There are so many things being tracked all the time in the game for puzzles and the power arm. Yet despites literally tracking sunshadows for some puzzle completion for example it runs almost smoothly with (in my 170h) no crashes. On a 6 yo portable console??
Botw was already impressive but I could grasp it with the shaders and also there weren’t that much physics puzzle. Objects were more static, there wasn’t the two other maps, enemy diversity was limited, same for weapons. There was less of everything overall but I thought it was the limit of the console and the possible engineering around it.
Is there any resources on how they managed to pull this off? White papers, behind the scenes, charts, …?
I don’t know, I wasn’t that wowed by TotK. I’m a huge Zelda fan, been playing all of their games at launch since A Link to the Past. But, TotK just felt like BotW with a clunky crafting system. It brought nothing new to the table outside of that. Additionally, the puzzles were often trivialized because of the crafting system being too overpowered.
While the open world aspect felt fresh in BotW, the fact that TotK was taking place in the same exact world felt stale. Sure, we got the depths and sky islands, but the former is pretty boring after the initial novelty wears off and the latter was pretty copy/paste feeling without much sense of exploration. The fact they they once again completely rely on your equipment constantly breaking in order to justify any reason to explore further reinforces the sense of forced purpose. In other words, there isn’t anything really to do in the open world besides finding stuff to replace stuff that will inevitably break.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just getting jaded or too old, but I’m just so tired of open world games. I missed the hand crafted feel of previous Zelda games, where the majority of your time was spent dungeon delving in places packed with secrets and puzzles that weren’t just physics minigames. I truly hope the next entry is something more along the lines of Twilight Princess or Ocarina of Time.
If they offered you puzzles and you ignored those puzzles via the crafting system, that sounds like a choice not to engage with the puzzles you claim to want.
I agree with OP. If there’s a puzzle in a game that’s clearly some kind of water puzzle, but I can make a boat to solve it in 15 seconds and bypass the obvious intent of the puzzle, maybe I feel a bit clever. But if I can solve every puzzle with effectively the same boat… what’s the point of doing the puzzles? I guess because I wanted puzzles? But on the other hand, if I know I can solve every puzzle with a 15 second boat, it feels kinda weird to pretend I don’t have an answer and struggle through anyway. Like, the victory is hollow when I know I could have solved it faster the dumb way.
The number of times in that game I thought “oh, maybe I have to jump up through the floor here to get through this door” and then I peeked through the floor and was like “oh, nope. It’s the damn final boss room again. Not supposed to be here yet, better go back through the floor and try another way to open this door” felt like I was babysitting the game so as to not entirely ruin the experience… and it kinda ruined the experience…
This so much.
Shrines are not a good replacement for real dungeons. The “dungeons” we get are so minimal and the upgrades you get are so meh. At best you get mobility or more ways to cheese combat encounters. Gone are the days of unique equipment and things that fundamentally change how you interact with the world, metroidvania style.
I think the open world aspect of zelda is it’s weakest link, it’s just too big of a sacrifice. Korok seeds are not real content for anyone who isn’t obsessed with the ‘gotta collect them all’ mindset, it’s just a copy paste idea like what we’ve seen in gta and assassin’s creed. There’s no real reward for excessive open world exploration, you’re constantly just trying to get from point A to point B with no reason to really delve into the landscape except for more koroks. Combat is a chore where you’re just fighting to get equipment to fight more.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of things going for the newer games, especially the controls. It’s just much less of what made the older titles great, and that’s fine. I keep having nostalgia for link to the past and that’s just not the kind of game this is.
Yes, you worded how I feel quite well. It’s a shame and I, too, long for another A Link to the Past styled Zelda (hell, Link Between Worlds was fantastic, please give us more of that while waiting for the next 3d entry).
Don’t get me wrong, I really did love BotW. I was floored when I first played it and truly appreciated the design concepts they were aiming for (especially since, as the name suggests, the wild is your main obstacle so it fits thematically). The open world tedium in that game didn’t feel, well, quite as tedious for some reason (I wager because it was fresh at the time). The dungeons were weak and disappointing, but the novelty of the shrines helped offset that. However, it no longer feels novel, to me at least.
I have plenty of nieces and nephews that got turned onto Zelda starting with BotW, so it’s all they’ve ever known. They absolutely love TotK and think it’s the greatest game ever (I’m happy for them and I do enjoy seeing the whacky contraptions they make). The game sold like hot cakes and received near universal acclaim. So, that’s why I am beginning to wonder if I’m just “too old” and no longer the target demographic. The lead designer did say they have no plans of ever going back to older Zelda formats, as they much prefer the current style of design and gameplay. If that’s truly the case, I just need to retire my investiture into the franchise and move on.
I suggest you take a good look at Tunic if you haven’t yet. That’s really excellent at doing zelda 1 type stuff.