9 ms·

I've had so much fun with this game. The game design is on a whole other level. The fact I can take a regular arrow, walk up to a campfire, light the arrow on

by dimgl 10y ago

I've had so much fun with this game. The game design is on a whole other level. The fact I can take a regular arrow, walk up to a campfire, light the arrow on fire, shoot the ground and light THAT on fire, create an updraft and ride it with the paraglider and then swing my hammer downwards to kill everything around me is incredible. Quite possibly one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had.

jay-saint 10y ago
Agreed absolutely every element of this game is fun. They struck the perfect balance between ease of entry and play and a massive and complex world. They avoided pitfalls of many other RPG games that add complexity at the cost of fun. They also learned to not completely hold your hand as many other Nintendo titles have in the past.
- Pulcinella 10y ago
  They also avoided the pitfall of open world at the cost of bugginess. Not to name names, but many open world games, especially on consoles, have been pretty buggy.
  - Rapzid 10y ago
    They did something amazing that at least I had never heard of in the game industry. In one of their making-of videos released today they said that every so often everybody would take a week break(at the same time) to play the game. This served as a check-in of sorts to see what everyone else was working on and to get company-wide exposure and feedback on each other's work. It shows. I played the entire game through use sleep mode on the switch between sessions. Not a single game breaking or fun breaking bug. The consistency throughout is phenomenal... Well, the people work on Death Mountain killed it; looks better than the other areas IMHO.
    - Agentlien 10y ago
      I also saw the GDC video where they talked about this and it really resonated with me. Where I work we are constantly reminded to spend time just playing the game and the whole studio (120+ people) regularly gather in the main meeting area, watching as someone plays through a mission. What was mentioned in this video, however, is on a whole different level and it sounds amazing.
      - Rapzid 10y ago
        I got the impression from the making-ofs that they jumped into the deep end as far as innovation. Not just from a gameplay and design perspective, but from a process and company culture perspective as well. I get the sense that a lot of process was cultural and stagnant. However, when the opportunity arose to throw more change after good they jumped on it and made some very interesting progress. I can't help but get a strong impression that the experience of developing BOTW has had a transformative effect on Nintendo. I'm also getting those vibes from the Switch and double-down strategy on indie devs and turn-key game engines; if not already certainly over the life cycle of the system. This particular process seems to have arisen from Nintendo's need to control quality. We've seen this in effect before with many games, but Metroid Prime and Retro Studios comes to mind. With a Warren Buffett like eye for potential Nintendo pulled on Retro to make Prime, and through sure will for quality helped guide their efforts and the final product into the amazeballs results of Metroid Prime. That need for uncompromising quality control, coupled with the challenges of a MASSIVE game(certainly more massive than anything they have undertaken) led them to try out this process that comes with obvious financial downsides. In the end, they are rightly satisfied with the results. Inspiring.
- cgriswald 10y ago
  I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the relative lack of a tutorial and 'front story'. I've gotten games and then sat on them for months because I knew I'd need a good 45 minutes to even start playing the game and just never had the time or patience. This game was just such a great "pick up and play" experience; and it let's you learn a lot of stuff on your own. The puzzles are amazing because they feel very natural. The game doesn't go out of its way to prevent you from "cheating" or solving the puzzle however you like. But it also doesn't feel like it was intended for there to be more than one solution. The intended solution is usually clear after the fact (even if you've solved it some other way); and it seems like the solution, but any other solution is also accepted. It feels as if I've really stumbled across this puzzle, and even if I can't figure it out, I can figure SOMETHING out, and that's alright.
  - flgr 10y ago
    And yet they kinda manage to still teach you things carefully. It feels like in the past they were afraid of making things to subtle, but if you look at the game with an eye of game design (just create a second user on the Switch and restart it from scratch) it's surprising how they still manage to steer you. The whole plateau is a tutorial, but it doesn't jump into your face as much. And then there's that one annoying motion controlled puzzle with a way to bypass it that a bunch of journalists mentioned in their reviews, and it's as if it was designed with that trick in mind. So that journalists discover it and write about how this game is different. Which is interesting. Almost like they thought of how to communicate that this game is different and how to best let people notice, and then they came up with that.
    - cgriswald 10y ago
      Agreed. You can definitely feel the 'steering' if you're looking out for it, and there are points later in the game where events happen and it gets a little hand-holdy. But compared to games where a character accosts you immediately, tells you exactly what button to press, then tells you exactly which button to press next, ad naseum (and usually tells me so much I don't retain any of it), it feels like it's not even there. I think the motion control puzzle was a flub, though. The motion controls sucked. I ended up doing it the "right" way, but at no time did it feel like what I was doing to the controller and what was happening on the screen was correct; but I love that it's possible to find other ways.
- on_and_off 10y ago
  >They also learned to not completely hold your hand as many other Nintendo titles have in the past. Except for some crucial passages in the game where it suddenly REALLY wants to hold your hand. I am still loving the game but I would to see it stop shouting at me to shoot an arrow on the big glowing parts of [redacted]. I would have much prefered to figure that on my own.
  - audunw 10y ago
    I felt that this kind of instruction was more related to story than to gameplay. Story-wise it wouldn't make sense that you're not told what to do there. That's kind of a theme for all the "boss" battles.. there's another character who knows more about the boss than you do. It also gives sense that the battle is more of a collaboration rather than you just figuring out some way to kill it. I don't think they were worried about people not figuring out what to do. In other parts of the battles you have to figure out much harder stuff for yourself.
    - on_and_off 10y ago
      Maybe. I guess that the main problem I had with this is that the French dialogs and dubs are awful. Sadly the switch does not let you choose the language of a game the same way that most desktop games do. The scenario and characterization are not great, but with bad translations and voice acting, it weakens these moments a lot.
      - idle_zealot 10y ago
        I can confirm that the English dubs are pretty bad too.
        eisrep 10y ago
        Yeah, the voices I can live with. But the delivery and emotion (or lack thereof) are really disappointing.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
flgr 10y ago
It's super interesting that Nintendo seems to have down the elements of game design really well that actually make a game fun. Compare that to other games such as Pokemon Go or No Man's Sky, which feel like the designers might have forgotten to add the core game itself. It's also interesting to compare to Witcher 3, which is another great game (but via different means IMHO). I'm surprised by how much Nintendo nailed this (what features to invest time into to make a game fun). Seems like they might be ahead of others there. And that makes me wish that that part of game design was better understood.
- city41 10y ago
