Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

They are design polar opposites.

Horizon is completely extrinsically designed via the seventh gen marketing first design school.

BOTW is completely intrinsically designed via the design philosophy prior to the seventh gen devolution, but with contemporary... Well, kinda comtemporary technology.

Horizon is the highly polished peak of a tiny mountain.

Botw is the bottom floor foundation reclaimed from under the worst generations toxic wastelands ready at last to finally be built upon. A wrought of solid pureified iron ready to be forged into the steel blade of the next zelda, which will have the intrinsically designed world and interaction of botw, along with the extrinsic aspects of story and dungeon design botw was lacking.

Or it will he a flash in the pan and Nintendo will once again forget what put them on the map.

I have GOT to make one of those dimension sliding doohikies. I'll be damned if Im going to be stuck in the worst dimension for gaming for another decade and a half again.

@TNGYM Those sound like a lot of terms that you just made up. Have you played Horizon to comment, or are you just judging from afar?

What the heck makes dungeons 'extrinsic?' The fact that Nintendo removed them when they had been integral to the games for three decades?

Well you can always google for definitions to words you have never heard before.

Yes, I have played Horizon, but honestly, with extrinsically designed games, you dont need to, what you see is what you get. Intrinsic design... Is trickier. What you see is just something someone else got. You could have used those same tools and systems and gotten something completely different.

Extrinsic is externally designed, in games, dungeons are externally designed because that is simply their point. It is a challenge and test the team created specifically to challenge you on various aspects. This is why the shrines in breath of the wild took away the intrinsic ability to climb anywhere.

Technically any kind of world building or modeling you do is extrinsic design, however, where intrinsic and extrinsic world design diverge, is on whether you then shape that world around the systemic aspects, virtual physics, rules, and abilities the player can utilize to enact their agency in their virtual world, or whether you restrict what the player can do to the world/path/progression you built.

Its the difference between going on an adventure, and an amusement park ride depicting said adventure.

Its not so much what you can do as it is how the dev went about doing it. You can have the same exact mechanic in different games utilize different solutions to accomplish it.

For example both Zelda and Horizon focus heavily on the mechanic of climbing.

In Zelda, climbing is handled intrinsically, in Horizon, extrinsically.

In horizon if you want to climb you have to go up to a wall where it looks like you might be able to climb, if The Devs decided this wall is one you are allowed to climb, a prompt will appear, push the button and you attach to the wall.

In Zelda you just do it. Its intrinsic. However, that was the easy part. The hard part was now they had to design an entire world around the fact the player has the power to climb anywhere. If there is an area they want to keep the player out of via climbing, they had to manually design a way to keep the player out... Or in. For example the great plataue. Not just deny a context sensitive button prompt.

Conversely, Breath of the wilds Zora Armor enables an extrinsically handled ability. You should have an idea now of what using that ability would be like had it been handled intrinsically.

Well, whatever man. I think the words you're looking for are 'systemic' and, well, 'non-systemic.' And even then asserting that one design philosophy is always superior is going to be shortsighted. I've enjoyed the 'amusement park ride' Zeldas much more than this one because they felt infinitely richer, better designed, and handcrafted as opposed to copy paste environments with all the personality of an MMO zone.

So much for one being more 'adventurous' if everything is just recycling the first ten hours.

Well, you can't have intrinsic design without systemic driven mechanics.... But you can have systemic driven mechanics that don't achieve good intrinsic design.

I think you may be picking up on my irritation with western AAAAAAA publishers and the worst generations egregious overuse and abuse of extrinsic design and the near extinction of intrinsic design over the past decade plus as me giving extrinsic design a negative connotation. Extrinsic design is just as important, and has its own irreplaceable place as well.... But it can be, and has been abused and done poorly a lot in the past decade.... Most likely as a response to the ps360's incredibly poor handling of branching code, which is intrinsic designs blood.

The best aspect of Zelda (and metroid) when they first came out was that they were master classes in both intrinsic and extrinsic design of the time, the best of both worlds. They were more flexible and the worlds more persistent than level based games of the time, and more focused and tightly designed than the 'loosey goosey' intrinsic designs of the time. Over time the intrinsic design aspects eroded away. It is much easier faster and cheaper to just go extrinsic.... Especially when production value demands keep ramping up.

I also think your irritation at the change (and all the praise its getting) may be causing you to be overgeneralizing.

There are lots of generated open world games that easily fit into the mold you are describing... Breath of the Wild is not one of them. Like the other two games using the engine its modified off of, and made by the people who designed them, Breath of the wild is clearly 100% hand designed, a modern day anomoly..... And truely intrinsically designed based off of how people reacted to and explored the world. Its so unique you can literally show people like us any decent screen shot, and (if weve been there) we can tell you where it is.

The lack of dungeons and story are unfortunate, but not mutually exclusive to this design path.... They aren't missing because of the way the game is designed... But logistics and time constraints. Now that the foundation is set, bringing those properly into the fold for The next title is inevitable. BOTW is a massive leap in the right fundamental direction... But the true master sword is not yet forged.

At the very least look at it this way. You are this irritated that ONE Zelda game catered to the original audiences design tastes. Now imagine its been twenty years of it happening over and over. We have been waiting a long long time.

@-Green- I forgot to thank you — like, a week ago — for explaining the snow dove for me. So thaaaaank you XD. I went back and it looks really clever. Probably one of Breath of the Wild's best puzzles, and a new type of puzzle for Zelda even.

@TNGYM Before you level assertions at me, perhaps stop looking through rose-tinted glasses toward a certain period of time and condemning an entire generation of games all the time. If you're getting terse responses, then you should think about the way you're using terms foreign to the online gaming space and how well you can convey the nostalgic concepts you're talking about.

And I think you're completely off base to imply Xenoblade and the sequel are in any way unique or handcrafted in the way they make their worlds. The first one at least is nothing but MMO fetch quests combat, and collectathon / crafting elements over and over again. Plus an unremarkable anime. Both those games and Breath of the Wild liberally reuse enemies and environments.

@MasterWario,

I heard that one before, and thought it would not be possible. Would have gotten my arms in a twist though.

@Octane,

I understand it now. Its a bit cumbersome but I tried it and it works. From now on I will use it (if I can remember it)!

Just finished fighting the final boss! Couldn't resist waiting any longer. This is definitely my favourite finale. I was only getting teary.... until I saw Satoru Iwata in the credits and started bawling! XD Also probably my favourite line from the game and maybe the entire series "But courage need not be remembered.... For it is never Forgotten"

The first 4 shrines you encounter in your exploration of Hyrule on the Great Plateau all pay homage to the power of the Triforce. The monks encountered at the end of the shrines are holding their hands in such a way that combined, they reference the most powerful object in the Zelda universe.

I love some of the old time-y writing in this game (it's only in the cutscenes, not in written dialogue), but the best lines in Zelda will always be Ganondorf's death lines.

"The wind... it is blowing..."

"The history of light and shadow will be written in blood!"

Ride or die.

@Haru17 Its...pretty obvious.

Also what Kass plot did they drop?

Almost got 20 shrines left, might also only have 2 weapon slots left to unlock, the quest goes on.

My favorite shrines are the gyroscope ones. Oh and this one I just did with moving an ice block to the end

@Tsurii Dragon Roost Island theme in Rito Village is neat too.

There's a shrine that requires the blood moon and of course I go from having two in a row to having none for the past 2 hours. I even went out and murdered a bunch of enemies.