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Joseph Anderson - Breath of the Wild Analysis
- Thread starter nynt9
- Start date
It has some problems. I don't know why the lock on is so inconsistent. Was it a design choice? An inability to account for more variation in the terrain? I end up not using it a lot of the time. I don't agree that the flurry rush system is broken. In what way? That it grants you some leeway even if an attack would have missed anyway? I don't think that's a problemthe game is doing its best to predict when contact will be made, and opens a window of opportunity to counter, guessing where the player might be after the enemy movement and player movement interact at some future time. It would be broken if it did not work when attacks were going to land. Better safe than sorry.
As for "fun," with all the personal baggage that word carries, I think this is the best combat in 3D Zelda so far. It is more dynamic, scrappy, and vertical than combat has ever been. There is no best approach. There is usually more movement on the battlefield, and at its best it creates a kinetic sense of flow: dodging arrows while seeking angles and opportunities against close range foes, never holding still, not hesitating, reacting to cues for parries and flurry rushes, scavenging for whatever resources are immediately available.
You acknowledge that it is possible to take enemies out in non-traditional ways, but for some reason discount that as part of combat. Why? It's all part of the same system.
Of course there is room to improve (i.e. better enemy variety, more unique bosses), but what is there already offers more variety, more options, more lateral and vertical movement, more opportunities for experimentation than the series ever has before. The dueling style of the past 3D games seems to have reached its peak in Skyward Sword. Before BotW, I wanted to see an evolution of that experiment, with more direct 1v1 dance-like combat. After playing BotW, I was surprised and happy that we didn't. Offering multiple possible solutions to every encounter allows me to improvise and develop my own approach to nearly every enemy camp. That improvisation is key to the ethos of BotW. It keeps me engaged and encourages me to keep trying new things. Dozens of hours in and I still find new, fresh approaches to combat. That simply wasn't possible in past games, which relied on simple patterns, button prompts, and item-specific methods for beating enemieseach encounter became less interesting as the game went on. Bosses were the saving grace.
Yeah, I liked the combat. Especially compared to Witcher 3...
lvl99 Pixel
Member
Witcher 3 lets you cycle targets easily though.
witcher is the only game let me feel uncomfortable even just control the character WALK
Not to mention that combat system....
In fact he migth actually be because the more ridiculous peopel with critisism you can at least spot from a mile away and ignore, but peopel liek him can hide it in walls of text and a veneer of authentic analysing and explaining and
conince people he must be right.
Just liek how outright haters are easier to spot than the more clever ones, or racists that are basically klansman vs the ones who spout pseudoscience and act intellectual to hide their behaviour in an effort to convince people.
Reviews are made during the honeymoon period, when the game is fresh in everyone's minds and, if it's great, people are riding the highs hard.
Reviews very often miss flaws that become a common concern amongst fans, technical issues are very often never mentioned and mechanic issues that become talking points down the road sometimes feel like huge surprises after reviews failed to discuss them.
This is fairly common.
Feels like this guy went into the game wanting a generic Zelda. This is the biggest departure in the series, surely they're not going to get everything right the first time.
Except for that weird flurry rush problem yes. I feel like I have to unlearn like 50 other games parry systems so I can play BotW.
Except for that weird flurry rush problem yes. I feel like I have to unlearn like 50 other games parry systems so I can play BotW.
I'm not sure about this, but I think the direction in which you dodge affects whether Flurry Rush can be triggered. If the enemy attacks vertically dodge to the side, if it attacks horizontally dodge away. Once I have the timing down of an attack I can consistently use Flurry Attack (or parry) like this.
lvl99 Pixel
Member
ok...
doesn't change the fact that Zelda now has a really poorly executed version of the very targeting system that it popularized
That seemed to be the case when I played.
Kelegacy
XBOX - RECORD ME LOVING DOWN MY WOMAN GOOD
My thing about the combat is not that it's bad, but that it's pointless.
Late in the game I was just running away to get to my next objective or point of interest and avoiding enemies. Just because the game gives you little reason to fight. The enemies are mostly avoidable, their "loot" is just meh most of the time and since there is no progression system like in an RPG, there is no EXP based reason to fight.
