I liked the shrines at first, a bunch of semi-optional puzzlets scattered around a big open world is a good idea, but i got a bit tired of the formula and too many of them are copy->pasted duels with mini-guardians. The coolest shrines were the ones where the puzzle was outside and you just got your reward once you got in — stuff like the labyrinths, the dark forest, the open arenas where Kass sings you a riddle and you have to figure out what it means, etc. I would love a sequel to hone in on that kind of design, and not feel beholden to have 100+ of the damn things to complete
Replaying Shadow of the Colossus the other day, it occurred to me that BotW was the first time they successfully incorporated stuff that they obviously pulled from SotC (Twilight Princess was the first time they tried and was nakedly an aesthetic grab, BotW is much subtler). The Divine Beasts even seem like a Zelda take on a colossus. And then the climbing, obviously.
I think the hardest part they had with the shrines was convincing players to not do them if they didn’t want to. The player needs barely any to progress through the game, they are scattered dense enough that a possibility is always being presented to the player like an hors d’oeuvre, and they’re the primary fast-travel mechanic in a game that is otherwise focused on getting the player away from maps and checklists primarily to squelch anxiety that a passed-over shrine will be forgotten.
Like most Breath of the Wild systems, it’s trying to present a surfeit of plenty to overcome and overwhelm checklist compulsion.
But that’s not what most games, starved for Content, train players to do! And players have this learned anxiety.
actually i think this is the same problem with every iteration of Animal Crossing adding more stuff - they’re trying to indicate that you can’t and should not try to get everything, but it just triggers that same Stuff Anxiety in people that other games do, so every new game just means people have to spend that extra thousand hours completing their catalogs.
It is a more enjoyable game if you don’t minmax and go for everything! Like i recommend against upgrading armor or inventory too much, because the combat is too shallow to be fun once you can tank hits and carry around a huge sack of weapons. I’d also like to see a more robust bestiary and armory in the sequel because the bones are pretty good, about as complex as you really need Zelda combat to be
botw depends on the impression of plentiful, sublime vastness, but this approach means everything is superfluous and disconnected in a way that makes it hard not to treat it like a (practically uncompletable) checklist of arbitrary stuff, to the detriment of that sense of “worldedness” i get from smaller but more tightly interconnected systems in other games. maybe it’s not so bad to encourage the instinct towards completionism if Content isn’t the paradigmatic model for what makes up a game?
I think they’re trying to tackle the problem just like Shadow of the Colossus did. They both realize that players gravitate towards objective-focused gameplay and start looking at an open world as a set of minable activity nodes.
Shadow of the Colossus believes that by removing explicit progression and content markers, and being coy about how to trigger the next objective, it can get players to look at the environment and appreciate it on its own terms, as human-curated, gardened spaces designed to reflect the character’s state and the values of its world. It works for me! but I don’t think it does for a lot of players for whom the world is a burden or a heavy application of open-world tropes, as Tulpa identifies it.
Breath of the Wild’s opposing tack has a few benefits: one, even if it’s designed to not require completionism, it is aware of and much more friendly towards that player type. As I argued, it leaves the door open for more normal players to tip into it, but it doesn’t slam the door shut like SotC does.
Two, and this is the most impressive part of the game, the density makes the game friendly to portable play and short session lengths by guaranteeing a meaningful accomplishment in any five minutes of play. This is huge! and the shortcomings of it may not be solvable, but even getting here is major, major design work.
By removing explicit progression trackers and re-focusing objective acquisition to world layout and world puzzles, and away from simple map nodes, they are arguing they can pull players’ eyes away from their map and back towards the world itself. I think they’re largely successful, although, as you note, it weakens the progression rewards. I think their framing device attempts to reconcile this: these are disconnected ancient ruins that may or may not be discovered by Link; they remain, waiting. If the game had a better sense of history this might work better, but I think they really struggled to impart a sense of older cultures when their storytelling framework was so personalized and their political culture so simple.
I agree with Felix’s contention that the 4 beast stories felt like a completely separate team, shut out of the meat of the game (and I’m familiar, now, with the conflict between a publisher/market-expecations-demanded Golden Path team living in a systemic game, and the way that team begins cutting every systemic feature out in the name of predictability, counter to the entire game’s value system, and how publisher expectations can linger even after being proved conclusively wrong, […]), but that does raise the question of why the castle was so great. Maybe it was owned by the world team, or maybe it was so important it had real high-level direction?
The colossi-dungeons were OK, the real garbage was the overworld questlines leading up to them. The game would be 10% better if all those quests were simply deleted and the colossi were just walking around their haunts for you to enter at any time
The 4 guardians can all be your 1st one and are designed around that, so they end up being antiseptic. The castle is designed to be beatable right away, but not without a lot of skill and persistence, so it’s really open and allows for lots of player authorship. Whole game is like a tense faceoff between the shit that’s cool about zelda/lawnmower sims and the shit that sucks
I found that BOTW severely lacked the sense of mystery, creep and/or wonder that would make the world worth exploring for its own sake, and nothing else about the game sticked
I could go anywhere, but why?
I dropped the game after the plateau and never went back
There is some speculation that since it’s (apparently) keeping the same overworld map then there is going to be an “underworld” map that mirrors the overworld in some way.
I mostly just hope for the sequel they make the world smaller and denser, and spend more time making the shrines more diverse. Having them all look the same and with the same intro and outro everytime was a bit of a drag after a while. Agree with Sleepy that the best ones had the puzzle outside and the shrine was just the reward.
Nintendo tend not to do the same gimmicks / themes twice, so I am wondering what they will do for this one. I was thinking tropical island, but that’s kind of Animal Crossing’s thing right now. Hopefully the rumours that you control Zelda are true, but not in the ‘girls can’t do adventure stuff’ way that they tend to do with playable Princess Peach usually