The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom is 1 year old
- Thread starter Mekanos
- Start date
Game is going to age incredibly well as the gold-standard for systems based gameplay, I think that style of game design is only going to become more popular in the coming years and a decade from now TotK will still likely be seen as the one to beat. Absolutely incredible stuff, BotW had like little glimpses at the potential of this style of gameplay, like updrafts from fire or making a physics object float temporarily with an octo-balloon but the systems were more something that the world around you used than anything you had much input into unless it was a specifically designed puzzle. Tears of the Kingdom just giving you a ton of tools to have much heavier input into the systems of the game and use those systems for gameplay wherever and whenever you wanted was exactly what I wanted from a sequel and I'm very happy they also thought that was the proper direction to go in.
I'm also weirdly thankful the Switch was such a small upgrade in power over the Wii U in this case, similar to Smash Ultimate, I don't think they could have justified simply building on top of the existing previous game for the new one if it was a standard new gen power increase, basically leading to a game with 12 years of development for both this and Smash. Doubt we see something like it again.
I'm also weirdly thankful the Switch was such a small upgrade in power over the Wii U in this case, similar to Smash Ultimate, I don't think they could have justified simply building on top of the existing previous game for the new one if it was a standard new gen power increase, basically leading to a game with 12 years of development for both this and Smash. Doubt we see something like it again.
Man I REALLY need to make time to play this, I have only put in a tiny bit of time and it did not click. Loved the first one.
How'd you guys react when this started playing during the Colgera boss fight?
View: https://youtu.be/WFB8UOt01Io?t=211
Such an amazing moment, especially for Wind Waker fans.
View: https://youtu.be/WFB8UOt01Io?t=211
Such an amazing moment, especially for Wind Waker fans.
Official one-year anniversary artwork:
View: https://x.com/zeldaofficialjp/status/1789491081387880567
The launch art from last year:
View: https://x.com/zeldaofficialjp/status/1656796324975742976
View: https://x.com/zeldaofficialjp/status/1789491081387880567
The launch art from last year:
View: https://x.com/zeldaofficialjp/status/1656796324975742976
The fact that most of the armor and unique weapons were in the previous game was pretty lame though, even if it was locked behind amiibo.
Yeah, the Depths are amazing. Honestly one of the best survival horror experiences around.
The sheer anxiety of flying through pitch darkness with an unwieldy hover-cycle and attached lightbloom, trying to reach the faint orange glow of a distant lightroot, miles away, and how it keeps slipping in and out of view due to unseen underground mountains... and then clipping a tree root and falling a thousand feet, and crash-landing in a pool of gloom... and suddenly you're on the run from gloom-covered monsters, fleeing through mines and ruins and swamps and woods and lava chambers, all underground, layers deep, other monsters popping up along the way (including the occasional temple boss, and Phantom Ganon!)... and the sheer disorientation when the lightroot you were flying toward before is now three underground mountains *above* you.
The resource management is also peak survival horror. Every arrow and lightbloom becomes a precious resource, creating breadcrumb pathways through the darkness. The monsters seal your hearts with gloom, so special preparations must be made to unlock your max health. But you also find amazing new tools, like the puffshrooms for stealth strikes and the muddlebuds to make enemies fight each other. And there are many depots with zonal devices, mine cart tracks to follow, yiga camps to raid, mine sites with ore to level up your batteries (a boon for flying long distance down there), the elite gear you find all over (some earned through incredible coliseum gautlets), and of course the whole multi-world spatial puzzle of comparing the Surface map and the Depths map to reverse-engineer the locations of shrines above and lightroots below (not to mention how mountains on the surface are valleys in the depths, and vice-versa).
The Depths are incredibly stressful, but also offer arguably the strongest sense of adventure, exploration and danger we've seen from the series. The best part is you can engage with them as much or as little as you want. Personally, they were a great palate cleanser before returning to the light above.
The sheer anxiety of flying through pitch darkness with an unwieldy hover-cycle and attached lightbloom, trying to reach the faint orange glow of a distant lightroot, miles away, and how it keeps slipping in and out of view due to unseen underground mountains... and then clipping a tree root and falling a thousand feet, and crash-landing in a pool of gloom... and suddenly you're on the run from gloom-covered monsters, fleeing through mines and ruins and swamps and woods and lava chambers, all underground, layers deep, other monsters popping up along the way (including the occasional temple boss, and Phantom Ganon!)... and the sheer disorientation when the lightroot you were flying toward before is now three underground mountains *above* you.
