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+--- Thread: Zelda - Breath of the Wild (/showthread.php?tid=6973)
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - Dark Jaguar - 17th June 2016
I thought I'd make a proper thread dedicated to the hype train this particular game has started.
I for one am very excited about this one. I've noted how many gamers have found Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword to be disappointing. Their reasons have been all over the place, but at this point I've got a good handle on what's changed (and for what matter, what Wind Waker did right). Namely, the freedom to roam was taken away from players in both Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. This has been a steady trend going back to when Zelda games got more cinematic. In order to direct those more movie-like moments, they had to funnel the player into a number of "plot gates", and Nintendo's been feeling the pushback as of late for such choices.
This also goes for their recent 2D games. The Capcom-made ones suffered from "gating" the player through and not really allowing a full sense of exploration, though to a lesser extent than TP and SS (huh, those are some problematic acronyms).
For my part, my favorite Zelda games are universally the oldest ones. Link to the Past, in recent years, has finally surpassed Link's Awakening in my standing. Link's Awakening is good, but Link to the Past allows more freedom. The very first Zelda game, while it has the least to do and least variety in puzzle design, had a truly open world more open than any later game. Link to the Past is a close second though. Link to the Past, once you get past the opening, lets you go wherever you like. You can break sequence right from the start, although clearing Death Mountain before the other two palaces does require some creativity that the designers may not have intended. Once you reach the dark world, once again you're free to take on the dungeons in an almost completely free way.
Ocarina of Time will always have a place in my list of favorite games, but it's luster has faded a bit. It is still a very well done game, but it was the start of a bad trend. Everything I can complain about with newer Zelda games got it's start with OOT. I never "hated" Navi like a lot of gamers, but her basic design of "hint giver" was not well done. She forced herself on you far too often and annoyed you into listening to her hints when you might have wanted to solve the puzzle yourself. While the overworld is far more open than later games like TP, it was also the start of forcing you along a gated path. There wasn't much of a way to do dungeons out of order, with only a few notable exceptions. It still did at least allow you to wander off to other locations and explore a bit though. I think we all loved finding that fishing pond for the first time.
Majora's Mask continued that trend, but it did offer an amazingly well designed experience in it's own right, and I gotta appreciate it for what it is. It is still one of my favorites just for being such an odd one.
Link Between Worlds was Nintendo's first attempt at a return to form. It is great, and really challenges Link to the Past as my all-time favorite game. It does have a more "open" design than LTTP, which is saying something, but that does come at a cost. In their effort to give the player choice, it skews a little too close to Megaman-like stage design. All the dungeons are "equal" difficulty, save the "final" one unlocked after beating them. For that matter, every dungeon only requires one specific item to solve it's puzzles. There's no sense of steadily using more and more tools to solve ever more elaborate puzzle design. The items themselves can all be obtained without needing to dive into the major dungeons, but that's because you just buy them all from the sales bunny camping in your house. There's no real sense of accomplishment in getting those items. You just grind up money and buy them. That's a shame, because the "side dungeons", those little caves dotting Zelda games with smaller scale challenges, would have been the perfect place to stick those items in as reward. You could still do things in any order, but you'd still need to find each item and solve puzzles to reach them. For all that I said, it is still a very well made game and I go back to it more often than I have a lot of recent Zelda games. I still highly recommend it.
So that leads us here. Not only do they seem to be learning from the design issues of recent Zelda games, they're adding in all sorts of fun things to do. I'm not a big fan of item durability in my Zelda games, but if they do it right, maybe those items will just feel like those "temp" weapons you could pick up off enemies in Wind Waker (Double Dragon style weapons, basically). The open world design should have that sense of a vastness that Wind Waker had, but on actual land. Even the art design really calls back to Zelda 1. (I've always loved how Zelda, as a series, isn't afraid to completely reinvent it's art style every few games, so if you aren't a fan of one art style, don't worry, they'll be trying something else in a few years.) The sense of loneliness in this vast world means they will be skewing away from cinematic narrative in favor of letting you put together the story by just exploring the world. Think something like Myst or the Souls series. I don't need everything spelled out for me, so this is great.
