Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I don't mind weapon upgrades as long as they are done ALttP style and actually mean something. Otherwise leveling up is...well...I don't mind it too much in Zelda II. However, I don't want to spend a lot of time grinding.

• Huge, semi-linear world. I want it to be open and encourage exploration, but with in-game mechanics to limit progression, such as needing a certain item to get to a certain place. Like Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess, but with bigger, more vast, more varied locations that make you want to spend hours just exploring new places.

Yes, semi-linear would be best.

• Unpredictable, inventive encounter design in the overworld and giving players a reason to actually engage in combat, maybe a hunting or mark system. Roaming optional bosses too, with no limits on difficulty for area. There's nothing wrong with throwing an superboss in a beginner's area. Players can just avoid it and come back later.

This sounds so RPGish actually, but I like this. Optional bosses would be great.

• Ditch gimmicky swordplay. Wind Waker still did it best, with different directional slashes, a stab, a leaping attack, and then blocking, dodging, and countering, all of this done with an analog stick and 2 buttons, 3 including targeting. Combat should be more challenging in Zelda U than it has been, but it should be quite basic at the core. Challenge can be achieved through better enemy AI, more precise timing required, and better use of weak points.

Yuuuuuuuuuuuup. The Twilight Princess swordplay was so pointless and laughable.

• Creative and difficult environmental puzzles in dungeons. I want to get stuck. Lots. And at the end of the dungeon, boss fight designs that go beyond simple finding weakness and exploiting it until dead.

Master Quest level puzzles would be great. Continue the "each room is a puzzle" with more challenges and hidden stuff.

• More sailing yaaaay, I need a boat, sails, and the open sea.

I will reword this. Regardless of the travel, make it meaningful and full of things to do. Skyward Sword failed so hard in this aspect.

If you ask me, WW's swordplay, while better than OoT or the 2D games, is pretty boring. For the most part, there were only 3 combat moves. The parry, spin attack, and normal slash. TP's hidden skills really spiced things up. The big issue it ran into was that the enemy design was poor. Stalfos, Redeads, and Chilfos were too easy to dispose of by other means.

IMO, Zelda U needs something close to TP's system, but it needs to either adjust the enemy design to better accommodate the skills. Also, some REAL difficulty settings would be nice.

Just don't make it entirely pointless like TP did. That's all I ask for

Pointless? How?! How was Quick Draw pointless? Or Helm Splitter????

Those were sword techniques?

... Yes. Quick Draw and Helm Splitter were both sword techniques. Both useful in battle, in my opinion.

I'd really like to see a co-op campaign incorporated in some way. In earlier interviews, Aonuma said they were thinking about multiplayer and I'd love to see it. Also, I'd like to see additional large, story driven quests in addition to the main quest. I'd be fine with this being added as DLC.
I'd also like to see Link in some new locales besides the typical forest, desert, mountain..... A rainforest type environment with river navigation via canoe would be awesome!

Co-op multiplayer? Reminds me a bit of the Scarescraper from Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon, or most of Four Swords and its sequel. Something that takes inspiration from both would be fantastic in a new Zelda game!

A little off target but please bring skyward sword to the wii u eshop. The game cost anywhere from $45-70 used( gamestop, Amazon, eBay). So there's definitely a strong demand and lack of supply. It'd provide a nice bandaid during the time we wait for the new zelda.

I would agree. Twilight Princess had plenty of combat complexity in both sword/item moves and enemy variety + attack variety. Most of the enemies were just a little weak for experienced gamers. (Granted, that was fitting for Chilfos because things made of ice are not supposed to be durable; they're supposed to shatter.) All it needed for the combat to be perfect for all audiences (in the button controlled version, mind) was some basic Skyrim difficulty settings; adjusting nothing but enemy attack and defense.

People are also upset at the overworld, I guess, because they expected it to be an open world game (not that there was any reason to expect that.) I liked the overworld, it served its purpose. I loved going out into Hyrule Field - Eldin and screwing around, testing the different weapons out on the bulblin riders. I don't know. I guess the most polished, fully realized combat system in the Zelda series just isn't enough for some people.

On the Wind Waker, I love that game, but there's no doubt in my mind that its combat is quite simple (not to mention just as easy as Twilight Princess'.) Just not enough attacks and the ones that were there just didn't have as satisfying audio/visual feedback as Twilight Princess', I feel. Twilight Princess had loads more enemy variety than the Wind Waker, too (whether you count reskinned variants or not.) And comparing horseback combat to combat in the boat... c'mon, just c'mon. You already know which is better.

Anyway, I would be satisfied if ZeldU basically just lifted Twilight Princess' combat animations, rotated out and in a few special abilities, and added some stylistically fitting visual effects (the flash effects when you hit an enemy.) In fact I kinda hope they do that, because they might have forgotten how to do good sword combat in the last decade :/

I would have liked Twilight Princess more if it didn't look awful. Zelda games need more polish and better designs than that. And for heaven's sake, quit copying previous games in the series. (Forest -> Fire -> Water bleh)

Er... either it's been a while since I've played it and Link is a lot less agile than I remember, or that's a really bad gif...

Lol tho.

It released in 2006, what do you expect? There aren't many gifs, let alone many high fps ones. The point was that converting TWW's contextual counter moves (roll, back slice, and helm splitter) to moves that you can do at-will was a really good idea. It felt like the most fluid combat of any Zelda to me.

Can we perhaps consider the possibility that some art simply isn't for us? I dislike Skyward Sword's style and that somewhat colored my perception of that game.

I agree with all of these except the puzzle difficulty. Zelda isn't the kind of game I really enjoy getting stuck on.

I'd love to see someone perform a semi-circle side-roll in reality. I suspect that be impossible.

Really? Are we really that fussed about verisimilitude in a fantasy game? The first suspect thing about that gif would be the dream cloud dimension and then the undead, talking ghost wolf.

Anyway, I think puzzle difficulty is good as long as it's intuitive. I don't want to get stuck much, and if Nintendo crafts the game well enough then I shouldn't need to, but still feel reasonably challenged.

Ha! You were the one who claimed a month or so back that every scientifically inaccurate phenomena in games needed an explanation. Make your mind up.

In what context? If you mean Xenoblade then that's because that world is kinda rando. Zelda has a magical fantasy adventure setting; undead and dream visions are hardly out of place. The explanation for magic is that in a magical world magic things happen; they fit in with the setting.

You're just digging a hole of madness. Are you seriously saying that the fact that realistic physics aren't respected is because it's based in a magical world? Why are you so incapable of accepting that they just make stuff up for the sake of easier gameplay? (as they should, I'm not criticizing that)

Then why the issue in the first place! Chuckling exasperation!

Anyway, plenty of video games have cartoony physics for the gameplay mechanics, especially in combat. That's fine, it's just glaring incongruencies in the plot that bug me (rarely a problem I have with Zelda.)

I don't know where this discussion came from, but I'll add my 2 cents.

For stories in games, just like stories in movies and TV, phenomena that aren't understood by a layman need to be explained (scientific or not). Otherwise, it can feel like a contrivance. This was a major issue in movies like Frozen and Lucy, which just made up how the universe was supposed to work as it went without really establishing the worlds rules well. In games, it's a significant problem in many JRPGs. TP is the only Zelda game I know that falls into that hole though. Towards the end it does tend to get overcomplicated. Zelda materializes out of the blue, Ganon gets power that seems pretty poorly defined, etc.

On the other hand, IMO, abnormal gameplay need not be explained. The fact that it's gameplay makes it feel far removed enough to just accept at face value. I don't care that Link has a magic meter or that Amaterasu had an ink limit.