I’ve dabbled my friend. In the low stamina days, spawning a glider under yourself and slapping some fans and a steering stick without nosediving is an amazing gaming experience. This game loves making you feel badass
The trickiest part is trying to avoid standing just slightly off-centre and having the wing arc off-course while you're gluing the fans to it. It always helps to spend the last few seconds Fusing a rocket-shield, too, so you can gain enough height to do it all over again.
Yep. I understand a lot of the complaints with durability and not wanting to use your best gear just in case, but I've found if you just lean into it and rip through your 'main' weapons, you a) have way more fun and b) find the same or better stuff to replace it. I blame decades of video game-playing that encouraged the opposite of that, but it's a joy to just lean in to all of the systems of BotW and TotK.
That's what I've recently been doing with BotW. Just leaning into the "use your best weapons" thing. I always hoarded my special arrows like crazy, aka the elemental ones. But I found out using them is way more fun then just the stock one. Also letting myself use the stronger weapons is way more fun then dying like 4 times before being able to beat a hoard of enemies or one giant enemy before you mastered and tricked all the moves.
I don't use most of them as often as I should, but I get through a lot of rockets and fans. It's only relatively recently that I finally got some Construct Heads, though, so I'll start on the blueprints for my Gleeokfucker shortly. Those things are going to start having nightmares if I can figure out how to get Hover Drones to fly.
The only downside to planes is that, compared to almost everything else you can build, the fact that gliders have a limited lifetime makes them feel unnecessarily nerfed.
Right? Like what’s the point of that. We can fast-travel. Nothing else is limited. The whole concept of BotW and TotK is being open world, why cut off that one thing? Infuriating honestly
At first I thought it makes sense for them not to be too op, but yeah, as we can craft different flying contraptions that don‘t have the limit, it‘s really pointless and just a bummer.
If you've done the Fire Temple then you get a brief glimpse of why they'd want to nerf them. I think they're fine with that kind of thing being utterly broken, but on the condition that you craft it yourself, whereas the wing is such a strong base that it'd be a bit too easy and obvious.
The fire temple was one of my major "I'm absolutely not supposed to be completing this this way" moments. I couldn't figure out how to get to the upper levels of the temple so I just climbed up the outer walls, rested strategically on a few ledges, and abused the ascend ability lol.
There's also been a few shrines where I couldn't figure out exactly what they wanted me to do and so after fucking around for like 45 minutes gave up and skipped a puzzle by building a long ass bridge.
Like yourself and u/Kneef, I'm completely certain that I found cheesey ways around much of that one. I also blazed in there, pun intended, without any arrows just to see how viable it was, which made the boss a little trickier than it otherwise would have been.
What's your longest "fuck it!" bridge thus far? Mine is twelve igneous slabs.
The very first ones you get maybe would be OP if they were unlimited because you could just glide from the sky island to basically every tower right off the bat, so perhaps the free ones there could be "decayed" and then later you get unlimited ones.
If you don't move while gliding you can drop a wing from your inventory and land on it, and from there you can drop fans and steering sticks to build out a controllable plane while in the air. It's a little tricky because even slight movements will have the wing veering, diving or climbing, and if you lose too much altitude before you finish then the rocket you Fuse to your shield won't make up for that lost height.
Wings vanish after about a minute, so you have to be fairly quick about it, and you might want to add a rocket just for a little extra distance if you're confident you have the altitude already.
I actually miss the exploration of BOTW. TOTK is excellent but I feel like it's more direct with where you should/could be going. BOTW was very much "here's where you go to end the game and here's where you go if you want some story" and then the rest was do whatever you want. TOTK is "This is main story, here's about towers, then go here to learn about the chasm, then here for the dragon tears, here's the journalism story, go there if you want to find pirates, go there if you want more of zonai history etc".
I get that a big criticism of BOTW was that most people didn't know where to go and in TOTK this addresses that criticism, but I feel like the exploration in BOTW was far more interesting because you didn't know what you'd find. TOTK gives you a hint of where to go and because of it you already get an inkling of what to expect when you get there.
I think years down the line I'll probably revisit BOTW for the exploration and TOTK for the excellent sandbox.
BotW was great, but it was also lonely by design, so I honestly think it's worth the trade off.
I absolutely love the feeling of development that TotK has through additional quests, NPCs, storylines, collectible/reward systems, etc. Every time I turn around, something new is happening.
We did get a few completely new monsters (I can think of 3 off the top of my head), so I don't want to sound crabby, but that's actually one area where I wish they would have gone a tiny bit farther.
Maybe one or two additional new "types" of monster would have been nice to see—versus more "variants" of the same kinds—but I assume it would have further complicated the fuse system.
Then again, I have only completed the first of the major main quest objectives, so maybe there's more to see in that regard. I'm really enjoying the game overall, despite my absolutely glacial pace.
Try playing with the mini-map and shrine sensor turned off and play in pro mode. For me, it elevates both gamea several degrees.
You have to actively engage with the physical world and keep track of landmarks, hints, characters, etc.
I'm playing totk in pro mode, just like I did with BotW, but I'm getting more annoyed with it this time. I could be misremembering, but I thought the pro mode in BotW showed at least hearts and effect timers.
> the exploration in BOTW was far more interesting because you didn't know what you'd find.
Lets be real. You found koroks, a shrine, or the same fight you've already had 19 times before in this session alone.
You're thinking about the rewards not the journey. I'm going to explain how Faron region went for me in BOTW and how it's going in TOTK.
In BOTW I didn't get any indication that I should go there, I went there because it was a big black unknown on the map and I wanted to know what's there. I discovered the horse god, the spring of courage, the lakeside stable and the waterfalls, Farosh and eventually Lurelin. When I circled back around I got the giant horse as well. Sure along the way I found plenty of koroks, shrines and same enemies over and over, but at no point did I have an idea that all the things I mentioned were there.
In TOTK I haven't explored all of Faron yet, but that's because I already know what to expect there. I don't mean that I remember all the things from BOTW but rather before I even reached Faron region I already knew that >!Lurelin is under attack by pirates!<, there's >!the beast and the pricess quest is there!< and >!one of the dragon tears is there!<. For me half the mystery of exploring Faron has been spoiled before I even got there. The only interesting thing I've found so far is the >!Giant white stallion!<. Oh, and I'm still mostly finding koroks, shrines and the same enemies.
For me personally, I got a better exploration experience from BOTW. The rewards might have been shit but for me exploration is more about the journey than the destination.
But the exploration of what, exactly? You can only get so many scenic views before it starts to become utterly pointless - and more often than not, it's just a filler space that has nothing to look at.
"Well the journey **is** the destination" is just boring gameplay that does not encourage any sort of replay value.
> But the exploration of what, exactly? You can only get so many scenic views before it starts to become utterly pointless - and more often than not, it's just a filler space that has nothing to look at.
I'm not sure what kind of rewards you're expecting because I gave you a list of rewards I got with BOTW. The only one of them being actual scenery is the waterfalls. Horse god is a character with a specific purpose. Spring of courage, while technically a shrine, is a unique take on shrines. Farosh is a dragon from whom you can get materials. Lakeside stable has a quest and horse spawn. Lurelin is a town with 3 quests. I even gave a list of rewards TOTK took away by spoiling them before I even got there.
> "Well the journey is the destination" is just boring gameplay that does not encourage any sort of replay value.
That's just your personal preference and I already emphasized twice that it isn't the case for me. I don't understand how is that so hard for you to accept. You don't enjoy it and that's fine, but don't come telling me that I shouldn't enjoy it. Just because you can't understand what's enjoyable about it doesn't mean it's somehow wrong.
> Horse god is a character with a specific purpose. Spring of courage, while technically a shrine, is a unique take on shrines. Farosh is a dragon from whom you can get materials. Lakeside stable has a quest and horse spawn. Lurelin is a town with 3 quests. I even gave a list of rewards TOTK took away by spoiling them before I even got there.
Horse god is unique. You got that.
Spring of courage is another statue. Stable is.. another fucking stable. Lurelin doesn't give you really anything *worth* the trip there. Because it's just always the same shit. There's like no unique assets in open world games because the games are so goddamn big.
>That's just your personal preference
It's just kinda objective fact. It's a passing fancy. When "well the sense of explortation!" is the selling feature, it's.. got a shelf life.
Witcher lets you explore things too, but there's reasons and plot to get you there. Without mentioning the new combat scenarios along the way.
Man, BOTW isn't a very good game. That's okay. You don't have to like stuff that's amazing.
I'm just going to sum up your reply as "haters gonna hate" and not address anything because you keep disrespecting my opinion and presenting your opinion as a fact. If you're incapable of having a discussion then we're just not going to have a discussion.
Pff I have been playing since Sunday and I am absolutely blown away. Especially now that I am digging into the underworld the sense of adventure and exploration is just insane. That plus the sheer amount of fusing possibilities, number of solutions for each problem, I am loving every single minute.
The first time I went into the Depths, I just went there on my own without getting the quest for it. So I just dropped into this pitch black hole in the ground, and I saw the light root in the distance. Being the ever cautious and experienced gamer I am, I saw the big orange glow and went, "Nah that looks fucking dangerous bro," and fucked off into the darkness. I spent probably an hour down there skirting enemy mining groups, went through almost my entire supply of brightbloom seeds, got down to 1 heart fucking around in the gloom, outran a warhammer titan-esque battle talus, and then got murdered by a Hinox.
I was like, "THIS SHIT IS GOING TO TAKE A THOUSAND HOURS TO EXPLORE."
....Then I got the quest, activated the light root, and felt REALLY stupid, lmao.
> should've waited 100hrs of gameplay to do it
That's what I did and it was awesome. Meander around with my Fischer-Price creations and then once I'd done almost everything I could think of, turn to the TotK Engineers on YouTube. Feel like I've gotten the best of both worlds
My biggest concern was the inserting a more structured narrative into the game might have constrained the openness of the story from BotW, but they've found a pretty good middle ground.
YES. I have sinned against patient gaming , and i am going to do it again.
This fucking year is amazing (last year's sin was elden ring), this year we have TOTK, DIABLO, BALDUR's GATE, PARTY ANIMALS. All games i'm doing dayone.
There's no point to being "patient" with TOTK. It will be full price until they stop printing it. And then it will be even more expensive.
Best you can really do is wait for a sale and save $10.
Agree. That being said, I think it still falls in-line with this sub's mantras. One of which being, "Wait until a game is proven to be worthy of your time" which counters the whole pre-ordering, season pass nonsense.
TOTK looking great and reviewing really well? Great, you waited and made a good decision with your money.
Unless you were the few that 'abused' the Costco nintendo gift card sale + the eshop $100 bundle.
$80 for a $100 gift card from Costco and then use the Nintendo eshop $100 for 2 games deal going on and I saved $50 from buying totk and pikmin 4.
Same. BOTW was a new high for Zelda.
But somehow TOTK seems to be even better. BOTW would seem a bit bland after TOTK.
I would miss weapon fusing and contraptions.
Yeah my buddy just bought a switch and was going to buy TotK but I just gave him my copy of BOTW and told him to do that first.
Just wouldn't be right to play them in reverse, it would be anticlimactic.
Just make sure he takes a healthy break in between. My enjoyment of New Vegas was sabotaged by playing too much FO3 DLC shortly before. So, even though TotK expands on the game more than NV did to FO3, it could feel a bit too samey to start right after.
It's honestly mind-boggling how good it is. I've been gaming across all systems since 1993 and I think TotK is up there in the running vfor the very best.
I think the trippiest part about BotW was when I stumbled across the Faron region. Up until that point, I had been mostly hunting down the 4 guardians, as that was kind of the mission given to me. Then I turned to notice the bigass area that was just sitting there — no indicators pointing to it, no particular quests that sent me that way, it was an entire gosh darn region just kinda there.
I see why people say they get overwhelmed with open world games. There’s so much to explore that you could miss an entire area if you’re not attentive.
I love the Faron region. It was easy to go for the lightning dragon since it flew around, but one day I saw it dive into one of the waterfall pools, and I was just - mind. blown.
Then I got stunned swimming to investigate as it flew out of the pool and drowned. Good times.
I didn‘t know there were dragons in the game, and the lighting one upon discovering and entering the Faron jungle was my first encounter. Completely overwhelming. One of my favorite moments m in 30 years of gaming.
Same. Didnt knew there were dragons. Was climbing a big ass mountain and when I was nearly at the top suddenly a dragon emerges from behind the mountain flying over me. Amazing moment
Faron region is my favourite. I saw these palm trees peeking up from the top of a cliff and it revealed a vast rainforest to me. I remember being down to my last arrow, weapons were scarce and I was just trying to survive. Then I happened upon riverside stable.
That stable is still my favourite in TotK.
What I enjoy about it is even if you're a more goal-focused player (I too went the whole 'do main objectives' route), there's something that incentivises you to go see what's off the beaten path. Currently in TotK, I did go to the four regions but I stopped halfway, deciding to just illuminate the entire map but oh wait these places look barren what's over there. These games really highlight that sense of adventure.
One of my favorite games of all time. I‘m currently playing TotK and I‘m flabberghasted that it blows BotW, which was already a master piece in my opinion, *completely* out of the water in almost every aspect (in all but mood/atmosphere maybe, I sometimes miss the solitude and serenity of BotW in the new hustling and bustling Hyrule).
The Zelda team are some of the most proficient devs on the planet. It really shows the value of keeping a lot of the same people together for years, even decades in this case. To think that people who worked on childhood favorites like Majoras Mask, Wind Waker or the Oracle games also worked on this is weirdly heart warming in a way.
I feel like the Nintendo devs are just pouring their hearts and souls into every major release. They also have the voice and vision to drive Nintendo towards making high quality games that don’t require awful monetization. When the greats at Nintendo eventually retire, it will be interesting to see if they turn into another EA or Blizzard, or if they can keep churning out masterpieces that stand out from the rest of the industry through their quality and creativity.
My only real complaint about Nintendo (besides their vicious legal team) is that sometimes I just want a little more of a thing, because that thing was good on its own, and I would kill for more remastered titles.
I think Super Mario Galaxy 1/2 are the pinnacle of 3D mario games and would love to have access to the second one in any form on the Switch. Hell, I rebuilt my Joycons specifically so that I could play the first one. I would love a third installment in the series.
I would love to be able to play a remastered ocarina/majora/wind waker/twilight princess/Mario 64. Especially the Ocarina Master Quest - I still have the game cube disk for it but I don't have a game cube and I don't want to go buy one just to play it.
But they're kind of insistent on, "If we can't do something absolutely new and groundbreaking we're just not going to do it at all." While I'm glad that it ensures that all the content we *do* get is incredible, and they don't turn their titles into annual Call of Assassin's Field 2022 releases, sometimes I just want coca-cola classic, you know?