Lastly, the things I've seen hint at a focus on sequence breaking and emergent gameplay. The game I enjoyed the MOST last year was Phantom Pain, and it wasn't even finished :D. The reason? The designers focused on giving the player a bunch of tools, yes, but more than that, focused on making the tools interact with other tools in interesting ways, and the environment besides. Phantom Pain is a game that is designed with the ethos "if you can do it, cool!". The sheer variety players have come up with to solve problems in the game is amazing. There's many a time you may find yourself surrounded, about to be discovered, and you end up just pulling up your list of items and saying "okay, what combination will open this lock?". For example, helicopter parked somewhere and you want to take it out? You could shoot a rocket at it. That's boring though. Air drop a tank on it!
As an aside, a quick fix to the gender issue would be simply letting a player pick their own pronoun at the start of the game, with the game script accordingly switching that pronoun around as you play. Link is androgynous enough for that to work with minimal effort.
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - A Black Falcon - 17th June 2016
My opinions on what you say are very different from yours.
- Twilight Princess is, despite my being seriously disappointed by the story (and you may or may not recall that that was the first Zelda game where I was hoping for a playable female character, tool... it's really sad that ten years later we've regressed, since at least TP has Midna!), easily the best Zelda game since OoT. TP is an amazing game with the series' best art design, a great world to explore, and fantastic gameplay. OoT remains my favorite Zelda game, but TP does a great job building on its model. (Skyward Sword is very good too, but I dislike that they made the overworld into essentially a giant dungeon. Playing through a dungeon, then you reach the dungeon and have to play through a dungeon, is a bit much -- by the time I get to the actual dungeon I'm ready to do something else, but I'm only halfway through the area! It's also disappointing that if you return to the sky you can only go to one start point in each of the three areas, so unlike other Zelda games, you can't break up your adventuring with trips elsewhere -- you're stuck until you beat that whole segment of the game unless you want to trek back to that point again, which I don't. And of course, while SS looks great, TP's art style is better.) And as for A Link Between Worlds, it's good and is far better than the somewhat bad DS Zelda games, but doesn't grab me like the GB or GBC games do; part of that is the LttP connection, I'm sure, it brings back a version of that world, etc, but beyond that I'd rather get items and keep them, rather than having to rent stuff! Some people like that mechanic, but I don't really. I don't know, it's good, and I have had fun with it as far as I've gotten, but I didn't get anywhere near the end and it's been some months now since I played the game... I'd rather keep playing Fire Emblem instead.
- Link's Awakening is of course my favorite 2d Zelda game by a wide margin, and Oracle of Ages/Seasons is second; I really love those games! They look great, play great, and are the perfect 2d Zelda experiences. Sure, once I played it on the SNES I eventually decided LttP is a very good game, but it's also the most over-rated Zelda game in my book and I'll never love it like many other Zelda fans do. And as for gating in Oracles, I prefer that to LttP's too-open world -- when you can just wander almost everywhere from the start, the sense of adventure as you get new abilities that let you get to completely new areas is lost! Of course the LttP overworld is also the most boring design ever, with its grid of nine squares design I have criticized before, and I still dislike the LttP character sprite art, but enough on that one. Breath of the Wild's map looks nice, but the very open design, like an open-world game or the original Zelda, is something I like less than traditional 3d Zelda or GB/GBC Zelda segmented designs. Of course given the huge popularity of open-world games over the past 15 or so years a lot of people disagree with me about them, but I generally find open-world games very boring, and rarely ever stick with one beyond, like, an hour or two. I can't think of any open world action-adventure or RPG games I've actually gotten very far into at all. (Now, I do love Guild Wars of course, I played well over a thousand hours of the game, and it does have a huge world, but I wouldn't call that world open-world in the traditional sense; the game has a lot of gating (so you often need to do the missions to progress), it's broken up by areas for different level characters, etc.)
- I hate crafting in general, and that's in Breath of the Wild. You don't mention crafting, but it's a definite. I can deal with it if it's very simlp0e, as in Guild Wars where you just talk to the person who makes some kind of armor or gives you an them from materials or somesuch, collect/buy the materials, then return to the trader to buy that item, but when you've got to deal with stupid "mix crafting items together to try to make formulas (and we either won't tell you them or they're kind of a pain to find)? ' No thanks, I hate that stuff! My first experience with crafting was Diablo 2, and I had next to no interest in trying to come up with Horadric Cube recipes; I just used the thing for some extra storage, and that's it. This is also why I never bought Minecraft, I hate crafting.
