The Official Legend of Zelda Thread: Nintendo Announces TLOZ: Echoes of Wisdom

[curl-6]

HoloDust said:

curl-6 said:

The game was built for the Wii U, a system running a 1.24GHz Tri-core PowerPC 750 CPU, essentially an overclocked triple core Gamecube processor. Obviously this limits the sheer quantity and complexity of interactions that can take place.

And yet, in what other game out there can you set a bear on fire and ride it through the forest setting bushes and grass alight as you go? Or shoot a bomb arrow at an enemy causing an apple tree nearby to fall and its apples to be roasted in the fire, and then use the updraft of that fire to take flight and rain arrows down on your enemy from the air?

That thrill of discovery when you find a new way to interact with the world is as much a part of the core gameplay as conquering Shrines or finding the hidden memories. to call it pointless is as inaccurate as calling the story pointless in The Last of Us or Bioshock, or the sidequests pointless in The Witcher 3.

BOTW's physics are not meant to be totally realistic; you can use a giant leaf to fan your sail boat along after all, like the graphics, the physics are supposed to be exaggerated and stylized. 

That's like saying, in what other game can you grapple the passing car and tie the other end to the enemy and watch him/her be dragged along the road. Or set fuel tank on fire, watch it fall and set another one along the way, which explodes, making massive whole in outer wall and killing all the soldiers behind it? JC3, btw. Yet I have no delusion that those are just cheap thrills, since whole game is based on them, and that there is nothing more to it underneath them - which is fine for such game.

But I don't consider Zelda as a cheap thrills game, and, for me, most of those lauded mechanisms boil down to that - and when you scrap them, what is left is not really that great.

Plenty of games have realistic (or attempting to be realistic) destructibility physics. It's the addition of interwoven chemistry that marks BOTW apart; fire doesn't just deal damage or destroy things, it also changes the properties of items; an animal set alight will become cooked meat, an apple that rolls into a fire becomes a roasted apple, chuchu jelly becomes red chuchu jelly. Rain puts out everything from campfires to fire keese to the fuses of bomb arrows. A deer or chuchu killed with an ice arrow will become frozen meat and white chuchu jelly, same for meat or chuchu jelly dropped in freezing environments. Hit a wet enemy with an electric weapon and you'll get a lightning AOE.

These aren't just vestigial mechanics put there for "cheap thrills"; they power the core tenant of BOTW's philosophy; setting the player loose in a truly dynamic world and letting them discover how it works through experimentation and discovery. They can no more be separated from the game's identity than you can separate the Plasmids from Bioshock or gravity from Mario Galaxy.