Anyone remember that intro to Twilight Princess? You know hours of herding and finding stuff in the village?
Well Horizon Forbidden West is even worse and has 6-8 HOURS of crap to wade thrrough before the actual game begins (and you arrive in the actual "Forbidden West")
6 hours of linear, boring, chatty (omfg the chatter) doing chores/tutorials. Oh and SOCIALIZING with Aloys hip and cool friends - easily the worst part.
After 6 hours the game actually opens up and "begins" - the story even has a nice starting point here. It feels like the other 6 hours were tacked on afterwards to "onboard" new players
I was about to give up - it was a real pain to play until it starts "for real"
Now - I really hope the intro is not an indication for the rest of the game
Why did it take you 6 hours to reach Chainscrape/The Duant? Were you just goofing off? I've not played the first game, don't even play a lot of open-world games TBH and had to learn the controls along the way of the intro but only took a couple hours at most and that was after failing some of the sections a few times and the snake boss once.
Most of the dialogue in that section with Varl, you can just speed past it and carry on freely, it's only the hologram sections and certain setpiece set-ups that eat up a bit of time. You don't even meet any of Aloy's other friends until you get past the snake boss (and the section immediately after doesn't even have that many you need to speak to before going to the Forbidden West).
So there's almost no way those two sections take you 6-8 hours, even while trying to get everything, unless you're purposely moving like a slug or kept getting lost. Either that, or you struggled multiple times on the very beginning stuff. Something doesn't really add up with your claims and the time it supposedly took to get through it, unless you playing on the hardest difficulty. Even then I struggle seeing how that'd make the opening bit 6-8 hours to get through.
It's not 8 hours. The linear intro he's talking about is less than 2h and the other area before the west opens is open and you are basically free to approach and play it as you like with the exception of course that the west is being locked for story reasons. It's exactly like that first area in Witcher 3. Don't listen to his insane ramblings.
This. There's no way in hell the parts before getting to Forbidden West (which as you said is still gated for story reasons, but otherwise can do almost everything in the sections in any order) takes 6-8 hours, even on hardest difficulty.
Even fully exploring the settlement after the snake boss fight (but before going to the Forbidden West) is like an hour at most, maybe a bit more on top if you want to be thorough, and it's not like there's much to explore there (compared to what you get starting right after).
So OP either died a lot or went at an absolute snail's pace to drag out those first two parts to 6-8 hours. You literally have to actively do that on purpose.