Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Wii U/Nintendo Switch)

[purbeast0]

Zelda was absolutely nothing like GTA. That's just a really stupid comparison.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Zelda was absolutely nothing like GTA. That's just a really stupid comparison.

Open world, many areas barren and there just to be there, item hunting just to make you go to all the areas they put in. Yeah kind of similar. Games which are proud of the world they create but lack substance.

 

[purbeast0]

That's like saying Madden is like NBA 2K18 because they are both sports games. Sure they are both open world games but that is where the similarities stop.

I also thought Zelda was a huge map "just to be a huge map" but after getting all the shrines, every part on the map has a reason to be there and has some sort of uniqueness to it, other than a few parts of the map. But many parts I thought "were there just to be there" had a purpose.

 

[Red Hawk]

And IMO the system sucks and takes away from what I've come to love of Zelda games. Knowing that certain areas are off limits until I find a way past. Being able to scale up any obstacle like Link has metal spikes in his hands turned is not "great" game design. Liked the game, but it felt very disjointed and mashed together as an overall package. Very little progression and I found myself doing things to be a completionist, not to advance.

I think being able to to scale any surface was a brilliant gameplay choice because of how it plays into the core tenet of the game, discovery and exploration. It also nicely synergizes with the paraglider mechanic. You want to scale as high as you can so you can paraglide out, and you want to paraglide out so you can reach further high places. That's where the great game design comes in.

The game wasn't unique. It was the same as any open world game except it had the Zelda title pasted onto it. The world was rather barren in many areas as usual for open world titles, didn't give me any feeling of accomplishment when I completed a challenge (no sense of progression), lacked variety in the shrines, and offered very little in the way of story which Nintendo still hasn't figured out how to do properly I guess.

Have fun playing grand theft Zelda cause that's what you're going to get.

Sorry, but I can't take your opinion seriously if you're going to dismissively compare Breath of the Wild to Grand Theft Auto and pretend that there's nothing distinguishing the game from other open world games. The distinction should be clear to anyone who's actually played the game.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I think being able to to scale any surface was a brilliant gameplay choice because of how it plays into the core tenet of the game, discovery and exploration. It also nicely synergizes with the paraglider mechanic. You want to scale as high as you can so you can paraglide out, and you want to paraglide out so you can reach further high places. That's where the great game design comes in.



Sorry, but I can't take your opinion seriously if you're going to dismissively compare Breath of the Wild to Grand Theft Auto and pretend that there's nothing distinguishing the game from other open world games. The distinction should be clear to anyone who's actually played the game.

Sorry but It's a poor Zelda game, period. Overhyped and underdeveloped on the whole. They spent way too much time on the world and way less than they should have on story, and building dungeons into the world etc. It could have been far better.

 

[Red Hawk]

Sorry but It's a poor Zelda game, period. Overhyped and underdeveloped on the whole. They spent way too much time on the world and way less than they should have on story, and building dungeons into the world etc. It could have been far better.

Sorry but the Zelda series would have continued to decline into irrelevance if you were the one making the decisions. Glad you weren't, doubt you would've made it better!

 

[cmdrdredd]

LOL ok so keeping Zelda actually a Zelda game is a bad thing? OOT is one of the best games of all time on any platform and it had real dungeons and the traditional mechanics I come to expect from a Zelda title. The problem wasn't the mechanics of the game in later titles it was that Nintendo wanted to shoehorn gimmicks into the games along the way.

Let me put it this way. If they presented this game as a new IP without the Zelda name it would not have done well.

 

[Red Hawk]

LOL ok so keeping Zelda actually a Zelda game is a bad thing? OOT is one of the best games of all time on any platform and it had real dungeons and the traditional mechanics I come to expect from a Zelda title. The problem wasn't the mechanics of the game in later titles it was that Nintendo wanted to shoehorn gimmicks into the games along the way.

Let me put it this way. If they presented this game as a new IP without the Zelda name it would not have done well.

I think making the same game over and over again would be a bad thing, yes, no matter how amazing the starting point was. Twilight Princess is good, but is it truly great? It constantly exists in Ocarina of Time's shadow, just with better graphics and even more railroading. Breath of the Wild defied that formula to become its own game. No one is going to say that Breath of the Wild is just Ocarina of Time (or rather, A Link to the Past) warmed over again.

And I absolutely think this game is good enough to have succeeded and found an audience if it wasn't a Zelda game. It was the combination of the great game design and mechanics with the Zelda title and mythology that pushed the game into the zone of being one of the greatest games of all time, and a day one system selling killer app. They took the Zelda franchise and made something amazing and fresh with it, rather than a ho-hum retread of everything that Zelda has done before.

