Now that the dust has settled, can we admit that, while BotW was pretty good...

Now that the dust has settled, can we admit that, while BotW was pretty good, it's world could have been a lot more interesting, and it left a lot to be desired? I hope for the next game they take similar mechanics but focus on the world building and give you a better sense of discovery.

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the next game simply needs more dungeons like Hyrule Castle, where it's built into the environment seamlessly, and less focus on shrines. Although I hope they don't remove shrine-like minidungeons completely as they were a nice addition when done well.

the only game I've played that captures that mysterious rpg feel was Grimrock 2.

The only problem with BotW's open world is that the only rewards you got were korok seeds and what's essentially the same dungeon over and over again. I'm not asking for dozens of different types of rewards, but some variety wouldn't hurt. My favorite parts of the game was on the Plateau when you were just starting out and it was basically a test if you could survive. I didn't even go straight for the dungeons at first because I was having more fun dicking around.

that's simply not true, there's just about every kind of reward possible present in the game - from money, to rare weapons, to armor sets, to rare ingredients, to surprise minigames and quests.

Get a grip OP.

BotW is the game I've waited 25 years to play and it exceeded my expectations.

pretty much this, if it had the standard zelda dungeons built into the world the game would be perfect
just make it so you can do them in any order, maybe add some light scaling so that the dungeons you do earlier on have easier enemies and the boss has less health and by the time you get to the last one it has the near endgame enemies and a boss with more damage and health

Near useless weapons that respawn can't be considered rare.

Hyrule was basically empty with zero NPCs and shrines like that typically had NOTHING in them.

Old Zeldas were cool because you would find shit like power gloves or hover boots which affected gameplay.

i thought the world was plenty interesting
could have used a few more interior areas was my only real complaint, because what there was, was good

>Money
Sell sticks and materials
>Rare Weapons
Sparkly weapons that give you two more hits before it breaks
>Armor sets
You can buy them in towns
>Rare ingredients
Mark them on the map and return to them when the reset moon occurs.
>Surprise Minigames and quests
Tedious and minuscule when the rewards can be found from fighting enemies and looking in chests hidden around the world

You're not wrong, but don't pretend those are rewards.

>Near useless weapons that respawn can't be considered rare.
I guess the hylian shield and champion weapons don't count, huh?

Shadow of the Colossus was the best Zelda game and it wasn't even a Zelda game

Don't know what champion weapons are but the hylian shield is just another shield.

>Old Zeldas were cool because you would find shit like power gloves or hover boots which affected gameplay.
You need to remember that those items you talk about were essential roadblocks.
>You can't go down this path until you have the power gloves to lift that big rock out the way.
BotW just lets you climb over the rock. That's was the entire thought process throughout development - a world without bounds, without restriction.

>Hyrule was basically empty with zero NPCs
the fuck are you talking about, there are NPCs all over the place
>Sell sticks and materials
the only things that'll give you good money are gemstones and rare mob parts, which are in itself rewards
>Sparkly weapons that give you two more hits before it breaks
nice meme, and blatantly false especially in the mid-game and later.
>You can buy them in towns
certain sets can only be obtained by completing shrines or quests.
>Mark them on the map and return to them when the reset moon occurs
okay, this one is actually true
>Tedious and minuscule when the rewards can be found from fighting enemies and looking in chests hidden around the world
not true, especially for the 3 horse minigames where the reward can only be obtained from those.

Finally, I'll ask what is it you want to see as rewards in the game?
Reason I ask is, whilst you're somewhat right with these points, at the same time I cannot for the life of me think of any other/better rewards they could've done - unless you simply want the OoT-style dungeons back or something, which I could understand but it's not entirely relevant to this point.

>Don't know what champion weapons are
have you literally never played the game or something?

That has ten times the durability of the next strongest shield.

BoTW was good, but I feel like if they play their cards right the sequel will actually live up to the reputation BoTW has as a perfect masterpiece. It's clear that most of the dev time of BoTW was spent polishing the new formula and gameplay, and to me BoTW is a great sandbox proof-of-concept. I really want to see the next one use the same formula, but add some caves and dungeons you can just find in the world as well as more general indoor areas. I also really want to see the weapon system tweaked, I hate not having any permanent weapons. I want to see unbreakable weapons and armor sets that you can find in the world.

