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curl-6 on 09 May 2023
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HoloDust said:
curl-6 said:

A huge part of BOTW's design though was that you didn't have to progress in a certain order or a particular way.

After the great plateau you could wander off in any direction to explore and progress freely without the game stopping you and saying "sorry, come back later." For example, you could do the 4 divine beasts in any order you wanted, or even go straight to Ganon. This freedom was central to BOTW, and messing with it would risk turning off the crowd that elevated it from a 3-8 million selling series to a 30 million selling series.

Yes, you could try to go to any Divine Beast - but you had to get into Gerudo Town first, or survive heat of Goron City...which in my book is gated progression, which I actually like - apart from that "one solution" to problem of getting into Gerudo Town, which I would be fine with in classic Zelda, but not in BotW.

There are ways to make gated progression seamless, interesting and non-intrusive and retain open ended exploration - from what I understand, in TotK you can't go directly to end, like in BotW, which is gated progression...and that is good in my book of Zelda. Now, if I could only play TotK without game forcing down my throat these new abilities...

Gerudo Town or Goron City don't force you to go somewhere else or do another dungeon first as both are immediately solvable.

The gated progression model of classic Zelda requires key items like the hookshot to progress through the game; this prevents players from exploring and progressing in the direction or order they wish and you'd run into areas where it's "go beat beat x temple then come back" which contradicts BOTW's open-ended design.

You may not like the physics stuff but it is integral to the new formula that people loved so much. Nintendo would be crazy to walk back on these elements after they helped bring the series to a level of success far beyond any prior entry.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 09 May 2023