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Pre-Release The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Pre-Release Discussion Thread

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The variety of enemies, trinkets, etc. is the weakest part of the game by far. Elden Ring obliterates it in that regard. That’s not the whole story though, because BotW gives you way more options for interactivity. They just need to do a better job of capitalizing on it in TotK.
 
Cheesehead302 said:
Well, idk what else to talk about since we aren't being given much, but the one guy talking about replaying Breath of the Wild makes me think about something that I haven't really realized until recently and kind of reinforces all of my big wants for Tears: Botw is a game that has been very difficult for me to ever replay, every time I've tried I don't get off of the Plateau. As much as I've held that game as the best experience I've had in a video game, it really only comes down to the first play through. Discovery of mechanics and exploration absolutely carried it, your intrinsic motivation to keep exploring everything. Under scrutiny, though, and especially after I've played Elden Ring which feels similar to the go any (direct)ion philosophy, I've realized that so much was sacrificed in order for them to make a game of that scale and breadth, and it really explains why replaying it is so hard for a lot of people.

I'm sure other people have talked about this same type of stuff before, I mean a million people have talked about this game to death, but I don't know this just feels good for me to keep in mind going into this game and evaluating what exactly I want with it. I guess to begin with, I'll say I think that what makes it hard to replay is kind of a collection of different things. Going back to the intrinsic motivation to explore, I think it was absolutely great that Botw recognized that traveling and choosing a destination to go to is an integral part of making an open world game entertaining. You've heard all before, you trying to scale mountains or getting distracted and setting out for different places every 15 minutes, etc etc. And this is great, but I think the problem here is that at a point, the game realizes way too much on this angle to the point that the rewards you get are essentially all intrinsic. After a while, you start realizing, hold on, it doesn't matter if you go here, there, or anywhere else, all you're going to find are korok seeds or shrines, both of which give you the same upgrade whether you're 5 hours in the game or 105 hours into the game. That alone wouldn't be so much of an issue for me, if it weren't for the fact that beyond these things, there really are almost no other kinds of unique and exciting rewards for exploring any specific area of the map.

So let's look at what other things you can get. I guess beyond those things the next items you pick up are weapons, but once again, we run into similar limitations here. I'm a defender of the weapon durability, but maybe it is partially do to this fact or maybe it isn't, but giving credence to the idea that you don't get many unique rewards for going to a specific area of the map, weapons are limited to a measly 4 types. And I know, Elden Ring and this game are different, but I can't just ignore how well souls games and especially that one implement its weapons. Where in Botw beyond like raiding the same tests of strength for the best ancient weapons you have such a small amount of types that you've seen everything before you leave the plateau, in Elden Ring you find dozens and dozens of completely unique weapons, all which you can specifically level your character to level toward. Beyond just the shear variety of options and gameplay types that gives you, it also makes it so there are an infinite number of ways to replay the game and, where Botw makes it difficult for me to care to seek out any specific area I've already seen in my og playthrough, you have a tangible reason to want to seek out a specific area beyond that original intrinsic motivation of the spectacle of the environment. You will never find a weapon more unique than say a fire or ice rod, and even then you can find every weapon in basically any area the game, stats withstanding.