SotC is my Gotyay and it has certain aspects very owed to Zelda. But the game itself is very far from being a substitute Zelda.

>the hylian shield is just another shield.
that lasts nearly forever and has by far the strongest parry power compared to all other shields. But yeah, sure it's "just another shield"

>You need to remember that those items you talk about were essential roadblocks.
What? They were incentives to explore the worlds and cool things to collect. And they impacted gameplay. Most of the Zelda games had cool stuff like this to find, BOTW had the slate and its functions but it wasn't cool to find them and there wasn't much there.

That was an analogy by the way, since you're being pedantic let me elaborate.
Iron boots
Hover boots
Bunny ears
Hookshot
Ocarina
Light arrows(inb4 defending amiibo)
Mirror shield
Fishing
The point I was making is that there were actual things to find and not just more stuff that will break.

I meant to type hyrule castle.

I played it, are you talking about a DLC?

sadly you couldn't explore the fortress.. i was hoping you could but you end up just climbing it and avoiding ganons goo

>castle you can't enter, basically just another mountain with a different skin
>a small cave with another fucking shrine
woah

The one thing I will say I wanted to see was shrines more incorporated with the enviroment. Just like in the OP pic. Some old ruins hidden in some crevice or some deep forest. Make the internal of the shrine match the environment you found it in. If you found it in a snow mountaintop the puzzles should be ice based etc.

That sits beside your 20 other shields. Shields are shields, you barely need them.

>I hate not having any permanent weapons. I want to see unbreakable weapons and armor sets that you can find in the world.
A simple idea would have been to let you craft unbreakable weapons from finding ultra rare materials - perhaps tied to side quests or whatever. Hell, even just using the falling star fragments would suffice and give the player an incentive to explore at night when it's more dangerous rather than just making camp and sleeping til dawn to avoid the night.

But ah fuck it. It's GOTY anyway. I'm not going to focus on nitpicks.

The Switch doesn’t have the processing power for a detailed overworld

>Literally proving Sup Forums right

Are you trying to make yourself look stupid on purpose?

Yeah, there were no fucking caves and proper dungeons. Also the towns in the game are kinda pointless. Really disappointing.

is this a joke?
the hylian shield is great as you can shield surf to your heart's content as it lasts like 50 hours or so, plus it's god-tier for parrying guardian lasers, and parrying in general.

yeah, that's a decent idea but I still dislike crafting. I would like to see really difficult world bosses that can drop permanent weapons, it would be cool if on a new playthrough you could run off and try to kill this crazy monster for a good weapon early (sort of like how you can in Dark Souls).

My main issue with the durability system is that it absolutely destroys replayability for me

what happened to the version of this image where the top-right was one of the mazes? that one made more sense

Hate to break it to you brainlet, you can't enter any of the things on the left of that image either because they're fucking PAINTINGS.

That artwork exisited in the original 8-bit and 16-bit manuals to complement world building which the game graphics alone couldn't conjure - a promise of high adventure and exploration in a magical fantasy world. A promise which BotW delivered. That imagery became reality.

does any game give me the feeling of the left?

My idea of a reward would be, a new rune if we're going by this game. A rune that isn't needed to complete the game but can be used to progress the game in a different matter. Or, as you said a place that could be a dungeon akin to Hyrule Castle. There's plenty of areas that could harbor one, but all you get is a shrine that just gives you the orb. Alternatively, what that other user said about items like the gauntlets or the eye of truth being optional items or runes again that could help you progress in certain areas.

But a real reward would be to find a miniboss. While I was happy to fight my first two Hinox and Taluses, having the entire map excluding the desert littered with those same two enemies and the occasional Lynel made the reward redundant. Two or three more minibosses and two more Lynel-tier enemies would make the exploration more rewarding in my opinion. I'll probably have to hope Nintendo builds up on this engine and does a Majora-type sequel.

