Topic: Please explain me why Breath of the Wild got so many high scores

As someone that's been saying the same for ages, I agree

I'm not one to normally defend Zelda story, but BOTW is almost beat to beat the exact story as OOT post time-skip.

Link wakes up after a long rest, learns that Ganon turned the world to crap, has to find the spirits of his friends, and borrow their power to end Ganon.

Nostalgia is pretty strong if someone bashes BOTW's premise, but praises OOT.

" I don't have to convince anyone that it's a bad game because it's not"
Yes exactly, for example (unfortunately) Kingdom of Amalur got to the point that it was a bad game. Breath of the wild is not bad like this, I agree, you can clearly see the differences between those two games after you play them for a while, but Breath of the wild is still immensely overrated, so much overrated that it's just sad reading comments and reviews about it. Both many other Zelda games and other open world games are much more interesting and much better than Breath of the wild. Breath of the wild is a really good template to start creating a real open world game that has some real and deep contents to it but Nintendo must understand what an open world game is and how focus on the things an open world game really need to be satisfying and interesting, and be willing even to sacrifice less importantant things if needed to improve those and make them really stand out. Or either get back to the traditional Zelda formula, that would be the best thing for them and for the franchise in my opinion, and maybe in the future create a new ip specifically intended to be an open world game

I feel like I just read the essay on BOTW I promised to write a few weeks ago...

While I agree, I think it's important to recognize that we can praise OoT for the story it had when it released. It's the people still claiming it's the best game ever that I find have nostalgia glasses on in full force.

@MegaTen
I hadn't seen this review. It's quite sad this guy had to rush the game, and as a result didn't appreciate it. But who the hell asked him to do that ?

@MegaTen Great article. It's very true how everything worth seeing in the world is in the main regions like Death Mountain and Zora's Domain, which you would see in a linear Zelda game anyway.

It really saddens me when people, Nintendo-only gamers especially, say they love the exploration and side questing aspect of this game, too. The exploration and side quests in this game are among the worst in the open world genre. So much of the world is copy and pasted, there are very few unique locations, and the side quests are all pure garbage. They should do themselves a favor and pick up Skyrim if they want real exploration and side quests, with side characters that aren't so forgettable that you can't even remember their names. Nearly everything that this game gets praised for, other games do much better. The only exception is the combat, which I found very enjoyable. The shrines and Divine Beasts were good too, but not as good as linear Zelda dungeons, and like the guy who wrote the article said, only 80 of the shrines were actual shrines and not blessings or combat shrines where you fight the same exact enemy every single time.

The story and main characters were pretty meh, too. Not the worst ever, but nowhere near as good as the stories or characters in past Zelda games. And because the lead-ups to the Divine Beasts are so short, it's extremely hard to feel any connection to the Champions or their descendants. The Zora and Gerudo ones were okay, but the Goron one was pretty poor, and the Rito one was just awful.

Like I've said in previous posts, open world could work for Zelda, but Nintendo doesn't really seem to know how to make an open world game. If the next Zelda game is a mile wide but an inch deep like BoTW (assuming it's also open world like they've hinted at), they should just completely forget about making open world games. I would much rather play something that's completely and 100% scripted but is a truly great game than play another relatively soulless game that let's me run around aimlessly in a boring world, find the same things over and over again, fight the same few enemies over and over again, do fetch quests and "go here, kill this" quests, and play through a weak story.

Eh, I don't get too bothered as to why a game scored the way it did. There are a few games where I don't quite get the universal praise,(God of War and Paper Mario TYD for ex.)but I can accept why people liked it. I find a little funny when we start questioning why a game got so many good scores when we're always clamoring for high quality titles.

oh good, I was concerned for a second that 7 pages in that people would still somehow be confused that an open world Zelda game made by Zelda people was praise worthy. Which would be the dumbest thing in the world. It'd be like being confused that people liked the last Captain America movie. It'd be like if I, person who hates MMOs, was shocked that World of Warcraft was well regarded. If I unironically did that, I would be a moron.

Someday I'll play this game and have an opinion of it, but SPOILERS I think the Zelda people that always make awesome Zelda games might've just made an awesome game that people like. I think the series I always like made by some of Nintendo's best might just be a game I like.

