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Incline The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for Wii U and Switch

Hobo Elf

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What the fuck are you smoking. The towers in Zelda don't unlock a region of the map so you can see where the distractions are, you have to put the icons there yourself. God damn

"Wow". Marking the areas yourself doesn't somehow make it any fundamentally different, it's still the same shit and if you can't see it you're being a fanboy. :M

This is why BotW is hailed as a 'return to the roots'. The question is wether this movement was done in a such a way to be a step forward. Well, I can't comment on how derivative the game is since I rarely play these open world games. There are a lot of elements taken straight from Assassins Creed, that is true. And I do feel that by spreading the shrines apart the whole dungeon delving and exploration side of the game got dilluted. However, I appreciate the game for what it is and had a good deal of fun with it, even as Majora's remains my favorite.

See, this is why I can't say I appreciate what BotW does, because it told the good Zelda elements that I care about to take a back seat in favor of Ubisoft open world. I know that many people love these kind of games, case in point this thread where the majority here love the vast world with nothing but endless distractions. It's why Assassins Creed and Shadow of Mordor are so popular, even here on the Codex. But I just can't give a damn about having my gameplay time artificially padded. I liked the more tight design of old Zelda. For me having a big world doesn't justify itself when I lost the dungeons and instead of some 4 dungeon with some kind of manipulation gimmick and it takes me an hour or two in total to do the quests that lead up to it and clear the dungeon. It's a huge loss and a huge step down.

Edit: Anyway I respect people like Delterius and DJOGamer PT who like BotW because it's obviously a game that appeals to them and they are able to articulate why they like it, even if I disagree with you on almost everything.
But people like TheHeroOfTime are just butthurt fanboys with no real arguments and can only post other peoples' opinions and they become emotionally compromised when someone doesn't love their meme genre.
 
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Villagkouras

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Ok, BOTW is my first Zelda game, so I can't be blamed to be a fanboy (I'm playing it on Cemu) and I hate open world games like Skyrim, AC. The last open world game I played was ELEX.

I really love this one. I wish it had a somewhat smaller world, I think I would enjoy it even more. Anyway, the thing about open world games is that they are stuffed with things to artificially bloat playing time. Zelda's distractions are very fun. It makes you scavenging for resources in a very enjoyable way. Really just imagine most open world games with this durability mechanic like Zelda and you have a recipe for destruction.

Probably I would prefer older games since they aren't open world but for this particular genre, companies like Ubisoft or Bethesda should take some lessons from this game (and Piranha Bytes).
 

Hobo Elf

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Probably I would prefer older games since they aren't open world but for this particular genre, companies like Ubisoft or Bethesda should take some lessons from this game (and Piranha Bytes).

For the record, I don't disagree with this. BotW does have the best iteration of the open world game formula. But I'm not convinced that it's because of the open world elements as much as it is because of the somewhat distant Zelda elements that still linger there somewhere. At least BotW has some puzzling gameplay, riddles and combat that isn't simply waiting for the enemy to attack you so you can counter / parry. But, as I said, those are despite the open world elements, not because of it.
 

Keldryn

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Not an argument

zb4x3.jpg
 

Nryn

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
BotW was my first Zelda game as well, and it left an incredible first impression during the initial half a dozen hours thanks to its fun physics interactions. But as I played the game to completion, that initial euphoria steadily gave way to disappointment. Comparing BotW to the Gothics, Stalkers and New Vegas (my favorite open world games), there are just too many areas where it falls short:

1. The Open World is Populated with Repetitive Content: Stuff one can do in BotW's world can be broadly broken down into the following categories: 15 Sheikah Towers to climb, 18 Zelda memories to uncover, dozens of copy-pasted enemy camps to clear for a treasure chest, 120 Shrines to complete, and 900 Korok seeds to discover. While BotW does not suffer from Ubisoft's icon vomit as soon as one activates a tower, the underlying structure of the open world content is too similar for my liking; the open world content essentially amounts to a handful of different activities, and each of these activities is repeated dozens if not hundreds of times with minor variations in a bid to pad out the world. To put this into perspective, the 5 kinds of activities I mentioned before would make BotW's map look like so when mapped out:

botwh0sxs.jpg


The map is filled willy-nilly with countless collectibles and activities that one can easily mistake it for a map from a Ubisoft game. Now compare how Gothic 1 populates its map:

minevalleyagsvs.jpg


In comparison, Gothic 1's world feels far more organic, with each point of interest containing a unique place, dungeon or npc with actual relevance to the world, and none of Gothic's points of interests fall into BotW's checklist way of designing open world content. In this case, less is definitely more (memorable).

2. The Actual Exploration has no Sense of Danger: BotW has the right ideas but bungles the execution when it comes to providing obstacles that the player must overcome while exploring. For instance, certain Sheikah towers initially seem too high to be climbable with the default stamina, but the game's design defeats the entire stamina mechanic by allowing the player to consume as many stamina replenishing consumables as needed while pausing the game, essentially turning what might have been a tense tower climb into just another flavor of Assassin's Creed towers. Similarly, when the game introduced fire-filled and ice-covered areas, I thought it could be a glorious return to STALKER-esque design where the player is scrambling just to survive deadly environmental hazards. Instead, right next to the hot and cold areas are conveniently placed villages that sell full sets of heat and cold immunity gear, respectively.

Thus, the onus then falls on the enemy AI to provide the sole source of challenge, and it is comically ill-equipped to do so. The enemy AI has no answer to the player gliding away or even running straight through their encampments. Even though there are enemies that can one shot the player's base hp early in the game, the game world is abundant with consumables that raise the maximum hp so this stops being an issue early on. The only challenge to BotW's exploration is to have the patience required to trek and glide through a far too huge map to reach the shrine/tower at the other end of the screen.

3. Durability System Guts Exploration Rewards: Thanks to weapons breaking after 2 minutes of combat, the game constantly showers the player with weapons they have already seen before. One of the most deflating experiences in the game was opening a chest in a shrine that contained a duplicate of the fire sword that I thought was unique and was overjoyed to find a couple of hours back -- it was then that I realized that the durability system made almost all weapons into nothing more than a consumable item one finds repeatedly and multiple copies of, sapping all my excitement for any future weapon finds. In the second half of the game I'd constantly throw chest contents right into the abyss because of the frequency with which the game kept throwing duplicates at me coupled with a lack of inventory space.

Another unfortunate aspect of the durability system is that the game needs a replenishing source of weapons for the player since chests do not respawn. BotW's solution in the form of Blood Moons respawning all enemies across the world robs the world of a feeling of persistence. Compared to the Gothics, Stalkers and New Vegas where even quest-related NPCs can die, the Blood Moon prevents even enemies from permanently dying, making BotW's incredibly interactive world seem paradoxically static at the same time.

4. Environmental Traversal and Shrine Puzzles Never Escalate in Challenge: I played my first metroidvania in Hollow Knight right before BotW, and that colored my expectations for rising environmental traversal challenges as a game progresses. BotW never has inaccessible areas that a player should revisit later to unlock. This oversight is a giant missed opportunity in world design, especially since each of the 4 divine beasts unlocks a new ability for the player. If BotW had areas that could only be accessed by using a specific divine beast skill, it would have gone a long way towards making environmental traversal not feel such a flat unchanging experience.

Even though Shrine puzzles were uniformly too short, easy and mostly unremarkable except for a few standout puzzles, they were still my favorite part of the whole game, pushing me to complete all 120 of them. My biggest disappointment with the puzzle design in this game is that I cannot recall a single divine beast or Shrine that required the use of all 4 of the runes to progress. Most of the puzzles can be completed with just the use of 1 or 2 runes, with outliers requiring 3. I expected the divine beasts and Shrines that can only be accessed after defeating specific divine beasts to contain challenging puzzles that required full use of all the runes, but the game never met these expectations.

