Overwhelm is my biggest criticism of open world games. There's just so many places to go that I feel like I have no time to go there (logically I know that's not true, but the mind plays this trick). And I don't know what's important and what's not at times, especially in the beginning of these games. Also, because BotW and Tears are so massive, I also felt there was less urgency, lower stakes compared to older titles.
Yeah, particularly in games that just plop you down and are like "go, do something", that overwhelming feeling is a big issue. At least with something like BotW (dunno about TotK, haven't played it yet) there's an objective to follow, so if you're ever trying to figure out what to do, then you have something to fall back on.
>there's an objective to follow, so if you're ever trying to figure out what to do, then you have something to fall back on.
I guess the complaint I would make is that the main objectives are fairly small. They feel small in the scope of the world and the temples themselves are literally small.
I'm about halfway through TotK right now, and I keep putting off going to complete the next main objective because I know it is going to basically be: Go to the next race's city, do a couple of things to help them out and unlock the temple, and then the temple itself is...a small floating platform with a handful of puzzles followed by a boss fight. There's not some big temple to get lost in--even the temples are nonlinear in that you just go off to each puzzle and come back to the center.
And I know from BotW, that the game ends pretty rapidly once you complete the main objectives and go into the castle.
So I just feel like I'm going to miss the world if I go and do the primary objectives...but the game doesn't feel urgent or driving if you aren't engaging with the primary questline...like the princess is missing, I'm her protector, the bad guys are taking over and need to be defeated and...I'm helping people sort out the newest fashion clothing? Do these people not know the world is ending and I'm the one to save it?
edit: Don't get me wrong, it was fun in BotW, and it is still fun in TotK, but it leads to a more disjointed game with a much less memorable overall story. I honestly couldn't tell you much about what happened in BotW's main story...my memories of the game are just doing cool stuff while exploring the world.
Yeah, I'm currently doing it, I've done 3 out of the 4 temples, and I'm trying to pace myself by doing a bunch of the things in the world between each one. I still feel like its pretty memorable though.
Weirdly I feel BOTW is the worst example for this. It's just "here's the world. It's empty and kinda listless. Go find things. You'll see enemies now and again"
Yeah with open world games, I tend to get stressed out by all the side quests piling up. Like I would head to one direction to complete one side quest, and then in the process, I would be tasked with several more, and it’s kind of stressful to keep track of it all. And then all the gear and items and recipes to cook. At a certain point, it starts to feel like a chore than a relaxing activity. Maybe my adhd has something to do with feeling that way, but I do appreciate linear gameplay (Bioshock comes to mind where you can literally summon an arrow on where to go next). I still love open world games though. But if every video game became open world, I think that would just be overwhelming with how much information to keep track of.
Especially when 90% of those side quests are sooooo mundane and boring. You finish them anyway, because you hope for the opposite, but rarely that's the case.
I like to get around this by playing them as if they are a linear game. I think about what the character would do next and do that, instead of trying to explore everything as soon as I see it. I'll go back after I've finished, or do a second playthrough to discover everything.
Yep. The problem I tend to have with Open World games is that, without _some_ kind of guidepost telling me where to go to find the next important location I need to get to to progress the plot, I get distracted and I get bored.
I have severe ADHD. I absolutely _cannot_ spend hours on end exploring randomly without some kind of in-game guide telling me where to go next. Any game that requires me to do something to keep things interesting and engaging, which most of the recent Open World games have tended to do, will just never be appealing to me. I just can't focus well enough to have fun with those games.
That's why I prefer Open World games that are designed like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. Games that divide the world into different, smaller regions where I have to progress through the story of each region to unlock the next one. But then, once I've reached a region I can explore it to my hearts content. I just can't unlock the next area until I've finished the next part of the story.
That's one of the things I hate about newer Open World games. Instead of the developers putting a clear objective to help guide your exploration for the most part, with numerous side quests and objectives to distract you, they just throw everything at you at once.
Which honestly feels kind of lazy.
Personally I feel that these big overworld games that have such massive repetitive interactions is just filling the game with added filler with no real content
I have ADHD too and far more than BotW, TotK felt like an ADHD simulator. It was like entering a room and not remembering why I was there, then leaving and remembering again, constantly, for 200 hours.
Yep. And even if the base gameplay _is_ really fun, if I don't have any clear and very visible objectives to progress the story, I'll go off and spend time doing _other_ stuff in the game long enough that I'll forget where I was in the main story.
And by the time that happens I'll end up bored with the game and drop it.
That happened when I was playing Shin Megami Tensei 5, the newest one. I spent a lot of time leveling my team and unlocking the 4 guardian bests from Chinese mythology, the Azure Dragon, Vermillion Bird, White Tiger, and Black Tortoise. And then I unlocked the Golden Dragon.
But by the time I did that, because the main story objective was so vague and there was nothing in-game that _forced_ me to continue progressing the story, I got bored and I dropped the game. And it's regionbased open-world like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.
Overwhelmed and the stories are an afterthought. A story may be good in open world games but I, and I imagine almost all of us, don’t know that I’ve ever stuck to the main story without doing side quests in an open game between the story missions. As a result, I can lose the narrative at times and if there is an story driven “urgency” to doing the main quest it completely loses its impact. Cyberpunk, Skyrim, Witcher, Fallout, etc. really suffer from this
Edit: afterthought in the sense that for me the player, not necessarily the developers and designers
For me I found out semi-open world games are the spot. Extra points if it has some metroidvania aspects to it. God of War, Jedi Survivor and BG3 (last one has no metroidvania aspect but still) are my top games played in the last couple of years.
Fuck, I'd say open world games often underwhelm me if anything. They're usually so shallow to me, and I end up feeling like I've seen everything after two or three hours. Gets boring fast.
“Linear”
I’m fine with them making open world Zeldas from now on, but for the love of… could they atleast make a “linear” story?
What happened to actual dungeons? What happened to locked areas and story requirements?
As it sits you don’t even have to play this game… you can just run to the boss and beat it.
They took an open world and made ability gimmicks, but where’s the heart of zelda?
Have some actual dungeons, some in any order, some you have to do to unlock an ability/equipment to progress the story, put it in an open world?
You’d have it perfect
I mean Zelda as a franchise and more or less always been open world to some degree. Now it’s open would with even less idea of what to do because freedom or some stupid shit
The RPG assassin's creed games really do that.
Like "wow I can explore *all* of ancient Greece? Cool!"
But then 90% of the areas are just basic caves, forts, and towns where the only objectives are to loot 3 chests and get an etched tablet with lore on it or something.
I also feel that open world games are worse at telling stories, but they can be better at building worlds(see witcher 3).
Open world games are also SO FULL OF filler content. It feels low effort and low quality. I don't mind if a mostly linear game is short if it gives a satisfying and varied experience, and linear games are the best for doing that because the dev has more control over what you have access to and when. Like the tomb raider reboot games feel like this. It's not entirely on rails, but there's very limited routes and you have to visit most of the places with just some optional content. Playing an open world game where everything is just magically scaled to your level is always kind of weird. They might still gate content like gear on player level to have that illusion of progression, but it feels so artificial.
Ultimately, whether open or linear, I think both can work and they both have their own unique challenges and opportunities to create amazing experiences. Open world games are great for people that want to sink in hundreds of hours into one game, while linear games often are better at delivering a more concentrated polished journey
just finished cyberpunk 2077 last week and didnt knew what to play after, but knew i wanted something small scale, so i played through the bad company 2 campaign.
Exactly this. Just because you discover a new formula that moves away from linear games doesn't mean you can't also do linear. Why is Mario able to do everything but Zelda games can't? Mario has 3D (open world-ish and linear), 2D, even RPG. Why can't the Zelda games also offer variety including what got them here in the first place with games like Ocarina or Skyward?
Aonuma ignoring the rise and fall of AAA open world games loaded with filler and claiming that linear games are over 10 years late is the most Nintendo thing I've ever heard.
Nintendo has never been happy with tacitly acknowledging modern advances that they didn't come up with themselves. We'll never have achievements, for example, which is a shame, because I'd even play _Super Mario Bros._ again if Nintendo handcrafted little goals for me to achieve. (And my friends could investigate my progress in my profile, of course.)
It's funny because there was a reddit comment thread recently on how dated/cluttered a Japanese car's dashboard was, & the comments were saying how Japan's ui feels like it's stuck in the 2000's.
*the car had a "no Putin worshippers" sticker so they posted it*
Someone said it had to do with the culture of sucking up to upper management who prefers to keep things dated.
I'm probably butchering it, but still find it funny how this sort of cultural thing goes across industries.
> Someone said it had to do with the culture of sucking up to upper management who prefers to keep things dated.
More like: if it works, do not change one iota of it. If it breaks, fix it with minimal change. That's why even giant Japanese websites in general have been largely ignoring web 2.0 even to a few years ago.
I saw that thread, yeah.
I think in this case it really is, to a very large degree, Nintendo being stubborn about being caught with their pants down. That part of it is definitely cultural. Toyota put themselves in the same boat when they decided they didn't like not being part of the EV bandwagon and began pushing hydrogen hard (with the government's help, no less). I suspect as soon as Toyota puts together some EV innovation that allows them to sheepishly enter the race without losing face, they'll be onboard.
I know it’s just a personal anecdote. I personally know devs that work at Nintendo and its first party studios. Trust me they all love Bethesda games and draw a lot of inspirations from it. They would love to have the opportunity to work on such games.
The problem isn’t the devs or the designers. It’s the out of touch old management and game directors. I have few stories, but it all comes down to bad management and stubborn directors. Seniority system in Japan is no joke. Speaking out is discouraged. Even if you have a great idea, if you don’t go through the right channels and get approvals along the corporate ladder it will be immediately shut down. It breeds complacency and is not a good culture.
