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+--- Thread: Time to make a Switch pun (/showthread.php?tid=7028)
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 3rd March 2017
Well, I got one. I had to. Breath of the Wild was at stake here!
The interface, spartan as it may be compared to the competition, seems to work pretty well. I'm still waiting for a way to add friends using their username instead of a friend code, but at least there's plenty of options to add friends from previous online sessions. No online chat yet, and I really hope that the party infrastructure doesn't require a cell phone. That's just not kid friendly.
The pro controller, which has an aesthetic that screams "cheap PC controller from the early 2000s", is actually pretty comfortable and solidly built, as one would expect from Nintendo. There's no analog triggers to be found on it though. That's disappointing... It'll also be big trouble for Gamecube virtual console games. I imagine they'll map the buttons to "full press" and as a consolation prize offer compatibility with the Wii U Gamecube controller adapter (meaning you have to have devices from two previous generations of consoles, and now I'm wondering why I don't just use my Gamecube).
Breath of the Wild is great. A good open world game isn't about random wandering so much as giving visually distinct items of interest for the player to decide to explore. The start of the game does a very good job indicating sites to see just by making them prominent on the landscape as you first exit the starting location. This is a great way to keep the player from getting totally lost, and it's good to see what they've done. Already this game has THOUGHT OF EVERYTHING! SO MUCH! Sick of smashing your face into trees in order to knock stuff down? Just grab an ax from a stump and chop those suckers down. Or, you know, maybe just climb it? The combat is silky smooth, though it'll take some adjustment now that Link can jump any time he wants. It's not like a Mario jump though, it's basically the same jump you're used to from side-stepping and back flipping in previous 3D Zelda games (and you can still do those specific moves). I'm a bit disappointed that I don't automatically jump if I just run towards the edge of a platform, so in that respect it's more platformy.
It's got autosave, but done better than a lot of games that have switched to that system. You can manually save and it also stores a list of recent autosaves instead of just one, so if you do something you regret, you can load your manual save or an older autosave. Well, to an extent. If your manual save is too old, it'll get deleted to make room for the next autosave. I don't think that's acceptable. Manual saves should be immune to that overwrite. Here's hoping they adjust that a bit, but it's already a better system than Bioshock Infinite, the new Doom, and Phantom Pain, which have all decided a single uncontrollable autosave is the future. Along those lines, this game has the Japanese voice acting right on the cart, but in order to switch you need to change the system language, which also changes the subtitles. The english voice acting isn't bad, but here's hoping these issues are easily patched in the future. I know they've gone that route before. If only I could whine on Miiverse!
I've only just begun, so these are just my first impressions. I can already sense another "sink into this world and vanish for months" game though.
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 4th March 2017
Quote: Well, I got one. I had to. Breath of the Wild was at stake here!Getting the system makes plenty of sense if you have the money and there are other Switch games you want to play right now, but for Zelda in specific, since you have a Wii U, why not just get that version? Other than being only 720p it sounds like it's only minimally different, visually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yFON2UON3k
Still, having a Switch now would be kind of cool, sure.
Time to make a Switch pun - Sacred Jellybean - 4th March 2017
I'll be honest, when I saw the first Nintendo Switch video, I didn't really "get" it. It seemed like a step up from the WiiU, but meh. Mobile gaming, who cares? Carrying around an enlarged game gear sounds bulky and inconvenient.
On the other hand, I just watched a new video, and it does seem like a neat concept. I salute Nintendo for innovating in an industry that's mostly just "carbon-copy of the last system with better graphics, all down to the same controller, and here's a new Call of Duty to go with it". Also, I took this screenshot to make fun of it:
![[Image: fm7polNh.png]](http://i.imgur.com/fm7polNh.png)
Hell yeah, take a nice stroll out to a breathtaking sunset over a lake so you can sit on a bench and look at the same screen you just saw at home! Young people need an electronic device to take away the anxiety of having to experience nature with nothing else to think about *brandishes cane*. Not that I'm any better. We're so used to being bombarded with information that it feels uneasy to just sit and daydream. No sir, I don't like it. I don't think. I don't know. I was thinking earlier at how technology will progress itself to a point where you could just enter a simulation of a beautiful sunset, maybe even take a vacation tailor-made to your wishes, such that you can sit on a beach of your own configuration and let the fake waves lap at your feet, indistinguishable from the real deal. Reality would become meaningless, it would be full of chaos and variables beyond your control. Maybe a crab will come and bite your toe, or you'll get sunburnt, or your flight will be delayed. Fake, plastic experiences will become preferable. Spooky or maybe awesome or maybe I'm just a rambling dumbass, how you liking the Switch DJ? Oh... you answered that the first post. Um. I think I'm out of eggs, maybe I'll run to the market later.
Looking at the new Zelda gives me "meh" memories of Skyward Sword. Beautiful to look at, fun to play, but something was lost in execution (I could never 100% get the hang of the sword movements and FUCK those electric sword Moblins that beat me at every turn). But more importantly, it was drawn out far beyond its reach. It was a chore to finish... which I never did... having stopped short at the last level where you presumably get the Triforce. Shitty place to run out of steam. And my Wii sensor broke at some point. I'll put it on the list of video games to complete when I retire in 50 years (we'll get our social security at 80 by then) and am left to play through all the games I left behind to fend off old man boredom and soul-crushing impending death.
But, that's only speaking to the aesthetic of Breath of the Wild. I imagine it's actually Cool and Good. I'd buy up a Switch if I had the money... been spending it too much lately and I need to reign it in. Maybe the Switch will Catch On, and I won't want to be left out of the newly sociable paradigm of portable games, meeting up with complete strangers and Mario Karting it the fuck up in here. I am optimistic of a future where the difficulty of beating your opponents is limited by geography. Fuck it if I'm gonna go online and play against all those 13 year olds that headshot me before I take three steps, god damned punks. *branishes cane again*
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 4th March 2017
Breath of the Wild is Nintendo's answer to complaints about Skyward Sword. I actually liked the aesthetic of Skyward Sword, but it's clear they did lose a lot in execution as you said. Their desire to tell a story meant you just weren't allowed to do what you will.
If you're worried about motion controls, the only motion controls in Wild are for aiming, and they are entirely optional. In fact, the control are as modular as they've ever been in a Zelda game. The default camera speed is pitiful, so I'm glad I was able to increase it this time. If you don't like where Jump is, you can reassign it, though button reassignment is pretty limited.
The game isn't narrative heavy. I mean, it's there, but you spend most of your time saying "oooh, what's THAT" and then going and finding "that". This extends to the minimalist tutorial. Your buttons all work right out of the gate and you can even jump ahead in the "this is how you do this" just by finding out how to do it accidentally beforehand. The "tutorial" is a brief blurb in the upper-right corner you can just ignore (or if you missed it, pause the game and look at the tutorial information in a small list, so you never have to worry you missed something important). Heck, the first area functions as a tutorial but much more like how the first section of Super Metroid or Link to the Past (or Link's Awakening) function as one. You learn by doing, and the environment just is filled with places you can use the commands you just used. They never hit you over the head with it or have some NPC scream at you for wanting to bypass some mandatory tutorial on climbing a box. (I have one big issue with Skyward Sword's tutorials beyond that. Slow slow tutorial, right up until they throw you off a cliff and force you to learn to fly just before tossing you into a race, and if you want to reset and try again when you're doing badly, well, you get to do all of that over again without any real opportunity to just casually figure out flying beforehand.)
The art design isn't the watercolor look of Skyward Sword. It's more of a mix of cel shading like Wind Waker and the more realistic proportions of Skyward Sword. I think it looks really good myself. Here's the thing, I don't WANT just one art style for Zelda. I don't consider any one style the "iconic look" for Zelda, and really don't want fans getting into that sort of expectation. Zelda as a series has really set itself apart for changing up it's art style significantly almost every entry, and I've grown to, like Plucky Duck, expect the unexpected. So long as we don't end up with something that looks like Wand of Gamalon, I want to see what new styles they come up with. If you'd prefer something a bit more like Twilight Princess, wait a few games and something darker like that may come up. As it stands, the look suits the game well, really emphasizing the places in Hyrule and the way nature has overrun it all.
Anyway, as for exclusives, I'm already sold on Super Mario Odyssey. It is so weird that the system launches with Zelda only for Mario to come later. Well, not really, that's what happened on the Wii too, but it FEELS weird.
I thought I'd tell you something quirky. When I first plugged in the Zelda cart, the system didn't detect it. I ended up cleaning the pins on the cart in the age old ways of our people, at which point it worked fine. Some things never change.