5. Combat is Best Avoided Entirely: Unless one is grinding for materials to improve armor, there is no point to engaging in combat out in the open world. The combat mechanics and enemy variety leave a lot to be desired and struggle to sustain a combat heavy playstyle over the dozens of hours the game can last. Melee combat lacks depth and devolves into circle strafing trash mobs awkwardly (the target lock while strafing is absolutely bizarre in BotW, with the camera not being locked behind Link's back -- a standard practice in a game involving melee combat and target locking) or baiting tough enemies into parries and flurries. Even when the player is in danger of dying, a return to full hp is only a game pause and consumable away. Enemy variety is shocking, with the vast majority of the game featuring the same 3 enemy types, albeit with recolored versions boasting hp bloat and the same moveset.

The only positive thing I found about the combat is the arrow drop mechanic while using bows. The immense satisfaction on nailing a headshot on an enemy half a screen away never got old.

6. The Side Quests Would Make MMOs Blush: Without mincing any words, BotW has the worst side quest content of the games I've played in recent years. I generally like to complete as many side quests as possible before progressing the main quest, but in order to not drop the game entirely, I had to abandon the side quests in BotW. They were all fetch quests, and as the game wore on, the quantity of fetching required increased exponentially. At the start of the game, most quests required a single item or two to complete, but that soon ballooned to 5, 10, 20, 55 and all the way to 110 for the Tarrey Town quest. Given the vendor trash rewards for these quests, the quest writing would have to be exceptional to justify that amount of fetching, but the quest writing in BotW is anything but exceptional, with threadbare characters, generic motivations, and banal quest setups.

Summing up BotW, I found it to be a game of wonderful physics interactions stuck in a map that was too large for its own good, leading to a repetitive structure and puzzle content that was stretched too thin to accommodate the size of the world. The game also never combined the open world and puzzles in a satisfying manner; the gameplay inside Shrines has a different playstyle compared to the gameplay that occurs out in the open world, making the game feel as if it has two distinct halves -- one that occurs inside Shrines and one that occurs outside. I found the Shrines' puzzle gameplay to be more enduring than the open world gameplay, despite initially being drawn to the title on hearing about its open world design. So, even though BotW disappointed me as an open world game, it has also served as a gateway game and made me curious about checking out older Zelda games, hopefully ones with a stronger puzzle focus.
 
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Krzysiek

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Nryn Great summary of BotW. My impression about it was almost identical. That was my first Zelda and after praise by the press and players as one of the best game of the decade I was sooo hyped. I forced myself to finished it. I spend 75% of my 80h playthrough trying to find what was such special in this huge, empty world. This game have one truly marvellous element - its physics engine. The rest is open world like from ubisoft game (but without markers) fill with uninspired, repetitive content and dull story. E.g. I can't understand how such fetch side quest are not an issue for most of the players. But maybe BotW is what Minecraft generation truly wants or 95% of players played only through first (great) 20h of new Zelda.
 

Hobo Elf

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Finished the game. Overall it was a 6/10 game. Not bad, not amazing, just mediocre. I won't bother repeating what I didn't like about the game since everyone has already seen it and I'm afraid that some certain snowflakes would suffer a mental breakdown from too many opinions that conflict with their delicate world view, so I'll instead expand on the things that I did like about the game.

10 The art design was nice and gave the game a good pseudo-Ghibli look.

20 The world design was great and the nice draw distance helped a lot. Being able to see pretty much all towers was a nice touch and gave a good sense of scale of the world. Pretty much all areas felt somehow memorable with easily identifiable landscapes. A good feat indeed.

30 Music ranged from good to beautiful. My only complaint here is that music, for the most part, felt a bit too under used when exploring the world.

40 The hidden memories were nice, though I wish some of them had been longer. The developers seemed shy about adding story and character development into Zelda and as The Game Analists said, Nintendo doesn't really excel at story telling, which is true, but I thought here it was somewhat decent, although lacking due to not putting enough time and effort into it.