Skyrim's exploration is miserable thanks to the terrible art direction, wonky physics, and complete lack of any sort of climbing system. In terms of how the world is actually navigated, in terms of the land design, and in terms of the amount of interactivity that is possible with the environment, BotW is absolutely second-to-none. I've played a variety of open world games over the years, and none of them has enchanted me quite like that game has.

It's indeed not perfect or "the greatest game ever made," but it is definitely the first truly spectacular title that Nintendo has released since Super Mario Galaxy (I love games like Mario Kart 8 and Pikmin 3, but, as good and polished as they are, they never wowed me), and I'm looking forward to seeing how they improve on it in future games.

I'm also glad that Nintendo is finally abandoning the archaic and tired formula that they've been running with since Ocarina of Time.

This I disagree with actually! While there are things about it that should totally be changed and innovated, the structure of OOT and beyond (how you progress through this fairly linear action-adventure title!) is my go to example of how 3D games with both good gameplay and story should be structured. And I miss 3d games that were neither a linear hallway nor gigantic open worlds. Stuff like Beyond Good and Evil or Okami or Darksiders etc. All the exact type of video game worlds I want to explore. Not too big, not too small. A bit of towns and NPCs, an overworld, lots of gameplay variety, some dungeons.

@kkslider5552000 amen to that. Not too linear and not too pointlessly big. I find the last two main Zelda games have swung on both extremes, and it's disappointing

@Ralizah The original version of Skyrim was indeed quite ugly, but the remastered and modded versions are very colorful and crisp looking. It isn't cartoony like BoTW is, and that might be a turn off for some people, but the more realistic visuals in Skyrim fit the game a lot better than BoTW's art style would.

As for the physics system, BoTW does beat out Skyrim, but as for climbing, I don't see how being able to scale every surface like Spiderman would make Skyrim's exploration any better, aside from the occasions where you can't find a path up a mountain. If anything, the mobility you get in Zelda is just a band-aid to make the amount of traveling you need to do to find anything worth seeing more bearable. Skyrim simply doesn't need it, because Bethesda bothered to actually put stuff in the world that wasn't just a shrine or a monster camp or stables that all look the same.

I suppose certain people will be drawn to one more than the other, though. Some people might be content with a fairly barren world if it means having a ton of mobility and being able to glide around and such. I personally was never that wowed with the climbing or paraglider, though. The most fun I had with exploring in BoTW was when I first started the game and was playing it more like Skyrim and was actually walking around on the ground level because I thought "Oh, maybe these ruins will have something cool in them" or "Maybe this mountain will have something interesting at the top", but then I realized that wasn't the case, and just went back to the traveling method of climbing up stuff and jumping off to reach the next shrine or Divine Beast or wherever else I was going.

I really do find it a shame that I even wanted to glide over the entire map to reach places, because that meant the map wasn't interesting enough for me to even want to walk around and explore the areas in between shrines or fairy fountains or Divine Beasts.

@kkslider5552000
Agreed! OOT is a great balance point for 3D Zelda: stray a little bit more in either linear or open direction, though, and things start to crumble.

And Link to the Past will always be the gold standard for 2D Zeldas.

Anyway, BotW is an excellent game, for sure, but yea - doesn't deserve as many perfects as it got. It's just riding the high tide of the open-world craze right now.

I think we're just a dozen or so open-world zombie, FPS, and tomb raiding games away from the breaking point, though, so we should see tastes swing away from it soon.

@rallydefault I hope your last statement is correct, though I reached my breaking point (excluding Zelda) a while ago. it'll be interesting what the next major genre is

Sorry, I totally disagree. You're not going on an adventure in most post-OoT Zelda games: instead, you're just encountering a series of regimented, locked off landscapes and locations that require you to obtain one particular thing or walk one particular place to trigger a cutscene to move the game forward. Can't venture out of this one particular area until you obtain a certain item, but the game usually doesn't tell you exactly what that is or where to find it, so you have to scour the same areas over and over until you find something you didn't notice before. Want to move the game forward? Sorry, but you have to find mystical Patutu in some random cave on the side of a mountain to get a pair of flippers or boots to move on with your life. Oh, sorry, you're supposed to stand on a rock and fire an arrow at the sun to get the magical arrow you need to move the game forward. Over and over and over. And this is the entirety of most of these games: just one walled off area after another.