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 5th March 2017
Nintendo has a rewards program that involves getting "coins" for digital purchases. Unlike the previous code-based system, this screws over people who buy physical copies. No more! On the Switch, the physical copies can be redeemed for coins. It saves that this has been done to the cart, so you can't just trade the cart around, but I'm fine with that. I just like that I'm not left out in the cold.
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 6th March 2017
1 2 Switch turns out to be a great party game. I've got plenty of family members, and a few friends, who really don't play video games that much. This is made for them, more so than even Wii Sports was. The design decision to have people look at each other instead of the screen is brilliant, since it keeps the party about the party goers and not the screen. Recently I've taken a keen interest in what makes a good "family and friends" game vs a good "gamer friends" game, ever since my sister pulled out some old cheap toy that's nothing but an LCD screen popping up random words and rules that tell you how to "hint" at the word without spelling it out. Fun was had by all, and the game more or less just provided ground rules and nothing else. I think that's the best way to design a party game. Non-gamers don't want to buckle down and read new rules every few minutes or pay attention to what a ghost or a turtle has to say on a TV screen. They want to talk to each other and get reactions from each other. The Jackbox Party Packs have been an amazing success in that regard, and it isn't even You Don't Know Jack that's winning it. It's the more "madlib" style games where the host more or less stands back. I get the impression this one will be perfect for that kind of play, and I can't wait to play a few rounds with some of my family members.
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 6th March 2017
So I've watched several hours of BotW footage, and it looks alright, but has some real issues.
On the positive side, the graphics are great, first. Yes, the art style doesn't match the series' best-looking game, TP, and technically it doesn't match the kind of graphics modern PC/etc. games can do, but it looks really nice for the hardware, and the art direction is very good.
Additionally, at least some elements of world exploration look like they could be fun. I really like that it lets you put icons on the map instead of doing that for you, and the shrines and dungeons look fun. Some elements of trying to get places in the overworld could be fun too, but I think that's get old after a bit, because of some of the issues below. Combat also looks alright, though apparently you have fewer moves than you do in some previous 3d Zelda games, which is unfortunate.
But for the negatives, the big ones are the stamina, weapon-durability, and food systems, as well as the directionless nature of open world games as well of course, since I always end up either overwhelmed by choice or bored by the things after a while. That latter issue is a huge one and I'm very doubtful about if I'll ever finish this game whenever it is I get it, since the world is huge and I doubt I'd stay interested long enough to get through its apparently quite lengthy run.
But as for those former issues... first on stamina, is there actually someone out there who likes stamina systems? Anyone? Or does everyone hate them, but accept the things because they make this kind of games harder? Because seriously, they're so annoying! That there's actually a Zelda game where you can drown when you run out of stamina, climb only for a limited amount of time, etc... that would be so, so annoying, and I do not think that that is good design. And then the game also has weapon durability, which is just as bad or maybe even worse! Apparently it isn't even directly shown with a durability meter, and preferably a way to repair things like slightly less irritating weapon durability like better-designed games have, but instead it just warns you when something is about to break, which sounds like it happens all the time. Sure, weapons are apparently plentiful, but forcing people to constantly switch weapons is not great design, particularly when you have such a limited inventory. Weapon durability does work in the Fire Emblem games or some others, so you can do it right, but it's a difficult thing to do well and those weapons last a lot longer than these sound like they do. And then in contrast armor never breaks, which is strange compared to the constantly failing weapons and shields. Huh.
And last, food and the crafting system... well, with how much I hate almost all crafting in games, it is probably unsurprising that this one sounds kind of terrible. If you just collected ingredients and then chose things from a list of things you can make, okay, it'd work, but you don't. You have to choose the ingredients, and it apparently never has any kind of in-game list of which recipes make something and which just waste your food! Why would you actually do anything ever that way, that's terrible! There is no reason to have such an annoyingly unhelpful crafting system today; this would encourage me to not bother trying to figure out how to use the system if you don't absolutely have to, instead of messing with the stuff -- see the Class of Heroes games, where the multi-step process that is figuring out what are good crafting combinations is enough to make me really not want to bother spending much time with it. And those games actually have a combinations list, it's just in a different place in the menus from the place where you do the crafting. This one's even worse, you'll have to guess or look them up online. Seriously, no. I do not want to do that.
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 6th March 2017
The game isn't directionless at all, not even in the slightest. You're given objectives along a "main path" and a primary objective you can decide to pursue at any time, under-prepared or not. It's just that the game LETS you do whatever you want instead of going on those quests. How is that "directionless"? Are you honestly telling me right now that you would prefer they put in artificial barriers to FORCE you along the main story path? Do you honestly believe that's better? I'm seriously asking here, because in this regard it seems you and I are exactly opposite in our tastes. Your "problems" are my "features", and the features of those who are playing the game. You seem to have missed that they had clear objectives, but they didn't care. You know what I did in the tutorial, the TUTORIAL? I lived like a hermit in the woods for days, hunting and gathering and cooking stuff up. I love that I could do that right out the starting gate!
As far as cooking goes, I wanted something like a mini-game, but I think Nintendo found a better way. It's hands-on cooking but without the burden of a mini-game every time you want to eat. You have to light the fire, carry a big handful of stuff, and stuff it in the pot. It could only be improved, I think, if one of those Koroks you find at the start summoned a magical shelf full of all your food so you picked it from the shelf instead of an in-game menu, further giving you that experience of actually picking stuff yourself. "Recipes" would come in the form of asking the korok to cook something you discovered for you, but generally I think Nintendo handled it well.
Durability... stamina... Frankly I agree. These are vestiges of gaming's experiments from a few years back that turned out to never have been worth pursuing in the first place. The new Doom and Phantom Pain in particular prove that such systems aren't really needed for the most part (Phantom Pain has durability on the silencer alone, but I'm okay with that, since the gun still works fine when that breaks, and they're easily replaced). The best I can say about stamina is the game does give you upgrades to it. Still, it would have been better if it hadn't been in the game at all and they'd designed it around that. Phantom Pain really did spoil me. I now look at stamina bars as nothing but a liability. It's a shame, because Nintendo was smart enough not to toss that into Link Between Worlds. I can say this about durability. Frankly, weapons are constantly dropping like candy in the game, so if something breaks there's probably already a replacement on the ground right next to you. If nothing else, I've had a number of "both me and the enemy scrambling towards that one weapon" moments like in an action movie. Those were pretty fun. Still, I would have preferred those moments come about because something knocked my weapon out of my hand and I had to run over and grab it. That'd be pretty cool.
All in all though, this is the "lived in" world I always dreamed of playing Zelda games! Random critters going about their lives, an endless wood I can just walk to, and I can climb up practically anything, stamina aside (and I've already found a little trick to get stamina back as I climb so I can keep going). The emergent gameplay is strong here. I got the ability to move things with a magnet. Normally, yeah, whatever, I use it on specific puzzle items. Now though, I can get clever about it. I was trying to throw some bombs to a distant outpost, and it suddenly clicked that I could go over and grab a long metal plank, a metal box, lay them over a log, and I created a working catapult to launch bombs with. I CREATED A WORKING CATAPULT USING IN-GAME PHYSICS! I DID THAT! THAT'S A THING I CAN DO! I.. CREATED A FRICKIN' CATAPULT! THIS is the sort of fun you could have in this game ABF.
I CREATED A CATAPULT!
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 8th March 2017
Quote:The game isn't directionless at all, not even in the slightest. You're given objectives along a "main path" and a primary objective you can decide to pursue at any time, under-prepared or not. It's just that the game LETS you do whatever you want instead of going on those quests. How is that "directionless"? Are you honestly telling me right now that you would prefer they put in artificial barriers to FORCE you along the main story path? Do you honestly believe that's better?"
Hmm... good question, really. Most of the time of course, I prefer a more guided experience over a more open one; I've said that many times over the years, and it's true. When a game is too open ended either I get overwhelmed with the number of directions I could go so I end up doing none of them, or I wander around for a while until I lose interest somewhere early-ish in the game. There's never been a conventional open-world game that I loved, or even finished.
The closest thing I can think of to answering "no" to your question, though, is thinking about my reaction to Twilight Princess, when I first played it around ten years ago. I really love that games' gameplay, world, dungeons, art, music, etc., with only the story and characters really holding it back, but at first I did find how little of the world you can visit early in that game frustrating; it's not until after the second or third dungeon that you finally are able to explore the whole game world, and I do think that that's when the game gets great. Of course this is not an open-world game, but it is one of the few cases where I actually wanted something a bit more open than it gave me. However, going back to the game more recently, this didn't bother me at all, since the early parts of the game are really good too in retrospect, and knowing that it will open up, the more railed early part is fine. (I've never had a problem with the "collect the shards of light" stuff either, finding all of those can be fun...)
