I wonder, what other games are you comparing it to / which have you played?
How does it stack for example against The Witcher 3 which won a landslide of awards?
I can kind of understand why The Witcher 3 won a load of awards, but it just wasn't my thing (and I kept getting stuck on collision boxes where I really didn't think there should be any, which is utterly infuriating).
I am expecting to see Breath of the Wild winning absolutely truckloads of awards. How it will stand up in the future remains to be seen, but in this moment it's a fantastic new milestone in the history of the open world RPG.
Besides, Witcher 3 had an intimate sex scene on stuffed unicorn.
That's why I love the Witcher lore. It's one of very, very few fantasy settings where ethics are fuzzy and ugly. It makes other fantasy settings look like rom coms.
(I used to write Quenya and Sindarin in the tengwar! Probably still could; I'm sure I kept those notes. Brilliant languages, if heavily systematized in the same unrealistic way as Esperanto. But I still to this day can't make it through the main trilogy without running out of patience. Would you believe, I used to think I was the one with the problem?)
But yeah, the good vs evil stuff is pretty ham-fisted and always was. And there's some pretty racist stuff in there.
I have a WiiU but I still don't know should I get a Switch or buy the WiiU version of Zelda. I'm a massive Nintendo fan but mostly playing with a PC nowadays.
The WiiU version plays fine. A few frame rate hiccups on complex scenes here and there but nothing terrible. And I hear the Switch has this when docked anyways.
Right now I’m playing through 3 and seeing Geralt as a monster-slayer consultant that occasionally has to deal with deadbeat clients. Interesting to see how he protects his finances before and after these encounters with the buyer (there’s only one quest I can recall where he actually asks for a deposit, since the quest giver reeks of thievery and corruption).
This article[0] goes into detail on why I think it's so great, but contains spoilers.
[0] https://killscreen.com/articles/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-att...
I don't normally like open world games, but I loved the Witcher 3 and Fallout New Vegas.
The world of the Witcher 3 feels more real, but Breath of the Wild is more fun to explore.
FO3 felt too linear and too hand held. FO:NV on the other hand was actually decent.
FO4 is not fun at all if you want the open world RPG element. It's a shooter more than anything else, and you have to avoid settlements completely. The survival difficulty mode was decent in difficulty, but it lacked "oh shit" mechanics so random encounters don't just kill you at will for the first many hours of gameplay until you get some gear.
The general consensus on Breath of the Wild so far is that it's at least a tier above that - the tier that defines a console generation. Games like Mario 64, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, stuff like that. That's Tier II.
In Tier I are the games that are in consideration for the greatest games of all time: Ocarina of Time, Link to the Past, Final Fantasy VII, etc. Some people think it'll end up here, but we won't know that until we look back on it in a few years.
Really? I don't think there is ANY game of the quality of Witcher 3 coming on a yearly basis...
The only way I could imagine saying that is if you focus only on the mechanics of the RPG game loop and ignore world design, dialog quality, voice acting, characters, breadth of content, quests, etc.
Had The Witcher 3 come out in 2016, it would have certainly been behind Overwatch. Had it come out in 2014, it would have certainly been behind Dark Souls II. In 2017, it would be behind Breath of the Wild, and it's only March. There are equal or better games every year.
Well, a lot of game critics disagree with that. Many of them gave GotY to MGS or Fallout instead, and MGS has a higher metacritic score than W3. I'm not going to debate beyond that because it'll devolve into complete subjectivity, but it's pretty clear W3 isn't a once-a-generation game.
https://gotypicks.blogspot.com/2015/09/2015-game-of-year.htm...
(And really, a suggestion of Dark Souls II as some kind of awards powerhouse is totally detached from any reality).
I'm going off of Wikipedia's GotY list, which includes only more notable publications. That lists adds in a ton of small gaming blogs and regional user's choice awards, which I don't think gives you better data. In Wikipedia's list, TW3 is winning, but a little less drastically.
