The only thing I'm inclined to disagree with is the "too much stuff" idea. This is kind of the antithesis of the "excessive encounter reuse." TotK is freakin' huge. If you're gonna throw one Russia's worth of game space at the players, you can't just have a Lichtenstein's worth of content variety to fill it. In my experience, this is a universal failing with the open world genre, and TotK really, really suffers from this. It has twice the gamespace of its predecessor, but nowhere near twice the content variety, and Breath of the Wild...? Coming back to your original point of over-reuse of enemies, BotW had a smaller bestiary than the original Legend of Zelda, released nearly 40 years ago.
So the fact that TotK has a wide variety of stuff is a good thing.
That's not to say there isn't a problem here, just that it needs a far better interface to handle all that stuff. The game did some dabbling with favorites ala the auto-build, and some "most used" sorting from time to time, but ultimately, you still end up staring at a sprawling grid of icons, scrolling, selecting, reselecting... cooking goes from fun and whimsical to navigating through a massive spreadsheet like Link is doing his taxes or something.
And the "constantly pause the game to fuse arrows one at a time" design was utter madness.
In short, a better, less cumbersome means of handling cooking and fusing would have counteracted the issues of having so much stuff. The stuff isn't the issue - the means by which you interact with it is. This is one of the issues of the genre change - the Legend of Zelda has always had a relatively limited scope and offering of items, weapons, etc. The more simplistic, direct means of interacting with it wasn't a problem because the scope was so limited. The fact that BotW/TotK's offering of items and inventory has exploded same as the world space is appropriate, but they just haven't adapted for that scope in terms of controls and interface as necessary.
I think when you add a new game element, you should ask, "Is this adding something no other game element is adding?" or "If this was gone, would something feel missing?"
So I'd leave in fish, because you need them to add gameplay to the water. Dragonflies, on the other hand, feel like stuff for the sake of stuff. Have them there as a nice graphical effect, sure, but then having them clutter inventory isn't really worth it.
I thought the story was pretty good, especially for a Zelda game. But it really did lose its luster quickly after hearing it over and over.
My other big gripe with both games is the Koroks. There are just too many, and only about 10% of the puzzles are fun or interesting. The ‘i need to reach my friend’ ones especially take way too long for so little payoff. I just mark them on the map when i see them in case i ever decide i want to waste time moving them around.
But one thing I love in this game and in BotW is the pro HUD. Not having anything on the HUD most of the time makes the exploration so much more immersive. My gameplay style in this game (and in Elden Ring) is basically “That thing on the map looks odd, let’s go see what it is”.
One thing I never mentioned: This game has a LOT of minigames, like the little "Help the guy hold up his sign" puzzles. There is too much stuff for 99% to do everything.
So you have to pick the things that are fun and do them until it's not fun. It's a big buffet where you can't sample all the dishes. This is a really good thing, except for players who feel compelled to do everything, for whom is it frustrating.. There's nothing wrong with being this sort of player, but this sort of player may want to pick a different game.
Having more prerequisites is something a lot of stories could benefit from. If it off putting to suddenly jump to the middle of the story, it then backs the start worst as you already learnt the plot twist. I had this problem with the adventure quest series of games and it put me off continuing with them.
Over focusing on open worldness makes telling a deep story almost impossible as game can't reliably know who is there and what situation they are in. This is a problem in the octopath traveller games as making it so the chapters can be done in any order meant the other 7 travelers had to just wait to the side until it is time to fight something as the game has no idea who will be there for any scene outside the hero of the path and it would be impossible to write the scenes for all the thousands of possible options. This is fixed in the concluding arc as game finally knows who is there (everybody) and what they've done (all the quests).
OK so I feel like I have to ask about the level of junk in Avernum...in light of what you say here, would you do that differently now? (For reference, I played the remake of Avernum, and I don't recall the junk being quite as prevalent in King's Wish.)
Uhhhhhh... if can pick up will pick up. It's not that I enjoy the hoarding per se, it's that a) I've been historically rewarded for it 99% of the time, and b) I loathe backtracking with a passion. Oh I need that one flower that I know I saw somewhere but I can't for the life of me remember where? NOT FUN.
So yuh, I've been gaming since around the first Prince of Persia, and very VERY few games have persuaded me not to pick up everything not nailed to the ground. I say "persuaded" on purpose. If you're just telling me I'm overburdened but have offered me an infinite stash in a not too out of the way location, you haven't persuaded me, you just made me grind, and I dislike you for it.
