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Nintendo president: “Game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated”
(mynintendonews.com)
this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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There's one thing they did right that most other open world games do wrong: The map starts blank and it fills in as you explore. Others in the genre, you'll Ubisoft that tower and then it fills in with all the icons of things to do here, so now follow the minimap to them all. In BotW, you Ubisoft the tower, you get the topology map, and now it's up to you to find stuff in it, and when you do you get an icon on the map telling you you've done it.
I'm pretty sure the Rito quest wasn't complete in time for launch so they had to rush to throw something together. The Hebra region is distinctly empty, I'm sure we were going to have to go on an arctic adventure to find Teba's favorite cuttlefish bone or something, but they didn't have time to finish it because the Switch was coming out so they said 'Fuck it, build something that runs and ship it.'
There isn't much variety in the enemy types, a lot of encounters are monotonous, a lot of the systems are so basic that they're easy to break, and they were so afraid of telling a story out of order that the game doesn't have a story of its own; "Link fucks around all over Hyrule for awhile then decides to defeat Ganon." Meanwhile it tells you a different, somewhat related story.
Then there's TotK, which they tried to make a sequel to BotW out of BotW's bones, and it didn't work as well.
Fair, they succeeded by not screwing up. It's really not much different to show a thing on a map based on proximity vs collecting a McGuffin.
Then again, I actually appreciate AC showing me all of their nonsense because they don't reward exploration. Every street looks samey (at least in the games I've played), and traversal on rooftops is more fun than at street level anyway. That's not an issue in BotW because the map is so empty that it's easy to pick out the interesting bits.
BotW is a pretty decent open world game, I just think it's a solution in search of a problem. I don't really like open world games, but if that's the best way to tell the story, I'm fine with it, so I've played my fair share (I loved GTA: SA, GTA IV, Morrowind, Red Dead Redemption, and a few others, where "open world" really fits). That wasn't the case for BotW, not even a little bit. Pretty much every Zelda game has exploration and "stranger in a strange land" type feel, yet they're able to weave together a sensible main quest with interesting dungeons. In BotW, they're like, "defeat ganon. If you don't wanna, you can defeat ganon in these divine beasts first. It's just ganon all the way down."
I think at least part of Breath of the Wild's design comes from Nintendo listening to their fans. I think Nintendo genuinely does listen to their fans, especially regarding the Zelda franchise. But they're also Japanese and thus anatomically incapable of doing anything halfway. After Wind Waker, they heard fans say they wanted a darker, more adult Zelda game, and then they published Twilight Princess. All games published after Ocarina of Time strictly prevent sequence breaking, and players said they wanted a less linear game and have some choice in which order they do things.
Nintendo responded with the least linear game in history. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will walk into your bedroom at night, hold you down, squat over your face and non-linear right in your mouth. It's not so much that you're allowed to do things out of intended order, but they went to excruciating pains to make sure there IS NO intended order. In the few places where NPCs list the divine beasts, the past champions, their modern day counterparts, their races, their villages, or the biomes they're found in, they're never listed in the same order twice for fear of establishing a "canon" order. And virtually all of the game is optional, the tutorial and the final boss are all that is required.
What the fans were saying was "remember when I was playing OoT, and I decided to do the water temple before the fire temple, and it totally worked? Good times."
Which is hilarious because TotK completely broke "canon" by having NPCs completely not mention events from the previous game. Nintendo is really weird about things sometimes.
TL;DR - lol
Source:Honestly, I don't understand why people care so much about non-linearity. My favorite Zelda games are completely linear: A Link to the Past, Skyward Sword, Link's Awakening. I did OoT linearly as well, because that made sense to me. Yeah, it's cool when you can do things "out of order," but there should absolutely be an intended order so things are interesting (no difficulty spikes, interesting use of items, etc), perhaps with some easter eggs if you hack around it. I think that's what fans wanted. BotW loses that, and the result is that you don't really have much interesting interaction between set pieces.
