This reminds me I got Breath of the Wild earlier this year and still need to play it.
I still don’t get all the love for Nier: Automata (it’s on that list). It was enjoyable, but nothing spectacular. I got bored with it at some point and stopped playing.
I hate open world games (liked The Witcher 3 despite the open world) and I love BotW and think it’s probable the best game if the decade and a true masterpiece (despite obvious shortcomings, what it does good it does amazingly good and compensates the lack of good dungeon design that would have made it one of the best games ever).
Maybe Nintendo will make a special edition cartridge of the game with harder dungeons but only make it available via their fan club. It’s happened before!
When Breath of the Wild gets praised so much I always consider giving it another shot but then I remember all the things that drove me mad about it and the feeling quickly dissipates (I had no problem with the weapon system either). It’s a shame because I really wanted to like it.
Looking back I preferred Wind Waker, although that was a long time ago now, and I’m still wanting to play Majora’s Mask at some point.
In the Kotaku review of Immortals: Fenyx Rising, I was really disappointed to hear this part about Breath of the Wild:
It’s not shocking that some developers played one of the most critically acclaimed open-world games released in the last decade and took inspiration when working on their own open-world game. And more personally, I didn’t like how empty and annoying Breath of The Wild was, with it’s constantly breaking swords, empty world and terrible performance. So Immortals takes the parts I like about Breath of The Wild —the visuals, simplified combat, puzzles and exploration—and replaces the annoying bits and adds some great comedy. And it all runs at a near locked 60fps on PS5, a nice advantage over the sub-30 fps action of Breath of The Wild on Switch.
So Breath of the Wild had terrible performance, sub-30 fps? That’s disappointing to hear. I would have thought that with such a stylized look, Nintendo would emphasize performance, since graphics aren’t a reason for people to play it in the first place.
BotW is in the running for GoaT, just play it. It’s not Dark Souls/Sekiro, it doesn’t need 120 fps. It doesn’t even need 60.
Still weird to me that some people go out of their way to find issues with games outside of their needs/genre. It’s been happening forever, stuff like, “this is an amazing single player game, but without multiplayer, it’s a 7/10”.
I actually give BotW credit for allowing some areas to be a bit empty that should be a bit empty. It contrasted well with the areas that were packed with stuff(specifically thinking about the distribution of Koroks) and made everything feel more real and natural and simply more interesting to explore. As you wandered you would see an interesting looking spot off a little ways, and chances are if you went to that spot there would be things there that made it worthwhile to stop by. Completely different feel from an Ubisoft open world where it can feel like everything is spaced out exactly 30 feet.
When I read impressions from people who like Immortals: Fenyx Rising because it’s what they wish Breath of the Wild had been, what I hear is “I really like the idea of pizza, I just don’t like cheese, or sauces, or crust, or toppings.”
To each their own, and I’m not trying to call out anyone specific here, I just have a very hard time wrapping my head around someone who wishes BotW was different.
I can relate to people who love it! I can understand people who don’t like it. But people who like BotW just enough to wish it was different exist in some weird head space I can’t inhabit. Everything about BotW seems so cohesive, every artistic and gameplay decision seem so deliberate and related—you can chalk it up to a lack of imagination on my part but anyone who plays Fenyx and says it’s what they wanted out of BotW might as well be speaking a different language.
Yeah it was a bit ropey in places but certainly not terrible. They did patch performance, and the newer model Switch apparently runs it better with boosted clock speeds too.
You can see how much the patch improved things here:
Yeah I think this area is around 3:40 in the above video? Most of the game runs better than here.
This is my least favorite criticism of BotW. It’s a signal that what the critic making it wants from an open-world game and what I want from one are so radically different that I’m unlikely to agree on anything with them (at least regarding this genre). How can you explore something if there’s a bunch of stuff constantly in the way? If anything, it could stand to be emptier. I’d love to be able to stroll about its world while encountering enemies less frequently.
Yeah, BotW is the only open world I’ve truly enjoyed (I’ve enjoyed other games with open worlds, like the Witcher 3, but because other factors other than the open world).
The easygoing nature of the world design, the openness and invitation to exploration, are a core part of why it’s such an amazing experience.
I think BotW is a different kind of open world game. That is, on paper it might be a very similar concept, but in reality it’s anathema to a lot of common design decisions in AAA games.
So yeah, I can see people who normally dislike open world games like me loving it and people who really like traditional open world games loathing it.