Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Yeah, that's the thing. Time travel isn't physically possible, at least not if everything we know about physics isn't complete nonsense (Einstein: killing dreams since 1905). Any story that uses it is going to have to disregard laws of physics in some way or another. Comes with the territory.

@justlink HMK made me believe for a few seconds. That's the only prank to get me, today.

Time travel can be an interesting narrative device (See Majora's Mask, Chrono Trigger, Life is Strange, etc), but that doesn't mean it stops being problematic. Time travel is always problematic, especially with regard to causation and paradoxes.

I agree, but I was struggling to word it properly. I was going to say thematically. Thematically, games like Chrono Trigger use time travel to great effect, eg. consequences of actions, that small people can accomplish great things, and in some cases, what is fate.

Damn, Chrono Trigger is such a perfect game.

I prefer time travel to be a simple cause and effect gameplay mechanic as opposed to a complicated plot point. It isn't exactly time travel, but the end of Bioshock Infinite created a paradox like nothing else.

Geoff Keighley on how the Game Awards demo was sort of a last minute thing:

Nintendo I mean, they had talked about doing a bunch of things with us. They weren’t quite sure what they were gonna do… I was the one that really pushed to do something musical with Mr. Kondo, which I thought would be really kind of cool and special, and they responded to that and liked that idea. The Imagine Dragons thing came in only 2 or 3 weeks before the show that that was gonna happen.

And yeah Zelda… I mean I was always pushing obviously for Zelda because that would be an amazing moment, that’s the big game everybody wanted to see more of. Many years in the past I’ve asked for Zelda games and they don’t come through, but yeah it was really amazing how it came together. I heard only a couple of weeks before the show that Mr. Aonuma was considering doing something around Zelda, and initially it sounded to me more like he was gonna maybe sort of show a little bit more of the scene from E3 – that short little piece to show that that was real. So I was like, ‘oh, that could be kind of cool.’ But you don’t quite know what you’re going to get. And then yeah, it was like the week of the show they were like, ‘oh, well Mr. Aonuma’s taped a video, Mr. Miyamoto’s in it, it’s about 5 minutes long, and he does like a full demo of the game.’ And I was like, ‘wow’.

So it was sort of unexpected how much great content was in that, and we were pleasantly surprised. And even when I saw the video, I’m like ‘wow, they’re just like playing the game.’ And I think people really responded to kind of how raw and real that demonstration was… there was something charming I think about the Nintendo presentation because it was just Miyamoto and Aonuma having a conversation… and it was obviously very early in development what they showed, but it was just a slice of the game. And yeah that came together super last minute, but was an amazing moment inside of the show.

http://nintendoeverything.com/zelda-wii-us-inclusion-at-the-g...

Not surprising given the obvious early state of the game in those videos.

Still, it was a nice surprised to show the game at that point.

It was quite noticeable the game was more under-developed in those videos than it was in the original trailer (which I assume looked roughly like the finished product will, lets hope)

We don't know what state the game is in. They didn't show much, but that doesn't mean that there wasn't plenty they just didn't want to show or were holding back atm.

I'm more curious about the ideas they have that they wanted to be sure to include in the game. It is, after all, a major change that made the delay happen.

Perhaps the demo mechanics are going the way of the dodo.

Well we know it didn't really look finished, s'all I'm saying!

Well maybe! Or maybe they just reached for their next item on the list of automatically generated business excuses.

My thoughts too, I was really underwhelmed/disappointed when I saw them playing it. It looked like it was in a near prototype stage.

I'm guessing that's why they actually showed it on a TV in the distance rather than a screen-grab. So it was harder to see the imperfections that they were planning to iron out later.

Well, obviously it's not optimized and there's some placeholder stuff in there at the moment. However, if that game is going to be great when it comes out then the majority of the content is probably there now. I mean, it has been 3.5 years since Skyward Sword. WWHD and ALBW couldn't have taken that much effort or time.

I'm really hoping Nintendo takes advantage of their extra time to implement things like dynamic dungeon difficulty...and motion controls

This has probably been pointed out but I'm new to Xenoblade, I think I heard in the Zelda Wii U demo video something about being able to go to anything you see in the world and that reminds me of what we see in Xenoblade, that world that feels so huge yet so in our reach to explore, you reach a giant new area and can see most of it looking around and can travel to all places with all kinds of quests and side stories to get through. I am all for Zelda taking a bit of that feel.

It feels like Zelda because it seems that the world will have some degree of uniqueness or value. If it ends up being an empty samey wasteland then I'll see the inspiration from Xenoblade, but it already looks like more thought went into the level design, so I'm not as concerned about that. Not to mention features like the sail cloth gliding seem to promise actual depth to the environments, instead of Xenoblade's verticality that seemed to exist only for the sake of fall damage.

And what is 'dynamic dungeon difficulty' you're on about? Most puzzles really only work one way. That's how Zelda has always worked, there's nothing wrong with that.

^it was mentioned earlier, but non-linear dungeon structure presents the problem of players tackling easy dungeons later on and hard dungeons early. When I say dynamic dungeon difficulty, I mean that the game keeps track of your dungeon order, and swaps the enemies for something at your level when you go in.

Many of the enemies in the recent 3D-Zeldas seem to have been designed with a specific dungeon in mind, like the different variations of Bokoblins in SS with their unique appearance and weaponry correlating with the dungeon. It wouldn't make much sense to have a ice enemy in midst of lava. What I think they could do is to bump up the amount of damage dealt and the health of enemies gradually.

This is of course assuming the order of the dungeons is non-linear. I'd speculate that there's at least one obligatory training dungeon to get everyone up to speed with the mechanics.

Pretty sad how the hype for this game is pretty much dead until E3 2016. Not showing this game at E3 this year still boggles my mind. Just show Link drinking some Lon Lon Milk while walking around a village, at least!