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Zelda needs to be zelda again

SantaC

SantaC

Member
I hope I am not the only one, but Tears of the Kingdom kinda soured me. For me it is not Zelda when you are builiding lego things. It's a physics-based construction simulator and I never asked for that. And also, who thought that weapon degradation is a good idea? Has it ever been fun in a game? I know they tried to fix it in TotK, but the constant need to open your menu and fuse a monster horn to a base weapon because your current sword broke after hitting three enemies is just a chore. The UI and resource management is not good , and I have to gather materials in order to have battery life for my constructions lol.

I liked Breath of the wild and have no problems that they experimentet with it, but sadly the dialed up all the wrong things in the sequel to it. I cannot fanthom how Tears of the Kingdom sits at 96 metacritic. I rather play Skyward sword again over it.
 
MZGA

Donald Trump Rnc GIF by Election 2016

around Hyrule and the Bokoblins are gonna pay for it
 
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SantaC said:
I hope I am not the only one, but Tears of the Kingdom kinda soured me. For me it is not Zelda when you are builiding lego things. It's a physics-based construction simulator and I never asked for that. And also, who thought that weapon degradation is a good idea? Has it ever been fun in a game? I know they tried to fix it in TotK, but the constant need to open your menu and fuse a monster horn to a base weapon because your current sword broke after hitting three enemies is just a chore. The UI and resource management is not good , and I have to gather materials in order to have battery life for my constructions lol.

I liked Breath of the wild and have no problems that they experimentet with it, but sadly the dialed up all the wrong things in the sequel to it. I cannot fanthom how Tears of the Kingdom sits at 96 metacritic. I rather play Skyward sword again over it.
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Lots of people loved Tears of the Kingdom and it was a lot of fun at times, but I don't disagree that Breath of the Wild was a more pure experience. But I think its a bit silly to say its not Zelda.

Personally, I would love to return to the dungeon driven semi-linear world. As great as the freedom was in BotW it was a little too free.

Maybe I am agreeing with you....
 
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I would like another open world attempt but this time they should fix the glaring flaws of the past 2 games and not just iterate on them.
 
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I miss the old formula, specially the dungeons and the items. Sadly (for me) the new games have sold a lot so I don't think they'll go back to that anytime soon. Hope I'm wrong.
 
SantaC said:
I hope I am not the only one, but Tears of the Kingdom kinda soured me. For me it is not Zelda when you are builiding lego things. It's a physics-based construction simulator and I never asked for that. And also, who thought that weapon degradation is a good idea? Has it ever been fun in a game? I know they tried to fix it in TotK, but the constant need to open your menu and fuse a monster horn to a base weapon because your current sword broke after hitting three enemies is just a chore. The UI and resource management is not good , and I have to gather materials in order to have battery life for my constructions lol.

I liked Breath of the wild and have no problems that they experimentet with it, but sadly the dialed up all the wrong things in the sequel to it. I cannot fanthom how Tears of the Kingdom sits at 96 metacritic. I rather play Skyward sword again over it.
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Unpopular opinion but I agree. We are alone on this one, tho. The hordes of open world zealots and everything must be modern gaming surpass the traditional gamer 1.000 to 1. Your only hope is that Nintendo is willing to experiment in spin offs but once those fuckers find a 10+ million seller you can bet your ass the formula is gong to stay like that until the end of times.

Edit with even more unpopular opinion: the fist mistake of the saga was that Ocarina shit.
 
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Agree, I loved BotW, but hated TotK. It's just filled with stupid content I don't care about, it's not a Zelda BotW 2.0, it's rather just an overbloated mess that screams "we have absolutely no fucking idea where to go from BotW!".

Never played through it and I'm pretty sure I never will.

PS: also, I just finished A Link Between Worlds, that game is miles ahead, I completely sunk into it for the past week and it's easily 100 times better than TotK.
 
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Radical_3d said:
Unpopular opinion but I agree. We are alone on this one, tho. The hordes of open world zealots and everything must be modern gaming surpass the traditional gamer 1.000 to 1. Your only hope is that Nintendo is willing to experiment in spin offs but once those fuckers find a 10+ million seller you can bet your ass the formula is gong to stay like that until the end of times.

Edit with even more unpopular opinion: the fist mistake of the saga was that Ocarina shit.
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Nah we are not alone on this. And I think that Zelda can still sell 10+ million even with more traditional gameplay. Games in general sell much more these days than 20-30 years ago.
 
Radical_3d said:
Unpopular opinion but I agree. We are alone on this one, tho. The hordes of open world zealots and everything must be modern gaming surpass the traditional gamer 1.000 to 1. Your only hope is that Nintendo is willing to experiment in spin offs but once those fuckers find a 10+ million seller you can bet your ass the formula is gong to stay like that until the end of times.
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Its more simple than that... its what I call content gamers.

