Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

If the improvements in technology covered the extra work needed for more graphically advanced games, surely we'd expect game budgets to have remained roughly the same over time?

NL has an analysis up
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2015/03/feature_the_legend_o...

Thoughts? I'm pretty sure the interface we saw at TGAs was just something makeshift. Also, please DON'T bring back SS's crafting system. Zelda as an adventure game is far more focused on large incremental upgrades over small crafting upgrades, as a result, there isn't a lot of incentive to craft at all.

I like the crafting and hope they go even further with it in this game. Or maybe I'm just playing too much Monster Hunter???

I LOVE crafting...in RPGs. RPGs have a very gradual and steady growth and difficulty curve coupled with deep battle systems, lots of different character stats, and often resource management elements. All of these allow for a very robust crafting system that allow the player agency in how they progress through the game. Monster Hunter is a great example of this coming together. The difficulty goes up pretty gradually in that game from monster to monster, and you have the same tools to use for each. So to grown in response to the difficulty, you get to craft. Now your character has a huge array of stats and abilities. Crafting allows you to choose which abilities you do and don't want on your character.

Of all those things that make crafting awesome, Zelda only has the resource management component. Link has a paltry number of stats. Zelda's growth and difficulty curves are incredibly punctuated. Stat boosts and new abilities also have a tendency of being far more significant than most RPG buffs and abilities. So while you could craft them, it'd make more sense to make them an exclusive reward of searching the world. Actually, even RPGs do this, with the best items being uncraftable, and hidden in a unique location in immediately usable form.

I will say the one thing that SS did pull off okay was the shield crafting. This is because it turned the shield into something closer to an RPG weapon/armor. There are gradually scaling stats, each type of shield has unique abilities and attributes, though none vary too significantly. But at the same time, they lost the ability to implement something like the mirror shield.

Crafting doesn't make sense in Zelda like it does in Monster Hunter. In Monster Hunter the point of the game is hunting monsters, so carving and crafting from their materials only follows. Zelda is a game about exploring ancient ruins; solving puzzles and defeating monsters to delve deeper. Finding hidden treasures and using them as items only makes sense; that's why A Link Between Worlds was one of the worst 2D Zeldas, because it wrecked the progression.

So you want Zelda to be more linear? You want to end up with a bunch of useless items like in TP? I don't think the renting system is the best system ever, but it helped break the trend of strict linearity.

False dilemma. You don't get to pretend that the two extremes are the only options and that's the way it is, pick one or the other.

But I agree that A Link Between Worlds was one of the weakest Zelda games to date. I liked the dungeons. The story was nice. The characters were charming. The gameplay was pretty tight and enjoyable. The whole game was bursting with charm, really. I finished my first playthrough in one sitting, I enjoyed it so much.

And I hate to use this word, but it all felt so lazy. It just plops a shop in the middle of the map where you can get everything immediately and then tells you to go do whatever. What concerns me is that Aonuma might think that this is the right way to take the series.

Well the reason it was like that was to make it more similar to A Link to the Past, what it was based on. In the game, you're pretty much shoved out the door to go figure out how to get to the next part of the game. Sure, the renting system could have been much better, but what Aonuma wanted was for the players to just figure out what to do by themselves. Like the complete opposite of Skyward Sword. Now it seems Zelda U is an expansion of LBW's ideas, because it's open world. He wants to make the franchise more about exploration again, which I think is something that we should look forward to.

I think it's more than just HD. HD itself is only the resolution that the game is. I think the scale of the games is what takes longer for development.

I was just posing two possible outcomes in the form of passive-aggressive, semi-rhetorical questions that are a lot worse than the "ruined" progression from ALBW.

I don't think the linearity is ruining the series at all. I think the choosing dungeons in any order is a bit overrated.

Linearity has always been a problem for me in this series. It makes no sense to give players this gigantic world to explore and then force them to run around like rats in a maze, following the string of cutscenes from one town or dungeon to the next. There might be an entire world for you to explore, but you have to worry about finding out the one thing to do in one corner of the map that will let you actually progress in the game. It's archaic game design, to be honest. A Link Between Worlds wasn't perfect, but loosening up the linear structure a bit and giving players more freedom really brought the game to life for me. It was like they found out they could have the freedom of the later part of Wind Waker while still maintaining a coherent, organized narrative.

I'm not too fussed about linearity either. As long as it's linearity in a wide explorable world, it's fine. Linearity only becomes a problem when it goes down the FF13 route of madness.

I think having a game in which you progress by collecting certain items that allow you to access new areas (what is being dubbed as "linear") is a fine concept. However, it won't work in an open world, as Zelda U is claiming to be. This is why I think Zelda U will go away from that formula. Having an open world that you can't explore won't make sense. Even Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess were linear, while only giving the impression of open world. But if Zelda U is really going to be open world, any form of linearity is going to be a confounding factor.

I haven't played Link Between Worlds, so I can't speak of how the open-world concept works in a Zelda game, but I for one am excited about the possibility of a true open world Zelda game.

You can do all those things in a nonlinear game. And they still weaken the value of crafting.

Non-linearity is kind of a neat feature, but not very important in my book. It's kind of like a minigame: it's great that it's there, but I wouldn't miss it if it weren't.

I honestly doubt it's going to be the "open world" everyone is expecting. If I had to guess, it's going to be Wind Waker on land, without loading times.

Linearity can be a good thing. I'd like to see some progression of difficulty.

Non-linearity alone isn't important. Mario Galaxy was technically nonlinear, but it didn't add much. Where it becomes important is when it is combined with a large, explorable overworld. Now you aren't just choosing an order to complete dungeons, you are looking for and discovering dungeons. With a nonlinear world, you don't just have one section cordoned off for you, you can find any dungeon anywhere.

On your first point, that's precisely what my definition of open-world was five years ago, and I still think that a huge landscape without loading times alone is cool even if it doesn't have everything every other open-world game has. It would be nice to see plenty of towns and cities, which I think there will be, if they're going so far as to put farmers in the fields.

On your second point, that's where I thought ALBW was lacking. I don't think non-linearity has to mean a flat difficulty curve. The original Legend of Zelda had levels 5-7 being much harder than levels 1-3, and that game worked just fine. The player was told which level he was on, so he knew that if he stumbled on level 7 early in the game, he was up against a real challenge. Part of the problem of ALBW is that it was non-linear, but you didn't really feel like it mattered what order you did them in.

That sounds more like an open-world game without a prominent main story, like Skyrim. In my opinion, Zelda U is still going to have a main story-line, with set dungeons you have to complete, albeit in any order. Except, in this open world, there are a plethora of additional content scattered across the landscape, including large additional dungeons not necessary to the main quest. Non-linearity, I've always assumed, just means that the steps in the main quest can be played out of order.