A more typical example are the Baldur's Gate games. BG1 has a large, somewhat directionless world. I love that game, but never even got into the city of Baldur's Gate, since I wandered around the woods until I lost interest. BG2 is more linear though most of the time, and that game I stuck with and finished. Games like Baldur's Gate II or Guild Wars 1 and its expansions, one of my favorite games ever of course, show that I can love a game with huge areas if it's presented in a linear manner -- like GW, where each explorable area is massive, but the main mission path in each campaign follows a linear structure. You go from town to explorable area to mission to the next explorable area, following the main quest line. Towns and mission lobbies are areas all players can be in, but missions and explorable areas are instanced, a system I really like. Along the way there are many also huge side areas, lots of side-quests everywhere, etc., but the main quest path in each campaign is linear and I like that. Guild Wars 2's world is more open-ended, and that's one issue I have with the game; yes, t here is still an entirely linear main story mission tree, but the world itself is now a single world, not an instanced combination of lobbies/towns and instances, and you can wander around a lot more without following the missions. I don't like how monsters now respawn continually for instance, in standard MMO fashion, it's so much more satisfying in the first game where enemies stay dead until you leave the zone!
But anyway, to get back to your question, saying that I dislike open worlds doesn't mean I always dislike games with large worlds, GW shows that that is not true. The games' world is huge! It's just that you have to unlock a lot of areas by playing through the story, you can't just wander anywhere in each of the three campaigns from the start. And in the end, that is definitely the style I prefer. Sure, just randomly wandering around in a GW2 or something can be fun, but I stay more engaged when there's something clearly pushing me to go in a direction, versus just 'wander around and do quests and stuff'. That's a recipe for "and then I stopped playing after a bit because I lost interest, since I do not find that kind of gameplay engaging for long". And sure, I may well not finish a more linear game either, but it'd be much less likely to be for that reason.
(Is this the right time to mention that surprisingly enough I've actually found Destiny (which I have for 360) to be kind of fun? It is another game with an instanced world of decent size that also has a main linear story path along with side stuff, so it is similar there, while being quite different in mechanics of course since it's a FPS. I haven't done any of the multiplayer stuff, which I know is a huge part of the game for those who get into it, and as always don't care much about the huge loot aspect of the game, but it looks great and plays well, and if I stick mostly to the main mission path it's fun. Even the wandering-around-the-areas element isn't too bad, as it gives you waypoints to missions you can try. I don't find Destiny to be a great classic, but I like it more than I thought I would.)
Quote: I was trying to throw some bombs to a distant outpost, and it suddenly clicked that I could go over and grab a long metal plank, a metal box, lay them over a log, and I created a working catapult to launch bombs with. I CREATED A WORKING CATAPULT USING IN-GAME PHYSICS! I DID THAT! THAT'S A THING I CAN DO! I.. CREATED A FRICKIN' CATAPULT! THIS is the sort of fun you could have in this game ABF.Physics systems in games can be fun, yeah. That was one of the things I remember most liking about Rocket: Robot on Wheels for the N64, the physics system...
Quote: Durability... stamina... Frankly I agree. These are vestiges of gaming's experiments from a few years back that turned out to never have been worth pursuing in the first place. The new Doom and Phantom Pain in particular prove that such systems aren't really needed for the most part (Phantom Pain has durability on the silencer alone, but I'm okay with that, since the gun still works fine when that breaks, and they're easily replaced). The best I can say about stamina is the game does give you upgrades to it. Still, it would have been better if it hadn't been in the game at all and they'd designed it around that. Phantom Pain really did spoil me. I now look at stamina bars as nothing but a liability. It's a shame, because Nintendo was smart enough not to toss that into Link Between Worlds. I can say this about durability. Frankly, weapons are constantly dropping like candy in the game, so if something breaks there's probably already a replacement on the ground right next to you. If nothing else, I've had a number of "both me and the enemy scrambling towards that one weapon" moments like in an action movie. Those were pretty fun. Still, I would have preferred those moments come about because something knocked my weapon out of my hand and I had to run over and grab it. That'd be pretty cool.It's like they thought 'okay, what can we do to make this game more difficult' so they stuck in a stamina system, even though it's never a good idea. Come up with a better way to do difficulty than that, seriously! Stamina systems are awful. As for weapon degradation, perhaps that was done to make you switch weapons regularly, but having things break constantly during fights does not sound fun, and with a limited inventory it seems like it'd be harder than it should be to store some good weapons for when you really need them...
Quote: As far as cooking goes, I wanted something like a mini-game, but I think Nintendo found a better way. It's hands-on cooking but without the burden of a mini-game every time you want to eat. You have to light the fire, carry a big handful of stuff, and stuff it in the pot. It could only be improved, I think, if one of those Koroks you find at the start summoned a magical shelf full of all your food so you picked it from the shelf instead of an in-game menu, further giving you that experience of actually picking stuff yourself. "Recipes" would come in the form of asking the korok to cook something you discovered for you, but generally I think Nintendo handled it well.No game with crafting should not have something ingame telling you what the good combinations are! "Go read a guide to figure out how this works" is the worst kind of design. I know that a lot of games do things that way, either in hiding game systems in ways you'll never notice unless you read a guide as so many JRPGs love to do or this annoying but not quite as bad crafting system with no recipe list, but I never like it.
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 8th March 2017
This game does a great job of giving you pretty clear hints on what to do next. The "sight lines" in any one location are tailor-made so that you see points of interest the developer wanted you to see. The distractions are just that, and you can either book it to the general location you're heading to or take a break and climb an entire mountain because it's there. You never lose sight of your goal (literally) and the layout of the world is such that you never feel truly lost. This game TRUSTS you. It doesn't burden you with a talking sword or hat or shadow reminding you every 5 seconds of your mission. It doesn't dump a bunch of icons all over the map and say "get all this stuff". It doesn't really even tell you where a place is with a marker most of the time. Most of the time, you get general instructions like "follow the road north past the great rock that looks like a long-neck and past the mountains that burn and you'll find the Great Valley". It's enough, it really is, and the game makes a quick note of that hint before leaving the rest to you. The hints are, at long last, cryptic again as they were in days of yore. I can't tell you what a relief it is for a Zelda game to finally once again trust me, the player, to figure things out without spelling it out 2 or 3 times in a row.
It is in this spirit that the game's cooking system turns out to be very intuitive without spelling out "okay, this is how you make a steak". The game gives you two general rules: normal cooking ingredients make normal food, and gross stuff makes potions. Generally, you can intuit exactly how to make what you want to make. The game's items all have very clear descriptions, so if it boosts your defense, it'll tell you "this armorshroom boosts defense in a meal". So, as a general rule, just toss three ingredients in a pot and you'll get something edible. The rest is just experimentation. Ever try to develop a new recipe in real life? It's like that, and it's fun. Sure, you'll get the occasional nightmare item that's so disgusting it's blurred out, but that's part of the fun. Heck, you even have the occasional NPC tell you outright how they made their personal specialty. Yes, I would love it if there was some form of recipe book that stored everything you learned, but I would never exchange trial and error this fun for something boring like just picking a recipe off the ground and following the directions every time.
Really though, I agree with you. A lot of the "open world" games out there are nothing but endlessly boring. There's a bunch of checklist collectibles with no real point to them beyond being on a checklist and generally nothing really tying all the myriad side-quests together. Breath of the Wild is NOT like those games. This is an expertly crafted open world experience where everything has a purpose, even the vast empty spaces! This video I think does a good job explaining it:
Come ABF, you need to Experience the Challenge of Endless Adventure!
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 9th March 2017
Dark Jaguar Wrote:This game does a great job of giving you pretty clear hints on what to do next. The "sight lines" in any one location are tailor-made so that you see points of interest the developer wanted you to see. The distractions are just that, and you can either book it to the general location you're heading to or take a break and climb an entire mountain because it's there. You never lose sight of your goal (literally) and the layout of the world is such that you never feel truly lost.This part could work, I won't know until I play it.
