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HoloDust on 30 September 2018
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Veknoid_Outcast said:
HoloDust said:

BotW is very fun sandbox game - but it's pretty average open-world game - and those two terms are something that many seem to confuse or even eqaute.

As I said earlier, people do tend to mostly praise it for its "fuck around" mechanisms - politely known as sandbox. Yes, some of its mechanisms are quite fun (until you try something like choping bokoblin tower and your axe goes through it like it doesn't exists and you realize how limited those mechanisms in fact are), yet I find something like Just Cause to be vastly superior as fuck around game. Why it's not rated higher and showered with praise? Because it doesn't have Zelda or any big IP coat of paint.

While many find some of those mechanisms enhancing the game, I actually find some of them detrimental - especially climbing in this form breaks the world design, that is already not so great to begin with. If anything, BotW is for me perfect example of how loosely intertwined mechanisms, world design and character abilites can actually ruin open-world game, making it fuck around game.

And, IMO, Zelda should not be fuck around game - exploration, yes, by all means...and that is where open-world should come in - a well thought out open-world, designed to properly  accomodate for exploration, puzzles and story. Nintendo only needs to look a bit further in the past for some games and take some notes from them and build on it, instead of being mostly influenced by more modern designs (Just Cause included) and making mishmash of what current mass-market expects.

Listen, I get that you want a Zelda game in the Ocarina/Wind Waker/Twilight Princess mold—I too love that formula—but you’re not exactly engaging with or disproving my point. I spent a long time explaining how the game is special, and you just dismiss it all as a “fuck around” game. 

Can you point to an open-world game that does what Breath of the Wild does, in terms of emergent gameplay and environmental manipulation? Please do so, because I’d love to play it.

I think you're too fixated on the idea that BotW is something very special and that "other" games should do exactly the same things that BotW does - you can take quite a lot of games and turn it around, and BotW will not pass that check. However, I'll play along - I find BotW to mostly be a mishmash of FarCry (FC 2 is pinacle of how enviroment reacts, no other FC game after it had it at the level of details FC2 had), and Just Cause - JC is probably king of let's fuck around, with destructable enviroment, great physics, paragliding and zipping to anywhere. These two IPs have been contantly popping into my mind while I was playing BotW.

And yes, for me, BotW indeed boiles down to fucking around, cause rarely any of those mechanisms is actually very usefull, apart for occasional...well, fucking around...which is not bad per se, I like fucking around in JC, it's just not what I want from Zelda.

And no, I don't want old formula, anyone that has ever been in any Zelda thread that I posted in, know what I think of Aonuma and his fixation on puzzles...and yet, I like puzzles, I always have, since all the way back in time, 80s and 90s, when they were quite common in CRPGs and dungeon crawlers. But he unbalanced Zelda so much with them ever since OoT, and now he swung it the other way, forgetiing meaningful puzzles in the process, instead making it about meaningless exploration in largely empty world - because, without fucking around, that what's BotW boils down to, given that there are only 4 beasts you need to go to (and even that is optional) and almost no significant story to follow.

What I would actually want is meaningful world with attention to details, and not the size, built for exploration, both horizontally and vertically (there's down, undergroung, as well, but seems they forgot that in BotW) crossed with "old mold" puzzles. Or if I'm crossbreading games, Twilight Princess mated with, let's say, Dark Souls (if I said Severance: Blade of Darkness no one would understand) all put together in the world that has world building philosophy of Gothic 1/2.

And no easy climbing - the most annoying thing for me in whole BotW, apart from lack of dungeons/shrines, is climbing, given how easy it breaks the world - such skill that Link is showing in BotW should never come at low price, and that should be one of character defining traits, for which he should suffer in other skills - but then we're in proper RPG domain, and I'm talking TES: Daggerfall/Morrowind amount of skills, and I'm not so sure Nintendo wants to push Zelda into full RPG, especially old school RPGs that draw so much from D&D.