Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

They have clearly poured a mountain of design and engineering effort into squeezing every last drop of graphic fidelity and art out of the Switch. It looks really really good. Some of that is having the wisdom to choose an art style that works well on the Switch—a little cel-shaded, not a ton of texture detail. But, also, they really are getting as much detail and graphic complexity as they possibly can out of that little machine.

This isn't some cheap 2D pixel art game that spent their whole budget on game mechanics. It's a AAA game that maxed out their budget along every single axis. They just happened to target hardware with lower specs.

Yes, I'm still slightly salty about the train wreck that KSP 2 turned out to be.

It's true that gameplay trumps all, and it definitely didn't push me off the (excellent) game, but the Switch hardware really _substantially_ impacts the experience.

A great game on the other hand cam have outdated graphics no problem. People will still love it.

It is impressive to make a great game with broad appeal. It isn't easy or trivial to do and companies that get it right should be recognized with good reputation and customers. I haven't heard other Studios whine and cry, but if they do it's not my problem so I don't care or mind if they do.

Nobody is forced to buy bad games, so I don't really understand the complaint there.

Also realistic graphic != good graphics, we need more stylized graphics like these recent 2 Zelda titles! It's a shame we already lost the great graphics of the 3ds era Pokemon (which I think is peak cell shading aesthetics) to a generic 3d look of recent titles.

Often, you can't tell what is that you're supposed to be looking at in order to advance or understand a gameplay mechanic.

I want to play a game. If I wanted to watch a movie, I would buy or stream a movie.

Absolute realism is a tedious goal.

life, art .. is complex and you need to cultivate, nurture people caring about making beautiful complex subtle things.

Totk is your classic AAA game it just was programmed for older hardware.

>more detail doesn't make a game better

Have you played red dead redemption 2? The detail elevates the game to one of the greatest masterpieces of all time.

Except in the case of this Zelda sequel you sort of are playing the exact same game you bought 5 years ago, and with little/no improvement to detail, for an even higher price (69.99)... While I've bought it and am enjoying it, its hardly some huge shift in any way (technical, gameplay or story) from BOTW, and virtually all the mechanics are identical. I still think it worthy of great reviews to be clear, but it is not some genre shaking release.

I don't make any strong claim that the proportion hasn't shifted, but that has absolutely been the case at every point in my awareness of games. Flip through an old Nintendo Power or Game Pro.

Meanwhile, some very interesting games are coming out these days - some of my favorites are from the past 5 years; time will tell how well they hold up, but I am optimistic.

The NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube were part of the "bits race" and kept pushing forward in hardware power. Mario 64 is credited along with Wing Commander for creating the AAA graphics race at all costs behavior in the industry.

The Wii wasn't entirely a direction change, Nintendo felt competing on CPU power now was not interesting and went for motion controls, that later all other consoles imitated.

Then we had the Wii U that tried to mix TV with handheld. Wii U kinda sucked so they just tried it again with the Switch and made it portable. This again is spawning clones (steam deck for example).

I am not a Nintendo fan (I was on Sega camp during console wars and currently I prefer the Playstation) but Nintendo hardware always is impressive.

PS4 and 5 for example are boring, just mostly normal x86 computers with custom OS.

Their [Nintendo] art-books are so cool - while a game-art-book isn’t necessarily unique to Nintendo I do appreciate the value in them being so well done and expansive. Don’t have the time to play Zelda sadly but the books have been a really neat thing to page through.

As a kid, going to Barnes and Noble and grabbing the Emerald/Sapphire/Leaf Green official strategy book was, and still is, one of the coolest “books” I have.

I also bought the Dragon Quest Builders game and hated that. It turns out I like classic RPG and action puzzler games but I don't like crafting and sandbox games. Now I know.

Nintendo knows how to lure in casual gamers.

They also take into consideration the limitations of the hardware from the very beginning, and not just the engineers, but the designers as well.

"...Although I am not an engineer, I have always included in my designs consideration for the technology that will make those designs a reality. People have paid me a lot of lip service, calling me a genius story teller or a talented animator, and have gone so far as to suggest that I try my hand at movies, since my style of game design is, in their words, quite similar to making movies. But I feel that I am not a movie maker, but rather that my strength lies in my pioneering spirit to make use of technology to create the best, interactive commodities possible, and use that interactivity to give users a game they can enjoy and play comfortably. "

Single digit fps at times when using ultrahand.

Like I get that they aren't anywhere close to as detailed or sophisticated as the graphics available in other games, but they appear to facilitate gameplay quite well.

Like "poor" has a connotation of "bad", where in this game they just weren't a focus and clearly are good enough to not be distracting, at least in the videos I've seen.

BotW was completely different than the zelda before. The only similiar enough zeldas mainline were Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, and these Switch Zeldas. And still both MM and TotK changed enough things from the previous game they they feel very completely different.

Same applies for mario main games for example. Check 64 -> Sunrise -> Galaxy -> 3D world -> Odyssey. They are all very different games.

Formulae changes, that something that most companies don't risk with their big IPs. And still, nintendo does occasionally comes up with new IPs like splatoon or arms.

