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Embargo on Nintendo Switch console/games previews lift on February 23th / March 1st

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Anyone else think there will be some more in-depth video/direct/document from Nintendo this week about the OS, maybe some indies, etc.?

I feel like they way want to beat the press to the punch and create a more standardized view.

Or they have OS features on lock in the embargo.
 
I think one reason the console previews are locked until the 23rd, is that we could get an official video of the UI/system features directly from Nintendo in the next couple of days. It'd make sense to introduce that stuff officially, then let the press release their opinions of it first hand.
 
I'm willing to bet that after the recent video Jim is under some pressure to give the game a relatively bad score. I can't see him looking past what he feels about the company ('s legal department)

You really think Jim would give a good game a bad score because he doesn't like some of Nintendo's corporate policies? Come on now. This reeks of pre-damage control just in case he doesn't give it a 10/10.
 
I'm willing to bet that after the recent video Jim is under some pressure to give the game a relatively bad score. I can't see him looking past what he feels about the company ('s legal department)

I really doubt this is Jim's MO when reviewing games. But hey, if he started docking 20% from every Nintendo review due to their Youtube policies, we would get one hell of a GAF thread out of it.
 
Not sure how this turned into a Zelda review prediction thread, but a lot of the worries people seem to be having about Zelda (empty world, bad/few dungeons) seem to be misplaced according to Game Informer and others. We also still don't know how many dungeons there are- people saying 4 is confirmed are incorrect, we have no official confirmation yet.

If I had to give a few worries about Zelda I'd basically say that resource/weapon management could get tedious, Shrine aesthetics (if they're all the same) could get tiresome, and... you know what? That's about it. I can't think of much else I'm worried about.


Anyway it's good to know when we'll hear more about the Switch too.

I'm more concerned about the usual Nintendo fuckups, like having absolutely no sound options & poor sound mixing, no way to speed up text, unskippable cutscenes, poor checkpoint place/long runs back to wherever you died, uneven/low/pathetic difficulty for most of the game, etc.

Monolith is helping out with the game. Monolith did an extraordinarily poor job on a lot of the open-world features of Xenoblade X.
 
Eh, i've never seen a game where the tutorial is better than the rest of the game.

What do you mean with "so many points of possible failure"? Just asking.

Well for one it's the first in-house massive land-based open world from Nintendo, it's also apparently a LOT bigger than what most other AAA teams are doing (such as Bethesda who has a lot more experience) as well.

It's also their first foray into physics-based systems, voices in Zelda, many systems such as weapon degredation and the like.

Basically there's a lot that Nintendo's doing new in here. Compared to, say, a Mario Kart game where they'd actively have to try to make things bad.
 
I'm willing to bet that after the recent video Jim is under some pressure to give the game a relatively bad score. I can't see him looking past what he feels about the company ('s legal department)

No way he is gonna give Zelda a low score lol.
 
You really think Jim would give a good game a bad score because he doesn't like some of Nintendo's corporate policies? Come on now. This reeks of pre-damage control just in case he doesn't give it a 10/10.

I really doubt this is Jim's MO when reviewing games. But hey, if he started docking 20% from every Nintendo review due to their Youtube policies, we would get one hell of a GAF thread out of it.

My opinion of him isn't that great, sure, but preconceptions can cloud judgements. It is a possibility, not a very big one but one for sure. It'll be interesting for sure but yeah, I admit I wasn't thinking too much with that post :)
 
Well for one it's the first in-house massive land-based open world from Nintendo, it's also apparently a LOT bigger than what most other AAA teams are doing (such as Bethesda who has a lot more experience) as well..
It goes both ways. The usual Nintendo polish in a game of this scale would be quite something :)
 
Well for one it's the first in-house massive land-based open world from Nintendo, it's also apparently a LOT bigger than what most other AAA teams are doing (such as Bethesda who has a lot more experience) as well.

It's also their first foray into physics-based systems, voices in Zelda, many systems such as weapon degredation and the like.

