The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (NS) is the most successful stand alone Zelda title (not counting remasters/other versions)

[Jumpin]

Wyrdness said:

contestgamer said:

You can have the existing BOTW world PLUS massive OOT/MM style dungeons. You're not subtracting, you're adding dozens of hours of gameplay. Everyone would be happy. It already has dungeons anyway, the divine beasts. However they are short, with cookie cutter designs and music. Make them more massive and intricate, with well designed, detailed rooms and puzzles and OOT/MM style orchestral music and you have a better game.

You're adding clutter that's the problem as these dungeons already have their void filled by the shrines, dungeons stopped being enjoyable for many people and started becoming tedious this is why the shrines are so well received a positive reaction because they're not these long drawn out moments like in previous games should the player decide to dabble in them.

BOTW did what the series needed and reduce all of that to focus on the world, as someone has mentioned they became discouraging where as exploration and discovering was never really touched on in the prior games. If anything they shouldn't be adding dungeons but more towns, secrets and places to find.

I agree 100%. The Shrines made the “dungeon” aspect of the game feel fresh for what felt like the first time since the Forest Temple in Ocarina of Time. Rather than stringing up an insanely long portion of the game that might take you hours, it broke it up into smaller locations with 1-4 puzzles; I never finished TP or Wind Waker because in each game my whole progress got blocked in some kind of a hide n seek game that was on the critical path. I had to find some small item in a very large 3D area in order to progress. I could have gone to gamefaqs to look it up, I likely had done that a bunch of times already in each game for similar things - but you hit a point where it’s just like “I can’t be bothered with this crap!” And I turned it off... I probably had similar issues in OOT and MM, but I probably wasn’t sick of the formula yet.

With Breath of the Wild, if I couldn’t get past something, I’d leave and come back later (you can warp to any Shrine you’ve visited). Breath of the Wild lives and Breaths in its overworld, and that fresh air focus is quite a breath of fresh air. Forcing in a bunch of long-slog dungeons is not only regressive in the series, but it’s adding back in the elements that caused the franchise to stagnate in the first place. Putting in something that takes 2-4 hours of stuff you HAVE to complete to finish it is not better than several 15-30 minute things.

Number 1: the smaller ones means you spend a lot more time doing stuff outside.

Number 2: way less chance on getting stuck after an hour because you can’t find some little switch somewhere in one of twelve giant rooms, and you need to in order to complete this dungeon; and then there’s like ten other things like that.

 

If we’re talking about themes, then yeah, I have no problem with - for example - theming Mt. Doom Shrines with lava and such; Forest Shrines like the forest temple; etc... But doubtlessly, Breath of the Wild’s Shrines fixed the problem with the sloggy dungeons that caused the franchise to become stale and fall from the position of grace it held from NES to N64. Breath of the Wild is the Zelda game that put it back up there.