And I also feel like it's somehow getting worse the further into the game I get.

• Climbing
  • Every vertical jump comes with a pause that feels like 2 seconds.
  • If there are multiple paths when trying to sideways, I feel like 90% of the time, instead of going the direction I tell Aloy to move, she will go in one of the other two.
  • "Drop to ledge" sometimes doesn't work responsively enough, so I press X again, at which point she does the action twice and I end up having to repeat a large chunk of climbing again
• Interacting with Objects
  • Button prompts, as far as I can tell, appear on the screen a second before they can actually be used, which leads to all sorts of frustrating scenarios. Interactive object on the edge of a cliff? Be careful pressing the prompt when it tells you because you're gonna swing your spear instead and fall down.
  • Crates. God the fucking crates. Aloy has so many problems trying to latch on or jump on top of crates. They get stuck everywhere when you're trying to drag them.
• Aiming, dodging, heavy weapons
  • I'm not sure what the point of having a precision aiming mechanic is in a game where the arrows/bombs/spears will routinely, for no apparent reason, fly way left or way right of where you aimed.
  • I'm fairly sure in the first game, the dodge came with some iframes. Does it not in this one? I'm about three quarters of the way through the story by now and I've found that jumping out of the way of attacks works far better than trying to dodge out of the way.
  • Picking up heavy weapons. The animation is so slow, and again doesn't always even trigger when the prompt appears on the screen, that it makes using them in the middle of a fight kinda pointless. You're guaranteed to get knocked down before you get chance to actually use them.
  • Speaking of, why is there a massive delay between picking up the weapon and then being able to aim with it?
  • Why does Aloy sometimes just randomly drop out of aiming mode? It is so frustrating when you're lining up a shot with a sharpshooter bow from an elevated area, and then when you press the right trigger, Aloy instead swings her spear and lunges off the cliff.
• Mounts
  • Mounts do whatever they want. Guild Wars 2 has amazing mounts, with controls that aren't immersion-breakingly instant, but just responsive enough to give you the feel of momentum and responsiveness. Forbidden West is 100% momentum and zero responsiveness. Mounts won't follow the road even though they're supposed to (yes I've checked the option is on). Sometimes telling them to turn left or right makes them stop and turn around 180 degrees?
  • Aiming on mounts drops out even more often then when not mounted.
• Getting stuck in scenery
  • This is the most annoying thing during combat by far. Aloy gets stuck on everything. Trying to dodge around the tree? Tough luck, the invisible collision box is 4x the size of the tree. Tiny rock on the floor under the foliage? You're gonna get stuck on that. Trying to jump instead of climb over a boulder? Aloy's gonna forget how to jump unless you press the jump button four or five times.
• Getting stun locked
  • The animations for recovering from getting knocked down are far too long. It feels like at some point this was meant to be a purely stealth game, meant to punish people for openly fighting. I played the first game like that on my first playthrough, it was great. This time I wanted to be a little more adventurous but boy do you get punished when you're fighting a group of machines, especially the clambermaws. If you get knocked down, she takes an absolute age to get up, and your knockdown animation can be restarted while you're still trying to get up but Aloy is unresponsive to control input. That's what makes it so frustrating.
• The camera
  • Does the camera have momentum? It feels like it sometimes, but it also feels like it's not consistent. Sometimes it swings around for a good half a second after I've stopped moving the right control stick. And it's so freakin slow when you have the focus turned on.

At this point I'm wondering whether I should finish my playthrough or just watch someone play it on YouTube, the game is that frustrating to play. What inspired this post was trying to do some of the hunting grounds trials - Shock a tremortusk and remove its tusks. Every time you shock the damn thing the tusks disappear into the ground!

I love how the game looks. I love the characters, the story is fascinating. It's just been made so terribly clunky. I had the same feeling about Witcher 3, where by the end of the game I was so fed up of actively fighting against the controls that it diminished how much I enjoyed the entire experience.

I was less frustrated trying to beat Elden Ring than Forbidden West.