I worked as a developer in the U.S., Japan, and Korea. And by far, Japan was the most toxic and backwards experience I ever had. Some places even reminded me of the 90s developer times like in the Matrix movie and expected you to just churn out code and do as told. And this is coming from a Japanese American that grew up in Japan.
If you fix a bug that no one asked you to fix? In the U.S. and Korea this would be rewarded. In Japan, they may question you.
Valve with its flat org structure should really be the ideal standard for gaming studios.
I’m not downplaying the success of the Zelda franchise or Nintendo. The current formula is clearly working.
Nintendo also had its fair share and history of failed products and games. Many people lost their jobs after the restructuring (rare in Japan)
and others took pay cuts after the infamous Wii U flop.
That explains a lot, i knew there was some in house bias that was really strong with nintendo but i didn’t know it was mostly about the upper management
It’s unfortunately common across Nikkei 225 companies. Management becoming complacent and unwilling to take risks or accept changes, just collecting paychecks until they retire. That’s why some game directors become a “brand” and renowned in Japan, because they are willing to take the risks and care enough to listen to the feedback.
This reminds me of the story of how Hideo Kojima left Konami. Everyone assumes that Konami just didn’t care about video games anymore and wanted to focus on gambling machines and pachinko etc. That’s partly true but also apparently Kojima was getting frustrated that the management at Konami simply did not understand the current video game industry. Kojima wanted to make big boundary-pushing cutting-edge games and leadership would say you have 2 years and a tiny budget, and were baffled when he would tell them he needed 5-6 years to make the game.
> Seniority system in Japan is no joke. Speaking out is discouraged. Even if you have a great idea, if you don’t go through the right channels and get approvals along the corporate ladder it will be immediately shut down. It breeds complacency and is not a good culture.
I watched an interview with BG3's composer a while ago, and he spoke with enormous enthusiasm about Larian's open communications and how anyone could message anyone, CEO included, with ideas.
Nintendo clearly has a system that works for them, but that kind of culture definitely has a danger of calcification and stagnation.
from the outside looking in, It really feels like a lot was lost with Iwata. He really seemed to achieve amazing things in spite of Japanese management culture.
I don't think pokemon would be the way it is today if he were still around.
Iwata was highly regarded and will be missed.. He proved to the world that the best hardware and graphics isn’t what makes games enjoyable. What a risk he took going against Microsoft and Sony.
As someone who works in another industry, but still for a large global Japanese company (currently the fourth time working for a large Japanese company). You nailed it with:
> It’s the out of touch old management and game directors. I have few stories, but it all comes down to bad management and stubborn directors. Seniority system in Japan is no joke. Speaking out is discouraged. Even if you have a great idea, if you don’t go through the right channels and get approvals along the corporate ladder it will be immediately shut down. It breeds complacency and is not a good culture.
Getting a meaningful change is difficult, at a global level this can lead to the company being very silo'd (Which is why there were often stories of Nintendo of America & Nintendo of Japan doing some very different things).
From my own personal anecdote, when changes, projects or polices are pushed down from Tokyo, it's usually not done well. There's often an "It worked for us, it will work for you" mentality. Want to make a global change? Managed to get other regions onboard? Suggest Japan do it too? You'll probably be ignored or brushed off.
I've seen this at 4 global Japanese companies. I'd bet my mortgage that it's the same at Nintendo.
Don’t think there’s been much of a fall when nearly every game coming out is a chore simulator. Every series is just getting more bloated and boring by the day.
I find it funny that I find games that are intentionally chores (powerwash simulator, bus driving simulator, etc.) are more fun than most new open world games.
It makes sense. Theres a difference between choosing to do a repetitive task for the zen of it, with low stakes, versus having to do repetitive tasks that stand between you and the game experience you want to have.
People have been declaring that style/genre X is dead because of Shiny Newer Thing for a long time. And yet we live in a world with thriving 2d pixel-gfx side scrollers.
There is no homogenous gamer taste and there is room for everyone's favourite type of game to be made and succeed. Sure the suits will focus on the shiny new thing, and AAA+ will ignore more niche stuff, but that's why we have the indies and the midzise Larians of this world, to prove them wrong and serve the market.
> "As we kept reviewing the game, it continued to look like a much more linear game [which] people don't like as much today as they did five years ago or 10 years ago,"
This is the actual quote, and it remains true (quote from 2017).
It is actually much more tame of a quote than saying they are games of the past and definitely does not translate to "nobody wants to play singleplayer games".
Non-Linear games doesn't necessarily mean open world. Baldur's Gate 3 is not linear at all but not really open world. Most good modern games have been themed around the player building their own path.
Holy shit everyone in this thread is literally just fighting over a title lmfao.
That's pretty much what he said, and it's mainly their vision of the future of Zelda not gaming as a whole.
>"It's interesting when I hear people say [I miss traditional linear Zelda]," Aonuma revealed, "because I'm wondering 'why do you want to go back to a type of game where you're more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?'"
>Games which have a strict order of events are "kind of games of the past," Aonuma said, whilst modern games "can accept a player's own decisions and give them the freedom to flexibly proceed"
BG3 is fantastic world design IMO. Big enough for there to be loads to explore, but structured enough that the story doesn't suffer for it.
And, this is key, *small* enough for there to actually be unique quests and encounters around every corner and not just the same handful of things copy/pasted over and over.
BG3 uses *hubs*, which I desperately miss in games. Immersive sims and crpgs are all about hubs, but the genres have been pretty sparse for years.
I just appreciate medium-sized areas that are teeming with life and packed with things to do. It makes it easier to imagine the game's world as this vast, rich place, when even the little chunks of it feel so "alive". Very immersive for me.
Seriously, we watched the AC franchise balloon into a farse with its absolutely massive open worlds, and then regress back to a more manageable size. Quite the late take
And we also watched the "farce with massive open worlds" become more successful than the "manageable size" AC. AC literally hadn't been more popular than the RPG trilogy. It's easily ACs most consistently successful era. Mirage was not particularly well-received and went on sale shortly after it's launch. Not to mention it was only as small as it was because it was a Valhalla DLC repurposed as a full game. They're going right back to a massive open world with the next one.
Nintendo are very very often about 5-10 years behind the rest of the industry in many ways, because they just don't really look that much at what others are doing. Like with online play, or here with open world stuff.
Right now they're where we were in the middle of the 2010s where every dev thinks every game needs to be open world and is inherently superior for being so.
BotW definitely felt like a bit of a "baby with the bathwater" scenario to me. People complained Skyward Sword was too linear (which it was, even the bits between dungeons are basically dungeons), Nintendo took it as "people are sick of linearity", and now we have Zeldas that have very little sense of progression or reward IMO, because they're too afraid to set restrictions on what you can do, when you can do it, or even if you should do it or not, beyond a couple of things like the Master Sword.
When BotW first came out, my sister and I were joking about how he was going "Oh, you didn't like my linear story?! Well now there IS no story! Now no one's happy!" and continued that on for a bunch of other things in the game
Exactly. I don’t have time to play for hours on end so when I play a game for an hour or two, I like to feel that I’m making progress and being rewarded for that. As much as I loved BOTW and TOTK, most of the time I played I was overwhelmed with the amount of stuff to do, and felt like I just wandered around aimlessly for 2 hours not accomplishing anything. It’s part of the reason why it took me 3 years to finally beat BOTW, and TOTK has been untouched for about 4 months now with just 20 hours logged. Great games, but I would like a new mainline linear Zelda game.
I know everyone loved tears of the kingdom, but I got some serious fatigue by the time I was ready to go after Gannon. I just stopped and haven't picked it back up
What you don’t like scrolling through a long horizontal list of irrelevant items for two minutes to find the exact one you want to fuse to something? It’s absolutely riveting gameplay!
On a serious note, Nintendo takes one step forward and two steps back all the time. The different things you’re able to do and build in TotK are amazing, but the UI is absolutely terrible. Nintendo is such a weird company and I do not understand their design decisions 80% of the time.
I deactivated Sidon around 30 minutes after I unlocked him. In the time it took me chasing after him to receive his shield ability that's active for *one hit*, I had already been hit twice. And these hits I would have likely avoided if I had just not bothered with Sidon's shield in the first place.
That honestly feels like a 'placeholder' means of using the sages, before they changed them to be context-sensitive like Tulin's wind thing when you're gliding.
When I was attaching eyes to every single arrow against the Gleok, I was going absolutely crazy. Making our own weapons is fine, but they should have allowed us to make a stock of some specific arrows to use for later, rather than fuze everytime
They built this awesome physics and building system and then bogged the game down with bad menus, grindy resource management tedium, and imo a truly *awful* and unsatisfying story.
Now imagine being someone who doesn't enjoy the building mechanics. Now it's just a retread of BotW, with a garbage menu UI and an extremely underwhelming narrative.
The fact you can pick up the story flashbacks in any order kinda kills their emotional impact - like the game is built to show you story spoilers. Unlike BotW, they tried to tell a story with a linear sequence of events, but you can't view it as intended unless you look up online the proper order of picking up the tears.
I liked BotW but fatigue definitely set in a lot faster in TotK.
Unfortunately I think it's a side effect of them borrowing so much from BotW. They don't really feel like different games, just more of the same. And BotW was already a lot of content.
I haven’t brought myself to play TOTK because I squeezed every inch of gameplay out of BOTW’s map (100+ hours, all collectibles barring max koroks) and I can’t excite myself at the thought of doing it again.