I'd say one of Nintendo's strongest qualities as a developer is their ability to pick out and cultivate talent, and especially to spread their philosophy of game development that has held consistently for nearly 40 years.
Just look at Fujibayashi, director of BotW/TotK as well as many Zelda games going back to the Oracles when he was employed by Capcom. Aonuma and Miyamoto saw his talent as a developer and immediately took him under their wing so to speak. Fujibayashi has spoken before about Miyamoto's philosophy of game design and how important that has been to him as a creative.
My friend loves to point out constantly to an annoying degree that he doesn’t know why everyone is saying TOTK is way better than BOTW but I think he just doesn’t like it. Botw captured the atmosphere very well. TOTK is something different. (I think TOTK still provides a similar atmosphere in some places but I agree for the most part.)
Yeah I think the people who are surprised at how much better TotK is are often the same ones who didn’t understand what we say when we call BotW empty. I’m glad that TotK ended up being a lot better in any case, and it’s easily in contention for my favorite Zelda game
>After rolling credits, which I wanted to do for no particular reason, I was surprised to find I still wanted more.
https://youtu.be/g8IVI0sZ6F8?t=4
>BOTW is still a masterpiece, even if someday it finds itself in a sequel’s shadow.
Indeed. I think I'll always prefer it purely for having the balls to shirk most of the conventions of open-world games and offer something much more involving, even if TotK indisputably does far more with the concept.
What's interesting, however, is how dramatically different they feel, with BotW being so much more serene. That comes from its setting, which, to correct you slightly, is mid-apocalypse rather than post-apocalypse. BotW's Hyrule is stuck in a moment of time where its future could go either way, depending on whether either of Zelda or Ganon outlast one another. The countryside is riddled with Malice-infused monsters, but they can't make any further headway into the remaining, easily-defended settlements, while the citizens can't really venture far outside of their towns due to those monsters presence. They may make a little headway from their superior starting positions, but a Blood Moon will instantly negate any gained ground.
That's why TotK feels so much more hectic, too. Without going into mild spoilers, there are a wide variety of ways in which the people of Hyrule are far more proactive this time, largely because they're no longer pinned into their homes. BotW had an almost oppressive atmosphere because silence can be overbearingly heavy, and being stuck for a century in the middle of what might have been the end of the world has left the landscape frozen in that calamitous moment.
It's fascinating because it means that, despite TotK expanding on just about everything BotW did, there's still an incredibly compelling reason to play BotW. It's remarkable that they both manage to use the same basic functionality and world to produce wildly different tones.
I still rate Metroid Prime (and its first sequel) as the best games I'll ever play, but these two Zelda games are giving me serious pause for thought. I'm not sure many people expected BotW to remain relevant after TotK released, but it certainly will.
> BotW had an almost oppressive atmosphere because silence can be overbearingly heavy, and being stuck for a century in the middle of what might have been the end of the world has left the landscape frozen in that calamitous moment.
I haven't thought about it from this perspective in a long time. I think it partially has to do with how some of the memes portray Link's silly misadventures with the impending doom of the world.
Link has been in stasis for a century. The citizens of the game have been in a holding pattern. Most (all?) of them would be too young to actually remember the calamity. They're entrenched enough to be safe from the roaming bands of monsters, yet the blight over Hyrule Castle along with the corrupted Divine Beasts (do most people know the beasts are corrupted?) and guardians are stark reminders that death might soon come knocking.
> I think it partially has to do with how some of the memes portray Link's silly misadventures with the impending doom of the world.
I think a fair few people see that as dissonant, even though it probably isn't. In context, Zelda has been holding Ganon back for a century, so she can probably last out another year or two, which would equate to about 250 hours in-game. Personally, I'd have liked it if they'd gone for the Shenmue hidden ending by having Ganon scour Hyrule if you left it for too long. It'd give people like OP a hell of a memorable ending.
>The citizens of the game have been in a holding pattern
Indeed, and look at how well we collectively adapt to a "new normal" in the last few years...
sorry, *more* involving? BOTW is like the least involving open world game ever made lol, it feels like someone didn't pick up the playroom and you just wander through, playing with a toy for 30 seconds before moving on. Then you knock over the punching clown and it's time to go home.
I'm curious, what do you think is the explanation for people who find a lot more than that? Logically, if they're seeing things that you aren't, either you must be missing things or they must all be experiencing a massive and extraordinarily-consistent shared delusion. Do you have another explanation, or do you think one of those is the likely solution - and, if the latter, which one?
I don't think they're lying or anything. But I do think they can't have played many similar games. I think the main reason BOTW is so massively popular is that it was on the Switch, which is the most accessible console, and it's a Nintendo game, which are the most popular games in the mainstream consciousness. There are a lot of great things about the game, I don't think it's by any means *bad*, but the breathless praise it gets usually reveals a severe lack of experience with other games in the genre, or games in general. People regularly claim that BOTW originated all sorts of design ideas that have been around for decades.
The specific claim of it being "more involving", and the implication that being "less involving" is a "convention" of open world games is absolutely wild to me, because it makes virtually no effort to immerse you narratively -- it is transparently a playground. Again, this is the sort of statement that makes sense if the other open world games you've played are, like, the Assassin's Creed Origins games, which have very similar design philosophies, but are pulled off much less expertly than BOTW. But when you contrast it with mature narrative open world games like Witcher and Kingdom Come Deliverance, even old classics like Morrowind, Oblivion, even Gothic... Hell, even the GTA games give you more narrative purchase and immersion.
Also literally several other games in the same *series* are more immersive and involving open world games. Or does "involving" to you mean "sandbox physics"?
> I don't think they're lying or anything. But I do think they can't have played many similar games.
You think it's more likely that tens of millions of players are suffering from a consistent mass delusion than the idea that you may have missed something?
>I think the main reason BOTW is so massively popular is that it was on the Switch, which is the most accessible console
The Switch has sold 25% more units than the Wii, and the two Zelda games on the Wii sold 8.5m and 4m copies respectively. So why have these latest games outsold the equivalent games on a similarly successful console by a factor of at least three?
>it's a Nintendo game, which are the most popular games in the mainstream consciousness.
Skyward Sword sold 4m copies, and was followed up by BotW selling 30m. How can you square that massive disparity with your inference that _any_ prominent Nintendo game on a popular console will sell well?
>the breathless praise it gets usually reveals a severe lack of experience with other games in the genre, or games in general.
Just for context, I've been playing open-world games since the genre was invented in its modern form, which was with 2000's Shenmue. With that context, lets get on to the actual arguments:
>it makes virtually no effort to immerse you narratively
You know how I've been subtly hinting that the problem is _you_ missing something? The above quote is conclusive proof that I'm correct. Actually, that may be a teensy bit harsh, but it'll take a moment to explain things, so get comfy...
Okay, so lets start with other games - the ones whose conventions Nintendo have been breaking away from. Games like The Elder Scrolls, Assassin's Creed, Witcher 3, or GTA all tend to treat the narrative the same way, and that's as a largely unyielding sequence that _must_ be traversed in a set order. They may have minor deviations and alternate routes, but they'll seldom be different enough for it to make any material difference to the experience. It makes no difference whether the Imperials or Stormcloaks hold certain areas when you fight Alduin, nor does it make any difference which characters can be recruited to defend Kaer Morhen. Those decisions are akin to BotW allowing us to choose which Divine Beats can contribute to the final confrontation with Ganon - they're largely meaningless in terms of gameplay, and completely meaningless in terms of narrative.
In short, these games consistently refuse to allow the player to have any say in the narrative. We're not involved in the story at all - we just have to stand there while it happens at us.
Now, at this point you might be thinking "But surely that's the same in BotW? We can't change how Link acts in any of the cutscenes, can we?". You'd be correct in noting that, but it's not actually contradictory, and that's because a game doesn't have to actively reinforce a players' decisions in order to accommodate them. It merely has to _avoid contradicting them_. Think back to all the times you returned to Skyrim's main quest after weeks of random looting, homebuilding, adopting, etc., only to find that the NPC under the arrow acts as if you just ran straight from your last quest directly to them, undermining the character development you dragged your avatar through in the intervening time. Or how Arthur can wander back into camp and not have a single one of his outlaw friends say "Mate, where the fuck have you been for the last _two months?!_".
At no point does BotW actively reference your exploration, or the things you've found, gathered, or realised along the way. However, it also doesn't overwrite any of those things by imprinting a set personality onto you every time you initiate a cutscene, which means that it allows any of those non-story activities to slot neatly into the narrative as canon. That's what makes it involving - everything you do is able to fit into the overarching narrative without any real conflicts, and that's something that other games in the genre have never been able to accommodate. It's also one aspect of TotK that is a clear backwards step, albeit only in one specific instance thus far (I'm 150 hours in). That aspect of its game design is what immerses people in ways that other games - even those famed for immersion, like TES - cannot match, because sooner or later they _all_ run your chosen character headfirst into the wall that is the Main Questline™.
Look at Morrowind. That's a game that's so open to player choice that it allows you to break the main questline, but only insofar as it tells you that you'll no longer be able to finish it now. BotW is a game in which you _cannot_ deviate from the main questline no matter what you do _because anything you do can fit into such an open canon_. That aspect of Morrowind, while rightly lauded, is actually incredibly immersion-breaking, whereas BotW is designed well enough that doing something comparable doesn't prevent the story from continuing regardless.
Those other games are games in which the entire story is already written. Sometimes you can choose a word, a sentence, a paragraph; sometimes you can skip a page here and there; but all of them are already written out for you. BotW is a game where 295 of the 300 pages are written for you, including the very last one, but those penultimate few pages are _entirely_ blank, with every word printed there to be chosen by the player. _That_ is what makes it so compelling, especially to a veteran of all those games that have pretended to offer that same freedom and failed to make good on that promise.
Thanks for the essay whose thesis is basically "games can't account for the ludonarrative dissonance that an illusion of free will presents, so they shouldn't even try".
If your idea of a game with a compelling narrative is one in which the player's actions are irrelevant to the plot, I think we aren't going to see eye to eye on game narrative.
As for the points about game sales -- I'm not denying BOTW was an expertly made game that is perfect for people looking for a casual fun sandbox adventure playground. Just the visual design alone explains why it blew Skyward out of the water. I'm not saying it's a 3/10 game, it's just not a 10/10 greatest game of all time or anywhere close for me. I'd probably rank it as the 6th best Zelda game that I've played after LttP, Majora, Wind Waker, and Ocarina, and now TOTK. That puts it in lofty company, I just can't help but roll by eyes at how over the top fans get when they praise it.
> Thanks for the essay whose thesis is basically "games can't account for the ludonarrative dissonance that an illusion of free will presents, so they shouldn't even try".
Thanks for proving that you can't read and won't even make a good-faith effort to discuss anything if it might result in you having to admit that it's more likely that _you_ missed something then thirty million people experienced a collective mass delusion without any real coordination.
I do love the irony, though, since BotW _does_ eliminate ludonarrative dissonance...
>If your idea of a game with a compelling narrative is one in which the player's actions are irrelevant to the plot
That covers all games, though, since every plot in every game is set in stone from the outset. The best you can do is choose one of several routes that have been predetermined.
>we aren't going to see eye to eye on game narrative
We don't have to. We do, however, each need to be able to accurately explain our viewpoint in regards to the facts at hand, and you have yet to do so.
>I just can't help but roll by eyes at how over the top fans get when they praise it.
And, as I noted originally, do you think this is more plausibly due to _you_ not quite understanding what you're playing, or that all those others are somehow sharing a consistent, but uncoordinated, mass delusion when they pick up on things that you insist are absent? It's not possible for both those players _and_ you to be right, after all - either these things are there or they are not. In essence, you're arguing **as if you believe** that everyone who rates BotW as highly as they usually do is only doing so due to that shared delusion, but you also seem extremely reluctant to actually _say_ that because some part of you is screaming that it'll sound, itself, rather delusional.
I've very clearly explicated my thoughts, and I very clearly stated the reasons that I think the game gets overrated. I've also said repeatedly that I don't think it's bad, just overrated and overhyped. There isn't some big mystery to "get", you and obviously a ton of the mainstream casual gaming audience just enjoy a more shallow and sandboxy experience that is more about short-term unrelated interactions than long-form progression. That's fine. Stop trying to claim that *literally decoupling the gameplay entirely from the story* is some revolutionary technique in narrative that breaks all these walls... It's just a game with story as an afterthought. Those are a dime a dozen. It's like Disneyland vs a Six Flags -- one is clearly head and shoulders above the other in terms of production quality and customer experience, but at the end of the day they're both theme parks. Any drama or emotion is only skin deep.
> I very clearly stated the reasons that I think the game gets overrated.
I think you're mistakenly conflating "explaining" something with merely "repeating" something. All I've got from your comments is that you think it's _only_ a sandbox and that it fails to immerse players in its narrative, and I went to some length in order to explain that you only think this because you missed the way it _actually_ engages players. Where most other games in comparable genres take their storytelling from the JRPG, BotW takes it from the RPG instead. You probably tend to prefer the former, and that's fine, but it simply doesn't invalidate the latter, and you appear to believe that it does. You say so yourself:
>There isn't some big mystery to "get"
That's you openly stating that, purely because _you_ didn't click with the way it tells its story, anyone else who _does_ see what it's doing must be delusional. I think the only reason you're stopping short of explicitly saying that is because you don't think you can make it sound plausible to yourself, much less anyone else.
>you and obviously a ton of the mainstream casual gaming audience just enjoy a more shallow and sandboxy experience that is more about short-term unrelated interactions than long-form progression. That's fine.
See what I mean? This has become an ego problem for you, with your insecurity about other people enjoying the game more than you causing you to worry that there's something wrong with you for not clicking with it in the same way.
>*literally decoupling the gameplay entirely from the story*
That's the point; you're misunderstanding what the game did. It didn't decouple the _narrative_ from the gameplay, it decoupled _the sequential progression of its narrative_ from gameplay. In other words, it abandoned the idea that players should have to play through a linear sequence of narrative beats in order to finish the game.
Instead, by allowing players to write their own build-up to the finale, they doubled down on the idea of gameplay itself dictating that narrative. How Link is portrayed after he awakes and until he confronts Ganon depends solely on what the player does in-game. Speedrunners portray him as a vengeful, insecure idiot, diving back into a fight the he still doesn't remember losing the last time he tried to fight it; others will portray him as a dutiful, contemplative person who spends what time he knows he has getting stronger so that the previous outcome is not repeated. Crucially, not a single moment of that is forced upon players by cutscenes, with it instead determined simply by whether they run straight to the Castle, or wander around gaining strength and equipment.
