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Comment by HellDunkel | Hacker News Reader

The game designers did a truly fantasic job with botw. Think how much time is invested in creating game assets these days and often the designs merely replicate cliches which have been seen a million times. Doing some reseach and drawing inspiration from ancient cultures adds a whole new dimension to the game.

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A great design job indeed. Both, BOTW and TOTK have a beautiful environment. I really wish Nintendo would create a mod without monsters, perhaps something focused more on nature, places and artifacts. My kids love to explore Hyrule but are afraid of monsters and fights :)

I only just recently been into BOTW (well technically last christmas but only played a few days in january) and went back to it last month. You can totally play and explore for a long time while avoiding most fights. Just keep some wood and silex to sleep during the night and avoid the random bats and skeleton creatures.

Sure, or you can stay in villages (that's what my kids do) or in other "safe zones" (marked in unofficial maps). Still, I think it would be nice to have some kind of a peaceful mod.

I had similar feelings about Far Cry 5. My son would have loved exploring, driving, flying, fishing, spotting wildlife… but at his age the violence made it useless. A mode that removed all the guns and bad guys would have been awesome.

I used to play a modded copy of GTA 5 with my son that removed all the violence and you would teleport into cars instead of stealing them. My son would have me ride the street car with him, drive in the sewers, drive to the farm and look for tractors. It's a really great city simulator with mods.

It's Zelda tradition :) I used to love "Zelda" when I was a kid, and I would always run around the sunny home island in Wind Waker on the Gamecube. When I went to play "Zelda" at my cousin's house, it was Majora's Mask on the N64, and I remember it scaring the absolute shit out of me!

Wear Majora's Mask and most monsters will just ignore you.

The art style in Zelda Switch games is certainly interesting but the game world is mostly just empty space dotted with the same couple dozen assets that have been reskinned and recycled.

The "grade inflation" that Nintendo fans bestow upon every title the company creates is frustrating, and there's a lot of toxic positivity that drowns out true criticisms. The Zelda Switch titles are nowhere close to 10/10 games.

Do you dislike sandbox games in general? BOTW’s map felt really designed to have unique, memorable areas and playtested to be “fair” to me, especially the noob area.

> The "grade inflation" that Nintendo fans bestow upon every title the company creates is frustrating, and there's a lot of toxic positivity that drowns out true criticisms. The Zelda Switch titles are nowhere close to 10/10 games.

BOTW is in my top 5 sandbox adventures for sure. TOTK had some good mechanics, but I think reusing the map was a mistake.

What's the "true criticism"? You've made a couple posts on this page about it that seem to just be "it's overrated" and "they re-use some assets a lot" and "other open-world games exist."

Neither of those are particularly compelling. Did they invent the game style? No. But this is the closest anyone's came to perfecting it. Exploration is encouraged and facilitated, without overloading you with "here are fifty map points of interest all at once." There are harder/deadlier enemies and areas, but you can usually get out easily enough and won't get stuck if you wander there before you're leveled up enough. The mechanics and responsiveness of interaction are super crisp. The inventory is quite well balanced and pretty thorough and allows a good number of different play styles (TOTK especially, obviously).

Not really interested in getting into a Reddit-style back and forth about a game I played and didn't finish like 6 years ago.

::starts online conversation::

::refuses to participate in online conversation::

>"grade inflation"/"toxic positivity"

This is probably true of me (for BOTW/TOTK) from the position of a hard-core gamer or game critic, and itt stems from where I am in life. I am not looking for a super innovative/blem free game. I am looking for something that I can play with my kid and just have a fun time.

I have played a lot of games over the years. I have 250+ hours in every single fallout title (except 76), have completed all Halo storylines, hundreds of hours into each of the HL games, and have completed most of MGS. Most recently I put 80+ hours into Starfield, and another 60+ into Helldivers 2. If you're a hardcore gamer, those are all baby numbers (especially since I played fallout 2 in 1999), but to a non-gamer those numbers probably seem obscene.

All that to say, the 300 hours I have combined between BOTW + TOTK were a truly magical time hanging out with my daughter. I can't explain it more than that.

10 out of 10 games. Zero flaws.

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