@Stephen

I read the review. It's far better written than the one from GBAtemps (also a 7) that I mentioned in the other thread. That said, he clearly enjoyed parts of game and recognized many of it's good points. It seems he glossed over them though just to focus on his beefs with items breaking... and to get people to read his reviews, like me.



Anyways, I finally finished my first dungeon and I'm not offended by it. Would I be okay with something bigger in the future? Yes, but I'm not feeling like I'm lacking in content in the least. As for the lead up to the beast, I thought it was awesome and the sequence immediately preceding it was well done. I actually like seeing Link as the part of a larger world that isn't oblivious to what's going on.

As for the voice acting, I keep getting Professor Layton vibes every time one of the aforementioned females speak. Maybe if they just talked a little faster.

@kriswright
That's true about the linear nature of puzzles/dungeons leading to being "stuck." I still remember getting caught in OoT's Water Temple for a long time because of that stupid key hidden behind the Longshot treasure chest Block of Time thing. Fortunately, OoT was a bit open in its design and I was able to go onto the Shadow and Spirit Temples without having to beat Morpha.

But for a defense of dungeons, I present this: dungeons bring about a nice change of pace from overworld exploration. You get a unique theme, a new "look," a new song (usually) to listen to, usually some new enemies, and major elements of Zelda to look forward to and wonder about--what horrible boss will be at the end and what cool new tool will be acquired? There're elements of the puzzle solving in BotW's shrines (and some of them are rather large) and I think BotW's puzzles in general are above-average for Zelda because of the physicality and versatility of them. But they don't bring about a variety of environments, songs or enemies and it's fairly predictable (give or take a cool weapon) what treasures lie within. As for the main dungeons, they lack some of that plus the surprising boss encounters. I mean, I don't know what bosses are in all the dungeons but I can hazard a safe guess based on the one I've fought already.

Maybe the dungeons can still be optional a la BotW but linear a la TP? Eh, I'd like it.

TheBigG753 said:

Breath of the Wild looks like how Zelda should look, and I hope they stick to it and evolve it this time instead of constantly changing it up. It's a beautiful game.

Heck yeah.

@kriswright Wait, why are you assuming Jim Sterling doesn't think Zelda deserves a 7? Because it is inconceivable anyone would think that, or something about Jim in particular? I think he is a pretty honest critic in general, doubt this is a manufacturer controversy. His complaints: too much repetitiveness, too many 1-2 hit kills, breaking weapons, the stamina meter, puzzle shrines feel out of place, bosses aren't memorable enough, etc.

Basically he just doesn't seem that into some of its core stuff, which like... is going to happen for some people? Don't think it has to be a manufactured thing. In fact, I actually agree with many of his complaints, they just don't really drag the game down nearly as much for me. But if that stuff bugs you... it might?

He hands out 6s and 7s and such to big games a lot too, which I respect more than sites than automatically give every AAA game at least an 8.5 or whatever.

@Hero_Of_Hyrule

I'd say it's time for you to beat the game then! I'm still early on, but I'm certainly enjoying it a lot more when I ignore sidequests and just do whatever I feel like. I'm not pressuring myself to complete this game 100%.

I just spent an hour trying to push a rock up a mountain in my underwear. This game is amazing. It was for the island challenge... one of the balls rolled down a mountain and it took me forever to get it back up there. But it was awesome! It was frustrating in the best way!

@Secret_Tunnel

Eventide Island? Finally cleared that after my 8th or so attempt last night (I stumbled on it early on and kept getting OHK'd.)

The balls will reset. I was trying to blast off the plate blocking the pedestal to no avail. In the process I'd already carried the ball partway there. Eventually I gave up figuring there had to be a sledgehammer hidden around somewhere (I didn't realise you could use other weapons to generate the stored energy for Stasis - I did figure that out later though.) When I came back, the ball was back at the spawn.

...I also wish I'd realised that before I dropped another ball down a hill and into the ocean. I spent a good ten minutes pushing that thing around like a trained seal to get it back to the beach where I could pick it up.

That whole island was a blast though.