It isn't just the weapon variety that's lacking, though. It's the enemies. It's the environments. It's the lack of more structured metroidvania lairs with unique themeing. Just to continue the Elden Ring comparison (and like i said, yeah they're different games), that game has such a plethora of unique environments, unique dungeons, unique enemies specific to those environments and dungeons, and an absolutely ridiculous amount of bosses. You look at Botw, and beyond the standard grass areas you've got snow areas, the desert, and beaches. Especially after you've spent 300 hours running around the map, stuff starts to feel incredibly same. But then look at the dungeon replacements. Near the games launch, I was one of the people who'd be the first to argument having the divine beasts over themed dungeons wasn't a big deal, but seeing how well and how many unique bosses and metroidvania dungeon areas Elden Ring can implement, it made me realize just how much that limits the game. You ask that age old Botw question of, hmm, I wonder what's over there and you get there, and it largely feels like you're just in the same kind of area as where you started without much structure. Divine beasts different way of doing the traditional dungeon format really do nothing for me, and they're over in the blink of an eye. One doesn't feel inherently different than the other. But this extends to the bosses as well. If I'm 100 percent brutaly honest when looking at Botw's boss line up, there's really only one that I find enjoyable, and it's the dlc boss. We've got four ganon blights that are pretty much the same thing design wise and visually, and they just don't feel unique to me whatsoever. And then you have the final boss, which has been ragged on a lot even at release, kind of just not a huge deal for what is the final boss. I'd argue, the dlc monk fight is the only boss fight I actually think is really unique and fun to fight, which is a little crazy to think about outlook. Beyond that, you have the three types of overworld bosses, which, I think in concept alone are better than the actual bosses, but it comes back around to the lack of variety once again. Fighting a Lyonell is a fantastic first experience, you have no idea what it's capable of. But then, fighting one for the 20th time is nowhere near as entertaining, and that extends to the other ones as well. It just comes back to the idea that there just isn't enough variety on display here. But once again, you look at elden ring and yeah, there is boss reuse in optional dungeons, but there is an absolutely ridiculous amount of completely unique bosses, each with their own design, and each with movesets so varied that even after your third time replaying you will see new moves you've never seen them do. Maybe in terms of overworld bosses Elden Rings falls short in a similar manner with the reuse of putrid tree spirits and sentinels, but it's still nowhere near as limited as this game. Even the reuse of bosses in dungeons I'd say utilizes those bosses better than the Botw overworld bosses, because at least there is an optional dungeon to complete along with them. And it isn't just bosses, it's the enemy variety as well. It once again falls into the same trap. In Elden Ring, you go to Caelid and the enemies there are completely different than any where else in the game, you go to Stormveil and same story, unique enemies. It's just a shear variety that not only goes a long way for making everything you experience continue to feel exciting on repeat play throughs, but helps to give every area of the map a huge sense of identity. But what does Botw have? You can count the enemies on your hands. Moblins, bokoblins, keese, chuchus, yiga clan guys, little taluses. Beyond say the big monster guys in the desert, you are seeing the same kinds of enemies everywhere you look. Though the world design is stellar in Botw, this lack of enemy variety once again makes it feel like you just don't get much out of choosing to go to one area over another. Now, it isn't all bad. You have unique armour with unique abilities to find and work toward upgrading, and on the rare occasion you have a unique quest to a specific area. Although, still, although not as frequently, armor is found in several locations. Though it does go a long way in adding some kind of variety to what you can find beyond the basic weapon types and monsters.

And I guess, that's the big thing here. Uniqueness and variety. 100 percent, I get that because they designed the world to be so open, they needed to make the open endedness "well designed," in that you wouldn't miss out if you chose to explore one area over another one. And funnily enough, I remember this same kind of discussion happening back in the day when A Link Between Worlds came out. Idk how many know it, but weirdly enough that game was the beginning of their philosophy of the type of player freedom they would go for in Botw. Because of the item rental system and way the world was designed, it meant you could tackle dungeons in any order (really damn good game BTW, completely surpasses a link to the past in every way and is my favorite top down Zelda). But the point here is, one critic i remember a lot of people had of the game was the lack of difficulty progression. Because you could beat the dungeons in any order, they had to design it with the idea in mind that any dungeon could be a different person's first dungeon. I think in a sense this is very similar to the issue with Botw. It's just arguably felt a lot more here because of the scale. The zelda team doesn't want somebody to be penalized for choosing to, say, make their way to Gerudo Desert instead of going to Death Mountain first. They don't want you to be refined to any path, and as a player who would almost exclusively climb over mountains and ignore the main paths, I experienced this first hand. There truly isn't a way for you to break the game in a sense because they give you so many options with going about things. But, unfortunately, that comes at the cost of uniqueness and variety. If I'm being cradled by the game in such a way that I'm not missing out anything by choosing one destination over the other, do i really have a reason to explore other locations at all besides korok seeds, shrines, and the intrinsic idea of getting to it?

So we're kind of at a crossroads here now. I believe the openess is what makes Botw stand out, but it's also seemingly what holds it back. So what then? Well, I think the solution here is that in Tears of the Kingdom, maybe they could realize that a little bit of linearity isn't a bad thing. And I'm not saying, completely throw the open design out the window. Far from it. But what I am saying is, have unique fortresses and dungeons in a specific area, with rewards and experiences you won't find anywhere else on the map. Maybe it's not perfectly balanced in terms of "oh no, you will miss out if you choose this direction compared to another," but I'd argue, it shouldn't be. You want a reason to seek out new areas and experiences. The idea that everyone has their own path and story can be fully realized here. Say you choose to go south in Tears. How about you are greeted with a big scary overworld monster, unlike anything you've seen or will see anywhere else you look in the game. Upon defeating it, you get some kind of special item that is a unique drop to that monster (granted, I'm assuming weapon durability will likely be the same, so it's kinda hard for me to rationalize getting a unique weapon, but maybe that's a problem with weapon durability. It encourages you to not go out of your way to get better stuff. But I digress, lol) that you can't find anywhere else. So you tell your friend, woah, I got a staff that shoots lightning here. But then they tell you, hey man, I went north and found a sunken village with a town of ghost people. I'm the only person who can see them because I'm the hero or whatever, and they had me help them free them from their curse. Doing so gave me the ability to turns invisible for stealth. I mean idk, I'm just spitballing with hypotheticals here, but you get the point. At the end of day, I could sum up what I want in this game just by saying "more variety, unique findings, and unique locations." I want it to feel like I'm traveling and progressing beyond just getting more hearts and inventory slots.

