Breja: Side quests were even more boring in my opinion, and all the characters terribly bland. And the world, while very nice looking, felt rather empty.
Also, there's my personal favorite pet peeve - oh, I just ran out of arrows. Let me pause combat, completely breaking its flow and immersion, go into a menu, click click click, and craft some more. And let's repeat that pretty in pretty much every bigger fight. It would have been better to make ammo unlimited - it's impossible to run out of resources, even in the high tech bases from the past there are inexplicable boxes full of sticks for that purpose, so crafting it is really just tedious, endless busywork.
I didn't mind those things that much. Characters, yes, included in what I meant about dialogues. And the side quests were rather formulaic most of the times. When I learnt about collectibles I didn't even want to bother, because it sounded so bland. BUT if you approach it a different way, not so much as a story-oriented game but as a playground for your own adventures, and for relaxation, like LegoDnD said, these things become just a means to an end, leading you to places in the world you wouldn't have gone to otherwise, and giving you enough purpose and reason to play around with the mechanics. I understand that for someone looking for an exciting story-telling adventure or RPG and trying to do all the quests in a row with hopes of being rewarded, this will not be attractive. But I thought, it is a very nice open world game. The good parts are more like Far Cry Primal, the bad parts trying to be Skyrim. It all depends on your expectations. If someone doesn't like Ubisoft-style open world games in general, I'd advise them to stay away from HZD.
The ammo crafting ... eh, it was a bit of busywork, but not that bad. Maybe it's different if you don't play with a gamepad, but I could craft ammo directly in the weapon wheel, with the quick press of two buttons. I never had to go into the crafting menu and click click click for it. What I found worse is that the weapon wheel only allowed access to four different weapons at a time, even though you could switch them out at will any time by going into the menu. Now THAT was cumbersome and unnecessary. Or hunting small animals for random bones and hide drops in order to craft the ammo bags, that was bad, too. None of the above was enough to spoil my fun though, because I still had agancy in all that and could decide whether to bother or not. Linear main missions with long walking and talking stretches were worse to me, because they weren't well written (how does Aloy have absolutely no problem understanding anything of the old world tech babble?).
But it all depends on what kind of game you're looking for and what type of player you are. In RPGs I usually prefer just look around on my own terms, too, without following linear stories. So I can relate to LegoDnD thinking it was a relaxed game with enjoyable stealth mechanics. I can also relate to it though if you were bored because you were expecting more of an exciting story RPG. The game had a bit of trouble deciding what it wanted to be, really. It's definitely not for everyone, and even I who loved it for the most part, still found many flaws with it.
