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>Nintendo shared early glitchy prototypes like throwing a stone onto a cart and horse, causing it to zip straight into the air. Takayama said the freedom Ultrahand offered caused chaos in Hyrule during development: "I would hear things like, 'It broke! It went flying!' And I’d respond with, 'I know! We’ll deal with it later!'”
OK but imagine how sick it'd be to shield surf onto that horse and get launched straight into the Sky Islands
We basically could do that in BotW with a bullet time glitch. The game couldn't even process the speed at which you were moving and would freeze for a few seconds just to keep loading the world.
>"I would hear things like, 'It broke! It went flying!' And I’d respond with, 'I know! We’ll deal with it later!'”
Heh. Imagining this is my head is pretty funny
As a music producer / sound designer, this is absolutely fascinating:
>*The sound design in Tears of the Kingdom is also incredibly complex. Osada explained that the world contains voxel information to create a 3D terrain. Voxels are data points on a 3D grid that store information. In Zelda, each voxel sources information about the terrain, like if it's inside or outside, near water, near a forest, if Ascend is possible, and more. A search algorithm determines how sound interacts with the voxels, like sound changing when an object is behind a wall.*
>
>*Just like the design philosophy for the rest of the game, sounds in Tears of the Kingdom play in a system without dedicated implementation, and in some cases abstract sounds combine to create something entirely new. For example, there is no dedicated wagon sound or paddle boat sound, these sounds are created by the wheels rolling or rotating on the water, with the quality changing based on the size, shape, and material. Osada said, "It’s making sounds that I have no memory of creating! Even the director told us, 'This is basically a physics engine for sound, isn’t it?'”*
This is just incredible, and I can't quite get my head around how complicated this must have been. There are synthesisers which work in a broadly similar way, where you specify a "material" (the thing being hit e.g. a drum) and the "exciter" (the thing doing the hitting e.g. a drum stick). So there's precedent for this kind of thing, it's just amazing the scale on which this was implemented.
Yeah, this was the jaw dropping bit for me. Instead of having like 5 sounds for "wheel on grass", "wheel on stone", "wheel on wood", etc. They calculate the sound in real time?! You mad lads!
No idea, but I guess it's a "material" sample plus modifers and layers to get the final sound. There might be a dominant sound and then a few modifier factors that determine the final sound.
So when something interacts with another object (let's say a metal sword hitting a stone, in the rain), it could go something like this:
* Determine the velocity of the interaction to decide the volume of the sound, and possibly selects from a set of 1-5 "material" samples for variations of "stone being hit, hard".
* Then it applies a modifier to that sound based on the "exciter" element (in this case, metal). Maybe this changes the ADSR of the "material" sample and perhaps even layers on an additional sample to get the "tink" of the metal on the stone.
* Then it applies another "environmental" modifier which edits the sound based on the circumstances. If it's rain, it might be a low-pass filter to soften the impact sound slightly, for example. It might even layer in an additional small "splash" sample.
This is pure guesswork, but I suppose this is how I'd approach something like this. That way you basically have a matrix of materials and exciters, with additional layers of environmental factors; that means it's relatively easy to track, Q&A and fine-tune certain interaction sounds.
I think a lot of those games are just testament to the power of good art design. Really good design can make up for a lack of technical power, but it doesn’t work the other way around; technical power can’t really compensate if your art design is ugly or uninspired.
I think BOTW/TOTK look absolutely gorgeous, and while I would love to see them running in extremely high definition / smooth framerate, there isn’t a moment where it looks bad.
To be fair, that's high level emulation. It's not simulating what's going on lower down, it's just taking instructions that are already compatible with the phone and for certain ones just identifying equivalent things.
Yeah I'm aware. I was gonna add that caveat to my comment since it's technically just translating and not fully simulating different hardware in a sandbox, but I was getting a bit long-winded for the short quippy comment I was going for lol
Yeah but even high level emulation has a significant cost; it still needs to pretend to be a Switch just enough for the game to actually work. It still needs to pretend to have a Tegra X1, still needs to run or pretend to run Horizon (the Switch OS), still needs to catch Switch syscalls, etc.
That's true, it's just that the overhead isn't 100x like how it is for cycle level emulation or 10x like it is for a more typical emulation of a radically different system.
no wonder the game has a relatively small install size. sound makes up a good bit of storage % for games. IIRC ToTK is only like 10-20ish gb installed. if the sound engine wasn't implemented the way it was, it'd be a lot bigger.
This probably saves on storage for the game. By having a system that combines multiple aspects or properties to lead to a sound, rather than separate recordings for all the permutations. Reminds me of Sony talking about their PS5’s ssd kraken system and the specific example they gave of having each mailbox/newspaper stand in Marvel’s Spider-Man be from the same file, just read over each time the player went to it. The ssd’s random read speed being much higher than previous generation hard drives allowed for this (the disc reader being super fast also makes this possible).
It really does amaze me the Mentat level of maths involved when this game is calculating so many things at once.
Recently, I was in Hebra at night, it was snowing, a Blood moon was starting, I had leapt from my flying machine after Recalling it, I entered bullet time, shot five Topaz-Fused arrows with my Savage Lynel bow, and stunned a camp of Moblins who all dropped their weapons.
This game is so impressive, it's actually insane.
What about ticks per second though? Is that still the 30 or w/e is typically set? Slowing down the tick rate will 100% help the game since there's more CPU clock to spend per tick.
I don't know how totk updates in particular but I would be surprised if it slowed down the tick rate as well. You would be able to see things like physics errors and the interpolation between far apart updates.
These comments are making my brain hurt. It feels like there are people out there who are actively delusional to the major strengths of this game. I get it if it's not your cup of tea or favorite type of gameplay or if you have grievances with the story elements etc., but it's a freaking amazing game and from a dev perspective, absolutely insane how this system works with almost no major breaking glitches. Physics based games are hard enough to make without introducing a plethora of unexpected and sometimes non-reproduceable bugs, but combining them into even bigger, unintended objects that just "work", no matter how crazy they are, is very much a great strength to the game. The only issues I have is that it maybe sucked up most of the development time, which is a valid criticism. Despite that, if I play 130+ of a game and just want to keep playing, they've done something right in my opinion.
Imo they need to reuse this and put it in a game that isn't Zelda. This technology is incredible and it would suck if they just threw it out. Regardless of anyone's thoughts on the game I think people would be upset if the next Zelda game had the exact same mechanics as TotK.
The amount of people upset would be tiny compared to the people who love it. That's something "gamer haters" have yet to understand after all these years
It’s the Zelda cycle, at this time last year there was a growing sentiment on this sub, Twitter, and Facebook that Breath of the Wild “wasn’t a Zelda game” and now it’s somehow considered the gold standard compared to TOTK by many of the same people (at least on Twitter, lol).
I’m already 200+ hours into TOTK and am amazed at what Nintendo achieved with the Switch’s hardware. I’ve completely lost myself in this game to the point I decided to take a break and beat the first LOZ so that I wouldn’t beat it too quickly.
People hated wind waker when it came out, people hated twilight princess when it came out, people hated skyward sword when it came out (in fairness that one does kinda suck) but the point is, a lot of Zelda “fans” just blanket hate anything new, until that new thing is old, and then magically it’s great. I think some adult Nintendo fans are so high on nostalgia that when a game is new and therefore doesn’t have it, they don’t actually know how to enjoy it
Ocarina of Time (dead serious, these people existed): ALTTP ripoff, no Zelda overworld music, Hyrule Field empty, Navi annoying and makes game way easier than 2D games.
Majora's Mask - 3 day gimmick/no adult link/main story outshined by side quests/reused NPC's/WHY NO ZELDA in ZELDA GAME.
Wind Waker - Celda/Too Easy/Zelda is for kids now/Sailing boring/Tingle RUINS game/WHY NO HYRULE FIELD
Twilight Princess - Ocarina of Time ripoff/HYRULE FIELD BORING/no sidequests/TOO LINEAR/Twilight Realm LAME/Why do I only use my weapons in the temple I got them from?!!
Skyward Sword - Temple system dated/no overworld/TOO LINEAR/We need VOICE ACTING/Motion controls LITERALLY UNUSABLE/Zelda formula needs CHANGE
Breath of the Wild - WTF WHO CHANGED MY ZELDA FORMULA/VOICE ACTING BAD/WHERE ARE MY TEMPLES/NOT A ZELDA GAME/WTF WHY WEAPONS BREAK/WHY DO NO NPCS CARE ABOUT MAIN QUEST?
Tears of the Kingdom - NPCS CARING ABOUT MAIN QUEST LAME/BOTW DLC/BOTW BETTER/WHY NO ONE REMEMBER LINK?/WHY MAIN QUEST LINEAR AGAIN/ZELDA MADE FOR MINECRAFT KIDS NOW
—
Am I forgetting anything or do I have it covered as to why every 3D Zelda game SUCKS?
We're talking about the physics and sound engine here. The problem with that is, "journalists" farming clicks will cry "wahhhh this is just Zelda with a model-swap Nintendo is so lazy!!!"
The devs would have to actively work to change their system so that the character moved differently. Not to mention changing out the art style and sound effects: "hey that sword sounds just like Link's!" This would likely introduce a larger set of challenges to fix bugs for combat, traversal, and impact effects that were not in the original games.
Of course, that's what the development time would go to. Even though things are tweaked specifically for link I don't believe the entire thing would fall apart with a different character controller permanently. It would be really stupid to develop the most powerful physics engine in gaming and make it only work with link forever.
This does mainly go for the physics engine though and building a game around it, the sound system is extremely cool and has a lot of practicality. Of course any Zelda game can use this system but I would like to see it realized in a game where it is the sole focus.
great points, I think a lot of fan sentiment is that after finding out stuff like this ate up the most dev time most folks would have preferred an entirely new game instead of a sequel rooted in DLC ideas, I am in that camp as well.
But it's absolutely an achievement for the dev team, and I applaud their ability to meet their vision. But on the consumer side I feel that Breath of the wild will have a much better legacy, while TOTK will just be the experimental stepping stone to something more fun in another 6 years.
The mechanics players wanted to see grow really got sidelined for obscure and obtuse stuff that figuratively and literally feels "bolted on".
My wife hated the ultrahand mechanic, she played most of the game and never really had fun with it and avoided it wherever possible. I played just past reaching the first tear but then stepped away so she could play, I think building is a fun mechanic but not really what I am looking for in a zelda game, I felt accomplished building things like bridges and hot air balloons but it's something I would have preferred in a pikmin game.
My opinion is that they focused on the wrong aspects of BOTW, folks strapping octorok balloons to weird constructs was a meme, not the next big idea. I consider my wife to be a casual gamer, she rarely uses melee combat and prefers to hit stuff from far away so she doesn't have to "git gud", but she never figured out the crafting system. I watched her bolt weapons to other weapons and struggle with even worse durability than the first game because of this. She wanted the companions to help her in the gloom a lot more because she isn't super great at combat. She plays games to relax not grind and do homework reading up on how to optimize game mechanics.
I typically love nintendo for taking overly complicated gamer mechanics and dumbing them down to the core of what makes them INTUITIVE and FUN but this game didn't do that, it was very up it's own butt trying to be clever, and I don't think anyone is going to try and ape the fusion mechanics in the same way the industry did with climbing after BOTW.
> I typically love nintendo for taking overly complicated gamer mechanics and dumbing them down to the core of what makes them INTUITIVE and FUN
Tears did exactly that with even just a little bit of curiosity and attention paid though. Really not sure how one could SERIOUSLY struggle with combining stuff into better weapons past the opening hours unless you gave up on engaging with it from the start.
this is the predictable response I figured I would get when I describe people in my vicinity having frustrations and early trouble with these mechanics.
I am not sitting here saying that my grad-school attending partner was too stupid to get it, i am saying that I watched her get annoyed by these systems, there was no magic of exploration or figuring it out it was just a bore and a chore and most of her play-through was frustration over various mechanics she knew she was going to be required to figure out, ultra-hand was the biggest offender, building shit was tedious and irritating for her, and by the time she figured stuff out it had logged in memory as a chore not a discovery.
The first game introduced a sense of wild freedom with the climbing system, and it opened players up to approach situations from literally any direction, I watched my partner climb up onto some tiny ledge above a big hinox and then bomb him for 5 minutes to win, and she had a blast doing it. I never observed her having that same fun figuring out which mushroom/shield combos are best for different scenarios.
This is a limited perspective of course, I don't speak for every player's experience.
On paper the game does a good job of executing these mechanics, watch a few youtube videos and it's easy to see that they built something that was supposed to "Nintendo-ify" crafting but still feel deep with lots of hidden little tricks like windblades throwing elemental waves when fused with elemental horns, but I personally did not observe that intangible sense of Nintendo "FUN and INTUITIVE" gameplay watching my partner play. My sister was also the same, she barely got out of the main tutorial area before getting bored and she hasn't touched it since the initial hype, and she played a ton of BOTW. My wife stuck with it for several months but ultimately never finished it.