Basically there's a lot that Nintendo's doing new in here. Compared to, say, a Mario Kart game where they'd actively have to try to make things bad.

Of course, but devs (especially of this level) don't usually go in randomly. Aonuma said that he and the team researched a lot of other open world games, they played the game and made it play to others at every new build to adjust stuff in every point of the world and other things like that. It's reasonable to think that they didn't fuck this up, especially considering how amazing are the bits we've already seen.

I'd say what OOT did for its time was way more risky in many ways, but it turned out well it seems.
 
It goes both ways. The usual Nintendo polish in a game of this scale would be quite something :)

That's what has me stoked. Open-world games usually have some awkwardness to them, with a lot of areas feeling randomly placed, duplicated from other areas and other small issues. I'm curious to see how/if Nintendo avoids this. They always create massively explorable worlds, so something like that on a massive scale would be amazing.
 
It goes both ways. The usual Nintendo polish in a game of this scale would be quite something :)

Yes definitely, that's what excites me the most. That and they've got MonolithSoft helping with the overall world design; XCX did wear me out a few hours after I got the Skell but damn was that world well designed. If Nintendo can pull of their signature level design over a massive world without making things seem disjointed we'll have something great on our hands. "Point of failure" here doesn't mean I think they will fail, just that there's no precedent for it in the same way there is for the upcoming Splatoon 2 (for example).
 
I'm more concerned about the usual Nintendo fuckups, like having absolutely no sound options & poor sound mixing, no way to speed up text, unskippable cutscenes, poor checkpoint place/long runs back to wherever you died, uneven/low/pathetic difficulty for most of the game, etc.

Monolith is helping out with the game. Monolith did an extraordinarily poor job on a lot of the open-world features of Xenoblade X.

No, don't run from it. It is inescapable. You will compare the two games and you will pick a side and you will make one look significantly worse than the other. Do it.

Legend of Belda vs. Horizon Zero Fog, who shall prevail?

It goes both ways. The usual Nintendo polish in a game of this scale would be quite something :)

That's what has me stoked. Open-world games usually have some awkwardness to them, with a lot of areas feeling randomly placed, duplicated from other areas and other small issues. I'm curious to see how/if Nintendo avoids this. They always create massively explorable worlds, so something like that on a massive scale would be amazing.

I've said it before, but if Nintendo (Zelda to be more specific) can't make me want to try and explore every nook and cranny of an open world, then no can.
 
So this will turn into a horizon/zelda war?
I guess I'll avoid the review thread like plague.

this place is going to be a slaughtering ground if zelda doesnt outscore horizon by a significant margin
which it most likely will . not trying to be a fanboy but thats the most likely outcome. hell even id agree zelda will score a tad bit higher than it deserves.

I'll take my side now : Nier's gonna be the best game of the three.

as someone who went through the trophy list and got spoiled, im inclined to agree.itll be a masterpiece in ways very few games are and that alone will put it above the rest for me.
 
No, don't run from it. It is inescapable. You will compare the two games and you will pick a side and you will make one look significantly worse than the other. Do it.

Nevah

89c.gif
 
It goes both ways. The usual Nintendo polish in a game of this scale would be quite something :)


That's what has me most excited... as a primarily Nintendo gamer who has been pretty into PS4 for the past few months, I didn't realize that crashes and really damaging glitches were that common. I still have a blast, I'm not trying to talk trash, but it's something that I kind of forgot about... I definitely save more now haha.
 
Anyone else think there will be some more in-depth video/direct/document from Nintendo this week about the OS, maybe some indies, etc.?

I feel like they way want to beat the press to the punch and create a more standardized view.

Or they have OS features on lock in the embargo.

I'm really hoping for one. As you said, it would need to be really damn soon if press are about to have certain embargo lift.