- Weapons with durability is a mechanic which can work in specific situations -- Fire Emblem, Riviera: The Promised Land, and such -- but it's always frustrating, and in an open world game it's an unnecssary annoyance. And yet it's central to Breath of the Wild's design.
There are probably more things I'm forgetting too, or don't know about. But all that said, and those things as well, Breath of the Wild looks like a very good game, yes. The combat looks pretty good, durability aside, and being able to climb rock walls is pretty cool. It might even be E3 Game of the Show (as IGN gave it), though I'm not sure; Microsoft is probably my pick for best publisher this E3, them making all their first-party titles dual-releases on PC is a fantastic move and they showed some great stuff too. Nintendo did have some good games to show, but without a Direct and with so much focus on Zelda you didn't see much of the others unless you were watching a lot of their day 2 stream... which I watched a bunch of, but still. Anyway, despite the good points, I can see myself liking this game less than any previous 3d Zelda game due to the kind of game it is.
Quote: As an aside, a quick fix to the gender issue would be simply letting a player pick their own pronoun at the start of the game, with the game script accordingly switching that pronoun around as you play. Link is androgynous enough for that to work with minimal effort.That could work, though a few things might need to change... still, it'd be easy to do if they weren't so stuck on being sexist.
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - Dark Jaguar - 18th June 2016
I... just can't possibly understand your opinion on Link to the Past. I think just about everything you said is simply... entirely backwards! I mean, the sense of adventure as you get new abilities and unlock new areas is completely lost? I've said this before but, did you even play the same game the rest of the world did?
Well, it's a matter of personal taste, and I could accept that if you just weren't so absolutely certain about LTTP's supposed failings with all your "obviously"s thrown in there.
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - Dark Jaguar - 18th June 2016
Well, of course your opinion is well known. You're the one who gives it every single time LTTP is brought up, ya know.
Oh, and that line that so confused you is something YOU SAID. I was disagreeing with it, that's all.
Look, you've made your point many many times. I disagree. Most of us disagree. I don't think it's nostalgia at all. Read all the articles from people with a lot of experience dissecting classic games explaining why they all think LTTP is a very well made game. I'll never be able to convince you that LTTP's map isn't boring (I don't think it is, as time goes on I become more and more impressed by just how well they designed it and how well they used the space, and I have a number of memories of discovering new places and being wow'd by them). I too am not obsessed with "loot", as you put it, but those things you say aren't there, me and most others say ARE there. I don't understand how you came to that view, no matter how many times you explain it, I end up thinking the exact opposite of practically everything you type about the game, so it's hard to really connect. That's fine. Sometimes, it's impossible for people to understand each other, and that's okay. I just really am sick of debating the merits of LTTP EVERY SINGLE TIME it gets brought up. I'm just trying to get across my thoughts on the new game, and how I feel it's a good return to form.
Along those lines though, I haven't heard any indication they're randomly generating maps. This world seems to have that hand-crafted design to it, which looks good to me.
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - Dark Jaguar - 20th June 2016
AAAAGH! ENOUGH ABF, I've heard it before. You aren't going to convince me of anything here, because, on an extremely FUNDAMENTAL level, we disagree on what makes a game good. Every single point you made, every last one, even the ice rod you hilariously missed, is something I'd put in the "plus" column, not the "minus" one.
Seriously, I brought up LTTP to compare it to the new game. I am NOT INTERESTED in arguing the merits of LTTP again! Just because I brought it up doesn't mean I asked you to once again try to disassemble it. I get it! We ALL get it! You don't like that game and didn't have a fun time playing it. You've gone over it again and again, and I don't know what it is you want from me (if it's for me to change my mind, it isn't going to happen, I came to my position after very careful consideration I've also explained), but I really do get it. Now PLEASE let us never have this conversation again. Everything I love about LTTP, you hate. Everything I don't like about more modern Zelda games, you love. Let's move on.
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - A Black Falcon - 21st June 2016
Dark Jaguar Wrote:AAAAGH! ENOUGH ABF, I've heard it before. You aren't going to convince me of anything here, because, on an extremely FUNDAMENTAL level, we disagree on what makes a game good. Every single point you made, every last one, even the ice rod you hilariously missed, is something I'd put in the "plus" column, not the "minus" one.Disagree with some of the things I say all you want, that's fine, but don't make up nonsense just to try to avoid a fun little discussion. So you disagree with "every single point"? That's not true one bit, I agreed with more than a few things you said. How about saying something actually true, like "unlike you, I like open-world games"? That's a fine, clearly true statement. But if you actually disagreed with "everything I say", which you don't, then to give many possible examples the DS Zelda games would be your favorites in the series, since they are probably my least favorites (not counting those CD-i games I've never played). You wouldn't be talking about LttP as one of your favorite Zelda games either, since it's one of my favorites too. Etc etc.