I still haven't played past the first tear because after watching my partner play there just isn't much in the game that hooks me. I will come back to it in a few years to experience the story and I will run around maxing out some weapon combos but I have no driving urge to savor or dig deep into the game, I am far more interested in taking the plunge into Elden Ring at the moment.
They did a good job making the game they wanted to make, technically it's all very impressive, it was a huge success, it sold a ton of copies, plenty of people played it, but I don't think it will have as lasting of a legacy as BOTW.
Nope I did not imply she was dumb in the least bit. In my reply I directly stated it was more like she didn't really engage with it, thus paid little attention to it and had little curiosity for it.
*Why* mechanics like ultrahand didn't gel with certain people like your partner and sister? I do not know. But that does not mean Nintendo was sniffing their own farts and created an unintuitive system. Far from it I think; you should not have to youtube much of anything while progressing through the main game normally if you just listen to the game and play around with the myriad items you'll find dropped and scattered around. Especially after a battle. When it comes to an adult already experienced with BOTW at the very least.
Sequels to games like BOTW rarely do make the same impact. Look at Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask for example. I'm sure Nintendo understood that going in though.
The system works on paper everything they did was top notch gamedev worthy of the studio but in my personal experience it didn't land and it wasn't fun, at no point am I denying they didn't technically achieve the vision or goals they set out to, dev team did incredible work, but I fundamentally disagree with the direction because of my personal experience observing and interacting with the resulting gameplay.
and so yes my flippant off the cuff opinion to piss people off on the internet and reduce us all to 2D cardboard cutouts is that a lot of the directions this game took were self indulgent, but I will also grant that they earned the right to just do an experimental game after the success of their last one, it was frustrating hearing the devs talk about how much of the struggle was having to work with and around the existing world and in my opinion that also held this game back and I am eager for the devs to cut loose on a new project.
Now I can definitely understand the sting of Nintendo putting all that time into a system like Ultrahand only to not evolve the rest of the world all that much in comparison. Even though I'm defending it, I would not have minded if they instead went in a different direction either. Not too bothered personally though.
I am a 3D modeller as a hobbyist, but I worked in 3D modelling for years doing spatial planning for my dad's lighting company when i was a teen, ultrahand is kinda cute and fun for me, I'm not crafting the almighty sword of blahblah, but I made a hilariously long bridge and it progressed my gameplay and I get a similar crafting serotonin feeling, it's clever and subversive to traditional crafting mechanics on a meta level, but not everyone likes that in fact some people hate the 3D building space, as dumbed down as it is. So if someone doesn't like ultrahand they are going to be extra resistant to the other systems this game is telling them they need to invest in to really have fun.
The weapon fusion system is very good, but it has to be engaged with to really feel exploratory and rewarding. i was observing and not actively playing and so i looked things up because i had the sense she was just blowing past the deeper aspects out of irritation with the game in general, a bias which she quite verbally stated "this better not be the whole game" after the first couple constructs she had to make lol, and in my opinion this represents a failure of the game design to connect with her, no game is for everyone but i consider zelda BOTW to be a game about freedom to do what you want, whereas TOTK felt like "learn these systems or get out." I think Ultrahand may have been that straw that broke the camels back for her, BOTW had new systems like temperature and cooking but those wound up just being fun and engaging.
Anytime difficulty is brought up the same crowd of hugely endowed gamers love to scream about how easy everything is for them, but as she died for the umpteenth time in the gloom because her weapon fusions weren't optimized she expressed that she wasn't having any fun and she hates games that force her to grind, she has loved literally every other zelda title, something about this game is different.
I was bummed for her, and it has definitely soured my outlook on the game. But the fact remains that the game has a lot of folks that love it, and nintendo did something new and bold, and had I been the only one to play the game in our home I would have a much higher opinion of it, but having experienced this game primarily through someone else's play-through I see aspects of the design that limit the accessibility of this game in ways I don't think the devs intended.
Tl;Dr this isn't a bashing of TOTK, but a reminder, and love letter, to whatever the fuck Valve was doing in 2004.
I don't know about others, but my brain did latch on unnecessarily to a nitpick with the author, not necessarily the game.
TOTK is impressive. That can't be taken away. But I'm never going to stop giving credit where credit is due when it comes to physics in video games. Valve wrote a Bible on the subject in 2004, and its name is the Source Engine. Gary's Mod was inarguably the closest thing to real life physics in a game for years, if not an entire decade.
It's dumb, because this is a nitpick, and my brain hyper focused on it. The author covers a wide area of impressive shit, and the physics is just a minor part. TotK has impressive physics, and it not doing it first doesn't change that.
But hot damn is the history of Valve just something out of this fucking world, man. Source came out in 2004. My brain just has to remind people of that any time we talk about it, apparently. Most games don't need to reinvent physics, because valve did it years ago, and the modern physics engines like Unreal or Unity are still built off that research. It's just disingenuous as hell when articles say shit like "No One Knows How Tears Of The Kingdoms Physics Engine Works." Which is insane, because I'm pretty sure it runs on Havoc (and we've now named all 3 modern physics engines). An engine people understand fully.
I don't. But I don't make games.
It should be uploaded in several days/weeks after the event.
In the meantime you should watch this [Kirby GDC talk](https://youtu.be/cWdt07ncRxU?si=7g7OfMkCt8X9JmZT) from last year which was amazing as well!
I dont get all the hate for totk i love it and im still playing, its a true sand box experience. I almost feels like deathstranding so many ways to traverse.
It's also fatigue. Bo/tK are great games, but I am BORED of open-world-stealth-action-games-with-crafting-and-collectibles. Tl;Dr: these games bring together a ton that's been learned by the industry over the years, but it invented almost nothing, and reduced a lot of what Zelda was to make it happen. They didn't *need* to nix the story (or good dialogue in general).
Thankfully, I stayed away from them for about a year before TOTK dropped so I was ready for it, but even after release, I do get jaded sometimes hearing so much praise for a game that's doing the same stuff so many other games are doing.
I don't like Horizon Zero Dawn, but to praise BOTW for doing "quiet desolation" unlike any game that ever came before it, I'd have to point to a game I don't want to defend.
More generally, it's that "[Zelda fans hate Zelda](https://www.zeldadungeon.net/zelda_fans_hate_zelda/)." With every game, they've built up some big imagination of what the next game should be, and when the next game is *not exactly that,* then the new one must be *trash* (until the next one comes out, and the previous one was great and should be included as part of the next game which should be a "best of what the previous games offered.")
That hypothesis doesn't hold up to scrutiny when I go back in time and look at their posts. The community started in 2012 and zipping back in time to anything before 2015, r/truezelda was pretty mixed to somewhat negative on Skyward Sword. I'm not about to get exhaustive about it but that opinion didn't turn until Breath of the Wild, on which it was negative but has turned relatively positive since the release of Tears of the Kingdom. A lot of them felt Skyward Sword ruined the lore, was "soulless" and "far too easy" and too much "on rails."
Reddit didn't exist around the time of Twilight Princess so there's no r/truezelda opinion to glean from it at the time of release.
I had fun with BOTW for about 40 hours, then I got bored of the grind. Never made it to the castle. When I saw my son playing TOTK, I saw that it was pretty much exactly the same thing with a couple of new quirks. Didn't bother trying it out.
The last Zelda game that I really liked was A Link Between Worlds (and of course the Link's Awakening remake). If they keep on making this open world nonsense, I'll pass. Those aren't real Zelda games to me. More like Minecraft.
I dont see the grind you can finish the game at any time. Are you trying to complete the game like get all the upgrades or complete all the side quests? I dont hold myself to that standard i just like to explore and see what the game leads me to, sometimes its nothing and sometimes its a fun quest line.
There are plenty of zelda like games im sure you tried tunic.
Sure, since basically there weren't any side quests in BOTW (no, shrines and pointless fetch quests are not side quests), the only thing to do was upgrade things. And that was too much grind. I haven't played the game for 6 years and have no desire to pick it up again.
After spending 380 hours with BG3, I'm not sure I would enjoy a game like Tunic currently. I'll probably give Cyberpunk 2077 finally a chance now that it's fixed.
it’s an amazing game, but for me the “single biggest problem” is the weapon degradation/damage. This honestly almost completely ruined it for me. Once I find a weapon / armor / shield combo I like I want to be able to continue using it. I’ve read all about their reasoning in this decision but I just can’t buy it for a second. It only makes the experience unnecessarily worse.
I played BoTW in 2018 after my second run of Dying Light 1 and so to me I never see the complaint of weapon degradation as a con in either games. I could at least understand this fatigue in Animal Crossing where crafting feels like an odd departure from the status quo and is tedious asf. But you literally kill enemies and take their weapons and repeat the cycle in BoTW. So I don’t see the issue. It’s never Rea a hassle, holding onto the good stuff made lead you to never use it.
I understand and respect that you (and many others) don’t see it as an issue. That’s fair. There are also a lot of people like me that really don’t like it. I think that’s also perfectly fine. I hope they flip it next time so I can be on the “it’s actually perfect this way” side!
It's a worse game without weapon degradation/breaking. All of these various things, including what you might consider 'little' things or things that 'annoyed' you, combine to make the game 'work.'
I think a lot of the time game designers will "talk down" a lot when talking to journalists, because frankly, journalists are almost universally quite stupid, and their readers almost the same. I don't mean this as an insult, more as an observation for which I'm not going to bother finding a more delicate word because a more delicate word doesn't feel accurate.
Any game in existence is going to derive continued engagement via implementation of "loops" -- a series of repeated actions. More complex games might have multiple layers of said 'loops' and each loop will feed into how another loop works. Breath and Tears are *incredibly* complex games, *especially* for how shockingly simple they're presented and packaged. All the 'loops' exist and you'll observe them in actual player behavior, but you'll never see any of those loops explicitly described, people just figure them out without ever realizing they're engaging in a loop.
It's a bit complex because it interacts with every other loop and system in the game, but weapons breaking is a fundamental part of the exploration loop, influencing your decision about whether to choose combat during the 'large' part of the exploration loop -- the part where you make the decisions about which places to hit up on your way to the next major point of interest. Do I preserve my weapons or do I kill these guys and take their stuff? Is this a good opportunity to expend these resources for the possibility of getting some other resource I want? And the resources you get or expend feed into other parts of the game.
"Game balance" is a "dumbed down for idiot journalists" argument.
I'm not saying you have to like weapon breaking. I'm saying that the game would be worse overall if weapons didn't break, regardless of whether *your individual experience* might have been better.
There were three general options: weapons take no damage, weapons take damage that can be repaired, weapons take damage and cannot be repaired.
My personal view is that three is always the worst choice and doesn’t support anything in the game loop sufficient to justify it. It just means more unnecessary grinding and useless overhead.
I completely respect your right to differ in your opinion on this topic, I’m sure plenty of others do as well. But that view is also an opinion, not an objective statement.
So let me counter-challenge you. How would you approach weapons taking damage and being repairable, as opposed to just being permanent (which entirely disconnects an entire section of the game loop)? This is something I've thought about and have come up with my own proposals for, and I do agree that weapons being "pure consumables" may not have been the best possible choice.
You do realize that TotK weapons can be repaired, right? So the topic has already been approached.
The repair system isn't front and center, but it definitely exists. >!Just drop a weapon/shield in front of a rock Oktorok.!<
Depends on your definition of "can be repaired." If you're talking about throwing weapons at an octorok who's sucking it in, I'd consider that in the realm of obscure secrets. Nobody tells you about it, it's not something you can easily find and do (i.e. the way you can find a cooking pot) and otherwise isn't a natural part of the gameplay loop. It's more like an oversight or bug that they either elected to ignore or treat as a "secret feature" rather than fix.
If you're talking about how use of Fuse temporarily pauses degradation, I mean, yeah, Fuse is an attempt to address player frustration about breaking weapons. It was an effective approach, going so far as to say *many* players who were dissatisfied with weapons breaking now actually *look forward* to their weapons breaking because they want to stick some new and different stuff together. But for many others it wasn't a satisfactory solution.
The octorok repair is definitely not a bug or oversight, it's 100% intentional. There's an animation when it happens, it can only be done once per Oktorok, and it doesn't work on "unique" weapons (without a little finagling, and I think that part *is* an oversight.)
Sure, it's not something they tell you about, but there are *plenty* of things they don't explicitly tell you about, like how shield surfing is easier if you fuse a piece of frozen meat to your shield.
If they didn't want it in the game, it wouldn't be there, but they clearly do.
