I feel (2 'divine beasts' in):
* It's very repetitive.
* The boss dungeons are unrewarding.
* The shrine dungeons are novel, but get tiresome quickly.
* As you can pretty much do everything off the bat, there's no "oh a boulder, can't move it, better come back later" element to the game. (This is my biggest gripe I think, a big part of the Zelda games was doing a dungeon and getting a gimmick to unlock new places).
* Weapon durability is an annoyance as there's no feedback of how much weapon there is left until the end.
* As my gear improves, I don't feel any stronger.
* Cooking could be 10x easier.
But I seem to be the odd one out thinking this, so maybe I just have bad taste.
> As you can pretty much do everything off the bat, there's no
> "oh a boulder, can't move it, better come back later" element to
> the game. (This is my biggest gripe I think, a big part of the
> Zelda games was doing a dungeon and getting a gimmick to unlock
> new places).
Done well, an "unlock" ability should either grant access to more space off a central hub (that you'd be returning to anyways) or give optional minor rewards if you want to be the completionist back-tracker - zelda pieces of heart, or max mana upgrades; metroid missile capacity; even raw cash.
Being forced to backtrack (especially without fast travel) to an arbitrary area _to progress the game_ is bad design.
On the other hand, I've always loved Gothic[1] for it's gating mechanism. If you got mangled by raptors ore some ork, that meant the area was certainly not meant for your level.
I guess it will be interesting how I'll feel on BotW once my Switch arrives...
Or you could locate the ingredients for heat-resistant elixirs, make some yourself and just plough on anyway.
This is a game which takes "open world" quite seriously, and lets you go and fight the final boss straight out of the tutorial area if you want. Although you'll probably die almost immediately, the choice is yours. I rather like the blend it gives me of freedom and guidance.
Oh and someone in the ancestry mentioned the cooking UI is poor. Indeed, the cooking UI is very poor. A few things like that and some issues with characterisation and voice acting would hold me off giving this game a perfect score.
I'd have liked to do all the puzzles in the Tomb Raider reboot, but most of the temples or whatever were locked behind "you need to have gone to the next area and then come back with the thing you acquire" idiocy.
I don't want to endlessly retrace my steps to re-find places I've been before because there's a gating mechanism. If I'd organically had to go near to the places again maybe I'd forgive them - but I'd literally have had to go to old areas for no other reason.
It's just bad design
I feel the same, it might seems counter intuitive but those limitation are what I liked the most about previous Zeldas. I miss the feeling of 'I wonder when I'l finally be able to go there'
Bows that break after shooting too many arrows, ugh...
All of the guardians I have faced in the combat shrines drop weapons that at least equal (usually exceed) the total damage/durability consumed to defeat them.
Also: Shooting the guardians in the eye stuns them giving you a long window of respite during a fight.
For cooking, pick an ingredient and select Hold, select the others, then go stand in front of a pot over a lit fire (of which you encounter plenty). The game will tell you to press A to cook. To restore health, just put a bunch of mushrooms and meat in a pot. Some mushrooms, herbs, crabs, fish, etc. tell you that they'll make you faster/stronger/less cold/etc., just throw them in with the meat. For elixirs just mix butterflies, lizards, etc. with boko horn, tooth, etc. Also if you get hearty radishes, you can throw them in a pot without anything else and it's basically full restore + extra hearts. It's broken.
I was actually considering getting it, but you might have just changed my mind. I like an open world, but the reward of progression is often a key to enjoyment for me in many cases. Do they make up for this in any other ways (ie: unbeatable monsters until you're high enough level/have better gear or something)?
All which was definitely progression. Just not like you'd traditionally think RPGs are: but more of a "real-life" acquisition style.
There are other kinds of traversal that feels this way too, but I'll leave the discovery to you.
I understand why you'd stop there, IMHO the first two or three (or even four) episodes aren't actually all that great. It's definitely worth persevering though, they get markedly better and Episode 6 is an absolute corker.
Same with Battlestar Galactica.
Certainly, I still go back and watch the first two episode pilot at least once a year. So. Damned. Good.
I like it even love it but it's not the best Zelda I've ever played. I still like Wind Waker better.
But honestly it's better than Skyward Sword, which I found tedious and annoying.
I don't see this as a problem. I'd rather a deep or skillful gameplay system where I get better and gear upgrades are incremental or side-grades.
