| super_etecoon said: If there are any fans out there who are still claiming that they're not excited for this game, that is more on them than it is on Aonuma's team and Nintendo. I would have been content with half of what they showed in this trailer. So much happening so fast. |
Well, I'm a Zelda fan, and to be honest I'm marginally more excited than I was before this trailer, but given that I didn't really find BotW that great, I'm not expecting this to be something I will like very much as well.
The defining feature of Zelda for me has always been "key and lock" mechanism, be it actual or metaphorical - that is, item gated progression game design. Combined with semi-open worlds, that is what has defined Zelda from the beginning, for good or worse.
Now, I don't mind "emergent" gameplay (that word gets tossed around in the last few years way too much), quite the opposite. It was fun when Ultima did it 30+ years ago, it is the core of TTRPGs (can't really think of any D&D or otherwise session without at least one "Player: Can I do this? DM: You can certainly try.") and I welcome the games that try to incorporate it into its design. It's just that I find that BotW design didn't do that great good job at it, and along the way it lost some of the key (pun intended) components of decades long Zelda game design.
Maybe sometimes in the future they will improve on the current formula and bring the pendulum back into equilibrium (I think it swung too much in the opposite direction from Aonuma's 3D Zeldas, which have their own problems compared to 2D Zeldas). But, just as I don't like new Tomb Raiders, since they ditched TR formula and became different games with TR label slapped on them, I don't feel compelled to like new Zelda just because it's called Zelda.