I think you're attacking a claim I'm not making, and we're not even disagreeing, though. I didn't claim TW3 was worse than other contenders in 2015, I said it's one of a few solid games that come out every year. Everything you're saying and everything I'm saying supports that.
Edit: GotY is a decent signal, but discussions about which videogames are better are always going to be highly subjective. The Walking Dead won in 2012 and most people don't consider TWD to be on the same level as a lot of the other GotY games.
OOT, LttP, FF VII ar all decent games but not even close to "greatest games of all time". I'd classify them as Tier 3 at best.
[BOTW puzzle spoilers below]
Comparing it to the Witcher 3 is actually a great way to highlight its strength--the insane depth of the mechanics. It feels almost like you're playing Nethack or Dwarf Fort in terms of how deep the mechanics go and how much the game designers allow you to do. Not _as_ deep, nothing's as deep as Dwarf Fort, but deep enough that I can make the comparison.
For example, both TW3 and BOTW have a mechanic where you can mix different ingredients together to give yourself stat bonuses. They both have you harvest the ingredients from the in-game world. Very similar so far. But in TW3, you mix them by going through some menu screens and clicking on the appropriate items. In BOTW, you take the items out of your inventory, hold them, and return to normal gameplay while holding them and can then choose to drop them anywhere in the outside world (ideally in a heated cauldron). But you can choose to drop them just in an open flame, and while you can't get potions this way, you _can_ cook ingredients like apples and meat to have them restore more of your health. But if you leave them in the fire too long, they'll catch fire themselves. And if it's a dry day and you're standing in the right (or wrong) kind of terrain, the grass underfoot may catch on fire, too. And it may spread (and start interfering with enemies--but that's another story). And there's more to it than that--if you drop certain ingredients in snowy landscapes or icy streams, they'll freeze over and give you heat resisting properties when they didn't before. And if you drop them in areas that are too hot (think side of an active volcano), they'll start cooking immediately, as if you had dropped them over an open flame in a standard area. You can distract certain a certain type of enemy by dropping food in front of it too.
The entire game is like this. For example, in another dungeon I got stuck on a puzzle that clearly wanted me to put two magic electric orbs on two switches, about 5m apart from each other. But for the life of me I could only find one of the orbs. After fifteen minutes of running around, I remembered that my metal weapons conducted electricity--I had found that out because I had gotten killed by a lightning strike while I was flying through a storm earlier, I ignored the warning sparking around my back and had to reload a save. So I dropped every metal weapon I had and dragged in a metal chest from another room in the dungeon and made a circuit from one switch to the other with the single electric orb in the middle. And it totally worked to solve the puzzle. (Looked up where the second orb was later and I was blind to not notice it, whoops.)
It doesn't have the depth of writing that TW3 does, the characters are more cartoonish and less nuanced and the plot itself is much more straightforward and doesn't have a tenth of the subterfuge. But the writing isn't poor, either, it's done extremely well for its style. It comes across as very Ghibli-esque to me. Zelda's character in particular is nuanced and an interesting examination of their old tropes without fully subverting them, and the way they reveal the story to you is through a series of clever small vignettes that overwhelmingly choose these small intimate moments that manage to imply so much more than they outright say.
It's unabashedly 11/10 GOTY and maybe "game of this generation" to me, though I'm trying to give myself some time to get over the initial rush before I make that kind of call. Blows TW3 out of the water, and I loved TW3.
There is no handholding or quests you must be complete in a particular sequence or being locked in a particular part of the map. You can just go anywhere and do anything. And everyone you do go is incredibly well designed, polished and interesting.
It isn't on par for me with Uncharted or The Last of Us for the depth and quality of the story but it is a pretty damn good game.
Usually doing 'a' while 'b' means you are primarily doing 'b', and 'a' is a bonus.
I would not compare a game aimed at kids (Zelda) vs a game which is clearly more adult-focused (Witcher 3). It's like comparing a Disney movie vs an Aliens episode and asking which one is the best.