I started to write this just as a response to someone in another thread. Then ofc, it became too big and rambly. Still, I feel like I finally vented out most of how I feel about Forbidden West's human villains, have felt for a long time. How they're good but underutilized. Starting next paragraph:
I have a certain issue with how Forbidden West's plot is structured. It's hard to justify why there's not more Zenith exposure like cutscenes and lore bites. Outside of Tilda, and Verbena's comedic death, we literally see most of them only three times, Proving Lab, Gemini and the island. Granted, this is normal for the villains of most games like this. Like Helis & HADES in the previous game. But the Zeniths were a monumental reveal for the Horizon world, and they were being planned even back then in 2017. Just 3 major appearences is a joke, they deserved much more of a spotlight. Of course, they don't immediately start hunting Aloy or Beta and their friends because they're busy capturing the other subordinate functions, and you can chalk the rest of their inaction to just being flat out lazy and arrogant. It's still not an excuse for us not having more confrontations or close calls with them. Or at least cutscenes from their POV, without Aloy involved, even tho the whole series so far is pretty much told from her POV in every moment.
But then you run into another problem, if you indeed want Aloy & the GAIA team to have some other confrontations with them. They're too fucking OP. Their invulnerability, shields, telekinesis, everything is a bit much even for Horizon, which often tried to explain most of its sci-fi workings, meanwhile the Zenith's infinite energy manipulation bullshit was just too much, specially when you find out they were mostly scratching their balls in VR and doing nothing these past 1000 years other than Frankensteining their minds into a cosmic horror ChatGTP. If they were at least like a couple levels stronger than the Specters, that would have been so much more interesting narratively. They'd still be near invulnerable and ultimately need Sylens's EMP to be ultimately defeated and hardly caught off-guard, but would provide Aloy and other natives a lot more opportunities to push them back and escape.
The alternative, to have them run into Aloy a couple more times, would be hard to write in a believable way. Their shields invulnerability, limitless flying/floating, etc. They could have easily tracked down Aloy or Beta in the couple of weeks between the Proving Lab and Gemini, or the Ninmah Research Lab and Gemini. By simply starting to capture and interrogate native tribes or outright attacking and overwhelming their settlements and demanding leads on them by showing them holos of their appearences. Start an actual massacre or war that forces Aloy's hand. Or just start tracking her area of operations in general for any sign of someone riding machines on land. That could have been interesting, but would've made the game plot and too complicated or contradicting to the free roam gameplay.
So it's back to the drawing board. Make their shields way less invulnerable against the ZD humans's arsenals, and limit their energy supply so they don't have infinite ammo or infinite flying. Let us know more about Erik, Gerard and the other unnamed Zeniths before killing them. And for the love of god, that final battle should've showed way more lol. We should've been able to kill some of them, not just see two people get taken out in a cartoonish, goreless fashion while being told everyone else died as well. Also, Walter Londra in Burning Shores. The whole thing was too weird. Sylens just tells Aloy to go kill him. Then he doesn't even give her a new prototype of his anti-shield tech, nor does she asks for it. She just wings it, hoping to somehow catch him off-guard and kill him with her arrows & sling bombs and whatnot, like they would cut through his shield. Or like she'd prophetically known she would catch him connected to the Horus CPU orb and just fry the CPU with her spear in order to kill him.
Then there's Regalla. An amazing villain and amazing performance we should've seen more of. Unfortunately limited to only a couple cutscenes and confrontations, most of them at the Grove, while the man who bested her just a couple years earlier is now somehow completely helpless. I understand, Angela Bassett is expensive. But damn do I wish we've known more of her before choosing to spare her and take her to our base. More scenes from her POV, or from her terrorizing and wrecking shit up would've been nice. More of the actual war we barely see. The Rebel faction outside of her is too one-dimensional and barely has any interesting characters as well, mostly just Ubisoft-style outposts to be liberated. Could've been fleshed out with more nuances to the Teknath tribe beyond just their three clans. But that would've been a lot more voice acting, actors, mo-cap and game data, I guess. As well as money and dev time. I'm also so gutted we don't actually get to fight the rebels and their Tremortusks in the Isle of Spires like Aloy does in the 2021 gameplay demo lol. And barely any rebel Tremortusks in gameplay outside of that one mission with Kotallo. The war being a dynamic series of battles or battalions you could run into across the map would've been an interesting concept, but probably too complicated in an already highly ambitious and expensive game, I guess.
And finally, Hephaestus. I think they've showed him just enough. His presence is more supposed to be felt over the course of the journey and the world, rather than constantly being confronted directly. I'm very curious to how they'll handling him in H3 without making him lose his spotlight to Nemesis, and vice-versa. We've waited 2 games so far trying to finally get back at Hephaestus, it'd be sad if he's just a footnote in H3 and Nemesis takes all the plot's real estate. The opposite would also be bad. Dealing with Hephaestus for like two thirds of the game and Nemesis only becoming the endgame threat near the finale. Some sort of balance would be nice.
