Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

@kkslider5552000 How do other open world games do co-op? Since I've yet to see one that actually tried doing split-screen before, without it running at like 4 frames a second.

@VoidofLight I’m not sure you understand how games works.

You boot up BOTW and the whole world isn’t loaded up, just the parts you can see and as you move about it’s when the other parts pop up. It’s why there are mountains everywhere as it’s hides it from you. It wouldn’t be running a different world at the same time the same way OOT doesn’t run both adult and child Link at the same time.

@jump Yes, I'm aware how the world loads in. That's why Pop-in is a thing in BotW, and why the game itself isn't great without the fog effect. However, the base world itself, such as the landmarks are generally always loaded in. Now take the basic world structure of BotW, and double that.

@VoidofLight why would it be doubling it when it’s not running at the same time?

I didn't. Most of the locations away from the main Hyrule field seemed to be doing just fine. Life in Hateno and Lurelin was very nice and pleasant.

@Dezzy Yeah, it kind of felt like Calamity Ganon had no real impact on the world, other than destroying Hyrule. I get why the game was made the way it was, so that you wouldn't have to deal with an empty/destroyed world.. but at the same time, I felt like there was no real sense of urgency.

Yeah, a big problem I had with BOTW is that it wants to be this game of like this ruined kingdom, desolate and hopeless but then you get to the towns and they feel like same as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary here!

Honestly I almost wonder if they wanted to go all in on that but then decided people would just like livelier towns more.

I mean... most of the apocalyptic stuff happened years before the start of the game, and even in incredibly harsh environments, people generally still try to live their best lives.

Putting aside the looming threat of Calamity Ganon, I agree that life seems nice in the current day BotW Hyrule. Very Ghibli post-post-apocalypse-ish, like the Valley of the Wind before the Tolmekians stormed in and ruined everything. The gentle piano music you usually hear also reinforces that impression.

That is one of my biggest issues with the first game. Its world and gameplay feel completely disconnected from its story. The story is trying to create this sense of urgency, but the gameplay and world design is trying to do the exact opposite, and make you explore everything and just spend hours getting distracted by all kinds of random landmarks.

In terms of huge game worlds having a story which fits with the epic scale, and makes use of its world well in order to tell its tale, I'd say it goes:

Xenoblade Chronicles> Witcher 3> Skyrim > Breath of the Wild
(just to pick 4 of my favourite games for sake of comparison)

To be fair, this describes possibly most Zelda games. It's been a running joke for as long as I've been on gaming sites that you can do random stuff and waste your time instead of actually stopping Ganon.

Though I do get how its more apparent in a much bigger game in a world that at places looks so much more ruined.

I had a theory a while back about this exact trailer, and what it could end up implying for the lore of Calamity Ganon itself, and what the hand could end up being.

My thoughts are that the glowing green hand which is pinning Ganondorf's corpse down is actually a seal of sorts. However, unlike the seals we've seen before in the series, this one seems different. It's an actual human hand, which is withering away at a very very slow rate. It also somewhat reminds me of the tapestry that's plastered on the Wii U disc of BotW and shown in the game, with one of the figures fighting Calamity Ganon having been represented in the same blueish green glow.

However, I wouldn't go as far to say that hero was the one who caused this seal, as Calamity Ganon has been known to exist for a long time, with the tapestry being based off the battle 10,000 years ago, when they made the Shiekah tech. Noting this, it would stand that this mummy, being the source of malice itself and the calamity itself would be over 10,000 years old, making the hand even older than the tapestry hero.

I feel as if Ganondorf himself was sealed over 10,000 years ago in order to prevent him from dying and reincarnating, plaguing Hyrule as he had been for centuries. In the process of sealing him, the hero who fought this incarnation of Ganon ended up giving his life, causing him to act as a seal which would effectively keep Ganondorf pinned down, barely clinging upon life itself.

