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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Started by Kelvin, February 14, 2017, 03:13:25 PM

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Kelvin

Quote from: Shay Chaise on February 05, 2018, 12:01:27 PM
Not being sexist but I always thought there's something off about guys riding horses

Looks pretty macho to me



and a pic I took in Zelda


madhair60

Quote from: Kelvin on February 05, 2018, 11:41:30 AM
The problem is that horses are fun to ride

I agree.

:p

Nah, I get it - it's just that in this game I get a lot out of the graphics, I really love the views and it's just kinda exhilarating riding a horse around. Tonight I'm going to try and find more shrines.

Shay Chaise

Get some shrines, upgrade your stamina, get the climbing gear and your freedom will increase exponentially. Then you really be fuckin.

Kelvin

Quote from: madhair60 on February 05, 2018, 01:40:50 PM
I agree.

:p

Nah, I get it - it's just that in this game I get a lot out of the graphics, I really love the views and it's just kinda exhilarating riding a horse around. Tonight I'm going to try and find more shrines.

I totally get that. I still pop into the game from time to time, just to ride a horse or the bike from one side of the map to the other, whacking enemies and shooting off bomb arrows at everything that moves.

Bhazor


Kelvin

Quote from: Bhazor on February 05, 2018, 03:20:36 PM
27 Obscure Combat Secrets and Tricks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlH7wIhS0WU

Can't believe how many of those I didn't know. I particularly like the one where he leaps off the bike and sends it crashing driverless into a batch of exploding barrels.

madhair60

Quote from: Shay Chaise on February 05, 2018, 02:40:02 PM
Get some shrines, upgrade your stamina, get the climbing gear and your freedom will increase exponentially. Then you really be fuckin.

Climbing gear is supposed to be en route to Kakariko, yeah? Presumably in a shrine?

Kelvin

Quote from: madhair60 on February 05, 2018, 03:59:36 PM
Climbing gear is supposed to be en route to Kakariko, yeah? Presumably in a shrine?

It's in three parts, but one is in a shrine on the main path to kakariko, yes.

As Shay says, the most important factor in making climbing easier is upgrading stamina. Once you have a decent amount, you can do the dash frequently.

Twed

A useful hint: Tra la la, look for Sahasrahla.

madhair60

Played this all evening. Levelled up stamina twice. Feel like a god.

Kelvin

Quote from: Twed on February 05, 2018, 04:12:02 PM
A useful hint: Tra la la, look for Sahasrahla.

What is the secret you're seeking? I know it, I know it, ha HA! I can't tell you, but I'll give you a clue: Tra la la, look for Sahasrahla♪ It's hiding somewhere and no peeking! ♪ Go find it, go find it, scra-CAW!"

madhair60

Pretty happy with this now. I don't care about weapon breakage any more (I've always got weapons and usually a couple of decent ones I can whip out for any fight that I can't just avoid), I've found several stables (I managed to play for hours without finding a single one, no idea how as they're everywhere), upped my stamina to make climbing more effortless, filled out more of the map by capturing a couple towers, died a few times to Guardians etc, but I'm enjoying it, I've found a gameplay flow that's really working for me. Back on tonight.

madhair60

Also I want to add how impressed I've been by the Shrines I found yesterday. One was a combat challenge - whatever - but the rest were effectively very tight mini-dungeons, exploiting the mechanics in ways that felt creative, like I solved it myself by "breaking" the game, when obviously I just did what was intended. The way that they hide chests of varying usefulness requiring you to go just beyond what you're already doing. It's very cool and concise level design and I'm liking it.

And I have to mention the time I was fighting a couple of Bokoblins, accidentally dropped a bomb and ran away only for Bokoblin A to punt the bomb away, right into Bokoblin B, killing them both. I didn't even know they could do that.

Kelvin

Just a tip you might not have noticed; if you check the map at the end of a shrine, you can tell whether you found all of the chests or not by whether there's a picture of one next to the shrines name.

madhair60

Caned this last night. Went to Zora's Domain, got leccy arrows from a centaur and shot them at a big elephant. Now I'm inside it (oo-er!).

falafel

Quote from: Kelvin on February 06, 2018, 11:34:49 AM
Just a tip you might not have noticed; if you check the map at the end of a shrine, you can tell whether you found all of the chests or not by whether there's a picture of one next to the shrines name.

