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Wyrdness said:
This just backs what I highlighted as fact is the original was still more open than all the games that followed it and unlike those games this was back in the 80s and you were given better freedom in your adventure than the others this is why the following games struggled to recapture its success with the exception of OOT which benefitted from the franchise's well executed jump from 2d to 3d and TP which was a call back to OOT as the rigid lock and key structure inavertedly held back the series appeal for many players this is why BOTW is appeal to so many new players as the element of "hey you can't beat this dungeon well you're stuck at this part of the game forever" is now gone and they can still freely enjoy the rest of the game regardless, BOTW recaptured what the original brought for the modern era. A key example of when this lock and key aspect goes wrong is OOT's Water Temple which back in the 90s had many players stuck on it for months, in the modern formula they could just leave and continue their adventure back in OOT the game grinds to a halt, the is always a place for the old formula yes but not as the mainline games anymore as ultimately having a fully focused Hyrule that's the centre of the game's adventure is better than tying the adventure to dungeon crawling a set number dungeons that rigidly dictate things. Again as I highlighted before the majority of the game is open to emergent gameplay it doesn't matter how you feel on it as this is not a subjective view it's a fully proven objective which is why your notion on emergent gameplay is contradicted by the actual reality of the game itself. |
Yes, Zelda 1 is more open than subsequent entries and we've been talking about Zelda 1 in previous posts, so not sure where you're going with your statement.
BotW is not like Zelda 1, it is not really back to roots, because those roots are semi-open item-gated world design, which BotW is not. Sure, it has given us exploration that was so sadly missing from Aonuma's 3D Zeldas, but it killed off other mechanisms that were part of what defined Zelda. You and many others might be fine with it and like the new formula, I am not and I don't. As I said on many occasions, there are IPs that I like more than Zelda that were subsequently changed too much and lost its DNA, so I've stopped enjoying those IPs...and life went on and I moved to other IPs that I enjoy more.
We'll never see eye to eye about BotW, but that's fine...for me there are much better open world games and much better Zeldas and I guess in 5-6 years will see what next Zelda after TotK will bring.