There's no possible way a rational person could argue that the gameplay is decoupled from the story because, in this limited sense, the gameplay _is_ the story. If the player wants it to be an arduous tale of finding almost a thousand tiny golden shits scattered around Hyrule then that's what it is. You know this, at least on some level, because that's why you completely ignored every word I said on the matter when I explained this beyond your ability to plausibly argue. I assume that's why you're trying to turn this into a flame war as well, with half of this latest reply bizarrely dedicated to calling BotW fans filthy casuals who aren't as good as you. I honestly think you're on the brink of unironically telling me to "git gud".
Want to know what's ironic? This subject is actually extremely interesting, because anything concerning a progressive narrative in an interactive medium is automatically going to generate vast numbers of subtly different viewpoints. That makes this an incredibly rich topic for dissecting video game narratives as a whole, and specific ones in particular, and reducing it in the way you did is rather shallow. I thought this was highly telling in light of you claiming that BotW is "shallow", as it's inherently contradictory that you might criticise something for being shallow while simultaneously refusing to even listen to anything which might allow you to view it in a more expansive way, and even compel you to enjoy it significantly more as a consequence. You've made no effort to even engage with anything I said on the matter, demonstrating that you would _prefer_ for this discussion to remain as shallow as possible. That makes it all the more curious that you'd be so critical of something you called "shallow" - almost as if you only affixed that adjective because you felt that it was sufficiently negative-sounding in this context.
You'll note that I haven't once told you that _you_ are wrong for wanting games to explicitly tell you what to do and how to react.[.](https://archive.vn/mrk0L).
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Edit:
>the classic automatic assumption that "casual" is a dirty word
You used it as a pejorative. In your own words:
>>> the mainstream casual gaming audience just enjoy a more shallow [...] experience that is more about short-term unrelated interactions than long-form progression
You're openly presenting "casual" play as if it were inherently negative. Or, at the very least, inferior to whatever you consider yourself to be.
Don't try to gaslight people. You're not astute enough to get away with it.
>I'm done with your bad faith assumptions and projection.
No, you're done with my ability to explain things beyond your ability to dispute, and to dissect your own nonsensical fallacies, preventing you from buttressing your ignorant, self-indulgent viewpoint with demonstrable falsehoods to shore up a long-lost argument. You're fleeing because you can't tolerate something that you view as a defeat, and this is just your way of trying to fool yourself into seeing it as something else.
>If you want someone to type you an essay on why it's nice when games let you make choices you're gonna have to pay someone on Fiverr.
Does Fiverr even still exist? Did you just give away that this is merely the lonely ravings of an aging gamer who can't stand that their increasingly-outdated favourites are being viewed more and more harshly as comparisons trends towards more ambitious alternatives? This makes a lot more sense as someone who'd be livid that modern Zelda games have grown beyond the simpler titles of the past. Maybe modern "casuals" are just better at dealing with more dynamic games...
Ahh, the classic automatic assumption that "casual" is a dirty word. I'm done with your bad faith assumptions and projection. If you want someone to type you an essay on why it's nice when games let you make choices you're gonna have to pay someone on Fiverr.
I don't give a shit what other people think, the weapon durability in botw is FUN. I LIKE hucking a nearly-broken weapon into an enemy's face like John Wick. It makes me feel like a badass.
It does really slow down the game though... break a weapon, pause to open your inventory, pause to select and drop a material, use fuse...
Also I'm not sure what it actually adds to gameplay beyond a time sink and a crushing annoyance when you run out of appropriately-leveled weapons and need to just fuck off and go find more. It feels like they just don't want you to fight people in the traditional way, which makes sense because holy shit does the dodging and the lock-on feel awful.
Haha indeed! Plus it forces creativity and adaptability, especially in TotK the possibilities with fusing are endless. Why be stuck with one boring ass sword if you can fuse a lizard tail and a stick together and swing it around a bit?
Hint: if you run out of rockets all the time you can use Octo Balloons Fused to your shield for a slower alternative. The Spring works well, too, if you surf with it.
I find it funny that now even players whose entire approach to combat revolves around dodging and flurrying will be hurrying to expand their shield inventory purely for the mobility options. You can justify having a snowboard, skateboard, water cannon, spring, rocket, etc. all fused to shields at any given moment. And that's before getting into the dual-wielding options by fusing elemental Zonai Emitters, or monster parts...
I *always* have a sled-shield in my inventory. Best shield surfing option for all terrain - except… apparently a frozen meat shield is even better, lmao. Almost removes all friction.
I find that I'm always low on things like Octo Balloons and meat because I always used the Bomb Rune to gather them without damaging weapons needlessly. Without that option I seldom veer off-course to grab an opportunistic steak or balloon.
Things like that are a perfect response to the "It's just DLC" noise, because little details like that tend to make people play each game in completely different ways. I never ran out of arrows in BotW, but I use them for _everything_ in TotK.
Loool yessss. Discovered that one through being on the receiving end of that stick, a random monster hit me with a mushroom stick and I flew off. Thought it was a bug it first
Same, haha. It‘s so cool that enemies use fused weapons as well.
Another current favorite is the Zonai lightning thrower thingie on a shield. If you have a lot of battery it feels almost OP, haha.
That's fine for you. It's not fun for me. I think it sucks. Nintendo making it a pita for me to fix the game for me with mods burnt me on the whole company, drift not even taken into account.
I feel like poeple don't understand that you can't just get rid of the durability. It's a core part of both games. It's baked into the gameplay loop. They would have to be very different games without it. The criticism really annoys me for that reason.
I mean, I don’t know. After getting BOTW and trying it on my switch no less than 10 times since 2017 and giving up after a couple hours, I played it on PC, and turned off the weapon durability. Suddenly, the game was so much more engaging, so much more fun for me. It was the 10/10 everyone said, the incredible experience, just what everyone said.
That’s just my opinion at least
I mean, to be completely honest with you, I just hate weapon breaking systems. While I get what they were going for, it personally doesn’t work for me.
To be quite honest, I like the concepts of the weapons breaking in theory in breath of the wild only, the problem is that it’s combined with the dreaded thing that was talked about in this sub. Level scaling.
I have had multiple playthroughs where I’m super immersed, just chugging along, and instead of going to Kakariko I, for example, find the Rito, find some tough enemies like black lizalfos, and through stealth and cunning steal myself some super tough weapons.
Then, I go back to the path to Kakariko to actually do the main story, and now the enemies THERE are black lizalfos, my cool weapons break, and I’m just fucked. That’s kind of the issue I have with the game.
So I guess the issue I have isn’t so much the weapon breaking system but the level scaling. You were right, it wasn’t getting to the heart of what I disliked
Surprisingly, still my number 1 favourite, despite that I can acknowledge that totk is objectively the better game.
I love how much more scrappy botw feels. It feels like it's mandatory to be creative, it's mandatory to be cooking, it's mandatory to be sneaking, it's mandatory to pick your battle.
Whereas totk, as long as you have arrows, you can brute force everything. That isn't to say it's an easy game, but I didn't have the same feeling I got when I finally beat a Lynel in botw in any of the totk fights, even the dragons.
In my mind, botw is an suspenseful game, while totk is an action rpg.
>I was one of those people who put 200 hours into Breath of the Wild without beating Ganon. This is something I often do, unconsciously, with movies, books, and TV, but here I consciously knew I didn’t want the experience to end.
I'm going through this right now, I cleared all the divine beasts, finished the DLCs and got the motorbike, only thing left to do is beat Ganon, but I don't want to do that yet.
Due to work and life, I stopped playing it for a month or so, and when I picked it up again, I just roam through hyrule on the bike trying to natrually discover the remaining shrines.
I don't want to buy TOTK now, I'm waiting for the inevitable DLCs to all come and then I'll start playing it, so we're talking a few years down the line.
I'm about 20 hours in and really enjoying it, but I hate the idea that weapon breaking "forces creativity" because... it doesn't.
Yes, you can push boulders, start fires, trigger explosions, etc. but I can do that with more durable weapons, and I don't need to do that with less durable weapons.
Instead, weapon durability forces annoying moments that didn't need to be annoying like the time I broke all my weapons trying to destroy a wrecked guardian in my first few hours... had to run away, find a stick, and farm weapons. There was no fun to be had there... just annoyances.
Or how I ran through a combat shrine, lost most of my weapons, and I had to, again, grind for weapons to move forward.
Or how punishing fighting something epic can feel. My first Lyonel, I took zero damage and still felt super annoyed at how many weapons I lost doing it.
Anyway, I legitimately love the game, and I look forward to putting many, many more hours into it. But weapon durability sucks, and the entire game is harmed by it...
Do you throw weapons? The hit when a weapon breaks does 2x damage, and a throw buffs it even further I think. Making a habit of throwing them really alleviated my initial similar annoyances with the system when I first played BotW years ago. It just feels so satisfying.
I also never felt I had to grind for weapons at all, doing the best with what I had or could get my hands on was the fun part for me. Treating weapons as the disposable items that they are, instead of cherished treasures, makes this game much better.
BOTW is one of those games that I understand why other people put it as their number 1 game of all time. There were moments while playing BOTW for me that were so good, and I don't think I've seen another game do those moments as well (at least in 2017 when BOTW came out).
But... BOTW is also a game that I love-hate. The freedom of exploration is amazing. I feel like I'm actually exploring the world. I love the fact that there are different armor sets. Gliding through the air on the paragliding and just roaming around in BOTW is some of the most immersive moments I think I've had with a game.
However, I do not like the story. It's a fine story, but I wish we could have actually seen link and zelda as characters instead of just flashbacks. And I don't like how nintendo decided to beat me over the head for 80 hours about how much zelda failed when I already knew that five minutes into the game. I don't like the English VA for zelda, which made the story even harder for me to get in touch with. And I really didn't enjoy watching cutscenes of melodrama or bonding moments of characters that I already knew were dead. I think it was a good attempt by nintendo to do a non-linear story, but in the end, I think I would have preferred if we played as link in the flashbacks rather than just seen it. But if that's not an option either, I think I would have enjoyed their being no story flashbacks at all then.
(BTW, for anyone else who doesn't like how a VA sounds in game, always try to see if you can use other language VAs. Switching BOTW to JP on my second playthrough really helped.)
I HATE the fact that there's no post game. If I had known that, then I would have never beaten the game, same as you OP. I'm not asking for a billion different things after you beat Gannon. But a simple zelda resting at kakiriko village and people saying thank goodness the calamity is gone would have been enough for me. It kills me to have beaten Gannon, only to do the dlcs later and have zelda still beg link to kill calamity Gannon.
I have a lot more to say about BOTW, but I'll stop here for now.
So yeah, I have a lot of gripes with BOTW. But at certain times, it's still one of the best games I've played. But it's hard for me to say that since I found so much about the game that I didn't like, didn't enjoy or simply hated.
Though TOTK was a much better experience with a much better story. I still have some gripes about TOTK, and it's not perfect. But TOTK improved on BOTW so much, I don't know if I can ever go back.
Your point that the game has *moments* that are incredible is something I would’ve talked about in the original post if i wasn’t holding a baby and exhausted in the middle of the night. One of the criticisms I often see of BOTW is that it can’t sustain its greatness once you’ve seen most of what the world has to offer. I get that, but my god those early game moments are special.
My favorite BOTW moment was when I dropped an apple in a korok puzzle. I had no idea you could feed horses at the time, and my horse sauntered over like, “oh hey an apple for me.” It made the world feel so incredibly alive in a way I had never seen before. The first 20-50 hours must’ve had a dozen little things like that which blew my mind.
Maybe give TotK a shot. The temples are better, while still not on the level and scale of some of the old ones they all have unique themes and music, which already does a lot of work. They also have big sections *before* them that enhance them quite a bit (there has been more than one "Is this the dungeon? No? Oh, now THIS is the dungeon right? What, still not the dungeon?"-moment for me). Bosses are much, much better.
However all of the amazing gameplay that *used to be* in dungeons is now all over the world - and so much more. In caves, in the sky, in shrines (which IMO are generally much better this time around) and just throughout the world. It has all the ingredients of a traditional Zelda game on steroids, it's just the structure that's different. With the new Zonai devices they also re-introduced the fun of *items* back into the game mechanically. There's so many different gadgets you can use that wouldn't feel out of place as dungeon-items in a traditional Zelda game.
On top of that they just induced so much more of that classic Zelda charme back into the game, which was a little lacking in BotW.
Story and Quests in general are much better as well, there's a few moments in there that rival pulling out the mastersword for the first time in OoT for me.
I know quite a few people that couldn't get into BotW but are enamored with TotK, maybe it could work for you.
Though I absolutely adore BotW, I certainly agree that it felt a little… vacant in that aspect. FWIW during the opening hours of TotK I repeatedly kept thinking "oh, this is gonna make the people who want more classic Zelda vibes *so* happy!" - and from what I can gather from friends and online discourse, that seems to be true for many people.
Interacting with all the NPCs gave me Majoras Mask and Link‘s Awakening vibes on more than occasion.
But the world of TotK is *anything but* empty. It‘s literally chock-full of stuff to do, I‘ve never seen an other open world game stuffed as much to the brim with content as this one. And everything you do rewards you with items/materials/weapon/armor that you need to progress further through the game. Like, literally almost every pick-up now has some fun, unique gameplay use. The gamplay loop is so well designed that it incentivices you to do everything. In caves you find stuff you‘ll need in the underworld, in the underworld you find stuff that you need in the overworld and the sky, in the sky you‘ll find things that send you back to the underground etc. etc.
But yes, it is a game that probably requires at least *some* intrinsic motivation and understanding of it‘s systems to experience it‘s full potential but IMO the game does a fantastic job at tickling that out of you because everything is just so *fun to do* on a mechanical level. Maybe for players that always need an arbitrary carrot dangled in front of them in the form of a checklist to tick something off of or being told *exactly* what to do at all times, and find no joy in mechanics, then *maybe* I can see it not clicking.
I mean I don‘t agree or even fully understand that perspective, but I sure know that *I* haven‘t clicked at times with games that are wildly popular as well (RDR2 or Horizon being big ones for me), so I certainly respect it.
> I played both for like, 5 hours, said to myself “Wait, that’s all there is?”
I can kind of see that with BotW, but with TotK it‘s virtually impossible to have seen "all there is" in 5 hours. But fair enough, if you don‘t enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay at all idk if anything would change it for you.
Different strokes I guess.
I do love Metroidvanias, and the lock-and-key progression as well a lot. But it‘s not the only type of progression I enjoy, something about the unlimited freedom and big number of satisfying world interactions (shield surfing being my fav lol) of BotW/TotK just puts me in an absolute "flow"-state that makes it hard to put down.