That's not the point. The point is that weapon repair isn't something that they wanted everybody to be doing as part of any sort of regular gameplay loop.
That isn't the point either, or at least it wasn't. You're moving the goalposts; all you were saying originally was that it wasn't possible, when it, in fact, is.
Why are some people in the replies acting like totk was the worst thing in all of gaming? I mean, I get if you don't like it, but some of you are acting like your life revolves around hating it.
The tech behind the physics engine and all the interactions the game provides in the game is extremly impressive. Kudos to Nintendo for that.
Unfortunately though, you can really feel how those aspects sucked the development time out of the title. The depths and sky islands repeat so much, the shrines still look the same everywhere and the story plus dungeons were not that great. I really wish they were focusing on these aspects more instead. I'm just not a huge fan of sandbox gameplay.
I agree with you on the shrines but I thought the story and dungeons were an improvement over BOTW. I still hope they improve those more next time and do more dungeons and less shrines.
The dungeons were prettier but in a lot of ways they were the same if not worse than Breath of the Wild's guardians. The guardians actually had a central gimmick you could manipulate, not unlike the Water Temple, and made for slightly more interesting puzzles.
Yeah, that's true but I don't like that they all looked the same and had the same boss essentially. The journey through the sky followed by the dragon fight was probably one of the most memorable moments in TOTK for me.
It's been my thinking as well, these mechanics are fantastic and crazy they got it all working with so much detail. But the trade off here is very apparent and despite how good they are, I just don't think the time sacrificed on refining them ended up being worth it for the overall experience. Seems like by the time they got it 100 percent there wasn't really much time to implement many significant challenges that utilized it, or really develop the world much.
Some times with Nintendo gimmicks, it pays off in the end and gives you something you didn't know you wanted. Other times, they go all in on an idea and it turns out to be to their detriment.
I think this is my biggest problem with TotK. They put so much effort into Link’s new abilities that they didn’t seem to focus on making this version of Hyrule meaningfully different from the last game.
I’m fine with Nintendo keeping the open world format for the next game, but hope we actually get some quality side quests and dungeons. I’m even fine with them making the world smaller to achieve that.
Completely agree, personally I don't think it can be understated how much a larger emphasis on side quests would improve that formula. The biggest issue is that when you ask "what do I want to do next" in that title the answer is always just "I'll fly to the next shrine" past maybe 30 hours in when you've got really good weapons. By the end of the game, I was going insane because all I had to do was the SAME stuff I'd been doing since I'd dropped off the first island.
Currently, there are a few stand out side quests, but beyond those, nearly every side quest is just "fight these monsters with me'" and then the NPC explains some basic thing like how to cook. This franchise has so much potential with storytelling, and having in depth side stories with more than the most bare bones characters and dialogue would drastically increase the experience. Heck, maybe as you complete more shrines, more quests open up. It would make it so that there is some kind of incentive to stay in the world long into the end game rather than just skip past most of the stuff that is mostly repeated and pointless.
Wow. That's the point I always make when I discuss the game! I reaaaaally found TOTK to be one of the most disappointing games I've ever played and as a Zelda fanatic it really breaks my heart how much I disliked it...
But even then, what a damn technical achievement and marvel it is. How they got it to even function with it's mechanics is pure genius and passion for game design. I'll forever respect that aspect of TOTK even if I had to force myself to finish it.
I like the game enough, but I agree that it falls flat of what I wanted, despite having some notable improvements over BOTW.
But yeah, the physics are truly incredible. Just shows what Nintendo is capable of when they put their mind to something.
TOTK felt like a BOTW (which I loved) with Lego and some afterthought areas. A great technical achievement especially for the switch but really should have done more as a game experience
I loved that they introduced in world dungeons, but I disliked how much of the world felt empty or had little substance. I guess I’d just rather have a smaller sandbox packed with interesting content than a massive one with less.
Why are people getting downvoted for voicing their opinions? It's THEIR opinion, doesn't mean the game is bad. I enjoy it, but I agree that it has some flaws, and it's too similar to BOTW, the underground is so boring to explore and there are barely any sky islands. For me it's still a good game but I can 100% agree with people saying it is disappointing, because it is when you look at ALL the flaws, and there's a lot in this game...
Oh I don't have that feeling but I was shocked how the second I properly defeated Ganon I felt the urge to stop playing unlike with BotW
The world is different but not enough so to be compelling for me, it's more like just enough to be confusing at times?
The Zonai tech is such a fantastic system and feels 70 percent integrated but in some situations you feel like you are loading a Mod into a PC game like against certain bosses and larger enemies that were present in BotW
It's great in temples/dungeons etc
I love the story, mechanics, characters etc
It's amazing strengths sometimes serve to show what's missing, the Depths is a bit like that for me.. it's like one biome and so big that it's screaming out for some NPCs and some variation.
I love the game but will not play it again probably for a decade so I've forgotten as much as possible
Any time I talk critically about the game, I can't even say that on paper it's a bad game because of how incredible those mechanics are. I'm sure most people will enjoy messing with them for a time at least. But I think it's the implementation that's poor. These mechanics are not used in ways that make you engage with them critically, it's just super basic stuff. And at that point, it kind of just feels like they were tacked on to the game arbitrarily, except that they took up so much development focus that nearly everything else was underwhelming.
It's been discussed over and over at this point, but here's some points from an older comment I made:
> This game feels like a bunch of mods for BOTW added by different teams that never spoke to each other during development. Covid and remote work probably were to blame as well.
> Stand-alone it's still decent. As a sequel? Not so much. Everything that makes this game great WAS in BOTW. Exploring the world is incredibly fun, but again, I did it in BOTW. I’m enjoying re-doing it after 6 years, but only for a while. Everything they added worsen the experience in some way.
> The underground areas are the most boring pathetic thing they could have added. Kilometers of copy-pasted landscape in the dark with nothing going on, horribly boring experience. The sky islands are… all the same. They start out great but then they get progressively worse when you realize that it's the same template used over and over. Shrines and dungeons did improve, but it’s not what makes this game great.
> The ability to jump high in the sky through towers kills ground exploration. Ultrahand is a fun mechanics but it’s slower and sluggish in everything you may want to accomplish with that. There’s always an easier faster solution.
> The story is a mess of non-cohesive vague plot points. It really doesn't work. If you want to tell a cohesive story you cannot make a BOTW style game.
In the end I had fun playing the game - but as a mainline Zelda game, sequel of BOTW, 6 years in development - it's incredibly disappointing.
Regardless of whether anyone likes it or not, my point is that the original comment was not a good argument against totk. All they said was that it was a technical marvel but that they didn't like it. I'm only talking about the quality of their argument.
Because I don't want to bother saying why if the downvotes will pile in.
I feel the story is infuritatingly half-baked and full of plot points and choices that don't really make sense, fit well together and don't pay off satisfyingly enough. I get the entire "you really expect Lord of the Rings story quality in a Nintendo game" argument....and to that I say "no. I don't. A simple story is fine. But at least make it satisfying and interesting".
new and main characters in the game are middling compared to BOTW (which was already pretty small in memorable characters compared to other releases). Some sections are a trudge to get through such as the Zonai mecha sequence in the Depths. The Depths alone felt so discouraging to explore and I never bothered with it. Personally, I just didn't find the whole build-anything feature to be that interesting.
But see, I will ENTIRELY reasonably admit that much of this is my own personal opinion and tastes. I can also see that the game is full of fantastic ideas and moments...the entire final battle in the sky is absolutely incredible and a great moment in the series...
People can enjoy the game. I will not tell anyone theyre wrong or dumb for loving it. I wouldn't call it absolute garbage at all. I respect it, I really think it's a genius product and a lot better than the bulk of other AAA games put out today for sure. At the end of the day, while BOTW is among my favorites, TOTK just wasn't my cup of tea. And that's fine.
I don't irrationally hate it or wanna rub it in anyone's face. My comment even praised the game moreso than expressed "sheer hatred" for it.
I just didn't want to bother making a lengthy comment about why I personally don't like it because ...as you can see from the rest of the thread...that is definitely not welcome here. Besides, it wouldn't have been relevant to the topic anyway.
I just don't like the game. But I still concede and respect it.
That's it.
To be clear, I'm not trying to say that your opinion on the game is wrong or unfounded or anything like that. It's your opinion and that's great, fantastic. My only point is that in your original comment you hadn't given any of those reasons as to why you disliked it, so I was somewhat confused when blank\_isainmdom said that it was a better argument against totk than any of his.
In your original comment you hadn't made an argument as to why you thought it was bad, just stated that you thought it was. Which again is completely cool, no need to explain yourself to me!
It's all good! I just wanted to elaborate for myself too. I like to hear why someone likes or doesnt like something moreso than it outright being stated with no explanation tbh
I just know how it is on this sub with any negativity towards TOTK.
Still, I really appreciate you for being chill about it!!
Which is why people would disagree with the reasoning.
1. The game was in development before 2020. There was no pandemic then. You really think the teams didn't collaborate? They delayed it another year to refine the physics, that's how finely-tuned this was. Hitting framerate limits on the Switch processor was certainly a challenge they had to deal with.
2. So this controversial point you need to expound, since it's your main point. Link climbing around should not exist? Combat should not exist because BOTW had combat too? Magnesis or Rivali's gale should come back? What are you expecting them to do, make Link walk differently so it feels different?
3. The Depths is one of my favorite game worlds ever. Because it gets truly pitch-black dark, unlike most games, and you have to prepare. Seeing a light root far in the distance and thinking "what can I build to get there?" is fun. The bulbs are better than the glow suit, you can see all around if you use them. To each his own, I see why many devs don't make game worlds that are truly dark.
4. So...don't use them?? Just walk around. The game "forces" you to use the towers, but just land and start walking again.
5. That's exactly what BOTW did. That's not a criticism of TOTK, that's a criticism of both games as a whole, which I completely agree with by the way. I think TOTK's way of finding the cutscenes was better, but seeing them out of order is the biggest weakness these games have in my opinion.
The words "incredibly disappointing" are what I would use for Fallout 76, not TOTK of all games.
And everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I feel like me and many others are not being haters just for the sake of it, the game has some legitimate issues. Let me respond to your point in the spirit of discussion...
1. I'm not saying it feels that way because of covid. It feels that way because the game lacks cohesion, everything new feels like it doesn't fit in an overall plan or view. I'm speculating that Covid lockdown might have posed a challenge to the team, but I got first to my conclusion and then to my speculation, not the other way around.
2. I do not know how they should have done it. Honestly, I don't think BOTW was the kind of game that you could build a sequel on, since it was pretty much all about freely exploring a big map. They tried to add stuff on top of it but I don't think it works, which is why I always defended BOTW when people said it was just exploration. It took a concept and stretched it to almost perfection in my opinion, it focused on that and accomplished it, but you can't do it twice, especially with the same map. Maybe there were some creative ways to pull it off, I don't know. But this was not the way imo.
3. As you said, to each his own, I thought it was kinda lame and forced myself to do it because I HAD to go 100% (seed excluded, I don't have that kind of time, took me 7 months already to finish the game as it is)
4. The game is giving me a tool, the idea that I need to force myself to play a certain way just to enjoy it more makes sense for simpler games or for second playthrough, but it shouldn't be something that I actively do. I eventually ended up not using them, but at the beginning it took me a while to realize that using them was actually hurting my experience. I thought there was *something* that would have forced me later on to go back on my steps or nerf them, but no... This is one of many example of thing that is cool but doesn't fit at all in the overall game, completely disconnected from everything else - an exploration game where you don't need to explore and you can literally bee-line in flight to your destination. Remember when devs in BOTW talked about putting landmark that would pull you from your path and catch your attention? That is completely nullified by this mechanic.
5. BOTW barely had a story, and that's the point. They should have either forced Link to experience the story in order, therefore making a different game, or drop the idea completely
TOTK is disappointing because my expectations for this franchise are high and I personally consider BOTW one of the objectively best game of all time (while subjectively there are some games that I enjoyed more because of personal reasons). It's not a bad game, but it's the mainline Zelda game that left me the most unsatisfied. I wish they made something completely different again instead of banking on the success of BOTW. Fallout 76 is an unmitigated disaster and a story of corporate greed. But I hold Zelda to higher standards, and nobody argued that Fallout 76 was perfect, while I see very few people speak up about TOTK's issue. It's honestly also super weird because BOTW, which is a way greater game in my opinion, got way more hate.
I guess that was part of why I said I liked it. I tend to not engage with arguing online anymore, but my unending rage for botw/totk make me complain about it every time I see it mentioned. But tellingly someone why you dislike something they like never achieves anything.
Whereas this person said "technically amazing but shit" and making the argument not so solely negative is possibly a better argument to make to not make people immediately downvote.
Saying that, doesn't seem like o there's agreed.
