Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I think I’m going to have to put this one aside for now and come back to it later. I’ve put about four hours into this so far because I feel somewhat obliged (the word of mouth about it was the primary reason I grabbed a Switch) but it’s just left me totally cold once the impact of the visuals has worn off.

Maybe it’s because I don’t have any real nostalgia for the franchise?

It plays so different than any other Zelda game, I don’t think this is it. Do you not enjoy games like Horizon or other open world action games? I don’t really get a sense for what isn’t working for people when almost the only adjective is “cold” - what does that mean?

It’s funny to see how divisive this game is in the Qt3 community, while almost everywhere else I go it’s 90% praise. I mean, it’s one of the best reviewed games of all time, even. It’s probably my GOTY, so while I’m not going to try and change your mind, I am curious why you and other’s find it “cold”?

Qt3 is like that with several games. We are a different demographic than you find at most game sites, though.

@anonymgeist, I don’t have any real nostalgia for Zelda specifically or Nintendo in general, but I’m loving the game thus far (I’m similarly just a few hours in). I don’t think the game is relying on nostalgia for its praise.

I can see this game having a less universal appeal than OoT did, mainly because its difficulty curve is steeper. But I wouldn’t expect that to impact the reviews from this community (maybe you nubs just need to git gud).

I still found this to be an amazingly well put together game.

Nostalgia definitely will improve one’s impression though, as little callbacks to earlier games are cool. Certainly not required for enjoyment, just bonus points.

I … didn’t really like OOT. Or Majora’s Mask. Honestly I havent’s really loved Zelda since Wind Waker (which I thought was awesome), and before that the SNES Zelda, which I for some reason can’t remember the name of. The N64 era Zeldas, and then the ones on Wii that required “waggle to attack” I just didn’t like playing - and I tried every one of them multiple times.

I fucking love BotW though, and played it all the way to the end. The end game content, with more challenging enemies, more awesome equipment and gear to find, and the end game locations were just… so cool.

Sorry, I should have explained myself a bit more.

I find the combat actively unpleasant. The controls feel awkward (though this might be in part because I came to this pretty fresh off of Bloodborne), the targeting doesn’t seem particularly helpful, and the crazy-fast weapon degradation would be bad enough if I didn’t have to open up a menu and select a new one every single time one breaks mid-fight. I’m just not having fun with any fights so far, and end up actively avoiding combat because of it.

There are some neat elements to the larger story, but there doesn’t seem to be much there on a micro-level with the individual side quests. Outside of the old man at the beginning, I haven’t come across an interesting character to interact with.

The exploration is my favorite part, but my interest there is waning as well. Aside from seeing the environment (which is admittedly very cool) the two key rewards seem to be the seeds (which is fine–but are more inventory slots the only benefit?) and the shrines. Some of the puzzles there are fun, but most are dull–and I’m just going to nope out of anything that involves motion controls.

I generally do like open-world games, but looking back, I guess the ones that really stuck out to me and held my interest were ones with great characters and story.

You are literally the first person in the entire universe that I have seen say that.

Straight up, no kidding. Literally the first.

Not to say your opinion isn’t just as valid as anyone else, but the almost universal love for that game was somewhat unique.

I know, believe me, I tried so many times to play it and Majora’s Mask. I got them on 3DS even, and played for several hours of each, but just… did NOT have fun with them. No idea why.

It’s this years GTA4 IMO. A few years from now it will be looked on less fondly.

I think I explained a bunch of my issues earlier in the thread.

I feel like a big part of OoT’s greatness was when it was released. While it generally holds up pretty well, at the time the game was nuts. If you played it later than its original release, I can imagine being less impressed by it.

I totally disagree with this assessment.

I think if anything it will be like half-life 2. A game that was completely revolutionary at the time but iterated and improved on until the things that made it novel seem run of the mill.

As it stands today it is one of the pinnacles of gaming for me, much like half-life 2 is in my eyes.

Haha, yeah, in my circle of friends I’ve been calling it the GTA IV of the Year.

Yeah it is funny, and interesting. Outside of Qt3 I’ve seen a fair amount of hostility towards anyone who’s said anything negative about it so I dare say there’s a lot of people out there simply not speaking up. Jim Sterling’s 7/10 review was followed by a DDoS attack on his site and the usual rabid backlash (his review knocked its Metacritic score down from 98 to 97! The horror of it).