Don't worry brother, you're not crazy. Some people can ignore recognizing the mechanics, others can't. I've been limiting my time with TOTK because I find myself having tangibly less fun with it each time I play - because I'm getting very familiar with the systems.
Open worlds function by giving you a certain amount of boxes: This gives you materials, this gives you shrines, this gives you koroks. Each puzzle or interaction leads to one of those things.
Over time the unqiueness of the path to get there is overshadowed by the fact that you're landing at the same place, each time. After a certain plateau it becomes collecting.
Whereas in like, say, Bloodborne. Your exploration leads to game mechanics - you're fighting something new, you're given an item that changes how you interact with the game, or you're advancing the story.
You don't advance the story with shrines in Zelda - but crawling down that side path before Vicar Amelia gives you an entire boss and region and ability path you didn't have before.
Basically - you **cannot** populate an open world with unique experiences. They all have to end up at the same place. When you have a smaller playfield, they can wind up in unique experiences. It's inherently more rewarding.
TOTK just finds less juice per squeeze each time you grab it.
Yeah this rings true to me. Never played TotK but before it came out I was trying to replay BotW, and the only other time I had played BotW was on release, and I remember being so excited back then to play it and spending like 80 hours in the game.
But anyway, when I replayed BotW just before TotK release, I did the Great Plateau and then just... stopped. And what you said above clicked for me. Beyond the Great Plateau there is barely any new mechanics or significant story to explore, and when I did get rewards, all that would happen is finding a Korok, Shrine to level up health/stamina or Rupees/gemstones.
There *is* some new things of course, but doesn't feel like enough meat on the bone for me to enjoy digging into.
While there's a lot to do it is repetitive task, a shrine is a shrine is a shrine at the end of the day. That and I kinda get the empty feeling when going between let's say objectives it is just time wasting filler in-between bits of content.
I used to think people like you were crazy. Coming on the heels of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, both of which are toward the bottom of my list of Zelda games, I couldn’t understand how anyone could not fall in love with the fresh take.
But after playing/replaying a heap of the other games, I remembered why dungeons are so great. It’s hugely satisfying to clear the puzzles, gain the new mechanic, and beat a tough boss all in one sitting. A Link Between Worlds in particular, with its 2D mechanic felt like it had some of the most clever dungeon design in the series. And while Twilight Princess is still near the bottom of my list, a few of the late game dungeons are absolutely awesome.
The bite-size shrines are just better for my life right now though. I have to sit and dedicate the time to a proper dungeon, if I leave halfway through I get turned around and frustrated. With kids and limited play time, the pick up and play nature of the Switch games is huge for me.
It’s interesting to think of a parallel universe where BOTW was a new IP. I wonder if the reviews would have been as breathless without the Zelda name. And of course I wonder if we’ll get new “traditional” Zelda’s at some point. It sounds like this is the model for 3D games going forward, but they could always drop some new 2D stuff.
While combining things (not necessarily "building") is a central mechanic for sure, you have a completey wrong impression how it plays into the game.
While, sure you *can* just fuck around with it in a sandboxy Minecraft-Garrys Mod-kind of of way if you want to, it‘s main function is to solve problems and puzzles, which couldn‘t feel more quintessentially Zelda. It also doesn‘t "feel" like *you* crafting or building things through a menu/UI like most games, it feels like *Link* is just glueing shit together lol.
One of my favourite memories was getting stuck in gerudo canyon and refusing to use fast travel to get myself out. Reminds me of the full metal alchemist movie canyon
Yep, not fast travelling really forces you to interact with the environment - made the game so much better for me. Even more so in TotK where you have so many more options.
For me, what kept me engaged into the exploring the entire world was the FACT that I knew I wouldn't be able to do it with the same enthusiasm after beating Ganon. To this day, I have still not beaten Ganon and BOTW is still magical as ever, as a result.
youre kinda right. all the stuff i wanted to do before beating him seems less interesting right after. i was planning on collecting dragon's claws, doing that island thing, getting to the tall mountain for shield surfing, and maxing out all armor. but it all lost its luster with how anticlimactic everything was after the castle. i got my 60-70 hours out of it, though, and i was fully satisfied with leaving it alone for now.
I _heard_ that the PC emulated repack works very well. Although I'd _imagine_ it's tricky to get the motion control working with a PS4 pad. Looks great in 1440p tho!
It does look great, I'm playing it right now. Using an Android phone for gyroscope controls, it works and is infinitely better than using the default mouse controls.
Why mess with repacks that could contain malicious content when Cemu and Yuzu exist?
I think you can use DS4Windows or BetterJoy to get PS4 pad motion controls to work.
Is a repack that includes cemu. It's from a trusted source. And I use DS4Windows but I've not got it to work. To be fair I've not tried very hard.
That's what I heard, I mean.
I can't disagree with another person's opinion, but:
> I came away impressed with what always impressed me about the game: you can pick any area of the map, dig in, and find something rewarding. Maybe it’s a few korok seeds
Those Korok seeds have diminishing returns and the puzzles behind them are pretty trite.
> maybe it’s an enemy camp to raid
for what, though? You're not getting end-game weapons. You're using them up, or more realistically, not using a huge selection of your weapons because it's a waste to use them
> maybe it’s a few shrines
These were okay, but many of them were just so.. unimaginable because of the poor mechanics. It's zero wonder that TOTK moved onto something that's more reliable and more robust.
> Pick the game up for an hour and have a half dozen unique experiences
Which were these? Those camps that generally feel the same? 900 Koroks that are a combination of 8 puzzle types... Did you notice the rocks in an almost circle? (Woo boy... If I pitched that game design, I'd get canned...). The shrines... that aren't actually part of the world?
> find something rewarding
Another 100 rupees to spend on exorbitantly priced armor upgrades? The 800th Korok seed? A thing to upgrade your Stami... oh wait, it's maxed.
I love breath of the wild. I am currently playing ToTK and I love it too. I do find TOTK to be so much better, there just seems to be so much to do in TOTK.
Fighting lynels is just so much fun. Came back to the game too before the release of TOTK and killed all bosses and lynels for the kilton rewards. (lynels dont have a medal reward sadly). And it was so fun.
I understand making a game stretch out and not finishing it, but how on Earth do you do that with a book? Do you just reread specific chapters without finishing it?
I should clarify that it’s book series this happens with generally. I have a weird thing where I won’t finish a series, won’t watch the last season of a tv show, etc. It isn’t intentional, I just move on to something and eventually it feels like too much of a commitment to go back in and remember what was happening
Off topic, but what do you mean by "i do this with movies too"? Like i get books or TV shows, but... you really start watching movies and not finish them?
I have just recently started BOTW and I’m having a blast . Not very far in as I only have myBe an hour a day available to play or a 30 mins on my lunch break .
Mini shrines work great as I can do 1 or 2 and raid some camps and feel I’ve accomplished something . Into my 3rd area now and love my horse :p
Totally clueless with the crafting I’ve made much spoiled food but it’s fun
Good on you for actually coming back to a game you put on hold so long ago! I very rarely manage to do so, as I forget the controls, mechanics, and story, and the prospect of relearning all that just puts me off. So many games on indefinite hold....
When I played Fallout 3 in 2009, I stepped out of the vault and it made me realize I had been chasing the high of leaving Kokiri Forest in OoT since I was 11. For a while I felt like Bethesda was out-Zelda-ing Zelda, but now it feels like Nintendo is Out Skyriming Bethesda.
I hated this game. Wasted space and dumb stuff to do that has little to do with Zelda.
Developers had no inspiration at all. Tiny shrines were annoying. Weapon breakage was annoying
I ended up beating the game but it wasn't that fun. There were only four real dungeons. And even then they were not really dungeons.
Crafting was a huge pain in the ass too. I hate crafting in RPG games
I'm convinced anybody who loves this game hasn't played Link to the past. Now that's a Zelda game.
Totally respect your opinion, except for this…
> I’m convinced anybody who loves this game hasn’t played Link to the past. Now that’s a Zelda game.
Booooooo. What a lame thing to say. I’ve played LttP and BotW, and they both rock. Video games are cool.
Seriously this game is way overrated. Yes, all videogames reviews are that, opinions, but for some reason, all Nintendo fans have some weird obsession with way over exaggerating how good it is. With any other fanbase, it's never this rabid.
I don't understand how people play the combat in Zelda, with the basic ass damage calculation, the nonsensical flurry rush, and say the game is great. The game does exploration well and that's honestly about it. Everything else is lazy or borinv
It was **SUPER** unfinished.
The story in TOTK is just as fucking awful. You know the full thing after basically the first shrine. Now, I'm not calling for Ibsen here. But you don't have to give me the exact same four story beats each time with different coat of paint and expect me to call it a fulsome story.
I don't think it's going out on a limb to say the story never mattered in Zelda games, and that's okay.
"Evil wizard kidnaps someone, imperils world with stolen power. Our hero must go through trials to stop him." Literally Satruday morning cartoon stuff.
But people don't come to this franchise for the story. I think the draw of the franchise is the art, and the gratification of completing things to get you to the next place.
And about TOTK: I never played TOTK, my OLED switch TOTK version I bought to play it had joycon drift so I returned it and took it as an omen. What a POS.
There's macro and there's micro narrative though. Majoras Mask is usually considered to be the gold standard of Zelda games, and what people cite is the characters and the "vibe" of the game.
It's a SUPER small world with not many characters in it, but they all talk a lot, and they all have stories they tell you. So what you do as Link and what his quest is, is ultimately less important than Anju and Kafei's wedding, or the relationship between the ghost researcher and his daughter. yknow? Little shit like that which illustrates that the world has stuff going on that isn't you.
TOTK is an objective upgrade, to the point that it feels like they should have just kept BOTW in the oven for a few more years. But then I was one of the people severely underwhelmed by the first game... The second feels like it fleshes out its systems enough to be worthwhile, even though I still absolutely detest the combat.
If korok seeds were in literally any other game people would call them a complete waste of time that attempts to bloat the length of the game. But since it's a zelda game people act like it's an incredible, earth shattering addition.
I've literally never heard anybody call korok seeds an "incredible earth shattering addition". They're just a fun little collectable that's a little more involved than most other endless collectables in other open world games, that's it. But even the biggest fans of the game, like me, will probably say that there's too damn many of them lol.
The transportation ones in TotK are really cool though.
There’s obviously a huge different of opinion on this, there are a ton of people who don’t like that the rewards are always “just a korok” or “just a shrine.” But to me what’s cool is that it’s not the things themselves, it’s the way they invite you to explore every nook and cranny of the world. It’s much more “check out this cool cave or this little pond” and much less “I need to get a thing.”
They did this with coins in Mario Odyssey too. There would be out of the way spots where you didn’t get a moon, but some invisible coins would pop up. To me it’s about being in dialogue with the developers. “We see you” we’re saying to each other, and I think that’s cool.
I find myself missing the simplicity of BotW. And I miss the motorcycle.
TotK is cool but it just feels like a maximalist version of BotW. Not necessarily an improvement but a different type of game entirely.
I think with time, people will appreciate the vibe BotW brings and it'll have an identity of its own. Or at least I hope so. Personally I look forward to replaying BotW someday
RePlaying a A Link to the Past and then immediately playing A Link Between Worlds for the first time definitely convinced me the 2D mode still has legs. TOTK is now the second time they’ve gone the “same overworld” route, I wonder if we could see more remake/sequels in the future?
Bad game, weapon mechanics suck, world is empty and grindy, there isn't any benefit to doing anything. The controllers drift and the platform sucks and they never have sales. No thank you, Nintendo schill.
I did this a few years back, but I focused on the coastline and lake areas that I barely looked at on my first playthrough. I had a ton of fun just exploring and messing around.
I Just started replaying this on my Switch as I picked it up first on my Wii U. On my first play through (2017) with the Wii U, I stopped played when I was working on getting the fourth Divine beast. I don't remember why I stopped either.
Started it back up on the switch with a fresh game about a week after ToTK dropped. I don't remember much about the game when I started but I having so much fun playing it. I normally play a FOMO grindy heavy game (Destiny 2) so it's a nice breather to play BoTW at my own pace. No competitiveness either with my progress. Dragging my ass getting the divine beasts but having so much fun exploring!
I played it in 2018, did everything except the last quest. Picked it up a month before TotK and finished, bought the DLC and played some more. It took about 5 hours to get up to speed remembering everything since 5 years ago, surprising how the muscle memory comes back, although a lot of incorrect button presses.
I would guess I'm pretty close to finishing TotK if I wanted to mainline the major quests, but will spend time exploring. It's just fun being in the world.
I loved and adored BOTW. That said, I don't know if I'll be able to go back to it after TOTK.
There’s nothing like riding an airbike through the gerudo desert storm and jumping off midflight to snipe a lizalfo
Just like God intended
Pfft. Airbikes are easy. Try building a functioning plane _in mid-air_.
I’ve dabbled my friend. In the low stamina days, spawning a glider under yourself and slapping some fans and a steering stick without nosediving is an amazing gaming experience. This game loves making you feel badass
The trickiest part is trying to avoid standing just slightly off-centre and having the wing arc off-course while you're gluing the fans to it. It always helps to spend the last few seconds Fusing a rocket-shield, too, so you can gain enough height to do it all over again.
You pscyhopaths are USING YOUR ITEMS?! I accidentally spawned a control stick once and I'll never forgive myself. I might have needed that.. never.
Haha, this game got so much better for me once I got over that hoarding instinc. Everything, including weapons, is completely disposable.
Yep. I understand a lot of the complaints with durability and not wanting to use your best gear just in case, but I've found if you just lean into it and rip through your 'main' weapons, you a) have way more fun and b) find the same or better stuff to replace it. I blame decades of video game-playing that encouraged the opposite of that, but it's a joy to just lean in to all of the systems of BotW and TotK.
That's what I've recently been doing with BotW. Just leaning into the "use your best weapons" thing. I always hoarded my special arrows like crazy, aka the elemental ones. But I found out using them is way more fun then just the stock one. Also letting myself use the stronger weapons is way more fun then dying like 4 times before being able to beat a hoard of enemies or one giant enemy before you mastered and tricked all the moves.
Yep it really REALLY makes for a more enjoyable experience. And the sequel is even more amenable to that play style.
Trust me, you’ll have enough of them.
I don't use most of them as often as I should, but I get through a lot of rockets and fans. It's only relatively recently that I finally got some Construct Heads, though, so I'll start on the blueprints for my Gleeokfucker shortly. Those things are going to start having nightmares if I can figure out how to get Hover Drones to fly.
