(Updated now with poll) E3: Zelda Breath of the Wild Vs Horizon Zero Dawn = which one has the "wow factor"?

[Normchacho]

sc94597 said:

Normchacho said:

 

Town and animal density or "empty" aren't some dichotomy. There is plenty to do in Zelda's world from what we've seen in the treehouse. Exploration, combat, shrines, various difficulty of enemies, camps, etc. Just because it is more spaced out (which is made up for with transporation methods such as the glider , horseback, and climbing) does not mean it is empty.

I disagree that it is bad game design. Different games try to accomplish different things. An Action-Adventure needs to play with scale. It needs to contrast the less-interesting with the very interesting so that it motivates you to explore. From the five or so hours I've been watching the treehouse Zelda  does this, and does it well. You see something off in the distance and you want to go there. Then once you get there you get some action. That is the point of an action-advanture. RPGs play differently. While they can have exploration, that isn't their core. Their core is character development, story telling, lore building, and world-building. Entirely different things from Action-Adventures, and that is why comparing two games from these genres is silly. Horizon is a much better comparison, because it is also primarily an Action-Adventure game, but even then there are different goals (it is more action-oriented, while Zelda is more adventure oriented.)

Of course there is stuff to do, I never said there wasn't. But, again, compared to other open world games it's pretty empty. You also act like this is the only game with more than one way to get around. Which certainly isn't the case.

The issue isn't just that there's a lot of space between things to do though. You could have a world with the same amount of open space, but if it's filled with a diverse array of scenery and life, it's going to be more interesting to travel through. From what we've seen so far, the open spaces in BotW are pretty baren. I'm watching a section of the Treehouse where he's running through woods, and even this is pretty empty. There are certainly more trees, but animal life is still pretty rare, and there isn't much in the way of underbrush. Things like that could make the spaces in between actual things to do more interesting.

I also didn't say Zelda had bad game design. Because it also doesn't have a realistic world. Like I said, you don't spend hours climbing mountains, you don't have to walk/ride for miles to reach objectives, you have to stop and sleep for several hours each day. I'm saying that game worlds are made to be enjoyable, not realistic, so saying that it's a bad thing to have a dense world because it isn't realistic is silly.