| UnderwaterFunktown said: The Wind Waker was released on GameCube and the Wii U - two systems with install bases of rougly 20 % and 15 % of where the Switch is currently sitting at. It can't be denied that Nintendo seem to have struck gold with the open-world formula of BotW and brought tons of new players to the series, but if they had followed it up with another critically acclaimed "linear story Zelda" it could still have done incredible numbers on the Switch. Personally I hope the series will draw elements from both types going forward. |
Disagree tbh the old formula was what held the series back no matter how critically acclaimed any game was it would never have reached BOTW's sales for several key reasons. The old formula was effectively a very refined template for dungeon crawling this limited who could enjoy the games as well as lock the potential of any title using the formula to the quality of the dungeons the result was everything else in the game not only played second fiddle to dungeons but were dictated by them this could be seen in how the land of Hyrule was a glorified hub rather than a world you were meant to get some attachment to.
A key point is BOTW's Hyrule gets some criticism of not much going on at times but a lot of this is negated by the sandbox mechanics allowing a player to approach the same situation in many different ways, in the other games you can't do this because mechanics were dictated by the dungeons and puzzle based nature meaning you had to adhere to the dungeon crawling template to get through the games and this is where the games would struggle to bring in and appeal to new players.