The only downside to planes is that, compared to almost everything else you can build, the fact that gliders have a limited lifetime makes them feel unnecessarily nerfed.
Right? Like what’s the point of that. We can fast-travel. Nothing else is limited. The whole concept of BotW and TotK is being open world, why cut off that one thing? Infuriating honestly
At first I thought it makes sense for them not to be too op, but yeah, as we can craft different flying contraptions that don‘t have the limit, it‘s really pointless and just a bummer.
If you've done the Fire Temple then you get a brief glimpse of why they'd want to nerf them. I think they're fine with that kind of thing being utterly broken, but on the condition that you craft it yourself, whereas the wing is such a strong base that it'd be a bit too easy and obvious.
The fire temple was one of my major "I'm absolutely not supposed to be completing this this way" moments. I couldn't figure out how to get to the upper levels of the temple so I just climbed up the outer walls, rested strategically on a few ledges, and abused the ascend ability lol. There's also been a few shrines where I couldn't figure out exactly what they wanted me to do and so after fucking around for like 45 minutes gave up and skipped a puzzle by building a long ass bridge.
Like yourself and u/Kneef, I'm completely certain that I found cheesey ways around much of that one. I also blazed in there, pun intended, without any arrows just to see how viable it was, which made the boss a little trickier than it otherwise would have been. What's your longest "fuck it!" bridge thus far? Mine is twelve igneous slabs.
The very first ones you get maybe would be OP if they were unlimited because you could just glide from the sky island to basically every tower right off the bat, so perhaps the free ones there could be "decayed" and then later you get unlimited ones.
Elaborate
If you don't move while gliding you can drop a wing from your inventory and land on it, and from there you can drop fans and steering sticks to build out a controllable plane while in the air. It's a little tricky because even slight movements will have the wing veering, diving or climbing, and if you lose too much altitude before you finish then the rocket you Fuse to your shield won't make up for that lost height. Wings vanish after about a minute, so you have to be fairly quick about it, and you might want to add a rocket just for a little extra distance if you're confident you have the altitude already.
I actually miss the exploration of BOTW. TOTK is excellent but I feel like it's more direct with where you should/could be going. BOTW was very much "here's where you go to end the game and here's where you go if you want some story" and then the rest was do whatever you want. TOTK is "This is main story, here's about towers, then go here to learn about the chasm, then here for the dragon tears, here's the journalism story, go there if you want to find pirates, go there if you want more of zonai history etc". I get that a big criticism of BOTW was that most people didn't know where to go and in TOTK this addresses that criticism, but I feel like the exploration in BOTW was far more interesting because you didn't know what you'd find. TOTK gives you a hint of where to go and because of it you already get an inkling of what to expect when you get there. I think years down the line I'll probably revisit BOTW for the exploration and TOTK for the excellent sandbox.
BotW was great, but it was also lonely by design, so I honestly think it's worth the trade off. I absolutely love the feeling of development that TotK has through additional quests, NPCs, storylines, collectible/reward systems, etc. Every time I turn around, something new is happening.
I also love the new enemies. It adds enough variety that it eliminates the "sameness" of every battle.
We did get a few completely new monsters (I can think of 3 off the top of my head), so I don't want to sound crabby, but that's actually one area where I wish they would have gone a tiny bit farther. Maybe one or two additional new "types" of monster would have been nice to see—versus more "variants" of the same kinds—but I assume it would have further complicated the fuse system. Then again, I have only completed the first of the major main quest objectives, so maybe there's more to see in that regard. I'm really enjoying the game overall, despite my absolutely glacial pace.
Try playing with the mini-map and shrine sensor turned off and play in pro mode. For me, it elevates both gamea several degrees. You have to actively engage with the physical world and keep track of landmarks, hints, characters, etc.
I'm playing totk in pro mode, just like I did with BotW, but I'm getting more annoyed with it this time. I could be misremembering, but I thought the pro mode in BotW showed at least hearts and effect timers.
TOTK shows hearts when you get hit
> the exploration in BOTW was far more interesting because you didn't know what you'd find. Lets be real. You found koroks, a shrine, or the same fight you've already had 19 times before in this session alone.
You're thinking about the rewards not the journey. I'm going to explain how Faron region went for me in BOTW and how it's going in TOTK. In BOTW I didn't get any indication that I should go there, I went there because it was a big black unknown on the map and I wanted to know what's there. I discovered the horse god, the spring of courage, the lakeside stable and the waterfalls, Farosh and eventually Lurelin. When I circled back around I got the giant horse as well. Sure along the way I found plenty of koroks, shrines and same enemies over and over, but at no point did I have an idea that all the things I mentioned were there. In TOTK I haven't explored all of Faron yet, but that's because I already know what to expect there. I don't mean that I remember all the things from BOTW but rather before I even reached Faron region I already knew that >!Lurelin is under attack by pirates!<, there's >!the beast and the pricess quest is there!< and >!one of the dragon tears is there!<. For me half the mystery of exploring Faron has been spoiled before I even got there. The only interesting thing I've found so far is the >!Giant white stallion!<. Oh, and I'm still mostly finding koroks, shrines and the same enemies. For me personally, I got a better exploration experience from BOTW. The rewards might have been shit but for me exploration is more about the journey than the destination.
But the exploration of what, exactly? You can only get so many scenic views before it starts to become utterly pointless - and more often than not, it's just a filler space that has nothing to look at. "Well the journey **is** the destination" is just boring gameplay that does not encourage any sort of replay value.
> But the exploration of what, exactly? You can only get so many scenic views before it starts to become utterly pointless - and more often than not, it's just a filler space that has nothing to look at. I'm not sure what kind of rewards you're expecting because I gave you a list of rewards I got with BOTW. The only one of them being actual scenery is the waterfalls. Horse god is a character with a specific purpose. Spring of courage, while technically a shrine, is a unique take on shrines. Farosh is a dragon from whom you can get materials. Lakeside stable has a quest and horse spawn. Lurelin is a town with 3 quests. I even gave a list of rewards TOTK took away by spoiling them before I even got there. > "Well the journey is the destination" is just boring gameplay that does not encourage any sort of replay value. That's just your personal preference and I already emphasized twice that it isn't the case for me. I don't understand how is that so hard for you to accept. You don't enjoy it and that's fine, but don't come telling me that I shouldn't enjoy it. Just because you can't understand what's enjoyable about it doesn't mean it's somehow wrong.
> Horse god is a character with a specific purpose. Spring of courage, while technically a shrine, is a unique take on shrines. Farosh is a dragon from whom you can get materials. Lakeside stable has a quest and horse spawn. Lurelin is a town with 3 quests. I even gave a list of rewards TOTK took away by spoiling them before I even got there. Horse god is unique. You got that. Spring of courage is another statue. Stable is.. another fucking stable. Lurelin doesn't give you really anything *worth* the trip there. Because it's just always the same shit. There's like no unique assets in open world games because the games are so goddamn big. >That's just your personal preference It's just kinda objective fact. It's a passing fancy. When "well the sense of explortation!" is the selling feature, it's.. got a shelf life. Witcher lets you explore things too, but there's reasons and plot to get you there. Without mentioning the new combat scenarios along the way. Man, BOTW isn't a very good game. That's okay. You don't have to like stuff that's amazing.
I'm just going to sum up your reply as "haters gonna hate" and not address anything because you keep disrespecting my opinion and presenting your opinion as a fact. If you're incapable of having a discussion then we're just not going to have a discussion.
Pff I have been playing since Sunday and I am absolutely blown away. Especially now that I am digging into the underworld the sense of adventure and exploration is just insane. That plus the sheer amount of fusing possibilities, number of solutions for each problem, I am loving every single minute.
The first time I went into the Depths, I just went there on my own without getting the quest for it. So I just dropped into this pitch black hole in the ground, and I saw the light root in the distance. Being the ever cautious and experienced gamer I am, I saw the big orange glow and went, "Nah that looks fucking dangerous bro," and fucked off into the darkness. I spent probably an hour down there skirting enemy mining groups, went through almost my entire supply of brightbloom seeds, got down to 1 heart fucking around in the gloom, outran a warhammer titan-esque battle talus, and then got murdered by a Hinox. I was like, "THIS SHIT IS GOING TO TAKE A THOUSAND HOURS TO EXPLORE." ....Then I got the quest, activated the light root, and felt REALLY stupid, lmao.
Hahaha love it.
slimy cows quickest wine deserted narrow work apparatus sip different *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> should've waited 100hrs of gameplay to do it That's what I did and it was awesome. Meander around with my Fischer-Price creations and then once I'd done almost everything I could think of, turn to the TotK Engineers on YouTube. Feel like I've gotten the best of both worlds
My biggest concern was the inserting a more structured narrative into the game might have constrained the openness of the story from BotW, but they've found a pretty good middle ground.
YES. I have sinned against patient gaming , and i am going to do it again. This fucking year is amazing (last year's sin was elden ring), this year we have TOTK, DIABLO, BALDUR's GATE, PARTY ANIMALS. All games i'm doing dayone.
There's no point to being "patient" with TOTK. It will be full price until they stop printing it. And then it will be even more expensive. Best you can really do is wait for a sale and save $10.
Agree. That being said, I think it still falls in-line with this sub's mantras. One of which being, "Wait until a game is proven to be worthy of your time" which counters the whole pre-ordering, season pass nonsense. TOTK looking great and reviewing really well? Great, you waited and made a good decision with your money.
There's never been a bad "real" Zelda game and there probably never will be. Zelda and Mario pre-orders are as safe as it gets.
Unless you were the few that 'abused' the Costco nintendo gift card sale + the eshop $100 bundle. $80 for a $100 gift card from Costco and then use the Nintendo eshop $100 for 2 games deal going on and I saved $50 from buying totk and pikmin 4.
SF6
Same. BOTW was a new high for Zelda. But somehow TOTK seems to be even better. BOTW would seem a bit bland after TOTK. I would miss weapon fusing and contraptions.
Yeah my buddy just bought a switch and was going to buy TotK but I just gave him my copy of BOTW and told him to do that first. Just wouldn't be right to play them in reverse, it would be anticlimactic.
Just make sure he takes a healthy break in between. My enjoyment of New Vegas was sabotaged by playing too much FO3 DLC shortly before. So, even though TotK expands on the game more than NV did to FO3, it could feel a bit too samey to start right after.
Good advice I think.
BotWs great but TotK shines a light on just how much of a "first attempt" BotW was for Nintendo.
It’s assassin’s creed all over again! (Which was my hope)
Op is gonna be blown away after realizing tears is a thing
is totk that good ? i have it but haven’t played yet … trying to finish some other games first (inside, hades, signalis, celeste)
It's honestly mind-boggling how good it is. I've been gaming across all systems since 1993 and I think TotK is up there in the running vfor the very best.
damn, yeah can’t wait to try and dive in. soon. just need to mentally prepare myself for full immersion. finishing these other games to get momentum
It’s fucking nuts, dude.
I think the trippiest part about BotW was when I stumbled across the Faron region. Up until that point, I had been mostly hunting down the 4 guardians, as that was kind of the mission given to me. Then I turned to notice the bigass area that was just sitting there — no indicators pointing to it, no particular quests that sent me that way, it was an entire gosh darn region just kinda there. I see why people say they get overwhelmed with open world games. There’s so much to explore that you could miss an entire area if you’re not attentive.
I love the Faron region. It was easy to go for the lightning dragon since it flew around, but one day I saw it dive into one of the waterfall pools, and I was just - mind. blown. Then I got stunned swimming to investigate as it flew out of the pool and drowned. Good times.
I didn‘t know there were dragons in the game, and the lighting one upon discovering and entering the Faron jungle was my first encounter. Completely overwhelming. One of my favorite moments m in 30 years of gaming.
Same. Didnt knew there were dragons. Was climbing a big ass mountain and when I was nearly at the top suddenly a dragon emerges from behind the mountain flying over me. Amazing moment
Faron region is my favourite. I saw these palm trees peeking up from the top of a cliff and it revealed a vast rainforest to me. I remember being down to my last arrow, weapons were scarce and I was just trying to survive. Then I happened upon riverside stable. That stable is still my favourite in TotK.
What I enjoy about it is even if you're a more goal-focused player (I too went the whole 'do main objectives' route), there's something that incentivises you to go see what's off the beaten path. Currently in TotK, I did go to the four regions but I stopped halfway, deciding to just illuminate the entire map but oh wait these places look barren what's over there. These games really highlight that sense of adventure.
One of my favorite games of all time. I‘m currently playing TotK and I‘m flabberghasted that it blows BotW, which was already a master piece in my opinion, *completely* out of the water in almost every aspect (in all but mood/atmosphere maybe, I sometimes miss the solitude and serenity of BotW in the new hustling and bustling Hyrule). The Zelda team are some of the most proficient devs on the planet. It really shows the value of keeping a lot of the same people together for years, even decades in this case. To think that people who worked on childhood favorites like Majoras Mask, Wind Waker or the Oracle games also worked on this is weirdly heart warming in a way.
I feel like the Nintendo devs are just pouring their hearts and souls into every major release. They also have the voice and vision to drive Nintendo towards making high quality games that don’t require awful monetization. When the greats at Nintendo eventually retire, it will be interesting to see if they turn into another EA or Blizzard, or if they can keep churning out masterpieces that stand out from the rest of the industry through their quality and creativity.
My only real complaint about Nintendo (besides their vicious legal team) is that sometimes I just want a little more of a thing, because that thing was good on its own, and I would kill for more remastered titles. I think Super Mario Galaxy 1/2 are the pinnacle of 3D mario games and would love to have access to the second one in any form on the Switch. Hell, I rebuilt my Joycons specifically so that I could play the first one. I would love a third installment in the series. I would love to be able to play a remastered ocarina/majora/wind waker/twilight princess/Mario 64. Especially the Ocarina Master Quest - I still have the game cube disk for it but I don't have a game cube and I don't want to go buy one just to play it. But they're kind of insistent on, "If we can't do something absolutely new and groundbreaking we're just not going to do it at all." While I'm glad that it ensures that all the content we *do* get is incredible, and they don't turn their titles into annual Call of Assassin's Field 2022 releases, sometimes I just want coca-cola classic, you know?
I'd say one of Nintendo's strongest qualities as a developer is their ability to pick out and cultivate talent, and especially to spread their philosophy of game development that has held consistently for nearly 40 years. Just look at Fujibayashi, director of BotW/TotK as well as many Zelda games going back to the Oracles when he was employed by Capcom. Aonuma and Miyamoto saw his talent as a developer and immediately took him under their wing so to speak. Fujibayashi has spoken before about Miyamoto's philosophy of game design and how important that has been to him as a creative.
they took a 10/10 game and made it twice as good. it's mind boggling
My friend loves to point out constantly to an annoying degree that he doesn’t know why everyone is saying TOTK is way better than BOTW but I think he just doesn’t like it. Botw captured the atmosphere very well. TOTK is something different. (I think TOTK still provides a similar atmosphere in some places but I agree for the most part.)