Quote:Seriously, I brought up LTTP to compare it to the new game.I don't think it's trying to be like LttP, though. I think it's trying to be like Modern Open-World Game crossed with 3D Zelda, with some hints of other influences here and there (claiming that the open world calls back to the original Zelda, etc.)
Quote: You don't like that game and didn't have a fun time playing it. You've gone over it again and again, and I don't know what it is you want from me (if it's for me to change my mind, it isn't going to happen, I came to my position after very careful consideration I've also explained), but I really do get it. Now PLEASE let us never have this conversation again.I(f you actually think anything you say here then I very much doubt you read much of my posts in this thread, because no one who "doesn't like" a game would say that it's a pretty good game they'd give an A- score to. An A- is not a bad score, and it's not something you give to games you dislike. LttP is a pretty good game, and I liked playing it on the SNES -- look up my posts from when I played it, I recall saying that I liked it more than I thought I would considering my its-only-okay feelings for the GBA version that was the first version of the game I got. It's only so over-rated because of all the "10.0/best game ever" things people say about it, not because it's bad or something!
Quote:Everything I love about LTTP, you hate. Everything I don't like about more modern Zelda games, you love. Let's move on.And again you repeat your incredibly overstated, untrue line from before. Sure I disagree with a lot you say in the OP, but certainly not all of it! I know I said this already but
Dark Jaguar Wrote:In their effort to give the player choice, it skews a little too close to Megaman-like stage design. All the dungeons are "equal" difficulty, save the "final" one unlocked after beating them. For that matter, every dungeon only requires one specific item to solve it's puzzles. There's no sense of steadily using more and more tools to solve ever more elaborate puzzle design. The items themselves can all be obtained without needing to dive into the major dungeons, but that's because you just buy them all from the sales bunny camping in your house. There's no real sense of accomplishment in getting those items.is a quite well-said criticism that I agree with, unless you dislike Megaman that is (I think of of it as the exception to the general rule that this kind of design does not work).
And beyond that, things like the basic mechanics of Zelda -- the controls, items, etc -- we surely agree on how great the series' mechanics are as well. It's just often taken as a given that Zelda games control, play, look, and sound fantastically, but look at almost any other game that tries to be like Zelda and its' far from a given... and for all the faults I see its design, Breath of the Wild looks like it's got that Zelda magic in its controls and design, and that's why I'm looking forward to it despite it being an open world game.
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - Dark Jaguar - 22nd June 2016
Very well, but you have to admit that every time anyone brings up LTTP, you consider it your duty to, without fail, give a long speech about all the reasons you dislike it. Here's what I'll do. I'm going to take your posts here that are specifically about LTTP and put them in their own thread. When you want to dissect LTTP and point out why you don't like it, now you'll have a special thread for that which won't derail countless other threads (because, let's face it, LTTP gets brought up a LOT in gaming forums, and with good reason).
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - Dark Jaguar - 22nd June 2016
I thought I'd add one of my concerns about the new Zelda game. They're adding cooking to the game (as well as bringing over crafting from Skyward Sword). However, I have to criticize those systems in a game like Zelda.
Zelda, primarily, has always used gameplay that made you feel like the actual agent of change, the actual person doing things in the world. They have traditionally skewed away from any user interface that isn't absolutely necessary, letting you just use items yourself whenever possible. This is what makes Zelda stand out for me as my favorite game series. Not that I don't enjoy a game like a more traditional RPG where you decide to solve a puzzle by throwing your INT stat at a problem inside a dialog menu. There's always room for variety in game design. I just think that on a fundamental level, I prefer to actually do the things myself.
With that said, I am not a fan of how crafting was implemented in Skyward Sword. In any other game, I'd be fine with it, but in Zelda? I think we, as the players, should be the ones actually doing the crafting. Not an interface menu, us. That is, crafting (and cooking) should be mini-games on the level of the fishing mini-game in OOT or TP. When I cook, I should have to pick my food (that part can use a menu), then actually cut up the parts and mix them together myself, followed by heating it over a flame and making sure I don't burn it. It doesn't need perfect realism, it just needs to "feel" like I'm doing it. In that way, even if the cooking looked cartoonish it would end up feeling more realistic than most cooking in RPGs.