The resource management is also peak survival horror. Every arrow and lightbloom becomes a precious resource, creating breadcrumb pathways through the darkness. The monsters seal your hearts with gloom, so special preparations must be made to unlock your max health. But you also find amazing new tools, like the puffshrooms for stealth strikes and the muddlebuds to make enemies fight each other. And there are many depots with zonal devices, mine cart tracks to follow, yiga camps to raid, mine sites with ore to level up your batteries (a boon for flying long distance down there), the elite gear you find all over (some earned through incredible coliseum gautlets), and of course the whole multi-world spatial puzzle of comparing the Surface map and the Depths map to reverse-engineer the locations of shrines above and lightroots below (not to mention how mountains on the surface are valleys in the depths, and vice-versa).
The Depths are incredibly stressful, but also offer arguably the strongest sense of adventure, exploration and danger we've seen from the series. The best part is you can engage with them as much or as little as you want. Personally, they were a great palate cleanser before returning to the light above.
Decided to get back into playing it after lapping from it because of this and I'm knee deep into the Fire Temple and I'm going to scour through the guides to help me out with this damn dungeon lol.
Don't forget the dungeon bosses just sitting around waiting to fuck your shit up in the darkness.
I remember I was gliding around the Depths below southern Hyrule (where the jungles would be on the surface), and I started feeling anxious because I literally did not see *any* land around (seriously, how did Nintendo make the darkness in this game so *dark*), and then I literally screamed out loud at 3 a.m. when freaking Colgera came roaring out of nowhere. The sheer size of that monstrosity, coupled with the sound and suddenness of the attack, made me nope outta there.
Oh, and whenever Gloom Hands appeared down there? Absolute nightmare fuel.
It's a great game, but a poor sequel imo.
Breath of the Wild is one of my all-time favourites, but there was obviously a ton of room for improvement. Unfortunately I think Tears of the Kingdom made all of the wrong choices for what to expand upon. It's like they saw those videos on Twitter of people messing around with the physics systems in elaborate ways and thought that's what ALL players wanted more of. I could be wrong, but I doubt more than 5% of players actually did things like that? Those videos are just really shareable and it's fun to see the extent of what was possible.
And yet that seems to be what birthed Ultrahand, which didn't do much for me at all.
A good chunk of the new stuff in general is pretty poor. The sky islands are bland and repetitive. The depths are...bland and repetitive. The monster force events are bland and repetitive. The caves seem cool at first until you start to realize they're bland and repetitive.
I could go on and on, but you get the point.
Breath of the Wild is one of my all-time favourites, but there was obviously a ton of room for improvement. Unfortunately I think Tears of the Kingdom made all of the wrong choices for what to expand upon. It's like they saw those videos on Twitter of people messing around with the physics systems in elaborate ways and thought that's what ALL players wanted more of. I could be wrong, but I doubt more than 5% of players actually did things like that? Those videos are just really shareable and it's fun to see the extent of what was possible.
And yet that seems to be what birthed Ultrahand, which didn't do much for me at all.
A good chunk of the new stuff in general is pretty poor. The sky islands are bland and repetitive. The depths are...bland and repetitive. The monster force events are bland and repetitive. The caves seem cool at first until you start to realize they're bland and repetitive.
I could go on and on, but you get the point.
My only piece of advice: Once you're off the tutorial island and in the open world, go straight north to the new town there and get your glider.
Although, it might be kinda fun to see what it would be like exploring the world without it... 🤔
Great game. It wasn't for me, and I didn't really get into it, but I would recommend it to 100% of everyone.
Only game I've ever gone to a midnight release for.
Vast improvement over Breath of the Wild in pretty much every way.
Vast improvement over Breath of the Wild in pretty much every way.
A rare game where I had to stop myself from playing. I kept finding more things to do and excuses to just keep going even after I had finished the game and gotten all of the Shrines and Lightroots. What a masterful game.
The dungeon designs hold it back a lot for me. I don't understand why they can go open world with traditional dungeons. Sounds like a fantastic recipe with how creative the team is.
I think most of the dungeons rock, with the water one probably being the worst of them. I loooove the fire temple, extremely fun to both play it properly and to break it wide open.
Honestly I hated the depths. The concept is amazing, but the fact that it had an impassable ceiling almost all the time was infuriating. Both BOTW and TOTK reinforce the idea that if you can climb it, you can surpass it. It's basically THE CORE design of their world for this incarnation is the series. It teaches you this and reinforces the philosophy over hundreds of hours of gameplay.
so the first time you come across a cliff face in the Depths and spend 20 minutes trying to get over it to get to your objective, only to find the only way to reach it is a VERY small walkway hundreds of meters in some other direction that you can't see because you haven't lit the area and don't have access to the map...