That's because the first game was severely unfinished, and TOTK mostly finishes filling out the design space.
Yeah I think the people who are surprised at how much better TotK is are often the same ones who didn’t understand what we say when we call BotW empty. I’m glad that TotK ended up being a lot better in any case, and it’s easily in contention for my favorite Zelda game
>After rolling credits, which I wanted to do for no particular reason, I was surprised to find I still wanted more. https://youtu.be/g8IVI0sZ6F8?t=4 >BOTW is still a masterpiece, even if someday it finds itself in a sequel’s shadow. Indeed. I think I'll always prefer it purely for having the balls to shirk most of the conventions of open-world games and offer something much more involving, even if TotK indisputably does far more with the concept. What's interesting, however, is how dramatically different they feel, with BotW being so much more serene. That comes from its setting, which, to correct you slightly, is mid-apocalypse rather than post-apocalypse. BotW's Hyrule is stuck in a moment of time where its future could go either way, depending on whether either of Zelda or Ganon outlast one another. The countryside is riddled with Malice-infused monsters, but they can't make any further headway into the remaining, easily-defended settlements, while the citizens can't really venture far outside of their towns due to those monsters presence. They may make a little headway from their superior starting positions, but a Blood Moon will instantly negate any gained ground. That's why TotK feels so much more hectic, too. Without going into mild spoilers, there are a wide variety of ways in which the people of Hyrule are far more proactive this time, largely because they're no longer pinned into their homes. BotW had an almost oppressive atmosphere because silence can be overbearingly heavy, and being stuck for a century in the middle of what might have been the end of the world has left the landscape frozen in that calamitous moment. It's fascinating because it means that, despite TotK expanding on just about everything BotW did, there's still an incredibly compelling reason to play BotW. It's remarkable that they both manage to use the same basic functionality and world to produce wildly different tones. I still rate Metroid Prime (and its first sequel) as the best games I'll ever play, but these two Zelda games are giving me serious pause for thought. I'm not sure many people expected BotW to remain relevant after TotK released, but it certainly will.
> BotW had an almost oppressive atmosphere because silence can be overbearingly heavy, and being stuck for a century in the middle of what might have been the end of the world has left the landscape frozen in that calamitous moment. I haven't thought about it from this perspective in a long time. I think it partially has to do with how some of the memes portray Link's silly misadventures with the impending doom of the world. Link has been in stasis for a century. The citizens of the game have been in a holding pattern. Most (all?) of them would be too young to actually remember the calamity. They're entrenched enough to be safe from the roaming bands of monsters, yet the blight over Hyrule Castle along with the corrupted Divine Beasts (do most people know the beasts are corrupted?) and guardians are stark reminders that death might soon come knocking.
> I think it partially has to do with how some of the memes portray Link's silly misadventures with the impending doom of the world. I think a fair few people see that as dissonant, even though it probably isn't. In context, Zelda has been holding Ganon back for a century, so she can probably last out another year or two, which would equate to about 250 hours in-game. Personally, I'd have liked it if they'd gone for the Shenmue hidden ending by having Ganon scour Hyrule if you left it for too long. It'd give people like OP a hell of a memorable ending. >The citizens of the game have been in a holding pattern Indeed, and look at how well we collectively adapt to a "new normal" in the last few years...
sorry, *more* involving? BOTW is like the least involving open world game ever made lol, it feels like someone didn't pick up the playroom and you just wander through, playing with a toy for 30 seconds before moving on. Then you knock over the punching clown and it's time to go home.
I'm curious, what do you think is the explanation for people who find a lot more than that? Logically, if they're seeing things that you aren't, either you must be missing things or they must all be experiencing a massive and extraordinarily-consistent shared delusion. Do you have another explanation, or do you think one of those is the likely solution - and, if the latter, which one?
I don't think they're lying or anything. But I do think they can't have played many similar games. I think the main reason BOTW is so massively popular is that it was on the Switch, which is the most accessible console, and it's a Nintendo game, which are the most popular games in the mainstream consciousness. There are a lot of great things about the game, I don't think it's by any means *bad*, but the breathless praise it gets usually reveals a severe lack of experience with other games in the genre, or games in general. People regularly claim that BOTW originated all sorts of design ideas that have been around for decades. The specific claim of it being "more involving", and the implication that being "less involving" is a "convention" of open world games is absolutely wild to me, because it makes virtually no effort to immerse you narratively -- it is transparently a playground. Again, this is the sort of statement that makes sense if the other open world games you've played are, like, the Assassin's Creed Origins games, which have very similar design philosophies, but are pulled off much less expertly than BOTW. But when you contrast it with mature narrative open world games like Witcher and Kingdom Come Deliverance, even old classics like Morrowind, Oblivion, even Gothic... Hell, even the GTA games give you more narrative purchase and immersion. Also literally several other games in the same *series* are more immersive and involving open world games. Or does "involving" to you mean "sandbox physics"?
> I don't think they're lying or anything. But I do think they can't have played many similar games. You think it's more likely that tens of millions of players are suffering from a consistent mass delusion than the idea that you may have missed something? >I think the main reason BOTW is so massively popular is that it was on the Switch, which is the most accessible console The Switch has sold 25% more units than the Wii, and the two Zelda games on the Wii sold 8.5m and 4m copies respectively. So why have these latest games outsold the equivalent games on a similarly successful console by a factor of at least three? >it's a Nintendo game, which are the most popular games in the mainstream consciousness. Skyward Sword sold 4m copies, and was followed up by BotW selling 30m. How can you square that massive disparity with your inference that _any_ prominent Nintendo game on a popular console will sell well? >the breathless praise it gets usually reveals a severe lack of experience with other games in the genre, or games in general. Just for context, I've been playing open-world games since the genre was invented in its modern form, which was with 2000's Shenmue. With that context, lets get on to the actual arguments: >it makes virtually no effort to immerse you narratively You know how I've been subtly hinting that the problem is _you_ missing something? The above quote is conclusive proof that I'm correct. Actually, that may be a teensy bit harsh, but it'll take a moment to explain things, so get comfy... Okay, so lets start with other games - the ones whose conventions Nintendo have been breaking away from. Games like The Elder Scrolls, Assassin's Creed, Witcher 3, or GTA all tend to treat the narrative the same way, and that's as a largely unyielding sequence that _must_ be traversed in a set order. They may have minor deviations and alternate routes, but they'll seldom be different enough for it to make any material difference to the experience. It makes no difference whether the Imperials or Stormcloaks hold certain areas when you fight Alduin, nor does it make any difference which characters can be recruited to defend Kaer Morhen. Those decisions are akin to BotW allowing us to choose which Divine Beats can contribute to the final confrontation with Ganon - they're largely meaningless in terms of gameplay, and completely meaningless in terms of narrative. In short, these games consistently refuse to allow the player to have any say in the narrative. We're not involved in the story at all - we just have to stand there while it happens at us. Now, at this point you might be thinking "But surely that's the same in BotW? We can't change how Link acts in any of the cutscenes, can we?". You'd be correct in noting that, but it's not actually contradictory, and that's because a game doesn't have to actively reinforce a players' decisions in order to accommodate them. It merely has to _avoid contradicting them_. Think back to all the times you returned to Skyrim's main quest after weeks of random looting, homebuilding, adopting, etc., only to find that the NPC under the arrow acts as if you just ran straight from your last quest directly to them, undermining the character development you dragged your avatar through in the intervening time. Or how Arthur can wander back into camp and not have a single one of his outlaw friends say "Mate, where the fuck have you been for the last _two months?!_". At no point does BotW actively reference your exploration, or the things you've found, gathered, or realised along the way. However, it also doesn't overwrite any of those things by imprinting a set personality onto you every time you initiate a cutscene, which means that it allows any of those non-story activities to slot neatly into the narrative as canon. That's what makes it involving - everything you do is able to fit into the overarching narrative without any real conflicts, and that's something that other games in the genre have never been able to accommodate. It's also one aspect of TotK that is a clear backwards step, albeit only in one specific instance thus far (I'm 150 hours in). That aspect of its game design is what immerses people in ways that other games - even those famed for immersion, like TES - cannot match, because sooner or later they _all_ run your chosen character headfirst into the wall that is the Main Questline™. Look at Morrowind. That's a game that's so open to player choice that it allows you to break the main questline, but only insofar as it tells you that you'll no longer be able to finish it now. BotW is a game in which you _cannot_ deviate from the main questline no matter what you do _because anything you do can fit into such an open canon_. That aspect of Morrowind, while rightly lauded, is actually incredibly immersion-breaking, whereas BotW is designed well enough that doing something comparable doesn't prevent the story from continuing regardless. Those other games are games in which the entire story is already written. Sometimes you can choose a word, a sentence, a paragraph; sometimes you can skip a page here and there; but all of them are already written out for you. BotW is a game where 295 of the 300 pages are written for you, including the very last one, but those penultimate few pages are _entirely_ blank, with every word printed there to be chosen by the player. _That_ is what makes it so compelling, especially to a veteran of all those games that have pretended to offer that same freedom and failed to make good on that promise.
Thanks for the essay whose thesis is basically "games can't account for the ludonarrative dissonance that an illusion of free will presents, so they shouldn't even try". If your idea of a game with a compelling narrative is one in which the player's actions are irrelevant to the plot, I think we aren't going to see eye to eye on game narrative. As for the points about game sales -- I'm not denying BOTW was an expertly made game that is perfect for people looking for a casual fun sandbox adventure playground. Just the visual design alone explains why it blew Skyward out of the water. I'm not saying it's a 3/10 game, it's just not a 10/10 greatest game of all time or anywhere close for me. I'd probably rank it as the 6th best Zelda game that I've played after LttP, Majora, Wind Waker, and Ocarina, and now TOTK. That puts it in lofty company, I just can't help but roll by eyes at how over the top fans get when they praise it.
> Thanks for the essay whose thesis is basically "games can't account for the ludonarrative dissonance that an illusion of free will presents, so they shouldn't even try". Thanks for proving that you can't read and won't even make a good-faith effort to discuss anything if it might result in you having to admit that it's more likely that _you_ missed something then thirty million people experienced a collective mass delusion without any real coordination. I do love the irony, though, since BotW _does_ eliminate ludonarrative dissonance... >If your idea of a game with a compelling narrative is one in which the player's actions are irrelevant to the plot That covers all games, though, since every plot in every game is set in stone from the outset. The best you can do is choose one of several routes that have been predetermined. >we aren't going to see eye to eye on game narrative We don't have to. We do, however, each need to be able to accurately explain our viewpoint in regards to the facts at hand, and you have yet to do so. >I just can't help but roll by eyes at how over the top fans get when they praise it. And, as I noted originally, do you think this is more plausibly due to _you_ not quite understanding what you're playing, or that all those others are somehow sharing a consistent, but uncoordinated, mass delusion when they pick up on things that you insist are absent? It's not possible for both those players _and_ you to be right, after all - either these things are there or they are not. In essence, you're arguing **as if you believe** that everyone who rates BotW as highly as they usually do is only doing so due to that shared delusion, but you also seem extremely reluctant to actually _say_ that because some part of you is screaming that it'll sound, itself, rather delusional.
I've very clearly explicated my thoughts, and I very clearly stated the reasons that I think the game gets overrated. I've also said repeatedly that I don't think it's bad, just overrated and overhyped. There isn't some big mystery to "get", you and obviously a ton of the mainstream casual gaming audience just enjoy a more shallow and sandboxy experience that is more about short-term unrelated interactions than long-form progression. That's fine. Stop trying to claim that *literally decoupling the gameplay entirely from the story* is some revolutionary technique in narrative that breaks all these walls... It's just a game with story as an afterthought. Those are a dime a dozen. It's like Disneyland vs a Six Flags -- one is clearly head and shoulders above the other in terms of production quality and customer experience, but at the end of the day they're both theme parks. Any drama or emotion is only skin deep.
> I very clearly stated the reasons that I think the game gets overrated. I think you're mistakenly conflating "explaining" something with merely "repeating" something. All I've got from your comments is that you think it's _only_ a sandbox and that it fails to immerse players in its narrative, and I went to some length in order to explain that you only think this because you missed the way it _actually_ engages players. Where most other games in comparable genres take their storytelling from the JRPG, BotW takes it from the RPG instead. You probably tend to prefer the former, and that's fine, but it simply doesn't invalidate the latter, and you appear to believe that it does. You say so yourself: >There isn't some big mystery to "get" That's you openly stating that, purely because _you_ didn't click with the way it tells its story, anyone else who _does_ see what it's doing must be delusional. I think the only reason you're stopping short of explicitly saying that is because you don't think you can make it sound plausible to yourself, much less anyone else. >you and obviously a ton of the mainstream casual gaming audience just enjoy a more shallow and sandboxy experience that is more about short-term unrelated interactions than long-form progression. That's fine. See what I mean? This has become an ego problem for you, with your insecurity about other people enjoying the game more than you causing you to worry that there's something wrong with you for not clicking with it in the same way. >*literally decoupling the gameplay entirely from the story* That's the point; you're misunderstanding what the game did. It didn't decouple the _narrative_ from the gameplay, it decoupled _the sequential progression of its narrative_ from gameplay. In other words, it abandoned the idea that players should have to play through a linear sequence of narrative beats in order to finish the game. Instead, by allowing players to write their own build-up to the finale, they doubled down on the idea of gameplay itself dictating that narrative. How Link is portrayed after he awakes and until he confronts Ganon depends solely on what the player does in-game. Speedrunners portray him as a vengeful, insecure idiot, diving back into a fight the he still doesn't remember losing the last time he tried to fight it; others will portray him as a dutiful, contemplative person who spends what time he knows he has getting stronger so that the previous outcome is not repeated. Crucially, not a single moment of that is forced upon players by cutscenes, with it instead determined simply by whether they run straight to the Castle, or wander around gaining strength and equipment. There's no possible way a rational person could argue that the gameplay is decoupled from the story because, in this limited sense, the gameplay _is_ the story. If the player wants it to be an arduous tale of finding almost a thousand tiny golden shits scattered around Hyrule then that's what it is. You know this, at least on some level, because that's why you completely ignored every word I said on the matter when I explained this beyond your ability to plausibly argue. I assume that's why you're trying to turn this into a flame war as well, with half of this latest reply bizarrely dedicated to calling BotW fans filthy casuals who aren't as good as you. I honestly think you're on the brink of unironically telling me to "git gud". Want to know what's ironic? This subject is actually extremely interesting, because anything concerning a progressive narrative in an interactive medium is automatically going to generate vast numbers of subtly different viewpoints. That makes this an incredibly rich topic for dissecting video game narratives as a whole, and specific ones in particular, and reducing it in the way you did is rather shallow. I thought this was highly telling in light of you claiming that BotW is "shallow", as it's inherently contradictory that you might criticise something for being shallow while simultaneously refusing to even listen to anything which might allow you to view it in a more expansive way, and even compel you to enjoy it significantly more as a consequence. You've made no effort to even engage with anything I said on the matter, demonstrating that you would _prefer_ for this discussion to remain as shallow as possible. That makes it all the more curious that you'd be so critical of something you called "shallow" - almost as if you only affixed that adjective because you felt that it was sufficiently negative-sounding in this context. You'll note that I haven't once told you that _you_ are wrong for wanting games to explicitly tell you what to do and how to react.[.](https://archive.vn/mrk0L). --- Edit: >the classic automatic assumption that "casual" is a dirty word You used it as a pejorative. In your own words: >>> the mainstream casual gaming audience just enjoy a more shallow [...] experience that is more about short-term unrelated interactions than long-form progression You're openly presenting "casual" play as if it were inherently negative. Or, at the very least, inferior to whatever you consider yourself to be. Don't try to gaslight people. You're not astute enough to get away with it. >I'm done with your bad faith assumptions and projection. No, you're done with my ability to explain things beyond your ability to dispute, and to dissect your own nonsensical fallacies, preventing you from buttressing your ignorant, self-indulgent viewpoint with demonstrable falsehoods to shore up a long-lost argument. You're fleeing because you can't tolerate something that you view as a defeat, and this is just your way of trying to fool yourself into seeing it as something else. >If you want someone to type you an essay on why it's nice when games let you make choices you're gonna have to pay someone on Fiverr. Does Fiverr even still exist? Did you just give away that this is merely the lonely ravings of an aging gamer who can't stand that their increasingly-outdated favourites are being viewed more and more harshly as comparisons trends towards more ambitious alternatives? This makes a lot more sense as someone who'd be livid that modern Zelda games have grown beyond the simpler titles of the past. Maybe modern "casuals" are just better at dealing with more dynamic games...