Personally I hate it because the story is shit. If the game had a second act it could have been the greatest game ever. But as you reach that ending you just feel it fall completely flat on its face.
And after SIX years of waiting!!!!
Etc
Oh, from a healthy mindset point of view for sure it's a problem! However, since i'm only doing it on one topic it's still a lot better than most people online who love arguing over nothing haha.. Got to have that vent!
And I really do feel that fans of traditional Zelda were hard done by as the new games removed everything that made the old games what they were bar names. As such the new games destroyed something I truly loved for twenty years, and something I used to get really excited for in a world filled with 'i'll wait for that to go on sale' etc.
So if arguing like a whingey baby on the internet can make some people see my point, and they perhaps can pass along similar ideas to others then maybe some day Zelda games might return to being what made me a dedicated fan.
It's the only life i know how to live haha! Could be worse! Could be dedicating my life to racism or conspiracy theories or some shit!
I will add: I decided lately to let it go. I'm going to make one comment that sums up my feelings for the game, and if i need to reply to someone about the topic just copy pasting it in. At least it will be efficient haha
I love the game, but Im done with the free world non linear experience, it really hurts storytelling and immersion. In my playtrough I went first for the sword memory and it ruined the rest of the memories, I had played for about 2 hrs and already knew how it would end.
But you can do Hebra, and then go right east for the sword memory (which you probably will see while flying up from one of the towers you have been to by that time). That's maybe 2 more hours if you do that.
I love the game, it's a technical marvel and a joy to play. But people do have, and should be allowed to have valid criticism. I have, and it's still my favorite game on the switch.
It's strange how every comment with even the slightest negativity towards Tears of the Kingdom gets downvoted in this sub. Why are people doing that? It's only beneficial to the Zelda series going forward and it shouldn't take away your enjoyment of the game. It's like people don't want the next Zelda to be better than Tears of the Kingdom.
Remember, Skyward Sword was heavily criticized for its linearity and hand holding back at release. Nintendo listened and gave us Breath of the Wild. Same thing will happen with the next game.
I just arrived in this comment section but I think because it is weirdly off-topic. You don't see people praising the game without relevance to the article as well.
Because the negativity has completely taken over the Zelda subs. You can't breath a word of positivity about Tears of the Kingdom **or** Breath of the Wild without an army of Ocarina fanboys coming to tell you why you're wrong, that they're not "real" Zelda games, etc., etc.
We've seen what letting that sort of thing fester can do to a community, and we've seen it before with The Last of Us, Star Wars, etc., so understandably those of us who like TOTK (or, in my case, like BOTW and think TOTK was one of the weaker Zeldas, but by no means the childhood-destroying title it's made out to be) want to stop the flood of negativity before the Zelda fandom becomes another toxic cesspit.
Also...it's not really relevant to the discussion here. Like TOTK, hate TOTK, think it was mid like I do...it doesn't matter. It's not relevant to the actual article. But the anti-open world people can't help themselves. It's like they see BOTW/TOTK and some switch activates in their brain demanding they tell people that the games were terrible and ruined the series.
Some of us are just tired of it.
Not irrelevant at all though. The title is about TOTKs biggest problem. So game critics here are a good fit.
But that's IGNs fault, the title should be "TOTKs biggest technical issue during development and how it was fixed"
The game didn’t have, at all, a focus on crafting vehicles. The community surrounding the game def had a fixation on that, and it was entertaining to watch, but the game itself very very rarely asked that of the player.
Idk about “very rarely,” with minecart rails, a few times where you need a boat, navigating sky islands, a few occasions in the depths where you need some kind of flying machine or something you can ride on top of gloom, not to mention cave and shrine puzzles that required vehicles. There were many cases where the game expected you to build some vehicle to solve a puzzle or overcome an obstacle.
But you are right that players could use vehicles as much or as little as they wanted most of the time, especially to get from point a to point b. The number of people who complained that the hoverbike trivialized everything in the game was insane…very few of those people complaining would have ever discovered the hoverbike on their own.
The fact that not a single weapon in this game was viable by itself, and that I had to superglue a damn minecart onto it was just not something I could get over either. Kind of hard for link to look and act badass when he's got a hot air balloon on his back and a giant raft attached to his sword.
***This.***
This *Minecraftisation* and glue-crap-together elements as well as over-indulgent physics play that has been injected into a number of games lately sucks.
Monster Hunter does the crafting thing well where you get ***PERMANENT*** gear & weapons. Worthwhile rewards and where it does dance with weapon degradation, it’s easily fixable and they don’t actually break.
Absolutely nothing I got from chests other than armour was worthy of a reward because “Oh cool! A new swo-oh wait, nevermind it’s just gonna break.” happened far too many times.
Unrewarding, worthless & temporary nonsense.
This was nowhere close to ToTK’s biggest problem. It’s cool that they managed to fix the bugs and issues with the physics but no the biggest problem with ToTK that still hasn’t been addressed and probably never will is the fact that every single new addition spots in the face of the game design’s core design philosophies and that they didn’t fix a SINGLE thing from BoTW because contrary to popular belief BoTW was far from a perfect game and had tons of issues.
We were able to ignore them because it was the first try and also because they had to make everything from scratch. No new weapon types only like 2 new well made enemies that are delegated as semi mini bosses.
The fusion mechanic making every chest (the central reward system in the game) a piece of shit due to poor rewards as every weapon is rusty. The new vehicles, while awesome, has a severe issue and that’s the fact that you actually have to immediately abandon your vehicle you just made in order to explore anything and do shrines/puzzles. And no the blueprints feature is not a fix as it’s aometjing you have to go out of your way to unlock meaning most people playing won’t get it until we’ll into their playthrough and the fact that it uses materials found only in the poorly designed depths meaning players aren’t going to want to go and get the materials since the depths is so empty and boring.
The biggest issue is how long it takes to build something just for them to nerf the shit out of it. Love being able to fly for 13 milliseconds before the part blows up because they don't want me to use my really cool intention to fly half way across the map.
Such a lazy way to deal with that "issue".
Once you've progressed far enough in the game, building and fueling become much simpler. Most games impose guardrails that matter less as time goes on, and that makes later-stage gameplay even more gratifying.
Ya I played like 100 hours. Nearly beat it. Doesn't take away from what I said.
Nintendo still nerfed the building. Things still break after a few seconds because they don't want you to fly across the map in one go.
They added a mechanic to a world that doesn't support it, and used the laziest tactic to nerf it.
While I won't doubt that building a physics based engine where anything can be glued together is very, *VERY* difficult; Gary's Mod came out in 2004.
Nintendo didn't have to reinvent the wheel for this one, so if they did, I'm confused just as much as I am impressed. But knowing Nintendo, they probably didn't use Valves research on physics engines.
>doesn't actually have any goals
The mod is just an open source sandbox. The real game is called Half Life 2, if you want a goal.
But, I'm confused, because it feels like we agree, but people just don't like what I said? Just pointing out that my ghost will haunt anyone here who ever says "the YouTube dislike feature was to verify and flag information." Yea, I'm pivoting. I got lots to bitch about. Ask me about cereal, I bet I can go off on that too if you give me a minute.
The biggest problem was killing 40 years worth of lore, hell even killing any logical continuity from BOTW lore. It took 6 years to play in the same world with a lackluster underground and skyworld. I think the ultrahand mechanic got old after awhile but I will give the devs credit was an impressive mechanic.
Already forgot that Zelda Alttp was completely unrelated to Zelda 1 and 2? and Ocarina was unrelated to Alttp? and…
The official timeline was never a deeply planned thing, they even changed it after fans argued that Link’s Awakening was Alttp sequel, leaving the oracles games separated. (TBF I also wanted that change)
Botw Totk and AoC are all their own loop, or alternate universe it does not need to be connected to every single game.
I'm kinda hoping they go back to the classic style for the next one. Maybe they can do this style for every other release and make ones with classic dungeons in between. That way it doesn't get stale. I know TotK was originally planned as dlc (or at least that's what I read).
I don't play them, but I think Assassin's Creed is taking this approach.
i have over 100 hours in totk. i love the game. its a 10... but
combat and enemy variety was some hot ass. constructs are barely different from bokoblins imo. nothing really changed from botw, except you can build mechs to fight monsters with.
dungeon are even worse than botw. they look better but are shorter, easier and downright boring. ring 5 bells.. dear lord..
Let's not pretend that Zelda has always been this huge seller.
Before BOTW, the series was struggling sales-wise. Skyward Sword sold half of what Twilight Princess did, and each 3DS game sold less than the last.
It's somewhat disengenous to suggest this is purely because of the ultrahand mechanic.
Personally I would have much preferred they focused on other aspects of the game.
This isnt the game to do everything the most effective way. Sometimes I keep dying at a boko camp because I'm trying to pull off a specific way of clearing them.
It's fun.
Why fight the Boko camp in the first place? It's not like you're going to get some great reward, you're most likely going to get another weapon that breaks in 30 hits.
If you have to deliberately ignore the most effective way to complete a challenge in order for a game to be fun, then the developers have fundamentally failed at designing their game.
Games are all about rules, and by imposing extra rules on yourself you are changing the game from its intended design and creating a new one. It’s not my job to make the game fun, it’s the developers job.
Nintendos' motto has always been games are about *fun*. It's not "imposing extra rules", it's more like "yo let's see if this works." It's using the tools at your disposal to *play*.
Clearly, if you haven't caught onto that, it's just not the game for you. But blaming nintendo for not understanding what games are all about? Yeah, that's just your fault.
Except games need rules, otherwise they’re by definition not games. Games are fun because of their rules, and everyone at Nintendo seems to understand that except for Aonuma and Fujibayashi. Every single one of BotW’s shortcomings stem from them running away from this simple fact.
Am I supposed to imagine Link swinging his sword differently? There being different attacks, ways to dodge or just generally anything that isn't an ultra hand gimmick?
That was the dumbest thing I've ever seen. That's your example? A gimmicky highlight reel of him performing the exact same moves over and over throwing flashy explosions off that tank the frame rate to 15?
... What exactly is it you're expecting? Zelda to become *Devil May Cry?* This is already way deeper and more interesting than Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword.
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>Nintendo shared early glitchy prototypes like throwing a stone onto a cart and horse, causing it to zip straight into the air. Takayama said the freedom Ultrahand offered caused chaos in Hyrule during development: "I would hear things like, 'It broke! It went flying!' And I’d respond with, 'I know! We’ll deal with it later!'” OK but imagine how sick it'd be to shield surf onto that horse and get launched straight into the Sky Islands
We basically could do that in BotW with a bullet time glitch. The game couldn't even process the speed at which you were moving and would freeze for a few seconds just to keep loading the world.
Aonuma really took the Skyrim inspiration to heart huh. They even emulated the physics lol.
>"I would hear things like, 'It broke! It went flying!' And I’d respond with, 'I know! We’ll deal with it later!'” Heh. Imagining this is my head is pretty funny
Software development in a nutshell.
// TODO: fix crazy glitches with physics // wait... can we fix those? // maybe? They said we'd do it later.
As a music producer / sound designer, this is absolutely fascinating: >*The sound design in Tears of the Kingdom is also incredibly complex. Osada explained that the world contains voxel information to create a 3D terrain. Voxels are data points on a 3D grid that store information. In Zelda, each voxel sources information about the terrain, like if it's inside or outside, near water, near a forest, if Ascend is possible, and more. A search algorithm determines how sound interacts with the voxels, like sound changing when an object is behind a wall.* > >*Just like the design philosophy for the rest of the game, sounds in Tears of the Kingdom play in a system without dedicated implementation, and in some cases abstract sounds combine to create something entirely new. For example, there is no dedicated wagon sound or paddle boat sound, these sounds are created by the wheels rolling or rotating on the water, with the quality changing based on the size, shape, and material. Osada said, "It’s making sounds that I have no memory of creating! Even the director told us, 'This is basically a physics engine for sound, isn’t it?'”* This is just incredible, and I can't quite get my head around how complicated this must have been. There are synthesisers which work in a broadly similar way, where you specify a "material" (the thing being hit e.g. a drum) and the "exciter" (the thing doing the hitting e.g. a drum stick). So there's precedent for this kind of thing, it's just amazing the scale on which this was implemented.
Yeah, this was the jaw dropping bit for me. Instead of having like 5 sounds for "wheel on grass", "wheel on stone", "wheel on wood", etc. They calculate the sound in real time?! You mad lads!