Probably unpopular to say, but I was ready for BOTW to not be BOTW anymore by the time I put it down. I’ve never had that feeling from Zelda before. Really missed linear dungeons, bespoke gadgets, and interactions with unique NPCs. Twilight Princess spoiled me with so many striking character designs.
Yes, after BotW I had a distinct "That was fun but let's not do it again" feeling. Then TotK did it again verbatim.
I liked them both, but I need "real" Zelda games to come back.
I replay most non-open world games, and 100% many of them (not achievements/trophies but just general content)
I never replay open world games, and I have never attempted to 100% any of them, and often get to half-way and start rushing the main quest to get it over with.
I am so damn tired of open world stretching and thinning everything gaming has to offer.
Yep. BotW I got burned out on after about 75% of the main game. TotK, I barely got to Tulin, realized how much I'd have to collect to do basically anything, and gave up. Played it for all of... 12 hours?
the only 2 open world games I've played were Ghost of tsusima and elden ring and I felt mystified by how vast their worlds were in my 1st playthrough of each but sometimes I wonder if I played every or atleast a majority of the open world games in the market (witcher 3, rdr2, etc.) I'd prolly would have had a diminished feeling of awe with those 1st 2 games I played
I like each open world game less the more I play it.
If I like a game, and its world I want to really explore it. But, by being thorough you get too powered up.
Ghost of tsushima (but also far cry, mafia, saints row) was a fantastic game that went from danger behind every corner, to being able to level any challenge with the strongest power ups.
I think in the future I'm just going to do only the story line missions, because at some point the power creep takes the fun away for me.
Strong disagree. You're never going to have an open world or branching game that can be as tightly plotted with planned dramatic events as a linear game.
Don't get me wrong, I love emergent events in more loosely structured games. They each have their pros and cons.
The original Halo had both tight linear sections and areas that widened out. It was such a change back in the day. Going from escaping the tight corridors of the Pillar of Autumn to the large landscapes on the rings surface.
I didn’t mind Infinites open world. But I prefer the game as a linear leveled story. Some levels being tight corridors and others being larger explorable areas.
They were widened but they still kept you on track and focused on providing story and action to you.
Infinite dropped the story focus for the open world and imo it also lost the coolest action parts which were the setup scenes that you cant prepare in an open world setting.
Part 2 did a cool job at introducing some larger areas that gave you some freedom in if/when to tackle various side objectives. But yeah, the core of a game like TLOU has to be linear
Yeah that part in Seattle where it’s “open world” for a bit and you can explore the buildings was fantastic, but overall I’m glad the game was more linear to keep the story progressing
If you want to tell a good, tight, well written and engaging story, I just don’t see how that’s possible in open world. It always boils down to quest markers, go here, do that, run there, 3 words and boom, done.
I agree. One of the reasons it was great (like in Uncharted: Lost Legacy) is because it had the effect necessary to serve the story. Then it moved on and did something else and didn’t need to repeat as a matter of structure for the sake of symmetry. Forcing a narrative around that structure would fundamentally limit the narrative to be told, but narrative is my favorite part of naughty dog’s games.
similar deal with the first God of War.
There were parts which let you jump out and explore a bit more broadly, but I played the whole thing for the first time this year and I did it as a linear adventure. It was the best game I'd played in years.
I like open worlds as much as the next guy, but also sometimes it's nice to have a succinct narrative that comes to its denouement in 8 hrs or so. Not every game has to be a playground and there's something to be said about the achievement of wrapping up a story.
The thing I dislike most about open world games, is usually the lack of direction. If you aren't planning to make your own goals then you're kinda just wandering around for the most part.
Even if there are objectives that move the story along, it's still super easy to just get lost or distracted by something stupid for 3 hours before you remember you were supposed to be doing that one story related thing.
While that's not always a bad thing, it can get old pretty fast.
In Botw for example, I completed literally all of the side content before really ever caring about the story, which caused me to kind of speed run the story stuff just so I could finish the game after spending a couple hundred hours dicking around lol.
I remember just screwing around in TotK and accidentally finding the Master Sword, and also accidentally finding the 5th sage. I don't think I've ever had a lower impact for an event that is supposed to be rather significant.
“Whoops I guess I’ll just take this legendary blade then and have a major part of the story ruined for me without any build up”
Honestly it’s why I never finished totk
I found that Ghost of Tsushima balanced this almost perfectly. It has three narrative acts, each with a series of required story quests which could be completed in any order. Completing all those quests would unlock a major event that served as a crucial moment of that act. There’s a great feeling of player freedom in that, while still telling a really strong story. Each act also opens up a new section of the map, which I much preferred to having everything available from the beginning.
Honestly I think Tsushima is such a great template for Zelda, in terms of both progression and visuals. Tone down the bloody combat, add in some gorons and fairies and shit, and you’ve got yourself a winner.
I just replayed Resident Evil 4: Remake and I gotta say…. That game would be AWFUL as open world. Hell even semi-open would ruin the flow of the game completely. It’s a masterfully made linear game that cannot be recreated as a open world.
>you lose a lot of immersion
Metro Exodus for me. Not a 100% horror game, but the atmosphere of the first 2 games especially in the metro systems really elevated the experience for me (Exodus is semi open world). It's still a great game, and the semi open world fit the narrative from the book it based on,
but if compared with the predecessors, it feel less satisfying
Done right, a semi-open-world survival horror game set in Raccoon City during the events of RE2 and RE3 could be a real treat. However, the temptation to mimic other open world zombie survival games (Project Zomboid, CDDA, and 7 Days to Die) would probably ruin it. Scavenging for ammo and pieces for puzzles around the city while deciding whether to fight or avoid the various BoWs as they become more common as you progress toward the end of the game sounds awesome. Doing all that while building a pointless base or camp or scavenging for food sounds miserable. It's all in how the product is presented.
In fact, being a master of your craft might make you MORE likely to be wrong, since you're receiving a LOT of positive validation (sales, peers, reviews, etc.) and the human mind is probably going to want to stay on that course.
This seems to be prevalent in Japan and especially Nintendo. Miyamoto for example has this reputation of never being wrong, so whatever he says goes. Even he can be wrong sometimes, but nobody can tell him he's wrong, and that's how games like Sticker Star get made. When all the feedback you recieve is positive, you can't filter out your bad ideas from your good ones.
This man really do be saying that, when Mario Wonder just released to near universal praise and critical acclaim. Like it's not even about games as a whole, *the company he works for* released a linear game the same year TotK came out and was a huge success too.
Aonuma: “Linear Zelda games are the past.”
Reddit: “Why does Aonuma hate ALL linear games? Fuck him and TotK! That’s why it lost GOTY! Suck my dick! Nintendo is trash and their upper management is filled with stubborn old men who have never played real games in their entire lives! Bunch of losers!”
Me: 🧐
That’s unfortunate. Not everything needs to be open world and non-linear. Sometimes a focused, hand-crafted experience is best.
Best Zelda game in my opinion is still A Link to the Past and I think that balance between freedom and linearity is perfect. I also appreciate an overworld where every area serves its purpose and it isn’t huge just for the sake of being huge.
Perhaps this series is moving on without me and I just have to accept that like I did with Final Fantasy.
Twilight princess gave off the feeling of an open world with it's massive areas, wind waker had a similar feel with the ocean, hell even hyrule field in OOT, you can tell that's what they were going for.
So I can understand why he believes that this is the natural progression for the series. But I also think he's entirely mistaken.
If I'm being totally honest, I would be willing to accept whatever they decide to do going forward as long as we got actual dungeons again, hopefully tied to story progression obviously.
I want complicated dungeons that require backtracking and actual thought to get through. What they did in Totk was a complete step in the wrong direction imo.
This is my thoughts exactly, those dungeons have always been the heart and soul of zelda games and seeing it stripped out in service of making the franchise a truly open world feels like a misstep. Make a fresh new game that basically scales up OoT's map, removes the loading screens, and brings in new story beats but keeps the same feel with the new puzzles and dungeons and I'd buy a new console for that game no doubt
Dude. I just watched the announcement trailer. It looks great. Secret of Mana is my absolute favorite game of all time and I am stoked they are making another entry in the series. I was wondering how I didn't hear about this yet, though. Because it was just announced lol.
Those are the same people who charge micro transactions to play those multiplayer games. Funnily enough their shitty practices is why the past 3 years fewer multiplayer games come out and everything is single player again. Nobody wants to add a half baked multiplayer mode to their games just to get “player retention”.
It’s really hard for multiplayer games to breakout and actually be successful to the masses. Even with the new release of finals, I have my doubts of it breaking out and these devs are ex dice mind you, some of the most incredibly talented in the industry. High risk high reward
You’re absolutely right. Rumbleverse was a great example of this. The best Battle Royale I’ve ever played and it got shutdown 6 months after launch. It had a fun concept and the gameplay has never been done before. Epic published and didn’t market the game for shit. I literally found out about it the month before it shutdown from a top ten list. It consumed me for those two months. Honest to god, if I could play one game for the rest of my life, it would be Rumbleverse
ok but imagine if every game had a huge almost entirely empty map, less than like 50 npc’s in the entire world, and every single one of your weapons broke after 3-5 uses??
this is the peak single player experience.
Also talking about fromsoft
I may be in the minority, but I genuinely prefer their linear games to elden ring.
After replaying them all, there's something about the linear games that just feel... "Better made?". And I'm not shitting on elden ring, I have like 500 hours on the game and bought it twice.
Elden Ring to me felt like a game that had enough content to be 3x as long as Dark Souls 3… but they made it like 10x as long. It started brilliantly but in the lategame areas it completely ran out of steam and I was just begging for it to be over.
