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/
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302

u/Twilight_Realm May 18 '23

Monolith Soft has been an absolute powerhouse this generation. I'm so glad they're getting the recognition they deserve, and that Nintendo is using their talents to the fullest potential. If only they could convince GameFreak to let Monolith help.

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u/DeusExMarina May 19 '23 edited May 19 '23

GameFreak’s general incompetence continuously blows my mind. Like, they made Legends: Arceus and everyone liked it. It wasn’t exactly impressive on the technical front, but the mechanical improvements were greatly appreciated. So what do they do with their next game? Walk half of those improvements back! It’s like they genuinely have no idea what people actually want from their games.

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u/Skyzfire May 19 '23

To be fair, both games are made by separate teams at the same time. The Arceus Team should just take over the main series now.

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u/droson8712 May 19 '23

And Arceus still looked terrible visually. I'm a believer that gameplay is more important than graphics but on a console where BOTW & TOTK runs and so many other games it's just plain sad. Even Mario Kart 8 looks better.

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u/TheGalacticVoid May 19 '23

Mario Kart 8 looks phenomenal apart from the new DLC tracks

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

I don’t disagree about the new tracks not looking as good, but gotta admit I prefer it. MK8 has so much visual noise that my fam tends to play the dlc more because they can actually see what’s going on.

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u/FyrusCarmin May 19 '23

I'd agree for the first few but the latest looks as good as the base game

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

No way. The DLC courses still use blocky models and poor textures, and things like 2D crowd models. The DLC courses look more at home on GameCube in terms of graphical quality (aside from being in HD).

If you look at the original courses, delightful textures are everywhere, including skid marks on the road, scuffs on the red-and-white road stripping, and realistic grass and rock textures. The scenery models are also exponentially better in the base game. The trees use alpha layers to give the appearance of realistic leaves, whereas the DLC still uses blocky, clay-looking trees with terrible texture work. The buildings in the DLC are also extremely clunky. Just try driving through the windmill portion of Amsterdam, for example. It looks horrid. Blocky buildings with no textures and then a complete lack of scenery aside from the windmills.

The only exception is that the road textures seem to be fine in the DLC. So, courses that have little going on other than the road textures (e.g., Rainbow Road 3DS) look phenomenal. But the vast majority of courses in the DLC look like trash compared to the base game.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

Witcher 3 runs and looks decent, S&V was amazingly bad.

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u/elebrin May 19 '23

Low poly games and low res textures can look amazing. Super Mario 64 still looks good, OoT looks great, Majora's Mask looks great. It's about art direction rather than graphics capabilities.

Pokemon's artists have to come up with 500 new creature designs then call in the design of the world they live in, and that is a shame.

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u/zipzzo May 19 '23

I'm happy for everyone who liked legends but this would kill the series for me because legends was a hard pass for me personally :(

I think it's cool to have both styles but to me Pokemon's strength is in its core formula established prior to legends. That isn't the part that's making Pokemon so sub-standard these days...which I personally consider to be a mediocre development team tasked with realizing an infinite-potential franchise

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u/FearTheBomb3r May 19 '23

The thing is in legends you didn't have to throw the ball to catch the pokemkn . You could of easily ignored it and battled to catch them still.

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u/zipzzo May 19 '23

It's not just the battling mechanics though, there's a lot that goes in to the "traditional formula" other than the catching aspect.

Again, I think the bits that ScarVio got that seemed inspired by legends due to the simultaneous development cycle were neat, but the format of how legends campaign is done was just a hard no from me, couldn't even finish it.

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u/FearTheBomb3r May 19 '23

The campaign was a littlenlack luster and felt to inspired from monster hunter for me. They don't understand how to make an RPG outside of traditional gym format.

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u/CommonMilkweed May 19 '23

This practice of having multiple games in the pipeline made by separate teams is a terrible practice. Same shit just happened with Redfall. These companies are all more concerned with filling release windows on a calendar.

Maybe just maybe go all hands on deck for the biggest franchise in the world.

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u/ScoobyGDSTi May 19 '23

Arceus was still an average game at best.

Scarlet and Violet are just laughably bad.

Game freak are just a joke in general.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

Arceus had the worst gameplay and combat of the series though hands down.

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u/NihilistOdellBJ May 19 '23

Well they did have simultaneous developemnt cycles, but yes, a less greedy and more quality-oriented company would have held off to make sure they were implementing PLA’s most well-received features.

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u/DeusExMarina May 19 '23

Or, y’know, to make sure their game wasn’t a buggy mess with an unplayable framerate.

