Zelda: Leaks of the kingdom thread

[SecondAmendment]

For my money I'd like to see them double down on the survival and crafting elements and increase the danger in the world. Make it so that enemy weapons shatter when you defeat them and you're only left with components. There are no clothes or armors that ignore weather effects so you have to craft potions to survive extreme heat and cold. Sharply limit inventory items so you have to carefully plan each journey into the wild and bring only the equipment you need to survive. And no on-demand fast travel to bail you out if you fuck up.

Your game sounds like even more inventory Tetris and micro than BotW. I'd rather not have that in my Zelda games, thanks. The fast travel was the only thing keeping me sane near the end of my BotW grind. Your ideas would complete the ruin of one of my favorite game series. I bet you'd also like Hyrule to be even emptier and for the story to take only five minutes instead of ten.

I am not saying there should be no fast travel options within the game. You can actually create interesting travel options in-world. Morrowind did a pretty good job of this, as opposed to Skyrim (and BotW) where you can instantly warp everywhere for no apparent reason other than making it easy for the player.

It sounds like you just aren't a fan of BotW's approach compared to old Zeldas. I don't completely disagree -- for instance I prefer the old, complex dungeons to shrine spam and all the meaningless little side quests that litter the world.

I'm absolutely not a fan of most of BotW compared to previous Zeldas. If they took the graphics, physics, art design, and some of the set pieces like the Zora team fight but then added story and better dungeons it might have been good.

Your ideas are certainly better than the armor system in the actual game. I actually enjoyed making the potions to survive the harsh weather, but hated that there was only more shrines and block puzzles to find in those locations. Then when I get the better gear I have to bring up menus and equip it? Just for more shrines and Korok seeds? Ugh.

 

[Zanzoken]

Yeah so much of the content in the game is just busywork and really suffers from a "quantity over quality" approach. I only did the crit path and the more interesting sidequests (Eventide, labyrinths, Master Sword) and didn't feel like I missed anything important.

Hopefully they will tone that down in the sequel, although I'm not sure I would bet on it.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

BotW was a game for people who enjoy exploration and wandering around. If you are the kind of a retard that needs to be told what to do every 5 seconds in tightly scripted quests, then yes, you might not enjoy it. But 'tis truly a great game.

 

[Dickie_Anderson]

I beat BotW the other day. Very surprised by how good it was. People who say stuff like "the world needs to be more compact" seem to have missed the point. The game is all about slowly traversing vistas of a massive scale, and it goes out of its way to actually make the player feel its scale (climbing the most obvious thing that does this). There's a very unique zen atmosphere to the game's world and how it expects you to take your time patiently wandering around it. In the past I would criticise open worlds for being too big and forcing you to fast-travel about, but BotW takes it to the extreme and somehow it works really well

 

[Tigranes]

Yeah, I was very rarely frustrated by walking around in BOTW. There are times that you feel this way in KCD as well: you're in a forest, you're hunting game, you're not looking at your map, you're keeping an eye on the time, watching out for bandits, appreciating the slowly changing terrain, and you don't really want to traverse the forest in 30 seconds to find the next sidequest hotspot.

With literally a hundred shrines to teleport to, the superb gliding mechanics, and horses, etc., you're also not having to take massively long way around most of the time, and you can start and stop the wandering at your leisure, especially if you give up on the OCD of 'cleaning' an area.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

That's the difference between well designed open worlds and shit like Ubisoft's checklist games. In the former, the world itself is an active participant in the gameplay, and in the latter, it's just a background picture.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

I beat BotW the other day.

What did you think of the ending?

Spoiler

c'mon baby, tell me it was shit, I need this

 

[Dickie_Anderson]

I beat BotW the other day.

What did you think of the ending?

Spoiler

c'mon baby, tell me it was shit, I need this

The final dungeon is really good. The game starts you off as a feeble elven boy swinging sticks and you end up all kitted out single-handedly storming a castle, and the progress feels real rather than a narrative thing imposed on you. The final boss isn't very good but I can forgive it.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

blergh

 

[Nutmeg]

I had to stop myself from playing BoTW.

Aside from the weapons, the itemization was nonsense. The cooking was especially retarded.

Another problem was that there was 0 reason to engage 99% of the world's enemies.

Somehow glued me to my seat anyway. Must have been the novelty.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Somehow glued me to my seat anyway. Must have been the novelty.

You can lead the horse to the water, but you can't make it discover general relativity.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

the itemization was nonsense.

was quite bad yes :[

 

[Drakortha]

The loot hoarding and whole crafting system was complete nonsense too. I hated cooking, what a huge piece of shit that was.