It's similar to the side mission design--you usually are rewarded after doing a fetch or other time-wasting quest with something like 3 bananas. Something worthless because you already probably have like 100 and rarely use them.
I liked the game a lot but felt after a while (a long while to be honest) that I was wasting time doing a lot of things that I had no real incentive to do.
Late in the game I was just running away to get to my next objective or point of interest and avoiding enemies. Just because the game gives you little reason to fight. The enemies are mostly avoidable, their "loot" is just meh most of the time and since there is no progression system like in an RPG, there is no EXP based reason to fight.
It's similar to the side mission design--you usually are rewarded after doing a fetch or other time-wasting quest with something like 3 bananas. Something worthless because you already probably have like 100 and rarely use them.
I liked the game a lot but felt after a while (a long while to be honest) that I was wasting time doing a lot of things that I had no real incentive to do.
I thought his video was fantastic, thorough, and I agree or learned a lot from it. I still think the game is fantastic; and I think the shrines are on balance better than he says they are; but probably only marginally better than where he is at.
I thought he was fair across the board. I don't care for the whole not Zelda enough section of his video, but that was like a line or two and barely worth knocking. And I guess as much as I think game reviewers suck; I still don't think you should ever open your own critique by bemoaning other critics. But that's just me.
I thought he was fair across the board. I don't care for the whole not Zelda enough section of his video, but that was like a line or two and barely worth knocking. And I guess as much as I think game reviewers suck; I still don't think you should ever open your own critique by bemoaning other critics. But that's just me.
well actually i agree ：D
This line of thinking is just needless to me. It ignores the idea that a 10/10 does not have to equal flawless and paints literally tens of reviewers as somehow "wrong." Reviewers aren't blind, if a flaw is large enough and noticeable enough that it affected their experience they would have docked points.
Anderson's critique is one that comes from a very niche perspective, he meticlously goes through his games and analyses them down to a frame-by-frame basis, most reviewers don't do that because the goal for their reviews are almost entirely different.
I just really dislike this whole mentality that finding flaws in a game is a sort of "gotcha" moment that nulifies a large number of reviewer's opinions. I really did not like Inside (another game where Anderson uses similar rhetoric), and I could write an entire essay on why, doesn't make those who did like it wrong.
10/10 doesn't mean perfect, yes, but it /is/ common that issues that later become common complaints don't get mentioned at all (or very little) by reviewers.
This /does/ happen.
Gonna have to stop you right there. With my playthrough, it seems to have been too forgiving rather than inconsistent. I can reliably force a flurry rushes in situations where I wouldn't get hit due to good spacing, but I can still pull it off when it's up close and personal. I do wish there were more enemies like Club wielding Lynels to punish flurry rushes spam. It was also a lot of fun fighting regular guys and learing the right time to dodge, because there a few are very strict, like the heavy sword Lizafos.
How does it make sense for the bokoblins, which are dime a dozen across the entire game's play area, would be stronger than the great Calamity Ganon who brought the world to its knees?
Nah actually most reviewers mentioned these flaws in their reviews
I also felt that, while it's a masterpiece and one of my favourite games of all time, the combat could be improved.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good combat system, but I think stuff like flurry rushes were inconsistent for me. Sometimes they would trigger and sometimes not.
I kind of wish they had gone for a more traditional, Souls style i-frame dodge system.
Still bloody love it though.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good combat system, but I think stuff like flurry rushes were inconsistent for me. Sometimes they would trigger and sometimes not.
I kind of wish they had gone for a more traditional, Souls style i-frame dodge system.
Still bloody love it though.
I agree with this. It would be narratively consistent for Ganon and other bosses to scale relative to how much time the player has invested or how much progress he's made. He is gathering his powerwhy not make him stronger instead of weaker as the player adventures?
They already use silver/purple striped enemies as evidence of Ganon's growing influence... but Ganon himself doesn't become any more powerful.
It's a missed opportunity.
As I said, if these issues were prominent enough they would have influenced the massive amount of 10/10 reviews the game was given. Anderson is incredibly thorough, if there's a flaw in your game he will analyse individual frames and use statistics to highlight it. That kind of information will be invaluable to the Zelda team on their next game but it does little for the average consumer and that's where the reviewers found on Metacritic come in.
