"Hey man, you touched me..."

- Groundhog Day

I had considered getting a switch to play Zelda but the game prices here in he UK are ridiculous, £59.99 for Zelda and £39.99 for 1-2 Switch is shocking...

I played both Witcher 3 and BotW. The comparision is not really there because each game has his strengths and weakpoints and different focuses.
Witcher 3 has a really rich story and focuses on character development and a mostly linear story structure with different endings. It presents you a rich open and beautiful world with lots of sidequests to do. But the controls are really stiff und clunky. It also guides you where to go and how to get there.

Botw on the otherhand let's you decide what you want to do and will also reward you in doing so. It sets its focus way more on exploration. The game gives you the controller and says "Go and have fun". You can do whatever you want. It's not telling you to go to a certain spot in order to find a secret like the Witcher 3.

Yes it's really that good. Totally revitalized not only the Zelda franchise but also Open world games.

I wouldnt bother much about user score on any gamingsite, since you know.. Trolls are gonna troll. You dont have to like Zelda, heck I am not the biggest fan of the franchise, but dayum.. all them 0's day #1 is just a proof that those either hates Zelda, Nintendo or just wanna show off their low self esteem.

"Great for Zelda game"!? You do realise what you wrote there has no sense at all, 3D Zelda games are famous about their quality so much that they are in completely own league, even "bad 3D Zelda" game means its better game than most other games on market.

Only whats better on other next games compared to Zelda BotW is graphic from technical perspective. Those technical issues don't effect on game experience too much, and game is so good that despite that received 98 mets score, lowest score that Zelda BotW received from 67 reviews is 90.

Critics reviews this game like simple "game", not hybrid game. Actually reviewers stated that game has frame drops, and that's actually reasons why game doesn't have higher score.

But like you wrote, you didn't played game so you don't know, but regardless some of your argument doesn't make sense.

Well I playing game around 15 hours, world is packed with staffs you can do, not one moment in 15 hours I didn't do anything that was boring or that didn't feel fun. First shrines have basic puzzles, later ones are much more complex. I dont see how speed run is something negative, that just shows how much game is open and full of possibilities, basically you can whatever you want and in way want, freedom that this game gave sto player is ridiculous.

If you really want to know why this game is already considered like one of best games ever, just read some media reviews, but yeah, you definitely need to play it and make yout judgement about game.

I am very much like you, OP, in that I have never actually played a Zelda game and I absolutely fell in love with Wither 3. Out of curiosity, I watched a good chunk of a BOTW Let's Play on Youtube. I suggest you do the same. The story is your basic "darkness has taken over and is about to engulf the world forever unless the hero of prophecy can defeat it" kind of thing, no surprises there. The landscape looks very nice (even though the graphics and artstyle aren't close to the Witcher) and the minimalistic music contributed to a nice atmosphere. The world gives you a little bit of those nice tingles that you want. However, there are things that don't work for me.
- Voice acting is there only for the most important bits. I've gotten so accustomed to fully voiced games, that reading silent bits of texts while talking to characters kind of bums me out
- Too cartoony for me. This goes for the art style as well as the combat. You can do colourful and yet "lifelike", these are not mutually exclusive things.
- Lack of mature themes and gore. Sorry, I just can't take a game seriously, if there's no grit and everything looks like it came out of an innocent baby unicorn's fart while it was dreaming. I get that this is a matter of taste and some people like their marshmallow worlds.
- The puzzles take you out of the world you're supposed to be immersed in. Visiting the shrines is like popping into an arcade in the middle of this fantasy adventure, it's just too stark a contrast and would break my suspension of disbelief. Think of Geralt slaughtering a band of thugs, then going to a tavern for a pint and a chat with a friend, maybe a nice game of cards as well, but then suddenly having to move some weird blocks around or using a gadget to freeze time and manipulate some arbitrary platforms that move on their own. Not good.

The's a difference between  telling whether a game is good or not and figuring out how good a game is, the latter is something that requires actual hands on play with especially with a game with as many things to do in it as BOTW. Believe me what you've seen in any video is not even close to half the things in the game so he's right in that sense even more so as the game is one that rewards players for literally playing in any way they want like someone has just mention, so watching a video of someone else playing how they want will never give you the full picture.

Yup. Let's ignore all the nintendo fanboys giving it a 10 the second they were allowed to post a review without even having had the chance to play it. Let's focus on them plastations trolls. Evil people.

The game is amazing, very beautiful with great atmosphere but I don't think its anything the 360 or ps3 couldn't do better in places. When you look at the graphics detail its a mixture of simplistic cartoon graphics and occasional texturing. A sort of half way house between wind waker and skyrim. The wii u was never a powerful console with its low cpu performance and other issues but I don't think it bodes well for the Switch that it can't do this game at 1080p native with anti-aliasing with a rock solid 60fps.

A native resolution of 900p with frame rate drops to 20 fps. I know its a portable and the portable side is good but docked its to be blunt hopeless. I guess its that shared memory of 25.6GB/s that kills docked performance and there simply was no point pushing cpu or gpu speed any more. I'm not hopeful of the performance level of future Switch games. I'm now expecting Skyrim to be quite bad graphically.

As much as I'm enjoying Breath of the Wild it has also made me more resistant to Switch current pricing. I was expecting Switch to be 2-3x wii u performance not performing marginally better than wii u. I guess it was to be expected as wii u has 60GB/s memory bandwidth for 32MB of memory, frame buffer and time critical code with 12.8GB/s for main memory where as Switch has to do everything with 25.6GB/s shared memory. It's not a huge gulf in how much data can be processed. Ample for portable mode but a real bottleneck for docked. I never expected games to be enhanced for docked mode but I did think they would run ok frame rate wise at the higher resolution with anti-aliasing.

It's quite good, but man is it quite hard, it's not like the previous 3D Zeldas at all where fighting enemies was kind of a joke and maybe only the odd boss made you sweat.

It also does away with several common Zelda staples like overworld music and the traditional dungeon structure. Not sure if everyone will like that, but it is bold and it definitely feels fresh. The world might be too big but it's magical.