Due to his refusal to give up on reincarnation, as stated in the final boss of BotW, Ganondorf found a way to escape his own body by creating the physical manifestation of his own hatred, which came to be known as Calamity Ganon and Malice respectively. This would explain why Calamity Ganon kept coming back over and over again, as sealing or defeating it isn't getting rid of the true source of the issue at hand.

It's also evident that Calamity Ganon isn't just a mindless beast like people believe, and he's instead still as cunning as normal Ganon, given that it actually learns from it's defeat every 10,000 years in which it returns. It learned that Guardians were used to defeat it in the past, so once it came back, it ended up turning the tides using Hyrule's weaponry against them.

@VoidofLight yeah the "sealing hand" reminds me a lot of something that could come from the Twilight Princess lore, maybe Midna herself, and it would be nice if Aonuma and his team can use Breath of the wild to sum up thematically what's been done in the series until now (I just hope this doesn't mean they'll go for the light/dark overworld map route, because personally has bored me).
I'm also interested how many other visual and plot themes they'll be inspired again by Princess Mononoke.
I recently rewatched the movie and I was happy to realize that botw is the closest thing we'll ever get to a Mononoke game.
I really like how Nintendo has reinterpreted Miyazaki's critique of our relationship with technology and industrialization, bringing in ancient technology.
I wonder if link's cursed hand will also mean we can cut off boblin heads with a single arrow 😆.
All jokes aside I'm really curious in Zelda's role and if she has her own gameplay.

@damien33ad Being a threat and being a monologuing bad guy are different things.

@damien33ad He's more of a passive threat in BotW due to him already winning in the end, and them wanting to allow the player to fight him at any time. He's still a ever present threat, given he controls the guardians themselves, and due to the malice littering the world. If anything, he's probably one of the most powerful incarnations of Ganon.

Most people believe he's mindless, but Age of Calamity and some of the lore of the original game contradicts that, seeing as the beast learns from it's mistakes and is willing to (AoC spoilers) betray people who in which follow him, only to achieve his goal of recreating his own body, as shown with Astor in Age of Calamity.

@damien33ad Most of the "Theory" is confirmed from Creating a Champion, which is 100% canon, and confirmed via the game itself. Not to mention, you do interact with Calamity Ganon in the original game. The Malice, Blights, and enemies are all a part of Calamity Ganon himself. The Dungeons thing is less a rumor, and more just speculation/people hoping they'll make a return.

@damien33ad I personally hope Ganondorf is still as cunning as he normally is, and he's not just a mummy without a voice the whole game.

Also, if you look in the reveal trailer and compare the shot of Hyrule at the end of it to the same area in the original, you can see that the shrines that are visible from that specific location are pretty much gone entirely.

I personally would like to see more themed dungeons, kind of like the ones of previous games, but full of puzzles from BotW, which you can solve with multiple solutions. I'd also love to see proper bosses that aren't just the same one with a different element to them.

Nah it's totally different. Most other games develop the story small piece by small piece, so the 'urgency' you feel is usually over something a lot more minor. If your next story point is just meeting a random character under a tree, it's easy for your imagination to just distort time as you go off and explore before coming back several hours later.
Totally different when your major destination throughout is the final boss that you can see from the very start, looking big and ominous in the distance. It's the fact that it creates that sense of urgency to go to the end of the story, but then gives you a massive game which means you won't do that!

Well it's very likely that this version of him is going to talk. Though, there is a possibility that they don't make him talk for X or Y reason. And thus we'll have to reach half-game for him to talk to learn more of the story. We'll probably learn some things from the green hand and perhaps other new characters, whenever they appear.

You say that, but I spent half of Wind Waker HD avoiding the finale so I could explore the Great Sea. And in fact the place I had to go to for the end is also a giant structure in the middle of the world that I regularly saw.

Or for that matter, every time I opened up Minish Cap and was always reminded to stop Vaati before I ignored that to get more seashells

Sounds like complaints about most open world games.... In theory, you're supposed to be trying to defeat the Big Bad as quickly as possible, with the idea you don't know when it'd be too late
Yet, in practice, what you do is lots of sidequests & secondary content along the actual story stuff