I will happily laud Nintendo as perhaps uncontested masters of game design, but whoever designed the Depths (not the idea but the actual implementation) just didn't really seem to get the assignment and I don't understand how playtesting didn't highlight the gameplay as frustrating and antithetical to everything else that BOTW and TOTK established.
(And yes, I get that "antithesis" is also very much the point of the Depths, but they could have made the design ceilingless, and kept everything else but just made it dark and underground with the same degree of freedom as the rest of the design allows. It would have made exploring them 10x more fun, I think, especially now that I have personal and professional experience in game design).
so the first time you come across a cliff face in the Depths and spend 20 minutes trying to get over it to get to your objective, only to find the only way to reach it is a VERY small walkway hundreds of meters in some other direction that you can't see because you haven't lit the area and don't have access to the map...
I will happily laud Nintendo as perhaps uncontested masters of game design, but whoever designed the Depths (not the idea but the actual implementation) just didn't really seem to get the assignment and I don't understand how playtesting didn't highlight the gameplay as frustrating and antithetical to everything else that BOTW and TOTK established.
(And yes, I get that "antithesis" is also very much the point of the Depths, but they could have made the design ceilingless, and kept everything else but just made it dark and underground with the same degree of freedom as the rest of the design allows. It would have made exploring them 10x more fun, I think, especially now that I have personal and professional experience in game design).
I think what you described is actually part of the appeal to me. The Depths are a massive world-sized cave, so there are moments where you really have to study and survey the map and your surroundings (and illuminate things accordingly) to uncover some of those bottleneck connections high up on cliffs or far below. Figuring out how certain areas connect had me more stumped than any dungeon puzzle. I would circle areas on my glider following cliff-faces only to eventually find a tunnel far below with rock I could blast through (or hammer, or drill, etc). Sometimes the answer was to re-enter the Depths from a different chasm entirely, with some areas *only* being accessible via tiny chasms that are on the surface but hidden from aerial view. This "secrets within secrets" aspect felt like something you'd see in the NES Zelda, and made the eventual "aha!" moment all the sweeter.
A masterful, GOAT-tier game. Sublime in every way. I wish I could replay it for the first time.
Also, those final battles were perfect.
Easily lived up to the hype and my expectations.
Also, those final battles were perfect.
Easily lived up to the hype and my expectations.
OP
OP
They've said in interviews creating the traditional lock-and-key dungeons is very time consuming to make, and preferred to spread out those puzzles to the Shrines. I do think though TOTK shows an attempt to improve on previous dungeons, so I'm hopeful the next game will expand on them even moreso.
Nintendo released the best game ever made with BotW and then somehow blew it out of the water in every single way with the sequel
The Sky islands badly needed more variety, a town, and unique (zonai? dragon?) dungeon.
The surface needed much more significant changes to make it feel new. There is only one new town and you meet it right away. The environmental storytelling took a huge nosedive from BotW (e.g. guardians just outright disappear) and you could see how the vloggers struggled to find things to talk about.
The depths needed more variation, much improved rewards, at least one town, and a unique dungeon (e.g. demon/ganon worshipping one).
"Demon King? Secret stone?" Cutscenes should not have been so repetitive. The dungeons were a good improvement, but the ending scenes seemed pretty tossed in there for lack of time/effort.
Alot of what left the game feeling like too much of a retread of BotW could have been adjusted via dlc, and i was actually excited for that possibility but then nintendo surprisingly declined to do any at all. We will see if they go back on that with switch 2, but it felt like a missed opportunity.
Nintendo piles so much effort and money into these games that they are always very good, but it's the cut corners that bring things down. TotK remains too much like BotW. I still had fun with it, but that stands out in my memory. That and a much, much cooler ending and select memory cutscenes.
The surface needed much more significant changes to make it feel new. There is only one new town and you meet it right away. The environmental storytelling took a huge nosedive from BotW (e.g. guardians just outright disappear) and you could see how the vloggers struggled to find things to talk about.
The depths needed more variation, much improved rewards, at least one town, and a unique dungeon (e.g. demon/ganon worshipping one).
"Demon King? Secret stone?" Cutscenes should not have been so repetitive. The dungeons were a good improvement, but the ending scenes seemed pretty tossed in there for lack of time/effort.
Alot of what left the game feeling like too much of a retread of BotW could have been adjusted via dlc, and i was actually excited for that possibility but then nintendo surprisingly declined to do any at all. We will see if they go back on that with switch 2, but it felt like a missed opportunity.