"Avatar strength" is boring.
ex.: You get to a new region, something in the environment prevents you from exploring easily (for instance, cold). You can either tough it out and spend a lot of time/resources, or return later once you've acquired some meals/weapons that help you deal with the situation. I see this system as a really clever alternative to classic logarithmic power creep curves.
I want to watch one of these 1hour speed runs, but only after I complete the game. I can only image how good those guys must be
Many people (myself included) see that as a good thing. Every time I come up to an obstacle, I know that the only thing keeping me from getting past it is my own skill; I know there's no contrived McGuffin that will come along later and trivialize the time/effort spent working my way around it.
> As my gear improves, I don't feel any stronger.
Really? I'm about the same place in the game as you (i.e. two divine beasts down), and I can take on all sorts of enemies that I couldn't before. I definitely feel stronger than I did at the beginning of the game (e.g. I don't have to run in fear every time a guardian lights up, I can quickly go to the "test of strength" shrines whenever I need new weaponry, etc.)
> Cooking could be 10x easier
It could certainly be faster (I'd love to be able to batch my recipies instead of having to cook 10 meals, one at a time)
I still feel that all of the good sides of that Zelda still makes it one of the best game I ever played.
I've been playing Horizon on PS4 and it's fantastic, plus the console actually has value outside of a single game.
I tried to buy a Switch and Zelda on launch day, but couldn't find one locally and settled for the Wii U version. I haven't been disappointed.
I'll probably buy a Switch when the new Mario comes out for it in like 6-10 months.
I wonder, what other games are you comparing it to / which have you played?
How does it stack for example against The Witcher 3 which won a landslide of awards?
I can kind of understand why The Witcher 3 won a load of awards, but it just wasn't my thing (and I kept getting stuck on collision boxes where I really didn't think there should be any, which is utterly infuriating).
I am expecting to see Breath of the Wild winning absolutely truckloads of awards. How it will stand up in the future remains to be seen, but in this moment it's a fantastic new milestone in the history of the open world RPG.
Besides, Witcher 3 had an intimate sex scene on stuffed unicorn.
That's why I love the Witcher lore. It's one of very, very few fantasy settings where ethics are fuzzy and ugly. It makes other fantasy settings look like rom coms.
(I used to write Quenya and Sindarin in the tengwar! Probably still could; I'm sure I kept those notes. Brilliant languages, if heavily systematized in the same unrealistic way as Esperanto. But I still to this day can't make it through the main trilogy without running out of patience. Would you believe, I used to think I was the one with the problem?)
But yeah, the good vs evil stuff is pretty ham-fisted and always was. And there's some pretty racist stuff in there.
I have a WiiU but I still don't know should I get a Switch or buy the WiiU version of Zelda. I'm a massive Nintendo fan but mostly playing with a PC nowadays.
The WiiU version plays fine. A few frame rate hiccups on complex scenes here and there but nothing terrible. And I hear the Switch has this when docked anyways.
Right now I’m playing through 3 and seeing Geralt as a monster-slayer consultant that occasionally has to deal with deadbeat clients. Interesting to see how he protects his finances before and after these encounters with the buyer (there’s only one quest I can recall where he actually asks for a deposit, since the quest giver reeks of thievery and corruption).
A.K.A. an emotionally engaging story, which would be very hard to do without some sequence of narrative. A complete sandbox is an endless timesink - if I'm building something freeform I'd rather do it using a medium which provides lasting value - art, 3D modeling, programming or such. But these are just personal preferences, I'm not claiming any objective value of one over the other (narrative v.s. sandbox).
This article[0] goes into detail on why I think it's so great, but contains spoilers.
[0] https://killscreen.com/articles/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-att...
I don't normally like open world games, but I loved the Witcher 3 and Fallout New Vegas.
The world of the Witcher 3 feels more real, but Breath of the Wild is more fun to explore.
FO3 felt too linear and too hand held. FO:NV on the other hand was actually decent.
FO4 is not fun at all if you want the open world RPG element. It's a shooter more than anything else, and you have to avoid settlements completely. The survival difficulty mode was decent in difficulty, but it lacked "oh shit" mechanics so random encounters don't just kill you at will for the first many hours of gameplay until you get some gear.
The general consensus on Breath of the Wild so far is that it's at least a tier above that - the tier that defines a console generation. Games like Mario 64, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, stuff like that. That's Tier II.
In Tier I are the games that are in consideration for the greatest games of all time: Ocarina of Time, Link to the Past, Final Fantasy VII, etc. Some people think it'll end up here, but we won't know that until we look back on it in a few years.
