Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

@kyleforrester87 Thanks, but if @Ralizah is commenting on the controls, then I know it would frustrate me just as much if not more than Breath of the Wild did. I'm glad a lot of people are loving it of course, but given how many games there are to play otherwise, I'm perfectly fine playing something else. I would likely end up falling off with it again anyways.

I know it's blasphemy, but I'm playing Immortals Fenyx Rising right now and am happy to be playing it instead. I don't have to worry about holding down several buttons to do something that should be simple. In other words, the game is more accessible overall. I know it pales in comparison for most, and I get it, but it's better for me.

@KilloWertz As an evolution of what BotW started, I'd be extremely surprised if someone disliked that game but liked this one. While it does improve on... well, virtually everything except the controls, tbh, the formula is extremely similar.

Like, you wouldn't expect someone who hated GoW 2018 to like Ragnarok, even though there are improvements, right? Same deal here.

@Ralizah can't say I've been having too much issues with it tbh tho it's still early days. Doesn't feel all that different from using the magnet rune in botw, but when you're trying to turn something vertically that's when it gets pretty wonky. The biggest offender would be how it tanks the frame rate whenever you try to use any ability in crowded spots. But even simple things like a couple of trees in the background while fighting an enemy is enough to make it drop

@Judal27 When building vehicles, I've had a few issues trying to make sure things are symmetrical. And yeah, turning objects can be a bit of a pain.

Although now that I know I can just combine it with Recall to create large moving platforms to get me past obstacles and give me lift out in the field, I don't expect I'll be doing much with vehicles except when strictly necessary.

@Ralizah oh trying to glue stuff together can be a pain yea but I guess i dont mind it as much rn cause there's not a lot going on. I bet it'll really be tedious if you're trying to build something elaborate asap

That's kinda how I feel about the ultrahand ability in general. I knew going in I wasn't gonna build any of those crazy contraptions you see in videos. But experiencing how slow it is to actually build something, I'll probably end up avoiding it for as much as I can. I tried to make a minecart float by attaching 2 fans on the sides facing down. It didn't work 😅. That's about as much "creativity" as you'll get from me

Made it to my first village, and this honestly spun out into a surprisingly enjoyable questline so far. Although that child's song they sing? Nightmare fuel.

The inclusion of companions is cool, even if the dude I met has an ability which is kinda awkward to use.

I remember the weather stuff being way more oppressive in early BOTW, but here, despite constant warnings about how this area of the map has been ravaged by an endless blizzard, I was able to move around very freely. I did get some trousers on the tutorial island which boosted my cold resistance, so I dunno if this has circumvented the curve of this part of the game? But I'm not complaining.

I also found a tunic which adds like ice element to my attacks if the area around me is cold enough, I don't really remember any gear like that in BOTW? And I just found this in a random non story cave which I don't really remember from BOTW, either, thought this was pretty cool.

@Ralizah I definitely get what you are saying. The last two God of War games have been strange for me though. I would have highly enjoyed the 2018 one if it wasn't for Atreus, but how much of an entitled brat he was written nearly killed the game for me. It's a shame because, like I said, I would have loved it otherwise. Raganrok though, it fixed everything I had problems with story wise for the most part (except for one instance in the game with Atreus that I won't spoil), but the gameplay is what frustrated me this time around. I'm still glad to have played both, but I do wish I was able to love both as much as the masses.

If they had improved upon the controls with Tears of the Kingdom, I probably would have been able to enjoy it well enough, especially since Immortals Fenyx Rising has helped me like the kind of game better. Still, you're not really wrong and I'm good in the end. I don't have to play every beloved game, and I'm far from hurting for games to play.

Sigh....
I continued my progress of Youtubers Life 2 Switch version as the only version that still working fine after get updated.

Also put me in the camp that thinks God of War 2018 is kinda not that good, and very overrated, but yet thinks Ragnarok is a bona fide masterpiece.

Interesting. I'll def have to get around to Ragnarok at some point.

If you are a crier like me be ready to cry a lot 😂

@Pizzamorg I'm heartless. My friends and I sit around laughing at melodrama that other people consider gut-wrenching most of the time.

Stuff that legitimately does upset me, like animal violence, just gets skipped if I know about it. It's why I've opted out of seeing GotG3.

