Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

@ruinez Doubtful. Without a real source, I'd say it's more likely that you're mistaken.

Little escapes Google.

Hopefully about thirty seconds. That's enough time to announce a release date. I don't want a lengthy Treehouse discussion about the game, especially if they just show more of The Great Plateau. I suppose one could say my BotW hype has plateaued. Release date, please; that's all I want. The trailers, pictures, teasing and speculation are getting boring now.

I agree, some some interesting stuff for the inevitable launch trailer. Don't need to see more. They're either withholding interesting stuff, meaning that they're not going to show that next week either, or there's not much else to show and we've seen it all. In both cases, we really don't need another trailer.

I agree in terms of a gameplay demo, but Breath of the Wild needs an exciting 2-minute trailer to convince the normies to buy it. Honestly, there hasn't been a single trailer that has singularly built a lot of hype for the game.

Skip launch trailers to be sure, but I'm gonna see the one from this event.

Good god, that'd be bad. Only seen about 2% of the world because the other 98% is just empty wasteland. That'd be No Man's Sky level of trolling.

That one with 10 million views did a fair amount of heavy lifting.

@Dezzy Don't mean it that way, but I wasn't too impressed with the Game Awards trailer. I mean, yeah, a village, neat and all, but there wasn't something unexpected that I wouldn't have guessed that would be in the game. There's bird people and a flying spaceship, but the latter was already established in the E3 demo. Still think that the original trailer is the best trailer IMO.

@Octane: Yeah, but we got to see what the airship looked like, and that was interesting. What about seeing autumn leaves, and npcs that fight other monsters? And the mysterious women, and the exact replica of TP's Hyrule Castle town? The electric arrows, the camouflage lizalfos? The smart AI that walk around bombs?

@Octane @Nicolai That's not what I mean. I'm not talking views or timing necessarily, I'm talking sheer, mouth-watering hype. None of Breath's trailers have come close to what the team mustered up for Twilight Princess, or what Square commissioned for Deus Ex: HR. I'm serious: do a close read of the E3 trailer. It was apparent to me even then that it was just a simple gameplay edit of the demo set to moving music. Zelda's VO and the Ganondorf half-second was the only story stuff in there. Very much an establishing trailer.

That trailer moved me a little, but only because I've been following this game for so long because I'm a Zelda fan, and then only because the music was dope. For my part, The Game Awards trailer — running just over a minute — was more impactful. Not only did it have the moving music, but it also showed these cutscenes, with great direction like how the music matches up with Zelda(?) rhythmically striding through the forest. And the fire-lit tapestry shots — kinda ugly though they were — crafted a narrative out of the short run time.

Classy logo wipe? Great. Tear drop piano music blossoms into a tree? Cool imagery. Music swells into a tapestry of farmers? Getting better, show some faces. They show some faces. A village? Oh cool, this one looks pretty bland. Why's the music stoping? BIRD TIME. The piano music tells you something's wrong when the birb proliferation airship flies over. Cue the tentacle proliferation tapestry, with a nice effect revealing? Explosions, guardians! But why would the castle's guardians be trying to shoot Link's horse? THE CASTLE IS EXPLODING! Then the trailer shows you what got exploded. The music swells, asking "what are you gonna do about it?" Next scene Link's glowing — that's probably good. Then there's another girl who he's kneeling before — more castle connotations. What? The trailer's over.

What's great and what's the biggest problem with this trailer? They're all building shots. The music sounds literally abridged at the end, screaming, "This is not complete!" That's why we need a trailer that establishes, builds, and blows people away in the last 30 seconds to a minute. Even peasant non-fans who think the game has bad textures because they're cold, tech-spec PC gamers who never knew love. Because of this all build up trailer and the generally laid back marketing, I really think they're holding something huge back for the Switch event. A bomb left in the chamber to drop on the industry. Let's go, baby. This post is too long! Don't sound-bite quote this part.

Hey guys! I actually came up with a theory!

So, according to GameXplain, these two shots are in two different locations (I'm not 100% convinced, but for the purposes of this theory, I'm going to assume this is true). So, one would come to the logical conclusion that there are multiple horse-head outposts. But this doesn't entirely convince me, if it's horse themed. If it really is just a place for you to take care of or buy horses, is it really important enough to have a bunch of them scattered all over the place? And if it's a general shop, why is it so obviously horse- themed?