 

[JujuFish]

LOL ok so keeping Zelda actually a Zelda game is a bad thing? OOT is one of the best games of all time on any platform

Wasn't even the best Zelda on its own platform.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I can't get into BOTW at all. I'm about nine hours in and bored to death by this game. I liked the first couple of hours climbing mountains and exploring the plateau, but the shrines are just boring and feel so empty. I miss the dungeons of Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. This game feels like the same slog GTA IV did to me: that I keep playing it waiting for it to get good because of all the hype and because I loved the earlier games in the series. GTA IV never did, I hated that game. And now I'm feeling the same about BOTW. Does this game ever really start picking up or am I just doing simplistic puzzles in the shrines and raiding enemy camps the whole game? I'm tempted to go dump this off to Gamestop and buy Kingdom Hearts Remix or Uncharted Lost Legacy with the $30 they'd give me for BOTW. So far BOTW feels to me like a nice scaffolding for future Zelda games because of the awesome climbing mechanics and the little touches like pushing boulders down hills and such, but it feels like something they never finished. I can't believe how empty this world feels when I'm used to open world games like Skyrim and GTA V that are popping with fun things to do everywhere. I don't see how this game got 10/10 reviews from everyone. Just based on my first nine hours I think Jim Sterling's 7/10 review seems charitable.

I'm really trying to give this game a chance, as it's pretty rare for me to continue playing a game I'm not really into by the end of the first hour. Is it something I should stick with or is the whole game like the early game? Thank god I got this on Wii U instead of dumping $300 on a Switch, since I got my Wii U cheap and Wii U has some other really cool games so it wasn't BOTW or bust like the Switch would be.

 

[Red Hawk]

I can't get into BOTW at all. I'm about nine hours in and bored to death by this game. I liked the first couple of hours climbing mountains and exploring the plateau, but the shrines are just boring and feel so empty. I miss the dungeons of Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. This game feels like the same slog GTA IV did to me: that I keep playing it waiting for it to get good because of all the hype and because I loved the earlier games in the series. GTA IV never did, I hated that game. And now I'm feeling the same about BOTW. Does this game ever really start picking up or am I just doing simplistic puzzles in the shrines and raiding enemy camps the whole game? I'm tempted to go dump this off to Gamestop and buy Kingdom Hearts Remix or Uncharted Lost Legacy with the $30 they'd give me for BOTW. So far BOTW feels to me like a nice scaffolding for future Zelda games because of the awesome climbing mechanics and the little touches like pushing boulders down hills and such, but it feels like something they never finished. I can't believe how empty this world feels when I'm used to open world games like Skyrim and GTA V that are popping with fun things to do everywhere. I don't see how this game got 10/10 reviews from everyone. Just based on my first nine hours I think Jim Sterling's 7/10 review seems charitable.

I'm really trying to give this game a chance, as it's pretty rare for me to continue playing a game I'm not really into by the end of the first hour. Is it something I should stick with or is the whole game like the early game? Thank god I got this on Wii U instead of dumping $300 on a Switch, since I got my Wii U cheap and Wii U has some other really cool games so it wasn't BOTW or bust like the Switch would be.

If BotW hasn't clicked yet, then it's unlikely to ever click, which is fine. However, it's rather inaccurate to say that the Switch is "BotW or bust", especially with the impending release of Super Mario Odyssey, but also with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Splatoon 2, Arms, Octopath Traveler, portable versions of Skyrim, Doom, LA Noire, etc. The Wii U has no future. If it has other really cool games, why didn't you buy it sooner?

 

[SteveGrabowski]

If BotW hasn't clicked yet, then it's unlikely to ever click, which is fine. However, it's rather inaccurate to say that the Switch is "BotW or bust", especially with the impending release of Super Mario Odyssey, but also with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Splatoon 2, Arms, Octopath Traveler, portable versions of Skyrim, Doom, LA Noire, etc. The Wii U has no future. If it has other really cool games, why didn't you buy it sooner?

Octopath Traveler and Super Mario Odyssey do both look awesome, but they're still unknowns right now. The portable part has never interested me. I'm still going to give BOTW another couple of days doing the main quest to see if that helps the game pick up more. Usually in open world games I like to do side quests and exploration before main quests, but it's not clicking on this one. I bought the Wii U now because I got it really cheap.

 

[Tweak155]

I can't get into BOTW at all... clip

Pretty much the reasons I quit playing after 4-5hrs. I ended up trading in all my Wii U stuff and probably will not go back to Nintendo as I have too many other things I like to do these days, I'm liking the "less stuff" approach I've been taking recently.

I also traded in all my physical disks and re-bought the critical games I wanted to still keep digitally on XB1. Feels good to reduce sometimes.

I now have almost $500 in GS trade in credit though from all this activity. I will probably get an XB1X some day, just not the launch version.

