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HoloDust on 29 April 2018
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curl-6 said:
HoloDust said:

It indeed became stale...long before SS. But BotW is, IMO, completely wrong direction.

Instead of just making interesting overworld and retaining great temples of the past, they went with what, in the end, boils down to quite generic open-world overworld (Gerudo Town was only place even remotely interesting for me), which is made even more untinteresting due to how easy is to climb anywhere...yeah, sure, it's somewhat fun for first few hours, but than it's just feels like it's breaking the game (which it really does, I almost completely skipped whole Hyrule Castle). And then on top of that, they gave us shrines, which are mostly Portal on extremely easy and not one single temple that is comparable to anything from previous 3D Zeldas.

I really wanted Zelda to be open-world, some of my favourite games fall into this type (Elite, Might&Magic 6/7, Wizardry 8, Gothic, Morrowind, STALKER), but BotW approach to open-world just broke what was good and replaced it with lot of very flawed mechanisms.

I guess best comparison for me would be if From made another Souls, but completely open-world, and instead of intricate and greatly designed areas (which is actually quite easily achievable in open-world approach) they went with Dan Osman alike skilled freeclimber that wanders fairly generic overworld, fights mostly same enemies over and over again, no matter the region, and solves easy physics based puzzles to enhance the stats without ever having to go through anything like brilliant levels of previous games.

I never found climbing "broken" in the slightest; you can bypass some of Hyrule Castle by climbing, great; you'll miss a bunch of secrets and stuff if you do, but if you're impatient to just get to Ganon, the game lets you. 

And I'd actually say some of the shrine challenges in BOTW are among the coolest puzzles in the entire series, such as the one where you guide a rolling ball through a Rude Golberg esque course of mechanisms, or another where you have to get a cube of ice through a gauntlet of fire-based obstacle while it slowly melts. I quite liked that it broke the dungeons down into digestible chunks that I could pick off at my own pace.

I've found climbing to break the game from fairly early in game - 2 stamina bars is all you need to get anywhere, and with infinite respawns of ingredients, you can cook up enough shit to even climb in rain without lot of problems.
Now, I'm all for climbing in games (especially in RPGs), been clamoring about it since forever, but it needs to be done properly - committing to that should be a playstyle decision and take a lot of skill points and learning in-game how to do it (talking RPGs in general, not BotW) - this will give you expert climber, but your character will inevitably suffer in other areas.
The way it's done in BotW just kills exploration for me, so world design becomes broken easily - just climb here, maybe find another worthless loot and glide down again with paraglider.

I skipped whole Hyrule Castle by accident really - not that I cared to bother with it much, tbh, at that point I was so bored with game that I couldn't care less. I did reload when I beat Ganon to see what I missed and went through castle - let's just say I haven't felt I've missed much first time for skipping so much of it.

In the end, it was decent game, but it just shows how much they lack when it comes to building open worlds, with proper main and side quest (well, most devs do).

When I finished it, first thing I thought of was - will I ever replay it? And unlike all other 3D Zeldas, answer was resounding no - maybe I'll even press myself to play through MM finally after this, but I'd take any other 3D Zelda over BotW.

Last edited by HoloDust - on 29 April 2018