You can shield surf to your heart's content with a lot of the shields, and if you have over a dozen shields it's a dumb argument. I know it's the best shield but it's still just a shield.

I pt in infinite durability on my Cemu playthrough and it does make the game a bit more fun especially for the rods. It was so stupid how they broke in 10 seconds since they weren't overpowered but are very fun to use. Having them recharge should have been good enough.

>more dungeons
No, it needs more towns, or cities, natural wonders, biomes, weather patterns, enemy types, and overworld shrine quests to replace the one-too-many Test of Strengths. No need at all for dungeons.

Champion weapons really don't count. When I first got them I did feel excited, like I had just received a super important item in terms of significance and looks, but then I learned that it can also break and "nvm, bring me this and that and I'll make a new one". That made it lose all and every uniqueness it had.

>That imagery became reality.

no

Dungeons have been the highlight of Zelda for most people. I agree though, the game would've been amazing with more detail put into the world. Anyone who says it isn't mostly empty is a fucking liar.

How the fuck would we know what you feel? If someone did 'feel those feelings' does that make their opinion more or less definitive than yours?

if they gave us 50 shrines, 500 less korok seeds, but added maybe 5 overworld integrated dungeons and 5-10 small secret unique dungeons I'd be much more happy with this game, I don't like how every reward boils down to shrine (which always has the same rewards, an orb, or maybe a random weapon) or a korok. it works in mario with the moons, not like multiple collectables in mario even matter, but for zelda it matters a lot.
original zelda does, but of course it's old as fuck and on the NES so it doesn't actually provide visually or in size what is portrayed in the art but it has a lot of secret dungeons and paths that are totally out of left field and up to the player to discover, BOTW has a few of these, like the hidden shrines and the mazes.

Top left is a real location in LttP. BotW didn’t deliver.

Uh like, the fucking images prove you wrong.

I agree. At least for this they had the excuse of a ruined Hyrule, but the next game should have the same Hyrule but more fleshed out.

Ohh he was talking about the items you get after finishing a divine beast quest? I felt the same was as you.

DQ8 for me.

>Take the least interesting part of Zelda (combat) and magnify it by 200% and throw in breakable weapons and piss easy to trigger flurry rush

>Scale down the most interesting part which is traversal of puzzle like environments using a unique array of tools and relegate it to closed off shrines and invalidate most puzzles in the over world because you can just climb over everything

For a game that claims to to return to the serie's roots it really ends up eschewing most of its legacy to become a watered down Elder Scrolls.

I don't think anyone but retards will say it was the best game ever.
It was a glorified walking simulator.

I can't think of a new rune that'd be useful, I feel the champion abilities already have that partially covered anyway. But I agree with the dungeons, I'm hoping that the next game will at least explore world dungeons (like Hyrule Castle was for BotW) more, with dungeons integrated as part of the world design rather than having them segregated like the shrines and even (technically) divine beasts were. Although, is a dungeon really a "reward" per se? Isn't what you get at the end of that dungeon the reward for the dungeon, or are you looking at this from a "reward for exploration" perspective?

I also agree about the minibosses, I especially would like more region-specific minibosses like how the molduga was exclusive to the Gerudo region (but unfortunately the ONLY region-specific miniboss in the game, unless you could elemental variants of Taluses)
literally
>it doesn't count because I said so!
almost all shields will break after a round or 2 of shield surfing, so you're absolutely wrong on that one.
I think BotW did fine for towns and natural wonders personally, the weather was well-executed as well (and I can't really see what adding other weather types would add to the game, do you really want tornados and hurricanes or what?), but I agree about the shrines and I agree about the enemy types.

>Fortress you can't explore because it's covered in goop
>Cave that only houses a small shrine puzzle

wow you sure showed me

And for being a watered down Elder Sctrolls, it really bothers me how shitty the NPCs, quests, and towns are. Worse than TES? How the fuck?

Really? You want to talk about how a 2D Zelda game from 1992 vs a 3D Zelda from 2017 stack up against each other? This is a rabbit hole of insanity.