Meanwhile, other ignorant people: WHERE's THE NEW IP???

Nintendo has a significant chunk of fans on that cultist level where they go ballistic and come for your throat when you point out they’ve been making the same games literally for 40 years. They have like half a dozen totally distinct IPs. LOL at the people bringing up side projects like BoxBoy, which could have shipped on all those old Nokias along with Snake. Mario + Rabbids is a MARIO game crossover and sells on name recognition. Literally nobody in 2023 would know what “Rabbids” even is let alone pay for a game centered on them without the “Mario” part.

The only thing that changes is technology, but they’re always behind too. Zelda is still using N64 single button combat and just sold 10 million copies of a copy/paste of BOTK with 20 year old Banjo and Kazooie Nuts & Bolts creation physics, and the vast majority of critics have to bow and praise. There are some real reviews with actual people out there unafraid to give BOTW/TOTK the 5-6 it deserves, but they’re too few and far between.

None of this is even getting into the gross superiority complex and behavior they show in their treatment of any third party studio even willing to port anything over to their systems, how they hold them hostage if they had ANY kind of involvement on any level financially (RIP Bayonetta 2 and 3), how they treat their own customers with crazy aggressive lawsuits and threats, etc. Just go look up their entire history - even that gold Nintendo label they put on boxes was for monetary and control reasons. Yes, companies do things to protect themselves and profits and blah blah blah, but nobody else does this stuff to the level and in the anti-consumer manner they do. The control and manipulation of Nintendo is even beyond Apple and Marvel/Disney levels, on par with Tesla. It’s literal insanity.

I know this is already way too long, but just a couple other interesting things you’d learn by reading up on their history - neither Sega (who positioned themselves and became a household name as the anti-Nintendo) nor PlayStation (Sony and Nintendo originally were working together on a CD-based system but their draconian behavior led to the partnership being called off by Sony and them going into gaming alone) would have existed in the way they have the past 3 decades if it weren’t for Nintendo being a POS company. Another interesting story involves Square Enix (then SquareSoft) at the end of the SNES generation, basically declaring they’re never making a game for Nintendo again (which didn’t hold up obviously but they still don’t release mainline Final Fantasy on them) and jumped to PlayStation for FF7. There is a two page advertisement for FF7 from back in the day that straight up makes fun of Nintendo by claiming the game is too advanced for them and would have taken up like 20 cartridges lol.

So, for their behavior resulting in these things and others, I do sincerely thank them (and anyone else who somehow got to the end of this)! :D

No. That is a western view point of someone that did not play the core nintendo games. It feels like projecting what is happening on every streaming service out there, or on every AAA western studio.

People are not praising new Zeldas because they are new games with the Zelda title, BotW was a complete revolution, it did open world like no other game did before it. It combined really well a huge a amount of features and fun things that no other game was able to do so before. Games like these are very rare.

Saying that is nostaligia when these 2 zelda play like no other Zelda. Saying that's it's because of brand when i've seen so many friends and colleagues that never gave a shit about nintendo buying a switch or emulating it and praising the hell out of this game.

Nintendo know what HBO does too, which is how to make exceptional content. That override absolutely every other value.

(I also suspect that part of the success is the mythical aspects of the Zelda games, and the reaching into the historical and religious past and traditions. Western companies seem to actively want to avoid this, but it’s extremely good for building content. Archetypes are archetypes for a reason, it’s evolutionary)

The titles you cite (Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time) also made sales records because they were so good they reached a wider audience. But if you look at historical sales a mainline Zelda entry usually sells 6m to 10m.

Breath of the Wild sold 30 million and Tears of the Kingdom looks to be on a similar trajectory. That's due to the strength of the game design that's broadened the appeal well beyond the typical Zelda gamer.

There are lots adults with college degrees now that are playing this game who weren't even in kindergarten yet (or born!) when the games you mentioned were released.

I don't think attach rates offer the full picture. Early on the audience for BOTW was so eager for the game they were buying the Switch just for BOTW. For a period the attach-rate was greater than 100%! But the Switch has broad appeal and the attach-rate of BOTW has declined as more types of gamers buy-in to the Switch. The Gamecube and (to a lesser extent) the Nintendo64 had less success than the Switch outside of core Nintendo fans which naturally means franchises like Zelda would have higher attach rates.

Mario Mario 1 & 2 are both well-designed executions of a concept that appeals to a more limited audience (building and playing user-made Mario levels). BOTW / TOTK hit that sweet spot of widely appealing concept and excellent execution.

Breath of the Wild has sold 30.7 million total so far, Tears of the Kingdom sold 10 million in its first 3 days.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda

Tears of the Kingdom is selling crazy numbers even without the lockdown boost. Other factors make a difference but the core of what drives the sale of these two titles is that they're great games people strongly want to play.

But this game (and Breath of the Wild) is selling above and beyond previous entries because it's such a great game that its appeal reaches well beyond Zelda's traditional audience.

Contrast that with BOTW at 30 million and ToTK at 10 million in 3 days.