@TheBigG753

I laugh every time I drop a rock on a Korok's head. For some reason it never ceases to amuse me. It's probably the little noise they make when it happens. I don't usually drop it on purpose though! Usually it's just me spamming the A button to get through the text that I've already seen 50+ times and then hitting the drop command before I know it's popped up.

And congrats on being 11% done with the Korok challenge! (Based on what I've heard is the total number of Koroks in this game...)

kriswright said:

I'm realizing playing BotW that the thing that annoys me most about Zelda in general is feeling like I'm stuck down in a hole somewhere trying to figure out which direction to push a *** box so I can continue playing my adventure game.

While I've never personally felt that way about the dungeons (though I have felt that way about some of the precursor quests you have to undertake to unlock certain dungeons in the series), would your opinion change if the dungeons gave more insight into the world, story, or characters of the game rather than just being big puzzle chambers with occasional battles?

That was one of the things I loved about Adventure of Link and Twilight Princess. Their dungeons added an extra element to the world I was exploring and (TP especially) they often felt like real places that would have existed in the world even if they weren't dungeons. Throw some extra lore to find in those things a la Metroid Prime and/or BotW's cut scenes, and those would likely be my new favorite dungeons of the series.

That said, if your issue is just being unable to progress in the story until you've completed these dungeons, I doubt this would help address that issue all that much. I've just never been stuck in a dungeon long enough for that possible annoyance to have ever occurred to me.

@TheBigG753

I definitely prefer the OoT/MM/TP art styles to BotW, but if we were to get an MM-esque sequel to BotW, I would definitely like for it to maintain the same art style as its predecessor unless it has no ties to BotW.

@V_s

What context did Zelda 2's dungeons have in the overall world of Hyrule? I might've caught on a bit more if the townspeople had clearer dialogue. So many of them seem to "know nothing"!

Speaking of Zelda 2, are you guys familiar with the theory (?) that the entirety of Zelda 1's map is in a small chunk of the world below Death Mountain? It certainly seems intentional to me, although I don't think Nintendo ever actually confirmed it. But if that is representative of Hyrule, it makes me wonder if Zelda 2's Hyrule is even larger than BotW's...



Graveyard, lakes, forests, it all adds up with the common factor being Death Mountain in the north in both games. You even find the Hammer in Spectacle Rock, although the scale is a bit off.

@TriforceBun I'd say that is more likely to be a nod to the original than some canon idea of how these worlds all fit together.

@TriforceBun
I did read somewhere that Zelda II's Hyrule was set to 'the north' of 'Old Hyrule which was abandoned in Zelda I. But I'd never seen that map comparison before!
That's too bizarrely close to be anything but deliberate IMO. Wild.

I'm itching to resurrect the old timeline thread myself with regards to some speculation about BotW's incarnation of Hyrule vis-vis it's apparent location in the timeline, but I'm waiting until I finish the game before I star throwing wild theories around.

@Zero

You think the guy who uses ironic fascist imagery and has a theme song that boasts about how clever he is isn't above manufacturing some controversy? Well, we can agree to disagree, then.

Just so it's clear, I like Jim Sterling. I think his video after the death of Iwata was one of the best, straightforward tributes I saw. But he seems to me to be another one of those guys who's trying to be the Lester Bangs of video game reviews. Yes, he has a very distinct voice and, yes, I think the complaints he has are mostly honest. And maybe he does this sort of thing with major games all the time - which, if that's true, kinda backs up my point a bit. But I don't believe for a second that he gave this game a 7 without considering the impact of that score, considering the glowing reception of BotW, and how it would drive traffic to his interests online. He's been in the business long enough to know a 7 is basically considered one step above trash. I don't believe for a second that it wasn't calculated for impact to some degree.


@Hero_Of_Hyrule

The feeling you describe is always going to be true about this sort of game, though. I mean, it's a game of discovery - about finding out what's around the corner. Once you know the answer to those questions, then it stops being high adventure and turns into your neighborhood. And I think that's ok. Because what's the alternative? An even larger game than BotW? A procedurally generated one?

