I don’t think that’s true. Everything actually points to the NX not having that, as they’ve apparently been removing critical features from the gamepad over the course of development.
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Oh. Thanks for that link. I stand corrected.
wat
What kind of twisted design process wound up with this? Either use the Wii U tablet or remove its analogue from the game – this compromise is bizarre. I’m all of a sudden more pessimistic about this game. If the design is so self-evidently absurd here, how else will it be stupid?
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how is that any different from pressing “start” and having a menu screen pop up like in every other game ever? if the NX isn’t going to have the dual screen option then it seems perfectly reasonable.
Well it is perhaps a little silly that the WiiU version isn’t going to use the feature exclusive to the WiiU
Like the Wii version of Twilight Princess was ultimately a rushed, shitty port-up but it would have been fairly bizarre if it hadn’t utilized motion controls.
it could be considered silly, but how many people already consider the wii u’s entire gimmick silly? i’m pretty ambivalent on it. it doesn’t seem particularly elegant, nor in egregiously bad taste. we’ll see what happens
The demo at E3 lets you just switch the whole feed to the tablet, like Mario Kart does. I thought the choice to make the Sheika Tablet a Thing in the game was weird too, but really, it was totally insignificant to the experience outside of like, one or two brief cutscenes and a diegetic explanation for Link’s map. So, who cares?
I’m pretty sure it was thought of early in development when the only platform was the Wii U, and they kept it around as the game got streamlined into a single screen + controller based experience because they were too invested into the design of it, or whatever. Since I want to play this I’m just glad they pivoted away from a 2 screen design.
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… that’s kind of the reason for 75% of things that are included in post-OoT Zeldas, isn’t it?
The same could be said of all religions Nintendo games!
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i am going to make an ill-advised hot take in an sb zelda thread (the most ill-advised of all hot takes)
i think the reason people are hyped about this is only partly because of the game itself. hear me out. even if the game sucks complete ass, it’s still a considerable and important shift in direction for nintendo. something someone said earlier resonated with me: this is probably the most ambitious game nintendo has attempted since the nintendo 64 era. even then, past OoT, nothing stands out. they seem incredibly risk-averse in terms of individual games; sure the wii and ds were bold hardware design moves, but the accompanying first-party games were tech demos or bloated, misguided trainwrecks. compare the approach of mario galaxy 1/2, twilight princess, skyward sword and this game: it’s incredibly refreshing and maybe, just maybe, this represents a design pivot that extends deeper than this single game. that’s an important, heartening thought for anyone who thinks nintendo still retains potential value. anyone who believes nintendo is already completely creatively bankrupt will respond differently (e.g. felix)
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Counterpoint: I neither think that they’re creatively bankrupt (3D world was great) nor that this is incredibly ambitious (it would’ve been a pretty logical followup to wind waker). 90% of my problem with Nintendo is that they act like they exist outside the industry until they finally decide to bless us with e.g. their perpetually-$60 team-based shooter which is not, on balance, much more creative than the average source engine mod – and even if it is significantly more polished, I’m not convinced of the value of that polish, nor am I sure that’s what people are taking about when they come off like “Nintendo is making X!”
Also I know I bring this up a lot but it does bug me that people seem to be so inconsistent in their willingness to regard them as a company who primarily targets kids particularly w/r/t their encounters with gg and whatnot.
I think their designers have gotten much better since the Wii era but their producers are still questionable. I loooved the gamecube and still do but mostly not for first party stuff.
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just to clarify, this is absolutely not incredibly ambitious. this game would have, as you’ve noted, been pretty damn ambitious in 2005-6. but can you name any post-OoT that are even in the same ballpark in terms of ambition? it’s completely relative
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You’re saying it’s ambitious for Nintendo in the sense that they’re stretching their abilities to a new thing they’ve never tried before. By that criteria, Splatoon is at least as ambitious. (Also, now that I think about it, Splatoon is also very ambitious in a marketing sense. Bringing the team-shooter genre to the Japanese market, and succeeding!? We would all have said it’s impossible.)
I also think there is a lot of ambition to 3D World in terms of visual and game engine design (this is a company that has never programmed a GPU shader in their entire lives before the Wii U, and they came out with an absolutely gorgeous, solid 60fps, and unique-looking modern game right off the bat), not to mention sheer mechanical variety.
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I admit that I’ve never played either game, so I might be missing something crucial that merely watching would not grant me, but neither of those titles strike me as particularly ambitious in the way this is. Splatoon is a new IP, which means it’s failure would not be nearly as detrimental as the failure of a Zelda title. I agree that technologically, Nintendo has had a lot of ambition since N64 in spurts but it’s rarely translated that into meaningful game experiences that were not fully iterative on prior successes or glorified tech demos. This title appears to possess both the creative vision, technological stoutness, and potential for failure that qualifies it as truly ambitious on a plane above 3D World and Splatoon.
As an aside, 3D World is certainly gorgeous and has a unique aesthetic, but the flow still seems regressive relative to prior mainline Mario titles; it very much appears to be the anti-ambitious angle from a level and mechanical design perspective to me. Consider the expansion in scope from SM64 to Galaxy 1, for example. By contrast, 3D World’s scope and scale almost appear to apologize for the prior games overreaching in ambition (and instead expand the scope of the NSMB titles).
