melancholy wrote:I finally finished Skyward Sword, so now my family is bugging me to play the new Zelda. But I'm just not convinced that it's something I'll like. A wilderness survival game does not sound like fun at all, nor does all the material collecting and crafting.
I was really scared after seeing the item crafting gameplay in teaser and preview videos. But Breath of the Wild does a great job building a good system around this Skyrim-type, open-world game style. The hardest thing for me to get used to was how disposable most of the normal weapons like swords and bows are.
The stuff like the UI are built pretty well around crafting and such, they make it very easy. The menus are nicely designed and have quick options to make weapon/armor switching fast while in combat. I've beaten two of the dungeons and only a few of the optional quests have had any item fetching or collecting.
As long as you keep battling the bad guys, you'll have an amble selection of weapons and crafting material. I only ran into inventory problems when skipping a large portion of Death Mountain by paragliding over it. Basically, the game does a great job feeding you items, materials and such if you stick to the main paths. The only time that item gathering might interrupt the game is if you run low on meat, but creatures to hunt are found in every part of the game.
Skyward Sword felt like a traditional adventure game with its set pieces and traditional puzzle solving. Breath of the Wild feels like an action game that provides role-playing-type gameplay through its items and rune system. Basically, it all comes down to how many "rules" each game has. One is extremely buttoned down and straight forward where the other is much more open and provides a loose framework in which the gamer can solve puzzles/battle enemies.
Whereas Skyward Sword was linear, BotW won't lead you through the game. After about 1-3 hours, you're given the vague version of a prologue and four waypoints to the major dungeons. After that, the game provides distractions and a large number of side quests along the way, of which you're free to ignore or complete in any order. But with all the new spangly open-world mechanics, you can still play it as a traditional Zelda game.