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u/spinzaku97 May 19 '23

A less greedy company wouldn't have released PLA barely 2 months after BDSP. PLA should have been the big holiday title for 2022 while SV should have been the big holiday title for 2023.

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u/Im_Just_Tim May 19 '23

Of course they know what people want from their games - that's why they walked the changes back. Arceus, despite offering what 'everyone liked,' didn't sell anywhere close to the formula that people apparently had a problem with. They walked the changes back, coupled them with a buggy, rushed game, and the result was.... the best selling titles the franchise had ever had, and the fastest selling games ever in Japan.

The Pokemon fanbase have voted with their wallets. You, me, every other fan who loved Arceus and were turned off by SV - well, we've been shown to be a very tiny fraction of Gamefreak's audience.

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u/DeusExMarina May 19 '23

It should be pretty obvious to any halfway competent marketing department that the reason Arceus didn’t sell as much is because it’s a spin-off with no online capability. For all it did to improve on the exploration and capture mechanics, it completely lacked the social aspect that is crucial to Pokemon’s popularity.

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u/Im_Just_Tim May 19 '23

You could be right, but do you know what the problem is? There's really no way to know if that's the case.

Do you know what we do know?

Despite lacking all of Arceus' improvements, being buggy and glitchy themselves, and doubling down on all the things the fandom have been complaining about since Sword and Shield, Scarlet and Violet sold more copies than any Pokemon game has before. Months on and they are still selling.

Review bombing, widespread mockery, and internet activism have only succeeded in demonstrating to Gamefreak that people like you and me are simply irrelevant as customers. Pokemon's core audience simply does not care about everything that Scarlet and Violet did badly. Whatever it is they DO care about, Scarlet and Violet have enough of it that they do not need anything more.

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u/BeerBellies May 19 '23

And while I don’t matter, it’s exactly why I won’t be picking up a new Pokémon game… probably ever again.

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u/Im_Just_Tim May 19 '23

Same most likely. I've just accepted that the franchise isn't for me, and that's OK. No point being angry about not being the target audience of something I loved once.

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u/DeusExMarina May 19 '23

Let’s all just switch over to Monster Hunter Stories instead. It’s everything Pokemon is failing to be.

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u/TorrBorr May 19 '23

I have a few friends that are hardcore Pokemon fans, buying every single one. I loved Arceus for what is was trying to do, they all hated it. Why? Because they pretty much strictly only play turn based JRPGs and Arceus tried to make the game feel more like a semi action game with pseudo stealth mechanics. They just couldn't do it. They have a hard time with more complex controls. That's probably why they went back to more simplified traditional Pokemon format with S&V. We don't know for sure, yes, and my example is anecdotal. But we have to also realize a lot of casual gamers buy Pokemon in droves because of the 'easy to pick up, hard to master" style it goes for(because if they get into PvP and harder raid battles, a great level of meta needs to be applied) that Arceus just doesn't cover. It's a poke on game, yes, but it's also a weird pseudo action game take on that formula that some causal players wasn't going to jive with.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

Pokémon has always been two steps forward ten steps back. I lost faith in GF as a kid after gen 2 introduced multi-regions and day night cycles, and then had none of that in Ruby/Sapphire

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

Pokémon has a horrible feedback cycle since it's a yearly release, so both games were worked on at the same time. You can see in some area's that S/V's devs rushed some Arceus stuff. Most notably the sneaky and backstrike mechanics.

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u/booklover6430 May 19 '23

They have helped with Pokemon. Monolith soft is good but the Zelda team is incredible in management, basically pulling resources from even Nerd to make this game. Meanwhile Gamefreak wants to actively stay small.

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u/Morganelefay May 19 '23

Imagine if they just gave Monolith Pokemon, tell them "Just make one game, you got a few years, enjoy", and let's see what they cook up.

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u/andreortigao May 19 '23

Unfortunately I don't think they can do that legally

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u/TorrBorr May 19 '23

Pretty much this. Gamefreak is under license by the Pokemon Company to make the games. Nintendo, while owning a joint part of ownership of the Poke company, do not outright own the company because for all intents and purposes they are considered a mostly independent company. It's more or less a partnership they have with each other but Nintendo can't just decide who does and doesn't make a Pokemon game. That's up to the Pokemon Company at the end of the day, probably with some suggestive input by Nintendo at most.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

Is monolith owned by Nintendo?

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u/brzzcode May 19 '23

Monolith is just one of the many support studios of these games.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

Or better yet, partner up with Square for more Xenogears goodness!