17th June 2016, 6:43 PM
(This post was last modified: 18th June 2016, 10:00 PM by A Black Falcon.)
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.
- 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.