a quick “last time on Horizon…” recap monologue from Sylens and otherwise just throws you right into control of Aloy and getting initial explorations and combat tutorials out of the way.

The problem is, and this is only sort-of true, that you’re not presented with any way to save the damn game until (as I started this piece with) THREE HOURS of content has been absorbed.

(Now it’s not exactly three hours, as we did struggle a bit with the stealth section, take a bathroom break, etc. But we didn’t inflate the time by a significant amount.)

There was a lot of cool things in the intro to the game, too. A psuedo-cooperative adventure with Varl, a bunch of background lore expanded upon very quickly, new machines and new environments to show off the improved visuals, and reunions with lots of our allies from the first game. Those reunions were not all that appreciated by time we got to them, however, as we were really just ready to turn off the game for the night and be done with it. Instead we had to rush through many conversations and setups for the whole game.

This set a pretty gnarly tone for our first venture into the game. Thankfully we already could assume we would enjoy it if we stuck with it, based on our experience with the first game – but we might have been in a similar position of taking multiple swings to get into it, or not getting into it at all.

Yes, before I go further, I know someone is angrily finding a way to inform me that Horizon: Forbidden West has some sort of autosave system. I have since learned this, but despite digging into it a few times now (and playing the game some more) I could not entirely tell you how it works. Looking into it online primarily reveals numerous forum and community posts of people either also complaining about the lengthy intro before your first save point, or much confusion about the save system. Supposedly Forbidden West doesn’t rely as heavily on campfires as Zero Dawn did, and autosaves as you update quest logs.

But no one can seem to agree on how this system works and based on our last play session, there’s zero indication that this is happening.

Coming from a game where we used campfires as save points religiously to preserve our progress (knowing that dying did load us beyond the campfire sometimes, but not consistently) and it being a game where managing crafting materials and skill points is a crucial component of our experience – how in the new world were we supposed to know the game would preserve any of our progress here?

This was made slightly worse by us moving from PlayStation 4 Pro for Zero Dawn to PC for Forbidden West, losing the quick suspend/resume capacity in the process. We frequently utilized that system on PlayStation to save our spot in-between actual save points, and cannot do that now.

If this was just a “Horizon issue” I wouldn’t care to say much about it – a side note in my review of the game on Backloggd or something like that. It seems like nearly every newer story game I try these days is set up this way, with lengthy intros before you get agency in the experience, and before you can save your progress. This is disrespectful of the player’s time and patience.

The intro to HZD got us invested in Aloy. I’d argue the challenged along the way did that more than the intro did, but I won’t pretend it didn’t help set up the story (even if it could have been made shorter). The intro to HFW got us playing sooner and acted as a “pay off” for the conclusion of the first game. Both were good. But neither required us to sit down and take it all in at once in a 3 hour chunk.

Honestly, the lengthy intro sections that we felt forced to sit through was at odds with what I considered to be the strength of Zero Dawn: Getting out of it what you put into it. The game could be played as an open world exploration game, a pure story action adventure game, a mostly dialog-oriented story, or whatever you wanted. There were days where we did very little and just explored the map, collected goodies and crafting materials and unlocking secrets. There were days we just focused on hunting down the biggest new machines the game threw at us. There were days we flew through the story, just focused on making progress. Every system of the game could be engaged with as deeply or shallowly as we wanted – with crafting materials being able to be gathered in the wild or bought from merchants, with most combat scenarios having alternatives, etc. But the intro of the game (and of the sequel)? Not in line with that feeling.

It feels that so many games these days – especially the bigger “AAAA” tier story games where the focus seems to be on the performance and presentation than game experience – aren’t made “for gamers” but rather to be a binge-watched TV show, with gameplay being secondary. They have a big, cool story they want to tell, and making a video game is just a coincidence. It doesn’t feel good.

I love a good story game. I love a good story in a video game. But I don’t like feeling like the time I spend on it is being dictated by the game itself, rather than me. That feeling is a big part of what drove me away from modern multiplayer shooters – what once was my favorite genre for two decades. Giving us regular save points and breaks in these long intros do not ruin immersion, and if anything help to preserve that investment as I’m not watching the clock as the credits play.