I realized half of the gameplay was collecting resources from the world to fill my inventory with hundreds/thousands of useless junk. They turned Zelda into just another walking & hoarding simulator, just like every other soulless western RPG.

 

[Jenkem]

filling your inventory and collecting stuff was a part of every other zelda though, the only difference is in the previous games you actually used new items you found to solve puzzles, reach new areas, etc... I hope they put a more "classic zelda" approach into BOTW2

 

[HeatEXTEND]

I realized half of the gameplay

Oh it's more than half.

just another walking & hoarding simulator

bullshit

 

[Drakortha]

filling your inventory and collecting stuff was a part of every other zelda though, the only difference is in the previous games you actually used new items you found to solve puzzles, reach new areas, etc... I hope they put a more "classic zelda" approach into BOTW2

It was the collecting resources infinitely that I had a problem with. It's addictive in some games where you collect lot's of things, it's a psychological thing. I just never wanted that in a Zelda game.

The game also had some fidelity missing. For example; remember when you hit a wall with your weapon in older Zelda games, your weapon would bounce off the wall? Well no longer; your weapon ghosts right through that wall. That's just a tip of the iceberg of my problems with the fidelity of the game, but overall my impression was that the game was half baked.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

it's a psychological thing

So that's on you, nobody is forcing you to hoard and it sure isn't needed to play through the game.

fidelity missing

It was made for the fucking switch. Have you played it? That shit's amazing.

 

[Drakortha]

it's a psychological thing

So that's on you, nobody is forcing you to hoard and it sure isn't needed to play through the game.

fidelity missing

It was made for the fucking switch. Have you played it? That shit's amazing.

I have played it, I owned it. I agree the device was nice but it wasn't worth keeping just for Zelda. Was pretty disappointed TBH.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

The point being the switch isn't exactly a supercomputer, and yes that shows if you're into that sort of thing.

 

[aweigh]

I am all on-board with shitting on BotW, but I gotta say the old "It's on the player's part to police the way they play the game!" argument (concerning the comment about too much hoarding in BotW being psychologically triggering); well, I gotta say man, that's a bunk line of reasoning.

The entire point of games is to provide the player with limitations, rules, challenges. Saying a game has too much collectible shit is a completely valid criticism if it negatively impacts the intended experience, if it is too repetitive, too un-rewarding, too superfluous, too intrusive, any one or any combination of those incidental or accidental effects on the player psychology, then it is very much a valid criticism.

There is such a thing as a game mechanic that serves no purpose other than inflation and which would benefit from being limited and reframed. I think if a player has to actively remind themselves to not partake in a mechanic because it would be distracting from continuing to enjoy the game then that's certainly something to be critical about.

 

[Drakortha]

Couldn't have put it better myself.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I don't know what you ninnies are whining about. Unlike most other RPGs, BotW actually does not have mindless hoarding, as most of the stuff you hoard IS an important resource. Their equipment system is brilliant in this. You have to constantly manage weapons, shields, ranged weapons, etc, because they are constantly breaking (at least until mid-late game when you get master sword, hylian shield, etc). The food you get you constantly have to cook in various interesting recipes, because it serves instead of potions in other games, to refill your health, or have other useful effects (heating, cooling, stamina, etc).

 

[Drakortha]

You have to constantly manage weapons, shields, ranged weapons, etc, because they are constantly breaking

This was not a positive experience when I played. It an unnecessary pain in the ass.

I'm all for sticks and other makeshift weapons breaking. But every single weapon for the first half of the game? Fuck no. And no way to repair/maintain the ones you liked either. What a huge piece of shit that was.

 

[Sranchammer]

Tell me when they have a Fun DLC

 

[Tigranes]

I didn't really experience the loot hoarding as a pain in BOTW, but that may indeed have to do with player styles. I tend to ignore the loot when games start throwing 8000 different things at you, and I did the same here - oh, I killed a monster and his loot rolled off a cliff, whatever. I stuck to a set number of recipes that I liked. I agree with aweigh that it's up to the game to provide constraints and encouragements, but the whole point of a good RPG is also that they retain some flexibility to support different playstyles. I certainly do think the game would have been better with less drop types and more unique things that matter.

As for item degradation, I have far less sympathy for the complaints. First, the very idea that you can't use Spear of Doom for 800 hours and you have to keep looking, scavenging, making do, fits very well with the design of the entire game as a foraging, exploring experience. Second, weapons drop often enough that you're never actually stuck with some shit ass stick for hours and you don't really need to hoard obsessively. Third, it's very simple to see a weapon drop in the world and ignore it or pick it up, there's no hours of inventory tetris or trekking back to the shop involved.