Dulfite said:
So a game that has probably sold 3-4 million copies by now is a game with bad word of mouth? Have you seen how many reaction videos there are on the reveal of that game? And each of those channels has a bunch of followers. The game has sold tremendously, and those who wish BOTW had more story components are probably very satisfied by the story building AoC does. There clearly is public interest if it's the best selling he in the series or on the way to be. |
Without opining about the quality of the game or what the word of mouth is: it's perfectly possible for a bad game to sell millions of copies. That's what hype is for, after all: those same reaction videos feed into selling copies before the game is reviewed or released, the initial interest was strong at least in part because this was billed as the prequel to one of Nintendo's biggest games in years, and being Nintendo's only serious holiday title didn't hurt how many units were moved. I think we can all name games off the top of our head which were quite bad, but still sold millions on copies on the back of the marketing machine. Even E.T., The Worst Game Of All Time™, sold 1.5 million copies in an era where a tenth of that was a genuine blockbuster.
Now, opining about the quality of the game, and speaking just for myself: it was meh. I haven't finished it. I'm not sure I'm going to finish it. I'm not a big Warriors fan, so that's not a shocker, but I was hoping that at least the game's other elements (e.g. narrative, characters, etc.) would make up for it. They didn't for me. No one really interacts much with one another, I haven't learned much about the world or events that I couldn't piece together from the base game, and the characters and events aren't even the ones we glimpsed in Breath of the Wild, so it's a bit of a bait-and-switch anyways.
I can't speak to word of mouth, since I haven't had my finger on the pulse for years, but I have a hard time imaging it was too spectacular, if the sell-through numbers have dropped so greatly.