Why can't I just get an open world game filled with shit to discover and explore and a fucking trove of secret things on the scale of the kosumoth or lucid nightmare secrets in WoW.

Don't let it keep you up at night.

>DQ8
I should give this series a try sometime

>Why can't I just get an open world game filled with shit to discover and explore
You should play Breath Of The Wild then.

>almost all
Not all. And you have tons of them. But that still wasn't my point, you're singling out 1 shield when the point I was making was much larger.

Why wouldn't you want tornadoes? That sounds cool.

this might feel like a cop-out answer but I'm fairly sure the reason there were so many shrines and nothing in terms of world-integrated dungeons (aside from hyrule castle) was due to technical limitations - especially since this was originally a wii u game and, if you played the wii u version, you'd know how poor performance gets when in the outdoor areas of hyrule castle. It can barely handle the seamless transition from overworld into dungeon there, so it's no wonder the shrines are these small rooms loaded in completely separate areas.

the secrets were the most important part of that.

This game is a Masterpiece. Maybe it is the best game I have ever played. Its like Studio Ghibli meets Shadow of the Colossus meets Zelda. The Comfyness, the details in the World, the impact of the weather, the physic, the advanced difficulty without holding hand and letting you explore the world by yourself etc.

My only complains are the Weapon system. Instead of a few Towers who discovers immediatly big parts of the world i would have prefered if the exploration would take longer. Maybe instead of the big towers you would have to find at least 5-10 shrines till a big tower appears. Wouldnt reveal the world so fast and makes it more thrilling to discover the unknown parts.

Still nearly pefect game considered the possibilitys of its time.

No, that's why it's the dream.

BotW is perhaps the closes any game as ever come but it's not quite there.

this.

I just hope they reuse assets so they can push a good game out sooner than waiting 5+ years for another installment

Reward for exploration. Because you don't have to go down a linear path, you could stumble upon a late-game dungeon an hour into playing the game, or find a really hidden dungeon from getting lost. The variants of Taluses were fine, but I don't consider them their own monster. If they're going to keep the shrines, make them look different. A shrine could be a hollow in a tree with a wooden aesthetic and forest decor. Stuff like that.

lol

I guess we'll just agree to disagree on the shield thing

>Why wouldn't you want tornadoes? That sounds cool.
to me it sounds annoying, I can't think of any way it'd benefit you - even rain gives you some benefit in the game as it increases stealth and rarer items become available in shops and uncommon wildlife spawns more frequently in rain. So what would a tornado do gameplay-wise (other than the obvious - blowing you around everywhere, making it nearly impossible to glide)

ironically the middle top image would be more desirable than that top left one. At least the middle one gives you a chance at there being a puzzle shrine.

No, I’m talking about how people who actually played the older Zeldas imagined an open world Zelda to be. And that artwork of LttP’s Tower of Hera was a great display of our wishes. BotW disappointed greatly.

I agree, but like I said in another post I think the shrine thing was mostly due to technical limitations from being a wii u game.

maybe an elder scrolls game such as the legend of skyrim?

played skryim and it's nothing like the left image. Every dungeon is copy-paste, even moreso than the botw shrines

Nah. People don't appreciate how good the world design in BotW is and it's fucking depressing. Everyone's whinging will probably turn the next one into generic themepark shit. It's the best open world to date.

>a small cave with another fucking shrine
kek. its not even really a cave. its just a giant skull thing that has one treasure chest inside.

world of warcraft classic?

It could help you glide the same way they do in Wind Waker. Rain also helps you shield surf by the way.

Back to shields, the Hylian shield is the same for this game as it was for any other Zelda shield. When I was talking about items I was saying it would be cool if there were actually unique things. Like the mirror shield which offered an additional gameplay function. When I was playing BOTW I was convinced there would be a properly unique shield the entire time, and it felt like shit when there wasn't.
>no shield that lets you surf on water
>no shield that lets you surf in the air
>no elemental shields a la Dragons Dogma
>just the same basic shield, some stronger than others
The only gimmick shields offered was wooden ones stealing arrows. Same thing with weapons, even the Fierce Diety sword had more functions in MM than it did in BOTW which really bothers me. Armor as well had its intrigue basically nullified by potions and food.