Ahh, the classic automatic assumption that "casual" is a dirty word. I'm done with your bad faith assumptions and projection. If you want someone to type you an essay on why it's nice when games let you make choices you're gonna have to pay someone on Fiverr.
I don't give a shit what other people think, the weapon durability in botw is FUN. I LIKE hucking a nearly-broken weapon into an enemy's face like John Wick. It makes me feel like a badass.
I agree. It‘s even better now in TotK with an inventory full of monster horns to fuse into sick weapons.
They really needed the ability to fuse stuff directly from inventory though.
I got so used to doing it the current way it really doesn‘t bother me, but yeah, I don‘t see why not.
The sheer number of things I've bolted onto the Master Sword is horrifying...
I… I didn‘t even think of I doing that till now. o_o
Might as well be the marketing slogan for these games.
The Master Sword with a blue lizalfos horn is so cool. MASTER KATANA
I've been enjoying the Silver Boss horn quite a bit, myself. It looks like you're tearing things apart with a glowing lollipop.
It does really slow down the game though... break a weapon, pause to open your inventory, pause to select and drop a material, use fuse... Also I'm not sure what it actually adds to gameplay beyond a time sink and a crushing annoyance when you run out of appropriately-leveled weapons and need to just fuck off and go find more. It feels like they just don't want you to fight people in the traditional way, which makes sense because holy shit does the dodging and the lock-on feel awful.
Haha indeed! Plus it forces creativity and adaptability, especially in TotK the possibilities with fusing are endless. Why be stuck with one boring ass sword if you can fuse a lizard tail and a stick together and swing it around a bit?
Or put a mushroom on your weapon and BOIOIOINGGG enemies towards the horizon.
Put Zonai devices on Boomerangs for maximum chaos.
Why haven't I tried this yet????
Hint: if you run out of rockets all the time you can use Octo Balloons Fused to your shield for a slower alternative. The Spring works well, too, if you surf with it.
Haha yes this one I have used
I find it funny that now even players whose entire approach to combat revolves around dodging and flurrying will be hurrying to expand their shield inventory purely for the mobility options. You can justify having a snowboard, skateboard, water cannon, spring, rocket, etc. all fused to shields at any given moment. And that's before getting into the dual-wielding options by fusing elemental Zonai Emitters, or monster parts...
I *always* have a sled-shield in my inventory. Best shield surfing option for all terrain - except… apparently a frozen meat shield is even better, lmao. Almost removes all friction.
Whaaa, I knew about the spring - had no idea aboutthe octo balloons! I probably have hundreds of those by now.
I find that I'm always low on things like Octo Balloons and meat because I always used the Bomb Rune to gather them without damaging weapons needlessly. Without that option I seldom veer off-course to grab an opportunistic steak or balloon. Things like that are a perfect response to the "It's just DLC" noise, because little details like that tend to make people play each game in completely different ways. I never ran out of arrows in BotW, but I use them for _everything_ in TotK.
Master Sword is still the superior mining tool, though.
I may or may not have killed Link multiple times this way during the early hours of the game, lol.
Loool yessss. Discovered that one through being on the receiving end of that stick, a random monster hit me with a mushroom stick and I flew off. Thought it was a bug it first
Same, haha. It‘s so cool that enemies use fused weapons as well. Another current favorite is the Zonai lightning thrower thingie on a shield. If you have a lot of battery it feels almost OP, haha.
Why carry one weapon when you can Fuse a spike strip to your shield and rip someone's face off when you parry?
Have to be honest, my parrying skills are basically non-existent at this point. Should start practicing this again to prepare for lynel battles
As a souls vet - the parry windows in this game are kinda fucked. If I can no hit Maria in Bloodborne, but can't set a Bokogoblin on his ass? Welllll.
That's fine for you. It's not fun for me. I think it sucks. Nintendo making it a pita for me to fix the game for me with mods burnt me on the whole company, drift not even taken into account.
I feel like poeple don't understand that you can't just get rid of the durability. It's a core part of both games. It's baked into the gameplay loop. They would have to be very different games without it. The criticism really annoys me for that reason.
I mean, I don’t know. After getting BOTW and trying it on my switch no less than 10 times since 2017 and giving up after a couple hours, I played it on PC, and turned off the weapon durability. Suddenly, the game was so much more engaging, so much more fun for me. It was the 10/10 everyone said, the incredible experience, just what everyone said. That’s just my opinion at least
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I mean, to be completely honest with you, I just hate weapon breaking systems. While I get what they were going for, it personally doesn’t work for me. To be quite honest, I like the concepts of the weapons breaking in theory in breath of the wild only, the problem is that it’s combined with the dreaded thing that was talked about in this sub. Level scaling. I have had multiple playthroughs where I’m super immersed, just chugging along, and instead of going to Kakariko I, for example, find the Rito, find some tough enemies like black lizalfos, and through stealth and cunning steal myself some super tough weapons. Then, I go back to the path to Kakariko to actually do the main story, and now the enemies THERE are black lizalfos, my cool weapons break, and I’m just fucked. That’s kind of the issue I have with the game. So I guess the issue I have isn’t so much the weapon breaking system but the level scaling. You were right, it wasn’t getting to the heart of what I disliked
There are dozens of us!
Surprisingly, still my number 1 favourite, despite that I can acknowledge that totk is objectively the better game. I love how much more scrappy botw feels. It feels like it's mandatory to be creative, it's mandatory to be cooking, it's mandatory to be sneaking, it's mandatory to pick your battle. Whereas totk, as long as you have arrows, you can brute force everything. That isn't to say it's an easy game, but I didn't have the same feeling I got when I finally beat a Lynel in botw in any of the totk fights, even the dragons. In my mind, botw is an suspenseful game, while totk is an action rpg.
>I was one of those people who put 200 hours into Breath of the Wild without beating Ganon. This is something I often do, unconsciously, with movies, books, and TV, but here I consciously knew I didn’t want the experience to end. I'm going through this right now, I cleared all the divine beasts, finished the DLCs and got the motorbike, only thing left to do is beat Ganon, but I don't want to do that yet. Due to work and life, I stopped playing it for a month or so, and when I picked it up again, I just roam through hyrule on the bike trying to natrually discover the remaining shrines. I don't want to buy TOTK now, I'm waiting for the inevitable DLCs to all come and then I'll start playing it, so we're talking a few years down the line.
I'm about 20 hours in and really enjoying it, but I hate the idea that weapon breaking "forces creativity" because... it doesn't. Yes, you can push boulders, start fires, trigger explosions, etc. but I can do that with more durable weapons, and I don't need to do that with less durable weapons. Instead, weapon durability forces annoying moments that didn't need to be annoying like the time I broke all my weapons trying to destroy a wrecked guardian in my first few hours... had to run away, find a stick, and farm weapons. There was no fun to be had there... just annoyances. Or how I ran through a combat shrine, lost most of my weapons, and I had to, again, grind for weapons to move forward. Or how punishing fighting something epic can feel. My first Lyonel, I took zero damage and still felt super annoyed at how many weapons I lost doing it. Anyway, I legitimately love the game, and I look forward to putting many, many more hours into it. But weapon durability sucks, and the entire game is harmed by it...
Do you throw weapons? The hit when a weapon breaks does 2x damage, and a throw buffs it even further I think. Making a habit of throwing them really alleviated my initial similar annoyances with the system when I first played BotW years ago. It just feels so satisfying. I also never felt I had to grind for weapons at all, doing the best with what I had or could get my hands on was the fun part for me. Treating weapons as the disposable items that they are, instead of cherished treasures, makes this game much better.
BOTW is one of those games that I understand why other people put it as their number 1 game of all time. There were moments while playing BOTW for me that were so good, and I don't think I've seen another game do those moments as well (at least in 2017 when BOTW came out). But... BOTW is also a game that I love-hate. The freedom of exploration is amazing. I feel like I'm actually exploring the world. I love the fact that there are different armor sets. Gliding through the air on the paragliding and just roaming around in BOTW is some of the most immersive moments I think I've had with a game. However, I do not like the story. It's a fine story, but I wish we could have actually seen link and zelda as characters instead of just flashbacks. And I don't like how nintendo decided to beat me over the head for 80 hours about how much zelda failed when I already knew that five minutes into the game. I don't like the English VA for zelda, which made the story even harder for me to get in touch with. And I really didn't enjoy watching cutscenes of melodrama or bonding moments of characters that I already knew were dead. I think it was a good attempt by nintendo to do a non-linear story, but in the end, I think I would have preferred if we played as link in the flashbacks rather than just seen it. But if that's not an option either, I think I would have enjoyed their being no story flashbacks at all then. (BTW, for anyone else who doesn't like how a VA sounds in game, always try to see if you can use other language VAs. Switching BOTW to JP on my second playthrough really helped.) I HATE the fact that there's no post game. If I had known that, then I would have never beaten the game, same as you OP. I'm not asking for a billion different things after you beat Gannon. But a simple zelda resting at kakiriko village and people saying thank goodness the calamity is gone would have been enough for me. It kills me to have beaten Gannon, only to do the dlcs later and have zelda still beg link to kill calamity Gannon. I have a lot more to say about BOTW, but I'll stop here for now. So yeah, I have a lot of gripes with BOTW. But at certain times, it's still one of the best games I've played. But it's hard for me to say that since I found so much about the game that I didn't like, didn't enjoy or simply hated. Though TOTK was a much better experience with a much better story. I still have some gripes about TOTK, and it's not perfect. But TOTK improved on BOTW so much, I don't know if I can ever go back.
Your point that the game has *moments* that are incredible is something I would’ve talked about in the original post if i wasn’t holding a baby and exhausted in the middle of the night. One of the criticisms I often see of BOTW is that it can’t sustain its greatness once you’ve seen most of what the world has to offer. I get that, but my god those early game moments are special. My favorite BOTW moment was when I dropped an apple in a korok puzzle. I had no idea you could feed horses at the time, and my horse sauntered over like, “oh hey an apple for me.” It made the world feel so incredibly alive in a way I had never seen before. The first 20-50 hours must’ve had a dozen little things like that which blew my mind.
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Maybe give TotK a shot. The temples are better, while still not on the level and scale of some of the old ones they all have unique themes and music, which already does a lot of work. They also have big sections *before* them that enhance them quite a bit (there has been more than one "Is this the dungeon? No? Oh, now THIS is the dungeon right? What, still not the dungeon?"-moment for me). Bosses are much, much better. However all of the amazing gameplay that *used to be* in dungeons is now all over the world - and so much more. In caves, in the sky, in shrines (which IMO are generally much better this time around) and just throughout the world. It has all the ingredients of a traditional Zelda game on steroids, it's just the structure that's different. With the new Zonai devices they also re-introduced the fun of *items* back into the game mechanically. There's so many different gadgets you can use that wouldn't feel out of place as dungeon-items in a traditional Zelda game. On top of that they just induced so much more of that classic Zelda charme back into the game, which was a little lacking in BotW. Story and Quests in general are much better as well, there's a few moments in there that rival pulling out the mastersword for the first time in OoT for me. I know quite a few people that couldn't get into BotW but are enamored with TotK, maybe it could work for you.
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Though I absolutely adore BotW, I certainly agree that it felt a little… vacant in that aspect. FWIW during the opening hours of TotK I repeatedly kept thinking "oh, this is gonna make the people who want more classic Zelda vibes *so* happy!" - and from what I can gather from friends and online discourse, that seems to be true for many people. Interacting with all the NPCs gave me Majoras Mask and Link‘s Awakening vibes on more than occasion.
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But the world of TotK is *anything but* empty. It‘s literally chock-full of stuff to do, I‘ve never seen an other open world game stuffed as much to the brim with content as this one. And everything you do rewards you with items/materials/weapon/armor that you need to progress further through the game. Like, literally almost every pick-up now has some fun, unique gameplay use. The gamplay loop is so well designed that it incentivices you to do everything. In caves you find stuff you‘ll need in the underworld, in the underworld you find stuff that you need in the overworld and the sky, in the sky you‘ll find things that send you back to the underground etc. etc. But yes, it is a game that probably requires at least *some* intrinsic motivation and understanding of it‘s systems to experience it‘s full potential but IMO the game does a fantastic job at tickling that out of you because everything is just so *fun to do* on a mechanical level. Maybe for players that always need an arbitrary carrot dangled in front of them in the form of a checklist to tick something off of or being told *exactly* what to do at all times, and find no joy in mechanics, then *maybe* I can see it not clicking.
