The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Wii U / Switch

[killthenet]

3 hours ago, Ronnie said:

That article could be written for every single succesful video game. Every critically acclaimed game can be torn apart if you look closely enough. Again it hunts down negatives, ignoring what the game has done to breath life into an over-saturated genre.

It has a progression system, it's just integrated into the gameplay more and doesn't rely on the tired arbitrary levelling up mechanic present in most other games. As Peer on NVC put it a while back the whole game is a quest for confidence, you're roaming the world making yourself stronger in an effort to take Ganon on.

I wrote my post quickly and didn't really word it properly. It obviously has that more natural progression of getting stronger and I really like that you don't feel like you're putting off fighting Ganon to do more banal things, everything you do obviously builds confidence and gives you a better shot at beating him. What I meant was that the lack of new items as you progress through the game is one thing that disappointed me about the game and leaves it feeling less like other Zelda's, but it's a necessary omission because the entire concept for BOTW was that you're given all the tools you need to complete the game in the opening 4 shrines and then let loose to tackle the game in anyway you want. It undoubtedly made for an incredibly fun game with endless possibilities for mischief in Hyrule but I would be lying if I said I didn't miss the more typical tropes of a Zelda game, which is why I think i'll always prefer Majora's Mask and Wind Waker even if I've played BOTW for more than double the hours that I've put into those games. 

And that article is so badly written, how is it that he gets paid to write about games when his work seems of lower quality than an unhinged forum rant? Though I will say the final boss was definitely a disappointment after the masterful build up of trekking through the ruins of Hyrule Castle.

[Hero-of-Time]

1 minute ago, killthenet said:

And that article is so badly written, how is it that he gets paid to write about games when his work seems of lower quality than an unhinged forum rant? Though I will say the final boss was definitely a disappointment after the masterful build up of trekking through the ruins of Hyrule Castle.

It's clearly very easy to break into the industry these days. You just have to look at some of the folks IGN seem to hire.

[Ronnie]

In terms of level design it was a pretty ballsy move for them to give us all the tools we needed and set free on the world. Being able to solve any puzzle from the get go is pretty impressive. Yes I love the item progression from previous games too but with 19 games that do it that way, I'm happy to have one that tries things a little differently (two if you count A Link Between Worlds).

It's tough, if not impossible to provide a good story/inventory progression yet at the same time have an open ended adventure where you can do anything at any time.

Edited August 8, 2017 by Ronnie

[Glen-i]

6 hours ago, Ronnie said:

That article could be written for every single succesful video game. Every critically acclaimed game can be torn apart if you look closely enough. Again it hunts down negatives, ignoring what the game has done to breath life into an over-saturated genre.

I wonder, have you given my synopsis on the gaming diary thread a read? I spent a lot of time on it and think you should give it a look.

[Kav]

 

[Ronnie]

Very strange!

[drahkon]

 

With a little polish, this would be exactly like how I wanted the game to look like...

[Ronnie]

Much like Wind Waker and Skyward Sword (and unlike Twilight Princess) I think the cel shaded art style they went with will age far better than the plastic look from this weird bug.

[bob]

Looks like Lego: Legend of Zelda.

[Sméagol]

.. Except without all the Lego?

[Glen-i]

Shesez, the guy who does awesome series Boundary Break, has started a new series called "Sequence Beak".

As the name suggests, it explores interesting things that can happen when you use modding to skip certain things in games. Stuff like this always interests me, so it's right up my alley.

He started with Breath of the Wild. Because everyone won't shut up about it. I particularly like the Master Sword Shenanigans. Also, obvious spoilers ahead.

 

[EEVILMURRAY]

My cousin came round to try out the Switch and frustratingly watching her run around in circles and not having the camera behind her I managed to steer her towards a shrine I had not yet discovered, which was right next to - also undiscovered by me - Lurelin Village. I am a little surprised that I missed a town on my travels, but I mainly feel sorry for its residents for having zero impact on my ability to complete the game.

