The common critiques of Breath of the Wild make me feel like an alien. It's all so far from any kind of reason or coherence and taken as gospel by so many people. People convincing themselves that "the exploration isn't satisfying" means something.
They are very comfy to look at but are filled with meaningless "content"
This critique, when thrown at Ubishit, makes sense because of the total experience being aesthetically unjustified, incoherent, and pointless. The games are ugly, miserable, made entirely of pre-existing stock elements. And each new activity module you initiate is effectively a self-contained instance, with the "open world" being a menu of boring, shit, pointless tasks that you have to move between in a meaningless and uninteresting way.
To say that the "content" of a game like Farcry5 is meaningless is to say that Farcry5 is meaningless and what you do in it and throughout that *content* is also not a justified experience.
Breath of the Wild is a game which lives or dies on whether or not you enjoy the bare basic fundamental engagement with it. Do you like moving through its world, do you like how Link handles, do you like how objects have weight, presence, characteristics, do you like that it's all big and it takes a far while to get around? The "meaning" of the "content" is that it's all there to be engaged with using these systems and mechanics, and the distance between them is really the body of the game. It's called Breath of the
WILD and most people talk about it like a checklist of things Scott the Woz have told them are designated "content", and nobody has told them walking can be interesting so even if they liked that part it wouldn't occur to them in a trillion years to
say they did. Appraisal is for CAWNTENT and CAWNTENT isn't WALKING because SCOTT said so. People
got used to "open world games" not in the sense of organically growing bored of novelty of movement and spending time, but in the bad sense that Ubisoft raped everyone so hard with pointless minimap icons that people were conditioned to think of all games as menus and silos of mini-instances of pointless action connected by meaningless connective tissue of dashing between these things.
Most new western games are for fucking slaves. Form has met the consumer. But a fucking slave is a fucking slave. You can put anything in front of them, and they'll make a slave's time out of it.
The MEANING of Breath of the Wild is that it's a wilderness. It's bringing something out of you every step of the way. The game does not really consist of silod CONTENT modules which can be appraised in isolation. This line of attack is so far off of the fundamental experience of actually playing the game that I'm lost to give you an equivalent analogy. Appraising a movie by the soundtrack notes of its written script? I don't fucking know.
Most people are raped slaves and I've never read a critique of these games that didn't leave me doubting the humanity of the one making it.
Were any of you born when the PS2 generation of Grand Theft Auto games were coming out? Do you remember why people liked them? Imagine trying to explain to a 10 year old at the time that the "content" was "meaningless". Grand Theft Auto was buying a world on a disc and being able to engage with it all on a level not really enabled or facilitated by anything else that was out at the time. Breath of the Wild is to its own generation (and everything since) what GTA3-SA were to their peers. See that city? This isn't a racing game. You aren't
the car. Get out and walk around. Go down that alley. Just walk off in that direction. Get in a care and fly all the way out of the city. Go down the sidewalk and just run down 50 people.
Todd Howard said "see that mountain, you can climb it", and the raped masses convinced themselves that was a compelling thought for some reason. Breath of the Wild is a game in which you can climb the mountain. You can climb the tree. You can cut the tree down. You can go on a slow-walk with detours and distractions for hours between things you're ostensibly meant to care about (referring to your CONTENT you ungrateful ape).
To say that the game has meaningless content, is to one suggest that anything that can be described as "content" can have meaning (wrong), and second that you've been conditioned to look for meaning only in exactly those places. What can the value of any game be, or at least any that superficially resembles this "open world" form? If you can move between things and they aren't all necessary to see the credits, where does
meaning come in?
In the 2000s most people didn't finish Grand Theft Auto games. Most San Andreas owners probably never even left Los Santos. Many getting dozens if not hundreds of hours out of it still just there. Tell them it was meaningless. Or maybe it wasn't. Explain to me how I'm supposed to tell the difference.
Breath of the Wild was a new set of hands. A game speaking a new language. A game that did the things its predecessors impersonated, mimed, and staged. It's a new standard for engaging with a virtual world. That is the "meaning". I repeat myself, as I always do on this site, for your benefit.
