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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Discussion (Nintendo Switch) [game]
 
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Switch
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Welcome to the official discussion thread for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Switch!

To start, please add this game to your log, add it to your collection (if applicable), and (when you are ready) rate it using the link above!

The wait is nearly over. The game is being detailed left and right by the media,… the amiibo have been announced,… and the Nintendo Switch is imminent… The Legend of Zelda series has been a special one for Nintendo fans since it began and the next chapter starts on March 3rd, 2017.

A hero's tale begins anew.
Open your eyes and see what is true.

Fun Facts:
Vast open world where you could go find the end of the game within 15 minutes… but you won't survive it.
Weapons have stats and durability.
Climb pretty much anything you want.
Eat and cook to regain health.
Full voice-acting for all except Link

Lets use this thread to discuss the game on the Nintendo Switch. To help hold the tide of the wait, here are some beautiful screenshots and links for your perusal.





Negative World Threads:
The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild for SWITCH and Wii U
BotW Sounds Pretty Expansive (Amount of Content Spoilers)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at launch, comes with Special and Master Editions

News:
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - More Dungeon Details
Game Informer Interview - Getting away from traditions and making dying fun

YouTube Videos of Interest
Nintendo Switch - Legend of Zelda 2017 Presentation Trailer
Nintendo E3 2016 Legend of Zelda BotW Trailer
Nintendo Switch Super Bowl LI Ad (2017)
Nintendo Switch Extended Superbowl LI Ad (2017)
The Legend of Zelda Art & Artifacts Book Tour – Nintendo Minute
Fan-Made Old-School Zelda Breath of the Wild Commercial

URL to share (right click and copy)
01/29/17, 18:20    Edited: 02/12/17, 21:42
 
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Did a bunch of exploring the southwest/Gerudo region, and finished my remaining side missions in the area. Although this eventually expanded into further exploration of other regions in all corners of the map. I'm 1 shy of 100 shrines, and I've been working on upgrading most of my armor. Everything's up to at least Level 2, and about half of everything else is up to Level 3. Feels good to have my Champion Tunic up to Level 3 -- hunting those dragons for materials is one hell of a rush.

My march towards Ganon begins tomorrow. I haven't sniffed most of the center of the world map, so I won't be going straight to the castle, but I should fight him sometime this week I imagine.

99 Shrines Completed.
3 full Stamina Wheels
21 Heart Containers
233 Korok Seeds Collected
834 Rupees on hand
Four Divine Beasts Resolved
8(13) Memories recovered

@DrFinkelstein

I've just been buying up ancient arrows with my surplus rupees. Takes 'em down in one shot. I'm so bad at doing parrys, though I've got a ton of good shields right now so I might try practicing that a bit...

@nate38

That's the memory that's had me scratching my head as well, though I still have to find 3 others. It's just trees. Stuff I've gleaned from NPCs about a certain important location made me think I was sure where it would be, and based on how it looks on the map, everything checked out. But...it's not there, it's not the spot. So I really don't know. I'm hoping it's somewhere I haven't been to yet.
03/20/17, 06:22   
Edited: 03/20/17, 06:46
@TheBigG753

I found a good amount of activity in Central Hyrule, realizing I never found shrines there yet. So that'll probably naturally take you into the 100 shrine mark. I need to go back to the south west. I did a good amount of stuff but I know I didn't thoroughly search it
03/20/17, 09:56   
I decided to actually focus on the main quest a bit for the first time in a long time, met up with the Zora on the bridge and started heading that way. Without taking any major diversions there's just a lot going on there, I played for almost 4 hours and still haven't gotten to the dungeon yet. The shrine over in the Zora city was pretty fun too, the first really interesting physics puzzle I've had in awhile.

One thing I'm seriously confused about is why Nintendo introduced so many of those "kill a bunch of enemies to unlock this special chest" things early on, which felt like they were teaching me to get used to this as a common, recurring gameplay mechanic... and they seem to mostly be non-existent everywhere I've been lately. There are still small set-piece type battles that would make you THINK they would have those special chests, but they don't anymore, usually just have regular chests or... nothing really. From a game design perspective I've been trying to understand what exactly is happening here, why introduce this so heavily early on to pull it away later? At first I felt like there were too many of these but now I'm actually missing them.
03/20/17, 14:03   
@Hero_Of_Hyrule

HE HAS A DIFFERENT OPINION, GET 'IM!

I do agree with a couple things you're mentioning, albeit not to the same degree. But I feel I should point out you said you were growing tired of it by 65 hours and the world's magic eventually wore off...I mean, isn't that longer than almost all the Zelda games in and of itself? Is your issue that the game doesn't have enough content? All good things must come to an end, after all!

I'll agree that BotW's "peaks" aren't quite up there with the best of the series--or to put it more accurately for myself, its narrative and scripted peaks in this case. Granted, I haven't done all the dungeons and story stuff yet, but no single scripted moment has come close to Wind Waker's Old Hyrule or Tetra reveals, OoT's Sheik reveal, MM's Anju/Kafei story or SS's late-game conversation with Zelda. What's there has been nice--the Zora story was on-par with solid moments like TP's Midna stuff--but I'm missing that level of emotion that the series has dipped into successfully in the past. Again though, it could still be coming--haven't seen Zelda's famous crying scene from the trailer, for instance.

But for me, the difference is that while it's lacking great scripted moments so far, it's balanced out by the great UNSCRIPTED moments. All those adventures I've had in the game so far are cool not because some dev out there wanted to show me his clever writing, but because they were mine. The memories with BotW are more personal than in many past Zelda games to me because I'm getting my own experiences out of the game that I feel aren't shared with other players, at least not in the way that I've experienced them. It hearkens back to the good old days of playground talk about games, before the internet made nothing feel like a secret anymore, and I've had plenty of these "Had any adventures?" type conversations with my friends and brother since the game came out. It's truly a refreshing approach to a series that prides itself on adventure.

To put it another way, my favorite parts of past Zeldas are almost all stuff that everyone who's beaten them will have experienced. "That was cool when Sheik turned out to be Zelda." Conversely, when I think of BotW, I'm not thinking of story stuff, but how great it felt to make a daring run into Hyrule Castle before attempting any dungeons and stumbling upon a real treasure, then escaping with my life. That experience wasn't necessarily better than entering the Dark World for the first time in ALttP, but it feels exciting because of how personalized it was, mixed with the usual thrill of "breaking the rules" in a game.

I'll agree a bit on the dungeons too, from what I've played. I miss 'em. But each Zelda game has its own strengths and weaknesses; BotW's dungeons aren't as good as TP's, but its world is a heck of a lot more enticing to explore. It's story isn't as surprising and delightful as TWW's, but its challenge and balance are way better. Even my favorite game in the series (the original) is severely lacking in character and emotion compared to many of the later games. So I can't really hold those elements against BotW all that much; character, exploration, rewarding gameplay and dungeon design are all really important to me in Zelda and it's hard to think of a single game in the series that fully nails all of them. I guess OoT, MM and TWW have a pretty strong balance but are all bested in some areas by another game.

@Zero

I actually think the puzzles might be among the best in the series. I love that they're physics-based now, as it leads to a lot more logical solutions. Instead of trying to get into the developer's head, you're utilizing what you know of your runes and your equipment to try to solve them. Heck, I'd say they extend to the overworld, too. Getting over that mountain, taking out that camp without using too many resources, clearing that river. They all fall under the umbrella of "problem-solving" and each have several solutions and approaches to take. And new problems crop up all the time to solve. It's raining! Should I wait it out? Try to shimmy up by climb/jumping and restoring stamina with food? Find shelter and build a fire to stay at until morning? Find a different, longer path up the mountain? I like how my brain is always being tested with the game, and not just with static (and if I'm being pedantic, unnatural) puzzles in dungeons.
03/20/17, 20:06   
Edited: 03/20/17, 20:08
@Zero

It kinda makes sense, actually. They train you to take on enemy hideouts by rewarding you with treasure early on, and then that behavior is ingrained in you for the rest of the game. The monster parts you get from those encounters are valuable enough on their own anyway!
03/20/17, 21:02   
@Secret_Tunnel That was kind of my thought, like maybe I was thinking about this all backwards. Instead of having this THING that they did a lot with early on then stopped using so much, perhaps it wasn't even there at first and they realized players were just skipping the battles so they decided to throw it into the early areas to get players actively taking on battles.

It's still bizarre that it disappears though, especially since a lot of the "set piece" type battles I've run into since still have treasure chests (just not the special ones that only unlock when you kill everyone.) If the chests work as motivation and they would (theoretically) be easy enough to put into more areas, it's weird that they kind of disappear. I felt a bit more motivated to fight for those chests, now I'm like... maybe I will, maybe I won't.
03/20/17, 21:08   
Edited: 03/20/17, 21:09
@Zero

That's funny, it didn't even occur to me that there are fewer of those "combat chests" as you get away from the plateau, but you're absolutely right. Weird that it never registered for me.
03/20/17, 21:34   
@TriforceBun

The awe inspiring of scope of the world stopped feeling so magical after about 40 hours though. My complaint is not that the game ends, but that its biggest draw for me has an expiration date. The point when I say, "okay, the world really is this big". I mean that I will never be able to get that magic back again, and now that it is gone the game is less appealing to me than a lot of other Zelda games. It's still a very good game, period. But, for me it is one of the all time greats. Today, I can enjoy Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, Skyward Sword, Link Between Worlds, Oracle of Ages, and so on to the same degree that I have in the past. I just replayed the completely linear DKC Tropical Freeze, and enjoyed it even more than when I first played it. But I will never enjoy Breath of the Wild as much as I did for those first 20-30 hours. With more time, I will only come to further see how shallow the combat is, how much time is spent just running or climbing, how often enemies are reused. I can still enjoy Breath of the Wild a lot. But not on the level that I enjoy plenty of other Zelda games.

A lot of this comes down to personal preference, though. I tend not to prefer games where the main appeal is in "creating/finding your own adventures". I tend to enjoy games with more direction, and a more tightly crafted experience. The uniqueness of my own experience doesn't intrinsically add value for me.

And I want to add that all of this is okay. I like Breath of the Wild. I'm fine with it straying so far from the prototypical Zelda template. I'm happy that this game means so much to so many people.
03/21/17, 02:18   
Not to be a pedantic pissant, but it actually returns to the prototypical Zelda.

And the combat is awesome. I don't know what you even mean by calling it shallow. And, again, I don't understand the complaint that the world can never surprise you like it did in the first 40 hours because what's the alternative in an exploratory game like this? If you're not content with this open world then I can't see how you could be content with any open world. I'm literally 100 hours in and still finding new stuff.

Honestly not trying to hassle you for your opinion, but it's really almost completely counter to my own experience. Very hard to find any common ground.
03/21/17, 03:05   
Edited: 03/21/17, 03:06
I'd say the prototypical Zelda had way more of a focus on dungeons though. And with Link to the Past, puzzle-filled dungeons.

I think there is always a worry with big exploration / secret-filled games that eventually you do everything there is in the game and 100% it and then... there is no mystery left, you know every single thing that exists in the game. My strategy to manage that is to NOT try to do everything. Which it seems like is probably necessary in a game like BOTW anyway... unless you want to spend hundreds of hours to 100% it.
03/21/17, 03:14   
@Zero

Usually when you use the word prototypical, you're referring to the 'original' form of something. And Breath of the Wild shares a lot in common with the original Legend of Zelda - Aonuma even said that was one of the development goals.

But it's just being pedantic. We understand what Hero of Hyrule means - that the typical version of Zelda as most of us understood it pre-BotW is much more linear, which he clearly prefers. And that's ok. I even understand it, to a degree, as I prefer the Mario series to be more tightly controlled and linear, like in the Galaxy series, rather than full of big, open jungle gyms, Mario 64 style. There's a case to be made for tightly woven, controlled experiences. Zelda just isn't the series I'm looking to make that point with. For me, I'm partial to the more exploratory Zeldas, like the original, Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild. Though I do love the others to various degrees.
03/21/17, 03:28   
Edited: 03/21/17, 03:30
@kriswright

Oh, you're right. My bad. I should have said typical. I was trying to refer to the essence of what makes a Zelda game a Zelda game, but that's kind of subjective and nebulous. EDIT: Yeah, you got what I was trying to say, I just didn't say it right.

For me, the combat mostly consists of running up to things to hit them. When they look like they're going to swing I'll either try to stagger them or back off. It grew kind of tiresome for me. You can get creative, but I never had any reason to. Button mash the stuff up close, shoot the stuff far away, and parry the robots lasers. Not bad at first, but after a while it wore on me.

And I'm not really saying there is an alternative in a game like this. For me, the fun and interesting things I discovered were heavily surrounded by a lot of down time climbing stuff and running. Towards the end of my time with the game the "boring running around"- to - "fun discovery" ratio was skewed too much toward "boring running around". Sure, there are probably plenty of interesting things to find, but I'm too tired of slowly running around and slowly climbing mountains to feel motivated to go out and find it. I may not have seen everything, but I feel like I have seen everything that's worth the effort of finding considering my level of fatigue with the game.

Most of this stuff comes down to me not being a fan of the genre. So it is a testament to Breath of the Wild's quality that I enjoyed it as much as I did.
03/21/17, 03:39   
Edited: 03/21/17, 03:45
Here I'll be even more pedantic: Prototypical: denoting the first, original, or typical form of something.

But actually what I was thinking was more along the lines of you don't have a series until you have multiple games, and Adventure of Link is weird and doesn't quite count, so the original, Link to the Past and maybe Link's Awakening all come together to me to make the early sort of definition of the Zelda series.

Still, even if we take just the first game, I'll still maintain that a large portion of the game is spent in dungeons. It's tough to think back in retrospect, but maybe even like 50/50 time spent in overworld/dungeons? Whereas I'm like 25 or 30 hours into BOTW and I still haven't gone to the first dungeon, lol. The balance is a bit different here.
03/21/17, 03:45   
@Zero

Yeah, but you can't just ignore that big fat overworld in LoZ where you're supposed to walk around fighting monsters and looking for solutions to cryptic environmental puzzles. Sounds an awful lot like B to the W to me. It's not a perfect translation - and I agree, LoZ is more dungeon heavy - but you gotta admit it's a return to some of those values after many, many years getting away from them. That's the real point.

I don't really know about that definition of prototypical, but whatever. Usually a prototype is understood to be the initial version of something - almost a concept demonstration. If it's used in any other way, it sounds like the initial meaning was watered down a bit. (Or, to put it another way, that the 'prototypical' version of 'prototypical' isn't synonymous with typical. Because why bother adding proto to the beginning?)(This has been Semantics With Skippy. Tune in next week for a boring discussion of the words irregardless and agreeance.)
03/21/17, 03:52   
Edited: 03/21/17, 03:53
@kriswright

I agree, I love those values, but HoH and Zero have a point with the whole balance being off just wee tad

Did I bring this up earlier? I think so. Too lazy to check. But generally speaking, couldn't we have had BotW exactly as is....but with the dungeons being meatier? It doesn't take away from the world, and keeps dungeon people happy.

As I've stated before, my preference would be for a slightly tighter experience. Make the world a touch smaller (we don't need 500 blasted Koroks!) Keep the cryptic exploration ala the hidden shrines. Make dungeons and items claimed within relevant again. Perhaps a compromise where you can access a handful at once, and you can use any one of the items found within to access a new region with more dungeons. Etc. Even in the original Zelda you couldn't cross the river until you found the raft.

The other option could be to make those necessary items available from multiple locations. The Warm Doublet was a great example. You could do the little mini quest where you cooked up a meal for the Old Man and he gave it to you. Or (as I did when I couldn't figure out how to give him the meal) you could use the spicy meal/torches/campfires to venture into the cold areas yourself. That's where I met the Old Man again on top of Mount Hylia and he gave me the Doublet then. And failing both of those options results in the Doublet simply being for sale later in in your adventure.

Keep a sense of structure, of progress, whilst still retaining the flexibility for people to approach things differently and have their own side adventures.
03/21/17, 04:21   
@Shadowlink

What you're describing would still be a great game, but I wouldn't like it more than what we've got, because you're clearly coming from the position that what BotW needs to be truly great is for it to be more like OoT. And that's not something I'm going to agree about. As I said a few pages back, I don't miss the dungeon crawl aspects of Zelda in BotW - and I definitely don't miss the linear, puzzle to puzzle, item-oriented dungeon style. If your premise is that BotW needs that for balance or something, I say phooey on you. And another phooey for good measure.

Having said that, this DLC is coming and I think it'd be kinda awesome if the dungeons in the DLC are slightly more traditional, if for no other reason than to make the OoT partisans happy, so I don't have to hear whining about no dungeons for the rest of my life. It'd legitimately be a nice addition to the world map and offer a form of play that isn't already in the game (though I think a few locations on the map might get closer to traditional dungeons than they're getting credit for.

Anyway: Structure schmucture.
03/21/17, 04:48   
Edited: 03/21/17, 04:49
@kriswright

Maybe I'm saying OoT needs to be a little more like BotW?

...Edit: Actually no, I'm not. OoT is great!

(But more BotW style cryptic quests wouldn't go astray)
03/21/17, 05:00   
Edited: 03/21/17, 05:01
@Shadowlink

...a ...criticism... of OoT... from... Shadowlink?

Well, I'm clearly already dead because this would not happen in any living timeline.
03/21/17, 05:01   
I often don't fast travel ;)

Re explore the same areas...

Go slow. Walk. Climb. Ride horse.
03/21/17, 05:18   
DungeonS in the DLC? Is it going to have multiple dungeons then? I thought it was just the one?!

I'm not disagreeing that the overworld in BOTW is a call back to the spirit of the original (I'd also add in Link to the Past, which is maybe a bit more sectioned off, but still has different ways to get from point A to point B), especially contrasted with something like Skyward Sword and its closed off areas, or Spirit Tracks and its... almost completely lack of an overworld to speak of. I just think overall the balance is very, very different from the original in the sense that the original still had a huge focus on dungeons (and boss fights in those dungeons.) And then Link to the Past added this huge focus on puzzle solving in the dungeons.

I do miss that. It's hard to feel dissatisfied when Breath of the Wild is so good. I mean, at this point I'd say it is one of the best games I've played, and much like Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4 or Super Mario Galaxy 2 I could find things that all of these games don't do quite as well as earlier games in the series did, but they're all so damn good that really, who cares?

But when it comes to what I'd like to see in the next Zelda, like Shadowlink I'd probably like something pushed a tad bit back in the puzzle dungeon direction.

But not another Ocarina of Time, ew.
03/21/17, 05:23   
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