Part of me really questions whether or not Nintendo feels they need one though. At this point, it seems like Virtual Console will be absent from launch so there's one talking point gone. The OS is fairly bare-bones, so I'm not quite sure how much they'd want to detail that. At most, they could maybe highlight some indies but those devs seem to be doing that job on their own.

So yeah... the more I think about it the less likely it seems.
 
I'll take my side now : Nier's gonna be the best game of the three.

Yo if Nier really turns out to be my GOTY, that'd honestly be just as awesome.

which it most likely will . not trying to be a fanboy but thats the most likely outcome. hell even id agree zelda will score a tad bit higher than it deserves.

I mean, out of all the Zelda games released recently, it'd be hard for me to take seriously any complaints of it getting scores "higher than it deserves". Looks polished as fuck so far, they really went all out on this.
 
Yo if Nier really turns out to be my GOTY, that'd honestly be just as awesome.



I mean, out of all the Zelda games released recently, it's hard to argue that it'd receive a score "higher than it deserves". Looks polished as fuck so far, they really went all out on this.

nah, ill never be able to swallow the fact that skyward sits above witcher and bloodborne
not hating on it but its a 80-85 game at best...i know opinions and all but a 93 is supposed to represent universal acclaim and a goty for the ages.
we both know thats anything but the common consensus
 
Yo if Nier really turns out to be my GOTY, that'd honestly be just as awesome.

I misread Nier as Ni-Oh and thought how hilarious it would be if two massive open world adventures vying to be this year's Witcher 3 are beaten to GOTY by a Bloodborne-inspired game starring Irish Samurai Geralt.
 
I'm really hoping for one. As you said, it would need to be really damn soon if press are about to have certain embargo lift.

Part of me really questions whether or not Nintendo feels they need one though. At this point, it seems like Virtual Console will be absent from launch so there's one talking point gone. The OS is fairly bare-bones, so I'm not quite sure how much they'd want to detail that. At most, they could maybe highlight some indies but those devs seem to be doing that job on their own.

So yeah... the more I think about it the less likely it seems.

Good points. I'm also feeling that Virtual Console won't be there at launch, but I may be surprised (probably not). In the Fast Racing thread I brought up how we don't have release dates for Fast Racing RMX and Snipperclips, which is a bit of a downer.

I feel like they would even just want to show off the look of the store. If it's anything like the "news" page we saw from that UI leak it's something to be proud of.
 
About the weapons management, i don't really see a problem. They're almost akin to ammunitions the way they're treated here. Let's say you find a nice weapon with 15 ammo in MGS V, you use it in an enemy camp and you finish all of them. What happens next? You search for more in enemies bodies and around the camps. What happens in Zelda? You have a weapon that gives you (for example) 15-20 hits, when it breaks you go around the world or in enemy camps and search for more, with the addition that you can also throw it before it breaks to deal 2x damage. With ammo you press a combination of keys to reload, in Zelda you use a button on your dpad to change the weapon you're using. The fact that each sword/spear/hammer/etc has its own moveset also adds a lot in terms of gameplay variety and strategies because you will be using the weapon with the most effective moveset for each enemy.

About the dungeons aesthetics i don't know what to expect, but if there's a reason in the lore for that theme to be recurring it's not going to be a problem for me (unless it's not pleasing).

I think weapon management will be pretty fun for a large portion of the game, but it might get a bit tedious if you run out of weapons or arrows too easily or quickly. I think the bigger issue might be food/cooking management rather than weapon- I remember in Skyrim crafting became a huge pain in the ass when you wanted to do a large amount of it at once. In Zelda it might get even worse than that if you want to make ~20 dishes at once, as you have to hold onto the food and then dump it onto the pot. I guess the simple solution to that is to not make 20 dishes at once!

And I'm more worried about the shrines than the dungeons. With 120 of them, if all of the walls look exactly the same that'll get super boring to me. Although maybe I'm judging that as someone watching youtube videos, rather than someone playing through the game. Maybe while playing I won't even notice the aesthetic because I'll be too focused on the puzzles!

