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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=samulGnaDVg

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYa2eAZ718

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.