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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The implicit steering is one of the things that Nintendo is famous for though. At least among game designers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE
What the video doesn't point out is that if you don't run to the right, the timing of the jump to avoid the Goomba makes you hit that first question mark block by accident.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Nobody ever got told they were an amazing composer because they followed all the rules. You can be good, but the greats all redefined something about the common practice of their time. However, if you stray too far away, people find your music too alien and tend not to like it at first. History is littered with references to new music from composers we now consider to be truly magnificent, who were at the time considered to be merely mediocre, or whose innovations were not welcomed with open arms.
And of course, computers are still terrible at writing lyrics. That's an entirely different game.
Maybe one day there'll be enough video games and literature that we can formulate a video game theory which is as extensive as our modern understanding of music theory. The thing with music of course is that we've been doing music for a lot longer.
My main takeaway from it, if I had to boil it down to one point, is your brain finds fun in mastering something (beating a challenge), but not so much afterwards (boring/repetitive) or if it's too difficult (frustrating). The problem is, where that line is for any given challenge can be different for everyone. You can also get more mileage out of something if an aspect of the challenge changes (people will play chess longer than tic tac toe for example, even though the game space is the same each time).
At Ghost we often find ourselves looking at a proposed or newly implemented feature and asking out loud "but, is it fun?". The answer can be very difficult to find, especially since many great features aren't fun until they've received that final layer of polish.
And here's part of what Zelda does so well. You can see how a lot of the great things in Breath of the Wild would be great fun even in a simple prototype. On the flip side, this kind of exhilarating feeling of being able to do so many cool things only works because every single piece of the game is designed with this in mind and all the crazy interactions people come up with are actually supported.
It only works so well because people aren't getting that familiar feeling of "oh. That didn't work." This must have been a massive task and I'm amazed they pulled it off!
[1] http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14780954/the-legend-of-zelda...
I can't begin to tell you how many times I come up with this clever idea, mock up a bunch of components or start coding a prototype, and go... "oh, damn, this isn't much fun." I've been able to whip a lot of those failed ideas into something fun, but it often takes a lot of experiments with different ideas or borrowing pieces of designs from other games that have worked, a lot of time and rumination on the design (I get a lot of my ideas for new things to try while walking my puppy, commuting in a quiet car, or in the shower), and putting it aside to work on something else and letting my subconscious or things I encounter in life to inspire potential solutions to the problem (and often it'll still take multiple attempts to fix things).
The ones that drive me the most crazy are the ones where you try it for the first time and go 'This isn't that fun with this set of rules, but it's close to fun. If I can just find the right tweak, this can be great.' It can sometimes seem like it takes forever to find that right tweak. I've got some prototypes that I think are almost there, but I've had to put aside because I spent so much time on it and still couldn't figure out the right tweak for them.
There have been attempts to nail down Game Design principles. There are quite a few books you can get on Amazon that have some good insights in them, GDC lectures, Gamasutra articles, academic journals, etc. There's nothing that's totally universal, but the more you learn, the larger your design palette to draw from.
Between us I think we've illustrated the distinction between "good setting" and "good game mechanics" and how they can influence whether somebody wants to play your game or not. But you definitely need at least one of them!
That is the "public" image of witchers in the universe. If you play the games (and especially if you read the books) it becomes quite clear that it is just a facade.
And quite a bit of brooding that is there is "I've seen this shit before" as Geralt by the time of Witcher 3 over 100 years old (the older witcher Vesemir is over 200 years old). The mutations give Witchers long lives (none of them have ever died of old age)
Also the word "Witcher" set my teeth on edge too. So really the whole world is probably not for me!
There's really no winning strategy here. The best creators can do is try to target what they know their existing fanbase will like, or target a fanbase as the audience they want to get. Miyamoto is really good at this. CDProjekt is also really good at this.
What we need in helping us find the games we will love is an understanding that not everyone likes the same things. Some reviewers do acknowledge this, but far from all, and a lot of it boils down to finding individual reviewers you feel you can trust.
Which is not something I've managed to do yet.
People need to stop comparing it with games from first-tier creators like Nintendo.
They have huge resources, exactly the experience needed and so on. Hardly comparable.
No Man's Sky's issues did not purely come down to budget or team size, but skewed priorities. Lots of work went into the tech and procedural generation, while seemingly a lot less went into the actual core gameplay systms that actually give the players something to do in said world.
They put the idea of an unlimited size universe above that of a game that has interesting things to actually do in said universe.
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"
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).
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.
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.
The only time I can recall stutter was at the beginning when I started down the mountain. It was very brief, and I thought there would be much more to come. I'm about 15 hours in and have only made it to the first village. No stuttering or frame drops in this configuration since the very beginning.