Like I said these are very minor worries and I can't really think of much else that might cause problems for me, so I'm super hyped.

^This, I pick up everything in these type of games. I really hope there is an option to get larger storage.

I think ingredients/materials have unlimited storage but there's probably a way to upgrade weapon/bow/shield storage, yeah.

I agree with you. I'd even say I'm looking foward to the weaon/ressource management as long as the bad is not too smal.
But I could see myself picking up everything but also using most of it quickly.
Like throwing weak weapons on explosive barrels/monsters and so on since we get a lot of these and so on, while just being a little more careful with the rarer stuff.

And I feel like there are a bunch of weapons that would get "damaged" instead of really break and you'd have to repair it to use it again (the master sword would be one)

I'm pretty sure they confirmed that no weapons are unbreakable, and when someone asked "even the Master Sword" they said it's a secret. Which makes me think
the Master Sword will not be usable as a weapon in this game.

I'm more concerned about the usual Nintendo fuckups, like having absolutely no sound options & poor sound mixing, no way to speed up text, unskippable cutscenes, poor checkpoint place/long runs back to wherever you died, uneven/low/pathetic difficulty for most of the game, etc.

Monolith is helping out with the game. Monolith did an extraordinarily poor job on a lot of the open-world features of Xenoblade X.

I don't know about most of those issues but the difficulty looks quite extreme for a Zelda game. Much closer to Zelda 1/2 difficulty than any other Zelda game.
 
nah, ill never be able to swallow the fact that skyward sits above witcher and bloodborne
not hating on it but its a 80-85 game at best...i know opinions and all but a 93 is supposed to represent universal acclaim and a goty for the ages.
we both know thats anything but the common consensus

That was like 6 years ago where it was much easier to get higher scores, so it's really time to let SS go imo. Aside from that, this game is a whole other beast compared to it, and seems to fix the majority of issues people had with it. So barring some major flaw in the gameplay loop, it's hard to picture them overrating it.

I misread Nier as Ni-Oh and thought how hilarious it would be if two massive open world adventures vying to be this year's Witcher 3 are beaten to GOTY by a Bloodborne-inspired game starring Irish Samurai Geralt.

Lmao
 
Gonna be hilarious when BotW gets an 85. It'll be the Gaming Side's equivalent to Election Night 2016.

People jerking off on a metascore is always hilarious. Just look at a few posts above, people are already judging the game (with fake metascores) and at best they didn't play more than 20 minutes in the tutorial zone.
 
Well for one it's the first in-house massive land-based open world from Nintendo, it's also apparently a LOT bigger than what most other AAA teams are doing (such as Bethesda who has a lot more experience) as well.

It's also their first foray into physics-based systems, voices in Zelda, many systems such as weapon degredation and the like.

Basically there's a lot that Nintendo's doing new in here. Compared to, say, a Mario Kart game where they'd actively have to try to make things bad.

Frankly, that´s one of the things that excite me more about BotW. Everytime Nintendo tries a new genre they usually deconstruct it to it´s core elements and then rebuild it into something new and amazing. See Mario64, OoT, Metroid Prime or most recently Splatoon and ARMS. Going by Aonuma´s interviews, it seems they´ve been doing this for BotW as well, so I can´t wait to see what Nintendo´s take on a big openworld is like.
 
Crap. I was really hoping for reviews of Zelda before Horizon comes out so I could figure out if I really want to keep my Switch preorder for day 1 or go all in on Horizon day 1... I just can't get myself to buy both since they are so close in release date

kind of the same here man, horizon is exatly the sort of game i'd be all over if it werent for switch being 2 days later
 
kind of the same here man, horizon is exatly the sort of game i'd be all over if it werent for switch being 2 days later

I don't think I could go knowing I'll could be playing zelda at the start of march given how long we've waited. Am ordering Horizon tho the moment I've completed Zelda mind
 
I'm willing to bet that after the recent video Jim is under some pressure to give the game a relatively bad score. I can't see him looking past what he feels about the company ('s legal department)

The dude with the Zant avatar is going to give Zelda a low score.
 
