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HoloDust on 08 May 2023
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curl-6 said:
HoloDust said:

I liked Zelda at its core the most - semi-open world with gated item progression and A LOT of themed dungeons (LoZ had 9, ALttP 12, TP 10, to name a few).

To make a comparison - at one point I was arguing around here that Souls can be made as open-world and that it's probable next step for FROM - a lot of people were opposed, probably not being able to imagine such a game. Then we got Elden Ring, which was, more or less, what I was expecting them to do. ER is not flawless, and though I like it very much, I would take any Souls over it, given that it has lot of space for improvement, but in its core it remained Souls through and through.

I can vividly imagine modern open-world 3D Zelda with its core only slightly tweaked from its original roots. BotW is not that, and IMO it strayed too far away from its core. I don't know about TotK - as I said, so far I've only seen some of the things from 10-11 hours in, and what I've seen catered more to BotW players than to classic Zelda fans. Hopefully I'm wrong, those dungeons, as few as they are, are as good as classics and underworld holds lot of aces in its sleeves.

The problem is that the gated progression of classic Zelda and the open ended freedom of BOTW are at odds with each other, and the former sells 3-8 million while the latter sold 30 million in its first iteration, so Nintendo is naturally going to favour the one that sells more.

That said, the fact they're adding themed dungeons shows they are willing to appeal to fans of the classics, they just can't do so in a way that would contradict the new model's success.

Yeah, that's the thing, I do think you can make Zelda that has gated progression of classic Zelda and be very open in exploration - there are games out there that have similar structure and I can certainly envision Zelda as one.
Of course, Nintendo will go for the sales and new market. After all, sales of Skyrim (game that is most likely one of the reasons that gave Nintendo kick in the butt to wake up for "new" open-world market), sold craploads more compared to something like Morrowind or Daggerfall, yet, creatively, it's inferior game compared to both. So, yeah, all those big guns will go for sales first, no doubt about that.
We'll see...I really hope I am wrong and that it'll surprise me...but since I didn't like BotW much (and liked it even less on second playthrough, on then obligatory "watching my ASD son play", which is luckily not necessary anymore) for all the reasons that other people liked it, and seeing (so far) TotK full of those same things dialed to 11, I can only hope that any of the stuff added to TotK that is supposed to cater to classic Zelda fans is enough to get me through it - cause BotW is only mainline Zelda so far that I have no desire to play ever again.