Gamers that dont mind fighting the same hyrox over and over and over because its all just content. This one has a green eye so thats like exciting enough to keep going for content gamer.

Hand crafted, intricate level design and dungeons and thoughtful puzzles to test the player wont work with the modern content gamer. Much like Netflix they just want an abundance of choice even if 99% of those things suck.
 
Last time they used the old Zelda art direction was Hyrule Warriors Definitive and I feel at that point or rather specifically the original Hyrule Warriors was when Nintendo at large ended the old Zelda.

Skyward Sword for better or for worse was the last Classic Zelda.

BotW and by extension TotK rebooted it into a Fallout 3 esque Sandbox game and it doesn't feel the same.

Best topdown Zelda's were Minish Cap and A Link Between Worlds and 3D Zelda will always be the OoT/MM/TP holy trinity. Hasn't been the same since. While Echoes of Wisdom had good lore the game was centered around a lame gimmick with terrible menus and wanted you to play the game as Link half the time and not as Zelda which should of been all about being a Mage and using magic. Severe missed opportunity.

Until they go back to it's semi-linear pseudo-metroidvania world design I have little interest in future entries in the IP. I find that unlikely however as BotW has outsold several Nintendo IPs off of one game alone.
 
StueyDuck said:
Its more simple than that... its what I call content gamers.

Gamers that dont mind fighting the same hyrox over and over and over because its all just content. This one has a green eye so thats like exciting enough to keep going for content gamer.

Hand crafted, intricate level design and dungeons and thoughtful puzzles to test the player wont work with the modern content gamer. Much like Netflix they just want an abundance of choice even if 99% of those things suck.
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It's like Elden Ring vs Dark Souls 1.
 
Nah, I'd like to see them keep improving on BotW/TotK. I love the physics and open-ended design. I can't wait to see what they do next.

It's hard for me to fathom that anyone would rather play Skyward Sword. If there's one game in this series that's overrated it's that one, imo.

I wouldn't mind them keeping to the "classic" formula in the 2D titles going forward though. Best of both worlds.
Compromise Shrug GIF
 
Robb said:
Nah, I'd like to see them keep improving on BotW/TotK. I love the physics and open-ended design. I can't wait to see what they do next.

It's hard for me to fathom that anyone would rather play Skyward Sword. If there's one game in this series that's overrated it's that one, imo.

I wouldn't mind them keeping to the "classic" formula in the 2D titles going forward though. Best of both worlds.
Compromise Shrug GIF
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Skyward sword without the waggle controls is more fun than TotK imo. At least it had real dungeons.
 
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I'm in agreement. I don't think Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are bad games per se... I just don't like how they've changed up the Zelda formula/game-play.
(My YouTube Shorts keeps showing me things people have made in TotK... things that can kill a Lynel with ease.)

I've had a lot more fun with Echoes of Wisdom and the Switch version of Link's Awakening.... Hyrule Warriors is okay too.
 
I like pretty much every Zelda game. I think Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are beautiful and atmospheric and really fun to explore. At the same time, I do miss the dungeons of the older games, and I'd be fine with going back to that.

For me peak Zelda combat is Ocarina of Time btw. It's so precise, and once you get good at it, it's awesome, especially dueling versus Stalfos. Wind Waker and the later games were cool too in different ways, but their combat was a downgrade from Ocarina.
 
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BotW is great, TotK some mistakes were made, but it's still good.
I wouldn't mind if they made a 5th game in the BotW universe. I wanna explore south of the Gerudo desert and they could make a dark world too.
 
uncreativename said:
I like pretty much every Zelda game. I think Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are beautiful and atmospheric and really fun to explore. At the same time, I do miss the dungeons of the older games, and I'd be fine with going back to that.

For me peak Zelda combat is Ocarina of Time btw. It's so precise, and once you get good at it, it's awesome, especially dueling versus Stalfos. Wind Waker and the later games were cool too in different ways, but their combat was a downgrade from Ocarina.
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Hopefully the Zelda OoT remake rumor is true
 
SantaC said:
Hopefully the Zelda OoT remake rumor is true
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Will laugh if OoT just gets retooled into just being BotW3. Especially with how on the nose the story and lore overall in BotW/TotK is a retelling of OoT to begin with.
 
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SantaC said:
Hopefully the Zelda OoT remake rumor is true
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I'm not really a fan of remakes for games that are already pretty much perfect, so either they better make huge changes and basically turn it into a different game or keep it exactly the same except with new pretty graphics that 100% match the intent of the original artists. Usually I'd have 0 faith in a dev to do that, but I trust Nintendo to respect their own games I think.
 