And, realistically, as much as I admit I'm worried about the reuse of the map in this game since I established that exploration is really the biggest motivator in Botw, that will have given them more time than any game before, where they didn't have to work any baseline engine stuff, so they could have hypothetically been putting a lot of thought into this kind of stuff. If this allows them to make the experience more unique depending on where you go, I'm totally fine with the map reuse. But even beyond exploration type stuff, something I haven't really touched on is the physics engine and how some times environmental factors come in to play. Just an example, and I must be stupid, but for some reason I really like the idea that rain makes you slip when climbing. Granted, maybe it isn't the most fun thing, but just from the perspective that it's really cool the environment can have such an effect on you. I hope they run wild with this concept. Lightning striking you when you have metal weapons, or a wild fire overwhelming you are really cool possibilities that the systems of botw allow to happen, it's just kind of limited in how much that kind of stuff can actually effect you or happen in actual gameplay. I would love if they look at that kind of stuff, and find ways to expand it ten fold. I want the environment to be an obstical itself, even more so. May sound weird, but recently I played Grand Theft Auto San Andreas all the way through for the first time. I absolutely love how the game world in that is seemingly alive and you are existing within it. You can be trying to navigate, and then some guy runs into you, causes you to run somebody over, but oh no, there was a cop there, and now you gotta run. Maybe odd comparison, but really with exploration and navigation being such a big deal in Botw, I feel like the world should be able to come alive and be even more of an obstacle to overcome than it already is. What if excessive raining for a period of time lead to flooding in some areas, which made it so you'd have to either go around an area or navigate it using a boat? Or what if tornadoes were a thing, and you have to avoid flying objects? Hurricanes on the coast, waves rising high into the air and crash onto shore? Now I wouldn't know the specific or practicality of these suggestions, but once again I'm just spit balling ideas here. More stuff to make the world feel alive like this would be so cool. Maybe their could be some kind of expansion of the physics system as well, but I'll be honest I don't have any ideas for that.

That turned into a gigantic essay, but whatever, I'm bored and also excited for this game. Maybe it sounds like I hate Botw, but really that's far from the case. That first experience will live with me till the day I die, it was just so fun discovering new things about what was possible in the game. I really hope tears is able to achieve that same feeling of wonder, but also make it so there's more of a worthwhile reason ton
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I agree as well (have to read the whole thing later).

BotW is my favorite game but I have a hard time to really replay it. Even the DLC did not click for me like the main game.

Regularly I feel the urge to boot the game up, enjoy the landscape, the music, fight some enemies, wander off in a random direction - but I stay aimless cause I have been everywhere, and then I quit.
While playing the game the first time I always had a goal/target in front of me that kept me going.
 
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Truthfully I can't really agree with the no replayability aspect.

I think that is the one thing they really fixed compared to past Zelda games. In past Zelda games every event played out the same way and mostly could only play out the same way. Puzzles were solvable only one way, boss and enemy encounters were one-dimensional, there are enough towns and events with NPCs to break up the exploration/puzzle/combat pacing and the game was linear so you couldn't change up the order of your journey or even just straight up skip parts and so on.

In contrast to BotW, puzzles are solvable in a lot of different ways, combat encounters never play out the same way and especially bosses can be defeated completely differently each time, there are enough towns and NPCs to get off the open-world pacing and you can skip by and do only the things you really feel like doing while also choosing which way you want to go. The game not being a RPG with conventional leveling also means I'm not restricted in the order of anything I want to do. Nothing in the game feels out of reach from each beginning or at any point of time of your playthrough when playing the game.

Especially in a my replay playthrough it became clear to me how good the game is. You know what you can do, you know the physics to fight enemies more efficiently or how puzzles can be solved differently, you know even with low stamina or health the tricks to overcome parts you had trouble with while playing for the first time when climbing or fighting something. It becomes also very clear there is really no wrong way when pathfinding your way through the world - the game is really designed to go wherever you want from the start, even Hyrule Castle.

And the most awesome thing is you don't even have to be a godlike speedrunner or something to make that happen like in lots of other games when you go off the recommended path at the start. It's made extremely approachable in that respect which makes it possible for most players. A really underappreciated aspect.
 
Bonejack said:
Don't forget them pins.

Seriously, i hope they add those to the international MyNintendoStores down the line.
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Awesomegames23 said:
7 weeks until release and Nate posts are boiling this kettle
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I haven't kept up on everything he has said but I'm pretty sure he's basically telling people to be patient.

It's pretty reasonable to assume Nintendo's marketing for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will role out in April. Probably with a Direct or Treehouse, new trailer, OLED announcement, expansion pass announcement, weekly or even daily news tibits and clips leading up to launch. My personal guess is still mid-April but it's just a guess based on Nintendo's "One Month Of Marketing" concept for many of their games.
 
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sanstea said:
Truthfully I can't really agree with the no replayability aspect.