Quote:This game TRUSTS you. It doesn't burden you with a talking sword or hat or shadow reminding you every 5 seconds of your mission. It doesn't dump a bunch of icons all over the map and say "get all this stuff". It doesn't really even tell you where a place is with a marker most of the time. Most of the time, you get general instructions like "follow the road north past the great rock that looks like a long-neck and past the mountains that burn and you'll find the Great Valley". It's enough, it really is, and the game makes a quick note of that hint before leaving the rest to you. The hints are, at long last, cryptic again as they were in days of yore. I can't tell you what a relief it is for a Zelda game to finally once again trust me, the player, to figure things out without spelling it out 2 or 3 times in a row.This part, however, is where we strongly disagree! Now, having a quest log is a big help here, and if the quests listed there have enough help -- pointers to tell you where to go, specific statements about what you should be doing, and such -- not having a companion character is okay. MM had a basic quest log and it was really helpful there. But Navi, Midna, Fi, and such, they are essential gameplay mechanics, and Midna, at least, is a great character too, the best one in that game by a wide margin. As much as it is occasionally slightly annoying to be told the same thing for the fifth time, I would never want to play any of those games without the helpers, just like how I would never, ever play Metroid Prime with the "you should go here" assist markers turned off. Apart from a game being totally broken, boring, or terrible, not knowing where I should be going in a game is one of the easiest ways to get me to stop playing; either I go look up what to do in a guide or quit playing, pretty much, in such situations. What you say about "vague clues" sounds TERRIBLE if they are not specific enough to make sense! I hate the useless "clues" of way too many games in the '80s to early '90s, that is awful game design as I go over in my LttP thread. I really, really hope that this game is much less vague than that, and that the quest log helps out a lot.
Quote:It is in this spirit that the game's cooking system turns out to be very intuitive without spelling out "okay, this is how you make a steak". The game gives you two general rules: normal cooking ingredients make normal food, and gross stuff makes potions. Generally, you can intuit exactly how to make what you want to make. The game's items all have very clear descriptions, so if it boosts your defense, it'll tell you "this armorshroom boosts defense in a meal". So, as a general rule, just toss three ingredients in a pot and you'll get something edible. The rest is just experimentation. Ever try to develop a new recipe in real life? It's like that, and it's fun. Sure, you'll get the occasional nightmare item that's so disgusting it's blurred out, but that's part of the fun. Heck, you even have the occasional NPC tell you outright how they made their personal specialty. Yes, I would love it if there was some form of recipe book that stored everything you learned, but I would never exchange trial and error this fun for something boring like just picking a recipe off the ground and following the directions every time.Again, I don't understand why someone would actually publish a game like this where you have to make the combination every time with no list saying what works... what? Why would you actually do things that way, that's so dumb... in real life things like "recipes" exist, after all.
Quote:Really though, I agree with you. A lot of the "open world" games out there are nothing but endlessly boring. There's a bunch of checklist collectibles with no real point to them beyond being on a checklist and generally nothing really tying all the myriad side-quests together. Breath of the Wild is NOT like those games. This is an expertly crafted open world experience where everything has a purpose, even the vast empty spaces! This video I think does a good job explaining it:I'm not so sure that that video makes me want to play the game...
Quote:Come ABF, you need to Experience the Challenge of Endless Adventure!When I decided to get a lot of computer parts last month, I knew that there was no way I'd get a Switch (or Wii U) now. I doubt I'd have gotten it anyway, but I spent a lot on a computer, no way can I justify buying a Switch or something on top of that... and besides, it's usually best to wait a while after launch before buying a system, since early systems often have issues. (Maybe I should have gotten a Wii U instead of a PS3 late last year, but the PS3's well worth having too and cost less, so I don't know...)
I'm sure I'll get either a Wii U or a Switch sometime this year, though it's hard to decide which; on the one hand I really do want a Wii U while the games are still easy to find in stores, and want the system because there are games on it I want to play, but on the other hand I want Nintendo's upcoming TV console stuff and not only past ones... not sure which way to go there. Additionally the Switch looks like it won't have a great software library until Christmas considering how thin the release library is until then, and there are some hardware issues I'm seeing mentioned often such as screen scratching and the left Joycon, so it's easy to put that one off for a while, but the Wii U... well, I would need to find a good price for one, no way am I paying what Gamestop wants for those things for instance.
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 9th March 2017
We really do differ completely in what we want from a game. To me, those partners were one of the low points of the design of the series. I want to have to figure things out, so long as the clues are laid out in a sensible way. I believe this game has hit that goal, and I really love it.
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 9th March 2017
I just attached some balloons to a random raft and used a leaf weapon to fill the sails with wind. I made an airship.
I MADE AN AIRSHIP! I can drop bombs off this thing and rain destruction from the heavens! Oh wait the balloons popped just way too soon...
This is the best The Incredible Machine game ever!
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 10th March 2017
Dark Jaguar Wrote:We really do differ completely in what we want from a game. To me, those partners were one of the low points of the design of the series. I want to have to figure things out, so long as the clues are laid out in a sensible way. I believe this game has hit that goal, and I really love it.
The first thing you're missing here is that games must have a system in place to remind people of what they need to do next. The LttP style of "too bad, if you missed the hint once you will never be given it again" is absolutely unacceptable because it's too easy to miss or forget. Something like the helper characters or a good quest log with helper text or arrows to point you in the next direction to remind you of your next task is is absolutely essential! Of course on top of that I want clues to actually be helpful and not uselessly vague. Clues should be something that the average player can actually figure out, and many of those in older games like LttP are far too vague for their own good.
Oh, and on top of that, in OoT and MM the fairies were a great gameplay mechanic too, since they actually came up with a decent in-game explanation for how the Z-targeting system works. That's a great touch, most games wouldn't bother with that. And finally, again, Midna is awesome. Yeah. she's kind of the ONLY great character in TP's story in terms of writing and characterization and that is part of my complaints about the story, but still at least there is one good character in the game. Of the companion characters in 3d Zelda games, Midna's the best by far. That's part of why Fi was kind of disappointing, she's a lot less interesting than Midna was.
... On a related note though, from what little I hear, the story in Breath of the Wild isn't the best, though Zelda stories never are so that's not exactly a surprise...
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 11th March 2017
Fi is a lot less interesting than the pause menu.
If you're asking for a way to be reminded of your clues, BOTW has you covered. There IS a quest log now, you forgetful person. It includes the cryptic hints you run across.
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 14th March 2017
I can't really say anything positive or negative about Fi, she's just sort of there. Which is why she's disappointing compared to how great Midna is, but I didn't think she's awful or something...
As for Switch news though, the system has now sold 1.5 million, and Zelda for Switch 1.34 million, so 89% of Switch owners got Zelda. That's an expectedly high attach rate of course, given how little else the system has, but it seems like the system is indeed selling as well as it seems to be, given how hard it is to find and such. It's good to see Nintendo doing well with it, so far at least. The bigger challenge for Nintendo will be to see how it sells over the coming months, with the software droughts that seem certain... but it's a good start and that counts for a lot. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-03-14-nintendo-switch-has-sold-1-5m-worldwide-superdata
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 14th March 2017
Fi is a boring character, but the worst of it is she NEVER SHUTS UP. People complained about Navi's hints, but she's got nothing on Fi.
Here's a regular conversation in Skyward Sword.
Elder: Hero! You must go to the shrine and insert the stone! You remember the shrine right? The one at the center of our village? The place you held the ceremony with Zelda at? It looks like the goddess Hylia. It's a holy place. You should go there. With that stone. Put it in the shrine, which is to say, the sacred place. You remember it right?
Fi: According to the elder, we should go to the shrine and insert the sacred stone. There is a 95% chance the elder is referring to the statue of the goddess here in Skyloft. Do you recall where we first met, inside the statue? That is likely the location the elder suggested. I HAVE MARKED THE LOCATION, WHICH AGAIN IS RIGHT HERE IN TOWN AND VISIBLE FROM WHERE WE ARE STANDING, ON YOUR MAP!
*After arriving at the statue*
Fi: Hero, we have arrived. Please go inside the shrine. Inside you can insert the holy stone.
*After inserting the stone and watching a new area open up on your map*
Fi: Hero, you have successfully inserted the stone into the shrine! A new region has opened up. We should go there. If we go there, we are likely to find the next part of our adventure.
Do you understand?
Yes/No
Me: *petrifies*
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 17th March 2017
So? The core of the fun in Zelda games isn't trying to figure out where to go, it's what you do once you're there! The puzzles, combat, dungeon exploration... those are the best things about Zelda. Seeing what you can do in the towns and exploring the world are great too, and are core parts of the experience, so long as I know what I should be doing next; seeing what you can do with your current abilities is great fun, so long as things are not TOO obtuse, as they haven't been since LttP.