The most recent example where I was temporarily (aka at the start of a run) persuaded to not hoard was NeoScavenger. I was persuaded by dying over and over and over for hours - until I realized I must learn to prioritize. It was a blast to be forced to change playstyles, even if you had to twist my arm for it. Still, a very idiosyncratic game.
So yeah. I'm all for environmental story telling, but if you want me not to pick up things, the game should make that clear to me. Plenty of ways to do that.
P.S. Avernum was fun, I remember that much, but I cant for the life of me remember the amount (or not) of junk, so that wasn't any specific criticism.
P.S.2 In massive games like this Zelda, the fact that the dev team doesn't spend a week specifically playtesting and thinking over the inventory UX is a crime. Half the time I spend in games is spent inside inventories - or it definitely feels that way, which amounts to the same thing. I have vivid images of the inventories of games whose story has long ago slipped my mind.
It sounds a bit like the problems I had with BotW. I love open world games in theory, just like MMOs. For years I’d buy any game with either label. But they so rarely click. Too much space with not enough unique content.
BotW was much better than most, but still: after the 20th shrine I start to wonder why I’m playing.
Love your Substack. If you wanted to do reviews where we could get discussions like this going more often I’d be down.
Right now I’m struggling with BG3. I want to really dig the game just like I wanted to really dig Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2. But something is making it frustrating and impossible for me to really stick with any of them, and it’s interesting that I’m having trouble articulating what.
The shrines are an issue if you don't like them because you have to do a lot of them.
But Zelda games are puzzle games, and the puzzle shrines (most of the shrines) are the key delivery element for the puzzles. It's the place where you're forced to directly engage with a puzzle without bring in tons of stuff to cheat past it.
(Which you can do most of the time outside, which is also a lot of fun. Diving the puzzles between cheatable and not-cheatable is good.)
But if you don't enjoy the shrine puzzles, then yeah, that's a real problem. Not every game is for everyone.
The Breath of the Wild games reinforce my impression that Nintendo has recuited and cultivated really great game designers over the years, but they have no great writers and even in games Zelda or Pokémon the story is almost non-existent. The same goes for character design. I was disappointed when the series went 3D and almost everyone looked grossly cartoonish.
The characters do have to have some sort of design, and when you aren't going photorealistic they'll have to make some sort of stylistic choice. The thing about style is that not everyone will like it. That's what makes it a style.
In other words, as I've been saying in a lot of these responses, not every game is for everyone. If you don't like Zelda games for whatever reason, that's cool. They are their own specific distinctive thing. I'm coming at this as someone who likes them.
I haven't got anything to say on the subject of Zelda games, since I never played any of them (not my genre - I want my RPGs to be isometric and turn-based). Actually, this might be the reason for the low popularity of your posts on the game - your usual audience probably doesn't intersect much with Zelda players (thought I might be wrong). But I really wanted to mention that if you, or anyone reading this likes long-form game analysis, I recommend the late Shamus Young's blog, for example his excellent (and very, very long) series on Mass Effect (https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792), or, for a lighter reading, his let's play of LoTR MMO (https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=30811).
I'd be very interested to see a similar examination of games I worked on (Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous) in text form (can't stand videos), so if anyone can point me that way, I'd be grateful.
Mass Effect was another one with copy/paste outposts, but without the excuse of a massive world. I think there was one building, one mine and one spaceship you could board.
They varied them a bit by blocking some passages in the mine, or moving the arrangement of crates in the building, but it didn't help much. A better implementation of that system could work though.
I really liked that blog. It stood out as one of the few great video game blogs around. But the format- Christ I could never find anything. I always gave up trying to follow a particular series of posts, no matter how interesting.
Yes, he died last year, unfortunately. His children and some friends try to carry on the legacy, but Shamus had an unique voice, so their stuff is very different (but might still be interesting).
The Zelda-playing market is huge enough that there are definitely some of us hanging around here, too!
Zelda games are almost certainly closer in genre to Spiderweb games than, say, the Dad of War games that have also been dissected here. ... I think? I'm second guessing myself now that I've made that confident claim.
The only thing I'm inclined to disagree with is the "too much stuff" idea. This is kind of the antithesis of the "excessive encounter reuse." TotK is freakin' huge. If you're gonna throw one Russia's worth of game space at the players, you can't just have a Lichtenstein's worth of content variety to fill it. In my experience, this is a universal failing with the open world genre, and TotK really, really suffers from this. It has twice the gamespace of its predecessor, but nowhere near twice the content variety, and Breath of the Wild...? Coming back to your original point of over-reuse of enemies, BotW had a smaller bestiary than the original Legend of Zelda, released nearly 40 years ago.