I think that is the one thing they really fixed compared to past Zelda games. In past Zelda games every event played out the same way and mostly could only play out the same way. Puzzles were solvable only one way, boss and enemy encounters were one-dimensional, there are enough towns and events with NPCs to break up the exploration/puzzle/combat pacing and the game was linear so you couldn't change up the order of your journey or even just straight up skip parts and so on.

In contrast to BotW, puzzles are solvable in a lot of different ways, combat encounters never play out the same way and especially bosses can be defeated completely differently each time, there are enough towns and NPCs to get off the open-world pacing and you can skip by and do only the things you really feel like doing while also choosing which way you want to go. The game not being a RPG with conventional leveling also means I'm not restricted in the order of anything I want to do. Nothing in the game feels out of reach from each beginning or at any point of time of your playthrough when playing the game.

Especially in a my replay playthrough it became clear to me how good the game is. You know what you can do, you know the physics to fight enemies more efficiently or how puzzles can be solved differently, you know even with low stamina or health the tricks to overcome parts you had trouble with while playing for the first time when climbing or fighting something. It becomes also very clear there is really no wrong way when pathfinding your way through the world - the game is really designed to go wherever you want from the start, even Hyrule Castle.

And the most awesome thing is you don't even have to be a godlike speedrunner or something to make that happen like in lots of other games when you go off the recommended path at the start. It's made extremely approachable in that respect which makes it possible for most players. A really underappreciated aspect.
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I agree. I feel this way about Super Mario Odyssey in a lot of aspects as well. What both those two games brought to each of their series was largely the much more freeform element of how you approach game play. It's about how you do things rather than what you do.

To be frank, I feel like post-streamer society has kind of poisoned me on concepts of "replayability". There's very few games these days that I go out of my way to return to unless I want to do some kind of challenge run or if the game play associated with them are just that good at enabling player expression, just to see whether I can achieve something I've never done before. Back during my teenage halcyon years I'd have no qualms of even setting aside a week to replay 20 hour visual novels like Ace Attorney. Nowadays the games I actually return to play out of my growing collection usually boils down to things like Mario, 2D Metroids, the first few Metal Gear Solid games, score games like DMC/Bayonetta/Ultrakill, and multiplayer games like Guilty Gear and Mario Kart. Almost everything else I tend to just prefer watching other people play after I've played through it once; even blind playthroughs I've already watched can have more staying power for me than going back to replaying games outright. Zelda is one of those series that similarly just had that knock-on effect for me because the game play in its 3D era has rarely ever been expressive enough to make replays interesting just for the "sensation", and once you solve puzzle dungeons it's rare for most of them to feel like they offer any additional dimensions on a revisit. Replaying through most 3D Zelda games to me is like going through Disney World again. It's nice and all but I've already been on this tour and seen the magic, it can't surprise me anymore unless I'm multiple years removed and feeling nostalgic -- and even then I'd rather experience it vicariously with someone else.

Breath of the Wild isn't something I replay often but my favorite part about having to revisit it is knowing that my experience and knowledge going into it is drastically reshaped by what I've known from future playthroughs. It isn't simply a case of "now I know I can beeline every Divine Beast and then go fight Ganon" but rather what achievements I consider ticking off on the way there and how I engage with enemies/trials/landscape. The bestiary might be scant but the amount of permutations and behaviors enemies can display in my eyes always make them a joy to engage with as a quality-over-quantity experience (which is also why I'll always find quantity comparisons with Elden Ring a groanworthy thing to talk about because yes surprise; the game about that's predominantly about combat design has more things in it that exist only for the purpose of hurting you).

Someone will certainly come along the way and say that they need material incentive to experiment more with its systems but to me I think those systems and designs always spoke to themselves; it's just fun to do. Like the person above on this page said, BOTW's greatest strength compared to all its contemporaries is the way the interaction design of the game plays out. That's the kind of stuff I think TOTK would do better to lean in on. Like everyone else I certainly would like more enemies, more presentationally diverse dungeons, etc. but I wouldn't want them simply to satisfy a checklist; I want them in the hopes that they'd be as substantive as how much mileage they successfully got out of mere Bokoblins.
 
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Ibrahim said:
Nintendo promoting TotK in PAX: “ you can explore from the landscapes of Hyrule to the vast…..”


Players:

jonah-hill-cut-it.gif
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You know, it wouldnt be that bad of a tagline if it wasn't for:
1. The fact they haven't shown anything unique, or interesting about the sky, or really any unique mechanics about it.
2. The fact that they used this tagline before, both in 2011, and for the last Zelda game released on Switch, Skyward Sword. And in the case of Skyward Sword, it seemed like a borderline lie due to how empty the sky was, and how linear the land portion was.
 
Isnt 1 april not always the invest meeting every year? I would think that they will wait to show something new until after that...
 