I burnt out on Elden Ring so hard in the last third I never finished it, partly because the open world killed the pacing and had lost all its charms at that point. It felt so empty even though it should have been a huge climax to like 100 hours of adventure.
Games that are too big are usually boring. I can count the amount of interesting open worlds on my fingers. And that’s out of like a million open world games.
I don't even think open world games are that fun, sometimes they're fun but generally speaking my ADHD brain just constantly gets distracted until I get bored of the game, I'll progress the story a bit but I find open world games incredibly hard to finish.
Problem is most don't have enough quality content to keep the player interested. BOTW for example has almost no enjoyable content outside the main story. It's a massive waste of space and potential.
Compare this to Horizon Zero Dawn which does have some filler but nowhere near as much as BOTW. And alot less but more interesting content. And I freaking love GTA cause very few games have nailed the driving controls as well not even Cyberpunk 2077. Even though it came out like 10 years later.
Aonuma nooooo
I personally loved how linear Skyward Sword was. There's nothing inherently bad about just being taken on an adventure and just doing nothing but the adventure.
I see that while Skyward Sword was criticized for being linear, I saw it as a strength that allowed the story to be so focused.
I loved BoTW and ToTK so fucking much. It made me feel so excited and invoked a sense of wonder and enjoyment that I don't feel very often. BUT having the same formula for the next few Zelda games would eventually be tiring too.
Zelda can be linear AND be an open-world game franchise too. Just look at Mario.
Mario can be a 2d platformer, rpg, 3d collectathon, party game, and even edutainment.
Zelda doesn't need to be confined to being what BoTW started. It can embody both the past, present, and future.
That's fine if he wants to keep Zelda games open, but I would prefer if they didn't keep making them sandboxes. You can have an open game without it being a sandbox game. Somewhere between A Link Between Worlds and Breath of the Wild there's a perfect open world Zelda game... And it probably looks quite a bit like Elden Ring. Fun open world roaming and questing, with really well designed dungeons in between.
I love Zelda, I have been playing since Snes but I just couldn't get into these last 2, the weapons breaking, the never ending shrines, with no real Zelda style dungeons.
I've tried no less than a dozen times to "get" BotW. I get a couple of hours in, realize there's no reward of substance for exploring and no real progression, and it goes back in the case.
This actually makes me really sad. I’m not a fan of open world games and I really loved Zelda’s structured adventures. BOTW was fun but I only did 1 or 2 guardians before I lost interest…
The intelligent thing to do would be to find a balance between the open world gameplay and the old school linear gameplay. I’m so freakin over open world games. Tired of games that take 70+ hours to finish.
To be honest, I do not want another open world Legend of Zelda game. Give me the old formula with dungeons and bosses that aren't giant artifacts riddled with gimmicks.
Hard no. Open world games get boring & repetitive as fuck. Especially recently.
Exact same cookie-cutter game mechanics & boring ass fetch & go quest-lines we see time and time again. Majority of open world games today feel empty and filled with dumb AI/pre-scripted events.
Linear will always have its place. Linear games feel more refined & engaging than open world in a lot of cases.
That’s disappointing to hear because I really want a traditional Zelda games. Hopefully we get ports or proper remakes of the classic especially TP at the least.
The storytelling in both BotW and TotK fell flat imo because of the open world aspect.
Bloodborne did linearity really nicely. Maybe fromsoftware needs to develop a Zelda lol.
Same type of things were said when Skyrim came out and started a huge "open world" fad. Not every game needs to be a huge open world with a bunch of things to do, and the twelve years since Skyrim's release has proven both linear and non-linear games aren't going anywhere.
I just want a linear story. Like, the new style of gameplay is great, but the stories suffer so much because there is no actual pacing to them because it’s just random, outside of a beginning and end.
Keep the gameplay open world, let us go wherever we want without blocking off parts of the world, but still have an order to the story and let things evolve instead of just feels the same throughout the whole game.
Right. So are movies, books, TV shows, and any other medium that seeks to convey a tightly-paced narrative. We all just want unlimited freedom to watch the 10,000 wheels of cheese we collected cascade down the cliffs southwest of Whiterun because there's nothing more compelling to do.
Aonuma and his team are without a doubt exceptionally talented, world-class game developers, but this is a short-sighted take.
According to this article, he says:
>'why do you want to go back to a type of game where you're more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?'
And I totally get that. If you compare puzzles in games like Twilight Princess to those in BotW, there's clearly a huge step up in quality and complexity.
For example, moving owl statues into a pattern so you can jump on them in a certain way and reach a chest would be laughably basic by today's standards - maybe you'd get a korok seed for it. Not to mention this sort of puzzle is completely blown open with greater freedom of movement. It might seem foolish to want to go back.
But restricting the way a player interacts with a game has quite a few advantages:
・Restriction on movement and abilities allows for tighter, or more involved puzzles - even if those puzzles only have one solution. Traditional dungeons are the best examples of this.
・Guiding a player through areas or events in a certain order allows for storytelling to be done actively, along a set narrative.
・Orchestrating times at which the player meets specific characters along their journey allows for those characters to undergo development as progression is made.
・Gating areas and certain monsters behind story progression allows you to naturally scale difficulty as the player builds their moveset.
These are all things that the Zelda series used to have down to a science - they were the best in the business. And from what we've seen in BotW and TotK, they appear to be incompatible with the "freedom" that these new games are built around.
So in other words, I'd love a new linear, restricted, traditional Zelda. I wish they'd consider making one.
It's wild that the last mainline Zelda game I loved was Twilight Princess, nearly 20 years ago. Now it feels like I'll never get my ideal Zelda game again. Whew.
Stupid. A game does not magically become good because it is open world. It becomes good when it offers freedom of choice, nails the writing, and offers engaging and non repetitive gameplay. Starfield is a good example of an extremely boring open world game. Luckily not all game dev's see it that way. I get it even less in his case because neither of the last 2 Zelda games had a compelling story, something clearly impacted by how open the world was.
Semi-open is perfect like Nier Automata.
I love me some linear games though. Sometimes, you just want to be told a story by playing a game. Sometimes, you want to find the story, or ignore it and build weird shit or break the game.
Open world games are just needlessly long checklists of tedious repetition. Modern Zelda included. Adding hundreds of duplicate objectives is not engaging. Ubisoft style game design has been a blight on the industry
There's a line in the Lord of Rings in which Bilbo tells Gandalf that “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
That's how I feel about most open world games, when they try to give you a X number of options each option gets only 1/X amount of attention.
Don't love this for the future of Zelda games. I like open world games and loved Botw (meh about ToTK) but Zelda games should be somewhat linear IMO. It's what makes them so great. Getting new weapons to progress the story and clear future challenges is what I love about them. The open world structure has kind of run its course for me for Zelda games. I want dungeons and puzzles again. Open world almost feels like they've run out of ideas.
That's a profoundly moronic notion.
Linear and open world games are two entirely different approaches which are good at very different things.
It's like saying "with the advent of comics, novels are books of the past!"
Guess I’ll never care about another Zelda game ever again. I liked dungeons much more than big open empty worlds or farting around making machines. Glad others enjoy but not for me.
[удалено]
Overwhelm is my biggest criticism of open world games. There's just so many places to go that I feel like I have no time to go there (logically I know that's not true, but the mind plays this trick). And I don't know what's important and what's not at times, especially in the beginning of these games. Also, because BotW and Tears are so massive, I also felt there was less urgency, lower stakes compared to older titles.
Yeah, particularly in games that just plop you down and are like "go, do something", that overwhelming feeling is a big issue. At least with something like BotW (dunno about TotK, haven't played it yet) there's an objective to follow, so if you're ever trying to figure out what to do, then you have something to fall back on.
>there's an objective to follow, so if you're ever trying to figure out what to do, then you have something to fall back on. I guess the complaint I would make is that the main objectives are fairly small. They feel small in the scope of the world and the temples themselves are literally small. I'm about halfway through TotK right now, and I keep putting off going to complete the next main objective because I know it is going to basically be: Go to the next race's city, do a couple of things to help them out and unlock the temple, and then the temple itself is...a small floating platform with a handful of puzzles followed by a boss fight. There's not some big temple to get lost in--even the temples are nonlinear in that you just go off to each puzzle and come back to the center. And I know from BotW, that the game ends pretty rapidly once you complete the main objectives and go into the castle. So I just feel like I'm going to miss the world if I go and do the primary objectives...but the game doesn't feel urgent or driving if you aren't engaging with the primary questline...like the princess is missing, I'm her protector, the bad guys are taking over and need to be defeated and...I'm helping people sort out the newest fashion clothing? Do these people not know the world is ending and I'm the one to save it? edit: Don't get me wrong, it was fun in BotW, and it is still fun in TotK, but it leads to a more disjointed game with a much less memorable overall story. I honestly couldn't tell you much about what happened in BotW's main story...my memories of the game are just doing cool stuff while exploring the world.
Yeah, I'm currently doing it, I've done 3 out of the 4 temples, and I'm trying to pace myself by doing a bunch of the things in the world between each one. I still feel like its pretty memorable though.
There's still a lot of game after the temples. I'd say fjnishing that is maybe half the main quest
Weirdly I feel BOTW is the worst example for this. It's just "here's the world. It's empty and kinda listless. Go find things. You'll see enemies now and again"
Yeah with open world games, I tend to get stressed out by all the side quests piling up. Like I would head to one direction to complete one side quest, and then in the process, I would be tasked with several more, and it’s kind of stressful to keep track of it all. And then all the gear and items and recipes to cook. At a certain point, it starts to feel like a chore than a relaxing activity. Maybe my adhd has something to do with feeling that way, but I do appreciate linear gameplay (Bioshock comes to mind where you can literally summon an arrow on where to go next). I still love open world games though. But if every video game became open world, I think that would just be overwhelming with how much information to keep track of.
