What about limiting the effect on native lifeforms and respect of nature?

Say you need to collect resources, but you have a set of ethics that dictates how much of an impact your actions have on the natives, so you make technology to collect the things you need, that looks and even behaves similarly to other animals.

The Machines could be made by an Alien species, post-Human made AI or even directly made by Human survivors of a catastrophe and they respect that those other forms of life need to live on the land too and they don't want to effect the development of those other species, like our Tribal decendants anymore than needed.

You're assuming that resource collection requires defense that can absolutely destroy any attacker, yet you're ignoring the glaringly obvious points that the motives of the Designers of said machine maker may not require ultra efficiency in all areas of The Machine's function. The fact the machines look the way they do and function how they do actually shows this makes the most sense.

The Thunderjaw firing those explosive discs actually look more like they're meant to deter a potential attacker, hence why Aloy isn't killed in an instant, maybe that beast can use higher yields of explosives if needed. The Thunderjaw was also already partly damaged (this is clear from the Arrows in it, along with GG actually stating that's the case), maybe it was running low on fuel for it's arsenal and had to measure the threat level, didn't think Aloy was a major concern, but made mistakes, AI isn't going to be right 100% of the time, not when you can't plan for every variable in a situation within this kind of a world.

As for your Crossbow point, I'd like to point out that Aloy is a tribal level Human, she's also using a Bow and Arrow as her main distance weapon, she also has Melee weapons that suit her needs, which makes sense. I'm sure Guerrilla Games were inspired by Hunger Games in multiple ways, it is afterall one of the most popular movie series of modern times, but they also draw from many other sources of inspiration like Game of Thrones, Terminator (Sarah Connor and machines/AI), Alien (Ripley).

The Aloy chatter thing is just Guerrilla's means to connect with the player, personally I think it works, don't think it would bother me to have Aloy talking to me as she explores the world, provided she doesn't keep saying the same things repeatedly within every minute of play time I'm cool if Guerrilla Games wants her to talk.

Well, what I'm saying is that, IMO, that's about least effective way I can think of for harvesting/guarding from high-tech entity,

From what we've seen The Machines aren't guarding from high tech entities (not in the demo anyway), they're guarding against low tech Humans, that use some Machine tech when they have access too it.

even if there are limitations in place...

See limitations created by the Creators of this tech actually puts some very hard limitations on how efficient you can make these devices, they can't just be big honking machines that scoop up tonnes of resources and there's also the possibility that the Creators only used Macro Scale technology, because they didn't want some nanoweapon, grey goo situation happening to the world, hence why they haven't released clouds of nanomachines to do the job and at that tech level they could probably just convert resources collected from underground into whatever they needed, they wouldn't even need The Machines in this form to get the resources they require.

Really making these kinds of animal like machine herds is about as efficient as you can get within those limitations, even micro-insect style collectors would probably be too fragile to fit the purpose.

but I'm quite certain they'll make some good story to justify why there are dinobots in game (other than obvious ones, of course).

Then we'll find out what Guerrilla's actually story is, so really we should just wait, without passing judgement until we know what it is.

Anyway, as I said, just ignore me on Horizon, game tech looks fantastic, they seem to have great art department on it, gameplay looks pretty good and fluid, my problem with it is that Sony decided for their first in-house WRPG to (from my point of view and for my taste) waste all of those on that particular setting.

The setting is actually about as appealing as you can get judging by how the community on the whole has judged it, I mean Horizon's regarded as game of the show at E3 this year, I know you're saying this is about your taste, but you have to think about how positively the game has been received by the community, it's clearly not a waste of a genre from where they're concerned.

Sony can always make more WRPGs in the future, depending on how well this sells, but given how The Witcher 3 is going I'd imagine we'll be seeing more games being made in this genre.

HoloDust said:

Actually, I meant as in high-tech entity that created those machines, whoever they are -  but apparently, you seem to think that whoever made them is obsessed with not disturbing balance so much that is willing to sacrifice a lot of resources on highly inefficient designs, both when it comes to harvesting and when it comes to fighting, given how easily they loose battles against primitive humans.

The trailer points to this being most likely, otherwise we'd be seeing big F***Off machines (automated trucks or more traditional Mechs) or swarms of nanomachine clouds coming in and cutting through the environment, with no AI mimicking natural life.

Efficiency of design for an end purpose doesn't always make sense, what makes sense is the tech doing what it was designed to do and this is what the trailer points too.

Also it wasn't exactly easy for Aloy to defeat the Thunderjaw, we're also seeing her at a later level of experience, so you have to take that into consideration and the fact she's gained knowledge about it's weapons and it took that to knock it's plating off.

The Thunderjaw was already damaged from a previous encounter, wasn't at full strength at this point, it actually looked like quite a challenge to bring it down, even in that weakened state.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see actual story, maybe there's some GLaDOS alike personality behind it all, just of a tree-hugging-dino-fandom variety, and the whole Earth is her gigantic testing facility. Until then, we're having fun speculating.

Why does a race or individual have to be a Tree Hugger to be concerned about the ecosystem?

As for setting and genre - actually, I was lamenting for quite some time over the fact that Sony is not getting into WRPGs, since, given how good some of their 1st parties are equipped for that, I believe they can make something that really stands out. But, even though I've been playing c/WRPGs for almost 30 years now, one of big 3 making this game is actually the only reason why I comment on it, otherwise I wouldn't give a damn (considering I didn't like what I saw), just like with tons of other games.

If you don't care for the game, then why are you even commenting?

As for overall reception - yeah, I don't think this setting is anywhere near as appealing as it could be if Sony is targeting as wide as possible WRPG audience - there is a reason why fantasy settings are staple of c/WRPGs for almost 35 years now - not saying though that it should've been necessarily high or dark fantasy setting. However, it is indeed matter of personal preference in the end and this is almost as bad as it can get from my perspective.

The game has everything for wide appeal, accept for Magic or an ultra high-tech setting, if you're not impressed or even interested in the game then why bother to comment on a thread about it?

It does just seems like you're trying to rile people up.

See bolded.