Nintendo piles so much effort and money into these games that they are always very good, but it's the cut corners that bring things down. TotK remains too much like BotW. I still had fun with it, but that stands out in my memory. That and a much, much cooler ending and select memory cutscenes.
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Yeah, the dungeons in TOTK are a big improvement over the divine beasts in BOTW. In TOTK each dungeon is aesthetically unique, a clear theme to the design, much better integrated into the world, and just more fun to complete. If the dungeons of TOTK signal the future of Zelda dungeon design, I'm more than happy.
Pretty much mankind's greatest achievement ever. I got 250 hours in and haven't wrapped it up yet.
I haven't even played Totk yet.
Breath of the Wild was however most of what I was promised with WRPGs as far as combat and exploration options go. I'm still trying to play through the Zelda series from start to finish before I dive into this one.
Breath of the Wild was however most of what I was promised with WRPGs as far as combat and exploration options go. I'm still trying to play through the Zelda series from start to finish before I dive into this one.
A monumental achievement.
The game is so rich of memorable moments and surprises. My favorites were: first jump into the Depths, first Gloom Hands encounter and finding the spirit dungeon on my own.
Everytime I pick up the game I find something new, be it a cave or a miniquest, and it's just so fun to do anything. The dungeons and pre-dungeon quests were mostly great, and another thing that rarely gets mentioned is how good the new town subquests were.
My only complaint is that the sages' powers were a step down from Botw, except for Mineru. Had no problem with the copypaste nature of the sky, that and the depths are supposed to be a break from the overworld.
Finally, I wish they made the dungeons replayable, I don't want to start a new file to play them again.
The game is so rich of memorable moments and surprises. My favorites were: first jump into the Depths, first Gloom Hands encounter and finding the spirit dungeon on my own.
Everytime I pick up the game I find something new, be it a cave or a miniquest, and it's just so fun to do anything. The dungeons and pre-dungeon quests were mostly great, and another thing that rarely gets mentioned is how good the new town subquests were.
My only complaint is that the sages' powers were a step down from Botw, except for Mineru. Had no problem with the copypaste nature of the sky, that and the depths are supposed to be a break from the overworld.
Finally, I wish they made the dungeons replayable, I don't want to start a new file to play them again.
One of the most infuriating games I've ever played. I tried my best to go in with an open mind, despite being more than a little skeptical about the fact that, from the little footage I'd watched pre-launch, they seemed to be using the same engine, map, enemies, etc as the first game. I kept telling myself "well, if they're re-using the map, that just means that they'll have been able to put that much more time and energy into making a much better game".
Instead, I keep wondering what the hell they were doing for all those years aside from making sure that Ultrahand worked really well.
Like a lot of other people have said, aside from a great first impression, I found the depths and sky insultingly bland.
I didn't mind the "shrines everywhere and four dungeons" approach to things in BotW, but was looking forward to what they were going to do differently... nope... shrines and four dungeons again.
Personal preference, but I found the divine beasts and the various *Blight Ganon bosses to be far superior to their equivalents in TotK. Sure, the BotW bosses might have looked a bit similar to each other in general theming, but I found the fights to be way more interesting.
All the flaws with BotW seem to have just been ignored. The absolutely broken health system (which I'm still surprised I never see anybody complain about) from BotW remains. Lack of enemy variety? Aside from a few welcome additions here and there, it still felt like I was fighting Bokoblins and Moblins 90% of the time. Weapon durability? I didn't mind it that much in BotW since it was pretty easy to just chuck your current weapon and select a new one, but instead of doing anything with a sytem everyone else seemed to hate, they just added a clunky extra step to it by requiring you to slap something else onto every weapon you find and now everybody seems fine with it. Hey, good for everyone else, but I just don't get it.
The game just seems to love undermining its own systems. Here's this construction system that allows you to make all these cool vehicles...
...except you'll eventually realize that you only ever need the stick-and-two-fans flier. Bonus point deduction for having some parts arbitrarily disappear after a time limit despite already having a time limit built into the system with the batteries.
Fuse seemingly lets you approach combat with all sorts of different options...
...yet after a bit of experimenting in the beginning, I realized the best option was to just leave my items sorted by fuse power, just fuse my strongest materials to strongest weapons and mindlessly whack away at everything for an easy win almost all the time.