 

[purbeast0]

Yea if you don't like it 9 hours in you probably won't like it. But to say the world feels "empty" tells me you clearly did not explore that much or aren't quite as far as you think you are. Initially I thought the world was "big just to be big" but then later realized just how unique pretty much every part of the map is and how every area actually had something to do in it.

You're insane if you think Switch is "zelda or bust". I have all 3 consoles and probably since the Switch came out, it's been my most played console probably, or very close to the PS4. I'm playing a lot of indie games that I never expected to play and also using it for flights, which makes time go by really fast. And with Mario coming out this week, it's only going to get better.

X1 on the other hand, I probably haven't played mine in over a year (for games, used it for HBO Go and Netflix) and traded it in recently with my PS4 to get a PS4 Pro. I have an X1X on the way though from Taco Bell, but I am assuming I won't be playing it much either. There's literally nothing in the pipe that I care about for X1.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Yea if you don't like it 9 hours in you probably won't like it. But to say the world feels "empty" tells me you clearly did not explore that much or aren't quite as far as you think you are. Initially I thought the world was "big just to be big" but then later realized just how unique pretty much every part of the map is and how every area actually had something to do in it.

You're insane if you think Switch is "zelda or bust". I have all 3 consoles and probably since the Switch came out, it's been my most played console probably, or very close to the PS4. I'm playing a lot of indie games that I never expected to play and also using it for flights, which makes time go by really fast. And with Mario coming out this week, it's only going to get better.

X1 on the other hand, I probably haven't played mine in over a year (for games, used it for HBO Go and Netflix) and traded it in recently with my PS4 to get a PS4 Pro. I have an X1X on the way though from Taco Bell, but I am assuming I won't be playing it much either. There's literally nothing in the pipe that I care about for X1.

Red Dead Redemption 2 should be awesome on the Scorpio. Otherwise, I guess some of the multiplats like AC Origins and Wolfenstein II will probably be better on it than PS4 Pro if you don't have a gaming PC. Mario Odyssey looks great but I'm probably going to wait for Metroid Prime 4 before seriously considering the system again, as I can't see buying a $300 console for one game (Octopath Traveler sounds like it's a ways away). I already got Bayonetta 2 with my Wii U and I don't care about Mario Kart 8, Arms, Doom, or yet another Skyrim (I already put 500 hours into that game on 360 and PC).

 

[zerocool84]

If it's not too your cup of tea then I no big deal. Mario Odyssey comes out this Friday, Stardew Valley is great. When Breath of the Wild came out there wasn't many good games on Switch besides Zelda, now it's got many great games besides Zelda.

 

[Sonikku]

I'm torn on Skyrim. I've had such a backlog I've never gotten around to really playing it. But do I get it for the Switch for it portability or for PC for the mods? ugh.

 

[Rifter]

I'm torn on Skyrim. I've had such a backlog I've never gotten around to really playing it. But do I get it for the Switch for it portability or for PC for the mods? ugh.

PC hands down

 

[zerocool84]

I'm torn on Skyrim. I've had such a backlog I've never gotten around to really playing it. But do I get it for the Switch for it portability or for PC for the mods? ugh.

Skyrim isn't much of an easy pick up and play game. Everything takes a while. Unless portability for you just means playing in a chair somewhere or on a toilet. Battery life for Switch while portable is only around 3 hours. Right when you start getting in a groove you will run out of battery. I've played Skyrim twice.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I think I'm starting to come around on this game. The early shrines were boring but they're definitely getting more interesting the farther away from the plateau I get.

 

[shortylickens]

A number of review sites have called it the best open world game in years. I guess I'll buy it closer to Xmas. Probably for the Wii U since I dont feel like spending money on the Switch.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

A number of review sites have called it the best open world game in years. I guess I'll buy it closer to Xmas. Probably for the Wii U since I dont feel like spending money on the Switch.

I think that's going a bit overboard. The review sites all said the same about GTA IV too. I'm starting to really like the game but it's got a long way to go to catch Skyrim, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, GTA V, The Witcher 3, Horizon Zero Dawn, NieR Automata, or Dying Light IMO.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

The rain is annoying in this game (not counting the Zora section before taking over the divine beast, it makes sense there). Since I'm constantly climbing and rain ruins that any time it starts raining I just put my controller down for 5-10 minutes and just leave the game running by itself whenever the rain starts.

 

[zerocool84]

The rain is annoying in this game (not counting the Zora section before taking over the divine beast, it makes sense there). Since I'm constantly climbing and rain ruins that any time it starts raining I just put my controller down for 5-10 minutes and just leave the game running by itself whenever the rain starts.

Yup rain is the most annoying thing about it. They should have definitely toned it down since climbing is so important to the game.

 

[JujuFish]

Yup rain is the most annoying thing about it. They should have definitely toned it down since climbing is so important to the game.

The weapon durability system is far more annoying to me.