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HoloDust on 14 May 2023
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Kakadu18 said:
HoloDust said:

Maybe that's cause I'm 50+ years old and I've played Zeldas and open world games whole my gaming life.

Simply put, BotW formula is not very much to my liking, neither as open world game, and especially not as Zelda game. There is some really good stuff in it, but there is just not enough to make it something that I like or care for very much, especially since lot of old stuff was thrown away. So, if Zelda keeps on in this direction, I'll just move on from it, like I did with some other IPs I loved so much that were too drastically changed - there's never really shortage of great games out there.

Your age doesn't make a difference. I've been playing Zelda games all my life too. And BotW and TotK appeal to me more than any other Zelda game.

You didn't like BotW. Why are you playing TotK then? You were complaining so much here and yet you still play it?

I gotta say, at least you don't lie like these idiots on Metacritic saying there are no changes from BotW in the overworld and the game only runs at 20fps and there are only koroks and shrines and nothing else and the dungeons are exactly like the divine beasts and the world is empty and barren blablabla.

It's rather absurd. I, who knows BotW's world through and through notice every even smallest difference everywhere and in many places barely recognise anything in TotK, but people who clearly barely played BotW if at all think nothing changed and hate on it.

I bought TotK for my son, who liked BotW a lot - it's actually only Zelda game he finished, since he always gets stuck in classic 3D Zelda dungeons. I'm playing it cause I want to see it for myself - and while I actually find Gfinity's review fairly well written and thought out, yet somewhat exaggerated in certain places, I don't rely on reviews to tell me how good any game is.

There are plenty of stuff in BotW formula that I find to be good...and then there are crapload that I find to be bad. I don't intend to get into detailed debate about that for the umpteenth time around here, but let's just say that I find lot of core game design and gameplay loop to be less than satisfying. And yes, my age makes a lot of difference in that opinion, since I've played crapload of openworld games in my life, both old and new, and I find BotW formula to easily break after certain amount of hours, becoming somewhat of a repetitive and predictable tedium and lacking well executed progression.

Unlike some of the overzealous fans around here, I have no problem criticizing video game franchise that is in my TOP 10 of all times (believe you me, I will bury deep in the ground new Fallout or Tomb Raider, so it's not Zelda only) - because I can see lot of the flaws in past installments, just like I can see the flaws in current installment - and I can vividly imagine formula that fixes both. That's why it's not "masterpiece" for me, and that's why I'm not raving about it without objectivity that a lot of people around here and on a larger scale seems to be showing.

As I said, I'll push on, hoping it won't become a chore. There are already stuff that I like quite a bit in TotK (Depths takes the crown for now, its Gloom "penalty" reminds me of numerous examples of similar mechanisms from Pen&Paper RPGs), and if narrative structure is really better (and it seems that it is), I might even end up liking it more than BotW - that is, if I keep to quests only and avoid most of the fluff and pointless padding (and as someone who actually likes well designed padding in open world games, I find current formula's padding to be surprising amount of times poorly executed).

Anyway, back to the game.