While quite literally is a tech demo, those games are indistinguishable from it. They figured out the formula of sort of cool gimmick crap set in a giant empty(literal in this case) sandbox. I hate seeing games that look like this now. It will be the illusory gigantic world with nothing in it so practically 3 hours of content separated by dozens of hours of walking simulator. Like wind waker but on a grander scale
I want videogames to be smaller but content rich like they used to be. Where hardware limitation forced devs to have realistic scale instead of screwing around with their pipedreams, having to crunch and delay the project 40 quadrillion times to blank checks and then at the 11th hour slap it onto marketplaces and patch it shortly afterwards and eventually fix it 2 years after release to sorta kinda be what they promised in concept
I want games like the original Fable or System Shock 2 or the old 80s and 90s RPGs. I'm sick and tired of wandering through the wilderness dispatching the same 5 enemy types, repeating the same boring fetch quests, with the same played out mechanics. I want a plethora of gameplay options, not 8 trillion ways to skin a cat where the end result is always the same. Elder Scrolls removing spells, classes, enchantments, magic schools, armor pieces, weapon types, etc. while giving me longer dungeons does the opposite of satisfying me, it makes more tedious and boring which is why when people go back to play skyrim they can only get so far before the tedium sets in and they uninstall
It isn't about the familiarity or nostalgia of smaller games like New Vegas or Ocarina of Time, we can replay those dozens if not hundreds of times because they were made well, they aren't a bunch of fluff, each area is recognizable and lived in, it isn't hundreds of miles of wasteland, you know specifically how the trek to New Vegas is sprawled out and even though it's scripted and well worn in your mind it's still fun. There are plenty of games we initially liked as kids that we go back to play and find out they sucked, we can recognize nostalgia and it's always an excuse for fags who want to erase the past because they're the children of satan or too stupid to realize they're being strung along by his servants to create a world unlike God's Kingdom
I'm just tired of it. No more open world, no more choices matter, no more narrative focus, no more gimmicks, no more online multiplayer, no more branching paths, no more crafting, no more roguelite elements, in fact I'm almost at the point where I don't even want branching dialogue, just have the npc do the oblivion 1 out of 5 phrase lottery and only plot critical npcs have anything worthwhile to say
ひげ
@sharutiaburaddofouren shadow of the colossus is a shit game that was way before it's time. Idk why people like that game at all. The boss fights are kind of cool but they make the game run at unplayable frame rates and there is LITERALLY nothing to do in between them and barely any semblance of a story.
Breath of the Wild has a pretty good story accompanying it, really great music and sound design, good attention to detail, and the open world is peppered with plenty of stuff to do and see. It is one of the few open world games that I've actually had fun playing. The mechanics are simple but open enough to allow for emergent gameplay which is something I really admire. I can definitely see why it wouldn't be somebody's cup of tea but it is LEAGUES better than SotC in pretty much every aspect.
I agree with you that the vast majority of games should still be linear, or at least mostly linear, experiences, though. I hate the fact that every single game has to be open world. Despite me loving Star Fox, that's the reason I haven't played the SF story in that one Ubisoft space game. There is no reason for it to be open world and all it serves is useless padding so companies can say "look, we made an open world game too!" Fuck that, I want levels.
Wind Waker is a pretty bad example of an open world game too. It's got some stuff to do and secrets to find out on the Great Sea, but there is a reason why Nintendo added the Swift Sail to the Wii U version. Good sense of scale and no loading screens to get in the way of the experience, but it needed to be a lot tighter. I think BotW was pretty well done in that aspect, but again, I can totally get why someone wouldn't like a game like it.
I hope that, while Tears of the Kingdom is certainly going to follow a similar formula, it has actual varied dungeons and unique items you need to have in order to complete those dungeons. I think they could really take some notes on how people play with randomizers and lock off certain parts of dungeons that you may need items from other dungeons to access... Kind of making it a bit like a Metroid gameplay loop. Nothing too crazy, maybe not things needed to beat the dungeons, but being able to go back and unlock a certain room would add to the experience a lot.