The game actually had nothing cool to find.

It really isn't dude, there are way too many arguments against it for you to even pretend it's the best. It's just big and that impressed you.

>everyone says exploration and freedom is the best part of the game
>meanwhile my favorite parts of the game were the more linear, cinematic parts, like the stuff in the towns and especially the divine beasts

seriously the divine beasts were epic as fuck, and these parts were where most of the game's emotional weight comes from. the first part of the game that really blew my away was not the exploration, but when you attack vah ruta with sidon. The divine beasts are where you really get that mixture of decay, but also majesty

youtube.com/watch?v=9G6088FtGsI

youtube.com/watch?v=XqKowuTPmH8

(1:16 in the second vid is my favorite track in the game. felt so epic going through the beast with that, manipulating it and turning it all topsy turvy as the beast groans with each movement)

Took me like 15 minutes tops to do them and I was pissed at how uninspired the art was. Must be nice being dumb.

Imagine if BotW had better dungeons.

>Took me like 15 minutes tops to do them
Stop talking absolute shite.

being best open world isn't really a great accomplishment

Better dungeons than what?

So

How many open world games have you honestly played? I would argue its among the WORST open world designs to date. Best open world MECHANICS but with one of the most boring worlds

>BotW
>emotional weight

What the actual fuck? Also have you never played any previous Zelda games?

>It could help you glide the same way they do in Wind Waker
I suppose but I think those types of "tornados" would look odd in BotW's large landscape.

>When I was talking about items I was saying it would be cool if there were actually unique things
I think I said this before, but the champion abilities and the champion weapons come to mind. I'm not sure what the point of and air shield would be when you already have a glider, but I could see a water shield potentially working.
>The game actually had nothing cool to find.
disagree on this, the magic rods (and elemental weapons in general), along with the rarer arrow types (bomb arrows in particular) were satisfying to find for me since they were uncommon even when you were actively seeking them out. Similarly, weapons like the windcleaver, lynel bows, and boomerang (especially the rare giant boomerang) were fun to play with and unique from other weapons. It is an area they could improve on, but at the same time I felt there was plenty of weapon and loot variety. For me, the main issue is the lack of enemy variety (which I've mentioned in previous posts).

>Nintendo schooling the industry yet again on game design is not really an accomplishment.

OP BTFO

I'm not.

>whoa it's a cave!
>that has nothing but another shrine dungeon
OP's point still stands

open world games are fundamentally bad.

>tfw Xenoblade BTFO Zelda in 2011 and is about to do so again in 2017

Keep your dull open world BotWfags, we’ll be over here playing a game with actual interesting locations and landmarks.

>I would argue its among the WORST open world designs to date.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion. But not all opinions are equal. Some opinions hold more water than others because they are backed up with reason, logic and accountability.

You sir, are peerless among the retarded.

OP BTFO

BotW is not anywhere close to the best designed open worlds. Compared to Morrowind, which is way more detailed, way more well thought out, and has way more caves/ruins/strongholds/citadels that really flesh out the world and give it a sense of depth.

Air shield could be a faster glider. And I just don't see how ephemeral items are cool. The rods are awesome until they break literally 10 seconds later. Arrows were already in the previous games, and I'd say they were more fun since you had a mana meter.

Link should be blue. Classic outfits are only unlocked by Amiibos or by clearing all 120 shrines.

if they never broke they'd lose their value and it'd be impossible to balance the game properly without retarded levels of enemy scaling like oblivion was infamous for.

REKT

You remember we are NOT talking about mechanics, but the world design, right?

BotW's world is so boring they felt the need to dump 120 shrines on it. The world is so boring it has hardly any interiors (compared to other open worlds which may have dozens if not hundreds). The world has a pathetic sense of history or lore compared to most other open worlds.

okay you can stop falseflagging now

>Now that the dust has settled, can we admit that, while BoTW was good, it could have had more relative content since it got delayed for 3 years

Yes, I can entirely agree.