I think we've got to expect that once we've uncovered the game's secrets, it'll never be the same. But that's not so much a flaw in the game as it is simply the nature of this sort of game. I like how you put it - that you've tamed the wild. To me, that's kind of the goal. It's what I'm playing for, even more than kicking Ganon out of that castle.


@V_s

Well, clearly I'm just an idiot who can't solve remedial puzzles.

To me, it's not so much the difficulty of the puzzles, it's that I don't like adventure games becoming so narrow that progress depends on basically you doing one thing right now. That attitude goes back to my first experiences with adventure games in the 80s with the King's Quest series. Yes, any story-based game will have specific tasks that have to be completed - and that's true for BotW, too - but I'm not getting that feeling I sometimes got in OoT or even WW, where I'd rather be off doing something else, but I'm grinding out dungeon puzzles because I can't go anywhere or do anything else until I do.

Anyway, my point isn't to attack all earlier Zelda games or anything. Obviously those are some of my favorite games. My point was to counter Shadowlink's argument that something important was lost because the dungeons aren't the same size as they'd been in previous Zeldas. To me, the dungeons were never the main appeal of this series. The main appeal was the adventure/exploration/discovery - which massive, linear dungeons tend to interrupt. That's why BotW really hits the sweet spot for me. The puzzles are decentralized, so I can work them when I want and progress the story in other ways through exploration.

Anand has that theory that your favorite Zelda games tend to reflect what you value in the series. I'm a Wind Waker/LoZ kinda guy more than an OoT/TP kinda guy. I think my attitude towards dungeons is kind of reflected in that. I want to be out on my boat seeing what's going on in the sea or paragliding into a new valley from a mountain, not figuring out which torch I need to shoot an arrow through so I can get a key and move into the next room of some dungeon.

@kriswright

Here was my post on GAF about the Jim Sterling stuff:

I like Jim Sterling a lot and I am eager to read his review.

I think BotW is an incredible game with some minor flaws that represents a bold new direction for Zelda. I could absolutely see someone put-off by some elements not enjoy the game as much as the majority seem to.

Obviously, Jim is the victim here. I cannot state that emphatically enough. No matter what he thought of the game he deserves to be able to put his opinion out there without being attacked for it.

All of that being said, though...

Jim sure is a lightning rod for controversy. He (almost?) always seems to be on the right side of things but I just get this sense that trouble keeps finding him more so than any other critic. And I think it isn't unfair to state that these things help his brand because as he says he doesn't lose ad revenue, and the majority of his content on the Jimquisition skews toward the shitty practices done by corporations or petulant children that take exception to his coverage of their content. All of this is to say that I think Jim knows what the reaction is going to be when he does stuff like this. I think that he is smart enough to know that his review gets more attention for being so far outside the zone than if it had just been another 10/10. The real question is if he alters his review or coverage to try and provoke that response which is something we can never know. Only he will know that. And it is insulting to assume that his coverage is done with a motive of getting attention.

So I guess my POV is that Jim is a good critic and I think he does stay true to his opinion but I don't think that he completely hates it when stuff like this happens. He's going to get a good amount of publicity out of this, make a Jimquisition tearing down the people who do this and come out as the hero of all of this. Which is again, totally fair and how it should be. But I think in the end he does gain more than he loses from this and I think he knows that. Again, I don't personally think that it affects any of his coverage. Just more of an observation.

@kriswright

Well I could probably write an entire post debating your characterisation of the dungeon concept. For example, I think there's plenty of dungeons in the series where puzzles are integrated into the structure as a whole as a whole rather than each room being a mere distinct puzzle chamber ala BotW's shrines. Majora's Masks's dungeons certainly come to mind.

That being said, that's really a separate argument from the point you're trying to make I feel. As you've said, you've got tons of other things to be getting on with in the game. Making the dungeons as epic as any of the other 3D entries certainly wouldn't take away from that in anyway. You can still do them in whatever order, and you still have all those other Overworld things to do if you get stuck. So your progress wouldn't have been really hampered with a bit more effort spent on the dungeons. The only thing really holding us back from that would have been development logistics, but that's a bit outside the scope of this discussion.

