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contestgamer 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 think its hard to deny that BOTW would be a much better game if it had 5-6 OOT/MM style temples in it in addition to the shrines.