Honestly there's a point where the luster faded away pretty hard. The game loop was really cool but once the difficulty the beginning brought with it wore off and I realized the rest of the world was slowly getting buffs to compete with me.
I dropped it hard. My wife went hardcore completionist with it tho so she really enjoyed it.
Hopefully the world will be in a state of evolution. Maybe someone will become a blacksmith, no more weapons from 100 years ago that break. That definitely has to go.
Otherwise all for it. Sign me up.
I definitely feel like having a bit more direction would help with the luster fading kind of issue. I know if you just spend a lot of time focusing on one aspect of the game like grinding temples or finding towers it becomes a bit boring.
Usually games dealt with this by offering pieces of the game in waves or areas. I wouldn’t be mad if the next Zelda had that sort of style to give the game a more linear sense of progression.
Rumors I've heard say that weapons will break faster than ever, but are more like powerups since the Master Sword is permanent this time against every enemy type but deals a lot less dmg than dropped weapons. Where the rumors come from is unknown and quite frankly I doubt the game is far enough into development for it to even be true or false at this point, but that's a scary thought nonetheless.
Still unwrapped gotta finish gow and get going on horizon.
I'm fine with next Zelda being exactly the same but that will mean it has no replay value for me. If it's more like old Zelda's then I'll replay it.
Zelda games are the only games I've ever replayed at all besides a few FF's, let alone replayed more than 1-2 additional times.
Aloy was incredible and the world of Horizon has a lot of potential, but playing it right after BotW put a spotlight on its gameplay weaknesses in terms of its open world and exploration.
Lucky me I haven't played botw since about a month or two after release and haven't opened horizon yet so I will be able to feel that both games are great.
I think I picked Horizon as my 2017 GOTY. It was an amazingly done game.
In BotW, if you saw something, you could go check it out. Maybe there would be something there, maybe not, but you decided where to explore. Horizon and a lot of other open world games don't have exploration. You go to a tower, scan the area, and then proceed to check off map markers.
you know there are open world games besides Ubisoft tower simulators right? i assume so by your use of " a lot", however "a lot" should be "most other" seeing as the most popular open world games like Skyrim and TW3 don't have this weakness.
for me, BotW's exploration was shallow and bland. The locations were almost all boring and it was very rare to find someone or something at your destination that provided you with anything, and I don't just mean rewards, but lore or a reason for that spot's existence would be great too.
In games like Skyrim/TW3 you have reasons for a lot of places to exist. BotW just doesn't inspire that level of "I found this and it's awesome" in me. Ultimately by halfway into the game I went to towers... scanned... and went and did the trials. That's about it. Sometimes I'd go look at a lake or something and find it was just as empty as the rest of them.
It's weird, I kinda had the total opposite reaction to exploring in BotW. I'd see something in the distance, be curious about it, and para-glide/climb/etc to it and then be pleasantly surprised if it was a shrine or something there. Many times it was just a korok seed puzzle, a lot of which I might not even notice the first time through. Maybe there would be an npc trying to solve some mystery in the area. I never went to some place expecting to be wowed by what I found but it was fun for me to explore all the same.
It's probably because I never really bothered with many open world games before that I wasn't expecting anything in particular. I get how people can be bored by the apparent emptiness of BotW. I don't have a lot of other open world games under my belt to compare it too. Starlink was completely barren compared to BotW to me so it's hard for me to judge it beyond that.
I think it lies somewhere in the middle between the two. In games like Skyrim you’d go look at some cool looking landmark on the map and it would typically expand into an entire quest line or at the very least bring you into a dungeon entrance. BOTW just isn’t structured like that because the dungeons are all just those mini dungeon puzzles. Which were in a majority of cool landmarks or very close by to them. Basically anywhere you are on the map in BOTW you’re within draw distance of a shrine but that’s not a very rewarding experience after 120 of them.
BoTW's environments are definitely missing a step. Getting around and fucking with enemies at various locations is fun, but I feel like the majority of exploration just leads to a shrine, and shrine's are boring because the pay off is basically the same every time (and it looks so generic and yawn).
The world needs more to it, there are hints of lore and interesting structures to find, but after a while I just wasn't curious as to what I'd find because I knew already.
But all of this is basically to say that the whole point of a sequel is to innovate and improve upon the existing formula. BoTW is a great start, but now they need to actually do something with it.
im Trying to think of examples of landmarks that were done well.
The mountain snowball thing opening the cave.
The frozen lake area and the cracks in the rocks.
The long valley with the temple at the end.
The waterfall with the big dragon.
These were all super cool experiences with very little actual payoff. I wish places like this were more abundant and there were stories behind them or things to do there (beside shrines).
I wonder how they would even up the exploration value if it's in the same world/map, unless it somehow gets warped or Link/Zelda end up trapped in the Dark World.
yee gotta side with my BotW stans fam, it is a hell of a game. there is a level of interactivity with the world little else in the genre had ever even attempted, from the glorious physics system which turned the entire joint into a ridiculous playground in a way no other game but maybe The Phantom Pain had done, to its extraordinary ability to communicate naturally to the player (pro HUD is the only way to play)- if Link is cold he shivers, if he's hot he sweats, if sound is loud it alerts enemies if it is quiet you may sneak up on all the horses, lightning catching in your metal weapons sparks before it strikes, wind blows the grass this way and that dictating which way fire spreads, et cetera. it annihilates games like The Witcher 3 and Skyrim which feature such uninteractive, sterile worlds in contrast, places that feel mostly like painted backgrounds (let us not speak of Ubisoft's dismal ideas for the genre). and the freedom of exploration is unrivaled (especially coming from a series that had always progressed fairly linearly and gated off huge sections of the world until you got the appropriate item), if you see a point on a map you can go climb swim run and glide to it. if you want to complete 120 shrines you can, if you want to go and kill Ganon in the first few hours of the game, feel free to try. one of my favorite memories was going to the top of the world and there discovering the skeleton of a great leviathan for no other reason than because i wanted to. could geek out for many more pages about the dulcet minimalist score, the art design, the introductory-here's-your-world scene which stands as one of the great world opening moments in vein of emerging from Fallout 3's bunker and Bioshock's lighthouse.
admittedly far from perfect. enemy design got terribly repetitive as you fought the same bros in different colors for one hundred hours, the durability system at its very best topped out at OK and at its very averagest topped out at annoying, the boss fights were aesthetically pleasing but mechanically mostly ehhhhh, and the classic sprawling Zelda dungeons were missed (slashing some shrines out and making the Divine Beasts + Hyrule Castle proper Zelda dungeons would have been a good compromise). but in my reckoning the core systems in play dunk all over every other game in the genre and its only real challenger to the title of best ever open world game is The Witcher 3, which is obviously a drastically different game with its emphasis on story and character and gwent (sweet gwent). hope they go hogwild on content in the sequel now that they got the framework in place.
AG pretty much summed up my opinion of BotW. Only other thing I'd add is get rid of fucking motion control puzzles. That shit can die in a huge fucking fire.