I think that it is a general shop, and the horse theme doesn't have to do with what business they're in (despite how they do in fact keep horses), but rather it represents the kind of people who run it. Perhaps a horse-clan, or a tribe of merchants who's symbol is the horse. But more importantly, the reason the horse represents them is that they are travelers who travel like a circus, but on horseback. This means that, despite the new location, they might actually be the same settlement! But, every day or two, they strip it all down, load it on to carts, and move to a new location on horseback! It would be just like in Phantom Hourglass or Spirit Tracks, where Beetle could be anywhere on his boat or hot air balloon, and you would have to track him down on your map. Cool idea?

I gotta give a shoutout to this BURN!

Sorry.

@Nicolai That's a good point, I dig it. It would be like the Khajiit caravans in Skyrim, except they would pull a wagon and ride horses instead of walking. I'd dig some random 'protect the wagon' quests ala Twilight Princess. Feels all western-like.

And you're good, I just meant the second to last sentence.

@Nicolai I hope that's true. That would be way more original than having multiple horse buildings copy-pasted all over the map!

I second this. That would be a really cool concept! They could ride horses and be wandering merchants/nomads, or maybe Horsehead from Zelda II was actually from a tribe of Horsehead people?....

I'm also wondering if we've almost seen everything on offer. The 2014 demo (with Miyamoto and Aonuma) showed the Great Plateau and we've seen little else since. I'm not convinced we're going to see sprawling towns or huge dungeons, for example. I think the focus will be on exploration (not necessarily a bad thing) and finding small settlements and shrines. But the core gameplay? I think we've seen it.

Agreed. The trailers have been missing a certain something. Sure, the hint of Zelda's presence was somewhat exciting, albeit inevitable. The rest was by the numbers. Here's Link fighting the same creatures you saw him battle a year ago. Here's Link on the Great Plateau. Here's Link on the Great Plateau again. Here's a house or two. Here's the Great Plateau; you remember this place, right? It's all getting a bit samey. The bird creature was a welcome surprise, but Nintendo need to show something different (dungeons, new locations, etc - anything but the Great Plateau). If there is anything different to show of course.

Don't get me wrong. I can't wait to play this game. Nintendo are usually good at surprising us so I'm hoping they are holding back something huge. However, unlike previous Zelda games, I can't let myself be too excited for this one. We've seen too much of the same thing for too long.

I think the worst — and now that I think about it — inevitable discovery is that all the dungeons are in the overworld, sort of like Skyward Sword. There won't be a 'Fire Temple,' instead there will be fire ruins basically everywhere you see lava on the map, leading up to the boss when you reach the tower. This also fits with the 2014 rumor/leak stating the forest temple is a literal giant forest ala Attack on Titan or Star Wars.

That would be kind of a bummer unless the puzzles get in-cred-ible.

I think both of the big trailers they released for the game so far worked well. I'm happy with what I've seen already and feel confident in saying this will be a great Zelda game based off them and the E3 livestreams.

Hopefully we have more to see over the next week but it's kinda a weird situation where I don't want any of the more fun and surprising elements to be shown off and over analysed by people like Gamexplain, but at the same time showing yet more Plateau footage is just pointless when we're a couple of months before launch.

There's still the concern that the truly meaningful content will be spread too thinly across the massive world along with the Zelda team trying to implement features like weapon durability, gear with stats and physics based puzzles and combat for the first time. They could (and probably will let's face it) misfire with a couple of these but the game shouldn't be hurt too much even if that happens.

@Haru17 Well, there was also a rumour that there only will be four major dungeons. But it does fit Aonuma's idea of approaching a ''dungeon'' from different angles. That's certainly possible when the dungeon aren't real dungeons, but just big areas.

@Octane Yeah, I think the forest temple one at least agreed with the four dungeon rumor. Let's hope they've packed more in since then. Indoors and not blue-colored ones as well.

@Haru17 @Octane Just a thought... Every Shrine we have seen contains an item which can be used in the overworld, and apparently there are over a hundred Shrines. Does that mean 100+ items? If so then what seems like a barren world might not be so empty once we're tooled up.

@Monkey_Balls That was probably just for the demo.

@Octane The demo seemed pretty complete and followed a certain narrative: Link exits cave, old man gives some backstory and offers paraglider in exchange for Link completing four shrines, etc:

I'm sure the final game will follow the same narrative. If so, it would be strange for subsequent Shrines to not contain items. And prior to Link entering any of those Shrines there were no indications that items were needed for certain things in the overworld. In previous games we usually had a sign, such as a cracked wall or a hookshot target, etc. We've not seen anything similar in BotW. Certain scenery was only highlighted once an item was acquired. If Nintendo have gone that route, which would highlight the exploration aspect, consider me hyped again.