Hacker News Reader

Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

I'd disagree. I like having a bit more direction in the main quest and being able to skip over all the side quests, mainly due to time constraints (which are very little compared to someone with kids, long commutes, etc), the linearity of older Zelda titles was never an issue for me. With BotW you seem to have to do many house of side quests just to be able to take on the main one.

I've sunk about 30+ hours in now and I don't think I would have come this far had it not been a Zelda game, a series I've been playing for 25 years.

It's certainly not a bad game, but it's not one for people that can't make serious time commitments.

View on HN

Disagree completely.

I have two kids (one is only 2 months old) and also have a long commute, demanding job, etc. I also don't have a lot of time to play games. But the Switch just makes it so easy to play. It's the first console I can play in bed at night without bothering my wife and newborn.

Thus, with its portability, it makes it extremely easy to just play anytime I have time.

Also, why rush? 1 to 2 hours a day is more than enough. This game is a slow burn and I'm loving every moment of it!

> It's the first console I can play in bed at night without bothering my wife and newborn.

What about WiiU and the 100s of handheld consoles?

The Wii U can be used in this way, but only if your bedroom is right next to the room that you normally have it connected to the TV and you have thin walls, as it is limited by the wireless connection range, which struggles sometimes even within large rooms.

Though, you can actually have wherever you want, if you don't need it connected to a TV, I've seen photos of people playing the Wii U in an airport lounge, all you need is a plug socket.

My issue with the New 3DS is that the buttons are incredibly clicky. Like using a mechanical keyboard while someone is trying to sleep. The Switch seems a bit quieter in that regard.

> Also, why rush?

Exactly. I rarely understand people who begrudgingly dismiss large, epic games due to their limited time. The size of the game becomes irrelevant if you can save and continue at any point. Feel free to progress as slowly as you prefer. Your quest log sums up what's going on in case you forgot since your last session a few weeks ago.

I bought The Witcher 3 on release and have been playing it since - 2 hours here, a free evening there, maybe on a lazy sunday. I'm still not finished. To me that just means that I'll be able to enjoy the game for a very, very long time.

Gets tough when time gets really short, and you occasionally miss an entire week or two. You forget WTF was going on, how the controls work, and so on. Kills your connection with the characters in games where that matters.

> Also, why rush?

Information density.

You can have a game that takes a long time, but it would need a LOT of story in it's missions and sidequests to keep it interesting. If you stretch a 10 hour story over 80 hours of gameplay it gets boring real quick because the pacing of the story will simply be too slow.

> With BotW you seem to have to do many house of side quests just to be able to take on the main one.

What? Why? I did almost no side quests until after doing all the divine beasts. There's some minor things to get into the relevant towns, and to get to the beast, but they were generally fun/interesting and part of the main quest. I don't see a reason you'd have to do any of the more boring ones.

I've noticed that BOTW which is different things to different people. I mean you could just run straight up to Ganon and finish the game in under 1 hour. Or you could play it linearly, only going where the quests take you.

Personally I just ran around finding shrines, and only finished the main quests after unlocking most of the world and many shrines.

You're probably more talented than me, I couldn't get through the boss fight of the water divine best so I went to level up.

It's a much harder game than normal Zelda's.

"normal Zelda's" being the other 3D ones?

Breath of the Wild has far more in common with the original Legend of Zelda than with the more recent games.

Some may consider that this game approaches the difficulty of the NES/SNES Zelda titles a return to form. Though, I suppose that those are not really 'Normal' Zelda games anymore.

I thought so too and that was my first boss and when in finally took him down I thought to myself "that was way Way WAY too hard for a Zelda game". Thats when a hint in the game finally made sense so I restored to test and yea, it was relatively easy if you do the right things.

Similarly with other combat I thought it was way harder than other Zeldas. When I was near finishing the game I went online and checked "how to fight a lynel" (the hardest enemy imo). Watching that opened up some ideas and combat got much easier and more exciting. I kind of wish I had looked it up earlier. I was literally at Hyrule Castle on my way to complete the game when I looked.