And most of that, of course, is where BotW sounds not so great. Combat I've seen mixed opinions on, that the various physics things you can do are fun but the weapon degradation is terrible; that the combat system is good, but maybe you have fewer moves than before... and such. Dungeons are more de-emphasized than ever, disappointingly, and for me this is a big issue. Those ~120 shrines sound good though, but for a Zelda game to be great it needs dungeons, and not four but eight or more as my favorite Zelda games (LA, OoT, TP) have. As for puzzles, in the dungeons and shrines they look pretty interesting... but at the cost of most any puzzle elements in the overworld. Not sure what I think of that. And that instead of getting new items as you progress you pretty much just use four that you get at the beginning, sorry, I don't like that either; getting new items as you progress and figuring out how to use them is one of the many things I love about Zelda games, and just getting new weapons that will break in five seconds and some more health and stamina does not sound like a good replacement for that. I want to keep items! This is part of why I don't like Link Between Worlds' rental item system, just give me the items like usual, that's so much better! That would let you design the dungeons to be played sequentially instead of any order too, which is always the vastly superior design because it allows for proper difficulty scaling as you progress. ALBW does better with that than many games, sure (Elder Scrolls...), but that is a huge issue I have with that game... and then BotW goes even farther in the wrong direction, really. At least you keep the items this time, but there are so few! They do sound really interesting and very useful, so I'm sure I'd have fun with that in the game, but still, conceptually I have big problems with this idea.
[Now as an aside, as much as I do prefer more complex overworlds over empty spaces (LA v. LttP, and such) I did kind of wish that SS would have a bit more space in its maybe too dungeon-like overworld... or maybe the real problem is that it doesn't let you go to the sky and return to the point you left. I often really wanted to, say, go through a part of the overworld, then go back and do a side-quest or something, then go back and go to the next dungeon... but you can't do that because you can only return to three specific points in the overworld. It's really annoying and forces you into overly long periods where you can't return to the sky, because if you do you'll need to go back through everything you went through again and I am NOT going to do that if I don't have to. But anyway, the other issues I'd probably have with BotW I've been over, from crafting to the aimlessness of open-world games...]
But yeah, in 3d Zelda games (before BotW of course), as much as I love most everything about the games, my overall favorite parts of the games are the dungeons. They are where 3d Zelda games are at their best. So I can't identify at all with your complaint here about being told where to go, because that guidance helps you get to the next dungeon, which is certainly a very good thing! Being lost in games is the worst... in a dungeon it can work since you have limited options, but an overworld is far too large for that kind of design. And in those dungeons, 3d Zelda games almost always do a good job of showing where you should go, either obviously or subtlety. It's really masterful work. 2d Zelda games have great dungeons too, but I have always thought that OoT's dungeons were impressive in a way that 2d Zelda dungeons never have been, and though several 3d Zelda games have too few dungeons (WW, MM), at least the ones they have are mostly pretty great. There are a lot of exceptional things about the best Zelda games, including their graphics, music, controls, game design, the worlds you explore, and such, but on top of the basic mechanics, the dungeons are probably the next most important thing.
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 17th March 2017
But seriously, READ my example. It isn't very far off the mark. I barely exaggerated it at all. We're not talking about a world making it clear where you are supposed to head. That would just be a stylistic choice you and I differ on. We're talking about a game that doesn't believe you are able to figure out that your destination is the ONLY place you can actually go. It's literally the one place you can see anywhere on the island, and the game is acting like if it doesn't remind you 4 or 5 times and stick a marker on the map, you are going to just end up wandering off the edge and falling to your death or maybe drowning in the rain because you forgot to close your mouth. It's a waste of time when you already know exactly where to go and what to do.
Frankly, I like Skyward Sword. It lacks the explorative part of Zelda games past, but it excels in that uniquely Zelda "tangibility" factor, in that feeling that you really are doing the things you are doing. The motion controls aren't perfect (they dedicated a whole button to realigning the aiming, because they knew you'd need to do it constantly, and that's not a sign of reliable controls). The dungeons are okay. They are well designed when it comes to funneling you from one area to the next while giving the illusion of choices. I respect that, because if it's invisible to the player, then it works out. However, every dungeon really is a direct path from start to finish. They did a good job disguising it, but there is basically no exploration, no choice, in which room to tackle next. I really lost the sense that I'm the one actually picking my way through. I think the biggest proof of this is that the game doesn't even have a key counter. The game knows that due to the dungeon design, you will NEVER have more than one key, because it's impossible to explore things in any order except the one they designed.
Compare this to Zelda 1, 2, or LTTP, Link's Awakening, or even Ocarina of Time. Zelda 1 and 2 were so open they literally just let you buy keys, or take keys from one dungeon and use them in another, or skip certain optional parts until you got the "all-mighty" key that could be used repeatedly (so, like, a normal key in our world). In Zelda 2, you could fly through the keyholes in doors by turning into a fairy. Yes, it let you bypass the intended design of the dungeon, but it felt like a fair option, and it was an option. Later games, like Link's Awakening (and yes, yes I am going to constantly refer to how your favorite Zelda game does the thing I'm advocating) may not have let you out and out skip puzzles, but they still gave you enough freedom to have multiple paths you can take in a dungeon, and enough freedom to get the feeling you may need to backtrack, and enough freedom to get lost. The hints were spartan, often given as a riddle, and I know for a fact you've pointed out that LA DX's addition of more overt hints was a mistake that cheapened the experience. Now, at this point some glitches were found that would let players bypass certain areas, but end up with one fewer key than the dungeon required to finish it. I think this started Nintendo's obsession with locking down dungeons and treating any discovered "sequence break" as a glitch that needed fixing. In the water temple of OOT, you could end the dungeon with one unusuable key, because they handed it out to be sure that if you did sequence break, you wouldn't be locked out of finishing the dungeon. That was a better way to handle things. Wind Waker was the start of dungeon design that, while masterful in how it could lead you to an item and then "back track" you without it even feeling like backtracking, still felt very easy. I myself commented back when it came out that I never actually got stuck once in that game, and felt that the interface itself had started to get insulting with it telling me instantly that "yes, you can hookshot this item, DO IT NOW", instead of leaving it to me to experiment and figure that out on my own.
In the case of Skyward Sword, that game needed to trust the player more. The whole layout of the world and it's dungeons already led the player to the conclusions they intended. Like a closed design or not (that's where we differ), I respect how well it worked, but clearly Nintendo themselves didn't trust their own design enough to get the job done, feeling the need to constantly interrupt you to force-feed you information the world design had already very clearly indicated. I accept Skyward Sword as a good game featuring an "invisible funneling "design that I don't personally prefer, but I CAN'T accept that annoying sidekick constantly telling me the blindingly obvious that NPCs had already told me over and over again. I remembered that tower with the propeller on it, and even if I didn't you've just given me a dowsing option to quickly locate it from across the world. Why did you feel the need to remind me of that twice, then tell me specifically where to "start" looking for it even though I can dowse? Why did you feel the need to give me a tutorial on HOW to dowse even though I clearly already know how to do that, being 4 dungeons into the game already? Dangit Fi, I am NOT that stupid! Say what you will about these constant reminders being intended for new gamers, but I never needed THAT level of hand-holding when I started playing Zelda back as a kid, back when the entire genre wasn't even established yet. I had the manual to refer to for basic controls and a basic description of enemies and items, and the rest I figured out on my own. Heck I never even bothered taking notes in that "memo" section. The hint givers in that game phrased things so idiosyncratically that there was no way I was going to forget them. (Heck, while playing Breath of the Wild I casually mentioned going "Up, up the mountain path." before remembering where I first heard that line.) Skyward Sword would be much improved if they could assume both you and me were intelligent enough to figure we were supposed to head to that GIANT structure off in the distance, or that maybe after just uncovering 3 distinct doors around a desert along with three glowing rings right next to me, that PERHAPS I should head to those places. Seriously, you can't possibly tell me those aren't blindingly obvious hints, or that they would need not one but two NPCs to explain to me that I should head there to make a thing happen here, and then REMIND me of that fact after each mini-dungeon is completed. That's not something people are going to have trouble figuring out, because their use of the camera and recognizable landmarks makes it clear already. A "Fi is mute" option would have only benefitted the game. Heck, if Fi never said a word and just wordlessly danced with some slabs or something just pointing me the right way like the game already did, not only would I have zero trouble figuring out where to go next, I might actually have grown to care for that NPC, because I could plant my own interpretation of her emotions on her, and it would explain why she never said a thing to any subsequent master sword wielding Link in the "later" games in the timeline. (Also, he shouldn't have had a hat in this game. Minish Cap was the origin story of Link's hat, don't take that from Minish Cap because that's all it has!)
