curl-6 said: It's not as big a change to the formula as BOTW was, but to be honest I think that's a good thing; there was so much potential yet to be explored in the new format, it would've been a shame to move on from it after only one game. Still, I would argue it's just as impressive an achievement as BOTW, to take all the systemic complexity of its predecessor and add a whole new level of freeform complexity on top of that with Ultrahand. |
Well, to where can you go after open world (a question in general not just for Zelda)? To make even bigger worlds? I think people are already tired of too big open worlds. The biggest innovation will be AI (but maybe less for Nintendo) even more physics, better graphics as always... . Maybe down the road someone really finds a completely new way of how to play a game. We just can't imagine it right now. Nintendo would probably be at the forefront of such innovations. But a complete different way to play a game automatically means it can't be done with traditional controllers/joy-cons, so VR? I doubt VR will ever be a mass market product (also AR).
Honestly, I don't think it's farfetched that in future we play our games with our brain, meaning diodes are connected to our brain and we just "think" to move and act with the character. But before such a technology is possible I think AI will know from our private information we give them (Email, social media, notes, private files we give them access to, etc.) how our personal perfect game should look like and they will form this game out of an existing base game, several conditions can be applied of course.
My fear is that in the foreseeable future we don't get out of the loop I personally call "Machete - Machete Kills - Machete Kills in Space" which stands for "Open World, so exciting, what we do next? Well, we make it bigger, more vertical (into the sky and underground); great, but what we do next? Well, we leave Earth and go into space!"
I still can remember when we had those old (western) RPG's (Wizardry for example) and Adventures (all of them) where we only had static pictures and accompanying texts which told the story. The whole word was built in our heads and back then I always thought, how great it would be if we actually could move to that distant castle we see on the picture, if we actually could move around freely in this fantastic world... . Well, nobody could have known back then that all that will become a reality. But you know what? I don't think the experience back then was lesser than what we perceive now with open worlds in high end graphics. Maybe, innovation doesn't necessarily mean progress, maybe one solution can also be regress? I philosophical thought.