And in what I'm almost certain I'm going to be alone on, I really think that the climbing mechanic pretty much breaks any idea of exploration that the game is trying to foster. Sure, you're exploring on a macro level by seeing all these things scattered around the world, but in both games, you very quickly get enough stamina to just climb over whatever obstacles are in your way. I often find myself wondering how different the game would feel if you didn't unlock that climbing ability until later in the game, and actually had to navigate AROUND stuff to get where you wanted to go. The only section like that was the approach to the Zora area in BotW, since the constant rain made it impossible to climb, which I always found to be kind of a nice change. Sure, the rain in the rest of the game was annoying, since it meant that you were just sitting there until it was over, but in this part, it actually made you navigate a path, which ended up being kind of a novelty for these games.
Instead, I keep wondering what the hell they were doing for all those years aside from making sure that Ultrahand worked really well.
Like a lot of other people have said, aside from a great first impression, I found the depths and sky insultingly bland.
I didn't mind the "shrines everywhere and four dungeons" approach to things in BotW, but was looking forward to what they were going to do differently... nope... shrines and four dungeons again.
Personal preference, but I found the divine beasts and the various *Blight Ganon bosses to be far superior to their equivalents in TotK. Sure, the BotW bosses might have looked a bit similar to each other in general theming, but I found the fights to be way more interesting.
All the flaws with BotW seem to have just been ignored. The absolutely broken health system (which I'm still surprised I never see anybody complain about) from BotW remains. Lack of enemy variety? Aside from a few welcome additions here and there, it still felt like I was fighting Bokoblins and Moblins 90% of the time. Weapon durability? I didn't mind it that much in BotW since it was pretty easy to just chuck your current weapon and select a new one, but instead of doing anything with a sytem everyone else seemed to hate, they just added a clunky extra step to it by requiring you to slap something else onto every weapon you find and now everybody seems fine with it. Hey, good for everyone else, but I just don't get it.
The game just seems to love undermining its own systems. Here's this construction system that allows you to make all these cool vehicles...
...except you'll eventually realize that you only ever need the stick-and-two-fans flier. Bonus point deduction for having some parts arbitrarily disappear after a time limit despite already having a time limit built into the system with the batteries.
Fuse seemingly lets you approach combat with all sorts of different options...
...yet after a bit of experimenting in the beginning, I realized the best option was to just leave my items sorted by fuse power, just fuse my strongest materials to strongest weapons and mindlessly whack away at everything for an easy win almost all the time.
And in what I'm almost certain I'm going to be alone on, I really think that the climbing mechanic pretty much breaks any idea of exploration that the game is trying to foster. Sure, you're exploring on a macro level by seeing all these things scattered around the world, but in both games, you very quickly get enough stamina to just climb over whatever obstacles are in your way. I often find myself wondering how different the game would feel if you didn't unlock that climbing ability until later in the game, and actually had to navigate AROUND stuff to get where you wanted to go. The only section like that was the approach to the Zora area in BotW, since the constant rain made it impossible to climb, which I always found to be kind of a nice change. Sure, the rain in the rest of the game was annoying, since it meant that you were just sitting there until it was over, but in this part, it actually made you navigate a path, which ended up being kind of a novelty for these games.
My views haven't changed since the game come out. I think the game's one step up from BotW. Like if BotW is a 7/10, this is a 8/10.
The powers are much better, ultrahand is insane and ascend is criminally underappreciated, but I still think they should have done more with the open world. There wasn't much different from BotW than I would have liked especially when it came to rebuilding Hyrule. Luckily the new powers made it feel different enough but the sense of exploration was mostly gone. Also the story was just as bad if not worse than BotW since I felt like it had more potential.
The powers are much better, ultrahand is insane and ascend is criminally underappreciated, but I still think they should have done more with the open world. There wasn't much different from BotW than I would have liked especially when it came to rebuilding Hyrule. Luckily the new powers made it feel different enough but the sense of exploration was mostly gone. Also the story was just as bad if not worse than BotW since I felt like it had more potential.
MASTERPIECE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!New artwork from Nintendo for the anniversary. Beware that it's for the very end of the game.
Highest highs, lowest lows. Amazing abilities and flawless execution on some incredibly complicated concepts. Putting something together and having it just work is still astounding. It's incredibly easy to have fun for the length of a full game just by the pure inertia of fucking around.
But the structure and poorly designed new areas leave a lot to be desired. And they've officially reached the point of way too much freedom as far as I'm concerned.
But the structure and poorly designed new areas leave a lot to be desired. And they've officially reached the point of way too much freedom as far as I'm concerned.
I enjoyed it but unfortunately it did end up being BOTW 1.5. The physics system is an incredible achievement but it can't make up for the stale feeling that comes from re-using the game world and structure from BOTW.
I was expecting so much more in terms of new content and unfortunately they couldn't deliver that.
I was expecting so much more in terms of new content and unfortunately they couldn't deliver that.
