All valid and fair points.
Regardless, I truly hope we never have to find out either way. The human species is capable of incredible things if we just set aside historical, cultural, and petty differences and worked towards a common goal of lifting everyone up. Wars of aggression are barbaric and unnecessary and I hope one day we all mentally evolve past such tendencies for mass violence. It’s a naive pipe dream, but one can always dream.
Agreed. HZD always felt like a game that was built around a story premise first and foremost, which sort of makes sense as that studio had never done a game like that before.
I remember an interview where they were struggling to shift gears from Killzone and looking for new ideas from among their staff when one of their devs pitched HZD’s premise. As a result, they approached making an open world action adventure game as complete noobs. This doesn’t excuse any of the poor design decisions. I was hoping they’d learn from their mistakes in FW, but they instead made the open world part somewhat better and then forgot to keep the focus on the main quest and characters in the process.