Crafting equipment would likewise involve a mini-game of hammering out metal, carving wood, fitting parts together, and maybe even a little sword tempering. Remember the dwarves tempering your sword in LTTP? Now imagine actually doing those steps yourself. This is what I'm hoping for in Zelda style crafting, and the sort of thing that would make Zelda stand apart from the rest of the crowd.
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - A Black Falcon - 22nd June 2016
This is mostly just a slightly altered rewrite of stuff I said in this thread already, but I think I organize it better here in this version I put together for my E3 2016 post on my blog. So, here's the section on Breath of the Wild:
http://www.blackfalcongames.net/?p=288#The%20Legend%20of%20Zelda:%20Breath%20of%20the%20Wild-%20My%20Thoughts%20on%20the%20Game%20As%20Shown%20at%20E3
2-2: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: My Thoughts on the Game As Shown at E3
At the show this year, Nintendo mostly focused on Zelda. The booth was large and the Zelda display impressive, with a whole Zelda-themed environment to pass through inside the booth. It looked pretty cool, from videos, and the game was very popular, the lines for the game were long all through the show, and it won some awards as well, such as IGN’s Game of the Show award. That’s all great. The game looks beautiful, too. This somewhat Skyward Sword-esque art style isn’t quite as great as Twilight Princess’s is in my book, but it does look very good. And a lot about the game looks fun to play, too. I do have reservations about the game, though, as while there is some of the core of what I love about Zelda here, this is also a Zelda game for people who like things in games very different from my own interests. I’ll list a few issues I have with this game, and also some things I liked about what I saw of Breath of the Wild.
First, this is an open-world game. I know open-world games are popular, but I have never liked them, and indeed have never managed to stay interested in an open-world action-adventure, action-RPG, or shooter game beyond the opening couple of hours. I need direction and an actual focused point to stay interested in an action or RPG game, not just “wander around and do whatever, where ‘whatever’ is a very limited number of mostly combat-related actions that you can take”. The Breath of the Wild’s map looks nice, but the very open design, like an open-world game or the original Zelda, is something I like less than traditional 3d Zelda or GB/GBC Zelda segmented designs. Of course given the huge popularity of open-world games over the past 15 or so years a lot of people disagree with me about them, but I generally find open-world games very boring, and rarely ever stick with one beyond, like, an hour or two. I can’t think of any open world action-adventure or RPG games I’ve actually gotten very far into at all. Now, I do love Guild Wars of course, I played well over a thousand hours of the game, and it does have a huge world, but I wouldn’t call that world open-world in the traditional sense; the game has a lot of gating (so you often need to do the missions to progress), it’s broken up by areas for different level characters, etc. But traditional open-world design? After a couple of hours of driving around in Grand Theft Auto III I pretty much lost interest in the concept, and no progress in the genre has changed my mind on that score.
And Breath of the Wild looks like very much an open-world game in key elements. I don’t need cinematic narrative, but I do need some kind of system to keep you on track — a quest log, indicators to show where you need to go, a good mapping system which rewards exploration by revealing the map as you go instead of just giving you all of it from the start since revealing the map as you explore is MUCH more rewarding, etc. Without that games are aimless and I’ll lose interest quickly, as always happens with me in open-world action, RPG, or action-adventure games. Endless choices doesn’t make me want to explore all those choices, it makes me often freeze up and probably just move on to some other game before seeing most of them. For an example of how much I dislike open-world design, I would say that StarTropics is a better game than the original Legend of Zelda, because it’s also fatnastic, but is a more focused, fun experience that doesn’t rely on stupid crutches like “go find the random hidden stuff” or “wander around pointlessly for no good reason”. I’ve beaten StarTropics 1, did so in the late ’00s, and loved it. But Zelda 1? I’ve still never gotten past the sixth dungeon. Sure, it’s a classic and a game I remember playing back during the NES’es lifespan various places, while StarTropics isn’t (I’d heard of it in Nintendo Power, but not played it until the ’00s), but while Zelda is fun, it’s also flawed and frustrating. StarTropics is better for sure, and it’s the best action-RPG I have played for the NES. Or for another example of how focused design is better than open-but-empty design, as much as I love Baldur’s Gate 1, I never even got into the city of Baldur’s Gate, as when we got it in ’99 I kept wandering around in the forests of the first half of the game until I lost interest in playing any more. In contrast Baldur’s Gate II is more focused than its predecessor, much less full of large, mostly empty forest zones. It’s the better game. I REALLY hope that Breath of the Wild has something to help you stay on track, be it a quest log, Navi or Midna analog, or what have you. It needs something.
