Game aside, the reviews have been pointing out how the game performs well (after day 1 patch) and is not pestered with bugs, which is an impressive feat for such an open world game where most things are able to interact with everything else.
Notable in that regard: Apple did the same under Steve Jobs. Focus on the important part, and don't play around.
But also Hollow Knight, Salt and Sanctuary and Axiom Verge are some pre-BotW games that I've personally played where you can rush the credits without experiencing a significant portion of the game once you've gotten out of the early game.
shout out to Chrono Trigger and Super Mario World which, while not metroidvanias, have the same "rush the final objective once you can with minimum exploration" vibe that many of them have.
Even if you take a completely different profession, like music, revolutionary artists still have their influences and build on instruments and techniques that are 99.9% the same. It's not like they are suddenly playing flutes made out of loaves of bread. And even if they were, most of the time those sorts of things just come across as gimmicks to me.
I don't understand the question, like what's a game play mechanic that it doesn't have?
Those all sound like things I've seen in lots of games, but not necessarily in Zelda games.
Execution. Not originality.
This is such an orientalist and borderline racist view it’s crazy. If it were true then it would also imply the other japanese game devs also affected by it. There countless bad games from Japan, don’t even have to walk far from Nintendo just look at the Pokémon games and how GameFreak release them with 0 optimization. And then the countless misses from Square Enix, Bandai Namco etc.
There, is that racist too?
The result is beautiful, I love the whole "ancient technology" concept in it, which is not something we have in our world (except for pyramids perhaps).
That's a pretty racist argument, to generalize this way. Not all Japanese are the same, not all share the same mindset, education and philosophies.
I haven’t worked with Japanese companies but Chinese companies work couldn’t be more different than western.
long hours, very high level of expectations, fine tuned attention to good gameplay design, and the protection of higher ups execs like miyamoto from bean counters.
Racism is hating a cultural group or having a prejudice against them, not making a comment on it.
If anything, OPs comment is a compliment on Japanese work.
Grow up man, this is some elementary stuff that you shouldn’t need explained to you.
The claim that Japanese culture causally leads to better craftmanship might be wrong. As you've mentioned, there are plenty of counterexamples that argue against Japanese culture having the claimed causal influence. But this doesn't make the original claim racist nor even borderline racist.
I disagree. Nintendo has good engineers but so does many of the other studios. For me what sets Nintendo apart is not their code or technology, but their game design and game direction. The way they seem to craft their game-play and game mechanics to have everything it needs but nothing more, and then couple it with the perfect match for game aesthetics with unmatched consistency.
You usually can’t get a great engineering team by throwing a bunch of good engineers together, it takes time and work.
I don’t know much about the game industry but from what little I have heard it seems there is a lot of churn.
Nintendo made blogs take down the pictures of the slides afterwards, but here is a good summary:
One big thing they pointed out is the type of gaming they target. While the Playstation and Xbox general aim for very serious, high "skill" players, Nintendo often launches just above the seriousness and skill level of mobile gamers. It's easy for me to sit down with my extended family and play Mario Party or Mario Kart, but they'd hate me if I had them play Elden Ring. They also are strongly against much of the free to play content.
I left that episode questioning how much of Nintendo's recent success is due to them outcompeting versus the competition making a series of unforced errors.
Game maker's toolkit has one on how they solved their open world problem for BotW:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZzcVs8tNfE
And at GDC, they talked about their Chemistry engine for BotW:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyMsF31NdNc&t=2354s
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk5swSyJ5zQ
Game historian has some tidbits of how they made certain design decisions for their successful games
Mario Kart:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDHZKYETDyU
Super Mario World:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2bTQK6vbKI
Super Mario Bro 3:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxT6IwUtLSU
GMT, Snowman, and Extra credit does analysis of how Nintendo designs their Mario levels.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBmIkEvEBtA
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KVEjhT4wQ
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwj3On5o58U
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fI9pfDf60g
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE
Generally, it follows the ramp up and down of the Hero's journey in storytelling.
1. Introduce a new mechanic in a safe area where it's impossible to die.
2. Increase the challenge with the mechanic by adding variations
3. Ramp up challenge even more by combining with previously learned mechanic
4. Have periods of rest inbetween the challenges.
I wish there were better crossplatform native desktop development environments. Teams made / is making the switch to React at the moment, but it's still a web application.
I've recently gotten into the early access program for Beeper, which promises to be a native cross-channel chat app connecting things like Slack, Teams, Whatsapp etc into a native app. I like the native app part, but the downside of one-app-for-all is that it's lowest common denominator in terms of features and visually it looks like none of the other apps. Still uses 130-140 MB of memory at the moment though.
I think this is the real lesson to take away from the Switch. The device is woefully underpowered, but developers know there's a huge market out there so they just have to Make It Work. The end result is that many games, especially first party ones, are super well optimized for their hardware. You could see this with the 3DS too, the things those 285MHz could pull off were definitely very impressive.
On PC and other amd64 platforms there's so much raw CPU and GPU compute available that it's possible to get away with performance impacts. Doom Eternal is one of the few well-optimized big games that just seems to play well on any device with a GPU you throw at it. Compare that to some recent releases and you really wonder how bad things must've gotten.
Of course, highly optimized game development takes time, effort, and skill, and that doesn't come cheap. As long as gamers accept the inefficiencies on other platforms, games will continue to be released in a subpar state. Nintendo cares more about the quality and reputation of their brand (in some areas) than it does about making money so it goes the extra mile; I doubt EA or Bethesda care as much as long as they keep making money.
Being exceptional is, by definition, exceptional.
To implement both at the same time is quite something if you ask me.
Basically by doing development like we used to do in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days.