We’re all familiar with that kind of thing around here with Tom’s reviews attracting the Metacritic mobs. I think Qt3 has such diverse perspectives because… well, we’re comfortable with them (and, y’know, we’re adults). I love that and may it long continue! It’s certainly what drew me towards Qt3 in the first place.

So I finished it over turkey break. If anything my opinion of it has gone down. I never found combat with the guardians fun and the last area is just a gauntlet of guardians for the most part.

Story is mediocre at best.
Voice acting is simply bad.
Menus could use some redesign. Why are quests on a the inventory submenu instead of the map submenu? Why can’t I quick tab between weapons and food/resources and instead need to scroll through pages of junk?
Shrines vary widely in quality.
Tilt puzzle controls and camera are flat out terrible, and also don’t really work in portable mode (which is where you think they would work best)
Disposable nature of equipment equates to no real rewards to quests or combat.
Only rewards to exploration are shrines and Korok seeds.
Enemy variety is lacking.
World is generally empty.
Weather and environmental effects are annoying. Rain specifically sucks as there is no counterplay mechanic to rain at all, other than to put the controller down and go make a sandwich.

I disagree specifically about this, because this is my favorite thing about BotW.

One of the main problems with the classic Zelda model is that rewards are terrible. In classic Zelda, a reward can either be :

  • rupees, useless
  • heart piece. Kind of nice, but severely diminishing value over time. And each incremental one makes no difference.
  • bottle. Literally the best thing in the game, but there’s only 4 of them, and you know they’re gated behind something significant.

Disposable weapons means that there’s always a class of rewards that could be useful. Each one might not be specifically, but there is always at least potential for something useful. I think that in general, weapons are a little too easy to come by, so theyre diluted a bit, but the design is sound. (Eventually, you get easy access to the colliseum, which lets you farm and elemental weapon you want endlessly, but that’s kind of an end game problem.) I think a version where you always had a shitty version of the master sword would have worked better, because weapon pickups could be slightly rarer but generally better.

Also, I think they did a good job with clothes as high value, but non game breaking rewards.

I generally agree with a lot of the other critiques, but I felt they were mostly minor w/r/t to the overall experience. They grated on me by the end, but that was after like 60+ hours, so it’s hardly surprising. Everything in the game has diminishing returns, but without some RNG-equipment, I don’t really see how you fix that

The rain thing is, I think, the worst decision they made. Aside from the perma-rain zone, which was useful for level design purposes, there should have been a way to use sticky resin or some kind of consumable to counter rain. When so much of the game is built around the climbing /exploration experience, it just wasn’t a good idea to block that off for large chunks of time. In theory, the design could have told you “go do something else, like combat, until the rain ends” - almost like a day/night cycle, but the world layout meant that you were unlikely to be in a position where you could easily choose one instead of the other, and if you were halfway up a climb, well, sucks to be you I guess.

It shows you right on the screen when rain is coming. Don’t start to climb a mountain when rain is imminent.

In other words, put the controller down and go make a sandwich. Look this is a random event with no real counterplay Ok I guess maybe the power you get from the bird Divine Beast helps somewhat but I ended up doing that beast last and just went on to finish the game after. If the only option to your random event is to either fast travel somewhere else or let the game idle, you fucked up the game design. There should have been something you could cook to help with rain, this way if you didn’t have it at least it was on you for not prepping properly, or if you saw rain coming you could cook some up if you had materials.

I don’t agree here because so many of the enemies are trash mobs with trash gear. So there are many instances where it’s far better to simply avoid combat for the sole reason that it would weaken the durability of your good gear or worse replace good gear with trash gear.

I agree that there are refinements that could be made, but I think the design is sound, and miles better than previous Zelda games.

I think one of the problems is that eventually you’re in an artificial scarcity situation. You don’t want to use up your “good” weapons, but good weapons aren’t actually that rare, and the differential isn’t that large between good and mediocre weapons, so you should just use them.

It’s like saving the good China for company, but then you never use it so it’s like you never had it to begin with.

Yeah, this for sure. People that claim they didn’t want use their weapons on 'trash mobs" are missing out. I never let weapon degradation bother me, as I never once was without a good weapon to use in any given situation. By the end of my time with the game I was tossing amazing weapons because I had no room, and actively TRYING to use up my favorite weapons just to make room for some of the crazy equipment I was finding. It was a lot of fun, honestly, and maybe even more fun than having one fun weapon that I could use all the time - the system really forced me outside of my comfort zone and consequently I got adept at a range of weapon types and discovered some really fun play styles I’d have missed out on in a “traditional” weapon system.