I enjoyed BOTW for what it was, and TOTK was a genuinely good game... but I still miss "Zelda". Dungeons, tool based progression, big key, boss. We had a comfort food thread recently, and the classic Zelda formula is serious comfort food for me. I do hope Nintendo is brave enough to give us something a little less western open world, but my hopes are low because BOTW/TOTK sold so well.

They may just do a lot of remakes and push the series forward away from this formula. I'll still play the shit out of an OOT remake, but I want new games too.
 
Idk I really enjoyed them. I don't like the breakable weapons but they insist on having stuff to collect. I guess they think if there weren't breakable weapons there'd be very little to find and do.

They probably ran out of steam and ideas on the old formula. Cuz quite frankly Nintendo is kinda right. How do you make enough to do and keep things moving and fresh?

Unfortunately too many people are expecting a lifetime of fresh ideas with the old style gameplay which would eventually tank sales and bury the series entirely.

They can't just keep releasing OOT over and over and nothing else.
 
riko said:
I enjoyed BOTW for what it was, and TOTK was a genuinely good game... but I still miss "Zelda". Dungeons, tool based progression, big key, boss. We had a comfort food thread recently, and the classic Zelda formula is serious comfort food for me. I do hope Nintendo is brave enough to give us something a little less western open world, but my hopes are low because BOTW/TOTK sold so well.

They may just do a lot of remakes and push the series forward away from this formula. I'll still play the shit out of an OOT remake, but I want new games too.
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As I said earlier, I dont believe that Zelda sell just because of the current formula. Any game can sell really well these days as long as it is good.
 
Just "2d" zelda saga will be like that. Now it's a minecraft with awful combat.

Xenoblade saga is far bettet but...it's called xenoblade not mario or zelda.
 
yeah no thanks, people who say things like this are the same people who would have called the forumla repetitive and not innovative if Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom remainded the same as it used to be, it is a 40 year old series you have to accept that it is going to evolve eventually.
 
I don't want to go back to a static world and game systems that only works in places the devs want them to work. The systemic world and mechanics is what has grown on me since BotW, although I really disliked the game at first. However, one-solution-only puzzles (except where it makes sense) feel outdated to me when I come up with different solutions for a problem but non of them work because the devs haven't thought about that and/or didn't implement them as a solution.

If Zelda has to be a massive open world on the other hand is up for debate. Personally, I'd prefer a smaller world.

I don't need that lego-crafting either, but you can ignore it most of the time in TotK.

The weapon deterioration is what made exploration rewarding. In old Zelda games you'd find rupees you haven't much use for, heart containers that made an easy game even easier and ... that's kind of it. Skyward Sword was a step into a right direction regarding exploration with upgradeable equipment you needed resources for. But generally it rarely was a worthwhile reward to do side questing in Zelda. With degrading weapons and shields becoming a resource, they added something to the pool of rewards for exploration and side questing.

The alternative would have been a masterfully balanced equipment system that makes new items almost always viable, in which many ARPG fail. Once you have your equipment set, new items are often worse and their only benefit is to be sold or salvaged for money and resources you barely need because you already have everything you need. That means you'd need an intricate upgrading/crafting system you could use the resource surplus or money for. Newly found items have to be salvageable then or need to be constantly better than your current equipment so doing your side quests feel rewarding; it's always disappointing to explore thoroughly some dungeons or multi-stage quests and get an item that's worse than the thing you already got. So you either have to be on the exact path the devs want you to be so you get item progression through rewards or they need a scaling system when they don't know where you are, item-level-wise. Of course there doesn't have to be constant progress or upgrades but there needs to be a general trend. Ultimately it's a hero's journey and maybe even a power fantasy; we're playing one of the most famous heroes of Hyrule and not a beggar in a character study.

And tuning item progression is something many games fail at. BotW took the "easy" way in giving things value, making it worth something because it's not for infinity (mostly).

How fast and much items degrade is also up for debate and could need some (fine) tuning according to taste and gameplay flow. But the general idea is in context of that specific game not inherently bad. It wouldn't work well in a Doom game, for instance, which uses ammo (that needs to be somewhat managed) as a resource to use your weapons.
 
Hadoukens said:
How do you make enough to do and keep things moving and fresh?
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-Removing Rocketshield and Flurry Rush would be a good start
-Decent world building also a thing to try
-Maybe make a game that ISN'T in Hyrule
-Make Handcrafted Dungeons instead of recycling the same tileset
-Upgrades and gear found in Dungeons or the World instead of 100+ instanced shrines
-Variety of quests that breathe life into the world
-Remove durability or have quest chains that would reward you with unbreakable weapons
-Better menu UI
-Better scenario writers
 
GymWolf said:
Not the right topic and it would be probably a waste of time on my part if you cant see them by yourself.
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Dude, I legit want to know what you consider to be flaws. I certainly would prefer they go back to the dungeon style of Ocarina, Wind Waker and Twilight.