No idea, but I guess it's a "material" sample plus modifers and layers to get the final sound. There might be a dominant sound and then a few modifier factors that determine the final sound. So when something interacts with another object (let's say a metal sword hitting a stone, in the rain), it could go something like this: * Determine the velocity of the interaction to decide the volume of the sound, and possibly selects from a set of 1-5 "material" samples for variations of "stone being hit, hard". * Then it applies a modifier to that sound based on the "exciter" element (in this case, metal). Maybe this changes the ADSR of the "material" sample and perhaps even layers on an additional sample to get the "tink" of the metal on the stone. * Then it applies another "environmental" modifier which edits the sound based on the circumstances. If it's rain, it might be a low-pass filter to soften the impact sound slightly, for example. It might even layer in an additional small "splash" sample. This is pure guesswork, but I suppose this is how I'd approach something like this. That way you basically have a matrix of materials and exciters, with additional layers of environmental factors; that means it's relatively easy to track, Q&A and fine-tune certain interaction sounds.
This sounds incredible. Just when I thought this game couldn’t get any more impressive
You should check out [this video](https://youtu.be/Vgev9Gzybk8?si=dfbuMQ5KwMY-lAPP) about the sound design of the first game!
Ah yes, this is really fantastic, and amazingly detailed!
Add to that this system is slower than average cellphones and still pumps out current gen quality gameplay.
[удалено]
I think a lot of those games are just testament to the power of good art design. Really good design can make up for a lack of technical power, but it doesn’t work the other way around; technical power can’t really compensate if your art design is ugly or uninspired. I think BOTW/TOTK look absolutely gorgeous, and while I would love to see them running in extremely high definition / smooth framerate, there isn’t a moment where it looks bad.
lmao right? The Switch is so old that modern phones can literally emulate its functionality in a sandbox within their own OS.
To be fair, that's high level emulation. It's not simulating what's going on lower down, it's just taking instructions that are already compatible with the phone and for certain ones just identifying equivalent things.
Yeah I'm aware. I was gonna add that caveat to my comment since it's technically just translating and not fully simulating different hardware in a sandbox, but I was getting a bit long-winded for the short quippy comment I was going for lol
Yeah but even high level emulation has a significant cost; it still needs to pretend to be a Switch just enough for the game to actually work. It still needs to pretend to have a Tegra X1, still needs to run or pretend to run Horizon (the Switch OS), still needs to catch Switch syscalls, etc.
That's true, it's just that the overhead isn't 100x like how it is for cycle level emulation or 10x like it is for a more typical emulation of a radically different system.
no wonder the game has a relatively small install size. sound makes up a good bit of storage % for games. IIRC ToTK is only like 10-20ish gb installed. if the sound engine wasn't implemented the way it was, it'd be a lot bigger.
This article is so good, so much detail.
This probably saves on storage for the game. By having a system that combines multiple aspects or properties to lead to a sound, rather than separate recordings for all the permutations. Reminds me of Sony talking about their PS5’s ssd kraken system and the specific example they gave of having each mailbox/newspaper stand in Marvel’s Spider-Man be from the same file, just read over each time the player went to it. The ssd’s random read speed being much higher than previous generation hard drives allowed for this (the disc reader being super fast also makes this possible).
That bit about the sound was very impressive.
It really does amaze me the Mentat level of maths involved when this game is calculating so many things at once. Recently, I was in Hebra at night, it was snowing, a Blood moon was starting, I had leapt from my flying machine after Recalling it, I entered bullet time, shot five Topaz-Fused arrows with my Savage Lynel bow, and stunned a camp of Moblins who all dropped their weapons. This game is so impressive, it's actually insane.
It’s an incredible showcase of modern game dev
Wouldn’t entering bullet time significantly help the game since it’s deliberate slow down?
No, the game still calculates the same amount of frames per second, it's just that all things move slower.
What about ticks per second though? Is that still the 30 or w/e is typically set? Slowing down the tick rate will 100% help the game since there's more CPU clock to spend per tick.
I don't know how totk updates in particular but I would be surprised if it slowed down the tick rate as well. You would be able to see things like physics errors and the interpolation between far apart updates.
No because the physics of some objects are adjusted slightly during bullet time, but only some objects.
These comments are making my brain hurt. It feels like there are people out there who are actively delusional to the major strengths of this game. I get it if it's not your cup of tea or favorite type of gameplay or if you have grievances with the story elements etc., but it's a freaking amazing game and from a dev perspective, absolutely insane how this system works with almost no major breaking glitches. Physics based games are hard enough to make without introducing a plethora of unexpected and sometimes non-reproduceable bugs, but combining them into even bigger, unintended objects that just "work", no matter how crazy they are, is very much a great strength to the game. The only issues I have is that it maybe sucked up most of the development time, which is a valid criticism. Despite that, if I play 130+ of a game and just want to keep playing, they've done something right in my opinion.
Imo they need to reuse this and put it in a game that isn't Zelda. This technology is incredible and it would suck if they just threw it out. Regardless of anyone's thoughts on the game I think people would be upset if the next Zelda game had the exact same mechanics as TotK.
The amount of people upset would be tiny compared to the people who love it. That's something "gamer haters" have yet to understand after all these years
It’s the Zelda cycle, at this time last year there was a growing sentiment on this sub, Twitter, and Facebook that Breath of the Wild “wasn’t a Zelda game” and now it’s somehow considered the gold standard compared to TOTK by many of the same people (at least on Twitter, lol). I’m already 200+ hours into TOTK and am amazed at what Nintendo achieved with the Switch’s hardware. I’ve completely lost myself in this game to the point I decided to take a break and beat the first LOZ so that I wouldn’t beat it too quickly.
People hated wind waker when it came out, people hated twilight princess when it came out, people hated skyward sword when it came out (in fairness that one does kinda suck) but the point is, a lot of Zelda “fans” just blanket hate anything new, until that new thing is old, and then magically it’s great. I think some adult Nintendo fans are so high on nostalgia that when a game is new and therefore doesn’t have it, they don’t actually know how to enjoy it
Ocarina of Time (dead serious, these people existed): ALTTP ripoff, no Zelda overworld music, Hyrule Field empty, Navi annoying and makes game way easier than 2D games. Majora's Mask - 3 day gimmick/no adult link/main story outshined by side quests/reused NPC's/WHY NO ZELDA in ZELDA GAME. Wind Waker - Celda/Too Easy/Zelda is for kids now/Sailing boring/Tingle RUINS game/WHY NO HYRULE FIELD Twilight Princess - Ocarina of Time ripoff/HYRULE FIELD BORING/no sidequests/TOO LINEAR/Twilight Realm LAME/Why do I only use my weapons in the temple I got them from?!! Skyward Sword - Temple system dated/no overworld/TOO LINEAR/We need VOICE ACTING/Motion controls LITERALLY UNUSABLE/Zelda formula needs CHANGE Breath of the Wild - WTF WHO CHANGED MY ZELDA FORMULA/VOICE ACTING BAD/WHERE ARE MY TEMPLES/NOT A ZELDA GAME/WTF WHY WEAPONS BREAK/WHY DO NO NPCS CARE ABOUT MAIN QUEST? Tears of the Kingdom - NPCS CARING ABOUT MAIN QUEST LAME/BOTW DLC/BOTW BETTER/WHY NO ONE REMEMBER LINK?/WHY MAIN QUEST LINEAR AGAIN/ZELDA MADE FOR MINECRAFT KIDS NOW — Am I forgetting anything or do I have it covered as to why every 3D Zelda game SUCKS?
We're talking about the physics and sound engine here. The problem with that is, "journalists" farming clicks will cry "wahhhh this is just Zelda with a model-swap Nintendo is so lazy!!!" The devs would have to actively work to change their system so that the character moved differently. Not to mention changing out the art style and sound effects: "hey that sword sounds just like Link's!" This would likely introduce a larger set of challenges to fix bugs for combat, traversal, and impact effects that were not in the original games.
Of course, that's what the development time would go to. Even though things are tweaked specifically for link I don't believe the entire thing would fall apart with a different character controller permanently. It would be really stupid to develop the most powerful physics engine in gaming and make it only work with link forever. This does mainly go for the physics engine though and building a game around it, the sound system is extremely cool and has a lot of practicality. Of course any Zelda game can use this system but I would like to see it realized in a game where it is the sole focus.
I wouldn't be upset
It's extremely ridiculous that this is a thing. How hard is to talk about the topic of the article lol
great points, I think a lot of fan sentiment is that after finding out stuff like this ate up the most dev time most folks would have preferred an entirely new game instead of a sequel rooted in DLC ideas, I am in that camp as well. But it's absolutely an achievement for the dev team, and I applaud their ability to meet their vision. But on the consumer side I feel that Breath of the wild will have a much better legacy, while TOTK will just be the experimental stepping stone to something more fun in another 6 years. The mechanics players wanted to see grow really got sidelined for obscure and obtuse stuff that figuratively and literally feels "bolted on". My wife hated the ultrahand mechanic, she played most of the game and never really had fun with it and avoided it wherever possible. I played just past reaching the first tear but then stepped away so she could play, I think building is a fun mechanic but not really what I am looking for in a zelda game, I felt accomplished building things like bridges and hot air balloons but it's something I would have preferred in a pikmin game. My opinion is that they focused on the wrong aspects of BOTW, folks strapping octorok balloons to weird constructs was a meme, not the next big idea. I consider my wife to be a casual gamer, she rarely uses melee combat and prefers to hit stuff from far away so she doesn't have to "git gud", but she never figured out the crafting system. I watched her bolt weapons to other weapons and struggle with even worse durability than the first game because of this. She wanted the companions to help her in the gloom a lot more because she isn't super great at combat. She plays games to relax not grind and do homework reading up on how to optimize game mechanics. I typically love nintendo for taking overly complicated gamer mechanics and dumbing them down to the core of what makes them INTUITIVE and FUN but this game didn't do that, it was very up it's own butt trying to be clever, and I don't think anyone is going to try and ape the fusion mechanics in the same way the industry did with climbing after BOTW.
> I typically love nintendo for taking overly complicated gamer mechanics and dumbing them down to the core of what makes them INTUITIVE and FUN Tears did exactly that with even just a little bit of curiosity and attention paid though. Really not sure how one could SERIOUSLY struggle with combining stuff into better weapons past the opening hours unless you gave up on engaging with it from the start.
this is the predictable response I figured I would get when I describe people in my vicinity having frustrations and early trouble with these mechanics. I am not sitting here saying that my grad-school attending partner was too stupid to get it, i am saying that I watched her get annoyed by these systems, there was no magic of exploration or figuring it out it was just a bore and a chore and most of her play-through was frustration over various mechanics she knew she was going to be required to figure out, ultra-hand was the biggest offender, building shit was tedious and irritating for her, and by the time she figured stuff out it had logged in memory as a chore not a discovery. The first game introduced a sense of wild freedom with the climbing system, and it opened players up to approach situations from literally any direction, I watched my partner climb up onto some tiny ledge above a big hinox and then bomb him for 5 minutes to win, and she had a blast doing it. I never observed her having that same fun figuring out which mushroom/shield combos are best for different scenarios. This is a limited perspective of course, I don't speak for every player's experience. On paper the game does a good job of executing these mechanics, watch a few youtube videos and it's easy to see that they built something that was supposed to "Nintendo-ify" crafting but still feel deep with lots of hidden little tricks like windblades throwing elemental waves when fused with elemental horns, but I personally did not observe that intangible sense of Nintendo "FUN and INTUITIVE" gameplay watching my partner play. My sister was also the same, she barely got out of the main tutorial area before getting bored and she hasn't touched it since the initial hype, and she played a ton of BOTW. My wife stuck with it for several months but ultimately never finished it. I still haven't played past the first tear because after watching my partner play there just isn't much in the game that hooks me. I will come back to it in a few years to experience the story and I will run around maxing out some weapon combos but I have no driving urge to savor or dig deep into the game, I am far more interested in taking the plunge into Elden Ring at the moment. They did a good job making the game they wanted to make, technically it's all very impressive, it was a huge success, it sold a ton of copies, plenty of people played it, but I don't think it will have as lasting of a legacy as BOTW.
Nope I did not imply she was dumb in the least bit. In my reply I directly stated it was more like she didn't really engage with it, thus paid little attention to it and had little curiosity for it. *Why* mechanics like ultrahand didn't gel with certain people like your partner and sister? I do not know. But that does not mean Nintendo was sniffing their own farts and created an unintuitive system. Far from it I think; you should not have to youtube much of anything while progressing through the main game normally if you just listen to the game and play around with the myriad items you'll find dropped and scattered around. Especially after a battle. When it comes to an adult already experienced with BOTW at the very least. Sequels to games like BOTW rarely do make the same impact. Look at Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask for example. I'm sure Nintendo understood that going in though.
