The problem with open world is that — especially with Nintendo — the testing required eats up so much of the development that there isn't room for anything else. That means story, puzzles, dungeons — basically all the best things about Zelda.
Like the last time, unless they do something very different on the Switch it'll be three years before we even see a new Zelda. So I'm not as worried about the sequel being open world, or if it is having the same barren, generic, and expected fantasy environs malaise of Breath of the Wild because the engine, physics, like twelve enemy types, and maybe even the art style are already done for them.
But regardless of the type of game they make, climbing and gliding should be cycled out, and the world — whatever structure it takes — should be smaller. They just screw with the puzzles design too much to the point where, instead of 'approaching dungeons from any angle' they got locked away in the SM Sunshine dimension. They help traversal a bit, but with the scale of the game there is far too much featureless walking and way too much slowly climbing up featureless rock inclines. Say what you want about Uncharted and Assassin's Creed, they're climbing is interesting. In Breath of the Wild it's holding up. Beyond that, the clinging to tree trunks was super fiddly and never worked. Trying to climb onto a log floating in the river is painful with the hypersensitive way movement works. Link also becomes detached from objects far too easily, and now being able to grab onto a surface when gliding into it any other way than straight on sucks!
Also, we need the item progression back. Probably the worst thing about Skyward Sword and now Breath of the Wild is the tiny, highly situational item roster. Cryonis was ugly from the start and exists only to allow the player to very tediously cross water rather than past games where you could just dive in, dive under, and swim way way way way faster than even Link with the Zora armor set. Magnesis has always been a lame concept — moving metal around with telekinesis like you're placing it in Minecraft is a much less creative way of interacting than actually pushing and pulling metal with magnetic force in a specific way. Moreover, practically all of the objects you can interact with in the entire game — besides larger blocks — are found on the Great Plateau. The item is entirely one-dimensional with no progression, learning, or thinking whatsoever. Bombs are bombs, and stasis was cool but underused like most of the runes. It's almost totally useless to send a boulder shooting off into the distance until it unloads.
BotW gets me excited to see what they can do with the next Zelda game. It's a great game, but I'm hopeful to see what they do next. I have a lot of fun playing with the different abilities. Cryonis is probably the only one that I find myself almost never using and generally disliking.
On a side note, Stasis is pretty broken. It and the Champion Powers are stupidly OP.
@Haru17
I actually do think Zelda and the Champions will be playable in DLC 2. My thinking is that the entire DLC "adventure" (as they are calling it) will rest heavily on Zelda as the main playable character, but the Champions will be playable for short snippets. Maybe just for a quick mini-game in a case or two, but still playable nonetheless. And it's not releasing until Holiday, right? They've been working on all of this DLC for quite some time, perhaps approaching nearly a year, so I see it as entirely feasible.
On a side note, lately I've been pretty much as negative on the game as you have. When I think about it in my mind, I think about it as an "ok" game, NOT a Zelda game AT ALL, that just rehashes too much of the boring crud that is killing console gaming (crafting, cooking, skinning random animals, scale that tower because map, generic/inexplicable "bullet time," REPEAT FOREVER).
HOWEVER, I am for some reason looking for to DLC 1. I look forward to a fresh playthrough in the harder mode, and I am intrigued for the Trials or whatever.
But man, when I keep thinking about the dev team's comments that this is the new direction Zelda will continue to go, I get really sad. They kinda ripped the soul out of what it means to be a Zelda game. Yea, it has the "open world" of the very first game, but that's about it. Without the items and bosses and actual dungeons, it's just missing so much of the heart of what it means to be Zelda. <I'm gonna go play Link to the Past now to feel better lol>
Welcome to the Resistance, brother.
But yeah I feel the same way. I love the game, I love how they made it, I love the changes they made, but I will only love it as much as I did -once-. I don't want another game this big, focused solely on exploration of a mostly empty world, that while absolutely gorgeous, isn't what I want from Zelda forever. I think with Skyward Sword they tried so hard to make everything like a dungeon that now the pendulum is on the other end where they tried too hard to make it all about exploration.
@Grumblevolcano I don't disagree, but that kind of segregated, dimensionless dungeon scheme is wrong for Zelda. I first noticed it with Galaxy and Skyward Sword, although that game had the many of the opposite problems of Breath of the Wild. All of those motion control mini games spread throughout the world, they just don't fit Zelda. They're more like what you would expect from a Mario game: a bunch of unconnected elements as opposed to ones that fit into the world and into a progression.
And even Sunshine had more variety in its pocket dimensions than Breath tbh. Just think of the sand hawk.
I'm hopeful they'll find a balance the next time around. Like you said, there is a lot to like about BotW, but at the end of the day, it just isn't Zelda. They just need to get the Zelda back in there. And not make the world so ludicrously big.
And remove the climbing, or restrict it in some way. It kinda breaks the game.
Agrees all around. They should have made some surfaces unclimbable. And shrines like the one in skull lake are just silly, where the challenge is just "have you gotten enough stamina shrooms for this really long climb?" and offer no real challenge at the top.
I'm all for weather effects, but the RNG of rain striking right as you're climbing the last three meters of a giant featureless vertical cliff is effin brutal. You're just totally helpless.
The rain slipping thing is one of those features that were cute in theory, but really shouldn't have made it into the game the way it is. It adds next to nothing beyond trying to be cute/realistic and detracts from the gameplay. It's one of those things that baffles me as to why they went to the actual trouble of putting it in.
Something BotW related is live on Wii U, starting up the eshop and selecting BotW DLC icon downloaded an add-on file. The update doesn't seem to be present though so you probably can't do anything with it.
Also the official info on the eshop does specifically state that the travel medallion and the 9 clothing items are in hidden treasure chests scattered across the world.
I may just use hard mode as an excuse to look for them. I'm curious as to how the saving function will work in Hard mode though. My understanding was that (at least in the Wii U version, not sure about Switch) you could only have one save file at a time. I'm wondering if having a Hard mode save file is separate from a normal save. I'd rather not lose everything I already put into the game...
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Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
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