Lozjam said:
You know, it wouldnt be that bad of a tagline if it wasn't for:
1. The fact they haven't shown anything unique, or interesting about the sky, or really any unique mechanics about it.
2. The fact that they used this tagline before, both in 2011, and for the last Zelda game released on Switch, Skyward Sword. And in the case of Skyward Sword, it seemed like a borderline lie due to how empty the sky was, and how linear the land portion was.
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I honestly feel like this should be self-evident. I've kinda gone on and on about this but the Sky is a killer concept in BoTW's framework and a perfect expansion of the first game's sense of discovery. Like, it's the natural evolution of the "ooh look over there" concept, with simultaneously more restrictions on and more options for traversal. Like, one of my favorite things in early BoTW was figuring out how to climb mountains before I had the stamina for it. This feels like it's that concept, but dialed up to 11. You can see a sky island that catches your attention, but now you have more of a task with figuring out how to get to it, with plenty of potential solutions that we've seen or can extrapolate (reversing blocks/climbing from below, skydiving from above, crafted vehicles). It's like the "cut a tree to cross a river" concepts from the Great Plateau but actually potentially relevant throughout the game. Yeah, maybe they've done a bad job of actually depicting this idea in trailers but it shouldn't be that hard to figure out

So basically yeah Nintendo should keep repeating the slogan until it sticks in people's heads that, hey, exploring the skies above is actually kinda sick
 
Yeah between the tweets and sale for BotW and the explorers guide being a free PDF they really are marketing a lot recently

“Remember how good this was? So trust us!!”
 
Awesomegames23 said:
I literally screamed "Fuck you!".....
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This lack of marketing might be the biggest insult by a major gaming company in the past decade. I literally screamed "FUCK YOU" at my screen. I knew they said it wasn't going to be marketed but the hype they created made me think they were just going to market to us anyway. Absolutely unacceptable to do this to us. Once they knew marketing was expected, they should've cancelled the game
 
NabiscoFelt said:
This lack of marketing might be the biggest insult by a major gaming company in the past decade. I literally screamed "FUCK YOU" at my screen. I knew they said it wasn't going to be marketed but the hype they created made me think they were just going to market to us anyway. Absolutely unacceptable to do this to us. Once they knew marketing was expected, they should've cancelled the game
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I saw Nintendo's Head of Marketing at a grocery store in Kyoto yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for a crumb of TotK marketing.
He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”
I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors without gracing us with some new TotK footage.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, how about you properly start marketing one of the most important games in your company's history?” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around.
When she looked at him and asked for new footage, he stopped her and told her that "not only can you explore the lands of Hyrule, but the skies above as well", and then turned around and winked at me. I think that's the 3483294th time I heard that. After she tried to politely tell him that this is old news and we need new information, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.
 
NabiscoFelt said:
This lack of marketing might be the biggest insult by a major gaming company in the past decade. I literally screamed "FUCK YOU" at my screen. I knew they said it wasn't going to be marketed but the hype they created made me think they were just going to market to us anyway. Absolutely unacceptable to do this to us. Once they knew marketing was expected, they should've cancelled the game
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I heard a rumor that they canceled Tears of the Kingdom and will instead be re-releasing Breath of the Wild on May 12th and have just now started the marketing campaign for that game. I heard that game is going to be pretty damn amazing! ;)
 
Phendrift said:
Yeah between the tweets and sale for BotW and the explorers guide being a free PDF they really are marketing a lot recently

“Remember how good this was? So trust us!!”
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I mean of course they are going to market BOTW now. People got to own the base game first before they can purchase the DLC.
 
NabiscoFelt said:
I honestly feel like this should be self-evident. I've kinda gone on and on about this but the Sky is a killer concept in BoTW's framework and a perfect expansion of the first game's sense of discovery. Like, it's the natural evolution of the "ooh look over there" concept, with simultaneously more restrictions on and more options for traversal. Like, one of my favorite things in early BoTW was figuring out how to climb mountains before I had the stamina for it. This feels like it's that concept, but dialed up to 11. You can see a sky island that catches your attention, but now you have more of a task with figuring out how to get to it, with plenty of potential solutions that we've seen or can extrapolate (reversing blocks/climbing from below, skydiving from above, crafted vehicles). It's like the "cut a tree to cross a river" concepts from the Great Plateau but actually potentially relevant throughout the game. Yeah, maybe they've done a bad job of actually depicting this idea in trailers but it shouldn't be that hard to figure out

So basically yeah Nintendo should keep repeating the slogan until it sticks in people's heads that, hey, exploring the skies above is actually kinda sick
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I get you:
However, I will raise you another situation.

Skyward Sword similarly was a killer concept. When they first showcased the concept, it was immediately evident how killer a concept it was. Traveling between the sky and the surface? Look at all of the puzzles that we can do, and flying on a loft wing too?! Being able to travel all of Hyrule in the sky was a concept that could have been a home run. All they really had to, was Twilight Princess, but you could fly, and there was stuff in the air. They could have also just done the Wind Waker, but it was in the sky as well, and both would have worked marvelously.