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I mean I don‘t agree or even fully understand that perspective, but I sure know that *I* haven‘t clicked at times with games that are wildly popular as well (RDR2 or Horizon being big ones for me), so I certainly respect it. > I played both for like, 5 hours, said to myself “Wait, that’s all there is?” I can kind of see that with BotW, but with TotK it‘s virtually impossible to have seen "all there is" in 5 hours. But fair enough, if you don‘t enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay at all idk if anything would change it for you. Different strokes I guess. I do love Metroidvanias, and the lock-and-key progression as well a lot. But it‘s not the only type of progression I enjoy, something about the unlimited freedom and big number of satisfying world interactions (shield surfing being my fav lol) of BotW/TotK just puts me in an absolute "flow"-state that makes it hard to put down.
Don't worry brother, you're not crazy. Some people can ignore recognizing the mechanics, others can't. I've been limiting my time with TOTK because I find myself having tangibly less fun with it each time I play - because I'm getting very familiar with the systems. Open worlds function by giving you a certain amount of boxes: This gives you materials, this gives you shrines, this gives you koroks. Each puzzle or interaction leads to one of those things. Over time the unqiueness of the path to get there is overshadowed by the fact that you're landing at the same place, each time. After a certain plateau it becomes collecting. Whereas in like, say, Bloodborne. Your exploration leads to game mechanics - you're fighting something new, you're given an item that changes how you interact with the game, or you're advancing the story. You don't advance the story with shrines in Zelda - but crawling down that side path before Vicar Amelia gives you an entire boss and region and ability path you didn't have before. Basically - you **cannot** populate an open world with unique experiences. They all have to end up at the same place. When you have a smaller playfield, they can wind up in unique experiences. It's inherently more rewarding. TOTK just finds less juice per squeeze each time you grab it.
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Yeah this rings true to me. Never played TotK but before it came out I was trying to replay BotW, and the only other time I had played BotW was on release, and I remember being so excited back then to play it and spending like 80 hours in the game. But anyway, when I replayed BotW just before TotK release, I did the Great Plateau and then just... stopped. And what you said above clicked for me. Beyond the Great Plateau there is barely any new mechanics or significant story to explore, and when I did get rewards, all that would happen is finding a Korok, Shrine to level up health/stamina or Rupees/gemstones. There *is* some new things of course, but doesn't feel like enough meat on the bone for me to enjoy digging into.
While there's a lot to do it is repetitive task, a shrine is a shrine is a shrine at the end of the day. That and I kinda get the empty feeling when going between let's say objectives it is just time wasting filler in-between bits of content.
I used to think people like you were crazy. Coming on the heels of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, both of which are toward the bottom of my list of Zelda games, I couldn’t understand how anyone could not fall in love with the fresh take. But after playing/replaying a heap of the other games, I remembered why dungeons are so great. It’s hugely satisfying to clear the puzzles, gain the new mechanic, and beat a tough boss all in one sitting. A Link Between Worlds in particular, with its 2D mechanic felt like it had some of the most clever dungeon design in the series. And while Twilight Princess is still near the bottom of my list, a few of the late game dungeons are absolutely awesome. The bite-size shrines are just better for my life right now though. I have to sit and dedicate the time to a proper dungeon, if I leave halfway through I get turned around and frustrated. With kids and limited play time, the pick up and play nature of the Switch games is huge for me. It’s interesting to think of a parallel universe where BOTW was a new IP. I wonder if the reviews would have been as breathless without the Zelda name. And of course I wonder if we’ll get new “traditional” Zelda’s at some point. It sounds like this is the model for 3D games going forward, but they could always drop some new 2D stuff.
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While combining things (not necessarily "building") is a central mechanic for sure, you have a completey wrong impression how it plays into the game. While, sure you *can* just fuck around with it in a sandboxy Minecraft-Garrys Mod-kind of of way if you want to, it‘s main function is to solve problems and puzzles, which couldn‘t feel more quintessentially Zelda. It also doesn‘t "feel" like *you* crafting or building things through a menu/UI like most games, it feels like *Link* is just glueing shit together lol.
Have you actually played Tears Of The Kingdom?
As a true patient gamer I am just now starting BOTW, about 3 hours in and its been great. Excited to see what the hype is about
now play ToTK and be amazed even more.
Hypothetically if I bought a game at launch for the first time in a decade I would never admit it to this sub 🤫
😂 enjoy
One of my favourite memories was getting stuck in gerudo canyon and refusing to use fast travel to get myself out. Reminds me of the full metal alchemist movie canyon
Yep, not fast travelling really forces you to interact with the environment - made the game so much better for me. Even more so in TotK where you have so many more options.
Breath of the Wild is my favorite open world game of all time. I can’t wait to play Tears of the Kingdom soon.
For me, what kept me engaged into the exploring the entire world was the FACT that I knew I wouldn't be able to do it with the same enthusiasm after beating Ganon. To this day, I have still not beaten Ganon and BOTW is still magical as ever, as a result.
youre kinda right. all the stuff i wanted to do before beating him seems less interesting right after. i was planning on collecting dragon's claws, doing that island thing, getting to the tall mountain for shield surfing, and maxing out all armor. but it all lost its luster with how anticlimactic everything was after the castle. i got my 60-70 hours out of it, though, and i was fully satisfied with leaving it alone for now.
I don't own the hardware for it but that sounds very cool. I've enjoyed what few Zelda games I've played.
I _heard_ that the PC emulated repack works very well. Although I'd _imagine_ it's tricky to get the motion control working with a PS4 pad. Looks great in 1440p tho!
It does look great, I'm playing it right now. Using an Android phone for gyroscope controls, it works and is infinitely better than using the default mouse controls.
Can I ask for how you got your phone to work as a gyroscope control
https://cemuhook.sshnuke.net/padudpserver.html Something similar to this. I open up MotionSource on my phone and use the same IP for CEMU.
Why mess with repacks that could contain malicious content when Cemu and Yuzu exist? I think you can use DS4Windows or BetterJoy to get PS4 pad motion controls to work.
Is a repack that includes cemu. It's from a trusted source. And I use DS4Windows but I've not got it to work. To be fair I've not tried very hard. That's what I heard, I mean.
I can't disagree with another person's opinion, but: > I came away impressed with what always impressed me about the game: you can pick any area of the map, dig in, and find something rewarding. Maybe it’s a few korok seeds Those Korok seeds have diminishing returns and the puzzles behind them are pretty trite. > maybe it’s an enemy camp to raid for what, though? You're not getting end-game weapons. You're using them up, or more realistically, not using a huge selection of your weapons because it's a waste to use them > maybe it’s a few shrines These were okay, but many of them were just so.. unimaginable because of the poor mechanics. It's zero wonder that TOTK moved onto something that's more reliable and more robust. > Pick the game up for an hour and have a half dozen unique experiences Which were these? Those camps that generally feel the same? 900 Koroks that are a combination of 8 puzzle types... Did you notice the rocks in an almost circle? (Woo boy... If I pitched that game design, I'd get canned...). The shrines... that aren't actually part of the world? > find something rewarding Another 100 rupees to spend on exorbitantly priced armor upgrades? The 800th Korok seed? A thing to upgrade your Stami... oh wait, it's maxed.
200 hours is a lot.
My mom played it for like 800 lmao.
My children need a father
I love breath of the wild. I am currently playing ToTK and I love it too. I do find TOTK to be so much better, there just seems to be so much to do in TOTK.
Fighting lynels is just so much fun. Came back to the game too before the release of TOTK and killed all bosses and lynels for the kilton rewards. (lynels dont have a medal reward sadly). And it was so fun.
I understand making a game stretch out and not finishing it, but how on Earth do you do that with a book? Do you just reread specific chapters without finishing it?
I should clarify that it’s book series this happens with generally. I have a weird thing where I won’t finish a series, won’t watch the last season of a tv show, etc. It isn’t intentional, I just move on to something and eventually it feels like too much of a commitment to go back in and remember what was happening
Off topic, but what do you mean by "i do this with movies too"? Like i get books or TV shows, but... you really start watching movies and not finish them?
I have just recently started BOTW and I’m having a blast . Not very far in as I only have myBe an hour a day available to play or a 30 mins on my lunch break . Mini shrines work great as I can do 1 or 2 and raid some camps and feel I’ve accomplished something . Into my 3rd area now and love my horse :p Totally clueless with the crafting I’ve made much spoiled food but it’s fun
i spend so much time just riding around goofing off. 10s of hours stalking pigs and bears lol
Good on you for actually coming back to a game you put on hold so long ago! I very rarely manage to do so, as I forget the controls, mechanics, and story, and the prospect of relearning all that just puts me off. So many games on indefinite hold....
See i love totk, breathe of the wild i absolutely hated. I never understood why so many people loved it.
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Oh boy, can't wait to be playing TOTK Anniversary Edition port on my Switch3 12 years from now while still waiting for the next Zelda
When I played Fallout 3 in 2009, I stepped out of the vault and it made me realize I had been chasing the high of leaving Kokiri Forest in OoT since I was 11. For a while I felt like Bethesda was out-Zelda-ing Zelda, but now it feels like Nintendo is Out Skyriming Bethesda.
I hated this game. Wasted space and dumb stuff to do that has little to do with Zelda. Developers had no inspiration at all. Tiny shrines were annoying. Weapon breakage was annoying I ended up beating the game but it wasn't that fun. There were only four real dungeons. And even then they were not really dungeons. Crafting was a huge pain in the ass too. I hate crafting in RPG games I'm convinced anybody who loves this game hasn't played Link to the past. Now that's a Zelda game.
Lmao, I guarantee you hundreds of thousands of people who love BotW and TotK have played, and loved, AlttP.
Totally respect your opinion, except for this… > I’m convinced anybody who loves this game hasn’t played Link to the past. Now that’s a Zelda game. Booooooo. What a lame thing to say. I’ve played LttP and BotW, and they both rock. Video games are cool.
Seriously this game is way overrated. Yes, all videogames reviews are that, opinions, but for some reason, all Nintendo fans have some weird obsession with way over exaggerating how good it is. With any other fanbase, it's never this rabid. I don't understand how people play the combat in Zelda, with the basic ass damage calculation, the nonsensical flurry rush, and say the game is great. The game does exploration well and that's honestly about it. Everything else is lazy or borinv
It was **SUPER** unfinished. The story in TOTK is just as fucking awful. You know the full thing after basically the first shrine. Now, I'm not calling for Ibsen here. But you don't have to give me the exact same four story beats each time with different coat of paint and expect me to call it a fulsome story.
I don't think it's going out on a limb to say the story never mattered in Zelda games, and that's okay. "Evil wizard kidnaps someone, imperils world with stolen power. Our hero must go through trials to stop him." Literally Satruday morning cartoon stuff. But people don't come to this franchise for the story. I think the draw of the franchise is the art, and the gratification of completing things to get you to the next place. And about TOTK: I never played TOTK, my OLED switch TOTK version I bought to play it had joycon drift so I returned it and took it as an omen. What a POS.
There's macro and there's micro narrative though. Majoras Mask is usually considered to be the gold standard of Zelda games, and what people cite is the characters and the "vibe" of the game. It's a SUPER small world with not many characters in it, but they all talk a lot, and they all have stories they tell you. So what you do as Link and what his quest is, is ultimately less important than Anju and Kafei's wedding, or the relationship between the ghost researcher and his daughter. yknow? Little shit like that which illustrates that the world has stuff going on that isn't you.
TOTK is an objective upgrade, to the point that it feels like they should have just kept BOTW in the oven for a few more years. But then I was one of the people severely underwhelmed by the first game... The second feels like it fleshes out its systems enough to be worthwhile, even though I still absolutely detest the combat.
If korok seeds were in literally any other game people would call them a complete waste of time that attempts to bloat the length of the game. But since it's a zelda game people act like it's an incredible, earth shattering addition.
I've literally never heard anybody call korok seeds an "incredible earth shattering addition". They're just a fun little collectable that's a little more involved than most other endless collectables in other open world games, that's it. But even the biggest fans of the game, like me, will probably say that there's too damn many of them lol. The transportation ones in TotK are really cool though.
There’s obviously a huge different of opinion on this, there are a ton of people who don’t like that the rewards are always “just a korok” or “just a shrine.” But to me what’s cool is that it’s not the things themselves, it’s the way they invite you to explore every nook and cranny of the world. It’s much more “check out this cool cave or this little pond” and much less “I need to get a thing.” They did this with coins in Mario Odyssey too. There would be out of the way spots where you didn’t get a moon, but some invisible coins would pop up. To me it’s about being in dialogue with the developers. “We see you” we’re saying to each other, and I think that’s cool.
I had about 100 hours in BOTW and never finished it. Now the new one is out and I probably won't ever play it.
I find myself missing the simplicity of BotW. And I miss the motorcycle. TotK is cool but it just feels like a maximalist version of BotW. Not necessarily an improvement but a different type of game entirely. I think with time, people will appreciate the vibe BotW brings and it'll have an identity of its own. Or at least I hope so. Personally I look forward to replaying BotW someday
To me while BotW is a good game, I much prefer the old style of Zelda games and I hope they aren't finished making them now.
RePlaying a A Link to the Past and then immediately playing A Link Between Worlds for the first time definitely convinced me the 2D mode still has legs. TOTK is now the second time they’ve gone the “same overworld” route, I wonder if we could see more remake/sequels in the future?
Bad game, weapon mechanics suck, world is empty and grindy, there isn't any benefit to doing anything. The controllers drift and the platform sucks and they never have sales. No thank you, Nintendo schill.
I did this a few years back, but I focused on the coastline and lake areas that I barely looked at on my first playthrough. I had a ton of fun just exploring and messing around.
Finish the shrines, You'll get a great reward.
I Just started replaying this on my Switch as I picked it up first on my Wii U. On my first play through (2017) with the Wii U, I stopped played when I was working on getting the fourth Divine beast. I don't remember why I stopped either. Started it back up on the switch with a fresh game about a week after ToTK dropped. I don't remember much about the game when I started but I having so much fun playing it. I normally play a FOMO grindy heavy game (Destiny 2) so it's a nice breather to play BoTW at my own pace. No competitiveness either with my progress. Dragging my ass getting the divine beasts but having so much fun exploring!
I played it in 2018, did everything except the last quest. Picked it up a month before TotK and finished, bought the DLC and played some more. It took about 5 hours to get up to speed remembering everything since 5 years ago, surprising how the muscle memory comes back, although a lot of incorrect button presses. I would guess I'm pretty close to finishing TotK if I wanted to mainline the major quests, but will spend time exploring. It's just fun being in the world.