I'm not talking about BotW specifically, obviously.
And that's kind of the point, Plum, reviewers are often not that thorough, for better or worse, and very often they don't mentioned issues that later become common talking points /especially/ when we consider the technical aspects (frame pacing/rates, etc..),
This happens quite often. I'm not sure if it happened here as I haven't read enough or played the game to make the call, but this idea that reviewers would mention it if it was there is silly as they've proven this to not be the case countless times.
This is a problem to some extent in all open world games and one that's very difficult to solve in a way that's satisfying to everyone. Agressively scaling every challenge in the game as the players becomes stronger is something I personally hate, but I can see how others never want to feel OP.
I can tell you that for my money, there's few things in gaming that have been as satisfying as returning to Ganon 50+ hours after first getting wrecked by him, now geared up with more hearts, better armor and weapons and just manhandling him. I also thought it felt very narratively consistent that the Hero of Legend wielding the sword that seals the darkness and backed up by the champions controlling the 4 Divine Beasts would be able to handle Ganon with relative ease. This felt like a reward for all the countless hour of adventuring I had done. I was ready, I was prepared.
But let's hope Hard Mode adds more scaling to enemies/bosses among other things to adress the issues some have with becoming too powerful.
I don't think all enemies should be scaled to the player, but I think it makes sense in certain cases (like in BotW) for certain enemies to grow more powerful, or for more powerful enemies to appear more often as time goes on. BotW establishes a narrative cause for enemies to grow more powerful and aggressive. It follows through on this by introducing malice-influenced monsters, but not by buffing the actual source of that malice.
I think increasing Ganon's power relative to time passed would not only fit narratively, it would create a sense of urgency that right now is lacking.
Ocarina_117
Banned
Games a masterpiece for sure, but it still has room for improvements.
I thought Mario Galaxy 1 was a masterpiece which could never be topped. Galaxy 2 blew me away.
Now imagine a Galaxy 2-esque refinement of BoTW. Add a few traditional dungeons, more enemy types, refine the combat, improve sidequests.
Boiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
I thought Mario Galaxy 1 was a masterpiece which could never be topped. Galaxy 2 blew me away.
Now imagine a Galaxy 2-esque refinement of BoTW. Add a few traditional dungeons, more enemy types, refine the combat, improve sidequests.
Boiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
Indeed. Also, the scaling should make sense. If you're going to scale bokoblins to that level, then even if Ganon is going to be constant, he should be at a higher level than the highest possible level of bokoblins. That creates issues with minimal playthroughs, but you can give players other means of weakening Ganon.
InterMusketeer
Gold Member
What if he doesn't think it's equally worthwhile?
I don't. A lot of stuff has been sacrificed to get this open world to succeed, and to me it's not a good trade.
I agree with a lot of the points he makes in the video. I'm happy I didn't go south from the great plateau immediately. It would've probably soured me on some aspects of the game as well.
Something I found disappointing in my own playthrough, was the heat around death mountain. I saw death mountain and figured I'd need some gear to protect me from the heat there. I travelled all over to obtain heat resisting gear so I could comfortably climb death mountain. After all that, I go to the stable near death mountain and there's some girl there selling potions and I'm like: "Psssht I've come fully prepared, no need!" I get to the mountain and it's just a bullshit third tier of heat. All of the stuff I did was for nothing. The game suddenly breaks its own rules. Then to top things off they sell the right gear INSIDE the village. Why? Wouldn't it make sense to sell it at the foot of the mountain so, y'know, people can actually climb it and visit the village?
Why are you telling me to chill, especially when the premise is 'the battle system is bad'. Especially when most of the complaints of subjective or highly flawed, like all the ways you can kill a Lynels without wasting weapons and calling yourself 'skilled' yet won't bother to find a work around that the game encourages.
It comes off as lazy.
And no, I will never be chilled with the BS 'not a true Zelda' game like someone has the right to say what is Zelda. So the moment anyone said that line, I don't give two hoots what their next words.