Nooooo.

madhair60

Did the big elephant dungeon. Really difficult but satisfying. Took on Waterblight Ganon. Died in one hit. Bye bitch, warped the fuck out. No mate. Later. Bye.

Timothy

A year on.

I still think the game is a bit overrated? It seems that it has been reviewed merely on style and not substance and with rose tinted Zelda glasses. All other games without the Zelda name wouldn't have gotten such high ratings. I mean:

- All enemies are the same, but with a different color.
- You have to open the map by climbing towers, something people hated in the Far Cry games but suddenly liked in the Zelda games.
- Almost all the side quests are fetch quests with little to no reward.
- There are a lot of bugs and glitches in the game. I won a dungeon by falling through the floor and shooting arrows while the enemy couldn't hit me.
- Lot of repetition in the shrines
- The weapon breaking. Ugh. The weapon breaking.
- The story, if we can even call it that.
- No post Ganon world.
- DLC bike that would have been great at the start of the game, not the end.
- The dungeons.
- The tablet thingy is clearly designed for the Wii U tablet but removed from the Wii U version because they wanted to release the game exactly the same for both consoles, which feels weak.

It's a beautiful game. And the feeling of exploration at the start feels wonderful. Some of the shrines are great puzzles. But when you find out that exploration will lead to either a fetch quest, the same enemy or a weapon that will break after a few strikes, it got tiresome. At least for me. Especially compared to Mario. That game was really good.

Thoughts?

Shay Chaise

It has boundless substance, but it lacks tick box satisfaction for a certain kind of player. It also lacks almost all the previous, beloved, traditional Zelda elements. It also fucks every other open world game ever made in the fucking head. Horizon - as I said recently - feels like a last-gen game after Zelda. If you like it, that's great, but it is very very basic when you compare the interlocking systems and creative opportunities. That's pure style over substance and vastly overrated in my eyes. It's not as good a game as Far Cry 3, put it that way.

I think we probably discussed this nine months ago and agreed to disagree so I'm not sure why I've bothered. I just saw some especially wrong things you said and thought we could go round in circles again.

Most of those criticisms I totally agree with, though.

Oh, I've played 120 hours and only done half the shrines and probably ten percent of side quests. Never had a single bug or glitch.

Timothy

Quote from: Shay Chaise on March 29, 2018, 08:05:34 AM
It has boundless substance, but it lacks tick box satisfaction for a certain kind of player. It also lacks almost all the previous, beloved, traditional Zelda elements. It also fucks every other open world game ever made in the fucking head. Horizon - as I said recently - feels like a last-gen game after Zelda. If you like it, that's great, but it is very very basic when you compare the interlocking systems and creative opportunities.

The missions and side quests from Horizon in the world of Zelda would have made a perfect game.

And it's not really tick box satisfaction. At least not for me. I love games where it's all about the exploration. It's more that I think it's a shame you get dropped in this beautiful world without any proper storyline or good main or sidequest. The exploration is great but everything else surrounding it is really disappointing. At least for me.

Maybe I had bad luck with bugs/glitches. Had the end boss glitch with the arrow fight, dungeons bosses glitch, got stuck in a shrine, etc.

brat-sampson

The story, writing and world-building in Horizon* are in a different galaxy to BotW, but it doesn't really have any exploration, the world is definitely smaller and less varied (by design) and it doesn't feature any real opportunities to use your ingenuity other than maybe to try and cheese the odd fight. I liked how the combat scaled in complexity but by the end you're an overpowered machine-destroying monster who doesn't afraid of anything. When you realise how damn good the ropecaster/tearblast arrows are, the game's your oyster. I finished all the cauldrons and tallnecks, but can't be bothered to go back for the challenges, collectables, bandit camps and side-quests.



*Which I just finished last night and so am keen to discuss

madhair60

Need to get back on this. So glad it finally clicked.

I really disliked Horizon. Felt utterly rote and joyless. Friends of mine loved it though, more power to them but I found it so, so boring.

colacentral

I played almost 200 hours and completed all but 7 shrines (still planning to go back and find those at some point), and I too never encountered a single bug, as far as I can recall. Maybe the game crashed once, possibly? But my memory is that it was perfect.

I feel like I have a good sense for when something is over-hyped, and I really don't think it's the case for BOTW that the Zelda brand gives it a break for perceived faults where another game would be docked points.