Then again, BotW and TotK were super successful, probably because they attracted a ton of people who don't normally like Zelda games, because it's not really a Zelda game, it's a Zelda-themed game. BotW feels more like *Assassin's Creed: Australia edition" than a Zelda game (lots of nothing, find random stuff, then fight a random, same-y boss; continue until a big, disappointing fight).
I usually feel accomplished after finishing a Zelda game, but getting to Ganon was harder than the actual fight, I didn't need to use any of my abilities, and the second phase was laughably easier than the first, so I largely left disappointed. It's like they tossed it in last-minute and shipped it, instead of giving actual thought to it. When people ask me what they need to prepare for the Ganon fight, I just say, "lots of shields." That's it.
A Link to the Past is not completely linear; once you have the hammer from the Palace of Darkness, you can choose between the Swamp Palace, Skull Woods or Thieves' Town, and Thieves' Town unlocks the Ice Palace and Misery Mire. Granted, the game tells you what order to do them in, but you are occasionally free to choose otherwise. Not so in, say, Twilight Princess, which is extremely flaggy.
I do think that TotK was very sloppily handled. On the one hand it's an amazing piece of software, that the physics systems they made actually...work. I've seen them take flak for re-using BotW's map, which I don't mind. The thing is, they did it very hamfistedly. In BotW, it makes sense that no one knows who you are because you've been in stasis for 100 years, there's only a handful of people alive who recognize you. In BotW, you're an interloper. TotK seems to take place 6 years after BotW (Given how some of the children like Nebb and Riju have aged, Bolson/Rhondson having a ~5 year old daughter, etc, plus that's the time between the games' release dates) and Link has been living and working in Hyrule this whole time...except he apparently hasn't. Zelda seems to have appropriated the house in Hateno Link bought, so where does Link live? Too many people outright don't recognize him when they see him. It feels like they wanted to make a clean-sheet game and not a sequel.
Frankly it also feels like any idea anyone came up with ended up in the game. "Let's have a cavernous underground." Okay, the lazy way to make that is to invert the terrain map of the surface which doesn't make logical sense, and then do extremely little with this very large environment. "Let's have islands in the sky." Okay, here's some cookie cutter islands floating in the sky that are difficult to reach and traverse with large expanses of emptiness and the ability to make flying machines that don't last long enough to actually move around. "How about a sidequest where an NPC asks Link to put some wheels on a cart for her? I've already written 90 pages of related dialog." Yes, put it in the game completely unedited.
The thing is that by the time you reach they point youbahve done the tutorial zones in the normal world and you have explored some of the "sacred land", plus you should already be hooked into the story. BotW and TotK both give you a short introduction and then it's all pepega, it really feels like you have less direction than in skyrim.
Also, this is something that TotK did better than BotW, kinda. They tell you about the final enemy right from the beginning, there's no mystery element for the player character, whereas in a link to the past or skyward sword the pc really doesn't know what's happening, you just know that there'd something wrong.
In a sense, in BotW there's no from 0 to hero feeling, you are the hero, not just someone that raises up to the task, but someone that did raise, failed, and is expected to do so again. To me, it feels like the post-game of a better game and that's bad.
In TotK there's some sense of mystery since the story begins with you trying to search Zelda, not knowing what happened to the castle. In the end we just fix 4 things in 4 places to get stronger but that again feels like a side quest you do while searching for Zelda, that's the initial quest and the one I cared for the most when I found out. It still feels like post-gameish because you have a super sense of urgency for Zelda, and there's 4 places where they saw her and once you go they have issues that you don't have the fucking time to solve where the fuck is Zelda but you have to do them I guess.
My issue in both games is that you have a big sense of urgency due to the dangers ahead being very real and very in your face, but then there's tons of stupid content and side quests of people that don't give two shits about your quest. Yeah let's collect horses while Zelda has been 200 years being tortured in pain to contain the big bad, no big deal.
I as a player know stuff is boing on because it's a TLoZ game, but I like the PC being in the dark about that stuff so I don't feel bad for not fixing the world asap.