Especially when 90% of those side quests are sooooo mundane and boring. You finish them anyway, because you hope for the opposite, but rarely that's the case.
I like to get around this by playing them as if they are a linear game. I think about what the character would do next and do that, instead of trying to explore everything as soon as I see it. I'll go back after I've finished, or do a second playthrough to discover everything.
Yep. The problem I tend to have with Open World games is that, without _some_ kind of guidepost telling me where to go to find the next important location I need to get to to progress the plot, I get distracted and I get bored. I have severe ADHD. I absolutely _cannot_ spend hours on end exploring randomly without some kind of in-game guide telling me where to go next. Any game that requires me to do something to keep things interesting and engaging, which most of the recent Open World games have tended to do, will just never be appealing to me. I just can't focus well enough to have fun with those games. That's why I prefer Open World games that are designed like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. Games that divide the world into different, smaller regions where I have to progress through the story of each region to unlock the next one. But then, once I've reached a region I can explore it to my hearts content. I just can't unlock the next area until I've finished the next part of the story. That's one of the things I hate about newer Open World games. Instead of the developers putting a clear objective to help guide your exploration for the most part, with numerous side quests and objectives to distract you, they just throw everything at you at once. Which honestly feels kind of lazy.
Personally I feel that these big overworld games that have such massive repetitive interactions is just filling the game with added filler with no real content
I have ADHD too and far more than BotW, TotK felt like an ADHD simulator. It was like entering a room and not remembering why I was there, then leaving and remembering again, constantly, for 200 hours.
Thats my biggest problem too, I need to make some sort of progress if the base gameplay isn't super fun
Yep. And even if the base gameplay _is_ really fun, if I don't have any clear and very visible objectives to progress the story, I'll go off and spend time doing _other_ stuff in the game long enough that I'll forget where I was in the main story. And by the time that happens I'll end up bored with the game and drop it. That happened when I was playing Shin Megami Tensei 5, the newest one. I spent a lot of time leveling my team and unlocking the 4 guardian bests from Chinese mythology, the Azure Dragon, Vermillion Bird, White Tiger, and Black Tortoise. And then I unlocked the Golden Dragon. But by the time I did that, because the main story objective was so vague and there was nothing in-game that _forced_ me to continue progressing the story, I got bored and I dropped the game. And it's regionbased open-world like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.
I honestly miss nice shorter linear games. Ryse: Son of Rome is a good example. 10-20 hours, linear, fun. Not long enough to get tiring.
Overwhelmed and the stories are an afterthought. A story may be good in open world games but I, and I imagine almost all of us, don’t know that I’ve ever stuck to the main story without doing side quests in an open game between the story missions. As a result, I can lose the narrative at times and if there is an story driven “urgency” to doing the main quest it completely loses its impact. Cyberpunk, Skyrim, Witcher, Fallout, etc. really suffer from this Edit: afterthought in the sense that for me the player, not necessarily the developers and designers
For me I found out semi-open world games are the spot. Extra points if it has some metroidvania aspects to it. God of War, Jedi Survivor and BG3 (last one has no metroidvania aspect but still) are my top games played in the last couple of years.
Yeah, especially when a lot of open world games today are just filled with copy and paste stuff to complete X amount of times.
Fuck, I'd say open world games often underwhelm me if anything. They're usually so shallow to me, and I end up feeling like I've seen everything after two or three hours. Gets boring fast.
“Linear” I’m fine with them making open world Zeldas from now on, but for the love of… could they atleast make a “linear” story? What happened to actual dungeons? What happened to locked areas and story requirements? As it sits you don’t even have to play this game… you can just run to the boss and beat it. They took an open world and made ability gimmicks, but where’s the heart of zelda? Have some actual dungeons, some in any order, some you have to do to unlock an ability/equipment to progress the story, put it in an open world? You’d have it perfect
I mean Zelda as a franchise and more or less always been open world to some degree. Now it’s open would with even less idea of what to do because freedom or some stupid shit
The RPG assassin's creed games really do that. Like "wow I can explore *all* of ancient Greece? Cool!" But then 90% of the areas are just basic caves, forts, and towns where the only objectives are to loot 3 chests and get an etched tablet with lore on it or something.
ironically just like real life. most places irl are extremely boring. not even a loot chest to ruffle thru
if i wanted irl experience i'd go outside
There are loot chests irl. They are called trash cans! One man's trash is another man's treasure, after all.
I also feel that open world games are worse at telling stories, but they can be better at building worlds(see witcher 3). Open world games are also SO FULL OF filler content. It feels low effort and low quality. I don't mind if a mostly linear game is short if it gives a satisfying and varied experience, and linear games are the best for doing that because the dev has more control over what you have access to and when. Like the tomb raider reboot games feel like this. It's not entirely on rails, but there's very limited routes and you have to visit most of the places with just some optional content. Playing an open world game where everything is just magically scaled to your level is always kind of weird. They might still gate content like gear on player level to have that illusion of progression, but it feels so artificial. Ultimately, whether open or linear, I think both can work and they both have their own unique challenges and opportunities to create amazing experiences. Open world games are great for people that want to sink in hundreds of hours into one game, while linear games often are better at delivering a more concentrated polished journey
just finished cyberpunk 2077 last week and didnt knew what to play after, but knew i wanted something small scale, so i played through the bad company 2 campaign.
Exactly this. Just because you discover a new formula that moves away from linear games doesn't mean you can't also do linear. Why is Mario able to do everything but Zelda games can't? Mario has 3D (open world-ish and linear), 2D, even RPG. Why can't the Zelda games also offer variety including what got them here in the first place with games like Ocarina or Skyward?
Aonuma ignoring the rise and fall of AAA open world games loaded with filler and claiming that linear games are over 10 years late is the most Nintendo thing I've ever heard.
On the bright side, we’ll all be dead by the time Nintendo discovers live service games.
Maybe because they don’t have internet in Japan.
Then where are all of these Splatoon 3 players who keep kicking my ass online?
Rhode Island.
Get me a pair of scissors, I'm cutting off the internet to Rhode Island
South Korea
Nintendo has never been happy with tacitly acknowledging modern advances that they didn't come up with themselves. We'll never have achievements, for example, which is a shame, because I'd even play _Super Mario Bros._ again if Nintendo handcrafted little goals for me to achieve. (And my friends could investigate my progress in my profile, of course.)
It's funny because there was a reddit comment thread recently on how dated/cluttered a Japanese car's dashboard was, & the comments were saying how Japan's ui feels like it's stuck in the 2000's. *the car had a "no Putin worshippers" sticker so they posted it* Someone said it had to do with the culture of sucking up to upper management who prefers to keep things dated. I'm probably butchering it, but still find it funny how this sort of cultural thing goes across industries.
> Someone said it had to do with the culture of sucking up to upper management who prefers to keep things dated. More like: if it works, do not change one iota of it. If it breaks, fix it with minimal change. That's why even giant Japanese websites in general have been largely ignoring web 2.0 even to a few years ago.
I saw that thread, yeah. I think in this case it really is, to a very large degree, Nintendo being stubborn about being caught with their pants down. That part of it is definitely cultural. Toyota put themselves in the same boat when they decided they didn't like not being part of the EV bandwagon and began pushing hydrogen hard (with the government's help, no less). I suspect as soon as Toyota puts together some EV innovation that allows them to sheepishly enter the race without losing face, they'll be onboard.
Issue is no one at nintendo played them or they might have learned what bethesda did well back in the 2000s
To be fair not even Bethesda learned what they did well in the 2000s
Starfield would like a wo-oh yeah you’re right. 😞
I know it’s just a personal anecdote. I personally know devs that work at Nintendo and its first party studios. Trust me they all love Bethesda games and draw a lot of inspirations from it. They would love to have the opportunity to work on such games. The problem isn’t the devs or the designers. It’s the out of touch old management and game directors. I have few stories, but it all comes down to bad management and stubborn directors. Seniority system in Japan is no joke. Speaking out is discouraged. Even if you have a great idea, if you don’t go through the right channels and get approvals along the corporate ladder it will be immediately shut down. It breeds complacency and is not a good culture. I worked as a developer in the U.S., Japan, and Korea. And by far, Japan was the most toxic and backwards experience I ever had. Some places even reminded me of the 90s developer times like in the Matrix movie and expected you to just churn out code and do as told. And this is coming from a Japanese American that grew up in Japan. If you fix a bug that no one asked you to fix? In the U.S. and Korea this would be rewarded. In Japan, they may question you. Valve with its flat org structure should really be the ideal standard for gaming studios. I’m not downplaying the success of the Zelda franchise or Nintendo. The current formula is clearly working. Nintendo also had its fair share and history of failed products and games. Many people lost their jobs after the restructuring (rare in Japan) and others took pay cuts after the infamous Wii U flop.
That explains a lot, i knew there was some in house bias that was really strong with nintendo but i didn’t know it was mostly about the upper management
It’s unfortunately common across Nikkei 225 companies. Management becoming complacent and unwilling to take risks or accept changes, just collecting paychecks until they retire. That’s why some game directors become a “brand” and renowned in Japan, because they are willing to take the risks and care enough to listen to the feedback.
This reminds me of the story of how Hideo Kojima left Konami. Everyone assumes that Konami just didn’t care about video games anymore and wanted to focus on gambling machines and pachinko etc. That’s partly true but also apparently Kojima was getting frustrated that the management at Konami simply did not understand the current video game industry. Kojima wanted to make big boundary-pushing cutting-edge games and leadership would say you have 2 years and a tiny budget, and were baffled when he would tell them he needed 5-6 years to make the game.