@Stephen

The only place you and I seem to disagree is how far we think it's acceptable to speculate on his motives. You note the trend of him being a lightning rod, but are unwilling to say it's intentional, since the truth of that is unknowable. I agree that it's unknowable, but I don't think his opinion is sacred or anything. I don't mind speculating about his motives because... who cares anyway? I mean, it's just some guy's opinion and/or career-boosting move. And then it's just my opinion about his motives. And I'm nobody.

It doesn't really matter, unless you think that Metacritic score matters. Which I don't.

---

In other, fun BotW news: Evie has named all 5 horses in my stable. There's Bouncy, Boo, Harper, Bink and Epona, which she calls Pinto. I also found a 6th horse which we couldn't keep which she named Bean. Pinto and Bean just go together I guess.

Also, she's started shouting, "You can do it, Link!" Every time she sees me paragliding somewhere. It's adorable. Good grief she's only two!

@Zero I also had a funny run-in with one of those enemies: There was a storm going on at the time, so right when he transformed, ZAP, DEAD.

@kriswright

Eh to me it just comes from a place of 'You only say this because you're nostalgic/biased/republican'. These days I am trying to presume others' motives less. He could be doing it to give himself a story but he could just also legitimately feel that way. Regardless of the motivations, the talking points are the same so at best all it does is muddy the discussion in my mind.

Why do we have to assume people have ulterior motives? Why can't we just go with the logic that he actually sees the game as a 7?

@kriswright Well, "isn't above" and "Of course he doesn't think the game deserves a 7. But Zelda's glowing scores has been the biggest story in gaming, and now he gets to be the guy that all the butthurt Sony fanboys who've hated Nintendo for 20 years get to cluck around and hold up as their champion." are two very different things, right? One says there is some possibility he did this on purpose, the other says he obviously did this on purpose. While it's always possible regardless of who we are talking about, I don't see any reason to believe he obviously did this on purpose. He just doesn't seem to like the game as much as some people. He still calls it good, and to some reviewers a 7 is a good score, he just thinks it gets in the way of itself a lot. A complaint that I think is understandable, although how much that affects your person experience will vary. I just don't see any reason to leap to "manufactured controversy".

As for the lightning rod stuff sure, everyone knows that giving a low score to an otherwise high scoring game will get you attention, but there seems to be a lot of selection bias in the way people apply thinking a site / person is just doing it for hits. I've seen way more times than I can count some review site being called exploitative or whatever just because they give a low score to an otherwise well scoring game. But you look at the rest of their reviews and it's pretty typical reviewing. Did they really just do a bunch of normal reviews and then decide out of nowhere they needed some hits so throw a wacky one out there? Or is this just the one where their reviewer really felt differently from the masses? The second seems more likely to me in most cases. I mean even us, let's say we had gotten listed on GR (as was a goal of mine once), and then this review pops up. The same complaints would get levied against us, but would they be true?

I think 5 years ago me would be grabbing my pitchfork to join the mob (ok probably not, because I'm too "nice", but in my MIND I'd be up in arms and complaining on forums) but I've just seen way too many Internet mobs forming by connecting vague dots to come to dubious conclusions over the last few years to feel very comfortable about assuming other people's motives. I think we would all agree that reviewers should have the space to step away from mainstream opinion, but nowadays I wonder what that means in practice.

I also think that perhaps people's obsessions over Metacritic / Gamerankings averages (and I'm guilty of this a lot) are driving this more than just not being able to handle an individual opinion. I think people start to see these deviations as knocking a game out of its "rightful" place in these lists, doubly so if they engage in "system wars" and want to be able to point to a list and say "SEE, WE HAVE THE BETTER GAME!" Do we give the lists too much power? They are, after all, just the average of a bunch of opinions.

Planned on playing only about an hour last night, but I experienced two (more) magical moments. The hits just keep on coming with this game.

I know some of you guys have mentioned Eventide Island? This isn't about that, but another moment in another place that rivals that experience.

Earlier in the day, I decided to tackle a couple of my outstanding shrine quests before moving on in my adventure towards Divine Beast #4. I did the "Spring of Wisdom" quest in the mountains, and this confirmed my suspicions regarding the seemingly-random dragons I had observed previously in the wild. I had already accepted the "Spring of Power" quest, so I knew that I had to go after Dinraal.

