Agreed, I'd go so far as to say BOTW and XCX were the only really ambitious games Nintendo made in the Wii U era.

No. It's barely possible on the Wii U. It requires a hefty install, uses dynamic resolution, and still drops to 20fps in busy scenes.

It's no GTA5 in terms of budget, but compared to Nintendo's other games it's much more complex and advanced, with system-pushing tech, a massive amount of content, and a sophisticated network of interacting systems that goes beyond almost any other game on the market.

Your point and logic is ridiculous. The series is now more mainstream than ever before, and again, a few other high sellers don’t magically make Zelda less mainstream compared to the past. It doesn’t speak tor the entire market: Most games do not sell like GTAV and Minecraft.

and Zelda isn’t even done selling yet either, hasn’t even had a complete edition/Nintendo Select/remake/remaster or price cut at all. This game will sell for years and isn’t near done yet. This just makes your ‘points’ sound even more ridiculous.

Not only is Breath of the Wild going to take the crown as top Zelda, but it is going to blow past all of the other Zeldas by a huge margin. I think BotW is going to get in the ballpark of 20m when all is said and done.

The thread for these news in Resetera is a Skyward Sword-bashing s**thole.

Not bad. I don't know if it can double the sales of OoT, but I think it could get close at least. Really great news for the game.

I guess no :p Zelda Skyward Sword may have problems that could bother some, but saying that it's outright a bad game is super hyperbolic. it always surprises me how so many people in that place can agree on the same thing, it's like they don't have individual opinions.

Skyward Sword was a good game, but it did show that the series formula was becoming very stale.

Breath of the Wild was exactly what the franchise needed; a bold reinvention.

It indeed became stale...long before SS. But BotW is, IMO, completely wrong direction.

Instead of just making interesting overworld and retaining great temples of the past, they went with what, in the end, boils down to quite generic open-world overworld (Gerudo Town was only place even remotely interesting for me), which is made even more untinteresting due to how easy is to climb anywhere...yeah, sure, it's somewhat fun for first few hours, but than it's just feels like it's breaking the game (which it really does, I almost completely skipped whole Hyrule Castle). And then on top of that, they gave us shrines, which are mostly Portal on extremely easy and not one single temple that is comparable to anything from previous 3D Zeldas.

I really wanted Zelda to be open-world, some of my favourite games fall into this type (Elite, Might&Magic 6/7, Wizardry 8, Gothic, Morrowind, STALKER), but BotW approach to open-world just broke what was good and replaced it with lot of very flawed mechanisms.

I guess best comparison for me would be if From made another Souls, but completely open-world, and instead of intricate and greatly designed areas (which is actually quite easily achievable in open-world approach) they went with Dan Osman alike skilled freeclimber that wanders fairly generic overworld, fights mostly same enemies over and over again, no matter the region, and solves easy physics based puzzles to enhance the stats without ever having to go through anything like brilliant levels of previous games.

I never found climbing "broken" in the slightest; you can bypass some of Hyrule Castle by climbing, great; you'll miss a bunch of secrets and stuff if you do, but if you're impatient to just get to Ganon, the game lets you. 

And I'd actually say some of the shrine challenges in BOTW are among the coolest puzzles in the entire series, such as the one where you guide a rolling ball through a Rude Golberg esque course of mechanisms, or another where you have to get a cube of ice through a gauntlet of fire-based obstacle while it slowly melts. I quite liked that it broke the dungeons down into digestible chunks that I could pick off at my own pace.

i would take that over BotW. I actually might finish that zelda.