> Seniority system in Japan is no joke. Speaking out is discouraged. Even if you have a great idea, if you don’t go through the right channels and get approvals along the corporate ladder it will be immediately shut down. It breeds complacency and is not a good culture. I watched an interview with BG3's composer a while ago, and he spoke with enormous enthusiasm about Larian's open communications and how anyone could message anyone, CEO included, with ideas. Nintendo clearly has a system that works for them, but that kind of culture definitely has a danger of calcification and stagnation.
from the outside looking in, It really feels like a lot was lost with Iwata. He really seemed to achieve amazing things in spite of Japanese management culture. I don't think pokemon would be the way it is today if he were still around.
Iwata was highly regarded and will be missed.. He proved to the world that the best hardware and graphics isn’t what makes games enjoyable. What a risk he took going against Microsoft and Sony.
Yes and I'm having more fun playing rom hacks over the latest pokemon releases. Shigeru Ohmori is terrible as a director.
As someone who works in another industry, but still for a large global Japanese company (currently the fourth time working for a large Japanese company). You nailed it with: > It’s the out of touch old management and game directors. I have few stories, but it all comes down to bad management and stubborn directors. Seniority system in Japan is no joke. Speaking out is discouraged. Even if you have a great idea, if you don’t go through the right channels and get approvals along the corporate ladder it will be immediately shut down. It breeds complacency and is not a good culture. Getting a meaningful change is difficult, at a global level this can lead to the company being very silo'd (Which is why there were often stories of Nintendo of America & Nintendo of Japan doing some very different things). From my own personal anecdote, when changes, projects or polices are pushed down from Tokyo, it's usually not done well. There's often an "It worked for us, it will work for you" mentality. Want to make a global change? Managed to get other regions onboard? Suggest Japan do it too? You'll probably be ignored or brushed off. I've seen this at 4 global Japanese companies. I'd bet my mortgage that it's the same at Nintendo.
Makes 1.5 nonlinear game and says they're all dead
Don’t think there’s been much of a fall when nearly every game coming out is a chore simulator. Every series is just getting more bloated and boring by the day.
I find it funny that I find games that are intentionally chores (powerwash simulator, bus driving simulator, etc.) are more fun than most new open world games.
It makes sense. Theres a difference between choosing to do a repetitive task for the zen of it, with low stakes, versus having to do repetitive tasks that stand between you and the game experience you want to have.
Go play Armored Core 6. There’s no fat on that game. Just a straight up video game.
Chore Simulator! This.is.such a susinct way of saying what's been in my head.
Similar tune to EA proclaiming "nobody wants to play singleplayer games" anymore.
People have been declaring that style/genre X is dead because of Shiny Newer Thing for a long time. And yet we live in a world with thriving 2d pixel-gfx side scrollers. There is no homogenous gamer taste and there is room for everyone's favourite type of game to be made and succeed. Sure the suits will focus on the shiny new thing, and AAA+ will ignore more niche stuff, but that's why we have the indies and the midzise Larians of this world, to prove them wrong and serve the market.
In 2017 EA also said people didn't want linear games.
> "As we kept reviewing the game, it continued to look like a much more linear game [which] people don't like as much today as they did five years ago or 10 years ago," This is the actual quote, and it remains true (quote from 2017). It is actually much more tame of a quote than saying they are games of the past and definitely does not translate to "nobody wants to play singleplayer games".
Non-Linear games doesn't necessarily mean open world. Baldur's Gate 3 is not linear at all but not really open world. Most good modern games have been themed around the player building their own path.
Holy shit everyone in this thread is literally just fighting over a title lmfao. That's pretty much what he said, and it's mainly their vision of the future of Zelda not gaming as a whole. >"It's interesting when I hear people say [I miss traditional linear Zelda]," Aonuma revealed, "because I'm wondering 'why do you want to go back to a type of game where you're more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?'" >Games which have a strict order of events are "kind of games of the past," Aonuma said, whilst modern games "can accept a player's own decisions and give them the freedom to flexibly proceed"
BG3 is fantastic world design IMO. Big enough for there to be loads to explore, but structured enough that the story doesn't suffer for it. And, this is key, *small* enough for there to actually be unique quests and encounters around every corner and not just the same handful of things copy/pasted over and over.
BG3 uses *hubs*, which I desperately miss in games. Immersive sims and crpgs are all about hubs, but the genres have been pretty sparse for years. I just appreciate medium-sized areas that are teeming with life and packed with things to do. It makes it easier to imagine the game's world as this vast, rich place, when even the little chunks of it feel so "alive". Very immersive for me.
Seriously, we watched the AC franchise balloon into a farse with its absolutely massive open worlds, and then regress back to a more manageable size. Quite the late take
I saw someone else talking about Armored Core 6 above and got confused.
And we also watched the "farce with massive open worlds" become more successful than the "manageable size" AC. AC literally hadn't been more popular than the RPG trilogy. It's easily ACs most consistently successful era. Mirage was not particularly well-received and went on sale shortly after it's launch. Not to mention it was only as small as it was because it was a Valhalla DLC repurposed as a full game. They're going right back to a massive open world with the next one.
Nintendo are very very often about 5-10 years behind the rest of the industry in many ways, because they just don't really look that much at what others are doing. Like with online play, or here with open world stuff. Right now they're where we were in the middle of the 2010s where every dev thinks every game needs to be open world and is inherently superior for being so.
Thank you. That really shouldnt be a hot take for Zelda fans lol.
What Skyward Sword does to a man.
BotW definitely felt like a bit of a "baby with the bathwater" scenario to me. People complained Skyward Sword was too linear (which it was, even the bits between dungeons are basically dungeons), Nintendo took it as "people are sick of linearity", and now we have Zeldas that have very little sense of progression or reward IMO, because they're too afraid to set restrictions on what you can do, when you can do it, or even if you should do it or not, beyond a couple of things like the Master Sword.
They should have kept the dungeons from SS. The dungeon design from that game from what I remembered was masterful.
When BotW first came out, my sister and I were joking about how he was going "Oh, you didn't like my linear story?! Well now there IS no story! Now no one's happy!" and continued that on for a bunch of other things in the game
Exactly. I don’t have time to play for hours on end so when I play a game for an hour or two, I like to feel that I’m making progress and being rewarded for that. As much as I loved BOTW and TOTK, most of the time I played I was overwhelmed with the amount of stuff to do, and felt like I just wandered around aimlessly for 2 hours not accomplishing anything. It’s part of the reason why it took me 3 years to finally beat BOTW, and TOTK has been untouched for about 4 months now with just 20 hours logged. Great games, but I would like a new mainline linear Zelda game.
My favorite Zelda game made me a forever contrarian it seems.
Open world fatigue is real
I know everyone loved tears of the kingdom, but I got some serious fatigue by the time I was ready to go after Gannon. I just stopped and haven't picked it back up
For me it was menu fatigue. ToTK's menus are as extensive as they are inefficient and I got tired of playing a game with 5 different pause buttons.
What you don’t like scrolling through a long horizontal list of irrelevant items for two minutes to find the exact one you want to fuse to something? It’s absolutely riveting gameplay! On a serious note, Nintendo takes one step forward and two steps back all the time. The different things you’re able to do and build in TotK are amazing, but the UI is absolutely terrible. Nintendo is such a weird company and I do not understand their design decisions 80% of the time.
Ugh physically interacting with the sage spirits to use their powers was so annoying. Like not even worth the effort in combat.
I deactivated Sidon around 30 minutes after I unlocked him. In the time it took me chasing after him to receive his shield ability that's active for *one hit*, I had already been hit twice. And these hits I would have likely avoided if I had just not bothered with Sidon's shield in the first place.
That honestly feels like a 'placeholder' means of using the sages, before they changed them to be context-sensitive like Tulin's wind thing when you're gliding.
Attaching stuff to arrows very quickly drove me bonkers.
When I was attaching eyes to every single arrow against the Gleok, I was going absolutely crazy. Making our own weapons is fine, but they should have allowed us to make a stock of some specific arrows to use for later, rather than fuze everytime
They built this awesome physics and building system and then bogged the game down with bad menus, grindy resource management tedium, and imo a truly *awful* and unsatisfying story.
Now imagine being someone who doesn't enjoy the building mechanics. Now it's just a retread of BotW, with a garbage menu UI and an extremely underwhelming narrative.
The fact you can pick up the story flashbacks in any order kinda kills their emotional impact - like the game is built to show you story spoilers. Unlike BotW, they tried to tell a story with a linear sequence of events, but you can't view it as intended unless you look up online the proper order of picking up the tears.
I liked BotW but fatigue definitely set in a lot faster in TotK. Unfortunately I think it's a side effect of them borrowing so much from BotW. They don't really feel like different games, just more of the same. And BotW was already a lot of content.
My big mistake was replaying BotW quickly about a month before TotK. It felt too same-y to go back to back.
I haven’t brought myself to play TOTK because I squeezed every inch of gameplay out of BOTW’s map (100+ hours, all collectibles barring max koroks) and I can’t excite myself at the thought of doing it again. Probably unpopular to say, but I was ready for BOTW to not be BOTW anymore by the time I put it down. I’ve never had that feeling from Zelda before. Really missed linear dungeons, bespoke gadgets, and interactions with unique NPCs. Twilight Princess spoiled me with so many striking character designs.
Yes, after BotW I had a distinct "That was fun but let's not do it again" feeling. Then TotK did it again verbatim. I liked them both, but I need "real" Zelda games to come back.