And worse, this is not only an open-world game, but it is an open-world game which sounds like it will use level-scaling to some extent, perhaps a significant one. This is a big problem, in my opinion — for a game like this, making the whole thing roughly equal in difficulty makes for boring gameplay! Yes, it can be done well, as Mega Man games show, but more often it leads to a whole game of no-difficulty-progression tedium, as you see in Elder Scrolls games since they introduced level scaling for example. I find many more things than that boring about TES games, but the level scaling sure doesn’t help. If I ever do actually play an Elder Scrolls game, I’d install one of those “we remove the whole-world level scaling” mods. Or for a really bad example, see Knuckles Chaotix for the 32X; making level select random in that game, and all five worlds even in difficulty, was a terrible idea! Sure, Zelda games usually do let you explore around, but there is at least some progression of easier to harder as you go. I really hope that traditonal Zelda world design returns here, and not a true “you can go anywhere from the start” design, but word that you can, if you want, go straight to the end of the game right from the beginning, skipping most of the content in between, is not promising. So yeah, I am very worried about this in this game; it’s a huge problem with open-world games that use it.
On the good side though, fortunately the game isn’t randomly-generated, as Nintendo seems to be putting a lot of work into making a detailed and interesting world to explore. I saw some cool stuff in the gameplay demos, and the game looks like fun to play. Link can climb up cliffsides this time, so you can travel all over with ease. The Moblins to fight, trees to climb, stuff to chop at, and areas to explore looked interesting, and for an open-world game this one looks far better than most. I’m sure it’ll be fun to play, but my question is, will I actually stay interested, or will I quit partway through as the unfocused, wandering-around-heavy gameplay drags down the good elements of the game? I have always said that I often prefer a well-crafted linear experience to something too open-ended, after all. There are exceptions to this, mostly in the strategy genre where I like a fairly wide-open game like Civilization a lot, but in action or RPG games it very much stands.
Breath of the Wild has a lot more items to get than past Zelda games, with lots of stuff to pick up all over, but this doesn’t mean as much to me as it would to some people. I care less than most people seem to about loot in games. I almost never play games just to get better stuff, that’s not something that often actually interests me. I like exploration, finding new places, and putting them on a permanent map… so yeah, not a fan of randomly-regenerated-every-time stuff either. :p (Stupid Diablo games, even though I know the map isn’t permanent I can’t help but want to explore out every zone every time I play one… I find that much more fun than whatever loot the game drops.) This applies here because you make it sound like just getting items is a reward on its own in LttP, in lieu of having more areas to explore, but I don’t agree with that. Of course it’s fun to use new items in a Zelda game, but that’s as much in the context of the new places it’ll let you get to than it is with the item itself… apart from things which add to the combat too, such as a bow, fire rod, etc. But I probably wouldn’t keep playing a game just to get some item.
And on a related note, for another negative, the game has crafting in it. I hate crafting in general, and that’s in Breath of the Wild for sure. I can deal with crafting if it’s very simple, as it is in Guild Wars where you just talk to the person who makes some kind of armor or gives you an them from materials or somesuch, collect/buy the materials, then return to the trader to buy that item, but when you’ve got to deal with stupid “mix crafting items together to try to make formulas (and we either won’t tell you them or they’re kind of a pain to find)? ‘ No thanks, I hate that stuff! My first experience with crafting was Diablo 2, and I had next to no interest in trying to come up with Horadric Cube recipes; I just used the thing for some extra storage, and that’s it. This is also why I never bought Minecraft, I hate crafting. And on top of the crafting, the game has weapon durability as well. This is a questionable mechanic, more often bad than good. There are a few games with good implementations of weapon durability, such as the Fire Emblem series or Riviera: The Promised Land, but it’s a hard mechanic to get right, particularly for someone like me who wants to keep things, not have to keep tossing them away as they break! And yet it is absolutely central to Breath of the Wild’s design, as weapons break very fast so you’re constantly grabbing weapons from enemies and fighting them with them. That looks fun at times, but I’m sure other times it’s quite annoying. I hope that there are permanent items you can get eventually, perhaps as this games’ equivalents to the items you get from dungeons in a normal Zelda game.