@sharutiaburaddofouren i know botw has framerate issues, but at least they're all in areas without combat. fighting a massive colossus at 12fps isn't a great time. i believe botw uses double buffered vsync, so when the frame rate drops below 30fps it automatically locks it to 20 instead to get a more consistent experience rather than having the frame times jump all over the place.
if you think botw is devoid of worldbuilding and narrative, i'm guessing it's just because you haven't really looked into it that much. the lands of hyrule are pretty rich in backstory. you have to be invested in it though. i haven't played dark souls enough to really know how the story telling is. i'm assuming that, for someone who likes dark souls lore, they would get more invested in that than the average random player. there's an entire youtube channel dedicated to zelda lore (zeltik) and the amount of stuff that nintendo crammed into breath of the wild is kind of absurd. he's got a 40 minute video summarizing a lot of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXSbXkw1ULo
that includes environmental storytelling, item descriptions, journal entries, NPCs describing things, all of that. you just weren't paying as much attention, which is fine if the game isn't your sort of thing, but saying that the game doesn't have any of that stuff is actually false.
it definitely has a narrative, too. a pretty epic one, might i add. i mean, it's the first zelda game with voiced cutscenes. idk what you're smoking there xD i guess if all you did was kill the divine beasts then kill ganon, you probably didn't get much of the story since you're supposed to go to locations where major events took place to recall your memories of them.
zelda doesn't actually kill ganon. she destroys his malice (calamity ganon) with the power of the triforce. there is a reason why you don't need to use the master sword in the final fight, which throws out every other game's convention of needing to do so (obtaining the master sword is also optional, and it's interesting because in hyrule castle there are clones of the master sword that sheikahs made to try to combat calamity ganon but they failed because of their low durability). it's likely that there was always a sequel planned where you would need to kill ganondorf himself, who has been sealed away underneath hyrule castle. botw itself even says as much, but people think he broke out when it was really just his pure hatred consuming everything.
breath of the wild was actually the first zelda game, and one of the only games period, that i 100% completed. if you don't count getting every single korok seed, that is, because doing so is literally pointless. i just got up to the full inventory expansion. i've beaten wind waker, skyward sword, four swords adventures, and minish cap.
i could talk on and on and on and on about all the lore and storytelling that goes on in breath of the wild and how it connects to other games in the series. like, dude, the game even provides backstory on why link doesn't speak! the only way you'd find that though is if you actually took the time to explore things. it sounds like you really didn't, so it makes sense why you don't think that the game actually has substance.
also, just to clarify, when i mentioned attention to detail, i mean stuff like this (and it's only scratching the surface): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj5chaeys5U
it goes to show that the sandbox of breath of the wild is, in my opinion, one of the best. it's not simply an empty open world game with all this scripted stuff going on... there are so many ways to approach things and so many little details. as far as i'm aware, there are no other open world games with this kind of dedication put into the actual world and how it functions in the way the player interacts with it. i think the only other open world game that really has that kind of detail is red dead redemption 2.
Wind waker I chose specifically because it is what devs make for open world games. You are correct at how poor it's attempt is, but I guarantee everybody who likes that game and the devs themselves would call it open world, and they argue the "fun" aspect of it is exploration which I think is retarded because there aren't any rewards and similar to breath of the wild there are tiny areas with buildings or manmade rock formations where you have no level of detail beyond the surface where it's just a manmade thing in the middle of nowhere, you don't know who made it, what it was supposed to be, anything period. It doesn't tell a story or invoke your imagination at all
I think A link between worlds absolutely curbstomps breath of the wild as a sort of reset. It introduced a few new mechanics and brought back the exploratory nature from the first game where you don't have to do the dungeons in a specific order, allowing you to borrow items instead of unlocking them. If tears of the kingdom does something similar instead of having a faggy ipad that has 4 abilities which get dull really fast to solve variations of the same 4 puzzles, then I'm out. Breath of the wild continued the trend of making the world bigger, emptier, with less npcs, items, dungeons, worldbuilding, and narrative. It continued the trend, it didn't buck it. If there are actual ruins where you can tell people lived in them and used them for some purpose, and enemies actually have a purpose on the overworld, if there are a variety of items, a more concrete ability to craft, improve, and edit weaponry, actual quests, and a reasonable amount of content, not literally less than Majora's Mask like breath of the wild, then it will truly be a good game. I know breath of the wild will be reevaluated as a fairly thin and underwhelming game with time, people are already starting to forget about it and have not replayed it. It was the first Zelda game I did not 100%. I played Zelda 2 all the way leveling up to max ffs, I even did it with wind waker and I mean even the stupid pictograph sculpture quest, and I couldn't bring myself to do every puzzle "dungeon", get the dlc, unlock the tunic, and so on. I just beat the 4 dungeons, got the master sword, and beat ganon which I hated because ofc in the gay modern fashion, Zelda actually defeated ganon, something she's never done before because that's not her job. She did it like it was a dragon ball fight too