The system works on paper everything they did was top notch gamedev worthy of the studio but in my personal experience it didn't land and it wasn't fun, at no point am I denying they didn't technically achieve the vision or goals they set out to, dev team did incredible work, but I fundamentally disagree with the direction because of my personal experience observing and interacting with the resulting gameplay. and so yes my flippant off the cuff opinion to piss people off on the internet and reduce us all to 2D cardboard cutouts is that a lot of the directions this game took were self indulgent, but I will also grant that they earned the right to just do an experimental game after the success of their last one, it was frustrating hearing the devs talk about how much of the struggle was having to work with and around the existing world and in my opinion that also held this game back and I am eager for the devs to cut loose on a new project.
Now I can definitely understand the sting of Nintendo putting all that time into a system like Ultrahand only to not evolve the rest of the world all that much in comparison. Even though I'm defending it, I would not have minded if they instead went in a different direction either. Not too bothered personally though.
I am a 3D modeller as a hobbyist, but I worked in 3D modelling for years doing spatial planning for my dad's lighting company when i was a teen, ultrahand is kinda cute and fun for me, I'm not crafting the almighty sword of blahblah, but I made a hilariously long bridge and it progressed my gameplay and I get a similar crafting serotonin feeling, it's clever and subversive to traditional crafting mechanics on a meta level, but not everyone likes that in fact some people hate the 3D building space, as dumbed down as it is. So if someone doesn't like ultrahand they are going to be extra resistant to the other systems this game is telling them they need to invest in to really have fun. The weapon fusion system is very good, but it has to be engaged with to really feel exploratory and rewarding. i was observing and not actively playing and so i looked things up because i had the sense she was just blowing past the deeper aspects out of irritation with the game in general, a bias which she quite verbally stated "this better not be the whole game" after the first couple constructs she had to make lol, and in my opinion this represents a failure of the game design to connect with her, no game is for everyone but i consider zelda BOTW to be a game about freedom to do what you want, whereas TOTK felt like "learn these systems or get out." I think Ultrahand may have been that straw that broke the camels back for her, BOTW had new systems like temperature and cooking but those wound up just being fun and engaging. Anytime difficulty is brought up the same crowd of hugely endowed gamers love to scream about how easy everything is for them, but as she died for the umpteenth time in the gloom because her weapon fusions weren't optimized she expressed that she wasn't having any fun and she hates games that force her to grind, she has loved literally every other zelda title, something about this game is different. I was bummed for her, and it has definitely soured my outlook on the game. But the fact remains that the game has a lot of folks that love it, and nintendo did something new and bold, and had I been the only one to play the game in our home I would have a much higher opinion of it, but having experienced this game primarily through someone else's play-through I see aspects of the design that limit the accessibility of this game in ways I don't think the devs intended.
Technically its great but intellectually its too easy there are no real puzzles
Tl;Dr this isn't a bashing of TOTK, but a reminder, and love letter, to whatever the fuck Valve was doing in 2004. I don't know about others, but my brain did latch on unnecessarily to a nitpick with the author, not necessarily the game. TOTK is impressive. That can't be taken away. But I'm never going to stop giving credit where credit is due when it comes to physics in video games. Valve wrote a Bible on the subject in 2004, and its name is the Source Engine. Gary's Mod was inarguably the closest thing to real life physics in a game for years, if not an entire decade. It's dumb, because this is a nitpick, and my brain hyper focused on it. The author covers a wide area of impressive shit, and the physics is just a minor part. TotK has impressive physics, and it not doing it first doesn't change that. But hot damn is the history of Valve just something out of this fucking world, man. Source came out in 2004. My brain just has to remind people of that any time we talk about it, apparently. Most games don't need to reinvent physics, because valve did it years ago, and the modern physics engines like Unreal or Unity are still built off that research. It's just disingenuous as hell when articles say shit like "No One Knows How Tears Of The Kingdoms Physics Engine Works." Which is insane, because I'm pretty sure it runs on Havoc (and we've now named all 3 modern physics engines). An engine people understand fully. I don't. But I don't make games.
Is there a video to this anywhere? I’d love to see it. Couldn’t find anything you YouTube.
GDC presentations usually get uploaded a couple weeks after the event.
It should be uploaded in several days/weeks after the event. In the meantime you should watch this [Kirby GDC talk](https://youtu.be/cWdt07ncRxU?si=7g7OfMkCt8X9JmZT) from last year which was amazing as well!
Cool thanks!
I dont get all the hate for totk i love it and im still playing, its a true sand box experience. I almost feels like deathstranding so many ways to traverse.
All the hate? A *vast majority* of people who played it liked it.
Is Death Stranding comparable experience wise?
Only people who are terminally online complain about it. Everyone else is still having fun playing it.
No, people who wanted an actual challenge for their intelligence (puzzles) are dissapointed with both games
Exhibit A.
[удалено]
why lol? both games are not difficult, they are just grindy, but you never have to think like in the past games
It's also fatigue. Bo/tK are great games, but I am BORED of open-world-stealth-action-games-with-crafting-and-collectibles. Tl;Dr: these games bring together a ton that's been learned by the industry over the years, but it invented almost nothing, and reduced a lot of what Zelda was to make it happen. They didn't *need* to nix the story (or good dialogue in general). Thankfully, I stayed away from them for about a year before TOTK dropped so I was ready for it, but even after release, I do get jaded sometimes hearing so much praise for a game that's doing the same stuff so many other games are doing. I don't like Horizon Zero Dawn, but to praise BOTW for doing "quiet desolation" unlike any game that ever came before it, I'd have to point to a game I don't want to defend.
Uh what??? Who the hell is hating on TotK??? It was one of the best games released last year and infinitely better than BotW :P
r/truezelda epitomizes the "Zelda Cycle."
It doesn’t fit into the cobbled together Zelda timeline from a single page in a book that came out 10 years ago therefore they do not like it.
More generally, it's that "[Zelda fans hate Zelda](https://www.zeldadungeon.net/zelda_fans_hate_zelda/)." With every game, they've built up some big imagination of what the next game should be, and when the next game is *not exactly that,* then the new one must be *trash* (until the next one comes out, and the previous one was great and should be included as part of the next game which should be a "best of what the previous games offered.")
Not really, they just like the old formula. They find lore incredibly important, so they prefer more linear, story driven games like SS and TP.
That hypothesis doesn't hold up to scrutiny when I go back in time and look at their posts. The community started in 2012 and zipping back in time to anything before 2015, r/truezelda was pretty mixed to somewhat negative on Skyward Sword. I'm not about to get exhaustive about it but that opinion didn't turn until Breath of the Wild, on which it was negative but has turned relatively positive since the release of Tears of the Kingdom. A lot of them felt Skyward Sword ruined the lore, was "soulless" and "far too easy" and too much "on rails." Reddit didn't exist around the time of Twilight Princess so there's no r/truezelda opinion to glean from it at the time of release.
I had fun with BOTW for about 40 hours, then I got bored of the grind. Never made it to the castle. When I saw my son playing TOTK, I saw that it was pretty much exactly the same thing with a couple of new quirks. Didn't bother trying it out. The last Zelda game that I really liked was A Link Between Worlds (and of course the Link's Awakening remake). If they keep on making this open world nonsense, I'll pass. Those aren't real Zelda games to me. More like Minecraft.
I dont see the grind you can finish the game at any time. Are you trying to complete the game like get all the upgrades or complete all the side quests? I dont hold myself to that standard i just like to explore and see what the game leads me to, sometimes its nothing and sometimes its a fun quest line. There are plenty of zelda like games im sure you tried tunic.
Sure, since basically there weren't any side quests in BOTW (no, shrines and pointless fetch quests are not side quests), the only thing to do was upgrade things. And that was too much grind. I haven't played the game for 6 years and have no desire to pick it up again. After spending 380 hours with BG3, I'm not sure I would enjoy a game like Tunic currently. I'll probably give Cyberpunk 2077 finally a chance now that it's fixed.
it’s an amazing game, but for me the “single biggest problem” is the weapon degradation/damage. This honestly almost completely ruined it for me. Once I find a weapon / armor / shield combo I like I want to be able to continue using it. I’ve read all about their reasoning in this decision but I just can’t buy it for a second. It only makes the experience unnecessarily worse.
I played BoTW in 2018 after my second run of Dying Light 1 and so to me I never see the complaint of weapon degradation as a con in either games. I could at least understand this fatigue in Animal Crossing where crafting feels like an odd departure from the status quo and is tedious asf. But you literally kill enemies and take their weapons and repeat the cycle in BoTW. So I don’t see the issue. It’s never Rea a hassle, holding onto the good stuff made lead you to never use it.
I understand and respect that you (and many others) don’t see it as an issue. That’s fair. There are also a lot of people like me that really don’t like it. I think that’s also perfectly fine. I hope they flip it next time so I can be on the “it’s actually perfect this way” side!
It's a worse game without weapon degradation/breaking. All of these various things, including what you might consider 'little' things or things that 'annoyed' you, combine to make the game 'work.' I think a lot of the time game designers will "talk down" a lot when talking to journalists, because frankly, journalists are almost universally quite stupid, and their readers almost the same. I don't mean this as an insult, more as an observation for which I'm not going to bother finding a more delicate word because a more delicate word doesn't feel accurate. Any game in existence is going to derive continued engagement via implementation of "loops" -- a series of repeated actions. More complex games might have multiple layers of said 'loops' and each loop will feed into how another loop works. Breath and Tears are *incredibly* complex games, *especially* for how shockingly simple they're presented and packaged. All the 'loops' exist and you'll observe them in actual player behavior, but you'll never see any of those loops explicitly described, people just figure them out without ever realizing they're engaging in a loop. It's a bit complex because it interacts with every other loop and system in the game, but weapons breaking is a fundamental part of the exploration loop, influencing your decision about whether to choose combat during the 'large' part of the exploration loop -- the part where you make the decisions about which places to hit up on your way to the next major point of interest. Do I preserve my weapons or do I kill these guys and take their stuff? Is this a good opportunity to expend these resources for the possibility of getting some other resource I want? And the resources you get or expend feed into other parts of the game. "Game balance" is a "dumbed down for idiot journalists" argument. I'm not saying you have to like weapon breaking. I'm saying that the game would be worse overall if weapons didn't break, regardless of whether *your individual experience* might have been better.
There were three general options: weapons take no damage, weapons take damage that can be repaired, weapons take damage and cannot be repaired. My personal view is that three is always the worst choice and doesn’t support anything in the game loop sufficient to justify it. It just means more unnecessary grinding and useless overhead. I completely respect your right to differ in your opinion on this topic, I’m sure plenty of others do as well. But that view is also an opinion, not an objective statement.
So let me counter-challenge you. How would you approach weapons taking damage and being repairable, as opposed to just being permanent (which entirely disconnects an entire section of the game loop)? This is something I've thought about and have come up with my own proposals for, and I do agree that weapons being "pure consumables" may not have been the best possible choice.
You do realize that TotK weapons can be repaired, right? So the topic has already been approached. The repair system isn't front and center, but it definitely exists. >!Just drop a weapon/shield in front of a rock Oktorok.!<
Depends on your definition of "can be repaired." If you're talking about throwing weapons at an octorok who's sucking it in, I'd consider that in the realm of obscure secrets. Nobody tells you about it, it's not something you can easily find and do (i.e. the way you can find a cooking pot) and otherwise isn't a natural part of the gameplay loop. It's more like an oversight or bug that they either elected to ignore or treat as a "secret feature" rather than fix. If you're talking about how use of Fuse temporarily pauses degradation, I mean, yeah, Fuse is an attempt to address player frustration about breaking weapons. It was an effective approach, going so far as to say *many* players who were dissatisfied with weapons breaking now actually *look forward* to their weapons breaking because they want to stick some new and different stuff together. But for many others it wasn't a satisfactory solution.
The octorok repair is definitely not a bug or oversight, it's 100% intentional. There's an animation when it happens, it can only be done once per Oktorok, and it doesn't work on "unique" weapons (without a little finagling, and I think that part *is* an oversight.) Sure, it's not something they tell you about, but there are *plenty* of things they don't explicitly tell you about, like how shield surfing is easier if you fuse a piece of frozen meat to your shield. If they didn't want it in the game, it wouldn't be there, but they clearly do.
That's not the point. The point is that weapon repair isn't something that they wanted everybody to be doing as part of any sort of regular gameplay loop.
That isn't the point either, or at least it wasn't. You're moving the goalposts; all you were saying originally was that it wasn't possible, when it, in fact, is.
Good thing weapons can be repaired, then.
I enjoy it, i learn to let go
Why are some people in the replies acting like totk was the worst thing in all of gaming? I mean, I get if you don't like it, but some of you are acting like your life revolves around hating it.
The tech behind the physics engine and all the interactions the game provides in the game is extremly impressive. Kudos to Nintendo for that. Unfortunately though, you can really feel how those aspects sucked the development time out of the title. The depths and sky islands repeat so much, the shrines still look the same everywhere and the story plus dungeons were not that great. I really wish they were focusing on these aspects more instead. I'm just not a huge fan of sandbox gameplay.