Originally Posted by Savinowned said:
Crap. I was really hoping for reviews of Zelda before Horizon comes out so I could figure out if I really want to keep my Switch preorder for day 1 or go all in on Horizon day 1... I just can't get myself to buy both since they are so close in release date

kind of the same here man, horizon is exatly the sort of game i'd be all over if it werent for switch being 2 days later

If it helps at all I canceled my Switch preorder last week, in part after getting even more hyped for Horizon after the impressions thread. Especially glad I did after the reviews it's gotten.

To be fair I was always more hyped for that, and for Mass Effect a few weeks later, than for Zelda. I'm also lukewarm on Switch as a console only I gamer so I'll probably just end up getting Zelda for Wii U (as long as performance is ok relative to the Switch version) and waiting at least until around Xmas at the earliest for Switch. There's just really no other games that interest me much before Mario--at least nothing at the early adopt a system I'm unsure about level of interest.

So I have zero regrets. I haven't had a drought in months with just having a PS4, PC and Wii U though, so it's easy for me to pass on Switch for a while and maybe indefinitely. Waiting on Zelda was also easy as I was never as hyped for it as Horizon or ME as I'm a bit burnt out on Zeldas (played through LTTP, OOT3D, MM3D, Link Between Worlds, WWHD and TPHD in recent years), don't care for the art style and am much more into games that are more immersive and have a decent story and characters to suck me in. Escapism is the main thing for me these days with Trump and my work sucking lately.

I'm looking forward to seeing some reviews, DF comparison etc. of the Wii U and Switch versions of Zelda though. I do really want to see how the Wii U version stacks up before deciding whether to play it there or just wait until when/if I get a Switch down the road to play it.
 
I am more excited about the preview thread than the revier thread, there will be much less shit posting in the first one,.
March 2nd tho, I think I will only see the metascore, if it is good maybe I will read the thread. If there is any HZD vs BotW war in it I will bail out quickly.

Damn, it just hit me that Zelda comes out next week.

Yeah I am pretty nervous.
 
That review embargo date is too close to the release date, bad sign. BvS review embargo was also a day before the release date...
 
That review embargo date is too close to the release date, bad sign. BvS review embargo was also a day before the release date...

Serious?^^

Zelda will be fine and i doubt they are scared of bad press anyway. Of course it would have been perfect if we could get the reviews this week but in the end it doesnt really matter if one day earlier or 5....the thread will be a bloodbath either way.

And let Horizon breath for a week. :P
 
That review embargo date is too close to the release date, bad sign. BvS review embargo was also a day before the release date...

The game has been heavily demoed and there will be previews in 2 days, if Nintendo wasn't confident in the game it wouldn't make launch.
 
I'm more concerned about the usual Nintendo fuckups, like having absolutely no sound options & poor sound mixing, no way to speed up text, unskippable cutscenes, poor checkpoint place/long runs back to wherever you died, uneven/low/pathetic difficulty for most of the game, etc.

Video footage show that at least some of the cut sequences are skippable (with X). Don't know to what extent though. Found memories are stored in the Sheikah Slate, so perhaps all major cut scenes are also skippable?

There is no check point system in BotW, since you can save the game anywhere.

And the game is pretty much designed around the fact that you will die multiple times. Sometimes you'll go in a direction where you weren't prepared for the situation ahead, and need to back out.
 
Yeah I would in no way think the embargo has anything to do with the quality of Zelda.

If there's any reason/concern behind it on Nintendo's part, at most it's that the WIi U and Switch versions are very similar and they don't want people canceling Switch preorders and sticking with Wii U for the game. And even that seems far fetched since the Wii U base is so small. Plus that was the situation with TP on GC and Wii and clearly didn't hurt the Wii despite it ramping up the "it's two GC's taped together" image.
 
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