Horizon and Zelda... a week apart? Will BOTW be overshadowed by the new Sony IP.

[Areym]

Helloplite said:

Areym said:

That's one review out of 60+. The game isn't reinventing the wheel, it's just doing all these established ideas well. It's not perfect, of course. Not sure how it is lacking gameplay wise when it has different weaponry, arrows, traps and other mechanics (like hacking and focus) and a decent variety of small to colossus enemies to fight. I'd say Zelda could suffer from the same type of problems that Horizon seems to suffer from. As far as I can tell, this is the first true open world or like survival style game for the Zelda genre. Unless Nintendo is doing something completely brand new, it will be more of the same with a coat of Zelda on it. That doesn't immediately mean it will be bad, if all the mechanics come together well, it matters very little if the ideas aren't revolutionary.

It's hard to say without playing it though. I don't think that Horizon will outshine Zelda however, Zelda is just Zelda. Like you said, it would have to be Nintendo dropping the ball through rushed work, rough performance on Switch, badly implemented open-world mechanics, etc. Neither game will affect the other sales at least.

It is not a review, it is an article articulating why its gameplay is very shallow -- impacted by AI, game design, and the inclusion of gameplay features that are unlikely to be useful to the player -- in other words the game's features do not appear integral to the game's design. These issues are fundamental, and while Zelda may also be guilty of them we simply do not know yet. To me, knowing that many skills in the game are useless, or broken by game and level design itself, is a major flaw. Zelda also has its own common issues (e.g. the increased redundancy of acquired dungeon items outside said dungeon) for the most part the game/level/item design is flawless and integral to the gameplay itself. Doesn't seem that Horizon can stand up to this.

Ah my bad, I skimmed through it, I thought it was one of those scoreless reviews. I just read it through and it is making valid points. Some other reviews complained about the trap system and luring being frustrating and other tools like the tripwire-thingy feeling clunky, as well as AI on the machines being hit or miss. They are unfortunate but if this does turn into a franchise, we can see some one these issues fixed. Still, it comes off as smaller issues rather than very meaningful faults with the game, with perphaps your mention of "useless" or "broken" skills being the biggest misstep although I think useless and broken might be a bit of an exageration, otherwise every single reviewer would be on that. Then again, maybe some reviewers didn't pick those specific skills so it flew pass them. I don't know, I just wanna try the damn game for myself.

I'm really interested how BotW will perform overall, Nintendo is almost always guaranteed quality but Switch is still so new, I wonder how much potential they can squeeze out of it so early and with an IP as big as Zelda.