50 The previous point kinda leads up to this one. Zelda has a pretty good setting imo. A bit undervalued, mostly because it never is developed really much, but it's a vibrant, high fantasy setting that hasn't really lost the same feeling that it has retained since the 80's. That specific kind of feeling of a setting that is about heroic exploration. The races are interesting and clearly they have their own cultures but it's never expanded upon enough in BotW. I wish for once Ninty gave a shot at trying to make the setting a bit deeper since it really is a fun setting and could be more. They don't have to go completely nuts with it, but a little substance might not hurt if they don't screw it up.

60 I liked the Gothicy vibes I was getting in the beginning where you're weak as hell and anything that's a head taller than you can just sneeze on you and you'll explode.

70 The ending segment in BotW was nice. Calamity Ganon was a fine boss fight and finally storming Hyrule Castle was great. I wish they had put more effort into the Blight bosses as they put effort into Calamity Ganon. Finally hearing the Zelda theme play as I was rushing through the Castle was a great touch. I got all hidden memories and the ending cinematic was still meh but Zelda was always about the journey and not the destination so I don't mind. Not like there was that much to get invested in anyway, but that's a bit of a sad thing.

Unfortunately this is a game that will probably collect dust from now on as I'll never revisit it. It's impossible for me to motivate myself into replaying a game like this where there's just so much running around involved and you just collecting tons of stuff. The good content is stretched out too thin with uninteresting padding stuffed to the brim in between. The high points of the game was the Great Plateau and Hyrule Castle. Everything else in between was kind of a middling experience for the most part.
 
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sullynathan

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New Vegas
New Vegas falls under the criticism of everything you mentioned except for having some good side quests.

Gothic falls under 2 of them

While the STALKER games aren't even similar enough to many of these open world games for me to compare them.
 

Bigg Boss

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^Agreed. These are not games where you OCD collect every last useless item. That is why you get a lump of golden shit when you do it.
 
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Silva

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First my disappointment with Persona 5*, now I see a lot of people saying BotW is not so good as the hype. Well, at least it saves me some bucks. My son almost convinced me to buy the Switch just to play Zelda.

*I'm honestly appalled how such an extremely linear, badly written, overly expositive and simply boring game like Persona 5 made the fuss it did.
 

Hobo Elf

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First my disappointment with Persona 5*, now I see a lot of people saying BotW is not so good as the hype. Well, at least it saves me some bucks. My son almost convinced me to buy the Switch just to play Zelda.

*I'm honestly appalled how such an extremely linear, badly written, overly expositive and simply boring game like Persona 5 made the fuss it did.

The Switch will get Shin Megami Tensei 5 which is the superior Atlus series, so getting a Switch isn't necessarily a bad idea.
 

Jaedar

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Project: Eternity Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Unfortunately this is a game that will probably collect dust from now on as I'll never revisit it. It's impossible for me to motivate myself into to replay a game like this where there's just so much running around involved and you just collecting tons of stuff. The good content is stretched out too thin with uninteresting padding stuffed to the brim in between. The high points of the game was the Great Plateau and Hyrule Castle. Everything else in between was kind of a middling experience for the most part.
Pretty much. I enjoyed exploring the world, but doing it again seems pointless. Except maybe some challenge run of going straight for hyrule castle or something like that.

The game needed more proper challenges, less running around between collectathons. I actually felt a bit bad for doing all 4 divine beasts when I learned it made the final boss easier.
 

TheHeroOfTime

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TheHeroOfTime It says in teh fucking video you posted that it the 2d zelda prototype was used to test out the environmental interactions dont you ever fucking talk to me again you worthless incomprehensible pile of shit

:retarded:

Are you dumb? That's exactly what I said in my message fucking moron. They consider it as a "legitimate prototype of Breath of the wild" as it's said in the video. They created it to experiment and test if those new additions and the overall new "Chemistry system" (That's how they name all the different interactions between elements that the game has) worked as additions to the original Zelda, and then they translated those experiments to the final game.
 

NotAGolfer

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
I restarted the game about a week ago on master mode with the DLCs included and I have to say that I'm addicted again.
Best truly open world game ever imo. Some minor framerate issues on the WII U, especially in some town hubs but nothing gamebreaking so far.