OOT, LttP, FF VII ar all decent games but not even close to "greatest games of all time". I'd classify them as Tier 3 at best.
Really? I don't think there is ANY game of the quality of Witcher 3 coming on a yearly basis...
Had The Witcher 3 come out in 2016, it would have certainly been behind Overwatch. Had it come out in 2014, it would have certainly been behind Dark Souls II. In 2017, it would be behind Breath of the Wild, and it's only March. There are equal or better games every year.
https://gotypicks.blogspot.com/2015/09/2015-game-of-year.htm...
(And really, a suggestion of Dark Souls II as some kind of awards powerhouse is totally detached from any reality).
I'm going off of Wikipedia's GotY list, which includes only more notable publications. That lists adds in a ton of small gaming blogs and regional user's choice awards, which I don't think gives you better data. In Wikipedia's list, TW3 is winning, but a little less drastically.
I think you're attacking a claim I'm not making, and we're not even disagreeing, though. I didn't claim TW3 was worse than other contenders in 2015, I said it's one of a few solid games that come out every year. Everything you're saying and everything I'm saying supports that.
Edit: GotY is a decent signal, but discussions about which videogames are better are always going to be highly subjective. The Walking Dead won in 2012 and most people don't consider TWD to be on the same level as a lot of the other GotY games.
Well, a lot of game critics disagree with that. Many of them gave GotY to MGS or Fallout instead, and MGS has a higher metacritic score than W3. I'm not going to debate beyond that because it'll devolve into complete subjectivity, but it's pretty clear W3 isn't a once-a-generation game.
The only way I could imagine saying that is if you focus only on the mechanics of the RPG game loop and ignore world design, dialog quality, voice acting, characters, breadth of content, quests, etc.
[BOTW puzzle spoilers below]
Comparing it to the Witcher 3 is actually a great way to highlight its strength--the insane depth of the mechanics. It feels almost like you're playing Nethack or Dwarf Fort in terms of how deep the mechanics go and how much the game designers allow you to do. Not _as_ deep, nothing's as deep as Dwarf Fort, but deep enough that I can make the comparison.
For example, both TW3 and BOTW have a mechanic where you can mix different ingredients together to give yourself stat bonuses. They both have you harvest the ingredients from the in-game world. Very similar so far. But in TW3, you mix them by going through some menu screens and clicking on the appropriate items. In BOTW, you take the items out of your inventory, hold them, and return to normal gameplay while holding them and can then choose to drop them anywhere in the outside world (ideally in a heated cauldron). But you can choose to drop them just in an open flame, and while you can't get potions this way, you _can_ cook ingredients like apples and meat to have them restore more of your health. But if you leave them in the fire too long, they'll catch fire themselves. And if it's a dry day and you're standing in the right (or wrong) kind of terrain, the grass underfoot may catch on fire, too. And it may spread (and start interfering with enemies--but that's another story). And there's more to it than that--if you drop certain ingredients in snowy landscapes or icy streams, they'll freeze over and give you heat resisting properties when they didn't before. And if you drop them in areas that are too hot (think side of an active volcano), they'll start cooking immediately, as if you had dropped them over an open flame in a standard area. You can distract certain a certain type of enemy by dropping food in front of it too.
The entire game is like this. For example, in another dungeon I got stuck on a puzzle that clearly wanted me to put two magic electric orbs on two switches, about 5m apart from each other. But for the life of me I could only find one of the orbs. After fifteen minutes of running around, I remembered that my metal weapons conducted electricity--I had found that out because I had gotten killed by a lightning strike while I was flying through a storm earlier, I ignored the warning sparking around my back and had to reload a save. So I dropped every metal weapon I had and dragged in a metal chest from another room in the dungeon and made a circuit from one switch to the other with the single electric orb in the middle. And it totally worked to solve the puzzle. (Looked up where the second orb was later and I was blind to not notice it, whoops.)
It doesn't have the depth of writing that TW3 does, the characters are more cartoonish and less nuanced and the plot itself is much more straightforward and doesn't have a tenth of the subterfuge. But the writing isn't poor, either, it's done extremely well for its style. It comes across as very Ghibli-esque to me. Zelda's character in particular is nuanced and an interesting examination of their old tropes without fully subverting them, and the way they reveal the story to you is through a series of clever small vignettes that overwhelmingly choose these small intimate moments that manage to imply so much more than they outright say.
