I am one of those people who hates BotW, let me xplain why

>>389813008
The gold standard of open world is still, IMO, Red Dead Redemption. That game had a compelling world, an interesting economy, interesting activities, a feeling that you were traversing the landscape and different things were happening. Simple but satisfying movement. Immersion. Atmosphere. BotW is the opposite of atmosphere; it is a test environment.

Posters: 1
Sad!

>>389813008
I don't give a rat's ass about the "open world genre", but I agree that BotW gives you a lot of tools and not a lot to meaningfully do with them. Fucking around is fun for a few hours but in a 70+ hour game you need real content. Shrines were, as you alluded to, very artificial-feeling and copypaste. Even the monks at the end never said anything unique or interesting. Zero charm. It doesn't help that the shrines themselves are mostly lackluster.

I think the reason for the game's copypaste design is
1. Nintendo just doesn't know how to fill a 3D world with good content. They're great at constrained spaces, but if you give them a lot of land they struggle to put anything meaningful in it. This is a problem with all the 3D Zeldas, but it's especially egregious in Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild because they're so reliant on exploration, and so the repetitiveness really shrines through.
2. The world is simply too fucking big. There's 100x more space than there is content to put in it. In a game with 4 divine beasts and half a dozen serious enemy types, having a world that huge is just backwards. It's like the team that created the landscapes and the team that crafted the content never communicated until the end of the project.

>>389815106
>They're great at constrained spaces, but if you give them a lot of land they struggle to put anything meaningful in it

Oh shut the fuck up, there have been countless lists posted in the last several threads that include the amount of unique structures and fairly involved shrine quests to be found in the overworld. You comparing this to Wind Waker and regurgitating the "copypaste" buzzword really doesn't do anything for your argument at all beyond just showing how disingenuous and hilariously dense you actually are.

>>389813008
>The world of BotW does not really have any mystery or intrigue

It's literally filled with intrigue. There's ruins, monuments and other ancient structures everywhere but never anything that spoonfeeds you what era they're supposed to be from, which is kind of the whole point in establishing that sense of mystery.

Really it's exactly why, say, Shadow of the Colossus was so fascinating to some players.

>>389813170
Red Dead Redemption doesn't let you do ANYTHING though. The world is even more barren than BotW.

>going UP is not as compelling as going DOWN. A big flaw of this world is that it is an outside, with no inside. Virtually no caves or underground areas, so the world feels insanely holllow and empty. Again, no mystery, no history.

Yeah this was pretty disappointing. Hyrule Castle was the best part of the game because it had an inside and an outside. Didn't it suck when you scaled that abandoned Akkala Citadel and you couldn't go inside it at all? And the Yiga Hideout is about the only other major "indoors" area. The few caves there were were really cool and more would have been nice.

>>389813008
Boy do I disagree in every way. BotW uses its mechanics better than any game I can think of because it is constantly rewarding lateral thinking. There are so many moments in the game where you can do something intuitively and it'll work, even though you wouldn't normally expect it to in the constraints of a game. That is precisely because the game gives you so many open-ended tools that are created without having specific problems in mind, so you get rewarded for creativity and resourcefulness.

When I can start a campfire and shoot arrows through it to circumvent a motion controls puzzle, that is the best feeling in the world because I can use out of the box thinking and be rewarded for it. BotW is made up of these moments, and it's moments like this where other games completely fail because they are too constrained. When I found out about feeding horses apples and carrots, I found that out on my own, and it seems perfectly natural. But if you take that expectation into other games, then of course it wouldn't work. This difference in philosophy is why BotW is so much better than games that came before it.

This is why the game has so many tools and why it's the game's strength. You never need to use octoballoons outside of one sidequest, but they open up all kinds of fun possibilities to play with, precisely because they aren't intended to solve any particular problem. It's not good because it has a physics engine, it's good because it uses the physics engine to make the game behave more intuitively, which makes the game way more immersive than any amount of shitty Dark Souls lore or out-of-place narrative.

Also, what the fuck are you even talking about with verticality? You go down when you glide and that's a major component of movement, even moreso than climbing.

FYI, there are a ton of NPCs in the game that flesh out the world's history. There's one that explains the backstory of Akkala Citadel for example, although you'd never know anything about it if you didn't interact with him. There's some others that talk about the importance of certain landmarks and locations too.

I think the problem is that you're just going into the game expecting to get all this lore stuff from books or written tablets, when most of it is actually told through optional dialogue. You just need to interact more.

>>389816708
I'm replaying it now, and it really stood out to me just how much dialog there is for everyone depending on different circumstances. Didn't realize everyone in Hateno had a different line for when you're holding the blue flame.

Pretty good game but not perfect
For starters it's on a shit console, if it had 60 fps and less shit graphics i could ALMOST understand the perfect scores it has.
Right now it is overrated tho.
Also the weapons breaking after 4-10 hits is infuriating.