The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (contains spoilers)

I'm hoping BotW will be able to read other amiibo in order to obtain unique weapons.

Who wouldn't want to play as Link wielding a Fire Flower (from Mario or Luigi), a parasol (from Peach), a rapier (from Zelda), Galaxia (from Meta Knight), Ragnell (from Ike) or the freaking Monado (from Shulk)?

Re: Those other rumored ports from last page - It may be possible to sync a gamepad to the NX for backwards compatibility if the screen is needed.

Yo, so what have I missed the past two weeks?

When all else fails....use fire.

The fandom basically declared that Naked "The Fury" Link is/will be canon.

BOTW was referred to as an open-air game at the recent investor meeting. I assume this is what they meant by that.◊

I can't see Bot W without thinking "Bottom of the Well". Anyways, I guess they're technically right with it being open-air, but I think they probably meant open world.

edited 5th Jul '16 9:38:42 PM by Nintendork64

I gotta say, it would be really interesting if this game ends up having a twist like the one seen in MGSV:

"So... I'm part of Ganon...."

"No, Link. You're The Ganon"

Why that video had more aerial movement than the entirety of Skyward Sword.

I want to ask this again: why couldn't we have had a game like BoTW back during the GameCube era? We're getting this game two whole generations late. The Sixth Gen gave us Morrowind and GTA3 and San Andreas for crying out loud!

You can say "better late than never", but there are limits to when too late makes me lose faith.

edited 19th Jul '16 12:18:56 PM by WaxingName

Because back then they wanted to make Wind Waker, and after that people wanted more Ocarina, which they got in Twilight Princess.

The physics are the real impressive stuff anyway, and I doubt those would've been possible on the Gamecube.

But you are aware that Ocarina was very open for its time. Zelda fans wanted something on that level in the context of its generation.

Instead TP set up the plot barriers and wasted the perfectly good overworld by barely populating it.

Besides, isn't the most impressive thing the openness that apparently Aonuma wanted to have for a long time now but apparently couldn't do it on earlier hardware because he's an incompetent hack?

People wanted something like Twilight Princess, and it was the best selling Zelda ever at the time. Don't try and retroactively apply your biases when the game sold well, reviewed well, and is looked on fondly to this day. People got their big open game with Wind Waker. It was flawed, so they went with a superior design for the next game.

And no insulting people who didn't do exactly what you specifically wanted a decade ago, especially when he is doing exactly what you want now.

If anything, this is a result of Aonuma gaining more influence as Miyamoto steps back compared to previous games.

I already said this, but Japanese gamers didn't give a shit about Morrowind and GTA (outside a niche of PC gamers for the latter who liked to mod it). In fact, Japanese gamers didn't really give much attention to Western games in general until about the latter half of the last console generation. Nintendo often pays more attention to what happening in Japan than elsewhere.

And also, I don't really remember people on English-speaking asking for Zelda become an open world game at the time. But that's just me.

@Sterok: Don't argumentum ad populum at me, please. If you'd look anywhere you'd see people complaining about TP for its linearity, emptiness, long prologue, Tear hunting, and other things.

And I'm just applying what Aonuma's been saying about previous Zelda games. This interview has him state that he's been wanting to explore a seamless open world for a long time but couldn't do it on the Gamecube for some reason. Even though the same generation gave us the first console open-world 3D games.

They may have not had the expertise or resources to do so at the time. Or maybe Nintendo themselves just wasn't keen on the idea. Who knows?

It doesn't really matter. Given that he's directed some of the best and most memorable games in the franchise, "incompetent hack" is the last thing I'd call him.

edited 19th Jul '16 12:49:47 PM by wehrmacht

Except Aonuma wanted to do it. As the head of the Zelda division of EPD (formerly EAD), Nintendo would have cooperated with his desires.

The only limitation was his own incompetence.

Generally, it's a bad idea to take a developer's claims at face value prior to and just after a major release- PR is a thing.

Just because you want to do something doesn't mean you have the resources to do it. Miyamoto wanted to have horseback combat in Oo T but couldn't do it. Does that make him or his team incompetent?

Maybe Aonuma did want to do it but eventually decided not to because he thought/realized they at Nintendo did not have the kind of development infrastructure or manpower necessary to make that sort of game. Developing that more open-world/vast kind of experience is something pretty specific and requires a different kind of pipeline than pretty much anything nintendo's ever done. That's not incompetence, at least not in any negative way.

I think you're latching way too much onto that statement in an attempt to vindicate your own preferences and opinion about the series' direction. Zelda not being more open until more recently isn't necessarily that much of a negative in a broad sense since all the 3D Zeldas so far have big followings and were critically and commercially successful games. Skyward Sword is often hated, but it's also the most recent game in the series. I'm sure once Bot W comes out some people are going to re-evaluate their opinions of it.

We also did get a seemless Open World Game. It's name was Wind Waker. It didn't have as much as what other open world games did at the time and it railroaded you a lot, but the Sea was very much Open World once you got the third Pearl.

And what most people seem to forget about GTA 3 and other games in it's universe is you were completely limited in where you could go at first up until you completed certain story missions due to Broken Bridges and lots of water. San Andreas let you explore the world all at once, but the bridges were closed and you got a 5 star wanted level if you explored either the San Fierro or Las Venturas areas making it more difficult to get around.

edited 19th Jul '16 1:17:56 PM by tclittle

It's also worth pointing out that "same generation" =/= "same processing power". The Gamecube might've been released at the same time as GTAIII and Morrowind, but those were released on PS 2 and PC respectively, both of which are platforms with much greater processing power than the GC. Nintendo has always followed a policy of "design over technical specs", so I think it's entirely plausible that it might've lacked the processing power to create a world with comparable detail and interactivity to something like GTA.

Also, I'm not sure why you'd assume that a thing is possible just because a dev states that they want to do it. The gaming world is rife with devs who had lofty concepts for their games and then realized that actually doing it would be very difficult. The most likely scenario is that Aonuma went "It would be cool to have an open world game, but we don't have the time, resources, or manpower to realistically create it the way I want on this console".

The other thing is that, honestly, the calls for an Open World Zelda game really weren't that strong at that point in the franchise's history. They were there, yes, but they weren't any louder or more common than any of the other things the fanbase wanted.

edited 19th Jul '16 2:12:41 PM by JapaneseTeeth

I was under the impression that the GameCube was more powerful than the PS2, but its mini discs held less data than standard CDs so it couldn't really abuse the power.

edited 19th Jul '16 2:13:25 PM by Karxrida

Actually, the PS 2 was weaker in terms of both processing power and graphical power compared to the GCN. The GCN's limits were based off the mini-discs Nintendo used for the GCN.

The best way to look at a GCN vs. PS 2 power comparison is to compare Resident Evil 4's GCN vs PS 2 versions. Here's a video.

edited 19th Jul '16 2:16:22 PM by tclittle