I have never had to break no more than two weapons on a Lynel, even a silver one. I do this by using one of the Lynel's weapons that will be replaced once I murdered them and the Master Sword. Eating items that increases your attack power also makes the battle goes faster and reduces you wasting weapons.
Running in and wasting all your good weapons is on you since you bull charged instead of thinking things through.
That's the thing that bothered me from the start, because he leads off right from the start with these quite condescending notes about reviewers "ignoring" the issues he's about to bring up, because obviously the problems he's describing are completely non-subjective and anyone who disregards them, looks past them or do not see them as problems at all are just being ignorant about them. He literally says that he "would be equally guilty of not doing my job if I didn't acknowledge that parts of BotW do things better than any other game"; the implications are clear as day.
It feels so arrogant of him to be this guy that has no restrictions in terms of deadlines or review length bemoaning others for not managing to bring up all the same problems he had. If say for example Jose Otero of IGN could make a two hour video based on months of possible time for research chances are he'd bring up a lot of the same things. Chances are he already noticed it while doing his review, but did not find it to noteworthy enough to bring up in a review where you need to cut to the chase fairly quickly (whether the "chase" is positive or not). Chances are he simply disagrees and thinks the game is a 10/10, regardless of what Joseph Anderson thinks, and is doing his job just fine despite of that.
But why though? You can beat Ganon and keep playing the game for hundreds of hours, it's much more important that the overworld keeps giving you some increased level of challenge since that's where you spend 90% of the time.
One of the great things about the game is that you can beat Ganon early for a huge challenge and then come back much later as a way to see just how much you've grown in power. If you make Ganon more difficult, but give other means of making him weaker.. you're changing nothing. You can still make him weaker even after playing for hundreds of hours. So either they could have made him impossibly difficult to beat early on in order to preserve the late-game challenge, or had him scale with the player which isn't really satisfying (imo) and could be problematic to balance given how many different variables there are to a player's power-level.
There's a reason the game pretty heavily nudges you north to begin with. Even so, I encountered a Lynel pretty much straight after the Plateau and it took all of one death to realize I should probably go around it instead of through it. It's basic open-world logic. You can stumble upon overly difficult enemies early in Dark Souls or Morrowind or lots of other games too. Taking those enemies out when you're a weak noob can be done, but you usually have to cheese them (think of the dragon on the bridge in Dark Souls).
Not everything will appeal exactly the same to all people. "Equally worthwhile" can't be measured. There is no one who can conclusively judge that. It's a personal call. I think BotW is the best of Zelda games. Its changes make it more worthwhile for me than many other entries. There will naturally be disagreement. You're in the minority who thinks the changes are a step back.
It does makes huge changes, but it does regress in some areas like the dungeons and the overall story. Now, this isn't a big deal if you don't care for those aspect, but I personally do, especially the dungeons. Breath of the Wild's dungeons wile innovated and fresh are just too short for me to fully enjoy. They just feel like bigger shines. The story points are also extremely short and feel like a side project.
yurinka
Member
I think he explains very well why he thinks that about many shrines and combat. And I agree him. Many shrines could be removed because they were there just to get a reward, others were repeated battles, others were a broken motion sensor gameplay+badly designed physics puzzle and others were just repeated very simple puzzles. Only like a quarter of the shrines are good enough to be in the game as shrines.
Heat resistant isn't same as flame resistant. In desert, you just lose hearts but on death mountain, you get set on fire. Both aren't different levels of same thing.
The thing with reviewers is that they aren't meant to be long-form critiques of a piece of work. Their purpose is to give the average consumer of a product a general overview of the quality of said product. It doesn't have to be thorough because, for the most part, people are not thorough, and this is especially the case when they're deciding to buy the game or not which is where reviews really matter.
Again I'd like to bring up Dark Souls, my personal favorite game of all time. If I were asked to write an IGN-style review of the game I'd completely gush over it and give the game a 10/10 at the end. If I decided to write a 5,000 word critique of the game you'd wonder how I could ever think such a thing. The point of this comparison is to show that flaws that a close critique of a game bring up don't, and shouldn't, detract from reviews meant for an entirely different purpose.