This is a very common criticism of not just Skyward Sword, but any video game series that decided long boring explanations were needed where none were asked for. The later Megaman X games are very guilty of this. No one ever asked for a radio operative to explain to X that, yes, those giant plues of fire shooting out of the ground are best avoided, or that, hey, the moving train is moving. Good level design will explain everything you need to know just by paying attention. You ABF were smart enough to solve those Link's Awakening dungeons with not a single NPC explaining what to do at every puzzle. So long as the level is smartly designed, all the hints will be visually apparent, or clear based on established trends earlier in the game. Skyward Sword DID have this smart design. There weren't any components of puzzles or how enemies worked that contradicted previously established gameplay. Certain aspects of enemies were also readily apparent just by looking at them. If a bat is on fire, it probably does fire type damage. I don't need to ask Fi to know that my wooden shield is probably not going to protect me very well against that. An electric bat probably does electric damage. While metal shields being weak to electricity wasn't established in previous Zelda games, all it took was one "zap" for me to figure that out, and the game stayed consistent with that rule so when I ran into moblins using electric weapons, I knew I should change to a wooden shield instead of my metal one. Fi didn't need to pause the action and explain that to me for me to figure it out.
I'm kinda going the long way around, as long-winded as Fi, but my point is that Nintendo didn't trust their own game design to lead the player in Skyward Sword. Closed world design? Fine. It was a well designed one (to a point, I sure could have gone without backtracking to the same places 3 times each, plus a 4th "meta backtrack" for good measure). However, if you're going to go that route, commit to it. Trust in it. Trust that you did a good enough job making the world and the visual cues that you don't need to explain my goal to me 4 times each.
....
So, back on Breath of the Wild... You're right about the dungeon thing. I mean, we really do differ on the dungeons being THE best part of Zelda games (if a Zelda game was literally just 4 dungeons strung together with no overworld to explore, I would consider that lacking, and well, it would basically be Four Swords), but it is still important. Breath of the Wild definitely focused mostly on the overworld. It's a great overworld, but that does mean dungeon design suffers. Here's how they have it worked out. There's a huge number of shrines (don't go telling me the exact number! Part of the fun is not knowing if I've found the last one, so I'm never hunting down shrines specifically, just running into them as I go, which is better.), but each shrine is basically one puzzle. They do switch things up. For the most part, each dungeon has it's own distinct puzzle to solve, and they get creative with them. However, it's clear that by only having ONE puzzle, they can't iterate upon that puzzle design, and at no point do you feel "lost exploring a dungeon". It's a small diversion at best, not an engaging experience to sink into, and it doesn't let it really "play" with any puzzle idea to put unique twists on it or really take it to it's ultimate level. As a result, the puzzles are all pretty easy. Further, while Zelda only rarely does this, I love when a dungeon's entire layout functions as one gigantic puzzle that requires you to think about how the entire dungeon's design fits together to solve it. The best examples of this sort of lateral thinking are in the Tower of Hera (LTTP), Eagle's Tower (LA), Water Temple (OOT), and Great Bay Temple (MM). I think there's a few in the Capcom Zelda games that touch on this too. Having to think about how EVERYTHING fits together to solve a dungeon's meta-puzzle is an amazing experience when it happens, but Breath of the Wild's shrines can never do that. It's funny how you don't want a dungeon to hold your hand and explain the puzzles to you, but you want the overworld to. To me, the overworld is basically the game's biggest dungeon, not just a "hub world". To that end, I'll explain where I think Breath of the Wild is trying to go with dungeon design.
The shrines are all tributes to "traditional puzzle" design, but it does seem as though the designer's intent was that the overworld be the "real" dungeon. Numerous locations are essentially "outdoor dungeons". Most of them ultimately lead to a shrine (in these cases, the shrines just give you the reward after explaining that just making it to them is proof enough that you deserve it). I've so far found a mountain that functioned as a giant boss fight with the puzzle being finding ways to reach distant peaks and find some way to fall "onto" the boss. I've found a straight-up labyrinth, with the guardian robots functioning as minotaurs. I've found a bizarre spiral in the ocean where I needed to find a way to get a sphere to the very center of it while working past groups of enemies. I've found a number of island connected by bridges. All of these are different kinds of "dungeon" experiences, but susceptible to things like weather and the occasional blood moon ritual, and all of them are open to numerous methods of tackling their challenges. So far, the most interesting of these outdoor dungeons has been an island I just barely saw in the distance. I took a break from where I was originally heading (because I ALWAYS get distracted by seeing weird things in the distance and will ALWAYS immediately veer off my path towards that neat thing over there, because that's just how I've always played video games and I will never ever stop doing that for anything short of an actual in-game timer, my greatest nemesis) to head to this island. I froze the ocean to walk over there one block of ice at a time (since the runes you use are infinite, you're free to do stuff like this). I could have grabbed a raft and sailed it there, but I picked this way. Took a while... Anyway, once I reached it a mysterious force stole all my equipment, leaving me stranded on a dangerous island with the task of setting 3 spheres in 3 special spots. The challenge there was one of stealth, sneaking around and taking down threats while all my equipment was OSP (on-site procurement). It really stands out to me, and I hope more such experiences are waiting ahead. The "outdoor" design means they had to focus on allowing numerous ways the player could tackle it, right down to simply accepting that a player could come into that "dungeon" from pretty much any angle. As a result, they tend to be laid out like an onion, with outer layers leading to inner layers.
So, it's a very interesting design. The "puzzles" in the outdoor "dungeons" aren't of the traditional design. They're focused entirely on the "emergent gameplay" style this game has. You mentioned the game doesn't really provide a whole lot of items like previous ones did. That's true, and heck the game gives them all (well, most of them) to you in the starting location. Being a game where you are free to go where your feet will take you, they wanted to be sure you'd be equipped to tackle any challenge you came across, regardless of the order you tackled them in. Well, aside from the difficulty. Some locations have much stronger enemies than others, but you're free to take them on anyway, if you're up for a challenge. It means you get to pick your difficulty. (That's part of the reason the "harder difficulty mode" in the upcoming DLC is getting so much flack. People who have played the game don't really see the point in adding a "hard mode" to a game that already let you decide if you want a challenge or not via the gameplay design.) So, you've got a shrine in the middle of a large enemy camp. How do you want to do this? Do you want to set off some explosions and lure a few enemies out of the way so you can sneak by? Do you want to climb a hill and glide over all of it, hoping none of them take some pot shots at you? Do you want to just go in swinging your sword? Maybe you want to pick them off with arrows? Or, let's get really creative! Is it raining? Are they standing in a puddle of water? Electrocute them all with a zap arrow. Nah, not creative enough. Looks like some sparks are going up on that weapon you've got equipped. That could be trouble, hey, let's just throw that metal weapon in the middle of their camp and let nature take them all out. Maybe you want to do some engineering. Set a few bombs (two at a time in this game), and put some octo-balloons on them. Now blow them over to the camp with a korok leaf and set 'em off. Got like 100 balloons? Grab a raft nearby and turn it into an airship, then while constantly replenishing balloons, start tossing bombs off the side and rain death from above. (Play Ride of the Valkyries for effect.) Do they have wooden weapons? There's a field of grass nearby, and the wind is blowing towards them! Fire! FIRE! Like, actual fire, burn them all! Use the updraft from the massive fire you just lit to ride over them while they're distracted by the flames! That's just what you have available to you in a combat situation. I've been having a lot of fun just figuring out some new and creative way to tackle every group I've run into. Now imagine what you can do with the more legitimate puzzles. Here's a rock, there's a hole. It seems clear I'm supposed to put that rock in that hole (and never once does anyone have to tell me, it just seems like that rock is just a bit TOO close to the edge and that hole is just a bit TOO perfectly round and too exactly the same size as that rock). I could try and push the thing up the hill. That's one way. I could use bombs to blow it over there. I could float it with those balloons and blow it over there. I could use stasis (think Dead Space) on it and hit it a bunch of times to load it up with kinetic energy that flings it over there. In another situation, I want to cross from this side of a gulch to the other. If I have an axe, I could chop down a tree and can use it as a bridge. I could also set fire to the tree, using the updraft to carry me across. I could also use stasis on a rock as before, fill it up with energy, and then climb onto the rock and RIDE it across the ravine. These are ALL things I've actually done. Every last one is an example of a thing I actually did. The game just... lets you do this stuff!