This regimentation extends to character movement as well. Link's ability to manuever his environment is severely hampered in these games, presumably so players are forced to do things in the scripted way the designers intended instead of allowing them some level of agency when they engage with the game.

The traditional dungeons everyone waxes poetic about are also the laziest things in the world. Room after room of mind-numbingly stupid and basic "puzzles." Shooting an eyeball on a wall isn't a puzzle, it's a waste of time. Same with the block pushing, or the varieties of keys you have to track down: they're busywork intended to pad out the length of a dungeon and little else. Some of these dungeons have original or interesting themes and puzzles (like the oft-maligned water dungeons and some of the later temples in OoT), but these get lost in the tedious bloat of locked doors, key snatching, eyeball shooting, and block pushing.

It's also quite boring how each of these dungeons are almost always structured around one particular item. It takes most of the mystery or interest out of a boss fight when you know there's some gimmick that revolves around whatever item you happened to pick up.

It might sound like I hate these games, but it's more that I feel like the formula has been played out. The series needed a re-invention that really took advantage of the additional power provided by modern hardware to provide a Zelda game that felt like a true adventure, and, for me, BotW fit the bill perfectly.

For the record, Majora's Mask is still my favorite game in the series: I felt like it was the best "example" of the classic Zelda formula done right, and it made some radical changes to the gameplay that really mixed things up and made it stand out as its own thing.

@Ralizah Skyrim's lack of a climbing system makes the game look rather weird and stupid in certain occasions, expecially if you play it using third person view, and Breath of the wild look a lot more polished in cases like this, I agree, but the fact is that this is not a very important part of an open world game. Interesting side quests, believable npcs and many different and varied locations of interest scattered through the world map, and big villages with both activities and quests to do and resources to help players achieve what they are aiming for (just to name a few) are much more important in an open world game and every single one of those things is much better in Skyrim, much more developed and thought out than in Breath of the wild, this is why Skyrim is a much better open world game than Breath of the wild. It doesn't do EVERYTHING better than Breath of the wild, but it does better all the things that REALLY MATTER in a game of this kind, so many of the efforts Breath of the wild accomplish end up being useless in the end. They could make the game a lot more polished, yes, if only there was a game. Unfortunately Breath of the wild lacks almost all the key features that should be mandatory in an open world game.
Also the art direction in Skyrim is not bad at all, it is really good honestly. The old version of the game looked rather poor because of the way shadows were displayed, the engine of the game really sucked in that regard and it made the whole game look poor. The art direction in the Special edition is exactly the same and it looks very good. I prefer Oblivion's type of setting, but this is only a matter of personal taste, art direction in Skyrim is good too.

Open-world games are just the next platformers of NES, beat-em-ups of SNES, RPGs of PS1/N64, and FPSs of PS3/360. (Can't remember what PS2/GCN had an overabundance of, correct me if I'm wrong on the above as well).

Every generation of gaming has a genre where it gets extremely oversaturated.

That said, BotW is still really really good. Yeah, lack of enemy variety is a problem, and the core "meat" of the story is really simple, but that doesn't change that I spent the entire game having fun.

No I think they reached a good balance with the overworld. If you don't add enough, the world feels empty, but if you add something every step of the way, it soon starts to feel artificial and predictable.

There are interesting places and then there are places that are just places, which is how it should be. I was kinda happy they decided to focus a lot more on making the world poetic through artstyle rather than packed with little things to do and to see. I enjoyed climbing a mountain to see the horizon, going to the beach and see the trees or simply walking through the ruins. This is very atypical of me as I don't like non-gaming moments in games, but I really liked the environment in BotW.

Though not perfect, I think BotW was a step in the right direction. It got rid of some stuff that, personally, made Zelda trite and unbearable, like the linearity or the overly ceremonious story (which is still too much for me, even on BotW). The thought of them going back to something more akin to Twilight Princess is scary.

Have we seriously reached the point where pre-BOTW Zelda games are considered to be too linear?