Cleared my first dungeon. Have to be honest, it was fairly anti climactic all around. You needed to complete a platforming challenge to get to it, this was fairly spectacular visually but also mostly on rails. I'm kinda fine with this in a way as I hate platforming challenges in otherwise non platforming games that just end up gating progression, but then I also dunno why it needed to be quite as long as it was, if it was all fairly linear and difficult to fail.

@RogerRoger Interesting! Wouldn't have imagined you'd have ever had the opportunity to play this game.

Out of interest, do you have any experience with BotW?

After spending most of my weekend with Tears of the Kingdom I will say I am enjoying it... but not loving it. If there was any part of BOTW you didn't like, it is probably still here and entirely untouched. I just think that is such a shame.

You could argue that "well BOTW to me was a perfect game" and even if you take that as an objective statement, many also said that about God of War 2018, yet almost no element that was carried over from 2018 into Ragnarok went untouched. Almost everything had some sort of pass over, some tweak, or refinement. It is why someone like me is able to be lukewarm on 2018, but love Ragnarok, even with the two games sharing core fundamental DNA.

It isn't lost to me on where all the energy, effort and resource went during the long, multi delay, development of TOTK though. And in those regards the result is pretty much an inarguably resounding success. To make a massive open world game that invites the player to break it, while also dealing with the extra limitations the Switch imposes upon them... And it come out like this, so fun and almost entirely bug free. Just wild. I mean just think of the state of something like Redfall that just came out and on the hardware that was built for. Nintendo are wizards at their craft.

But that doesn't mean I can't help but wish for more from everything else, which is very much just more BOTW, untouched (which to some I am sure sounds like a good thing, rather than a negative). Based on some completion times I am probably just a drop in the bucket though, so who knows maybe some late game development will fix everything, I dunno.

This is just where I am at right now, I fully plan to keep playing either way.

@Pizzamorg I feel the same way. I've played TotK for around 5 hours this weekend and it's fundamentally more BotW. Just like Ragnarok was more 2018. The key difference is that both BotW and 2018 felt new and refreshing for the franchises, while TotK and Ragnarok certainly improved a lot of aspects but are still more of the same. I'm just not as amazed with TotK as I was with BotW for this reason.

It is crazy too when you think that it was Skyward Sword before Breath of the Wild right? And that had roughly the same gap that BOTW did to TOTK, but BOTW is a complete reinvention of what a Zelda game is, whereas TOTK is more of a BOTW side grade. And that isn't a horrible thing, but it again does make me wish that more parts of the game were attended to, rather than carried over verbatim.

@Pizzamorg I was actually going to mention that I'm all for developers reusing the same template as long as it shortens the development time. But TotK took just as long to be made as BotW and that game was made from the ground up. So it makes me wonder what they did during all these years.

But yeah, at this point I think I'd rather have them take a break from the open world formula and go back to creating something like Skyward Sword or Ocarina of Time. A more linear adventure with a focus on classic Zelda. I think both types of Zelda can co-exist, but I'm definitely feeling fatigued from open world Zelda right now.

I feel like what they did, based on what we know, was to use an entirely different engine. Plus the lack of obvious loading between....well you'll see, and the new systems that had to be added on top of BOTW is probably what took so long.

Granted I don't think it's 5 to 6 years of dev time long but it's certainly more than just reusing BOTW for something else.

It makes BOTW look like a tech demo.

Just to make it clear, I'm not trying to rehash the 'its just a dlc' comments, I think those takes are in bad faith whether intended or not, but I'm just more saying that on a fundamental level almost anything that is carried over here from BOTW is basically unchanged, and untouched. And for me at least, as someone who didn't love BOTW, this has been a real shame for me.

I am really enjoying the TOTK parts of TOTK, like the new abilities, the new approaches to problem solving, traversal options, the maps and story etc but there is a lot of carried over BOTW between those moments, probably more carried over BOTW moments than new moments. And each time I am just reminded of all of the things I didn't like about that game, or all the micro frustrations I experienced while playing that game, and feel somewhat bewildered this is all still here.

Especially given the amount carried over, given how long this was in development for and given all the player data and feedback they have collected over the years.