Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 175 posts

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

#151

Post by astrange »

phamilton wrote: post #5
yestoallthat wrote: post #2

> Link gets more health and stamina as you progress, and you can acquire stronger weapons and armor, but he never gets stronger himself. He doesn’t learn to swing a sword or shoot a bow any better. But you do. If this is true, that's wonderful, and if more games became more like that again, I'd be interested in them again. Even just the fact that the reviewer mentioned this as a good thing made me smile.

Isn't this true of all games in the Zelda series?

You get various attack/puzzle solving items at fixed points in Zelda; they're usually needed to solve the next dungeon, in not-really-intellectually-stimulating ways where you look at the puzzle and immediately know how to apply the item you just got.

Link Between Worlds added a shop where you can rent all the items in the game and solve everything out of order.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

#152

Post by astrange »

ihuman wrote: post #7

Breath of the Wild is getting fantastic reviews from critics right now. It currently has a 98/100 on Metacritic [1], an aggregator for video game reviews. This makes is the #4 highest rated game of all time on their site [2] [1] http://www.metacritic.com/game/switch/the-legend-of-zelda-br... [2] http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/a...

Yeah, AAA games have a mandatory review floor of 80 and Zelda games have a floor of 90. If you go below that, the developers starve because their bonus is, literally, structured around Metacritic scores.

Compare: a mediocre Zelda game (Skyward Sword) got 93, a mediocre AAA game (Dragon Age 1) got 86, only a really bad game (Dragon Age II) goes negative at 75.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

#153

Post by btschaegg »

vlunkr wrote: post #105
alphonsegaston wrote: post #6

I'm really hoping that Zelda/Switch are successful enough to push game aesthetics in a better direction. This headlong plunge into the uncanny valley is just gonna lead us to the same dead end that art found itself at the end of the 19th century. No one cares about the bad aesthetics of Orientalist painting any more, and this era of hyperreal titilation is gonna meet the same fate in retrospect.

It seems like lots of gamers I talk to who play lots of AAA games seem to think graphics and getting out of the uncanny valley, but IMO it's just getting worse. The people in games like Uncharted are so plastic and gross looking.

Come to think of it, Doom 2016 had only one recognizable human in it - and she was obviously intentionally kept creepy in a very "Dead Space" oriented style. One has to wonder if the goal of that was to minimize the effect you're describing.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

#154

Post by nubbins »

alphonsegaston wrote: post #29
_ph_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I have grown up with all kinds of animated cartoons on the TV, I always wanted a computer game which sported that level of graphics. It turns out, that from the raw hardware capability, computers long ago exceeded this ability, yet there is a big scarcity of real animated games. Windwaker (HD) is a really nice exception from that. It looks like an animate comic movie. From this point of view, I am actually happy t…

I think all kids growing up in this period had fantasies about games matching up with their imaginations of them through some technical revolution. What modern game dev misses is that it's the space to imagine things within a more abstract visual framework that creates that sense of wonder and possibility. Game aesthetics have to have "space" for their players' imaginations to fill in order to have the same impact as…

Agreed but it was easier when games naturally had "space" for imagination because of technical limitations. It is really hard to self-consciously go back and work inside a self imposed frame when everything else is moving ahead.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

#155

Post by croon »

TheGRS wrote: post #135
croon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe a lot of people really like it, but it was more an issue that game reviewers got A LOT of flak if they didn't give the game a 9+/10 (at a time when point reviews were more of a thing than now). I don't think many people thought it was bad, only that it wasn't THAT good, and that seemed to upset some hardcore Zelda fans at the time, and in various parts of the internet, possibly still. You can google for "Tw…

I was thinking about this when I read about the perfect scores from GameSpot and Giant Bomb today. That review basically created Giant Bomb...or at least helped him leave GameSpot later on.

Yeah, and at least to a small extent I think it opened up for more against the grain reviews. Grading games on aggregate scores of graphics, sound, story, etc was kind of pointless (pun intended).

On the topic of that new review, it was written by Dan Ryckert. Even if he has integrity, that guy even loves Yoshi Island and thinks Taco Bell is the greatest restaurant in the world, so clearly there's something wrong with him. :) He's basically wrong about everything other than movies.

