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Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

This used to be the reputation of Nintendo.

I think it was more true in the late 90s/early 2000s. Now that enough time has past, it seems like the GameCube was the last genuine quality system and genuine quality games.

After that it was just gimmicks and marketing campaigns. You can see this from both hardware and software sides. With TotK's flop, people were able to see BotW wasnt that great, and its getting people to take a more objective look at Nintendo 'Quality'.

I wonder if Nintendo will continue to keep loyal people repeating the line about 'good Nintendo games', but with Indie devs making games that are more enjoyable than Nintendo, how much longer can Nintendo keep giving people bare minimum? (Honestly my bet is forever, they will turn into a gambling company sucking the money from their IP devotes before Nintendo dies)

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> With TotK's flop, people were able to see BotW wasnt that great

Uhhh, what? https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/all/all/current-year/

While I don't agree with that poster, Tears seems hugely popular, many 3D Zelda games have gotten stellar reviews then people over time start to dislike it.

Compare the Skyward Sword reviews with the remake. The original saw massive praise while the remake got a lot of flak for not fixing enough of the issues with the original. No idea if that's started happening to Breath of the Wild, but I wouldn't be surprised.

There's objectively little to complain about in TotK, there's no realistic reason for it to age poorly. It's a perfected version of botw, which itself was a great game, and then they added a lot of new functionality and gimmicks to make things fresh.

Skyward, even at the time you could tell that some parts were not going to age well or weren't even really good. Skyward gestured towards a lot of stuff that was perfected in botw/totk, but was clearly limited by hardware and time.

You say that, but the reviews for Skyward also said things like "Every moment is a joy" and "All of the gameplay innovations, emotionally involving moments, beautiful little details, and purely blissful experiences in this game have me completely and utterly spoiled." https://www.metacritic.com/game/the-legend-of-zelda-skyward-...

Maybe Tears is actually good enough to survive the test of time. From the outside, I can easily imagine people in ten years saying "then I needed to craft a slightly different car for the billionth time."

There's always poor quality reviews.

I'm just talking about from my own personal experience of playing Skyward and TotK both pretty soon after each came out, it was easy to tell which would age better.

> From the outside, I can easily imagine people in ten years saying "then I needed to craft a slightly different car for the billionth time."

Doesn't sound realistic, I mean there's a whole mechanic in the game to avoid that problem. I get that that's just an example, but it seems indicative of what I mean, you really have to work to find much to complain about beyond nitpicks. The devs clearly understood their game and worked hard to fix many of what otherwise would have been issues.

I liked it a lot but many friends who played it got lost constantly. The funnel for moving you along the game is big but if you fell out of it suddenly everything feels hard or impossible or inscrutable in the worst way (big example: many people trying to access a certain temple before they’re supposed to and then trying way too hard to get there)

It takes a little bit of a mindset change to adjust to how sprawling the game is. If you get stuck on something, move on to one of the hundreds of other quests and eventually you'll be ready for that big challenge again.

With TotK's flop, people were able to see BotW wasnt that great

What a strange, trivially falsifiable take.

18 million units sold in two months. What a flop.

Zelda didn't flop? Lmao.

But I do agree that without indie devs being added to Switch platform, it would be completely dead. Nintendo haven't really made any new IP for a very, very long time now. They release a new Mario/Zelda game every what 2-3 years now or something?

And yeah, the new Mario/Zelda games have interesting new things in them (and are super fun) but are still relatively cookie-cutter.

I've started collecting "retro" games from my childhood now and been buying GB/GBC/PS1/DS/PSP etc games and it's crazy to go back because I really am starting to notice how many new franchises and interesting gameplay elements older games had.

Even if those franchises didn't succeed/get sequels it still added fun/value and variety to the platform. But it seems like the game industry is playing it safe now, every x time we get a new Mario/Zelda/Halo/CoD/etc. Playing older games now it's just so much fun to see "oh this one they wanted to do x but with this weird y thing" even if y was annoying & it didn't work out, it still makes for an interesting/different game. Same thing with Nintendo, they're playing it safe now after the era of "what if we based our console around motion control" spawning many a Wii sports meme. Now it's "we so smart, our console is handheld and TV console"; bruh the PSP go did that (I suppose the detachable joycons kiiind of count?)

Sure there are indie games in between but I've also noticed that indie games...aren't as good as they used to be? Like the golden indie age was maybe 2010-2016 or so? There have been a few hits since then, but I really feel like indie games have become formulaic especially the "make something crazy & quirky by design" formula, as opposed to previous indie hits that turned out crazy & quirky, but weren't planned to be; it's just because the developers' personalities were that way and it really shows with how polished and loved some of the older indie games are.

I guess the slice of indie pie for people that start a game with "I'm going to make this game & sell it & it will be an indie hit" has grown larger compared to the "I'm gonna make this rad game that I've wanted to make since I was a kid and I'm making it for my friends & I if nobody else" which has become a smaller slice.

I am genuinely confused, is this post meant to be taken as a joke?

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