I gotta halt my hot take generator
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don’t stop your hot take generator it rules
though I do think you might be misreading 3D world! it’s really great and it might as well be on a timeline where nsmb doesn’t exist. and I don’t think it’s meaningfully lesser than galaxy in terms of scale, unless you’re just looking at the fact that galaxy sort of takes place in space? but that’s rarely more than flavor text
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Yeah. There is this strange fact that “feeling of hugeness/scope” has a pretty weak correlation to actual variety, development effort or necessarily even physical size of the space relative to your playable character. Human brains are pretty bad at truly appreciating scope in a quantitative manner, we can hardly tell the difference between a billion things and a trillion, at some point we just collapse it all into “really big” or “not that big” based on loose heuristics like “interconnected/not”. Games, being the most directly psychologically manipulative of the artforms, definitely take advantage of this for whatever kind of effect they want to create.
Galaxy (like the new Zelda) is interested in appearing enormous, whereas 3D world prefers to appear small, friendly, and accessible to all comers, but this is an illusion. Galaxy “feels” bigger because it looks like a galaxy which we know to be awe-inspiringly enormous, whereas 3d world is themed around separate levels and takes after the diorama look introduced in 3D land in the context of what’s appropriate for 3DS (loosely inspired by SMB3).
Building on this, but with a slightly different (maybe even hotter!) take–
Rather than say Nintendo hasn’t done anything ambitious since Oot, we could put a spin on it by saying that their ambition has been geared towards making things simpler and more accessible. This doesn’t always work, of course, but I think with the Wii Nintendo realized that there are people who want to play video games that are not necessarily interested in a 40+ hour experience, or in the cutting edge of graphics and overstuffed games–so their innovations in the past couple of decades have been all about cutting away needless alienating complexity to make things that are more like toys than immersive worlds. Again, I don’t think they have been stellar at doing this all (or even most) of the time, and the Zelda series has probably been the prime example of why this approach is not always a great one. Rather than making the series simpler and more streamlined, they’ve just overloaded it with tutorial cruft.
So if there is anything that is really exciting about the new zeld from my perspective, other than the fact that it looks hella cute and chill, is that it is combining Nintendo’s most overburdened franchise with video games’ clunkiest and least welcoming genre, that is nevertheless extremely popular among “hardcore” gamers. It’s exciting because it seems like they are playing with fire–the result could very easily be one of the most unplayable and alienating things they’ve ever released, and yet from the looks of it it seems like they are actually pulling it off.
And I think if it is successful RPG that is meaningfully better than stuff like Witcher or Fallout or whatever, it will be thanks to a successful trimming of the fat from the things it is stealing from those games, and if it is a successful Zelda game it will be thanks to totally ditching the decades of “tradition” since Oot that have made each successive game more boring than the last, while maintaining some of the essential elements that keep it recognizable as a new entry in that series.
It just seems like the first time they have actually been applying some of the tactics that made 3D Land/World more interesting than other current platformers to a Zelda game. I used to think they would have done this just by literally copying 3D Land and Mario Maker but with Zelda instead (they kind of did this with the 3DS Zelda, and I still actually hope they do a Zelda Maker at some point), but it seems like what they are doing instead is actually paying attention to what other games “inspired” by Zelda have been up to for the past 18 years. That isn’t mind blowing or anything, but I still find it kind of interesting.
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I’d say they weren’t even remotely successful at this beyond just Wii Sports, as iOS took off immediately after and ate their lunch while they pretended not to notice for years.
I guess I have a lot of problems with how Nintendo chooses to regard/position themselves 
but this looks good!
Once I learned about the virtual iPad I sighed a big sigh.
Presumably, this iteration will probably feature more tutorials in order to introduce all these “GROUND BREAKING NEW FEATURES” to what Nintendo perceives as their average consumer.
Visually it looks impeccable and i’m certain movement will be a joy, but at present this seems like a case of Nintendo throwing the last decade of Japanese industry development at the drawing board and seeing what sticks.
galaxy felt incredibly small to me
i’m of the opinion that 3D World is the most robust, feature-heavy and plain fun to play Mario game since SNES Mario World and while it’s not as grand in scope or as mechanically novel as Galaxy 1/2, its just so damn well put together and is really varied in experience if you play it alone, co-op with one other person (imo the preferred way to play this game) and the fuck-around 4-player party mode.
Nintendo isn’t as precious and grand as it probably thinks it is, but their first party Wii U output (especially Splatoon, 3D World and Mario Maker), imo, has been making up for a lot of ground they kicked away post-N64/gamecube/Wii era. Granted their PR and marketing and first party properties optioned out to other developers (Star Fox Zero, Pokken Tournament) leave a lot to be desired, but whoever is on their Mario team has got it solid.
This new Zelda game at the very least looks way more interesting and mechanically sound in design and scope than fuckin’ Skyward Sword, which looks like a baby toy version of this game comparatively.
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