Skyward Sword really failed at that promise, despite its predecessors doing far better in exploration and freedom. Now, Skyward Sword is a fantastic game because of its dungeons and its story. However, just because it's predecessor does well, doesn't necessarily mean the sequel will.
 
Lozjam said:
I get you:
However, I will raise you another situation.

Skyward Sword similarly was a killer concept. When they first showcased the concept, it was immediately evident how killer a concept it was. Traveling between the sky and the surface? Look at all of the puzzles that we can do, and flying on a loft wing too?! Being able to travel all of Hyrule in the sky was a concept that could have been a home run. All they really had to, was Twilight Princess, but you could fly, and there was stuff in the air. They could have also just done the Wind Waker, but it was in the sky as well, and both would have worked marvelously.

Skyward Sword really failed at that promise, despite its predecessors doing far better in exploration and freedom. Now, Skyward Sword is a fantastic game because of its dungeons and its story. However, just because it's predecessor does well, doesn't necessarily mean the sequel will.
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I mean, the difference is that Skyward Sword wasn't a direct sequel that we know is carrying over a ton of mechanics from its predecessor

We know how BoTW plays already, and we've already seen that ToTK is carrying over those core mechanics. We can make a much safer extrapolation on how Sky Islands will play out in this game than we could with a fresh title like Skyward Sword. Making conclusions about an open world game with Sky Islands from a linear game with them also seems kinda fallacious to me, they're entirely different conceptually in my eyes
 
NabiscoFelt said:
I honestly feel like this should be self-evident. I've kinda gone on and on about this but the Sky is a killer concept in BoTW's framework and a perfect expansion of the first game's sense of discovery. Like, it's the natural evolution of the "ooh look over there" concept, with simultaneously more restrictions on and more options for traversal. Like, one of my favorite things in early BoTW was figuring out how to climb mountains before I had the stamina for it. This feels like it's that concept, but dialed up to 11. You can see a sky island that catches your attention, but now you have more of a task with figuring out how to get to it, with plenty of potential solutions that we've seen or can extrapolate (reversing blocks/climbing from below, skydiving from above, crafted vehicles). It's like the "cut a tree to cross a river" concepts from the Great Plateau but actually potentially relevant throughout the game. Yeah, maybe they've done a bad job of actually depicting this idea in trailers but it shouldn't be that hard to figure out

So basically yeah Nintendo should keep repeating the slogan until it sticks in people's heads that, hey, exploring the skies above is actually kinda sick
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Or instead of them continuously repeating empty words, the simple and obvious solution is: just show a clear example.
 
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Jencks said:
The variety of enemies, trinkets, etc. is the weakest part of the game by far. Elden Ring obliterates it in that regard. That’s not the whole story though, because BotW gives you way more options for interactivity. They just need to do a better job of capitalizing on it in TotK.
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sanstea said:
Truthfully I can't really agree with the no replayability aspect.

I think that is the one thing they really fixed compared to past Zelda games. In past Zelda games every event played out the same way and mostly could only play out the same way. Puzzles were solvable only one way, boss and enemy encounters were one-dimensional, there are enough towns and events with NPCs to break up the exploration/puzzle/combat pacing and the game was linear so you couldn't change up the order of your journey or even just straight up skip parts and so on.

In contrast to BotW, puzzles are solvable in a lot of different ways, combat encounters never play out the same way and especially bosses can be defeated completely differently each time, there are enough towns and NPCs to get off the open-world pacing and you can skip by and do only the things you really feel like doing while also choosing which way you want to go. The game not being a RPG with conventional leveling also means I'm not restricted in the order of anything I want to do. Nothing in the game feels out of reach from each beginning or at any point of time of your playthrough when playing the game.

Especially in a my replay playthrough it became clear to me how good the game is. You know what you can do, you know the physics to fight enemies more efficiently or how puzzles can be solved differently, you know even with low stamina or health the tricks to overcome parts you had trouble with while playing for the first time when climbing or fighting something. It becomes also very clear there is really no wrong way when pathfinding your way through the world - the game is really designed to go wherever you want from the start, even Hyrule Castle.

And the most awesome thing is you don't even have to be a godlike speedrunner or something to make that happen like in lots of other games when you go off the recommended path at the start. It's made extremely approachable in that respect which makes it possible for most players. A really underappreciated aspect.
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I respect where you're coming from, but I just don't feel the same. I like the physics engine and what not, and I like the different ways to solve puzzles. But both of these things are kind of just a fun novelty at the end of the day. Sure you can take advantage of a boulder to kill enemies or use magnesis, but at the end of the day it comes down to lack of rewards for doing these things. Once you've done a lot of the stuff that can be done it just isn't satisfying to repeat for me at least. I definitely think the game is phenomenal. But after the first time flying myself to hyrule castle in a minecart from Death Mountain, personally I feel like I spent so many 100s of doing things just to try and do them. At a certain point, I want more of a reward instead of endless wondering.