But all that said, Breath of the Wild looks like a very good game, yes. The combat looks pretty good, durability aside, and being able to climb rock walls is pretty cool. It might even be E3 Game of the Show (as IGN gave it), though I’m not sure; Microsoft is my pick for best publisher this E3, them making all their first-party titles dual-releases on PC is a fantastic move and they showed some great stuff too. Nintendo did have some good games to show, but without a Direct and with so much focus on Zelda you didn’t see much of the others unless you were watching a lot of their day 2 stream… which I watched a bunch of, but still. Anyway, despite the good points, I can see myself liking this game less than any previous 3d Zelda game due to the kind of game it is.
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - Dark Jaguar - 22nd June 2016
Please read my last post above. I talk specifically about crafting and how I'd like to see it implemented.
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - A Black Falcon - 22nd June 2016
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1233823 - This is one of the best summaries of the E3 info that I've seen.
I did read it before posting that, but didn't edit in anything to it. I'll do that now though, sure. You make two points there I do want to respond to, on crafting and on stat numbers and the like. And yes, I don't mention it in that post though I probably should, but I did notice that BotW has numbers on the items, armors, and the like. Zelda hasn't had anything like that outside of The Adventure of Link, so I don't know if it's a good idea... AoL aside the series has always been an action-adventure series that isn't quite an RPG, and maybe it will stay that way, but would making it a full-on RPG, with stats that upgrade and the like, be a good idea? But even if it doesn't have that, still, armor and weapons have hard numbers attached to them now, and enemies have numerical health indicators above their heads, RPG-style. From a Zelda standpoint, that's weird, and I am far from convinced it's a good idea. After AoL they abandoned the idea of full RPG elements in Zelda, and it was probably a good move. Should they really change that now? I mean, I like RPGs, but Zelda's style is so incredible as it is! But at leas there this is a mechanic I like in other games. Not so for crafting.
As for crafting, I'd forgotten about the crafting in SS... but yeah, now that you mention it, it does have that simple style of crafting I mention as being in Guild Wars, where you bring items to a person and they make the item for you. That works, but I'm sure this game will have an annoyingly more complex crafting system in it that I'll probably dislike. Stupid crafting... it's not fun!
On another note though, one thing I haven't mentioned is the physics system underneath this game. The game runs on a physics engine now, so when you fall off a cliff Link can ragdoll, you can cut down trees and watch them fall over, etc. And you can start fires, light campfires (and apparently cook food for increasing its healing value?), and such as well. That cooking system is the one crafting element Nintendo has revealed so far, I believe, unless showing that items can interact (drop wood and flint and hit it with sword = fire, so there will be a player-action component to it as you want) also counts. That's kind of neat in concept I guess, but again, I don't like these item-combining systems much when they get complex at all. It's fine in Link's Awakening where you can use bomb-arrows, but complex crafting systems? Forget that, I can't stand those! When I see a crafting system like that in a game I think a bit less of the game because of it.
I'm sure there are also some pretty cool things you can do with the physics system, though. This game does sound like it'll have a lot to do, but will it be fun? Like, the fishing in all 3d Zelda games is absolutely TERRIBLE, and easily the very worst thing about every single 3d Zelda game you can fish in. (That you have to fish right at the beginning of TP is one of the worst things about that game!) The crafting, for food or whatever else, in this game will more likely than not end up somewhere on that level of bad on my list... but maybe they'll manage to make it inoffensive somehow, we'll see.
And finally, the game does look really beautiful and fun to explore for a while, but what systems will they have in place to help you keep focused? How could it avoid the usual "I wander around for a while then get bored" problem of this genre? Or maybe it just won't, and despite all the stuff in this game, it will indeed end up being my least favorite 3d Zelda. I'll need to play it to know, I suspect...
Zelda - Breath of the Wild - Dark Jaguar - 23rd June 2016
I still play Phantom Pain for one reason: there's endless ways to mess with the guards. What they've shown is a strong indicator of that emergent gameplay I talked about before. The world could literally be nothing but random groups of stuff and enemies, and so long as all that stuff can interact with each other in countless ways, I expect countless hours of fun.
Here, let me show you the pure joys of emergent gameplay: