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Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days
- 29athrowaway 3y agoIt has to be a good game because "software sells hardware". Without good 1st party games from Nintendo, the consoles would not sell.
- epmaybe 3y agoNote this strategy is mainly only being executed by Nintendo, who insists on selling their hardware at a profit. I still suspect they are making more money on their software though. I believe Microsoft And Sony lose money per console sold
- tstrimple 3y agoI thought they only lost money per console early in the builds, but as the production ramps up efficiencies are realized and the consoles themselves become profitable. Are they really sold at a loss throughout the product lifecycle?
- FumblingBear 3y agoI've heard that the turning point on the hardware profitability tends to occur around the halfway point of a given generation, but haven't seen anything to really substantiate that—just echoing what I've seen in past discussions.
- asdajksah2123 3y agoI think MS might have been losing money throughout the lifecycle of the device. I'm pretty sure that was true for at least one of their console generations. Sony has always made money on a per console basis after the first year or years. The PS3, I believe, was exceptional in how long it took Sony to start making money off the device, which might have been largely due to the high cost of including the Blu Ray player.
- nikanj 3y agoI would agree with you if didn't only include Nintendo. Without good games, the consoles would not sell. But how is that insightful? Of course people buy game consoles for the games.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoYes but most people buy a Nintendo console to play their 1st party games or console exclusive games. That is Mario, Metroid, Zelda, Pokemon, etc. If you could play them on PC or Android very few consoles would be sold.
- veryfancy 3y ago...and it's actually very good.
- candiddevmike 3y agoIs it? It plays like a clone of the first game without a lot of meaningful improvements over the criticisms of the first. Weapons still break, the story still sucks, the dungeons aren't dungeons... It plays more like Minecraft. I grew up on SNES and N64 Zelda, so admittedly I'm biased towards the old gameplay loop and mechanics.
- aezart 3y agoYeah, from the trailers and footage I've seen on Twitter this doesn't seem like the game for me. I want a dungeon crawler, not a physics sandbox. Also I want Link to be left handed again.
- ErneX 3y agoI’m liking this one more than BOTW.
- veryfancy 3y agoLink to the Past was my Zelda, too. But BotW surpassed it for me, and TotK so far has been "more BotW". I guess I could imagine being disappointed by that, but so far the prevailing feeling is delight. And a wish that I had more time in my schedule to play.
- FunHearing3443 3y agoYes, it's amazing. The story is better, the dungeons are better, and the weapon durability is further reduced in impact due to continually finding new weapon attachments on enemies. And you are listing pretty much the lower priority parts of the game - the exploration, density of content, core mechanics, innovation, insane freedom, variety of content, is absolute magic. It definitely plays like BOTW so you may not like it if you didn't like BOTW, but to say it doesn't have a lot of meaningful improvements is simply inaccurate.
- 3y ago
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoI wonder what the physical/digital breakdown is.
- hospitalJail 3y agoThe marketing was insane as usual. Nintendo performed excellent. Multiple front page reddit posts, multiple 10/10 reviews from big name outlets. Nintendo rivals Apple as the best company in marketing. Nintendo has done some sort of mass psychology that allows them to have sub 30fps with no complaints, I was born too early to see this reviewed in business schools, but we are starting to see a bit of the innerworkings of how Nintendo has created IP that is worshiped.
- nindalf 3y agoDiscussion from 6 days ago with 652 points, 753 comments: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35912318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35912318).
- arnaudsm 3y agoIt is impressive that a game running on an 8-year-old phone GPU will likely be game of the year. Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything.
- lostmsu 3y agoGTA 5 sold 11.1M copies on the first day. I think you are jumping to conclusions.
- Dudester230518 3y agoMinecraft's formula of poor graphics + open-ended gameplay wins again.
- maxerickson 3y agoIs "poor" the right description for the graphics? Like I get that they aren't anywhere close to as detailed or sophisticated as the graphics available in other games, but they appear to facilitate gameplay quite well. Like "poor" has a connotation of "bad", where in this game they just weren't a focus and clearly are good enough to not be distracting, at least in the videos I've seen.
- Dudester230518 3y agoThat graphics would not look out of place in a 2013 indie game from a well-established but not rich studio. It would have not been ground-breaking in 2003, but would grab some attention for sure. I bet they will use same level of graphics in 2033, maybe with some AI tricks slapped on top if they manage to get cheap hardware for that.
- tm-guimaraes 3y ago> That graphics would not look out of place in a 2013 indie game from a well-established but not rich studio. Sure. The WiiU was around in that year, BotW ran on it. Indie games for powerful platforms could definitely have better grafics. > It would have not been ground-breaking in 2003 This is biggest bullshit I've heard. This is Xbox/GC/PS2 era. Not only there weren't any games with 720p or 900p resolution on those consoles, PC capable of those were very rare. Games were still very cubish. Even games like FF that spend most of their budget on visuals and were not very interactive were just so bad in comparision. You don't really know how expansive it is to have small details like hair, light small objects and things like that rendered. Also add all the particles the game generates for all its possibilities. go to a top 2003 game list, and you will notice that there is nothing that comes close visually, specially with these resolutions, moving interactable objects, etc. None of them would require one tenth of the processing power a game like TotK. BotW and TotK push the swith to its max potential. Obviously that is nothing compared to what can be done today, the switch is based on a nvidia shield which is a SoC for a portable for 2015, obviously it is not very powerful. But that doesn't mean that the game doesn't have a lot of effort to make it able to run on such a system. Sure the Switch can handle 1080p, there are nintendo games with 1080p 60fps on both switch and wiiu, and nowadays PC games aim to 4k and 120fps, but this is a Switch, and this is a beatfiful game with a level of interaction not easily seen, this is much harder to make than a lot of 4k/120fps games on PC. Well, not TotK in particular as that's BotW 2.0, but BotW is out of the ordinary, expanding is still not an easy thing.
- timeimp 3y agoFor those out of the loop: think Garrys Mod (GMod) meets the Zelda series and yes, it was made by Nintendo themselves. The entire game is a fantastic example of well-designed map, gameplay, storyline / plot advancement, AND sandboxing all in one. Incredible to think that its also running on seven year old hardware. The emulation videos of the game running at 4K 60FPS on YouTube are astounding to watch.
- udkl 3y agoFor those not in the nintendo ecosystem, 'Immortals Fenyx rising' is a Zelda esque game to try. It's on game pass and is the best game ubisoft has made in some time.
- eru 3y agoEven seven years ago the hardware was already quite underpowered, and only really made sense because it's a hybrid console. Yes, the game looks good. They also seem to have fixed some issues compared to BotW, eg the pop-in of objects isn't as jarring.
- alexjplant 3y ago> pop-in of objects isn't as jarring. I don't play modern games and am hardly a connoisseur but I seem to recall this being a mostly-solved problem via "level of detail" and hardware fog effects... has pop-in been an issue in the last decade? Saturn/PS1 games having it was par for the course but modern hardware is so powerful that it seems unnecessary.
- eru 3y agoBotW had (and still has) quite bad pop-in. They use level-of-detail tricks for the actual landscape, but the objects (like flowers etc) still pop in abruptly.
- htag 3y agoPop-in essentially exists because the draw distance is too low. As the player get's closer to an object, it is more likely to be drawn, and the level of detail it is drawn at is higher. While it's not Saturn/PS1 levels in modern games, in very large and very open maps you can have this problem where you know in the distance there can be things that you simply cannot see because of draw distance. If your running towards something in the distance, there can be noticeable 'step-ups' as it decides to draw the model with more and more details. So it comes up in exploring very large and very open areas. This happens to various degrees even on PS5+ level hardware. There's a similar issues with movement speed, but instead the limit is how quickly can the game load new content.
- Farbklex 3y agoAfaik this is the first time that the second installment of a Zelda game per generation is better than the first one. Zelda 1 is considered to be better than 2. Ocarina of Time > Majora's Mask. Twilight Princess > Skyward Sword. Pretty darn good.
- whateveracct 3y agoI think many people consider Majora to be better.
- 10729287 3y agoIt's a very recent thing, from players liking to go against the grain for the sake of it. No one would have assumed that in the 64 era. In fact Majora was pretty unloved, which lead to the "for those who knows" phenomena about it.
- hydrok9 3y agoI always thought MM was better
- Twisol 3y agoThis seems pretty revisionist. I loved Majora to bits as a child, and I don't recall this being a contrarian opinion whatsoever on the Zelda Universe forums at the time. Maybe there's a difference between critical and popular reception at play here?
- edgyquant 3y agoThis is definitely not the case. If anything the opposite is true, when MM was released those who played through it found it to be a better game and only with time have people (myself included) come to think of it as worse than OOT.
- Twisol 3y agoI think a fair number of people, including myself, consider MM > OoT. They are very different games, but MM excels in areas that OoT doesn't. You're right that this inversion is rare though. I think Phantom Hourglass is a great sequel to Wind Waker, but I can't reasonably claim it's better. (And Spirit Tracks was not better than Phantom Hourglass.)
- jameshart 3y agoThere are over 118 million Switches out there. So they hit nearly 10% of their total addressable market in three days.
- wccrawford 3y agoAnd it was pirated 12 days before release.
- toyg 3y agoVery few Switches can play pirated games though. Most people don't bother with emulation.
- ganoushoreilly 3y agoI ordered the standard and just before launch they optioned a collectors edition. I ordered that at two spots in the off chance it didn't come. So now I'm sitting with three copies. I know a few people in this boat. Still bodes well for the number of copies moved.
- joseda-hg 3y agoThat's if you think every single switch sold in the last 8 years still works, which, specially for a mobile console doesn't seem too sensible
- furyofantares 3y agoHm. I've got 4 switches in my household, only multiplayer games are purchased on multiple though.
- jugg1es 3y agoAchieving (what feels like) true gaming freedom with such a simple UX is really impressive. I know Zelda has always had a great UX, but they've added so much complexity. Games like this remind you why Nintendo has had so much staying power.
- donatj 3y agoThey even somehow managed to simplify the UI vs BOTW and made it genuinely easier to use.
- vsareto 3y agoThe only potentially bad UX is attaching things to arrows or choosing what item to throw. Using the sorting options helps, but you still end up doing a lot of scrolling through a list during combat which takes you out of fun of combat. They might've gone with a grid display, but with the amount of items they have, they're inevitably going to have some UI sprawl, so it's a hard problem.
- Madmallard 3y ago[flagged]
- whateveracct 3y agoDoes it? I've been playing quite a bit and the framerate feels steady and I also have not been bothered by the fps even when the game is in fast motion. And I'm a longtime Melee player so I have eyes used to 60fps and am usually bothered by poor framerate in games.
- whalesalad 3y agoIt’s capped at 30 and regularly drops to 20. Terrible indeed.
- ErneX 3y agoIt doesn’t affect me gameplay wise, the game is pretty good.
- whateveracct 3y agoHonestly, it's made me question my hardline 60fps stance.
- alexchro93 3y agoGenerally curious, but how do you (and everyone else) know when the game drops to a certain framerate, and how do you know exactly what framerate it's running at? Are you actually measuring it somehow, or do you just "feel" it?
- datpiff 3y agoI don't think it's a huge deal but there is a ton of footage of youtube that does frame-by-frame analysis and "30fps dropping to 20fps" seems very accurate.
- 3y ago
- jiveturkey42 3y agoGentle reminder that the main target market is children first, techie adults second.
- Dudester230518 3y agoAre you sure about that? I mean, boomers may have stolen all the wealth, but aren't 20-30 adolescents still the primary market for any AAA game?
- robertlagrant 3y ago> boomers may have stolen all the wealth I think this is unacceptable. I know it feels acceptable, but I think it's not.
- raphaelj 3y agoBoomers own a bigger share of the wealth than people the same age 20y+ ago: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charting-the-growing-generational-wealth-gap/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charting-the-growing-genera...
- robertlagrant 3y agoThat isn't "all the wealth"; nor is it "stealing".
- bigbillheck 3y agoSince when are 20-30yos adolescent?
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoI think the general consensus will end up giving this game a solid 8.5/10 (user consensus of course, not journali$t consensus. You can already see that in the user score on metascore.) Someone mentioned online "which part of this game constitues giving it a 10/10?" and I totally agree having been playing since the leaks. This is coming from an OG OOT 1998 player too. Happy Zelda is back, but still think they could have done more with this one or at least innovate more. Worst is the Switch hardware making this unplayable until emulation catches up. How on earth did a game that looks and runs like how TOTK not get dinged EVEN A TINY BIT for graphics and performance? I'm not a graphics whore by any means, but there's a limit here.
- raphaelj 3y agoStrange, I personally find it very enjoyable on the switch. Could be better obviously but I really like the art style and the gameplay is way more fluid than almost any other AAA games running at 60FPS on my PC.
- w0m 3y ago> way more fluid we all have our blinders.
- mrguyorama 3y ago"Gameplay is more fluid" =/= "game has fluid fps"
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoI've seen Switch Gifs when the game is under stress and they don't look too fluid. I'm talking with giant contraptions flying in the sky and all that.
- Jochim 3y agoIt lags every time I open ultrahand.
- 3y ago
- ErneX 3y agoIt’s an incredible achievement. Nintendo 1st party games have crazy attach rates, way more than the other consoles. Mario Kart 8 has sold over 50 million copies for example.
- qwery 3y agoGentle reminder that criticism isn't something you win or lose, and: - art criticism isn't objective and is not majority-rule - it is possible and healthy to criticise media that you enjoy - negative comments about a game you like are not attacks on you
- ConfusedDog 3y ago“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” — Edsger W. Dijkstra Game is about how fun the game is. Totk is easily the best game I've played this year. Definitely an upgrade from Botw. Costco is like $59, cheaper than preorder with $5 credits from GameStop which was $69 I think.
- xvilka 3y agoAnd there is an immense interest in running it in Yuzu[1][2]. You can see how many relevant issues[3] were reported in last few days. [1] https://yuzu-emu.org/ https://yuzu-emu.org/ [2] https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu [3] https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+TOTK https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aop...
- nerdjon 3y agoI am very much enjoying this game. It would rate my favorite game for the simple fact that I just feel zero desire or need to finish it. Not in a bad way! I am just having fun in this world, I feel like I can get lost in it. The new mechanics with the abilities is just insane and I could easily just spend hours building things. Sure the frame rate drops a bit, but the core gameplay is so good that I honestly don't care. It never gets bad enough that I can't play it or I feel like the drops are why I died. It is just a beautiful game to look at. I am getting really frustrated seeing the complaints that it's "the same game". No... no it's not. Not anymore than the countless COD games that come out every year. This feels like a sequel that takes place in the same world that has been drastically changed that actually deserves to be a sequel.
- taeric 3y agoI love how every top level comment is all about how this is because Nintendo made an amazing game. Yet... with how fast this is selling, there is literally no way that folks know it is an amazing game ahead of time. More, odds are high that if they had made this as not a sequel, it would not be selling as well. Go bolder and make it a new franchise? Same game would basically not be noticed. I think it is fair to like the game. I go ever farther and think it is a fun game. But the lessons to learn from how fast and well this is selling is as much about the power of franchise as it is anything about this particular game/system.
- faitswulff 3y agoThey did make an amazing game: Breath of the Wild. They’re continuing to reap the profits from it.
- agnos 3y agoThis. They made BotW to sell the Switch, and this sequel doesn't add any novel elements to it. This game deserves the success if BotW didn't exist, but as a sequel the hype is pure marketing. If game of the year awards were reserved for new, non-sequel games, maybe franchises would be discouraged from selling the same game multiple times.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jmholla 3y ago> this sequel doesn't add any novel elements to it It absolutely does. Have you played it?
- agnos 3y agoI bought and played it the day of release, because of the hype and since I loved BotW. Yeah, they added some new mechanics and items and overall the gameplay seems more refined, but it definitely feels like a sequel with a lot of familiarity. If TotK was a standalone game, it'd be a masterpiece. But in comparison to BotW, it's just more and a little better. Admittedly, some of my disappointment comes from chasing the thrill of playing BotW for the first time. Maybe those were unrealistic expectations, but for the same price and more hype, TotK just didn't have nearly the same impact for me.
- kettlecorn 3y agoI'm often discouraged by comments on Hacker News that downplay the importance of great design in a design-heavy medium. This game isn't succeeding primarily because of great marketing, franchise, or blind loyalty to Nintendo (though all of those help!). It's succeeding primarily because it's the follow-up to a game that critics and players universally found enormously fun. Before Breath of the Wild previous Zelda entries did not sell this well.
- kramerger 3y agoCounterpoint: Ask random old gamer to list his top 5 games. Chances are at least two will be zelda games. Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/13jurfi/only_8_games_ever_have_been_scored_a_perfect_10/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/13jurfi/only_8_game...
- kettlecorn 3y agoThat's not a counterpoint. More serious gamers have always loved Zelda and the series has always sold well amongst that audience. But this game (and Breath of the Wild) is selling above and beyond previous entries because it's such a great game that its appeal reaches well beyond Zelda's traditional audience.
- munificent 3y ago> Before Breath of the Wild previous Zelda entries did not sell this well. Breath of the Wild was certainly the best-seller, but nearly every Zelda game has been a knock-out success selling millions of copies. I think Breath of the Wild is an outlier among them in part because it was out during the pandemic. I know a whole lot of people who bought a Switch during the lockdown and poured hours into escapism with that game.
- kettlecorn 3y agoThe previous mainline Zelda entries sold 7.58, 10, and 6.79 million respectively for Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess, and Wind Waker. Breath of the Wild has sold 30.7 million total so far, Tears of the Kingdom sold 10 million in its first 3 days. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda Tears of the Kingdom is selling crazy numbers even without the lockdown boost. Other factors make a difference but the core of what drives the sale of these two titles is that they're great games people strongly want to play.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoI love this game, but the surface map being the same does make it feel like a DLC, not a full fledged new game. I know they’ve added a ton of new stuff, but I was really hoping for a new map, not the same with more horizontal levels.
- bitwize 3y agoBased on the complaints about framerate, pop-in, etc. I'm strongly reminded of Shadow of the Colossus (2005) which had these same issues on its original PS2 release. It was truly a seventh-gen game running on sixth-gen hardware, revolutionary for the time but the available hardware struggled to keep up. Looks like time is nearly up for the Switch. Awesome run, though.
- toyg 3y agoI think the Switch form factor will remain, it just needs a chipset refresh. It clearly hit a sweet spot that would be silly to abandon, I would expect Nintendo to have learned that lesson with the Wii U.
- bitwize 3y agoNintendo would be fools to abandon the Switch form factor. And with the Steam Deck and Asus Ally delivering AAA-tier gaming in a similar form factor, doubtless some executives at Nintendo are stroking their chins, pondering how to evolve the Switch concept to take back the lead -- with airtight DRM this time, of course.
- wilsonnb3 3y agoI believe that it was going to get a chip refresh like a year and a half ago but they had to scrap it because of the chip shortage, so they just released the refreshed hardware as the OLED switch with the same chip. No firm proof for this, just some rumors.
- toyg 3y agoJudging by activity on eBay and FB, a lot of those copies are already changing hands. Wild reviews must have had a role in overselling the title a bit; I've never played Zelda before and I'm not a massive RPG player, but I just bought BotW to dip my toes into it because the hype is so massive. Before, to me it had always been just "that game that gave Zelda Williams her name". (We miss you, Robin)
- w4rh4wk5 3y agoI am sad that a great game like this is held back by being a Switch exclusive. Of course I know the whys, and that you can emulate it, but still. I just don't like Nintendo, nor do I like the Nintendo Switch.
- delecti 3y agoIt seems silly to me to adhere to cliques like that. Software makes the hardware. I like the Switch because it has loads of games I want to play.
- w4rh4wk5 3y agoI don't like the Nintendo Switch because it's not ergonomic as a handheld and doesn't perform that well in docked mode. Also, I can't simply backup / transfer saves :(
- rando14775 3y agoImagine how many they would sell if it ran on something else besides a switch. I'm not paying $500 just so I can play the three switch games I'm interested in.
- dgfitz 3y agoI sure hope you don't pay $500 for hardware that retails around $199-$249.
- solarmist 3y agoI’ve said this before, but Nintendo is a hardware company that does software. Like Apple. They make awesome games solely to sell systems.
- DerekL 3y agoI'm not sure if that's correct. While Nintendo does make some profit selling the Switch console, it's not much, and they make most of their money by selling their own games and charging fees to third-party developers. But I don't know the exact amounts, so this may be wrong.
- solarmist 3y agoI include the 3rd party fees as part of the hardware platform. I could be wrong too, but I don’t think most of their money comes from their own games. Actually, thinking about their other franchises like Pokémon, Animal Crossing, Smash, etc. you’re probably right, but I still fell like the way they act/view themselves is in-line with my comment.
- birracerveza 3y agoDeservedly so. The game has tons of content, it's fun, and very polished; it has no right to run as well as it does on hardware as constrained as the Switch. It still dips of course and pop-in is noticeable, but it's very minimal. Props to Nintendo for making an excellent game.
- ndesaulniers 3y agoHere are some fun things people are building in TotK that got a rise out of me: Orbital strike laser canon: https://www.reddit.com/r/tearsofthekingdom/comments/13iwr0g/orbital_strike_laser_cannon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tearsofthekingdom/comments/13iwr0g/... Attack helicopter: https://www.reddit.com/r/tearsofthekingdom/comments/13hjd4p/i_love_the_smell_of_zonaite_in_the_morning/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tearsofthekingdom/comments/13hjd4p/... Mech/Gundam: https://www.reddit.com/r/tearsofthekingdom/comments/13gk3a6/this_is_getting_ridiculous_bysoulbanana/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tearsofthekingdom/comments/13gk3a6/...
- ShamelessC 3y agoHeavy gameplay spoilers, fwiw. Normally that doesn't bother me as much but the gameplay in this one is basically one subversion after another.
- pallas_athena 3y agoThese spawned a whole new subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HyruleEngineering/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HyruleEngineering/
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y agoI enjoyed BOTW, it wasn't perfect. It does annoy me a bit to see TOTK getting perfect 10s everywhere. It just looks like a DLC, I can barely tell it apart. I stop trusting game reviews after no mans sky and cyberpunk too. Everyone now is just a shill trying to build relationships.
- vorpalhex 3y agoI disliked BOTW but TOTK is radically different. Combat flows differently, the world feels different, the story is dramatically changed in actually interesting ways. It's not BOTW with minor crafting add-ins.
- stanleychink 3y ago[dead]
- cheald 3y agoIt's genuinely impressive to me that in a day when AAA games tend to weigh in at 100GB+, TOTK is only 18GB. Nintendo has done something genuinely impressive both technologically and in terms of game design.
- ggregoire 3y agoI wonder what would be those sales if the game was released on PC too. Like they obviously make it exclusive to the Switch to sell more consoles. But I'll never buy that console (or any console, really) just to play this game, or even to play 10 games as good as this one. I imagine tons of PC gamers are in my case. I heard the game runs quite well on a Switch emulator and it was getting massively downloaded via torrent on day 1. Personally I won't bother going this route, I'm too lazy for that, but if the game was on Steam and playable in 1 click, I would gladly give Nintendo 70 bucks.
- Namari 3y agoI bought the switch for the first Zelda, great game that got me back into console games. I don't really see any other game worth playing on Switch but it was great. You can always buy it second handed and sell it once you're done.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoSame here, it's a shame they don't support the PC market. I bought the game for my wife to play on Switch, but I'm playing it at 4k 60fps on my desktop via Yuzu with my saves being synced to my steamdeck which can emulate the game at 1080p and 25-40fps.
- m3kw9 3y agoIt’s a business strategy that works to have exclusives on a hardware. It sells the hardware and it keeps them in their ecosystem. There are a few percent that won’t buy but they are not going to go after you just to blow up their entire business model
- jjice 3y agoFirst party Nintendo (at least mainline Zelda and Mario) are all about quality. You might wait six years between games, but it'll always be worth it. I haven't had a "I wish I wasn't working so I could play this game" in years, but I have it now with TOTK and I couldn't be happier. Neglecting sleep to play just one more hour - I feel like a kid again. They've always squeezed a ton out of the hardware they have, especially since the Wii, which, in my head at least, is when they started being notably behind hardware wise. I'm just glad that they're a fantastic example of a company that really prioritizes quality over quantity.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoEveryone in this thread is arguing about what single data point is or isn't 100% responsible for the game's success. It's exhausting.
- alec_irl 3y agoThe big story with this new Zelda game, and why it is able to include so many deep and interlocking systems on top of a staggering amount of content, comes down to institutional knowledge at Nintendo. Many of the people working on or giving input on this game have been making Zelda games for decades. Eiji Aonuma, the current producer of the Zelda series, directed every mainline Zelda from Ocarina to Twilight Princess. Hidemaro Fujibayashi was at Capcom when he directed Oracle of Ages/Seasons, Four Swords, and the Minish Cap in the late 90s and early 2000s. Skyward Sword was the first Zelda he directed and he went on to direct Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. While Western games studios crush their developers with crunchtime and pursue flashy graphics over deep systems, Nintendo nurtures and retains its internal talent and as a result they do far more with technically inferior hardware. Contrast Tears of the Kingdom's smooth launch with the ongoing debacle of Overwatch 2 from Blizzard, whose devs just announced they won't be delivering one of the core promised features of the sequel. Obviously not every Western studio is as bad as Activision/Blizzard, but Nintendo running circles around everyone on 7 year old mobile phone hardware should prompt some serious soul searching for Western games execs.
- LetsGetTechnicl 3y agoTOTK is truly a technical and gameplay marvel, it's been so much to spend hours upon hours running around. It's hard to focus on a single mission because you can get side-tracked so easily and that is one of its charms. It's also amazingly impressive because of the seamless transition from sky to earth to underground, and the amount of stuff it can draw on over 10 year old hardware. But it's also doing impressive physics stuff - attaching multiple objects to each other, and tracking the movement of everything to allow for time reversal. It's truly incredible.
- idk1 3y agoI say this in the best possible way, because I love them but, but Tears of the Kingdom makes Breath of the Wild look like a tech demo.
- FractalHQ 3y agoI just wish Nintendo would sell the rights to Zelda, one of the most iconic franchises in gaming history, to a modern game company that won’t cripple it by forcing studios to cram it onto god damn potato. It’s fun, sure… but it’s so much worse than it could be.
- user00012-ab 3y agoAfter a few hours of play, I found the game extremely tedious and gave up. I don't want to build a raft from scratch every time I come to a river, or maybe I would if the building system wasn't so cumbersome to use. Also the, "your weapon breaks every few seconds" gets old real quick. But It seems like I'm in the minority; people really like games that have a lot of tedium to them.
- dudzik 3y agoThere is an Auto-build capability you can unlock. Makes the crafting much less tedious.