I thoroughly enjoyed the game but my previous Zelda experience also limited my thinking about what's possible. I feel like I missed a large part of the game play because of that

the linearity of older Zelda titles was never an issue for me.

The thing is that the first 3 Zelda's were not linear. I remember being so frustrated that Ocarina of time went out of it's way to stop me from exploring new areas, and how navi ruined all the exploration. I think Breath of the Wild is the first 3d Zelda that feels like the classic games.

They were more linear than you realise, too progress in dungeon 3 you needed a weapon from dungeon 2, etc. OOT wasn't a radical departure from that and was about as open. The Wii ones were the most linear and that was a reaction to the criticism for lack of story.

This isn't really all that true. In Zelda 1 first quest I think only two dungeons are item locked to dungeon items. People who are good at the game can do them pretty significantly out of order. There's still a difficulty progression that makes this hard, but you can be good enough to overcome it.

Zelda 2 I'm less familiar with, but it has fewer items to lock you out in general with. I think once you get the hammer you have a lot of run of the overworld, again largely being constrained by difficulty ramping and leveling up which you can do anywhere.

Zelda 3 is considerably more linear though, it's true. You can sequence break the dark world a fair bit, but it's a lot clunkier by this point. Still, it's not anywhere near as rigid as the 3d Zeldas have been.

don't have the game, but i was under the impression you could walk over to the final boss fight in 15 minutes. are you maybe doing some min maxing to avoid that fight?

I very much doubt that's the case, at the very least I doubt it's possible for all but the most freakishly talented. There are regular enemies all over the world, even in the tutorial area that can single hit you, even after you've upgraded a lot.

Looks like the speedrunners have it under an hour now. http://www.usgamer.net/articles/zelda-breath-of-the-wild-spe...

I mean, sure, they're probably crazy good, but i doubt you're 30x worse than they are. Watch a video or two. I don't think you'll set a record or anything, but i bet you'll be able to finish the game real fast.

I'd put them in the freakishly talented category. There's no way 99.9℅ of us could do that.

actually me and my friends did it like the video (we actually entered the castle in a more regular way, using a raft and then using the rails) and came to the first ganon bosses. I let them play and everytime one died they needed to switch controllers, they played all previous zeldas but never botw and they came really really far in something like 4 hours, while switching the controller. (of course they skipped all the main quests).

That's just not how games like this work, and it's not that normal gamers are worse. It's perfectly reasonable that a normal gamer might take 30 hours to complete a game that a speed runner can complete in an hour. One's goal is to play the game, the other's goal is to use their existing game knowledge to cut out as much content as possible.

You can't expect to do a speed run on your first play through without following a guide, and if you do that what's the point in even playing it? Unless beating games as fast as humanly possible is your thing.

So, a simple "run to the final boss and then die" is 12 minutes [0], but actual speedruns routed for completion have quickly dropped from 1.5 hours to under 1 hour just within the past week. [1] Speedrunners are very gutsy and innovative and are basically guaranteed to find ways to dramatically reduce times on a game this popular.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=samulGnaDVg

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYa2eAZ718

Haven't played it either, but from what I've heard you can do that, but you'll get pounded to a fine paste by said boss in about three seconds flat.

Just because a game _can_ be beaten like that doesn't mean that's all there is to it. Example: far cry 4 [0]

[0] http://kotaku.com/far-cry-4-has-a-hidden-bad-ending-16589899...

I'm the exact opposite. I don't care about main quests and such. In terms of gamer persona I'm more of an explorer and just like poking around and seeing what's out there and what I can do. For that, BotW has been perfect.

Why do you need to rush through the game? I only play max 1 hour per day and having a blast.

It's more that the side quests are a mixed bag in terms of how compelling they are, yet they aren't really side quests but required for the more interesting parts of the game.

The rush is so that I can do the million other things I want to do in my spare time. I much prefer the old way of doing the main quest and coming back to side quests for an hour or two here and there.

Is it so important that you need to finish the game in order to have your spare time back? So what if it takes you 2 months to finish the game, playing a couple of hours here, a few hours there?

Not really, but I'd prefer it not to be like Skyward sword where I got frustrated with the waggle controls, put it down and never picked it up again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com