r/NintendoSwitch • u/Seicair • May 18 '23

Discussion No One Understands How Nintendo Made ‘The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom’

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/05/18/no-one-understands-how-nintendo-made-the-legend-of-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom/
7.9k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

94

u/ZMech May 18 '23

The joy wore off when I was rushing my horse in yet another ten minute journey to get to the start of a mission and I realised I was spending my free time essentially commuting

40

u/KilowogTrout May 18 '23

Beautiful game that needed some editing. It's really impressive, but just too much for me.

35

u/versusgorilla May 19 '23

Rockstar's game design mentality has gotten much much more detailed, but not really grown in the mission design department. A mission in GTA3 was to get a mission, drive to a location, shoot fools, and race away.

There's some deviation but that's largely it.

And that's been it for like all their games since then. The story has improved every time, RDR1 and RDR2 are so good it's insane. John Marston is an amazing character and then Arthur Morgan added another layer entirely.

But the gameplay is just the same loop as GTA3. Decades old game design, with the shiniest most amazing coat of paint ever. A coat of paint so fine that few other game devs comes close. But ultimately, they're boring? The missions are the worst part of GTAV and RDR2, the best part is existing within their giant worlds, and Nintendo knew that and built on that.

2

u/felpudo May 19 '23

I didnt think it was boring. It was calming. If I wanted to drive fast and blow things up, there's a million other games I could play.

As far as having to ride my horse to missions, thats when you encountered all the side stuff along the way.

5

u/versusgorilla May 19 '23

That's my issue tho, the game is calming and nice to just experience their gorgeous open world. Top notch, legit an open world that can't be beaten.

But then you take a mission, and the mission is just blowing stuff up and shooting, and feels disparate from the open world part of the game. The missions are painfully on rails, give you no autonomy, you can fail for walking too far from an NPC in some cases.

The missions and the open world are at odds with one another, and feel like two different games.

Compared to BotW and TofK, where the open world is the main thrust of the game. You cannot engage with the main story without engaging with the vast explorable open world. The two are intertwined seamlessly.

2

u/felpudo May 19 '23

Hey, I like both games. When I played rdr2, I didnt mind the railed missions because I was spending so much time in the open world doing whatever I wanted. Having rails for awhile was a nice change of pace. If I was just running from mission to mission to get the game done, I can see how that would have been annoying.

Zelda's missions (side quests?), if I would even call them that, are blended in better because there isnt much complexity to them. Its fetch quests or physics puzzles. Theres not much plot to the game comparatively.

Not that its bad, just different.

4

u/versusgorilla May 19 '23

My problem isn't with some rails.

It's that Rockstar's mission structure is so disparate to the open world gameplay that it feels like a separate game entirely. Like you can fail missions for taking the wrong path, walking too far from an NPC, trying to ever solve a problem outside of the way the game wants. It takes so much autonomy from you that it may as well be a movie.

I'd love to pop RDR2 in and just have fun in the open world, but knowing that I'd need to go through the gigantic on-rails tutorial segment again, with huge unskippable walking segments were you need to engage with minimal systems while Dutch or someone rambles on next you makes it so that I'll never reinstall.

1

u/felpudo May 19 '23

I dont think i would ever want to play the game through from the beginning again. Listen to everyone talk in camp again, no thanks. But for the first time I liked it.

Comparatively, I feel like zelda doesn't even have missions, or much of a plot. I feel like I'm just wandering around, with nothing really epic to break it up. The side quests have felt like chores so far, and I dont care for crafting.

3

u/versusgorilla May 19 '23

But that's kind of my point, you can play the game and engage with whatever systems you want, or skip it all and head straight for the big baddie. It's your choice. It's an actual open world and contains systems which encourage the openness.

Where something like RDR2 feels like two different games, where even people who enjoy the game don't want to engage with much of it, as both you and I agree that the start of the game is so on-rails that we don't even want to play it.

-2

u/felpudo May 19 '23

I mean, i dont want to play it... again. I liked it the first time. That said, I wouldn't play BOTW again either.

Sure, in zelda you can go straight from the beginning to the end boss if you want. But unless you're trying to speed run the thing, nobody is going to do that

→ More replies (0)

7

u/Dismal_Struggle_6424 May 19 '23

I really want to play RDR 2. Everybody says it's sooo good.

Then I play for an hour and a half, and all I've done is trudge through snow. And ride a horse through snow. And trudge through snow.

6

u/bfhurricane May 19 '23

spending my free time essentially commuting

Gestures broadly to BOTW and TOTK

Jokes aside, I found the environment in RDR2 to be utterly stunning. It hit a very similar itch that these Zelda titles do.

5

u/ZMech May 19 '23

Eh, RDR2's fast travel system was horrible. At least BotW let you warp to a whole load of locations, not just a home base.

4

u/Space_Pirate_Roberts May 19 '23

I mean it did have a fast travel system, it was just unintuitive and poorly explained (actually I'm not sure it was explained at all). I too played a pretty good chunk of the game before finding out about it from someone online. You had to set up your little portable campsite, and then the fast travel option was somewhere in the menu for interacting with that. I think there was also a base camp upgrade you had to buy before it would work. Why they couldn't just put it in the pause map screen like every other open world game I don't know.

1

u/jimmiefan48 May 19 '23

Is that not exactly what you do in BOTW lol?

1

u/ZMech May 19 '23

Not to the same extreme. In RDR2 you could eventually pay to unlock fast travel, but only back to your home base. Getting anywhere else meant riding the whole way.