[nekunando]

I hope the date for the DLC is revealed soon! I feel ready to jump back into Breath of the Wild but want to wait until the DLC arrives to indulge

It may not be my favourite Zelda game but it was still a great adventure and there's still so much to go back and explore. I still have to find about half of the shrines!

[Ronnie]

Lurelin Village was lovely, and quite a surprising find

[dwarf]

I won't deny that you guys have aired some legitimate grievances with the game, but you still sound like spoilt children to me! That ranting article being a clear example of someone who's thrown his toys out of the pram - sure some of the criticisms were valid, but spare me the reactionary bullshit. 

When a game achieves critical acclaim there's always a push-back from nitpickers who start to inflate every drawback they can find. As if by tallying all the niggles you can render the genuinely brilliant features of the game worthless or trivial. It'd be easy for me to write a few pages of criticism about Breath of the Wild, but that would be to miss the point. A half-wit can point to a lack of enemy variety, or highlight the underwhelming side quest rewards. The story is half-baked and more time should've been taken to humanise/contextualise Ganon. But if that's your overriding impression of this game I do question your ability to appreciate the things that matter, or your ability to recognise the abyssal level of complexity involved in making a game of this magnitude. 

Get some perspective guys - this is the most revolutionary Zelda game at least since as far back as Ocarina of Time, and the way it invests players with agency in an open world setting is frankly miraculous. Quibbling something as small as the slip mechanic when climbing in the rain shows a lack of awareness of the bigger picture. To be able to overhaul so many systems in one go with so much success is unbelievably difficult. And the nature of these design choices, like weapon-breaking, is that they are give and take. In chess, almost every attacking move comes with a defensive compromise; in game design, almost every bold new mechanic raises a potential flaw. There are dozens of new interlocking mechanics in Breath of the Wild, and yet they all come together holistically. Some of the mechanics will likely prove to be iterative, as is always the way in games that break the mould, but overall they pay off. 

The criticisms I've read are as much a reflection of tired player attitudes as they are flaws in the game. Weapon-breaking wasn't perfect, true, but I nevertheless appreciated being forced to rotate between weapons, when in other RPGs like Dark Souls I'd fall back on my favourite weapon for half the playtime. You're overly entitled to your own comfort zone if you feel ripped off by this system. It's one game. Why not put your hardened concept of weapon ownership aside and just run with it? On a more practical level, if you feel like you've got everything you wanted from the open world experience when playing the game, choose that time to finish up the bosses and move onto the next thing instead of playing it to the point of boredom. I'm delighted Nintendo refused to listen to the fans in this thread. This game has single-handedly made them relevant to me again. From the testimony of the developers it's obvious that they were desperate to leave the shackles of formula behind them, and the game shines because of it.

For those who say Breath of the Wild lacked that ineffable Zelda magic - dude, are you for real? Breath of the Wild inspired the same wonderment I felt when exploring Hyrule in Ocarina of Time. It's fair to say the quality/structure of the story was a letdown, but the writing was occasionally imbued with classic Zelda charm (see: Purah, the diddy age-reversing scientist girl). Let's not kid ourselves as to the quality of past Zelda stories too - the series has been crying out for help from Studio Ghibli for a long time.

Tl:dr - this game is lit, and fully deserves the praise it received. Even if it wasn't your ideal, traditional Zelda game (yawn), you have to admit it achieved some remarkable things.

Edited October 10, 2017 by dwarf

[Glen-i]

Nope, not going to get into that again. I've already given my thoughts in the Gaming Diary thread and I thought I was very fair.

[Ronnie]

Brilliant post @dwarf

Edited October 12, 2017 by Ronnie

[dwarf]

35 minutes ago, Glen-i said:

Nope, not going to get into that again. I've already given my thoughts in the Gaming Diary thread and I thought I was very fair.