For me the flaws of the games was that they were too bloated. I absolutely hated weapon durability. Hated it so much.
 
SantaC said:
I hope I am not the only one, but Tears of the Kingdom kinda soured me. For me it is not Zelda when you are builiding lego things. It's a physics-based construction simulator and I never asked for that. And also, who thought that weapon degradation is a good idea? Has it ever been fun in a game? I know they tried to fix it in TotK, but the constant need to open your menu and fuse a monster horn to a base weapon because your current sword broke after hitting three enemies is just a chore. The UI and resource management is not good , and I have to gather materials in order to have battery life for my constructions lol.

I liked Breath of the wild and have no problems that they experimentet with it, but sadly the dialed up all the wrong things in the sequel to it. I cannot fanthom how Tears of the Kingdom sits at 96 metacritic. I rather play Skyward sword again over it.
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Man, I've been replaying Twilight Princess on the PC port, and as much as I like the dungeons of the game, It really sheds a light on how flat and boring the old 3D overworld/Hyrule Field used to be.

I thought I wanted Zelda to go back to this design, but no, I would rather them add traditional dungeons to the new style than go back to the old style. I do like the classic items, but they need to be integrated into the combat flow a lot better.
 
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Jinzo Prime said:
Man, I've been replaying Twilight Princess on the PC port, and as much as I lije the dungeons of the game, It really sheds a light on how flat and boring the old 3D overworld/Hyrule Field used to be.

I thought I wanted Zelda to go back to this design, but no, I would rather them add traditional dungeons to the new style than go back to the old style. I do like the traditional items, but they need to be integrated into the combat flow a lot better.
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I mean, you can still make improvement to the old forumula without it being a lego construction simulator.
 
MagiusNecros said:
-Removing Rocketshield and Flurry Rush would be a good start
-Decent world building also a thing to try
-Maybe make a game that ISN'T in Hyrule
-Make Handcrafted Dungeons instead of recycling the same tileset
-Upgrades and gear found in Dungeons or the World instead of 100+ instanced shrines
-Variety of quests that breathe life into the world
-Remove durability or have quest chains that would reward you with unbreakable weapons
-Better menu UI
-Better scenario writers
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I agree with a few of those but not all of it.

I liked the shrines and the puzzles involved with those in both games. Like i said I think they ran out of ideas.

How many times have they had hookshot and whatever else for mobility and puzzles?

Quests are good. Handcrafted dungeons are cool: they had a couple in both games fwiw just I guess not enough for your tastes which is fair.

I'm down with unbreakable weapons but then you'd need something else to collect besides various types of currency.

There were plenty of armor pieces around both games maps.

Better writers is fine too but the draw is the gameplay anyway. The writing wasn't perfect for totk but the basic stories were fine.

A few quests written like Witcher 3 but for a younger age group would be a plus too.

On the whole I'm in agreement just I wonder if the end product would have enough meat on its bones.
 
I decided after some hours of trying to play ToTK that the game was designed in a way that it doesn't actually want me to play it. I was rushing past enemies to keep my weapons from breaking just to finish the game. I wasn't interested in building things. The one thing I did enjoy was building supports for the halfwit holding the signs, until, I discovered building V shape supports would hold almost every sign… I finally just turned it off.
 
While i enjoyed both of those games, I never finished totk. I hope they drop the full on open world and go back to something more contained.
 
The TotK shit talking is getting tired. Sure the game was flawed but it was still an absolutely phenomenal action-adventure game and the idea Skyward Sword was somehow a better Zelda experience is a joke.

I don't even disagree that they should change a lot of things for the next mainline entry (I'll be very disappointed if we still get the four main powers during the mandatory tutorial and there's memories based narration and shrines) but I don't think the people who endlessly cry about the new formula will ever be satisfied because we already got a mainline Zelda entry that fixed a lot of the issues people have with the BotW formula and yet it's as if the game didn't exist.
 
ahtlas7 said:
I decided after some hours of trying to play ToTK that the game was designed in a way that it doesn't actually want me to play it. I was rushing past enemies to keep my weapons from breaking just to finish the game. I wasn't interested in building things. The one thing I did enjoy was building supports for the halfwit holding the signs, until, I discovered building V shape supports would hold almost every sign… I finally just turned it off.
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I was the same... and the reason those support beam side quests were fun was because there was a modicum of puzzle design. The devs were creating a scenario for the player and testing them

I much prefer when games intelligently design tests for me to overcome instead of throwing 5 toys in the ground and saying "use your imagination" then setting up some simplistic blocks around so you arent completely bored to tears.

I respect parts of breath of the wild, if it was called something else I can see it as a great game. But TotK just was so bland, its the only zelda game in my entire ~30 years of plahing Zelda that I never finished, I literally cant tell you how it ends or what the final fight is.
 
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