My only hurdle besides probably not playing this for twenty years – I ain’t gonna buy a console for a Zelda no matter how good it is – is that everything I’ve seen of the visual direction in stills and videos is palatable but unremarkable. Kinetic possibilities, level design, combat mechanics, etc., all that can be there but I won’t commit to a game that has adventurous sensibilities for dozens of hours unless I’m hooked by the atmosphere. Did anyone else here feel the same and do an about-face after actually playing the game?
yeah i felt that it was looking pretty bland (up until the last trailer where they actually showed character designs) but it really works well as a whole and has a very distinct visual feel and the writing syncs up well with that too.
diplo you can come over here and play it whenever you want~~
At a glance most of it looks simply like a very pretty open-world fantasy game. Pleasantly, they lean into vivid colors and away from grit. It’s kind of remarkable how much effort they put into the grass, of all things – the way it sways in the wind and shimmers under the sun is so true-to-life, it’s honestly kinda breathtaking at times.
The Sheikah towers and shrines are (literal) standouts. They’re evidently a nod to the aesthetic implied by that one Wind Waker boss. I enjoyed the contrast between that techno-fantasy look and the more natural environment, personally.
The NPC design is pleasantly cod-Ghibli, if not mind-blowing. i dig how the Zora and Rito look this time. It definitely has the most appealing cast since WW.
The monster design, though, is uniformly fantastic and very Wind Waker-y as well. Wizzrobes look like the Flatwoods monster!
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how does this compare to the trees in witcher 3??
Hmm. Can you climb those?
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BotW has a lot of wind effects - embers, grass, leaves - that are effective in making the wind feel real, but it’s not amazing like a forested section of Velen.
after watching a few videos at random, the only thing that bothers me is that floating trivial pursuit piece that appears whenever you run or climb anywhere. it’s exasperatingly ugly
nah but they look unbelievable in motion during windstorms, the effect is “oh my god, no developer has actually animated them all like this before”
Yeah I just checked out a video, that’s hella impressive. Wanna say the grass effects in BotW are comparable but maybe not as real? They work great for establishing that rolling Ghibli plains look though
In BotW you can climb any tree and this is reportedly what Miyamoto spent most of his time doing when he was testing the game to give it the OK.
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again, this is all based on just a few minutes of playing the game, but i think one of the things i didn’t realize about it from reading reviews and playing videos is how sparse the early game is in terms of what you’re actually expected to do. like the tutorial plateau might throw a lot of stuff at you at once, but after that it really feels a little bit more like a walking simulator or ‘art game’ or whatever than AAA open world sandbox ARPG gameplay. i think you kind of gradually work your way up to those things as you go, but i was surprised by how much mileage you could get out of just sort of playing around and seeing how the environment would respond to different actions. it feels kind of like a different model for what ‘realism’ should be in a large game like this, in that they trade graphical fidelity and detail for making an environment that feels genuinely responsive to player action. like, if i wanted to compare it to Witcher 3, of course that game has a lot more aesthetic detail and depth in terms of world building, but as a game about maneuvering through a 3d space it is extremely shallow.
botw on the other hand seems designed to appeal to people whose other favorite current gen gaming experiences are things like journey and flower, in that it can draw you in with the stylization and deliberateness of the design and all that, but then obviously they have a lot more muscle when it comes to variety and interactiveness. i guess what i didn’t get from reading other reports is that things like ‘you can climb every tree’ and ‘you can conduct electricity through metal objects’ are not like, individual features, but just examples–not only can you do those things, but the entire game creates the expectation that those things should be possible, so that you would actually think to try them. and again, it’s not that the world reacts exactly the way the real world would, but that a much larger variety of possible actions and reactions are immediately evident in the game. i think people will probably write about how this is accomplished for a long time. but i also felt like after a few more hours you’d start to see the seams of what was and wasn’t possible, who knows.
but all of this is why the shallowness of the cooking system is especially irritating to me. i mean there’s plenty of other stuff to do, but i guess see my other thread for why i find it dumb.
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Yeah, the systemic pieces are amazing not in design on their own but in the breadth of them; their production is a miracle. This sort of work, in a western AAA production, would add a year to the production. Good luck convincing your publisher you need $30m for that.
(uh, though if this team has been active since Skyward Sword,)
I suppose Dishonored is the closest big-budget counterpart, and they do pretty well, but it’s a hard, tense game and the depth of systems only comes out when things have gone wrong so it’s not front-facing it. They also don’t build enemies and world toys at such a scale to interact with, rather it’s many tools against the same guys in different terrain constraints.
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Foliage Grand Tourney:
- Witcher 3
- Last Guardian
- Horizon
- Uncharted 4
- Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I like this because it sounds like you’re describing immersive sims as a brand new but entirely logical genre, rather than this sort of grim derivative of deus ex design that the same few PC developers have been swinging at and mostly missing for the past 15 years
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To be fair it feels pretty different. The structure encourages experimentation and playfulness due to a) low consequence and b) scarce resources; Deus Ex and co encourage it through difficulty and progression branches; unfortunately, their scarce resources encourage hoarding more than experimentation and the difficulty leads many into deepening the groove of a single specialty rather than trying something new on each encounter.
If they had a flat progression and built levels/encounters to encourage different methods rather than weighting all relatively equally due to 20-hour build investments maybe we’d see them differently.
Breath of the Wild actually feels closest in experimentability to MGSV, which similarly had a breathtaking array of tools and systemic reactions.
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It reminds me more of the early Metroids, but realized at a much larger and 3D scale.
Invite me over then
The Last Guardian has the best grass/trees I’ve seen in a game and I’m curious to see how BotW’s greenery stacks up in this battle of the gods
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Time for criticism yet?
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criticism welcome, and i have plenty, but that video is kind of insufferable
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Yeah, I don’t know why I watched that video at all since I’m allegedly trying to not really watch much of it/on it until I get a chance to actually play it, but I skipped around a bit and at some point he says:
But when it comes to balancing stories against gameplay, wouldn’t you rather have the [upward nasal tilt] best of both worlds?
And egad.
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