You could at least link us to the post m8.

[Glen-i]

3 minutes ago, dwarf said:

You could at least link us to the post m8.

Yeah, OK. Fair enough.

Fair warning though, this is before the forum change, so the formatting is a bit messy. It's also before Photobucket decided to be stupid, so a lot of the images no longer work.

[dwarf]

The gripes you had were things I could kind of forgive given the sheer amount of stuff Nintendo added and reinvented. If you isolate certain elements of the game and examine them closely, I concede they can be a little half-baked. For example, one-on-one combat when taken on its own is a little broken, what with the dodgy flurry system and the next-to-useless parry. But if you step back and view the combat within the context of the game as a whole, it's pretty impressive. The rune abilities serve multiple functions in combat, allowing you to attack, defend, or outmaneuver opponents, especially when used inventively in conjunction with each other. The environment also plays a massive part in combat - it affects the way you approach battles to begin with (get a vantage point to fly in from? sneak along the ground?), the weapons you use, and the physics of the objects in the vicinity add a tactical layer. It's fucking remarkable, really. Two thirds of the way through the game the combat did get a little stale, but for me there was enough gameplay variety elsewhere, and enough promise in exploration, that I didn't get hung up on it.

I think the differences in opinion come down to values in some sense, in a way that's difficult to explain. On your side, the blemishes add up and tarnish the overall experience. On my side, the blemishes become insignificant in light of the game's philosophy (without wanting to sound wanky about it) - the mystery of it, the feeling of freedom it grants you, and all those things that can't be quantified. None of these abstract concepts can be traced back to one mechanic. Rather, all the mechanics contribute to a greater, uncompromising vision. We forget sometimes to really talk about how games make us feel when we play them, instead choosing to focus on game mechanics and features in the same way publishers do on their box arts. I can't give enough weight to the sense of surprise I felt when discovering some of the physics-based tricks in Breath of the Wild. And it was a sustained surprise too, bordering on bewilderment, that all these things could exist in the same game. Everything in the world has a consistent logic underpinning it. So while you might say that recipes and meal-cooking kind of make a mockery out of the health system, I just loved the fact that you could forage for ingredients, intuitively combine them, drop them, freeze them, feed them to a dog, and so on. It's a tiny aspect of the game really, but it works toward those grander ideals of mystery and freedom. Playing the game with a more detached, critical eye, the game is enjoyable as a piece of engineering. That Nintendo had the balls to follow through on all their ideas to the extent that they did is terrific.

Again, something like the repetitive nature of the combat trials doesn't really irk me. They were tedious, granted, but the point for me is that they don't fundamentally bring into question the core systems/philosophy of the game. The systems and approach were right; it just shows Nintendo lacked the time to add enough content to fully explore those systems. On the face of it, Portal has a very simple mechanic, but there are hundreds of ways it can be used depending on the layout of each chamber/level. Breath of the Wild is the same, it just didn't quite have enough fresh levels. Still, I thought a sizable portion of the puzzles were pretty neat.   

I flatly disagree about the world being too empty. Nintendo dispersed the loot and hidden locations pretty damn well perfectly.

I'm not expecting to win you round. You can't help how you feel, after all.

But what you feel is wrong.

 

 

Edited October 12, 2017 by dwarf

[Glen-i]

The physics are the best thing about this game. I said this somewhere before, but BOTW shows a promising baseline for a future game. Just touch up the combat quirks, make the world not so massive, have some actual good dungeons and there's potential.

I've fully completed every Zelda to date, but couldn't be bothered after around 70 shrines, called it a day and went to beat down Ganon. If I have to go finish the game because I'm bored, then I can't really say the game is as good as everyone else thinks it is. It's the ultimate gaming sin in my opinion.

[ArtMediocre]

I thought this was a funny moment

[Kav]

 

[Kav]

 

[Kav]

I can’t wait to catch some awesome stuff on video! 😁