Yes, games in the past have recieved critical acclaim yet fallen out of favour by the general populace, but that process happens over a long period of time. Rhetoric such as "I don't get the 10/10s" or "reviewers are caught up in the Zelda hype" are, in my eyes, lame attempts at forcing such a change by people who merely want justification for their less commonly-held opinion.
Given how much the game hypes up Ganon as this world-ending disaster, having him be weaker than trash mobs is a pretty big problem, I'd say. I can't think of a single game that does this. Note you, we're not talking about a rare elite open world boss being stronger than Ganon. Every single bokoblin in the game, the most basic enemy, will be stronger than The Great Calamity.
That's just incongruent to the point of being dumb.
These are perfectly fine descriptions if the person goes on to justify the claim. Don't take it so personally.
This is nonsense.
Obviously... this doesn't need such a big discussion.
Reviews very often don't note issues that later become common complaints.
The idea that "if it was there the reviewers would have noted it" is what I was arguing against, and my argument remains true.
You agree with me it seems, so I don't see why we're still talking about it.
... what? Surely you mean only the silver ones. And are we sure they're stronger than Ganon anyway? I'm pretty sure Ganon has significantly more HP at least.
But he's only easy if you have already mastered the overworld content. Is he really easy if you go to him straight from the Great Plateau?
Also are white Bokoblins really hard when they telegraph their attacks with great exaggeration? Yes they have high HP but you are not forced to fight them ever and they always drop rare gems and endgame weapons so trade-off is worth it.
I mean once you get to the point where the silver ones are spawning.
this game is definitely this decade's OoT for Nintendo.
it lays the foundation for the future of the series, gets praised by a lot of people and still has room for improvement.
OoT had the benefit of being the first 3D Zelda so it took longer for people to see there was room to improve over it and the sequels all seemed to focus on different areas.
i've enjoyed the game and put over 100 hours on it but i can still see they can do better now that they've finally evoled the series past the OoT leap.
it lays the foundation for the future of the series, gets praised by a lot of people and still has room for improvement.
OoT had the benefit of being the first 3D Zelda so it took longer for people to see there was room to improve over it and the sequels all seemed to focus on different areas.
i've enjoyed the game and put over 100 hours on it but i can still see they can do better now that they've finally evoled the series past the OoT leap.
I can agree with your second line to a point, yes, but the thing is is that I don't think it matters nor do I think itas common as you say it is. I explained quite well the difference, in my eyes, between review and critique; what constitutes a flaw for a reviewer and a flaw for a critic can be very different.
If BotW's flaws were ones that a reviewer with a limited time and with a different audience might notice then they would have noticed it, but since they seemingly aren't they didn't. Whether the flaws Joseph brought up in his critique manifest themselves in a change of common opinion and a general rejection of the reviewer's opinions later down the line is not up for anyone to decide. With the Dark Souls example I showed that even after acknowledging all the flaws of a game one can still hold it in high regard.
I think the potential implications BoTWs success could have on Nintendo are the most exciting part of all this. You know everyone at Nintendo played this and they will finally, by proxy, modernize their games in similar ways or be inspired to rethink the conventions of the games theyre making. I hope somewhere out there Game Freak is getting a lot of ideas.
I'm not bothered about this specific instance. It's literally the insistence that reviewers always pick up on these things that I had issue with. People were claiming reviewers always pick up on everything, I was arguing against that idea.
That's it. You really don't need to argue with me here.
Lower-tier Bokoblins will still be around, though, so not entirely true. I understand your point, though.
Related to this, but also unrelated: while I agree with some people's complaints that stronger enemies should've been notably different from the weaker ones (not just health and damage buffs), I think they do change the dynamic of encounters a bit. That's a direct consequence of the weaker types not disappearing; it means you get more variation within camps as you play. In group encounters you now to a higher degree than before need to think about who to focus on (it mattered in the beginning of the game too, but not quite as much). In the beginning of the game I would more or less choose at random who to attack, but with both weak and powerful ones in a group I started making more deliberate choices and strategizing more. So I would often try to freeze or in some other way incapacitate the stronger enemies in order to easily dispose of the weaker ones first. They are very easy to kill, but things do get very dangerous if you focus on them while stronger enemies are coming at you or shooting extremely powerful arrows at you from a distance.