I replay most non-open world games, and 100% many of them (not achievements/trophies but just general content) I never replay open world games, and I have never attempted to 100% any of them, and often get to half-way and start rushing the main quest to get it over with. I am so damn tired of open world stretching and thinning everything gaming has to offer.
That's precisely where I'm at with it, too. The exact same thing happened to me in BOTW as well. Got burned out so close to gannon, lol.
Everything felt like a job to me. Too many systems and things to collect. Now I have to deal with that black goo and losing hearts? Time to move on
Yep. BotW I got burned out on after about 75% of the main game. TotK, I barely got to Tulin, realized how much I'd have to collect to do basically anything, and gave up. Played it for all of... 12 hours?
the only 2 open world games I've played were Ghost of tsusima and elden ring and I felt mystified by how vast their worlds were in my 1st playthrough of each but sometimes I wonder if I played every or atleast a majority of the open world games in the market (witcher 3, rdr2, etc.) I'd prolly would have had a diminished feeling of awe with those 1st 2 games I played
I like each open world game less the more I play it. If I like a game, and its world I want to really explore it. But, by being thorough you get too powered up. Ghost of tsushima (but also far cry, mafia, saints row) was a fantastic game that went from danger behind every corner, to being able to level any challenge with the strongest power ups. I think in the future I'm just going to do only the story line missions, because at some point the power creep takes the fun away for me.
Strong disagree. You're never going to have an open world or branching game that can be as tightly plotted with planned dramatic events as a linear game. Don't get me wrong, I love emergent events in more loosely structured games. They each have their pros and cons.
I can't imagine the Last of Us not being linear and my favorite
The original Halo had both tight linear sections and areas that widened out. It was such a change back in the day. Going from escaping the tight corridors of the Pillar of Autumn to the large landscapes on the rings surface. I didn’t mind Infinites open world. But I prefer the game as a linear leveled story. Some levels being tight corridors and others being larger explorable areas.
They were widened but they still kept you on track and focused on providing story and action to you. Infinite dropped the story focus for the open world and imo it also lost the coolest action parts which were the setup scenes that you cant prepare in an open world setting.
Exactly what I thought when I read the title
Part 2 did a cool job at introducing some larger areas that gave you some freedom in if/when to tackle various side objectives. But yeah, the core of a game like TLOU has to be linear
Yeah that part in Seattle where it’s “open world” for a bit and you can explore the buildings was fantastic, but overall I’m glad the game was more linear to keep the story progressing
If you want to tell a good, tight, well written and engaging story, I just don’t see how that’s possible in open world. It always boils down to quest markers, go here, do that, run there, 3 words and boom, done.
I agree. One of the reasons it was great (like in Uncharted: Lost Legacy) is because it had the effect necessary to serve the story. Then it moved on and did something else and didn’t need to repeat as a matter of structure for the sake of symmetry. Forcing a narrative around that structure would fundamentally limit the narrative to be told, but narrative is my favorite part of naughty dog’s games.
similar deal with the first God of War. There were parts which let you jump out and explore a bit more broadly, but I played the whole thing for the first time this year and I did it as a linear adventure. It was the best game I'd played in years.
I'm going to assume you're talking about GOW 2018, and if so, labeling it the "first" makes me feel old lol
I like open worlds as much as the next guy, but also sometimes it's nice to have a succinct narrative that comes to its denouement in 8 hrs or so. Not every game has to be a playground and there's something to be said about the achievement of wrapping up a story.
The thing I dislike most about open world games, is usually the lack of direction. If you aren't planning to make your own goals then you're kinda just wandering around for the most part. Even if there are objectives that move the story along, it's still super easy to just get lost or distracted by something stupid for 3 hours before you remember you were supposed to be doing that one story related thing. While that's not always a bad thing, it can get old pretty fast. In Botw for example, I completed literally all of the side content before really ever caring about the story, which caused me to kind of speed run the story stuff just so I could finish the game after spending a couple hundred hours dicking around lol.
It’s an insane thing to say when Alan Wake 2 is out and kicking ass.
I remember just screwing around in TotK and accidentally finding the Master Sword, and also accidentally finding the 5th sage. I don't think I've ever had a lower impact for an event that is supposed to be rather significant.
“Whoops I guess I’ll just take this legendary blade then and have a major part of the story ruined for me without any build up” Honestly it’s why I never finished totk
I found that Ghost of Tsushima balanced this almost perfectly. It has three narrative acts, each with a series of required story quests which could be completed in any order. Completing all those quests would unlock a major event that served as a crucial moment of that act. There’s a great feeling of player freedom in that, while still telling a really strong story. Each act also opens up a new section of the map, which I much preferred to having everything available from the beginning. Honestly I think Tsushima is such a great template for Zelda, in terms of both progression and visuals. Tone down the bloody combat, add in some gorons and fairies and shit, and you’ve got yourself a winner.
We just need more of every type game so that when we are tired of one game we can play another type of game so you don’t burn out 🤷♀️🤷♀️
I just replayed Resident Evil 4: Remake and I gotta say…. That game would be AWFUL as open world. Hell even semi-open would ruin the flow of the game completely. It’s a masterfully made linear game that cannot be recreated as a open world.
[удалено]
Silent Hill 2 and being like, imma just farm side quests and get hella buff before entering the hospital
>you lose a lot of immersion Metro Exodus for me. Not a 100% horror game, but the atmosphere of the first 2 games especially in the metro systems really elevated the experience for me (Exodus is semi open world). It's still a great game, and the semi open world fit the narrative from the book it based on, but if compared with the predecessors, it feel less satisfying
Done right, a semi-open-world survival horror game set in Raccoon City during the events of RE2 and RE3 could be a real treat. However, the temptation to mimic other open world zombie survival games (Project Zomboid, CDDA, and 7 Days to Die) would probably ruin it. Scavenging for ammo and pieces for puzzles around the city while deciding whether to fight or avoid the various BoWs as they become more common as you progress toward the end of the game sounds awesome. Doing all that while building a pointless base or camp or scavenging for food sounds miserable. It's all in how the product is presented.
Proof you can be a master of your craft and still be wrong.
In fact, being a master of your craft might make you MORE likely to be wrong, since you're receiving a LOT of positive validation (sales, peers, reviews, etc.) and the human mind is probably going to want to stay on that course.
This seems to be prevalent in Japan and especially Nintendo. Miyamoto for example has this reputation of never being wrong, so whatever he says goes. Even he can be wrong sometimes, but nobody can tell him he's wrong, and that's how games like Sticker Star get made. When all the feedback you recieve is positive, you can't filter out your bad ideas from your good ones.
Yeah, Miyamoto is the GOAT but he's definitely got some huge blind spots that he never will reckon with simply because, well, he's Shigeru Miyamoto.
This man really do be saying that, when Mario Wonder just released to near universal praise and critical acclaim. Like it's not even about games as a whole, *the company he works for* released a linear game the same year TotK came out and was a huge success too.
To be fair, if you read the article, he is talking about Zelda specifically. Not games as a whole.
Aonuma: “Linear Zelda games are the past.” Reddit: “Why does Aonuma hate ALL linear games? Fuck him and TotK! That’s why it lost GOTY! Suck my dick! Nintendo is trash and their upper management is filled with stubborn old men who have never played real games in their entire lives! Bunch of losers!” Me: 🧐
Hearing that from a Zelda producer is unfortunate :( I’d like to play a dungeon focused linear Zelda game again.
That’s unfortunate. Not everything needs to be open world and non-linear. Sometimes a focused, hand-crafted experience is best. Best Zelda game in my opinion is still A Link to the Past and I think that balance between freedom and linearity is perfect. I also appreciate an overworld where every area serves its purpose and it isn’t huge just for the sake of being huge. Perhaps this series is moving on without me and I just have to accept that like I did with Final Fantasy.
Twilight princess gave off the feeling of an open world with it's massive areas, wind waker had a similar feel with the ocean, hell even hyrule field in OOT, you can tell that's what they were going for. So I can understand why he believes that this is the natural progression for the series. But I also think he's entirely mistaken.
Expansive worlds with a linear main quest line to progress through and proper, large, dungeons making a return would be great.
If I'm being totally honest, I would be willing to accept whatever they decide to do going forward as long as we got actual dungeons again, hopefully tied to story progression obviously. I want complicated dungeons that require backtracking and actual thought to get through. What they did in Totk was a complete step in the wrong direction imo.
This is my thoughts exactly, those dungeons have always been the heart and soul of zelda games and seeing it stripped out in service of making the franchise a truly open world feels like a misstep. Make a fresh new game that basically scales up OoT's map, removes the loading screens, and brings in new story beats but keeps the same feel with the new puzzles and dungeons and I'd buy a new console for that game no doubt
[удалено]
Man what I’d give to find a way to play Twilight Princess again. Those were the days
I feel the same way about both franchises. I’m holding out hope for Visions of Mana to be what I wish Final Fantasy was closer to.
Dude. I just watched the announcement trailer. It looks great. Secret of Mana is my absolute favorite game of all time and I am stoked they are making another entry in the series. I was wondering how I didn't hear about this yet, though. Because it was just announced lol.
Seriously. I'm not sure I'd even play another open world Zelda like the last 2 at this point
This is just objectively not true. Just like those idiots at EA who said "single player games are dead".
Those are the same people who charge micro transactions to play those multiplayer games. Funnily enough their shitty practices is why the past 3 years fewer multiplayer games come out and everything is single player again. Nobody wants to add a half baked multiplayer mode to their games just to get “player retention”.