Along those large "dungeon style" areas are an amazing number of puzzles just oozing out of every crack in the world. I mentioned seeing the occasional large stone and a hole and just thinking "hmm, I wonder if", but that's just one example. I saw a bunch of circles of stones everywhere, all of them missing a couple of rocks in them. Well, I started thinking "I wonder what would happen if I just picked up a rock and finished the circle?" and sure enough, that was entirely the intent. I might see an odd flower, try to pick it only to see it vanish and reappear somewhere else, and I just HAVE to follow it to see where it goes. I might see flower arrangements that change color when I touch then, and notice hey, each arrangement has a different number of flowers, I bet that's the order... yep! Sometimes it's just a single rock perched on the top of a hill, and I just know I should totally pick that rock up and, YES! If it looks like a puzzle, it IS a puzzle.
Of course, a large part of being able to enjoy a game like this is attitude. For some people, they are dead-set on reaching a specific objective, and everything else is just "in the way" of the thing they want to do. That's one way to play a game, I suppose. For me, a destination is just that, a destination. I will generally be heading in that direction, but my main focus is on looking at every little thing I can see on my way to that destination, and if I see or hear something interesting, or even just suspect that something that MIGHT be interesting is just over that hill that's not THAT far off the path I'm taking, I WILL investigate it, every single time, and maybe, if I'm lucky, I might actually reach my original destination by the end of the real-world day I first picked that destination. I somehow ended up wandering into the middle of a volcano before finally making my way to my original destination, the Zora Domain. I COULD have just headed straight there, but the prince popping up to tell me I'm nearly there had the GALL to say "oh, and it's constantly raining here, so forget about climbing those rocks, just stick to the path". I wouldn't stand for that! I climbed them anyway, to SPITE him, and it was clear the developers knew I was going to do this, because yes, up there was the ENTIRE WORLD OF EVERYTHING and I had a fun time running around finding little secrets and reading lore about the history of the Zora kingdom. Eventually, I went back to the path, but I kept getting distracted, of my own volition, because they would put something interesting in my field of view.
You may not play it this way. To that end, I want to assure you that the game does a very good job of "bread crumbing". That is, they'll set up your main objective in the game at the very start, and then provide you with a first optional destination. That place, should you choose to go there, will lead you to another town, which will point you to another location, and along the way you'll get some other major questlines. You can ignore them, or you can follow them, or you can do as I did and "get around to them eventually". My point is that at no point do you feel completely lost about what to do. If you get lost, it's your own fault, and if you forget something, the quest log will remind you (it categorizes the quests between "shrine quests" (you occasionally pick up hints on where shrines are located), "side quests" (stuff NPCs ask you to do) and "main quests" (stuff that will prepare you for the final showdown, such as regaining your lost memories). Instead of revealing the entire map to you at the very start, you find segments of the map. This isn't so hard. They stick area maps in gigantic red towers visible from almost everywhere in a zone (often visible from several zones away in fact, thanks to the crazy draw distance in the game), so you always have a clear idea where to go if you want to see what's in the new area right away. You can place a massive number of markers on the map too. If there's a puzzle of interest to you but you'd rather just come back later, stick a marker on that section and you'll remember where to come back. Every village, shrine, and map marker also will be added to your map automatically as you discover them. Every single shrine also functions as a fast travel location, with a lore related reason why fast travel is a thing in this world. You will never feel burdened with a massive checklist of miscellaneous stuff to collect either. The towers give you a vantage point to look around and a map, but that's it. No need to look at a list of treasure chests saying "incomplete". If you don't want to bother, just don't.
What I'm getting at here is this game may be more enjoyable than you think. You may have watched videos of people wandering around "aimlessly", but know that that's just how those people WANT to play the game. If you don't want that, know that you can just head to the main locations in the game and ignore the side objectives and you'll do just fine.
Whatever you do, don't approach shrines with a "I'm just going to hunt for shrines now" attitude. Every time I've seen someone online get frustrated with the game, that seems to be the reason why. They set finding shrines as their objective, and get frustrated because there's no clear "shrine markers". Treat shrines as a bonus you MIGHT find and it becomes a lot more fun when you do.
Dunkey seems to be loving it anyway:
As for the story, Zelda games tend to have simple stories. If all you want is a basic outline, then this is it. You lost to Ganon last time, imitated Rip Van Winkle, and are back to beat him/it (Ganon seems to have been at this so long he's lost his mind almost entirely). If you take the time to talk to everyone you meet though, you'll find everyone is very well characterized. The general mood is very much in the vein of classic fairy tales. Everything is the thing of legend, but that's just how the Zelda series rolls. Moving past that, you'll find out all sorts of information about the various races, how they organize, how the kingdoms all came to be one, and even find out about the sad history of the Sheikah tribe in particular. Frankly, one can understand why some of them might betray the kingdom to work for Ganon. The major NPCs also get some fleshing out, and this is possibly the most well-rounded Zelda in ANY of the games to date. She has actually been fighting Ganon by herself nonstep for a century, ever since Link fell in battle during their first attempt. She's the sole reason Hyrule is even still around after all this time, scattered though everyone may be. She "needs your help" as always, but I will say this. For the first time, Link and Zelda's roles can EASILY be reversed and barely anything would need to be changed. Zelda could easily have been the one to fall in battle, with Link battling Ganon for 100 years and her waking up to come to his aid. Recent games have at least done a good job of having Link and Zelda fight together during the final battle, so it works out either way. Even the flashbacks you gain wouldn't need to change, and that's where things get interesting. First of all, Zelda wears pants. Yes, she's worn them before, but only as an "alter-ego" like Tetra or Sheik (and yes, the fanbase still has lots of people insistent that Sheik is physically a man, because we all know she couldn't be a ninja without a penis, and no, making her physically a man does nothing for the trans community because having a penis has nothing to do with gender identity, and that's your Social Justice Warrior outburst for the day). This is the first time in a main straight-from-Nintendo release that she's got a decent pair of pants to traipse across the land in. Also, she's got some weird ornate royal breastplate on, with exaggerated pecs, which is a nice change of pace from the thing female breastplates normally exaggerate. Her design is very well done. (Okay, I suppose the first Zelda to wear pants was in the 80's cartoon.) Anyway, all these memories show someone who's questioning everything she's been taught and seems to resent this "role of legend" decided for her by the gods before she was even born, while also not even sure she can live up to that role. It's the first time I've ever seen the series question it's own notion of "destiny" before, and it was very interesting. There's four other warriors travelling with you, a merry little band, and their characterization is pretty interesting too, especially considering you know what happens at the end of these memories. It's some great stuff and about as introspective as I've ever seen the series get. Yes, the overall story is simple, but in that simplicity they're able to explore some interesting character ideas. Zelda is as progressive a character as she's ever been. Sure, you still don't get to play as her (as I said above, this would have been the perfect game to do it, as they literally could have swapped them without altering the story, just some of the NPC dialog), but she's the one leading the party in the flash backs. She's the one who saves Link, and she's the one who's been dealing with Ganon, by herself, for a century (odd thing is, lots of NPCs are over 100 years old, explicitly, including the Sheikaih who I had thought were just a tribe of Hylians and not their own race). I've said before that Zelda has always been a much more progressively written princess than Peach, but there have still always been problems. This game however, well, I'd say it handles things very well. She even has multiple conversations with female characters about their OWN futures that don't necessarily talk about Link specifically. She speaks about her own concerns to Link, rather than just talking about her feelings about how Link ties into her life all the time, and that's pretty huge coming from Japan. I mean, don't expect a LOT (she's not going into issues of legal decrees or land development or the mistreatment of the Sheikaih minority), but it's something, and it's notable. If only they'd done the extra work to just let you pick between them at the start. Maybe a character name/select screen could appear in the form of some quasimystical computer interface, as though the machine keeping you in a coma was verifying data on you (Crystalis did this at the start of the game).