I don't play modern games and am hardly a connoisseur but I seem to recall this being a mostly-solved problem via "level of detail" and hardware fog effects... has pop-in been an issue in the last decade? Saturn/PS1 games having it was par for the course but modern hardware is so powerful that it seems unnecessary.

There are, certainly, franchises that tank. Usually not after a successful release, though. That said, this one is odd, as the prequel didn't seem to generate near as much buzz?

If game of the year awards were reserved for new, non-sequel games, maybe franchises would be discouraged from selling the same game multiple times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_CD-i_games

But for more official games, I find Phantom Hourglass to be the weakest entry in the series. It's... fine? Painfully easy and loaded with padding.

still they did.

I'm in Warsaw and I see countless of zelda ads: whole walls of huge buildings are covered with them. They probably spent insane amount of money if they advertise it like this everywhere

I agree on the stuttering though - the only thing worse than low framerate is slightly higher average framerate + big dips.

60 fps is great for anything else.

If Inception runs at 24 fps, Zelda does not need to run at 60 fps.

Have you played Paper Mario: Sticker Star?

Rail shooters aren't exactly knock out hits anymore.

I love F-Zero and dumped a lot of time into it when I was 13 but F-Zero GX was so insanely inaccessible to new players. None of my friends ever wanted to play split-screen because it required intimate knowledge of the controls, tracks, and machines in addition to crackerjack timing on the controller. Mario Kart is a lot more successful because it's the exact opposite. Although I'd love another F-Zero game I understand why they aren't bothering.

Or perhaps make new IP, instead of warming up the old stuff?

You'll never get anything like God of war, red dead redemption 2 or dead space out of Nintendo.

The Wii was the first time Nintendo explicitly entered the market with hardware knowingly less powerful than their competition, and that was... 2006? So like 17 years, not 30.

You could make a case that their handheld hardware was always "underpowered" compared to the competition, like the Game Gear and PSP, but the justification at those times was better battery life and pocket-ability. The market results seem to speak for themselves, though

A lot of western pundits (and major studio executives) have been expecting Nintendo to "go third party" like Sega ever since the Gamecube, and yet they're still around. They seem to know what they're doing.

Edit: bad at math

It wasn't until the Wii that Nintendo gave up the tech arms race, because making games people want to play and marketing to the people who aren't turbo-nerds about half true specs turns out to be way more profitable.

But yes, TOTK is one of those titles which work great at 30 FPS.

I think it might be better when you play docked than in handheld mode, but I haven't rigorously checked.

we all have our blinders.

And you are listing pretty much the lower priority parts of the game - the exploration, density of content, core mechanics, innovation, insane freedom, variety of content, is absolute magic. It definitely plays like BOTW so you may not like it if you didn't like BOTW, but to say it doesn't have a lot of meaningful improvements is simply inaccurate.

It’s not going to fix the desire for the game to be like the old games, no. But for those that did already find something to like in the original BOTW, TOTK is most definitely all around an improvement on the original and substantially more fun.

This is an interesting perspective to me. I bounced off Ocarina of Time hard. It felt like I was being shuffled along a story that was already fully written.

Contrast that to my first experience with the series — the Legend of Zelda on NES — where you’re essentially dumped into the world without instruction and need to make your way.

For me, a huge draw of Breath of the Wild was the same as the NES version: being dumped into a world and being able to go wherever I wanted. I felt like that was a return to the old gameplay loop and mechanics. There was even item breakage — the Like Likes eating your upgraded shield.

I had essentially resigned myself to Zelda games from Ocarina on not being what I wanted, so it was refreshing to get BotW. I’m guessing similarly with TotK, but others in my household have made it such that I haven’t had a chance to try it yet.

The only thing I can think of that Nintendo could do to make me happier than with BotW is make a playable 3D game that is essentially the art that was in the original NES Legend of Zelda’s instruction manual.

And in 15 years, people will have the same level of adoration for this game and ignore any rough spots, like FPS or weapons breaking

That is a feature, not a flaw. They improved the feature in TOTK with Fuse. Now you're forced to try out hundreds of different weapons. You could play for ages and not use the same weapon twice.

Compare to something like Elden Ring, where I felt like the game was almost discouraging me from trying out different weapons. You have to sink so much into a build that just kicking the tires on a different kind of weapon is almost impossible. It's almost guaranteed to feel underpowered.

https://hoten.cc/blog/porting-zelda-classic-to-the-web/

That is Mario, Metroid, Zelda, Pokemon, etc.

If you could play them on PC or Android very few consoles would be sold.

I like Majora's Mask more, but Ocarina of Time is the better game.

Meanwhile it had incredible music, looked really good, the combat was a great fusion of 2D simplicity with the openness and flexibility of Windwaker, the boss fights were fun and felt "Big", boat customization was great, the world was huge, writing directly on your map is a wonderful feature, the characters were lovely, I just don't understand the hate it gets.

I feel like a lot of people wanted it to be a 3D zelda game and that's why they were upset. 2D zeldas and 3D zeldas are basically two different franchises.

No firm proof for this, just some rumors.

I think this is unacceptable. I know it feels acceptable, but I think it's not.