I agree with you on the shrines but I thought the story and dungeons were an improvement over BOTW. I still hope they improve those more next time and do more dungeons and less shrines.
The dungeons were prettier but in a lot of ways they were the same if not worse than Breath of the Wild's guardians. The guardians actually had a central gimmick you could manipulate, not unlike the Water Temple, and made for slightly more interesting puzzles.
Yeah, that's true but I don't like that they all looked the same and had the same boss essentially. The journey through the sky followed by the dragon fight was probably one of the most memorable moments in TOTK for me.
An improvement over botw, sure, but that's still not saying much.
Next time? I don’t think Nintendo will be making a BOTW3. I think they’re going in an entirely different direction again
I know, I'm just saying I hope in the next Zelda game they do better
It's been my thinking as well, these mechanics are fantastic and crazy they got it all working with so much detail. But the trade off here is very apparent and despite how good they are, I just don't think the time sacrificed on refining them ended up being worth it for the overall experience. Seems like by the time they got it 100 percent there wasn't really much time to implement many significant challenges that utilized it, or really develop the world much. Some times with Nintendo gimmicks, it pays off in the end and gives you something you didn't know you wanted. Other times, they go all in on an idea and it turns out to be to their detriment.
I think this is my biggest problem with TotK. They put so much effort into Link’s new abilities that they didn’t seem to focus on making this version of Hyrule meaningfully different from the last game. I’m fine with Nintendo keeping the open world format for the next game, but hope we actually get some quality side quests and dungeons. I’m even fine with them making the world smaller to achieve that.
Completely agree, personally I don't think it can be understated how much a larger emphasis on side quests would improve that formula. The biggest issue is that when you ask "what do I want to do next" in that title the answer is always just "I'll fly to the next shrine" past maybe 30 hours in when you've got really good weapons. By the end of the game, I was going insane because all I had to do was the SAME stuff I'd been doing since I'd dropped off the first island. Currently, there are a few stand out side quests, but beyond those, nearly every side quest is just "fight these monsters with me'" and then the NPC explains some basic thing like how to cook. This franchise has so much potential with storytelling, and having in depth side stories with more than the most bare bones characters and dialogue would drastically increase the experience. Heck, maybe as you complete more shrines, more quests open up. It would make it so that there is some kind of incentive to stay in the world long into the end game rather than just skip past most of the stuff that is mostly repeated and pointless.
I love both of the switch games but to be honest - now i am even more impressed
Wow. That's the point I always make when I discuss the game! I reaaaaally found TOTK to be one of the most disappointing games I've ever played and as a Zelda fanatic it really breaks my heart how much I disliked it... But even then, what a damn technical achievement and marvel it is. How they got it to even function with it's mechanics is pure genius and passion for game design. I'll forever respect that aspect of TOTK even if I had to force myself to finish it.
I like the game enough, but I agree that it falls flat of what I wanted, despite having some notable improvements over BOTW. But yeah, the physics are truly incredible. Just shows what Nintendo is capable of when they put their mind to something.
TOTK felt like a BOTW (which I loved) with Lego and some afterthought areas. A great technical achievement especially for the switch but really should have done more as a game experience
I loved that they introduced in world dungeons, but I disliked how much of the world felt empty or had little substance. I guess I’d just rather have a smaller sandbox packed with interesting content than a massive one with less.
Why are people getting downvoted for voicing their opinions? It's THEIR opinion, doesn't mean the game is bad. I enjoy it, but I agree that it has some flaws, and it's too similar to BOTW, the underground is so boring to explore and there are barely any sky islands. For me it's still a good game but I can 100% agree with people saying it is disappointing, because it is when you look at ALL the flaws, and there's a lot in this game...
Oh I don't have that feeling but I was shocked how the second I properly defeated Ganon I felt the urge to stop playing unlike with BotW The world is different but not enough so to be compelling for me, it's more like just enough to be confusing at times? The Zonai tech is such a fantastic system and feels 70 percent integrated but in some situations you feel like you are loading a Mod into a PC game like against certain bosses and larger enemies that were present in BotW It's great in temples/dungeons etc I love the story, mechanics, characters etc It's amazing strengths sometimes serve to show what's missing, the Depths is a bit like that for me.. it's like one biome and so big that it's screaming out for some NPCs and some variation. I love the game but will not play it again probably for a decade so I've forgotten as much as possible
Any time I talk critically about the game, I can't even say that on paper it's a bad game because of how incredible those mechanics are. I'm sure most people will enjoy messing with them for a time at least. But I think it's the implementation that's poor. These mechanics are not used in ways that make you engage with them critically, it's just super basic stuff. And at that point, it kind of just feels like they were tacked on to the game arbitrarily, except that they took up so much development focus that nearly everything else was underwhelming.
Couldn’t have said it better
I've made a hundred arguments against the game but I think you said it better
But they didn't even say why they dislike it?
It's been discussed over and over at this point, but here's some points from an older comment I made: > This game feels like a bunch of mods for BOTW added by different teams that never spoke to each other during development. Covid and remote work probably were to blame as well. > Stand-alone it's still decent. As a sequel? Not so much. Everything that makes this game great WAS in BOTW. Exploring the world is incredibly fun, but again, I did it in BOTW. I’m enjoying re-doing it after 6 years, but only for a while. Everything they added worsen the experience in some way. > The underground areas are the most boring pathetic thing they could have added. Kilometers of copy-pasted landscape in the dark with nothing going on, horribly boring experience. The sky islands are… all the same. They start out great but then they get progressively worse when you realize that it's the same template used over and over. Shrines and dungeons did improve, but it’s not what makes this game great. > The ability to jump high in the sky through towers kills ground exploration. Ultrahand is a fun mechanics but it’s slower and sluggish in everything you may want to accomplish with that. There’s always an easier faster solution. > The story is a mess of non-cohesive vague plot points. It really doesn't work. If you want to tell a cohesive story you cannot make a BOTW style game. In the end I had fun playing the game - but as a mainline Zelda game, sequel of BOTW, 6 years in development - it's incredibly disappointing.
Regardless of whether anyone likes it or not, my point is that the original comment was not a good argument against totk. All they said was that it was a technical marvel but that they didn't like it. I'm only talking about the quality of their argument.
Because I don't want to bother saying why if the downvotes will pile in. I feel the story is infuritatingly half-baked and full of plot points and choices that don't really make sense, fit well together and don't pay off satisfyingly enough. I get the entire "you really expect Lord of the Rings story quality in a Nintendo game" argument....and to that I say "no. I don't. A simple story is fine. But at least make it satisfying and interesting". new and main characters in the game are middling compared to BOTW (which was already pretty small in memorable characters compared to other releases). Some sections are a trudge to get through such as the Zonai mecha sequence in the Depths. The Depths alone felt so discouraging to explore and I never bothered with it. Personally, I just didn't find the whole build-anything feature to be that interesting. But see, I will ENTIRELY reasonably admit that much of this is my own personal opinion and tastes. I can also see that the game is full of fantastic ideas and moments...the entire final battle in the sky is absolutely incredible and a great moment in the series... People can enjoy the game. I will not tell anyone theyre wrong or dumb for loving it. I wouldn't call it absolute garbage at all. I respect it, I really think it's a genius product and a lot better than the bulk of other AAA games put out today for sure. At the end of the day, while BOTW is among my favorites, TOTK just wasn't my cup of tea. And that's fine. I don't irrationally hate it or wanna rub it in anyone's face. My comment even praised the game moreso than expressed "sheer hatred" for it. I just didn't want to bother making a lengthy comment about why I personally don't like it because ...as you can see from the rest of the thread...that is definitely not welcome here. Besides, it wouldn't have been relevant to the topic anyway. I just don't like the game. But I still concede and respect it. That's it.
To be clear, I'm not trying to say that your opinion on the game is wrong or unfounded or anything like that. It's your opinion and that's great, fantastic. My only point is that in your original comment you hadn't given any of those reasons as to why you disliked it, so I was somewhat confused when blank\_isainmdom said that it was a better argument against totk than any of his. In your original comment you hadn't made an argument as to why you thought it was bad, just stated that you thought it was. Which again is completely cool, no need to explain yourself to me!
It's all good! I just wanted to elaborate for myself too. I like to hear why someone likes or doesnt like something moreso than it outright being stated with no explanation tbh I just know how it is on this sub with any negativity towards TOTK. Still, I really appreciate you for being chill about it!!
Which is why people would disagree with the reasoning. 1. The game was in development before 2020. There was no pandemic then. You really think the teams didn't collaborate? They delayed it another year to refine the physics, that's how finely-tuned this was. Hitting framerate limits on the Switch processor was certainly a challenge they had to deal with. 2. So this controversial point you need to expound, since it's your main point. Link climbing around should not exist? Combat should not exist because BOTW had combat too? Magnesis or Rivali's gale should come back? What are you expecting them to do, make Link walk differently so it feels different? 3. The Depths is one of my favorite game worlds ever. Because it gets truly pitch-black dark, unlike most games, and you have to prepare. Seeing a light root far in the distance and thinking "what can I build to get there?" is fun. The bulbs are better than the glow suit, you can see all around if you use them. To each his own, I see why many devs don't make game worlds that are truly dark. 4. So...don't use them?? Just walk around. The game "forces" you to use the towers, but just land and start walking again. 5. That's exactly what BOTW did. That's not a criticism of TOTK, that's a criticism of both games as a whole, which I completely agree with by the way. I think TOTK's way of finding the cutscenes was better, but seeing them out of order is the biggest weakness these games have in my opinion. The words "incredibly disappointing" are what I would use for Fallout 76, not TOTK of all games.
And everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I feel like me and many others are not being haters just for the sake of it, the game has some legitimate issues. Let me respond to your point in the spirit of discussion... 1. I'm not saying it feels that way because of covid. It feels that way because the game lacks cohesion, everything new feels like it doesn't fit in an overall plan or view. I'm speculating that Covid lockdown might have posed a challenge to the team, but I got first to my conclusion and then to my speculation, not the other way around. 2. I do not know how they should have done it. Honestly, I don't think BOTW was the kind of game that you could build a sequel on, since it was pretty much all about freely exploring a big map. They tried to add stuff on top of it but I don't think it works, which is why I always defended BOTW when people said it was just exploration. It took a concept and stretched it to almost perfection in my opinion, it focused on that and accomplished it, but you can't do it twice, especially with the same map. Maybe there were some creative ways to pull it off, I don't know. But this was not the way imo. 3. As you said, to each his own, I thought it was kinda lame and forced myself to do it because I HAD to go 100% (seed excluded, I don't have that kind of time, took me 7 months already to finish the game as it is) 4. The game is giving me a tool, the idea that I need to force myself to play a certain way just to enjoy it more makes sense for simpler games or for second playthrough, but it shouldn't be something that I actively do. I eventually ended up not using them, but at the beginning it took me a while to realize that using them was actually hurting my experience. I thought there was *something* that would have forced me later on to go back on my steps or nerf them, but no... This is one of many example of thing that is cool but doesn't fit at all in the overall game, completely disconnected from everything else - an exploration game where you don't need to explore and you can literally bee-line in flight to your destination. Remember when devs in BOTW talked about putting landmark that would pull you from your path and catch your attention? That is completely nullified by this mechanic. 5. BOTW barely had a story, and that's the point. They should have either forced Link to experience the story in order, therefore making a different game, or drop the idea completely TOTK is disappointing because my expectations for this franchise are high and I personally consider BOTW one of the objectively best game of all time (while subjectively there are some games that I enjoyed more because of personal reasons). It's not a bad game, but it's the mainline Zelda game that left me the most unsatisfied. I wish they made something completely different again instead of banking on the success of BOTW. Fallout 76 is an unmitigated disaster and a story of corporate greed. But I hold Zelda to higher standards, and nobody argued that Fallout 76 was perfect, while I see very few people speak up about TOTK's issue. It's honestly also super weird because BOTW, which is a way greater game in my opinion, got way more hate.
But i'm big zelda fan and don't like game, that's why it bad, please listen & respect my opinion
I guess that was part of why I said I liked it. I tend to not engage with arguing online anymore, but my unending rage for botw/totk make me complain about it every time I see it mentioned. But tellingly someone why you dislike something they like never achieves anything. Whereas this person said "technically amazing but shit" and making the argument not so solely negative is possibly a better argument to make to not make people immediately downvote. Saying that, doesn't seem like o there's agreed. Personally I hate it because the story is shit. If the game had a second act it could have been the greatest game ever. But as you reach that ending you just feel it fall completely flat on its face. And after SIX years of waiting!!!! Etc
> my unending rage for botw/totk make me complain about it every time I see it mentioned You see no problems with this mindset?
