What do you all expect the divide of sales to be like on this?

I think Twilight Princess was about 7m on Wii to 1.5m on GCN.

I can't see the Switch being a runaway success like the Wii so I think BotW might be a bit more even.

A lot of Wii U owners are waiting on this.

Liveinadive wrote:

I'm day one for this on wiiu. Will probably pre-order. Print run will be small.

Will go same way as GC TP, which I stupidly sold for the sum total of fuck all.

Right, I'm way too tired to be as concise as I'd like, but here goes...

(This might be one for you, @Tempy, 'cause I know that @isanbard disagrees.)

My view's that 3D Zelda games draw feelings of epicness from their players through sheer length - through commitment to the cause. Maybe because of their (at times) nice graphics; maybe because of rejigged nostalgia... Whatever the reason for their hooks, there must be something intrinsically enjoyable about them to hand over 30+ hours without self-questioning. I dunno, maybe if only to escape the real world for a bit. But I struggle to see them as rewarding in the oldest - and I'd say truest - sense of gaming mechanics: improvement through action.

Almost anyone with enough time can finish a Zelda, seeing exactly the same situations as everyone else. It might take some players longer than others to play through certain shrines, but there'll be no differentiation in approaches and outcomes. If it were in the arcades, those looking over your shoulder would do so for its world alone, having no concern for your play unless you were frustratingly, game-delayingly bad.

So does it matter? If you don't mind, of course not. But I do. I mind the lack of any real criticality towards my performance as a barrier to progression, the kind that forces me to improve incrementally until I've sussed a better tactic or simply advanced my execution. I mind the lack of pressure when given puzzles with rote solutions and no timers. I'd argue that better games have pressure ticks to impose that urgency - to frame the challenge of each task, so that you're encouraged to consider multiple ways around them to find the best way. And that imposition of personality as you win is one of gaming's founding and greatest rewards.

You can't inject much of your character or style into Breath of the Wild because it's such a preconfigured world, with enemy-attack-patterns set in limited stone. Its puzzles aren't hard enough to trigger much sense of reward, they're just there as rhythm-breakers from the three-at-a-time monster-bashing, requiring the interaction of overly highlighted furniture-moving to progress. Their stalling of progression promoting a feeling of pseudo-involvement, presenting as puzzles when really they're just simple obstacles to delay the player for long enough to prompt wonders about what the next room might hold. To rope one's imagination through imprisonment of interactive freedom.

Indiana Jones' traps are mostly interesting for their unforeseens, and that's largely what 3D Zelda games miss. Tricking the player with unfair setups, the player then learning to use those same tricks against the AI in turn. And why not afford combat where the right stick's used to manually target instead of moving the camera to no real end?

There's so much to love about Hyrule - and in A Link to the Past, I mostly did - but so little in its representations to take away as memories of your chosen, learned and practised playstyle. They're autopilot games with an utterly convincing method of time-investment deception. Your experience is mine; mine is yours. All of us are Link, yet none of us are.

I'm kind of the opposite to you Escape.
I appreciate a game that offers a kind challenge but allows the majority of players to see it through. Difficult for difficult's sake pisses me off.

The go to "difficult" games currently are the souls games. Personally I think they are different though, given time everyone can complete them, they just don't subscribe to the tropes of most games.

I have completed Dark Souls 1 and 3 and I am shit at games.

Really I am happy to plod through a Zelda with a couple of deaths.

Souls isn't difficult for difficult sake. It is just different.
It doesn't allow players to use what they have learnt in other games.
What you described is what souls is. You just haven't given them enough time to work them out.

Generally I found if getting to the boss was trouble I wasn't ready for the boss.
The only real annoyance I have found is S and O if you have to use the corkscrew lift which can be slow.

The lack of checkpoints near bosses is certainly a fault, and especially in the first Dark Souls. It's mitigated somewhat once you realise you can pretty much run through most areas without bothering to fight anything on the way, but still not ideal.

I would say, however, that a lot of the time those ideas about how to change tactics came while doing those runs - it becomes a time to reflect on different possibilities that I wouldn't necessarily do if just repeatedly being thrown in to the arena. It also rebuilds tension. But maybe that's just me.

From what you say though, Escape, it sounds like it should really be up your street. It is about ingenuity and developing your own approaches, and immensely rewarding when they succeed. If you can get past that repetition.

Escape wrote:

Liveinadive wrote:

Difficult for difficult's sake pisses me off.

Sure, and that's why I'm not a fan of the Souls games.

Dark Souls is not a hard game. It just requires you to pay attention and observe your surroundings. It's also not a game that will be conquered by dogged persistence. There are myriad ways to deal with every single encounter. The run back to the boss is part of the game. If they had you restart outside the boss room it would totally take away a lot of what Dark Souls is about. You die a couple of times on the boss? Time to maybe rethink and go somewhere else. You need to be sure you stand a good chance against the boss before you walk through that fog, and that you don't have a shit ton of souls on you. Prep prep prep...

Not enough games like that around.

It should be helping you learn the fundamentals, giving you opportunities to stock up on resources, or teaching you to run past.

If you find the repeat of encounters boring then the Souls games are always going to be dull to you because - and this is especially true of bloodborne - everything pivots around what is a very narrow but deep combat system.

It's Bruce Lee's 1 Kick 1000 times. If you're bored by kick 5, it isn't for you.

I think I can get on board with repeat encounters to an extent but I think the boss felt fundamentally a different challenge which required a different approach, which is fine and lauded. The problem was the space between the boss and restart was wide and blandly time consuming and the risk of failure in experimentation was so high (because it's a tough game) which meant that desire to reach payoff diminished every time I killed the three guys in the upstairs and battered a the wolfs through the door (inevitable successes each time)

You say inevitable, but it isn't unless you're preternaturally good at the game.

By and large Bloodborne sorted its boss encounters for me because they were all tied so closely to the fundamentals. They were all fought the same way as regularl enemies, and those with gimmicks like Rom, could be reached in under a minute with no combat.

The first two, Gascgoine especially, are just regular enemies writ large. All the same tactics apply, you just need to be very competent with them, hence the reinforcement and resupply run.

Edit: re-reading your post that's the key disagreement, I don't think the bosses encourage a different approach. Just like all of bloodborne, it's philosophy is usually pretty simple: this but more so, until you can't take it, or you win.

It is inevitable after I've done it five times!

I'm clearly not better given i didn't get past the first boss.

I gave up on the first boss battle of the Wii one. The wiimote wasn't up to the demands of slicing that it seemed to require or it didn't do a good enough job of explaining it to me

I also managed to accidentally lose my shield and couldn't find another one which didn't help

Also I have no patience

Childintime wrote:

Gascgoine is the ultimate double-check: have you learnt how to dodge and parry? If yes, proceed. If no, lol get rekt.

Surely there's an element of learning the guy himself though? I always felt there was an element of punch out which was about learning animations and stuff.

I also don't think there are any aerial enemies up to that point (perhaps the crows?)