Also, as always, the character designs across the board are engaging and colorful. I've loved the character design of the Zelda series since Wind Waker. I mean, there's nothing wrong with their design in previous games. They work well enough, and I've got a soft spot for the first Zelda's concept art. It's just that starting with Wind Waker they reached a whole new level, both in overall silhouette and in the incredible attention to functional details. Beedle, for example, has always been a character that more or less is a part of his shop, and has been since Wind Waker. In this game, he carries his entire shop on his back in pack shaped like a beetle. Everything about his design is informed by what he does and his inventive personality. His giant pack also has banners flying off of it, and a large shade covering him that also resembles the little shades over street vending carts. When you speak with him, he quickly pulls a table from under this shade which he attaches to his waste. I'm jealous of how skilled their designer is at coming up with this stuff, time after time, and I'm not even slightly an artist. The monsters also have very unique designs. The bokoblins, ever since Wind Waker, have essentially replaced moblins as the standard enemy you encounter, with moblins now pushed to "bigger bad" status, similar to how they were used in OOT. I had hoped they might go retro with the "bulldog face" look they had in the first two Zelda games, but the pig look they picked works because it is just so different than what I expected. They are giants, but lanky ones. Long arms, long legs, and a really long snout (that's almost their entire head) really make for an alien looking moblin. The "sacred beasts" (giant robots based on animals, so... zords) are very clearly robots, but their design looks magical and legendary, like something out of the mists of time. They don't spoil the aesthetic of the rest of the world at all. They fit right into it perfectly. The shrines in particular have some sort of "living Buddah" corpse as their main objective with an overall design that both looks high-tech and mystical all at once.
Anyway, I still haven't beaten the game. As you may have figured, I'm in no rush to do so.
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 17th March 2017
... I will write a reply. But as an aside... that Switch dock power supply, what in the world was Nintendo thinking? Putting the plug on the brick is rewinding the clock more than 25 years, as far as home console power supplies go, and it is in no way okay! I know phones and handhelds usually have the plug on the brick, but almost no consoles in the past 25 years have; after the 4th generation (SNES, Genesis, its addons, etc.) -- and even then some PC Engine/TurboGrafx models have the brick in the middle of the cord instead of on the plug -- all that I can think of is the PSone (the small model). There are probably a few more, but not many, and Nintendo bringing it back is terrible; plug-on-the-brick stuff is a pain to deal with with how much space they take up on normal power strips! You need breakout cables, splitters, etc. to deal with that stuff, and it is so easily avoided. It's Nintendo saving a few cents at the cost of consumer convenience, sadly. It's a sad retreat from their vastly superior console power solutions of every home console they've released since the N64.
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 17th March 2017
Wait, you actually WANT the brick in the middle of the cable? That's been a constant annoyance for me! The ideal solution is putting the power converter in the system itself (the N64 had the best possible solution, being both easily replacable and also stuck right on the system), but failing that, I MUCH prefer it be at the outlet than as some unwieldy blob right in the middle of the cable I have to somehow manage. When the thing is halfway on the cable, well, where am I supposed to stick it if I have the power cable running up the length of an entertainment center? Sometimes I might get lucky and there will be a small shelf or something I can "rest" that section of the brick on, but mostly it just end up pulling down while dangling from nowhere. UNACCEPTABLE!
I was pretty happy to see their new system had a much easier to manage power solution. If you have older power strips, it can be annoying. Newer ones tend to have all the outlets facing perpendicular to the strip though, with decent spacing, so you shouldn't have any need of breakout cables. Also, you really should be updating your power strips every decade or so anyway. The circuit breakers in power strips degrade over time, and anything older than that is not really any good for actually saving your equipment from a surge.
Anyway, there's a different of opinion for ya. I HATE "middle of the cable" power bricks. I can't imagine how you handle those, unless you just keep all your consoles in a pile on the floor. Oh wait...
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 20th March 2017
If I've had trouble selling you on this game, try this video on for size. This person makes a good case for the game's open world design not being a tedious affair but a fun one, really delving into that sense of exploration and discovery with something new hidden in every corner.
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 21st March 2017
Yes, that does look like a good summation of many of the reasons you like this game. :p
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 21st March 2017
Yes?
Well, in any case I think I just wanted to break down the differences down to the basic difference in taste. When it comes down to it, if you prefer a game that gives you a set of objectives and you just want the challenge of completing stated objectives, that's fine. I love plenty of games like that, such as Mario or Megaman. If you prefer something more like a sandbox, there are the extremes such as Minecraft, but I prefer just a BIT more structure than that. Give me an overall goal and a vast world to explore full of secrets, and I'm usually pretty happy. I never really cared much for Grand Theft Auto, but stuff like Phantom Pain and Breath of the Wild are right up my alley. I think we've got an understanding of the differences in our tastes at this point at least. You know, I took my sweet time in Twilight Princess too. I explored every inch and more or less ignored the indicated path until I was good and ready to move on, but it really is something when I can just "keep going". There's not a single giant wall made out of a "forest" texture blocking me off, so I can just keep going, and I love that. That ALONE isn't enough, because heck I don't like No Man's Sky at all. I also want that world to be engaging and full of surprises and things to do, and Breath of the Wild delivers on that more than Phantom Pain did. The animals all have their own little lives, and sometimes I'll spot a few moblins hunting some wild boar. I recall hiding behind a tree and when they ran by while chasing the boar I snuck out and backstabbed it. Good times. But, clearly that's debatable. I think it's fine explaining what you want out of a game, but please don't say they are "obvious" flaws when clearly the thing you call a flaw is the very thing I wanted and enjoyed, so it isn't a flaw, just different design than what you want.
Weapon durability and stamina though... and also the rain is starting to get on my nerves (the rain really only being a problem because of the stamina issue).
What's REALLY starting to get to me is the gaming community though. They've lost their minds. On the one side, you've got Nintendo fans beyond all reason who've decided that someone giving the game a 7/10 is UNACCEPTABLE and thus decided to ruin that guy's entire life. On the other side, you've got massive groups who have decided they have to "counter" all this love just for the sake of "balance" and are sending death threats to anyone who gave the game a 10/10 because they are "clearly" biased and thus... deserve to die for it I guess? (It should be noted that the vast majority of them openly admit they haven't actually played the game, but that's a pretty minor point since even if they had played it and didn't like it, it still wouldn't justify their behavior.) The two idiotic tribes are currently battling over a metacritic score, and it's downright pathetic. You know what I've been doing? Playing games I like, and not playing the ones I don't.
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 23rd July 2017
So the phone app that allows online chat, party play in games, etc. is out, and by all accounts it is an atrocious disaster, just as expected but maybe even worse. Of course I personally hate the idea of forcing people to use cellphones to play online, not least since I don't ever want to own one, but even beyond that this is awful because no game console should require you use a completely external device just to do basic, should-be-included features like voice chat and normal party play. This Nintendo-DeNa partnership is leading to bad, bad things.
That is a ludicrous idea, and this app is even worse because it needs to be running and fullscreen to work; you cannot minimize the app or it'll shut off; you cannot let the phone turn the screen off and go into low-power mode or it'll shut off; it shuts down immediately the moment anything else pops up; etc. And chat audio comes only from the phone while game audio comes only from the Switch, so either you need to listen to them separately or use a ridiculous cable merger/adapter thing. And worst of all of course you need an Apple or Android phone to have full online functionality on your console. How can Nintendo, of all people, actually release something in a state this broken and terrible?
But you'd better use the app, because some games pretty much require it -- apparently Splatoon 2 requires it to save or view any stats or screenshots of your online results, unlock some gear, and more. It's unacceptable to lock that stuff to an external app.
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 23rd July 2017
Also, as the kid-centric company, it isn't a good idea to lock out a large number of their own playerbase by requiring smart phones that lots of kids simply don't have. I know plenty of parents will let their kids play with their cell phone to kill time, but it's a whole other matter to let their kids essentially hog it all to themselves for several hours.
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 24th July 2017
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Also, as the kid-centric company, it isn't a good idea to lock out a large number of their own playerbase by requiring smart phones that lots of kids simply don't have. I know plenty of parents will let their kids play with their cell phone to kill time, but it's a whole other matter to let their kids essentially hog it all to themselves for several hours.Good point. And wouldn't it require usage of your often-limited mobile data and such too? That is not okay!
On another phone-app-related point, if it HAS to be an app -- and it doesn't, there is no actual reason for this besides that Nintendo remains clueless about how to do competent internet policy -- while I don't own a cellphone I do have a Windows tablet which would be just fine for this, if Nintendo had released a PC or Windows Store version of the app instead of only Android and iOS... but no, of course not.
Time to make a Switch pun - Dark Jaguar - 24th July 2017
I'm personally not opposed to this app as one option. There is room for it to be better or more useable in some cases than the on-console solution, and it would be a natural fit for setting your online connection up when you are on the go. However, it's no good as the ONLY option, and certainly is an inferior option when it's used as a home console.
Time to make a Switch pun - A Black Falcon - 2nd September 2017
So I didn't buy one, but when in one of the Gamestops I was looking for games in over the past few days... well, they actually had Switches for sale! That's the first time I have actually seen one in person... I was a little tempted, but not all that much because there still are so few games for it that I really want and it costs quite a bit. It is cool to see though, it's good that supply seems to be stabilizing.