I had seen him previously near a certain stable, so I went there and staked out for a bit and sure enough, he made another appearance. I took a snapshot of him, which gave me some location details and I set my Sheikah Slate to track how close I was to him (this comes into play later in a different way). So, off to Death Mountain I go. I (wrongly) expected that, like Naydra, I'd find his proper home in the mountains and we'd go from there. But I found nothing.

However, there was a seemingly-important area that I hadn't explored yet, located between here and the other place where I saw him, and that place is Thyphlo Ruins, directly north of the Great Hyrule Forest. I thought, "Okay, I haven't been here yet, maybe this is where he hangs out." Boy, was I in for a surprise.

So, I get there and it's a totally pitch-dark forest. I literally can't see anything besides a luminous stone or two in the distance. It's a shrine quest, to find the shrine entrance in pitch-dark. Naturally, I had no torch on me, but I did have some fire arrows. I walked around very slowly with my bow drawn for a while, and shot at anything that moved. It's all darkness and fire at this point! I'm walking around with no idea where I'm going at this point -- I remembered that my Sheikah Slate was not set to track shrine locations, and at this point I made the decision to leave it that way. I was dropping my remaining flint & steel to start fires every so often to try and keep track of where I was.

Next, there was water -- or was it a mud pit? -- between me and some elevated flame. I used my cryonis ability to make some ice, and again, it's so dark you can only see the ice blocks and nothing else. I get what was in the chest and drop down into a grassy area. Still with my fire arrows drawn, a pack of wolves attacked me out of the darkness. I killed one, but the others ran off -- I could hear them, but all I could see in the darkness was their glowing eyes. Spooky! Then a flock of keese attacked me. Eventually I found a torch, and used this to light other torches, and I found my way to where I needed to place a ball to unlock the shrine gate. And where was that ball? Guarded by an enemy in the next room that I could hear, but could not see, until I got close enough with my torch: a Hinox! Super-epic battle at this point, in near-darkness where the giant Hinox appears as nothing but a shadow, with reflections from the nearby flames giving me at least an outline. By using stasis to stop him in place and shooting his glowing eye with fire arrows, I was able to defeat him and complete the shrine quest. Absolutely amazing, atmospheric and heart-pounding experience.

But that's not all. Feeling satisfied, I fast-travel back to Death Mountain to call it a night, and it's about 2:00 AM (in-game) and what do I spy out of the corner of my eye? Dinraal, flying high in the sky. I follow his movements across the map, and though I lost him again, I spotted a location where I could get close to him after his descent. I slept until the next night and went back to this location to stake out. Still not entirely sure what to do, when he got close I tried to jump on him and climb onto him -- this did not work out well, as he's HOT HOT HOT and I bounced off of him like 10 times as he floated back off into the sky, before I fell to the ground. Not totally discouraged, I slept another full day and went back. This time, I fired a few ice arrows at him and one must have hit him this time, as his scale landed on the ground below. Another shrine quest completed!

That was, like, 2 hours of playing. This game, man.

V_s said:

And congrats on being 11% done with the Korok challenge! (Based on what I've heard is the total number of Koroks in this game...)

Holy crap! I would have guessed there were "only" around 500.

kriswright said:

I think we've got to expect that once we've uncovered the game's secrets, it'll never be the same. But that's not so much a flaw in the game as it is simply the nature of this sort of game. I like how you put it - that you've tamed the wild. To me, that's kind of the goal. It's what I'm playing for, even more than kicking Ganon out of that castle.

Totally agreed. I've never looked at Zelda as a "combat game" or a "survival game", even though it's awesome that BotW advances the series greatly in both areas. But after hours and hours of that, it feels to me like a reward when Link becomes more powerful. Engaging in random combat isn't something I have to do as much now, and I'm fine with that as it just means I can do more exploring in a shorter span. And I can still go wreck some guard outposts if I want to, just for fun, even if I won't get anything good from it.

I mean, I've probably already put in close to 100 hours and I still feel there's so much more to discover from this world (almost 1/3 of the map is still untouched in my game). Yeah, at a certain point you will run out of new things to discover, but even after everything I've done thus far that's not something I'd complain about. All things must end, but my time with BotW so far has been nothing short of excellent.