It's unabashedly 11/10 GOTY and maybe "game of this generation" to me, though I'm trying to give myself some time to get over the initial rush before I make that kind of call. Blows TW3 out of the water, and I loved TW3.
There is no handholding or quests you must be complete in a particular sequence or being locked in a particular part of the map. You can just go anywhere and do anything. And everyone you do go is incredibly well designed, polished and interesting.
It isn't on par for me with Uncharted or The Last of Us for the depth and quality of the story but it is a pretty damn good game.
Usually doing 'a' while 'b' means you are primarily doing 'b', and 'a' is a bonus.
I would not compare a game aimed at kids (Zelda) vs a game which is clearly more adult-focused (Witcher 3). It's like comparing a Disney movie vs an Aliens episode and asking which one is the best.
same for me, but I admit that for me, as a not-anymore hardcore gamer, SMG was simple an amazing piece of art; awesome in all aspects of gaiming: gameplay, innovation music/art, fun.
"What are you talking about? Sunshine's like the best one!"
The music is cool and the setting is refreshing. The FLOOD gimmick is fine; it's nice to have some variance in Mario's move-pool. The weird tone can actually be endearing.
But it's not enough to make up for the in-intuitive level design and wild difficulty swings. A Mario game is expected to be one thing above all else "Fun Running And Jumping Puzzles" and Sunshine simply doesn't deliver.
I've sunk about 30+ hours in now and I don't think I would have come this far had it not been a Zelda game, a series I've been playing for 25 years.
It's certainly not a bad game, but it's not one for people that can't make serious time commitments.
I have two kids (one is only 2 months old) and also have a long commute, demanding job, etc. I also don't have a lot of time to play games. But the Switch just makes it so easy to play. It's the first console I can play in bed at night without bothering my wife and newborn.
Thus, with its portability, it makes it extremely easy to just play anytime I have time.
Also, why rush? 1 to 2 hours a day is more than enough. This game is a slow burn and I'm loving every moment of it!
Exactly. I rarely understand people who begrudgingly dismiss large, epic games due to their limited time. The size of the game becomes irrelevant if you can save and continue at any point. Feel free to progress as slowly as you prefer. Your quest log sums up what's going on in case you forgot since your last session a few weeks ago.
I bought The Witcher 3 on release and have been playing it since - 2 hours here, a free evening there, maybe on a lazy sunday. I'm still not finished. To me that just means that I'll be able to enjoy the game for a very, very long time.
Information density.
You can have a game that takes a long time, but it would need a LOT of story in it's missions and sidequests to keep it interesting. If you stretch a 10 hour story over 80 hours of gameplay it gets boring real quick because the pacing of the story will simply be too slow.
What about WiiU and the 100s of handheld consoles?
Though, you can actually have wherever you want, if you don't need it connected to a TV, I've seen photos of people playing the Wii U in an airport lounge, all you need is a plug socket.
What? Why? I did almost no side quests until after doing all the divine beasts. There's some minor things to get into the relevant towns, and to get to the beast, but they were generally fun/interesting and part of the main quest. I don't see a reason you'd have to do any of the more boring ones.
I've noticed that BOTW which is different things to different people. I mean you could just run straight up to Ganon and finish the game in under 1 hour. Or you could play it linearly, only going where the quests take you.
Personally I just ran around finding shrines, and only finished the main quests after unlocking most of the world and many shrines.
It's a much harder game than normal Zelda's.
Similarly with other combat I thought it was way harder than other Zeldas. When I was near finishing the game I went online and checked "how to fight a lynel" (the hardest enemy imo). Watching that opened up some ideas and combat got much easier and more exciting. I kind of wish I had looked it up earlier. I was literally at Hyrule Castle on my way to complete the game when I looked.
I thoroughly enjoyed the game but my previous Zelda experience also limited my thinking about what's possible. I feel like I missed a large part of the game play because of that
Breath of the Wild has far more in common with the original Legend of Zelda than with the more recent games.
Some may consider that this game approaches the difficulty of the NES/SNES Zelda titles a return to form. Though, I suppose that those are not really 'Normal' Zelda games anymore.
The thing is that the first 3 Zelda's were not linear. I remember being so frustrated that Ocarina of time went out of it's way to stop me from exploring new areas, and how navi ruined all the exploration. I think Breath of the Wild is the first 3d Zelda that feels like the classic games.
Zelda 2 I'm less familiar with, but it has fewer items to lock you out in general with. I think once you get the hammer you have a lot of run of the overworld, again largely being constrained by difficulty ramping and leveling up which you can do anywhere.