So the fact that TotK has a wide variety of stuff is a good thing.
That's not to say there isn't a problem here, just that it needs a far better interface to handle all that stuff. The game did some dabbling with favorites ala the auto-build, and some "most used" sorting from time to time, but ultimately, you still end up staring at a sprawling grid of icons, scrolling, selecting, reselecting... cooking goes from fun and whimsical to navigating through a massive spreadsheet like Link is doing his taxes or something.
And the "constantly pause the game to fuse arrows one at a time" design was utter madness.
In short, a better, less cumbersome means of handling cooking and fusing would have counteracted the issues of having so much stuff. The stuff isn't the issue - the means by which you interact with it is. This is one of the issues of the genre change - the Legend of Zelda has always had a relatively limited scope and offering of items, weapons, etc. The more simplistic, direct means of interacting with it wasn't a problem because the scope was so limited. The fact that BotW/TotK's offering of items and inventory has exploded same as the world space is appropriate, but they just haven't adapted for that scope in terms of controls and interface as necessary.
I think when you add a new game element, you should ask, "Is this adding something no other game element is adding?" or "If this was gone, would something feel missing?"
So I'd leave in fish, because you need them to add gameplay to the water. Dragonflies, on the other hand, feel like stuff for the sake of stuff. Have them there as a nice graphical effect, sure, but then having them clutter inventory isn't really worth it.
I thought the story was pretty good, especially for a Zelda game. But it really did lose its luster quickly after hearing it over and over.
My other big gripe with both games is the Koroks. There are just too many, and only about 10% of the puzzles are fun or interesting. The ‘i need to reach my friend’ ones especially take way too long for so little payoff. I just mark them on the map when i see them in case i ever decide i want to waste time moving them around.
But one thing I love in this game and in BotW is the pro HUD. Not having anything on the HUD most of the time makes the exploration so much more immersive. My gameplay style in this game (and in Elden Ring) is basically “That thing on the map looks odd, let’s go see what it is”.
One thing I never mentioned: This game has a LOT of minigames, like the little "Help the guy hold up his sign" puzzles. There is too much stuff for 99% to do everything.
So you have to pick the things that are fun and do them until it's not fun. It's a big buffet where you can't sample all the dishes. This is a really good thing, except for players who feel compelled to do everything, for whom is it frustrating.. There's nothing wrong with being this sort of player, but this sort of player may want to pick a different game.
Wow I had no idea that the sign guy was a puzzle! I kind of assumed it was a way to be mean and make him drop it. Should have known better!
Having more prerequisites is something a lot of stories could benefit from. If it off putting to suddenly jump to the middle of the story, it then backs the start worst as you already learnt the plot twist. I had this problem with the adventure quest series of games and it put me off continuing with them.
Over focusing on open worldness makes telling a deep story almost impossible as game can't reliably know who is there and what situation they are in. This is a problem in the octopath traveller games as making it so the chapters can be done in any order meant the other 7 travelers had to just wait to the side until it is time to fight something as the game has no idea who will be there for any scene outside the hero of the path and it would be impossible to write the scenes for all the thousands of possible options. This is fixed in the concluding arc as game finally knows who is there (everybody) and what they've done (all the quests).
OK so I feel like I have to ask about the level of junk in Avernum...in light of what you say here, would you do that differently now? (For reference, I played the remake of Avernum, and I don't recall the junk being quite as prevalent in King's Wish.)
No, because I never meant you to pick up 98% of that stuff. It's all environmental storytelling. (I was influenced a lot by later Ultima games.)
Uhhhhhh... if can pick up will pick up. It's not that I enjoy the hoarding per se, it's that a) I've been historically rewarded for it 99% of the time, and b) I loathe backtracking with a passion. Oh I need that one flower that I know I saw somewhere but I can't for the life of me remember where? NOT FUN.
So yuh, I've been gaming since around the first Prince of Persia, and very VERY few games have persuaded me not to pick up everything not nailed to the ground. I say "persuaded" on purpose. If you're just telling me I'm overburdened but have offered me an infinite stash in a not too out of the way location, you haven't persuaded me, you just made me grind, and I dislike you for it.
The most recent example where I was temporarily (aka at the start of a run) persuaded to not hoard was NeoScavenger. I was persuaded by dying over and over and over for hours - until I realized I must learn to prioritize. It was a blast to be forced to change playstyles, even if you had to twist my arm for it. Still, a very idiosyncratic game.