Now I think it would be really cool to see Tears expand this concept of "hmmm what can you do with the physics engine to solve this particular thing" or the weather system becomes more of a complex obstacle. If the recent comments hint that the player has some form of creativity and building like some people believe, it's entirely possible they hone in on another subject matter. The reuse of the world map makes that kind of likely I'd argue. If Tears is a place where you can pack so many completely different user created structures, or vehicles, or weapons, or whatever, I could see that helping with the variety problem for me. Sure, you'd still likely have the similar reward system I don't like but given enough custimizability we could see them attempt to achieve the same openess but in the concept of creating things. I made a reddit post a few weeks ago talking about the depth of the vehicle creating system, and while I don't think it's likely that it's THAT in depth, I'd love to be proven wrong.

How cool would it be if similar to how we figured out how all of the different new systems worked in Botw without an actual tutorial explaining it in detail, it's a similar thing with the creation process? People pointed out that Link has what looks like glue holding his vehicles together. What if you're able to design and develop things in a way where, you try one thing, and Oops that doesn't work, there's no an even amount of drag or enough wheels to make it stable, so you have to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make it into something usable? I don't actually anticipate this to be the case but the thought is pretty interesting. Maybe similarly you'd have to build a specific building to accomplish a certain thing. I don't know, the idea of Minecraft x Zelda sounds really cool to me, if it's given some kind of concrete purpose. I feel like, either the vehicle making is just a neat little thing, or they purposely only showed a fraction of what's possible with building materials in this game, and that's what they're hiding here.

Either way, I can't stress enough how much I wanna see Eijah Aounuma come out and say what the teams vision for this game is, because whatever it is seems to be the reason they aren't saying anything. Thinking about it now, its absolutely insane that we knew the concept for Botw going back to 2013, and here we are 49 days from release and just know it's a sequel, on the same world map, with caves and sky islands. The time is in full on slow mode rn.
 
How far out from launch did media have copies of Breath of the Wild for review? I felt like they had a long runway, but it was a Switch launch title so it would have required advance access to the console itself. Pretty sure most reviews were on Switch not Wii U.

I'd imagine early access to the game will be highly curated to avoid leaks, but if Nintendo is as confident in the game as their $70 implies, I would think they'd want to give journalists plenty of time to soak it all in.

Edit: I'd say a month / a few weeks is 'plenty of time' so it's not like we've passed that point yet.
 
Cheesehead302 said:
I respect where you're coming from, but I just don't feel the same. I like the physics engine and what not, and I like the different ways to solve puzzles. But both of these things are kind of just a fun novelty at the end of the day. Sure you can take advantage of a boulder to kill enemies or use magnesis, but at the end of the day it comes down to lack of rewards for doing these things. Once you've done a lot of the stuff that can be done it just isn't satisfying to repeat for me at least. I definitely think the game is phenomenal. But after the first time flying myself to hyrule castle in a minecart from Death Mountain, personally I feel like I spent so many 100s of doing things just to try and do them. At a certain point, I want more of a reward instead of endless wondering.
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I think you are drastically underselling how huge the physics and chemistry systems change the way you interact with the world, and what actions you can do as a player. Like I said, by comparing it with Elden Ring, where literally all you can do is swing a weapon, walk, run, and get on a horse, it becomes clear how freeing the game is. The only variety in Elden Ring comes in how you interact through combat.

I don't even really disagree about the rewards thing, although I don't think it was as bad as you've described. However, what I meant with my original comment when I said Nintendo didn't 'capitalize' on BotW's systems was more in line with my point above. With Elden Ring, the design of the game is structured around the insanely limited options of player actions. They do a good job of giving you interesting situations, but the size of the game is big enough that the core gameplay loop becomes monotonous anyway. I don't think it's a coincidence most people cite burnout around Leyndell. With BotW, and even moreso in TotK, there's just more options on the table for events, puzzles, and situations they can design. To me that's just plainly more interesting. And hopefully they do a good job of that.
 
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Jencks said:
I think you are drastically underselling how huge the physics and chemistry systems change the way you interact with the world, and what actions you can do as a player. Like I said, by comparing it with Elden Ring, where literally all you can do is swing a weapon, walk, run, and get on a horse, it becomes clear how freeing the game is.