@Zero

I think you're piling a lot of other people's history into my comment, though. I mean, I think it's obvious that - at least in the case of the score - Sterling is doing it for the hits. Of course I don't know for sure and of course it's speculation, but that's my read on the situation and so there it is. I don't care that other people have accused other people of doing that, and have maybe been wrong or right or whatever. That's drama I don't care about and won't bother talking about. I don't feel obligated to deal with that history of complaining about review scores because I don't actually care that much about review scores.

I've said my piece before about my dislike of the 100 point rating system and how I think it's foolish to try to buck the system and "use more" of the 100 point scale by rating good games lower. If a 7 is still a good score for Sterling then my complaint also includes the quixotic idea that a 7 is a good score when everyone who has ever read video game reviews knows it isn't.

Beyond that, I've said my part. I still like Jim Sterling and my opinion hasn't changed much on him - that he's a pretty insightful guy who makes good videos and also courts controversy when it's helpful to his career as a guy who talks about video games for a living.


@Pokefreak911

Yeah. Sure. And maybe he did feel the game was a 7 and I'm wrong.

I'm starting to get perplexed why everyone's jumping to Sterling's defense, here, particularly against my rando comment. Is it so important that we come across as 'reasonable' and 'giving someone the benefit of the doubt' when we're talking about something so shallow and stupid as a review score that wrecked a composite review score on Metacritic (or maybe it didn't, I don't even know). I mean...

Here's the thing I don't get: Are we not allowed to question ulterior motives about someone's professional criticism now without essentially looking like cry baby console warriors? Are you guys saying that, since a thing is unknowable, it's now unquestionable? Because that line of thinking, beyond being sorta naive, is also opening yourself up for exploitation by games media, which (despite the way certain phrases have been abused in Gamergate circles) is crooked as shit.

Also, considering a big portion of this forum heaped hot fire on Fran from IGN for rating Double Dash a 7.9, it also comes off as a little inconsistent. (Though, I admit, that was a long long time ago and there could be some overzealous self-correction going on here.)

Hey I tend to use the US school system grading scale when scoring my games so yeah, to me a 7 is a bit mediocre and I think it is to a lot of reviewers at a lot of sources at the end of the day. Yet it's not a very straight-forward discussion, in fact I seem to be in the minority when I'm having scoring discussions with other people. To the point where the consensus that we came up with for games in the 7s on NW is:

7.0-7.9: "Good". Good games are very solid, respectable games that are held back from greatness by some real issues.

This is what people here wanted! Do we follow this when reviewing games though? I'm not sure that I do. I mean, I've given games that I consider "good" with some caveats high 7s, but once you get down to those low 7s... well, I pretty much never give low 7s to games because I usually only play games that interest me to completion.

Still, other people review quite differently, and the other thing I learned about trying to have a unified scoring system on NW is that no matter what you put in your score guideline text, people still just score based on what makes sense to them. I don't know much about academic grades in the UK (where he is from) but they seem very different than here? Which might explain why UK reviewers also seem "harsher" to us in general? (EDGE gets called out for low scores a lot too.) If a 7 really means "good" to Jim Sterling and he thought it was a good game held back by his many complaints, I don't think a 7 is out of line. It's just sort of weird to me to insist that it's obvious he is doing it for hits, like it is unfathomable that he played a game most people are absolutely loving and only sort of liked it.

I guess I feel this a bit personally too because, while I'm getting into it more lately, my early BOTW experience was a bit iffy and I still have moments where I'm like why did I just spend a half hour collecting stuff I don't care about to finish a quest that gave me a meaningless reward like, is the core gameplay here really as compelling as some of my other favorite games? Is more always better? I don't think I'll have an answer to that for quite some time, at the moment it feels like it is (I'm currently on a bit of a BOTW high), but I can definitely see it dropping the other way for some people because it always feels a bit to me like I'm right on the edge. And I've also personally experienced how UTTERLY RIDICULOUS people think you are when you have any issues with this game at all so... yeah.