So yeah. I'm all for environmental story telling, but if you want me not to pick up things, the game should make that clear to me. Plenty of ways to do that.
P.S. Avernum was fun, I remember that much, but I cant for the life of me remember the amount (or not) of junk, so that wasn't any specific criticism.
P.S.2 In massive games like this Zelda, the fact that the dev team doesn't spend a week specifically playtesting and thinking over the inventory UX is a crime. Half the time I spend in games is spent inside inventories - or it definitely feels that way, which amounts to the same thing. I have vivid images of the inventories of games whose story has long ago slipped my mind.
(Just wanted to clarify that I like both of the games mentioned above.)
It sounds a bit like the problems I had with BotW. I love open world games in theory, just like MMOs. For years I’d buy any game with either label. But they so rarely click. Too much space with not enough unique content.
BotW was much better than most, but still: after the 20th shrine I start to wonder why I’m playing.
Love your Substack. If you wanted to do reviews where we could get discussions like this going more often I’d be down.
Right now I’m struggling with BG3. I want to really dig the game just like I wanted to really dig Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2. But something is making it frustrating and impossible for me to really stick with any of them, and it’s interesting that I’m having trouble articulating what.
The shrines are an issue if you don't like them because you have to do a lot of them.
But Zelda games are puzzle games, and the puzzle shrines (most of the shrines) are the key delivery element for the puzzles. It's the place where you're forced to directly engage with a puzzle without bring in tons of stuff to cheat past it.
(Which you can do most of the time outside, which is also a lot of fun. Diving the puzzles between cheatable and not-cheatable is good.)
But if you don't enjoy the shrine puzzles, then yeah, that's a real problem. Not every game is for everyone.
The Breath of the Wild games reinforce my impression that Nintendo has recuited and cultivated really great game designers over the years, but they have no great writers and even in games Zelda or Pokémon the story is almost non-existent. The same goes for character design. I was disappointed when the series went 3D and almost everyone looked grossly cartoonish.
This is definitely a subjective thing. I think a photorealistic Zelda (or Mario) would look weird. I've really liked the art design.
Emphasis on _character_ design, not presentation like cell shading.
The characters do have to have some sort of design, and when you aren't going photorealistic they'll have to make some sort of stylistic choice. The thing about style is that not everyone will like it. That's what makes it a style.
In other words, as I've been saying in a lot of these responses, not every game is for everyone. If you don't like Zelda games for whatever reason, that's cool. They are their own specific distinctive thing. I'm coming at this as someone who likes them.
I haven't got anything to say on the subject of Zelda games, since I never played any of them (not my genre - I want my RPGs to be isometric and turn-based). Actually, this might be the reason for the low popularity of your posts on the game - your usual audience probably doesn't intersect much with Zelda players (thought I might be wrong). But I really wanted to mention that if you, or anyone reading this likes long-form game analysis, I recommend the late Shamus Young's blog, for example his excellent (and very, very long) series on Mass Effect (https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792), or, for a lighter reading, his let's play of LoTR MMO (https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=30811).
I'd be very interested to see a similar examination of games I worked on (Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous) in text form (can't stand videos), so if anyone can point me that way, I'd be grateful.
Mass Effect was another one with copy/paste outposts, but without the excuse of a massive world. I think there was one building, one mine and one spaceship you could board.
They varied them a bit by blocking some passages in the mine, or moving the arrangement of crates in the building, but it didn't help much. A better implementation of that system could work though.
Shamus Young died? Or just his blog is gone?
I really liked that blog. It stood out as one of the few great video game blogs around. But the format- Christ I could never find anything. I always gave up trying to follow a particular series of posts, no matter how interesting.
Yes, he died last year, unfortunately. His children and some friends try to carry on the legacy, but Shamus had an unique voice, so their stuff is very different (but might still be interesting).
It's a real shame, because he was a very dedicated and interesting critic. I was sad to hear he was gone.
The Zelda-playing market is huge enough that there are definitely some of us hanging around here, too!
Zelda games are almost certainly closer in genre to Spiderweb games than, say, the Dad of War games that have also been dissected here. ... I think? I'm second guessing myself now that I've made that confident claim.
Yeah, I wrote a lot of about God of War.
I feel like I should write about Starfield, but I don't really care that much about playing Starfield.
Bad phrasing on my part -- I was second guessing my declaration of Zelda being closer in genre than God of War, not whether you'd written about it!