  Shigero Miyamoto has been overseeing Nintendo's games for 37 years now. If you read any interviews or histories on Nintendo, Miyamoto providing feedback on a game to make it fun and engaging is very common. Combine his vast experience with the fact he's a genius when it comes to gameplay, and he's tough for other companies to beat.
  - flgr 10y ago
    I guess what surprises me is that we haven't written down mechanics or principles that will make a game fun instead of just addictive. (There seem to be many well established dark patterns for getting people to spend money on freemium games, but I haven't seen much about what makes a video game more fun.)
    - marrone12 10y ago
      You can't encapsulate fun to a series of algorithms. The brilliance of the Breath of the Wild is in it's imagination. When a game truly feels like magic, it needs someone to inspire it.
    - Negitivefrags 10y ago
      There are numerous attempts at theories of fun out there, but none of them really let you look at a design and know if something will be fun without trying it. They don't even really give you much of any concrete guidance on how you might change a design to make it more fun if it isn't currently. The best attempts at this tend to be along the lines of looking at certain player profiles and trying to imagine what about your design appeals to those who enjoy that profile. It's possible that this isn't something we can easily quantify. If I asked you to write a book about what makes music good, would you be able to do that?
jghn 10y ago
I've always loved sandboxy style open world games, stretching back over 20 years now. As time passed my ability to find time to play these sorts of games has drastically waned. I'd pick something up but it'd take so long to figure out how to make it work that I'd just stop playing. You're spot on. What I love about this game is capture by what you wrote but also that it turns out to be pretty easy to get into. I'll likely never beat the thing, but there's so much cool stuff that my natural explorer tendencies are already coming out. "I wonder if I can do this?" generally winds up being answered with "yes"
joshmn 10y ago
Have you attached those little balloony-things to a bomb and sent that down to some moblins yet? Or dropped a leaf on purpose so a moblin uses it as a weapon?
Pigo 10y ago
Just out of curiosity, have you experienced any of these problems I keep hearing so much about? The videos from launch have led me to think everyone has scratched their screen and the system barely runs Zelda.
- vintagedave 10y ago
  I'm astonished at how much people are mentioning apparent problems, given how great the game is. I run it with the console both plugged in and handheld. On a TV, I have seen stutters a few (ten?) times in twice as many hours of gameplay. Even then they weren't very bad. My screen is not scratched. I have no dead pixels. The game is the best I have ever played. It is absolutely incredible. My personal opinion? Bad news sells better than good news; a glowing review is never going to be as "good" (widely shared, viral, etc) a review as one selling problems. (And for websites and Youtube, it is selling: selling their channel).
- Belphemur 10y ago
  As an owner of the switch and the game. Nope not any issue you read online. No problem with the joy con, no performance problem (either handheld or TV). No dead pixels. I bought the carrying box for it, then no scratch on the screen. Battery life is good when used in transport (forget about road trips of more than 3-4h). The game slow a little down when there is a huge amount of grass, but it doesn't impede the gaming experience. All in all, I'm really happy with my purchase and I don't get how so many people have so many issues with it.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  The game does have performance issues. Anyone telling you they aren't there is either in love with the game (and not seeing it) or is only used to low framerate games It's not an issue undocked (because it runs at 720) and the game looks fantastic. If you play docked, though, there's lots of performance stutters - look at a certain area, attack a specific enemy and framerate drops to sub-30 and it might stay that way for a few seconds. That being said, it's a good enough game that you can ignore it and even forget about it, but it's always there. It's my only real issue with the game.

