Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I mean in man-hours; certainly ‘mounting on moving objects’ has worked sporadically in games (Battlefield 1942’s plane hopping!) but usually it takes hard work and it’s harder with modern substantial physics engines

Getting it to work systemically and at speeds an order of magnitude higher than expected without the world collapsing in on itself is an impressive feat of engineering (and budgeting!)

Does Nintendo use any middleware? Are they one of the few still writing their own physics entire?

I’d be amazed if not

there’s a very good GDC talk where they said that the level of detail they needed required Havok at least as a starting point

I should probably watch that thing!

incredibly impressive to get that working with Havok, or even have the confidence to impute that level of acceleration to an object that large and not worry about tunneling

I played this for a few minutes this weekend, very cool. The surprising thing for me was how different it feels just to move around from both older zelds and other 3rd person stabber games. Interesting experience, took a while to feel confident about controlling my lad. Kind of wish I had more time

Yeah, he moves/animates a lot like modern Mario – very quick acceleration/deceleration but magnified by a ‘bouncy’ response in animation

It’s pleasant especially in our nightmare future where nobody likes slidey character physics (but me)

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The poppiness of the combat is really cute too. But I feel like the foes tend to get between your camera and your lad too much. The lock on system felt different somehow, but I didn’t play long enough to get the hang of it

I’ll have to look explicitly but it’s very likely they have a concept of concentric circles in which enemies are placed and maneuver so they can take turns attacking

Mark Brown on Breath of the Wild!

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I’ve played this game for over 50 hours and I still saw things I need to seek out in that video!

I’m glad he started by talking about “open world” as a characteristic and not a category.

That video perfectly nails down why i have scarcely been able to stop thinking about BotW since last night!

Jeez, this game is a better sequel to Morrowind than any Bethesda thing ever could be, huh
Like the bit about people actually giving you directions alone made my scalp itch (in the best way)

For it to take on Morrowind’s mantle, I’d want it to build on the different cultures and have more dynamic changes in the environment beyond solving the one environmental problem in each inhabited zone. Gerudo Town is more developed than the other three with the Thunder Helm quest. There were brief glints of development with the suspicious and racist Zora elder, but it resolved almost immediately.

Ganon as essentially the only antagonist flattens the story. It’s a little odd that all of the non-Ganon beings in Hyrule get along fine.

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Oh, fair. i guess it lacks that sense of cultural difference & political intrigue. i was speaking more to the feeling of wanderlust, and being trusted to explore the world as you see fit. This Zelda cribs a lot of obvious ideas from Skyrim, but it’s much more playful and loose in its expression of them.

It’s also the worthiest successor to Wind Waker (which is my favorite 3D Zelda!) and i think is deliberately referential/reverential to that game, both explicitly (Koroks, “Celda,” King Hyrule) and more subtly (the paraglider as a more freeform Deku Leaf, the triumphant return of cool techno-Aztec designs).

Yeah, hey, that’s what i was thinking of: this game is like Nintendo revisiting Wind Waker, dumping a pot of Skyrim into it, and carefully stirring and seasoning it until it actually tastes pretty damn good. Sorry, i’m cooking dinner rn and it’s turning my similes into stupid

Yeah - I think I said this already, but it is as expansive as Wind Waker felt to me as a ten year old. I didn’t use to perceive the invisible walls and edges of a game environment readily, and they’re almost absent in Breath of the Wild. It also picks up a lot of half-baked, decade-dormant mechanics from Wind Waker and makes them work: weapon variety, the spoils bag, parries, etc.

I played this for the professionally-mandated ten hours and have felt surprisingly little draw since putting it down. Partly this is because I know I’ll pick it up in the summer once hard mode is released for a ‘real’ playthrough but I think I’d also be more invested if Nintendo had the interest in storytelling as elder Bethesda or the architectural storytelling of Team Ico.

My faraway thoughts/desire to keep playing are because I want to experience more of the expansive puzzles and customized encounter zones – which is great and healthy compared to insidious compulsive progression loops.

Really curious how they’ll handle this. It HAS to be something more then starting a new save file where enemies have x2 health and damage, right? I think one small change that might have a real impact on difficulty would be if snacking in the middle combat forced locked you into a short Monster Hunter-style eating animation. A lot of encounters lose their tension when you practically can’t die as long as you don’t suffer OHKO.

I get the feeling though that they may want to lean further into the Survival-game stuff though and add things like a hunger meter which I would be pretty skeptical about. In any case I don’t really want “the same game but harder” that would make the base game essentially obsolete if you like a good challenge. Best case scenario we get a Master Quest type deal that uses the same assets but just jumbles up the world and enemies in an interesting way.

There’s already an invisible system that determines the class of enemies you face ala Halo. They could just spawn mostly black-to-silver enemies like goldies on Legendary.

The balloons are just some real Garry’s Mod shit:

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yeah i am very curious about the hard mode myself. i guess if food restored hearts gradually instead of all at once that would really change everything? i guess my other thought was something about resource/food spoilage, but i can’t imagine they’d do something that fiddly. remixed shrines is probably too much to hope for? i’m just hoping to be surprised by it tbh

curious how the cave of trials will shake out, too - this game is hungry for some kind of super-difficult postgame freakdungeon to gear up for

Especially since they’re charging for it which implies more dev time than almost any difficulty options ever get.

Either way I can’t walk this road more than once so if it turns out bad I can just start normal, then.