Anecdotally I picked up my switch / Zelda combo around 7.5 hours ago at the midnight launch for my region, I only got an hour of play in before sleep butso far it is both reminiscent of early Zelda games with an elder scrolls feeling open world (very limited gameplay time) - big fan of combat so far also! Can take on some pretty strong enemies with a series of branches and dodges =)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review
111–120 of 175 posts
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review
#112Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review
#113There's a reviews megathread on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5x2lph/the_legend_of... Many, many perfect scores. Even acounting for hype, it's doing surprisingly well. Having watched about 6 hours of gameplay so far, I'm on the fence about how deserved that is. It seems like such a huge game that it won't be possible to judge it fairly without playing at least 40 hours, probably more. It's clea…
>It seems like such a huge game that it won't be possible to judge it fairly without playing at least 40 hours
this is a rather absurd statement
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review
#114One thing that is really interesting to me is that they are going back to the roots of the original Zelda: with exploration and discovery being a key part of the game. So much so that they made prototypes in the original Zelda style: http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14780954/the-legend-of-zelda... . This to me seems like a great strategy of helping communicate the 'soul' of something to team members by imitating the o…
Yep. I remember back in the day you could go into the dungeons out of order, even with a wooden sword (which made the game magnitudes of order more difficult). Looking forward to tomorrow.
>I remember back in the day you could go into the dungeons out of order
Link Between Worlds brought this back to some degree. You're on rails at the very beginning but after that you're free to tackle most of the dungeons in whatever order you like because most of your 'tools' are available very early on.
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review
#115I'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…
> I always wanted a computer game which sported that level of graphics
There's a bunch of Breath of the Wild fanart out there that purposefully imitates Hayao Miyazaki's style: https://imgur.com/a/t4x4U . Forget realism, something like a playable Princess Mononoke is what I've been craving ever since the dawn of 3D gaming.
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review
#116> 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.
I think this explains the success of the Souls series. Yes, you do get to level up and get new gear, but the game presents problems that can only be solved through skill and thought. I honestly don't think it's feasible to grind even 500 hours and expect to get anywhere purely by being OP.
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review
#117I'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.
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.
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review
#118There's a reviews megathread on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5x2lph/the_legend_of... Many, many perfect scores. Even acounting for hype, it's doing surprisingly well. Having watched about 6 hours of gameplay so far, I'm on the fence about how deserved that is. It seems like such a huge game that it won't be possible to judge it fairly without playing at least 40 hours, probably more. It's clea…
>It seems like such a huge game that it won't be possible to judge it fairly without playing at least 40 hours this is a rather absurd statement
>this is a rather absurd statement
For something like a buy/skip recommendation, sure. But open-world systems-based games take a lot of time to dig into.
Like if you asked me if Skyrim was an above average game in the first few hours, I'd say 'sure' but as time went on the broken systems kept becoming more and more obvious and painful. My opinion turned to 'just average' after 30 hours or so.
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review
#119There's a reviews megathread on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5x2lph/the_legend_of... Many, many perfect scores. Even acounting for hype, it's doing surprisingly well. Having watched about 6 hours of gameplay so far, I'm on the fence about how deserved that is. It seems like such a huge game that it won't be possible to judge it fairly without playing at least 40 hours, probably more. It's clea…
> Even acounting for hype
Impossible. Dragon Age: Inquisition was universally praised in its first couple weeks, but if you ask the same people now? Meh.
It's remarkable how many games look very different with the perspective of a month or two.
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 one would win out. WoW beat it and proceeded to beat every MMO record ever by several orders of magnitude.