I hate to say it, and I feel like a cunt for doing so, but: I really think alot of the critical voices are just playing it wrong. It's a survival game, and the weapon breakage feeds into that. It's called Breath of the Wild - sorry, but you might have to fight a group of moblins with a branch occassionally; good luck to you.

Kelvin

The thing about side quests being fetch quests comes up quite a bit, but I think it slightly misses how important the numerous shrine quests are. In effect, having to solve and complete those, while not exactly the same as a conventional sidequest, still serves much the same purpose; meeting characters, doing tasks, filling out the game between Divine beasts, giving you a reason to travel, and earning you stuff (better weapons, etc, and an orb ie. a quarter heart peice, like in old Zelda games). While the game doesn't have many big, elaborate "quests", it certainly isn't lacking in varied things to do in the world.

It's the same problem I have with people saying "all you find is shrines and koroks". Well, even if that was true (and it's not), many of those shrines have a little challenge or quest attached to them; it's not "just a shrine", it's rolling snowballs, fighting three ogre brothers, avoiding a mad lady's flower maze, spying on villagers to find a thief, climbing spires against the clock... I just find it a reductive way of looking at the game.               

Kelvin

Quote from: Timothy on March 29, 2018, 07:39:12 AM
It seems that it has been reviewed merely on style and not substance.

This is surely the opposite of what happened. People frequently (and rightly) criticised superficial things like the story and voice acting, but concluded that the game was so much fun, so satisfying to explore, so refreshing to play, that it was wonderful in spite of those limitations. Reading reviews and hearing discussion about it, there was no lack of criticism of the game. We just think it's utterly brilliant in countless other ways.   

falafel

I love it, but I don't think story is a superficial criticism. Tell that to Tolstoy. But it's more that BotW isn't about story.

Kelvin

Quote from: falafel on March 29, 2018, 10:27:39 PM
I love it, but I don't think story is a superficial criticism. Tell that to Tolstoy. But it's more that BotW isn't about story.

Sorry, I didn't mean it's a superficial criticism, just that, in most (not all) games, story is more superficial than gameplay, imo. Music, graphics, story, all very important, but ultimately, very important surface elements compared to the mechanics of a game.

As for Tolstoy; we're talking about a game here, not a novel, TV show or film. Different mediums have different priorities. Even games have different needs. Some are more about story-telling than gameplay mechanics, in which case you'd judge them on their writing, characters, etc. I'm not saying story is inherently superficial. Just that it's not the focus of a game like BOTW. It's just a loose framework to give you certain objectives. 

And to return to my original point, I don't see how a person could say the response to BOTW was about style over substance, when almost all the praise was about the way it encouraged exploration, and it's versatile, interactive mechanics, rather than things like visuals, which were clearly trumped by the technical wizardry of Horizon: Zero Dawn.   

Kelvin

As for it getting praise simply for being Zelda; I don't know how you can divorce that from the experience, to be frank. If millions of gamers have a deep affection for the Zelda series, a great Zelda game is obviously going to feel more special to them than the exact same game without the Zelda world and characters. That's part of the experience, and I can't view the game objectively without that lens. Nor would I want to. 

The fact that the game received such insane (and sustained) praise, even compared to other Zelda titles, and from people who weren't previously Zelda fans, or who had dropped off the series after recent disappointments, surely suggests the game did have a certain magic regardless of, or in addition to, it's "brand".

falafel

Re. story: When you put it like that i agree with you completely.

Also, Timothy, I had only ever played one Zelda game before and not particularly enjoyed it. I think you might just not like this game. I have several hundred games in my library and the only two I genuinely regret paying for are Silent Hill 2 and Bayonetta. Despise both of them. Stone cold classics, apparently. Sometimes you have to say to yourself: maybe it's just me.

Bazooka

Quote from: falafel on March 29, 2018, 11:00:22 PM
Re. story: When you put it like that i agree with you completely.

Also, Timothy, I had only ever played one Zelda game before and not particularly enjoyed it. I think you might just not like this game. I have several hundred games in my library and the only two I genuinely regret paying for are Silent Hill 2 and Bayonetta. Despise both of them. Stone cold classics, apparently. Sometimes you have to say to yourself: maybe it's just me.

Silent Hill 2?!!#@#£€€!!!