Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

It did use the sensor bar. You still use the pointer, and the bar helps the remote stay calibrated.

@Meowpheel Calibrating just sets the "pointer" to the middle of the screen IIRC.

@Octane It existed as a stopgap release, just like WWHD. BotW was taking too long so those 2 remasters happened so Wii U owners had Zelda games to play.

Yeah, but TWWHD was actually done in house instead of farmed out.

I have no problem with outsourcing for remasters, as long as they're done right. Take Bluepoint Games as an example.

The thing is the Zelda team know how their own games work and are just more experienced / equipped developers overall.

By the way, it just hit me that Breath of the Wild is technically another vehicle gimmick Zelda game. Ocarina's horse, The Wind Waker's boat, Spirit Tracks' train, Skyward Sword's Loftwing, and Breath's paraglider.

I'd say the horse in ocarina is a very minor element of the game. You can even go through the entire game without ever meeting epona.

The Oracle games were a bit more "vehicle gimmick"-y, in case you want to add them to your list.

@Meowpheel I don't know what the Oracle games do unless you mean the respective rods. I was just talking about vehicle gimmicks, otherwise I would have mentioned Wolf Link, hidden skills, and masks.

And whether or not Epona is practical, she became a series staple after her appearance in Ocarina. Horses aren't very practical in Breath of the Wild either with all of the rocks and ledges and the inability to summon your horse like any other open world game despite being bigger than any other open world game.

In the Oracle games you have three possible rides, whichever you choose decides the layout of a certain area of the map, which makes your ride necessary to explore that area (and continuing the game).

And yeah, she became a staple of the series, but she's not a central gimmick in ocarina, unlike the other vehicles you mention.

If you simply mean all the vehicle gimmicks in general, then the spinner counts too.

I think Epona is a bit more focal and useful as a vehicle than the spinner, haha. I also didn't include the raft for what it's worth.

@Haru17 It really annoys me when open world games don't have a "summon horse" button. I quickly stopped using horses both in Skyrim and in BoTW for that reason. They're pretty slow and clunky in those games anyway, although you can at least use them to help you climb mountains in Skyrim.

@KirbyTheVampire It was nice when the Dawnguard DLC added in the summon horse spell, but yeah, horses aren't that useful in Skyrim.

@Haru17 That was definitely a great surprise, although I will say that (People that haven't played through Skyrim should avoid reading this) unless I was using a vampire or just a normal character, I would always find myself using the werewolf form whenever I needed to travel a long distance. The werewolf form is faster than every horse in the game to my knowledge, and I never put points into Conjuration or magic in general with my werewolf characters, aside from maybe a bit of Restoration.

@Octane If you've ever tried playing SS without the sensor bar, you'll find that Link's 1-to-1 sword-holding (and the Beetle even worse) will drift and will have odd "blind spots," either due to actually drifting or from inadvertently orienting to other infrared light in the room. I had that problem for weeks before I realized what the problem was, and plugged it in. You may be able to re-center the pointer when selecting in the menu, but for whatever reason, that feature isn't available during normal gameplay with the sword.

In fact, it makes me wonder whether the sizable fraction of people who had trouble with the motion controls simply didn't plug in their sensor bars...

The 3DS, Wii U Gamepad, and Joy-cons all have magnometers, so they always know where north is and orient to that.

@KirbyTheVampire

@Nicolai Yeah, SS needs to be played with the sensor bar. I have found that quite a few people who complain about the controls are people who used wireless sensor bars and turned them off after the initial calibration.

@Haru17 Yeah, I don't blame you. Having to save constantly in games majorly sucks. I'm just glad that many modern games are making use of frequent autosaves. People might think that makes the games easier, but to me it just makes them less frustrating. If I've already gotten through an area, chances are I don't feel like going through it again.

@KirbyTheVampire I actually don't mind manual saving in games — we are in the Zelda thread after all — and manual quicksaves are just so nice. Perhaps long games like Persona and Monster Hunter get a little stressful if you come back from a long dungeon or hunt late at night and can't remember if you've saved or not, so failsave quicksaves are nice. Probably what I hate most is when a game only quicksaves. It works great for optional difficulty modes like Fallout 4's survival mode where only being able to save at beds becomes a mechanic, but games where that's mandatory often feel like they're trying to decieve me.

@Nicolai Mine was plugged it, the sensor bar wasn't the issue

Anyway, the Joy-Cons clearly don't need a sensor bar (even for pointer controls), so problem solved!

So I assume we're allowed to talk about it since the frontpage has, well I tried emulating BOTW today. I've still got the Wii U version so I'm not doing anything legally or morally wrong.

I don't have one of those top 5% of PCs but I have a fairly good one so I thought I'd give it a try in the hopes that I could get better performance than on the Wii U.

This has to be the weirdest coincidence but I got almost identical performance as the WiiU version. 30fps on the field and 20-25fps in towns and dense forests. That's seriously bizarre luck. Pretty damn impressive for an emulator for a such a recent console though.