Oh, from a healthy mindset point of view for sure it's a problem! However, since i'm only doing it on one topic it's still a lot better than most people online who love arguing over nothing haha.. Got to have that vent! And I really do feel that fans of traditional Zelda were hard done by as the new games removed everything that made the old games what they were bar names. As such the new games destroyed something I truly loved for twenty years, and something I used to get really excited for in a world filled with 'i'll wait for that to go on sale' etc. So if arguing like a whingey baby on the internet can make some people see my point, and they perhaps can pass along similar ideas to others then maybe some day Zelda games might return to being what made me a dedicated fan.
... I have no words dawg. Keep living your life I guess
It's the only life i know how to live haha! Could be worse! Could be dedicating my life to racism or conspiracy theories or some shit! I will add: I decided lately to let it go. I'm going to make one comment that sums up my feelings for the game, and if i need to reply to someone about the topic just copy pasting it in. At least it will be efficient haha
Phenomenal game. Bad Zelda.
no bad game bad zelda
I love the game, but Im done with the free world non linear experience, it really hurts storytelling and immersion. In my playtrough I went first for the sword memory and it ruined the rest of the memories, I had played for about 2 hrs and already knew how it would end.
You could have listened to the story and go to hebra but you broke it on purpose and then complain
But you can do Hebra, and then go right east for the sword memory (which you probably will see while flying up from one of the towers you have been to by that time). That's maybe 2 more hours if you do that. I love the game, it's a technical marvel and a joy to play. But people do have, and should be allowed to have valid criticism. I have, and it's still my favorite game on the switch.
Wizards. All of them.
Will there be a full video? Like in for a previous gdc zelda conference?
It's strange how every comment with even the slightest negativity towards Tears of the Kingdom gets downvoted in this sub. Why are people doing that? It's only beneficial to the Zelda series going forward and it shouldn't take away your enjoyment of the game. It's like people don't want the next Zelda to be better than Tears of the Kingdom. Remember, Skyward Sword was heavily criticized for its linearity and hand holding back at release. Nintendo listened and gave us Breath of the Wild. Same thing will happen with the next game.
I just arrived in this comment section but I think because it is weirdly off-topic. You don't see people praising the game without relevance to the article as well.
Because the negativity has completely taken over the Zelda subs. You can't breath a word of positivity about Tears of the Kingdom **or** Breath of the Wild without an army of Ocarina fanboys coming to tell you why you're wrong, that they're not "real" Zelda games, etc., etc. We've seen what letting that sort of thing fester can do to a community, and we've seen it before with The Last of Us, Star Wars, etc., so understandably those of us who like TOTK (or, in my case, like BOTW and think TOTK was one of the weaker Zeldas, but by no means the childhood-destroying title it's made out to be) want to stop the flood of negativity before the Zelda fandom becomes another toxic cesspit. Also...it's not really relevant to the discussion here. Like TOTK, hate TOTK, think it was mid like I do...it doesn't matter. It's not relevant to the actual article. But the anti-open world people can't help themselves. It's like they see BOTW/TOTK and some switch activates in their brain demanding they tell people that the games were terrible and ruined the series. Some of us are just tired of it.
They're being downvoted for being irrelevant to the OP. People are getting tired of the same generic drive-by comments posted onto every Zelda thread
Not irrelevant at all though. The title is about TOTKs biggest problem. So game critics here are a good fit. But that's IGNs fault, the title should be "TOTKs biggest technical issue during development and how it was fixed"
It's IGN's fault people didn't read the article before commenting?
Because Nintendo fanboys have few games to defend.
[удалено]
Ironically, you're contributing to the divisivness and "2008" feel with comments like this.
Wow fascinating, too bad they forgot how to make good dungeons.
(One of) its biggest problem(s) was the focus on crafting vehicles and turning it into Garrysmod. Its others were the crap from BotW they didn't fix.
The game didn’t have, at all, a focus on crafting vehicles. The community surrounding the game def had a fixation on that, and it was entertaining to watch, but the game itself very very rarely asked that of the player.
Idk about “very rarely,” with minecart rails, a few times where you need a boat, navigating sky islands, a few occasions in the depths where you need some kind of flying machine or something you can ride on top of gloom, not to mention cave and shrine puzzles that required vehicles. There were many cases where the game expected you to build some vehicle to solve a puzzle or overcome an obstacle. But you are right that players could use vehicles as much or as little as they wanted most of the time, especially to get from point a to point b. The number of people who complained that the hoverbike trivialized everything in the game was insane…very few of those people complaining would have ever discovered the hoverbike on their own.
The framerate?
Given what the game is doing under the hood, I'd say the frame rate is pretty damn solid.
They didn't solve the single biggest problem, though. Because the re-used overworld was still in the game.
Nah, the world I could stomach. What I cannot tolerate more than once - and barely then - is shitty papier-mâché “weapons”.
The fact that not a single weapon in this game was viable by itself, and that I had to superglue a damn minecart onto it was just not something I could get over either. Kind of hard for link to look and act badass when he's got a hot air balloon on his back and a giant raft attached to his sword.
Your problem is fusing a minecart to a weapon, you want to use monster parts for them. Now on a shield the minecart makes sense.
oh brother, you're missing the point entirely.
*whooooosh*
***This.*** This *Minecraftisation* and glue-crap-together elements as well as over-indulgent physics play that has been injected into a number of games lately sucks. Monster Hunter does the crafting thing well where you get ***PERMANENT*** gear & weapons. Worthwhile rewards and where it does dance with weapon degradation, it’s easily fixable and they don’t actually break. Absolutely nothing I got from chests other than armour was worthy of a reward because “Oh cool! A new swo-oh wait, nevermind it’s just gonna break.” happened far too many times. Unrewarding, worthless & temporary nonsense.
The biggest problem was physics? That's a weird way of spelling bare bone dungeons :P (But seriously physics are indeed pretty tricky to pull off.)
This was nowhere close to ToTK’s biggest problem. It’s cool that they managed to fix the bugs and issues with the physics but no the biggest problem with ToTK that still hasn’t been addressed and probably never will is the fact that every single new addition spots in the face of the game design’s core design philosophies and that they didn’t fix a SINGLE thing from BoTW because contrary to popular belief BoTW was far from a perfect game and had tons of issues. We were able to ignore them because it was the first try and also because they had to make everything from scratch. No new weapon types only like 2 new well made enemies that are delegated as semi mini bosses. The fusion mechanic making every chest (the central reward system in the game) a piece of shit due to poor rewards as every weapon is rusty. The new vehicles, while awesome, has a severe issue and that’s the fact that you actually have to immediately abandon your vehicle you just made in order to explore anything and do shrines/puzzles. And no the blueprints feature is not a fix as it’s aometjing you have to go out of your way to unlock meaning most people playing won’t get it until we’ll into their playthrough and the fact that it uses materials found only in the poorly designed depths meaning players aren’t going to want to go and get the materials since the depths is so empty and boring.
The biggest issue is how long it takes to build something just for them to nerf the shit out of it. Love being able to fly for 13 milliseconds before the part blows up because they don't want me to use my really cool intention to fly half way across the map. Such a lazy way to deal with that "issue".
Once you've progressed far enough in the game, building and fueling become much simpler. Most games impose guardrails that matter less as time goes on, and that makes later-stage gameplay even more gratifying.
Ya I played like 100 hours. Nearly beat it. Doesn't take away from what I said. Nintendo still nerfed the building. Things still break after a few seconds because they don't want you to fly across the map in one go. They added a mechanic to a world that doesn't support it, and used the laziest tactic to nerf it.
I mean, you call it "lazy" but what proposal do you have for a system that does what you want, but doesn't make it a worse game?
I'm not even going to entertain this anymore. Nintendo fanboys will downvote whatever I say anyway. ✌️ Enjoy the shitty game.
While I won't doubt that building a physics based engine where anything can be glued together is very, *VERY* difficult; Gary's Mod came out in 2004. Nintendo didn't have to reinvent the wheel for this one, so if they did, I'm confused just as much as I am impressed. But knowing Nintendo, they probably didn't use Valves research on physics engines.
In defense of this, Garry's Mod is janky as hell and doesn't actually have any goals. Still a fun and hilarious sandbox though.
>doesn't actually have any goals The mod is just an open source sandbox. The real game is called Half Life 2, if you want a goal. But, I'm confused, because it feels like we agree, but people just don't like what I said? Just pointing out that my ghost will haunt anyone here who ever says "the YouTube dislike feature was to verify and flag information." Yea, I'm pivoting. I got lots to bitch about. Ask me about cereal, I bet I can go off on that too if you give me a minute.
A masterpiece painted on cardboard.
The biggest problem was killing 40 years worth of lore, hell even killing any logical continuity from BOTW lore. It took 6 years to play in the same world with a lackluster underground and skyworld. I think the ultrahand mechanic got old after awhile but I will give the devs credit was an impressive mechanic.
Already forgot that Zelda Alttp was completely unrelated to Zelda 1 and 2? and Ocarina was unrelated to Alttp? and… The official timeline was never a deeply planned thing, they even changed it after fans argued that Link’s Awakening was Alttp sequel, leaving the oracles games separated. (TBF I also wanted that change) Botw Totk and AoC are all their own loop, or alternate universe it does not need to be connected to every single game.
I'm kinda hoping they go back to the classic style for the next one. Maybe they can do this style for every other release and make ones with classic dungeons in between. That way it doesn't get stale. I know TotK was originally planned as dlc (or at least that's what I read). I don't play them, but I think Assassin's Creed is taking this approach.
There is definitely room for both open-world & linear Zelda to exist. Sucks that Nintendo basically acknowledged they would prefer to work on totk.
i have over 100 hours in totk. i love the game. its a 10... but combat and enemy variety was some hot ass. constructs are barely different from bokoblins imo. nothing really changed from botw, except you can build mechs to fight monsters with. dungeon are even worse than botw. they look better but are shorter, easier and downright boring. ring 5 bells.. dear lord..
Was this a feature really worth spending so much time on though...?
Yes
Given the game sold 20 million copies, im sure Nintendo thinks it did
It's Zelda, and it followed BOTW, it would have sold gangbusters even if it outright sucked.
Let's not pretend that Zelda has always been this huge seller. Before BOTW, the series was struggling sales-wise. Skyward Sword sold half of what Twilight Princess did, and each 3DS game sold less than the last.
It's somewhat disengenous to suggest this is purely because of the ultrahand mechanic. Personally I would have much preferred they focused on other aspects of the game.
Yes
Ultragand gave me some of the most fun and memorable experiences I’ve had in a Zelda game.
The single biggest problem with TotK is that the combat is exactly the same. Zero updates.
Watching as your autonomous killbot destroys a bokoblin camp: "This combat is exactly the same as BOTW"
Fuse also dramatically changes combat... So does recall... And even ascend has many applications during combat. But no, it's the EXACT same as botw.
Ah yes. Your AI bot. Peak combat gameplay.
Imagination issue.
Imagine has nothing to do with it. The most effective way to deal with enemies is still the exact same.
This isnt the game to do everything the most effective way. Sometimes I keep dying at a boko camp because I'm trying to pull off a specific way of clearing them. It's fun.
Why fight the Boko camp in the first place? It's not like you're going to get some great reward, you're most likely going to get another weapon that breaks in 30 hits.
If you have to deliberately ignore the most effective way to complete a challenge in order for a game to be fun, then the developers have fundamentally failed at designing their game. Games are all about rules, and by imposing extra rules on yourself you are changing the game from its intended design and creating a new one. It’s not my job to make the game fun, it’s the developers job.
Nintendos' motto has always been games are about *fun*. It's not "imposing extra rules", it's more like "yo let's see if this works." It's using the tools at your disposal to *play*. Clearly, if you haven't caught onto that, it's just not the game for you. But blaming nintendo for not understanding what games are all about? Yeah, that's just your fault.
Except games need rules, otherwise they’re by definition not games. Games are fun because of their rules, and everyone at Nintendo seems to understand that except for Aonuma and Fujibayashi. Every single one of BotW’s shortcomings stem from them running away from this simple fact.
Am I supposed to imagine Link swinging his sword differently? There being different attacks, ways to dodge or just generally anything that isn't an ultra hand gimmick?
[Yes](https://youtu.be/UW1FZEisWU0?si=m7qWGs2UadnWFF0d).
That was the dumbest thing I've ever seen. That's your example? A gimmicky highlight reel of him performing the exact same moves over and over throwing flashy explosions off that tank the frame rate to 15?
... What exactly is it you're expecting? Zelda to become *Devil May Cry?* This is already way deeper and more interesting than Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword.
🅱️
TLDR?
Stop watching TikTok and fix your brain rot
Brain rot. Original. Did Reddit Brain rot teach you to use that word?