Zelda 3 is considerably more linear though, it's true. You can sequence break the dark world a fair bit, but it's a lot clunkier by this point. Still, it's not anywhere near as rigid as the 3d Zeldas have been.
I mean, sure, they're probably crazy good, but i doubt you're 30x worse than they are. Watch a video or two. I don't think you'll set a record or anything, but i bet you'll be able to finish the game real fast.
You can't expect to do a speed run on your first play through without following a guide, and if you do that what's the point in even playing it? Unless beating games as fast as humanly possible is your thing.
[0] http://kotaku.com/far-cry-4-has-a-hidden-bad-ending-16589899...
The rush is so that I can do the million other things I want to do in my spare time. I much prefer the old way of doing the main quest and coming back to side quests for an hour or two here and there.
Out of curiosity, other than standard Wii games which ones are you including here?
For example, I saw refurbished Wii U consoles for $200 the other day, and I'd be hesitant to spend $100 or $150 on a device with no warranty. But for $200 it's not crazy to think you might as well go for the Switch at $100 more.
In practice they are practically identical.
I really like my Wii U, but I don't think this is the prettiest game it could be. Honestly I think Wind Waker HD has much cleaner graphics (albeit not as technically good). It is a very fun game, though.
How big a Zelda fan were you before playing Breath of the Wild?
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?snr=1_614_615_street-f...
I didn't like Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword very much at all.
I just beat the major test of strength, time to get one of these beasts.
The switch is smaller than my current graphics card. The switch + ALL of its accessories is (rough estimate) slightly less material than what is inside my PC case. Certainly far less electronics. Most of the Switch accessories are just plastic.
edit: If the one metric you want to maximize (or minimize) is electronic waste, the ONLY device you should own is a high-end smartphone that you carefully maintain so that you can replace it only after at least triple its expected (2 year) lifetime.
Plastic are a big waste. Most of my computers made 10 years or more, always find someone that need one, or a part that can be reused. No need for new GF every year...
Plus the more modular nature of the components/accessories means that it is possible (though unlikely) that upgrades for different components may be made on a module-by-module basis. Which translates to less waste overall.
In terms of computers/consoles made 10+ years ago I think the same comparisons still apply. There are plenty of old consoles still in use today. Though old consoles were certainly less modular than old PCs.
I think the Switch is particularly targeted at non-hardcore-gamers.
I made this mistake with gran turismo on PS3... I have only the PS3 for Gran Turismo and clearly was a waste.
I can understand the hype over Zelda but like many of other game because of his content that is cheap, boring start to degrade now. See the live streaming on youtube, almost every youtube guy that stream is on the end. Two weeks after. In 1 months we will not talk more about Zelda.
Actually it would only make sense as a purchase right now if you're a hardcore game dying to play Zelda.
A few of the glitches in the game:
- Water doesn't exist, you just walk on the bottom of lakebeds, all the fish behave as if they're on dry land
- Magnesis and Stasis do not work (but you can just walk underwater to get to those chests)
- The game locks up often, typically during auto-saves
- Graphical glitches, big cyan and magenta polygons, flicker constantly on screen
- All humanoid characters, including Link, sink about halfway into the ground
- Animals will randomly disappear, AI behaves weird around the non-existent water
- Frame rate is extremely troubled
- You can't beat many of the shrines, including the first few, so you need a save file to escape the first area
So imagine trying to play through the shrines without Magnesis or Stasis. What do you do? The game itself is actually pretty flexible: instead of lifting metal boxes and spheres you can use bombs to knock them in the direction you need. You can use arrows and other weapons to knock around far away objects. Still, many shrines are impassable.
CEMU is not anywhere close to a substitute for the console, and it will be months to years before it has the same accuracy as say Dolphin.
To compare, I've been playing Super Mario 3D World at 4K and it's gorgeous. It looks and performs far better than the Wii U version once you install a precompiled shader cache.
So while BotW is currently unplayable on Cemu, I suspect that won't be the case in 6 months or so.
I personally always thought the screen on the controller was dumb, I owned a Dreamcast and thought it was annoying then, so it didn't bother me. But you might feel different.
- can't take a playstation on the train/plane/subway/car
- can't stream Playstation Now on the train/plane/subway/car
If this iteration of Nintendo's console would have a been your standard home console, I wouldn't have bought it. It being a hybrid made me pull the trigger, and I'm sure I'm not alone there.