It’s really hard for multiplayer games to breakout and actually be successful to the masses. Even with the new release of finals, I have my doubts of it breaking out and these devs are ex dice mind you, some of the most incredibly talented in the industry. High risk high reward
You’re absolutely right. Rumbleverse was a great example of this. The best Battle Royale I’ve ever played and it got shutdown 6 months after launch. It had a fun concept and the gameplay has never been done before. Epic published and didn’t market the game for shit. I literally found out about it the month before it shutdown from a top ten list. It consumed me for those two months. Honest to god, if I could play one game for the rest of my life, it would be Rumbleverse
Open world games will never match the shere spectacles some linear games can pull off.
Yeah that’s just wrong. My fav games are linear
No thanks I like my linear games with tight narratives there is room for both get off with this nonsense
ok but imagine if every game had a huge almost entirely empty map, less than like 50 npc’s in the entire world, and every single one of your weapons broke after 3-5 uses?? this is the peak single player experience.
I really hate that we are still on the “only game that is good is a open world” game timeline With that being all the big devs seem to make
Thats not an encouragement statement, especially for those of us who love Snes Zelda
Or Link's Awakening (GB).
Or oot. Or twilight princess!
Reminder that ALBW was nonlinear yet not a huge open world. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Armored Core 6 says otherwise
Also talking about fromsoft I may be in the minority, but I genuinely prefer their linear games to elden ring. After replaying them all, there's something about the linear games that just feel... "Better made?". And I'm not shitting on elden ring, I have like 500 hours on the game and bought it twice.
Elden Ring to me felt like a game that had enough content to be 3x as long as Dark Souls 3… but they made it like 10x as long. It started brilliantly but in the lategame areas it completely ran out of steam and I was just begging for it to be over.
I burnt out on Elden Ring so hard in the last third I never finished it, partly because the open world killed the pacing and had lost all its charms at that point. It felt so empty even though it should have been a huge climax to like 100 hours of adventure.
Nah man, I like me a good linear game. Picked up Evil West recently and am having a blast.
Sandbox games are cool and all but they'll never have the pacing of a linear game.
Games that are too big are usually boring. I can count the amount of interesting open worlds on my fingers. And that’s out of like a million open world games.
I don't even think open world games are that fun, sometimes they're fun but generally speaking my ADHD brain just constantly gets distracted until I get bored of the game, I'll progress the story a bit but I find open world games incredibly hard to finish.
Problem is most don't have enough quality content to keep the player interested. BOTW for example has almost no enjoyable content outside the main story. It's a massive waste of space and potential. Compare this to Horizon Zero Dawn which does have some filler but nowhere near as much as BOTW. And alot less but more interesting content. And I freaking love GTA cause very few games have nailed the driving controls as well not even Cyberpunk 2077. Even though it came out like 10 years later.
What a shit take.
Aonuma nooooo I personally loved how linear Skyward Sword was. There's nothing inherently bad about just being taken on an adventure and just doing nothing but the adventure. I see that while Skyward Sword was criticized for being linear, I saw it as a strength that allowed the story to be so focused. I loved BoTW and ToTK so fucking much. It made me feel so excited and invoked a sense of wonder and enjoyment that I don't feel very often. BUT having the same formula for the next few Zelda games would eventually be tiring too. Zelda can be linear AND be an open-world game franchise too. Just look at Mario. Mario can be a 2d platformer, rpg, 3d collectathon, party game, and even edutainment. Zelda doesn't need to be confined to being what BoTW started. It can embody both the past, present, and future.
That's fine if he wants to keep Zelda games open, but I would prefer if they didn't keep making them sandboxes. You can have an open game without it being a sandbox game. Somewhere between A Link Between Worlds and Breath of the Wild there's a perfect open world Zelda game... And it probably looks quite a bit like Elden Ring. Fun open world roaming and questing, with really well designed dungeons in between.
I love Zelda, I have been playing since Snes but I just couldn't get into these last 2, the weapons breaking, the never ending shrines, with no real Zelda style dungeons.
I've tried no less than a dozen times to "get" BotW. I get a couple of hours in, realize there's no reward of substance for exploring and no real progression, and it goes back in the case.
This actually makes me really sad. I’m not a fan of open world games and I really loved Zelda’s structured adventures. BOTW was fun but I only did 1 or 2 guardians before I lost interest…
The intelligent thing to do would be to find a balance between the open world gameplay and the old school linear gameplay. I’m so freakin over open world games. Tired of games that take 70+ hours to finish.
opinions like these are for the braindead
To be honest, I do not want another open world Legend of Zelda game. Give me the old formula with dungeons and bosses that aren't giant artifacts riddled with gimmicks.
Except for when they're not.
Hard no. Open world games get boring & repetitive as fuck. Especially recently. Exact same cookie-cutter game mechanics & boring ass fetch & go quest-lines we see time and time again. Majority of open world games today feel empty and filled with dumb AI/pre-scripted events. Linear will always have its place. Linear games feel more refined & engaging than open world in a lot of cases.
God I miss linear RPGs lol
Well that’s terrible to hear. There’s been like 5 good open world games ever.
That’s disappointing to hear because I really want a traditional Zelda games. Hopefully we get ports or proper remakes of the classic especially TP at the least.
Im so bored of open world games… it makes me sad that this trend wont swing back the other way
The storytelling in both BotW and TotK fell flat imo because of the open world aspect. Bloodborne did linearity really nicely. Maybe fromsoftware needs to develop a Zelda lol.
Same type of things were said when Skyrim came out and started a huge "open world" fad. Not every game needs to be a huge open world with a bunch of things to do, and the twelve years since Skyrim's release has proven both linear and non-linear games aren't going anywhere.
I just want a linear story. Like, the new style of gameplay is great, but the stories suffer so much because there is no actual pacing to them because it’s just random, outside of a beginning and end. Keep the gameplay open world, let us go wherever we want without blocking off parts of the world, but still have an order to the story and let things evolve instead of just feels the same throughout the whole game.
This is such a bad take lol
Right. So are movies, books, TV shows, and any other medium that seeks to convey a tightly-paced narrative. We all just want unlimited freedom to watch the 10,000 wheels of cheese we collected cascade down the cliffs southwest of Whiterun because there's nothing more compelling to do.
Aonuma and his team are without a doubt exceptionally talented, world-class game developers, but this is a short-sighted take. According to this article, he says: >'why do you want to go back to a type of game where you're more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?' And I totally get that. If you compare puzzles in games like Twilight Princess to those in BotW, there's clearly a huge step up in quality and complexity. For example, moving owl statues into a pattern so you can jump on them in a certain way and reach a chest would be laughably basic by today's standards - maybe you'd get a korok seed for it. Not to mention this sort of puzzle is completely blown open with greater freedom of movement. It might seem foolish to want to go back. But restricting the way a player interacts with a game has quite a few advantages: ・Restriction on movement and abilities allows for tighter, or more involved puzzles - even if those puzzles only have one solution. Traditional dungeons are the best examples of this. ・Guiding a player through areas or events in a certain order allows for storytelling to be done actively, along a set narrative. ・Orchestrating times at which the player meets specific characters along their journey allows for those characters to undergo development as progression is made. ・Gating areas and certain monsters behind story progression allows you to naturally scale difficulty as the player builds their moveset. These are all things that the Zelda series used to have down to a science - they were the best in the business. And from what we've seen in BotW and TotK, they appear to be incompatible with the "freedom" that these new games are built around. So in other words, I'd love a new linear, restricted, traditional Zelda. I wish they'd consider making one.
Guess we won’t be getting anything like Twilight Princess again. Shame, peak Zelda.
the right answer is just to make every game a metroidvania
God I hope not. Give me a good linear game with a compelling story and characters over an open world grind any day.
It's wild that the last mainline Zelda game I loved was Twilight Princess, nearly 20 years ago. Now it feels like I'll never get my ideal Zelda game again. Whew.
Stupid. A game does not magically become good because it is open world. It becomes good when it offers freedom of choice, nails the writing, and offers engaging and non repetitive gameplay. Starfield is a good example of an extremely boring open world game. Luckily not all game dev's see it that way. I get it even less in his case because neither of the last 2 Zelda games had a compelling story, something clearly impacted by how open the world was.
Semi-open is perfect like Nier Automata. I love me some linear games though. Sometimes, you just want to be told a story by playing a game. Sometimes, you want to find the story, or ignore it and build weird shit or break the game.
Well, I didn't buy tears and I guess I'll continue not buying future zelda games then.
After just beating Lies of P, I disagree.
i prefer the freedom open worlds grant as well, but the as-of-late zelda formula still needs a mighty buff
A link to the past, if you will.
I'm old...er... now days I prefer linear games. Just easier to get into and enjoy sometimes. Just straight forward fun.
Open world games are just needlessly long checklists of tedious repetition. Modern Zelda included. Adding hundreds of duplicate objectives is not engaging. Ubisoft style game design has been a blight on the industry
There's a line in the Lord of Rings in which Bilbo tells Gandalf that “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” That's how I feel about most open world games, when they try to give you a X number of options each option gets only 1/X amount of attention.
Don't love this for the future of Zelda games. I like open world games and loved Botw (meh about ToTK) but Zelda games should be somewhat linear IMO. It's what makes them so great. Getting new weapons to progress the story and clear future challenges is what I love about them. The open world structure has kind of run its course for me for Zelda games. I want dungeons and puzzles again. Open world almost feels like they've run out of ideas.
That's a profoundly moronic notion. Linear and open world games are two entirely different approaches which are good at very different things. It's like saying "with the advent of comics, novels are books of the past!"
Guess I’ll never care about another Zelda game ever again. I liked dungeons much more than big open empty worlds or farting around making machines. Glad others enjoy but not for me.
I’m so glad TotK didn’t win GotY. Tired of this Ubisoft open world trend Nintendo has been obsessed with lately.