I made this image in prevision people playing this friday.
Hopefully it helps somebody.
I did not cheated, that’s for sure.
I just wanted to pop in to mention Tears of the Kingdom is clearly the spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, one of the last bold, original, high-quality exclusives from Microsoft. As someone who found Breath of the Wild to be fine, just fine, that alone is enough to make me really excited for this Friday.
Reviews dropped this morning. Looks like it’s a wait and see. ;) Not the best weekend to come out. Wife’s birthday tomorrow and mother’s day on Sunday. I didn’t preorder but expect I can just grab it at Best Buy when I’m out getting a cake. ;)
The whole ‘let’s build some shit platform with wheels and energy jets’ seems clunky to me, I think it’s only interesting for some puzzles and that’s it, not as a main mechanic for traversal, but well, maybe I’m wrong. Curious if some reviewers will think the same.
I’ve been playing Breath of the Wild a lot over the last couple of months, and have recently started pondering if it’s an immersive sim, in the tradition of games like System shock. It certainly has a really robust physics system, one that’s more advanced than the Looking Glass immersive sims. It has a stealth system. There’s so many ways of getting goals accomplished in the game.
I know I’m late to the game, so I searched here, and looks like there’s been no discussion on that topic here at Qt3, surprisingly. But I did find a big discussion about the topic at ResetEra, there’s a Waypoint podcast episode about it, and there’s a Screenrant article that argues that Breath of the Wild is indeed an immersive sim like the Looking Glass legacy games.
Wow! Those reviews are incredible.
Confession: I JUST started really “getting” Breath of the Wild, (and by getting it, meaning I’m really enjoying it and want to keep playing it) so it’ll be a few months at minimum before I move on to TOTK. But wow those reviews.
BTW, one thing: if you’re looking to buy TWO nintendo triple A titles, it looks like TOTK is part of the Nintendo voucher system for people with monthly subscriptions – buy two vouchers for $99, redeem them for two games. Might be a way to save a few bucks if you’re looking to pick up two games at once.
The entire draw of BOTW is the fact that the world is alive for me. That random stuff could happen with the physics and such. That they leaned heavily into that in the 2nd game is brilliant IMHO. That’s my favorite type of game and it’s also super hard to do well.
Excellent heads up. And as someone pointed out to me in the Switch thread when I brought it up: you can get it even cheaper if you first get your nintendo bucks through Costco. They normally sell $50 of currency for $45, but they go on sale all the time for $40. So I followed that advice and waited for a sale, got two of them for $40 each, and bought the two vouchers, and so now I can get Tears of the Kingdom (eventually) and Pikmin 4 (eventually) for $80 total.
Of course, the downside is that I’ll be getting the digital version that way. The physical cartridge will have more sentimental value, and more resale value, etc. Plus my son just loves holding the actual physical cases in his hands. So I’m regretting my advance decision already, a little bit.
It’s pretty amazing really. I think the moment when it first started dawning on me that BOTW was an immersive sim-type game was when my son accidentally started a boulder rolling down a hill and killed two enemies. And when it really solidified in my head was when I was doing this ball through a maze puzzle in one of the shrines where you run a ball through a maze, and my son got the controller and turned it upside down, and suddenly the ball fell on the other side of the maze, and I said, woah, give me the controller! And I guided the ball on a flat surface to the target! Ha! I love that the game doesn’t mind if you break it in creative ways.
I can see that, but I finished the game, and most of the time I never felt the difficulty was high enough nor the objectives complex enough that really pushed me into leaning hard into it and do creative solutions to problems. The made complex systems, but the real content of the game barely asked the players to use it, the quests were in that sense more conservative. It’s the thing when games are polished and streamlined so much. In practical terms, you had to a) climb high enough for some places or b)protect yourself from heat for some areas or c) protect yourself from cold in some areas or d) protect yourself enough from lightning in one area. The four main dungeons (divine beasts) had a specific solution to use, and the side dungeons where you get your powers, while allowed for more freedom, they had a clear ‘true solution’ to use, that was easier than doing some clunky shit with explosives and time freeze powers or whatever like I’ve seen on youtube videos.
That’s interesting, so you think a game should be harder and actually push you to use those creative solutions. To me it seems better this way, I mean, for god’s sake, this is aimed partially at kids. My bias being that I’m playing it with a 6 year old, and it’s plenty tough for both of us, especially since he tends to throw away or break all our hard-won weapons. It forces us constantly to actually use creative solutions like boulders. He loves using the leaf to generate wind, even against tough enemies, mostly because that’s usually the only weapon he keeps and doesn’t break. I try to help him out in those situations by activating time freeze or explosives to help out because otherwise he’d be taken out by the bad guys.
Yeah, the thing that makes BotW so great is that it is a true open-world sandbox outside of the discrete puzzles and ancients. Monster den in the middle of nowhere? Take it out with swords. Flatten it with boulders. Pepper it with arrows. Use Bombs. Crazy things can happen and that’s all in the design.
BOTW in master mode is crazy hard. Try that.
From PCMag’s review:
PROS: […] Dungeons return alongside shrines
CONS: […] Weapon durability and melee combat are still clunky and frustrating
The first one is going to get me back in, the second one is going to drive me absolutely nuts again during the moment-to-moment gameplay. I guess it’s probably worth it to actually play something that is part of the current zeitgeist as it’s happening, for once.
SkillUp’s review is, uh, up. A youtube critic whom I trust – he doesn’t just rubberstamp games, and seems at least somewhat to not get too caught up in hype.
What do they critics say about enemy variety, is it improved? It was one of the weak points of BOTW.
Yeah, it’s a completely different game. I bounced off it twice before I realized that you have to focus on stealth and using the environment because until you are consistently getting higher-level weapons you can’t kill stuff consistently.
Sooooonnnnnn. I rarely get excited for games, but this is certainly one of them.
6 minutes. Got my wife out with friends and my kiddo in her room. Leave me alone family.