I love the combat and enemies are fun to experiment with, like giving them bombs, setting them on fire just to watch them use it against you afterwards, the movement and attack patterns, using physics against them, drowning whole enemy groups using just a Korok leaf etc.
Master mode makes me think a lot more about if and how I want to engage combat, I often just avoid them now or try to figure out a way to kill them without using standard weapons.

The story so far doesn't really grip me, not because there's so few of it which doesn't bother me at all (I like searching for memory locations and all these quirky characters are nice to watch) but because the voice acting is pretty shit so far (sad little princess Zelda - ughh!) and because there doesn't seem to be much to it anyway (search the McGuffins and kill the big bad - dunno, maybe it's just me but this feels slightly familiar ^^)

But exploring the map and using all the different mechanics is really fun, even after 100 hours.
And I disagree with pretty much every criticism towards the mechanics. Equipment breaking is very welcome and important because it makes me use other weapons with another combat style which mixes up gameplay (so it doesn't get repetitive), and it also gives me a huge incentive to do some more exploring and treasure hunting. So it basically puts your focus back to where it belongs and where the game really shines, free-roaming open world exploration. And oh boy is it fun to explore the map, take in the views and climb steep cliffs, paraglide, shield-surf, ride your horse (ancient gear makes it possible to call it everywhere) or simply run around and collect Korok seeds (they are everywhere).
And the way the gameworld is structured always manages to lure me off the path I originally wanted to go, because these rocks there are forming a pattern so of course I go over there and collect that Korok seed ... and now I'm close to that hilltop over there and I bet there's either another seed or I can at least get a good look at the valley beyond and see if there's a shrine there or if my treasure chest Sheikah sensor detects something. So now I'm on that hilltop and I see some flying wooden platforms held by octarons so I sneak closer, sneakstrike a lizard enemy on the way and then paraglide down to the upper platform, but before I land there I first headshot and kill the enemy on it using the slomo camera function. And so on, and before I even think about it I'm on top of a tower in the opposite direction of where I originally wanted to go and see another stable where I know I can find one of those painter dudes that can help me to find memory locations and also some book about special DLC gear.
And between all of this I'm just having a grand old time. :)

Cooking is nothing special but doesn't distract much and gets the job done.
And combat and the physics system are absolutely awesome, especially in master mode where you often actually need every trick in the book to win a fight.
Also I love finding shrines and doing these puzzles, especially the ones where you directly rotate some object with the controller. Some of the physics puzzle ones are nice too.
Oh and the towers are great. Isn't it simple and still marvelous how they copied that tired Ubisoft formula and turned into something good? So now these towers are just vantage points to find points of interests and to get a topographical map that just gives you some hints like the names of landmarks and the location of lakes etc instead of littering the map with markers. How come nobody thought of this before, it's freaking genius!

Can't say that except for the weak story (some ingame set pieces/parts of the scenery kinda make up for that though) I have any real criticism with this game so far, thanks to master mode it's challenging enough now and there's always stuff to do and reasons to go on exploring.
Now on to Korok Forest to find Hestu again, I need more weapon slots asap. And then on to my first divine beast, probably the fish head people one (fish head people are stupid creature design imo, but whatever).
 
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circ

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so, the Switch has two games worth playing. And even that's debatable. What happened Nintendo? Did you lose the will to produce gud consoles when your friendly competition with SEGA ended?
 

Hobo Elf

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so, the Switch has two games worth playing. And even that's debatable. What happened Nintendo? Did you lose the will to produce gud consoles when your friendly competition with SEGA ended?

As far as console releases go, the Switch has the best lineup for launch titles that I can think of that a console has had in a long time. I may not be a fan of BotW or Xenoblade 2, but those and Mario Odyssey are a pretty strong way send off a new console. Compare with the PS4 which was released in 2013 and the first game worth owning for it (Bloodborne) came out in 2015, and the PS4 is only just now starting to pick up the pace.

And isn't the XCOM Mario supposed to be good?
 

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