But that's kind of the point with reviews IMO. Scores (even if looking at metacritic which is better) only works when you know who graded it, since it obviously ultimately is a subjective thing.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

#156

Post by lokedhs »

_ph_ wrote: post #24
alphonsegaston wrote: post #6

I'm really hoping that Zelda/Switch are successful enough to push game aesthetics in a better direction. This headlong plunge into the uncanny valley is just gonna lead us to the same dead end that art found itself at the end of the 19th century. No one cares about the bad aesthetics of Orientalist painting any more, and this era of hyperreal titilation is gonna meet the same fate in retrospect.

As I have grown up with all kinds of animated cartoons on the TV, I always wanted a computer game which sported that level of graphics. It turns out, that from the raw hardware capability, computers long ago exceeded this ability, yet there is a big scarcity of real animated games. Windwaker (HD) is a really nice exception from that. It looks like an animate comic movie. From this point of view, I am actually happy t…

There are many such games. I just finished Gravity Rush, and currently playing Tales of Zestiria, both of which has a very cartoon style art style.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

#157

Post by timje1 »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #10
alphonsegaston wrote: post #6

I'm really hoping that Zelda/Switch are successful enough to push game aesthetics in a better direction. This headlong plunge into the uncanny valley is just gonna lead us to the same dead end that art found itself at the end of the 19th century. No one cares about the bad aesthetics of Orientalist painting any more, and this era of hyperreal titilation is gonna meet the same fate in retrospect.

I think the best example of this is Doom 3. It looked incredible at the time (even on the Xbox on release in 2005), but it has not aged well. Maybe today's games hold up better, but photorealism is always gonna be competing with tomorrow. On the other hand, BotW has framerate drops and limitations on the Switch and it was designed for a console that was underpowered five years ago, which doesn't bode well.

I remember thinking at the time "wow, the characters look like ass". I think the character models look worse than Final Fantasy X, which was a game with good art direction and miniscule polycount that came out in 2001.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

#158

Post by timje1 »

TheGRS wrote: post #120
simplicio wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World of WarCraft is probably the best example of this effect. If they'd gone for realism, the game would've looked dated within a year or two, and had its popularity drop a lot faster. But the cartoony style let them keep going with just minor updates to the graphics for more than a decade. That decision must've made them at least a billion dollars over the last 10 or so years.

While I kind of think WoW looks pretty dated these days I would otherwise agree. When WoW was released it was alongside Everquest 2, which was poised to be the next big thing with realistic graphics and a name everyone recognized in MMOs (though people certainly recognized Warcraft as well). I would be surprised if anyone even really remembers Everquest 2 at this point, but for a good year or so we talked about which…

I played both, and I remember talking loudly and often about how much better WoW looked despite having a fraction of the system reqs. WoW vanilla could be run on a potato - I think I had it going on a pentium 2 with a third hand graphics card...

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

#159

Post by classybull »

Why are we constantly pushing for larger and larger open worlds? When I was a kid, the idea of such a gigantic open world where I could spend endless hours exploring would have been amazing. However, now, as an adult with responsibilities, when I usually play video games its for 30 or 45 minutes once or twice a week when I have just a bit of down time. Gigantic open worlds have become a hinderance to me rather than a feature, because it means I will never fully be able to explore all of it.

I know that my experience doesn't reflect every gamer's experience, and many people do have the time and energy for them, but I also know quite a few people in this "prime", aging game demographic that are turned off by these large games and tend to focus on smaller, more compact experiences. I wouldn't be so upset if it weren't for the fact that the games that seem to get the most attention and development effort are these giant ones, with small experience games generally an afterthought or published as indie.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

#160

Post by gknapp »

yestoallthat wrote: post #2

> Link gets more health and stamina as you progress, and you can acquire stronger weapons and armor, but he never gets stronger himself. He doesn’t learn to swing a sword or shoot a bow any better. But you do. If this is true, that's wonderful, and if more games became more like that again, I'd be interested in them again. Even just the fact that the reviewer mentioned this as a good thing made me smile.

This has been true with every Zelda game I've played, more or less. Link never gains experience or levels, but you get better at using the tools and solving the puzzles. The caveat is that you can often get a better primary weapon that effectively makes you stronger.

That being said, aside from Skyward Sword, Zelda has always been about falling in love with the art and lore, as well as problem solving through the dungeons.

Post reply on HN