I don't even really disagree about the rewards thing, although I don't think it was as bad as you've described. However, what I meant with my original comment when I said Nintendo didn't 'capitalize' on BotW's systems was more in line with my point above. With Elden Ring, the design of the game is structured around what the player can do, which is insanely limited. They do a good job of giving you interesting situations, but the size of the game is big enough that the core gameplay loop becomes monotonous anyway. I don't think it's a coincidence most people cite burnout around Leyndell. With BotW, and even moreso in TotK, there's just more options on the table for events, puzzles, and situations they can design. And hopefully they do a good job of that.
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Maybe I am, but I still say in comparison to having a reason to explore beyond something looks neat its kind of a novelty. Cool to be able to attach balloons to something and see it float. Cool that rain prevents you from climbing. Cool to kill an enemy with magnesis or use a wind bomb to launch yourself. I get that it's a lot of what makes the game unique. But beyond that, it just isn't fun to do on subsequent playthroughs. Do I really wanna be like, "hey look, I can intricately kill this enemy by moving a piece of metal" or do I just want to attack it normally and go on about my business? Now you could argue this type of stuff is actually helpful to pull off to save brittle weapons, but I'd argue still that it's only truly useful in the beginning of the game. Once you have a collection of decent weapons, not only can you kill enemies really easily, but you can also just simply ignore them since you know what you will get out of them. But like, I don't see why in Tears you can't have the best of both worlds. The development time has to have been spent on something if a large part of the world is the same, so why not on expanding the physics engine and world systems? In botw, a lot of troubles the world throws at you are simply from it being an unknown early on, and then it goes away later in the play through. I'd like to be constantly challenged no matter what stage of my playthrough I'm at.

I know where you're coming from, if you asked me about this I would have said what you said 2 years ago. And I still say I wouldn't change that aspect of the game. Solving puzzles in shrines with different solutions is something that is legitimately a great thing. I just find it hard to complete shrines at all when replaying because I know the end goal will be something unsatisfying. But yeah. I want to be really clear here, I really like this aspect of the game, it gives it a unique feeling not found anywhere else. But I just don't think it can hold the entirety of the gameplay on its back on its own.
 
oic it’s elden ring vs breath of the wild time again

i could write a short novel on why I prefer breath of the wild, but that’s not to say it couldn’t take a few pages from elden ring. let it be known that combat and how it handles treasure / rewards are not among them. breath of the wild does have a rewards issue, especially late game, but the solution is definitely not looking at how elden ring manages it, which in its own way was still pretty poor.
 
karmitt said:
oic it’s elden ring vs breath of the wild time again

i could write a short novel on why I prefer breath of the wild, but that’s not to say it couldn’t take a few pages from elden ring. let it be known that combat and how it handles treasure / rewards are not among them. breath of the wild does have a rewards issue, especially late game, but the solution is definitely not looking at how elden ring manages it, which in its own way was still pretty poor.
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Yeah Elden Ring's reward system might definitely be great for incentivizing multiple playthroughs

It would be nice if it was fun enough for me to finish my first though
 
NabiscoFelt said:
Yeah Elden Ring's reward system might definitely be great for incentivizing multiple playthroughs

It would be nice if it was fun enough for me to finish my first though
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I think the comparison is being conflated here. I'm not saying botw needs to rip off Elden Ring and be super non user friendly and have obnoxiously hard bosses. I am saying that it needs some kind of rewarding progression.
 
Why's everybody talking about replaying games. It tells you nothing about a game. All games are boring when you replay them! Only nasty freaks play a game and then play that same game again!
 
I loved Breath of the Wild for the most part with the exception of wanting more story, more characters, bigger towns, fishing, proper dungeons, etc. BOTW was still as close to a 10/10 game as it gets but it did have some glaring issues for me. That being said, it's been difficult getting excited for Tears of the Kingdom since it's reusing the same map (and adding to it with the sky and underground) which is why I've been waiting and waiting and waiting to see SOMETHING from this game that could spark some excitement but it's becoming more and more clear that we won't see anything until at least mid-April if not around launch or if the game leaks early. Not a fan of this marketing style (or lack thereof) but it's not my call.

At the end of the day I'm hoping that the game some how delivers something epic. I haven't seen any real indication of that yet personally but I'm hoping to be surprised in a huge significant way. An epic story, massive time travel shenanigans, a vastly changed world, a significant amount of new stuff you can do in the world, underwater exploration, fishing, full scale proper dungeons... I don't know what but I'm hoping for significant stuff to differentiate this new game from Breath of the Wild.

I want to be hyped but so far I'm still feeling pretty indifferent and not all that excited. Hoping that changes soon. Hoping long before May 12th... Get me excited Nintendo!
 
Cheesehead302 said:
I think the comparison is being conflated here. I'm not saying botw needs to rip off Elden Ring and be super non user friendly and have obnoxiously hard bosses. I am saying that it needs some kind of rewarding progression.
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Nah see that's my point

Elden Ring's progression is kinda one of my main problems with it. Yeah, it's great when you find a cool new weapon for your build, and absolutely annoying if you go through some mini dungeon and find something you have absolutely no use for. Elden Ring's weapon upgrade and leveling systems means weapon loot is of limited use most of the time

Unless you're talking about difficulty progression in which case, yeah, there's probably a point to be made there.
 
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