by dimgl 10y ago

jay-saint 10y ago

Agreed absolutely every element of this game is fun. They struck the perfect balance between ease of entry and play and a massive and complex world. They avoided pitfalls of many other RPG games that add complexity at the cost of fun. They also learned to not completely hold your hand as many other Nintendo titles have in the past.

Pulcinella 10y ago
They also avoided the pitfall of open world at the cost of bugginess. Not to name names, but many open world games, especially on consoles, have been pretty buggy.
- Rapzid 10y ago
  They did something amazing that at least I had never heard of in the game industry. In one of their making-of videos released today they said that every so often everybody would take a week break(at the same time) to play the game. This served as a check-in of sorts to see what everyone else was working on and to get company-wide exposure and feedback on each other's work. It shows. I played the entire game through use sleep mode on the switch between sessions. Not a single game breaking or fun breaking bug. The consistency throughout is phenomenal... Well, the people work on Death Mountain killed it; looks better than the other areas IMHO.
  - Agentlien 10y ago
    I also saw the GDC video where they talked about this and it really resonated with me. Where I work we are constantly reminded to spend time just playing the game and the whole studio (120+ people) regularly gather in the main meeting area, watching as someone plays through a mission. What was mentioned in this video, however, is on a whole different level and it sounds amazing.
    - Rapzid 10y ago
      I got the impression from the making-ofs that they jumped into the deep end as far as innovation. Not just from a gameplay and design perspective, but from a process and company culture perspective as well. I get the sense that a lot of process was cultural and stagnant. However, when the opportunity arose to throw more change after good they jumped on it and made some very interesting progress. I can't help but get a strong impression that the experience of developing BOTW has had a transformative effect on Nintendo. I'm also getting those vibes from the Switch and double-down strategy on indie devs and turn-key game engines; if not already certainly over the life cycle of the system. This particular process seems to have arisen from Nintendo's need to control quality. We've seen this in effect before with many games, but Metroid Prime and Retro Studios comes to mind. With a Warren Buffett like eye for potential Nintendo pulled on Retro to make Prime, and through sure will for quality helped guide their efforts and the final product into the amazeballs results of Metroid Prime. That need for uncompromising quality control, coupled with the challenges of a MASSIVE game(certainly more massive than anything they have undertaken) led them to try out this process that comes with obvious financial downsides. In the end, they are rightly satisfied with the results. Inspiring.
cgriswald 10y ago
I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the relative lack of a tutorial and 'front story'. I've gotten games and then sat on them for months because I knew I'd need a good 45 minutes to even start playing the game and just never had the time or patience. This game was just such a great "pick up and play" experience; and it let's you learn a lot of stuff on your own. The puzzles are amazing because they feel very natural. The game doesn't go out of its way to prevent you from "cheating" or solving the puzzle however you like. But it also doesn't feel like it was intended for there to be more than one solution. The intended solution is usually clear after the fact (even if you've solved it some other way); and it seems like the solution, but any other solution is also accepted. It feels as if I've really stumbled across this puzzle, and even if I can't figure it out, I can figure SOMETHING out, and that's alright.
- flgr 10y ago
  And yet they kinda manage to still teach you things carefully. It feels like in the past they were afraid of making things to subtle, but if you look at the game with an eye of game design (just create a second user on the Switch and restart it from scratch) it's surprising how they still manage to steer you. The whole plateau is a tutorial, but it doesn't jump into your face as much. And then there's that one annoying motion controlled puzzle with a way to bypass it that a bunch of journalists mentioned in their reviews, and it's as if it was designed with that trick in mind. So that journalists discover it and write about how this game is different. Which is interesting. Almost like they thought of how to communicate that this game is different and how to best let people notice, and then they came up with that.
  - cgriswald 10y ago
    Agreed. You can definitely feel the 'steering' if you're looking out for it, and there are points later in the game where events happen and it gets a little hand-holdy. But compared to games where a character accosts you immediately, tells you exactly what button to press, then tells you exactly which button to press next, ad naseum (and usually tells me so much I don't retain any of it), it feels like it's not even there. I think the motion control puzzle was a flub, though. The motion controls sucked. I ended up doing it the "right" way, but at no time did it feel like what I was doing to the controller and what was happening on the screen was correct; but I love that it's possible to find other ways.
on_and_off 10y ago
>They also learned to not completely hold your hand as many other Nintendo titles have in the past. Except for some crucial passages in the game where it suddenly REALLY wants to hold your hand. I am still loving the game but I would to see it stop shouting at me to shoot an arrow on the big glowing parts of [redacted]. I would have much prefered to figure that on my own.
- audunw 10y ago
  I felt that this kind of instruction was more related to story than to gameplay. Story-wise it wouldn't make sense that you're not told what to do there. That's kind of a theme for all the "boss" battles.. there's another character who knows more about the boss than you do. It also gives sense that the battle is more of a collaboration rather than you just figuring out some way to kill it. I don't think they were worried about people not figuring out what to do. In other parts of the battles you have to figure out much harder stuff for yourself.
  - on_and_off 10y ago
    Maybe. I guess that the main problem I had with this is that the French dialogs and dubs are awful. Sadly the switch does not let you choose the language of a game the same way that most desktop games do. The scenario and characterization are not great, but with bad translations and voice acting, it weakens these moments a lot.
    - idle_zealot 10y ago
      I can confirm that the English dubs are pretty bad too.
      - eisrep 10y ago
        Yeah, the voices I can live with. But the delivery and emotion (or lack thereof) are really disappointing.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

flgr 10y ago

It's super interesting that Nintendo seems to have down the elements of game design really well that actually make a game fun. Compare that to other games such as Pokemon Go or No Man's Sky, which feel like the designers might have forgotten to add the core game itself. It's also interesting to compare to Witcher 3, which is another great game (but via different means IMHO). I'm surprised by how much Nintendo nailed this (what features to invest time into to make a game fun). Seems like they might be ahead of others there. And that makes me wish that that part of game design was better understood.

