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.How is it a hot take? Combat is my least favortie part of the game.
Broken lock on system and dodge system, and generally quite boring.
Fortunately you can take out enemies in various other ways, which is what makes up for it, but the act of facing off against an enemy with your weapons, is pretty poor in the game.
Except it isn't.
(Edited the rest and expanded my point under here)
Yeah, I liked the combat. Especially compared to Witcher 3...
Witcher 3 lets you cycle targets easily though.
Chill out. lt's a good critique with a lot of solid points. Definitely not SuperBunnyHop or Sterling level rubbish.
I'm only five minutes into the video and he seems a bit... extreme in both his position of the game and the verbiage he uses to describe his experiences.
He first bemoans the "perfect scores" and "10/10's", saying the game has "huge critical problems" that somehow 60+ reviewers "ignored". So either it's a conspiracy (he obviously doesn't think that, but here we are), or these "problems" aren't as problematic to the vast majority of players as it was to him.
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.Flurry Rushes seemed inconsistent for the bigger part.
I never felt like I could reliably pull them off as sometimes I got them when attacks would be nowhere near hitting me while other times it would be after a succesful dodge over something that would have wrecked me.
witcher is the only game let me feel uncomfortable even just control the character WALK
Not to mention that combat system....
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.
ok...
doesn't change the fact that Zelda now has a really poorly executed version of the very targeting system that it popularized
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.
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.
Flurry Rushes seemed inconsistent for the bigger part.
I never felt like I could reliably pull them off as sometimes I got them when attacks would be nowhere near hitting me while other times it would be after a succesful dodge over something that would have wrecked me.
It's not problematic. The whole point of the Defeat Ganon main quest is to prepare for the task. When you feel you're ready for the task, you go to Ganon. Simple as that. (You can then continue playing the game.)
The problematic thing would be if the goal post for defeating Ganon would change just because Link has become OP.
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.
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?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?
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.
Nah actually most reviewers mentioned these flaws in their reviews
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.
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 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?
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.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.
What if he doesn't think it's equally worthwhile?Totally shaking up conventions is fine as long as you nail the execution and still manage to properly replace what you took out with something equally worthwhile.
Chill out. lt's a good critique with a lot of solid points. Definitely not SuperBunnyHop or Sterling level rubbish.
Hoarding weapons to beat an enemy who has an over abundance of hp is no fun, the combat would be okay if the enemies would be more complex, the basic moblins are joy to watch while they scramble around the battlefield but they pose no threat to you. Lynels are the only monsters that have a decent number of moves, but with the low enemy variety and basic moves it really doesn't do the game any favors.
Encounters in breath of the wild feels like if in Doom you would only fight imps the whole game with a cyber demon sprinkled in every now and then.
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.
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.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.
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).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.
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.Yeah, the "not a real Zelda game" was the weakest part of the video. Totally shaking up conventions is fine as long as you nail the execution and still manage to properly replace what you took out with something equally worthwhile. BotW didn't nail the execution but it isn't any less of a Zelda game at the end of the day.
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.
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.However, calling the weaker aspects "unfinished" or amateurish does nothing constructive.
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?
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.
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.
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.
These are perfectly fine descriptions if the person goes on to justify the claim. Don't take it so personally.However, calling the weaker aspects "unfinished" or amateurish does nothing constructive, it encourages hyperbole in message boards and .
limits creativity on the developers' side
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.
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 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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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 mean once you get to the point where the silver ones are spawning.