city41 10y ago
Shigero Miyamoto has been overseeing Nintendo's games for 37 years now. If you read any interviews or histories on Nintendo, Miyamoto providing feedback on a game to make it fun and engaging is very common. Combine his vast experience with the fact he's a genius when it comes to gameplay, and he's tough for other companies to beat.
- flgr 10y ago
  I guess what surprises me is that we haven't written down mechanics or principles that will make a game fun instead of just addictive. (There seem to be many well established dark patterns for getting people to spend money on freemium games, but I haven't seen much about what makes a video game more fun.)
  - marrone12 10y ago
    You can't encapsulate fun to a series of algorithms. The brilliance of the Breath of the Wild is in it's imagination. When a game truly feels like magic, it needs someone to inspire it.
  - Negitivefrags 10y ago
    There are numerous attempts at theories of fun out there, but none of them really let you look at a design and know if something will be fun without trying it. They don't even really give you much of any concrete guidance on how you might change a design to make it more fun if it isn't currently. The best attempts at this tend to be along the lines of looking at certain player profiles and trying to imagine what about your design appeals to those who enjoy that profile. It's possible that this isn't something we can easily quantify. If I asked you to write a book about what makes music good, would you be able to do that?

jghn 10y ago

I've always loved sandboxy style open world games, stretching back over 20 years now. As time passed my ability to find time to play these sorts of games has drastically waned. I'd pick something up but it'd take so long to figure out how to make it work that I'd just stop playing. You're spot on. What I love about this game is capture by what you wrote but also that it turns out to be pretty easy to get into. I'll likely never beat the thing, but there's so much cool stuff that my natural explorer tendencies are already coming out. "I wonder if I can do this?" generally winds up being answered with "yes"

joshmn 10y ago

Have you attached those little balloony-things to a bomb and sent that down to some moblins yet? Or dropped a leaf on purpose so a moblin uses it as a weapon?

Pigo 10y ago

Just out of curiosity, have you experienced any of these problems I keep hearing so much about? The videos from launch have led me to think everyone has scratched their screen and the system barely runs Zelda.

vintagedave 10y ago
I'm astonished at how much people are mentioning apparent problems, given how great the game is. I run it with the console both plugged in and handheld. On a TV, I have seen stutters a few (ten?) times in twice as many hours of gameplay. Even then they weren't very bad. My screen is not scratched. I have no dead pixels. The game is the best I have ever played. It is absolutely incredible. My personal opinion? Bad news sells better than good news; a glowing review is never going to be as "good" (widely shared, viral, etc) a review as one selling problems. (And for websites and Youtube, it is selling: selling their channel).
Belphemur 10y ago
As an owner of the switch and the game. Nope not any issue you read online. No problem with the joy con, no performance problem (either handheld or TV). No dead pixels. I bought the carrying box for it, then no scratch on the screen. Battery life is good when used in transport (forget about road trips of more than 3-4h). The game slow a little down when there is a huge amount of grass, but it doesn't impede the gaming experience. All in all, I'm really happy with my purchase and I don't get how so many people have so many issues with it.
aaron-lebo 10y ago
The game does have performance issues. Anyone telling you they aren't there is either in love with the game (and not seeing it) or is only used to low framerate games It's not an issue undocked (because it runs at 720) and the game looks fantastic. If you play docked, though, there's lots of performance stutters - look at a certain area, attack a specific enemy and framerate drops to sub-30 and it might stay that way for a few seconds. That being said, it's a good enough game that you can ignore it and even forget about it, but it's always there. It's my only real issue with the game.