Hundreds of gamers ran towards the playable Zelda kiosks yesterday to try their hands at The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. As Kotaku states, this kind of stampede hasn't been scene since the Wii was launched in 2006. Also as Kotaku states, some of these people have waited four hours to play the new Zelda. FOUR HOURS! That's a long time of doing nothing to play just a little bit of this new Zelda. This game appears to be all the rage right now.
But allow me to curb my enthusiasm a bit. Now granted, I was impressed from what I saw streamed of the game a couple days ago. However, if I was there at the E3 floor, I would not have ran against countless others just to try it. I definitely would have played it given the chance, but not in a manic fashion like that. Maybe it's because I've grown older and a bit wiser, but I don't view this kind of behavior as smart.
Sound familiar?
One of the reasons why I don't go out and shop on Black Friday. People have gotten hurt and even killed in Black Friday stampedes. People lose their shit when there's something they want real bad and there are many other people gunning for the same thing at the same time. An incident like what you saw in this video could have easily happened at E3. I haven't heard of anyone being hurt, and if none were, thank God. Last thing we need is a story of people trampling each other at E3 trying to play a video game.
"BUT IT'S NOT JUST ANY VIDEO GAME! IT'S THE NEW ZELDA!"
Which is funny now that you mention it. Yes, it's not just any new Zelda. It's a Zelda that for the first time has broken its shackles of traditional formulaic game design and caught up with the rest of the gaming industry. "Link has a jump button now." That sentence alone should drive home what I'm getting at it. Yes, for the first time, Link will now be able to explore a world that is open-ended and delineated, something that games have been doing since, I don't know, at least a good couple of decades or so.
But catching up with the rest of the gaming world is a very important milestone for Nintendo. it shows that, after hounding and prodding and nudging - even kicking and screaming, Nintendo will break away from their comfort zone. As a result, we have a new Zelda that has generated this kind of reception, a kind of "must-play" mantra that makes people risk their well-being just to be the first few to experience it for themselves......
.... even though they've already experienced it in many other games before. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure Breath of the Wild will be a fantastic game of the highest Nintendo caliber (well, I said the same thing about Skyward Sword, and look how that turned out), but nothing in the footage that I saw was really all that new to gaming, just new to Zelda. This also illustrates a problem I've had with Nintendo fans for some time. They're so content and complacent with whatever Nintendo hands their way. Even though games from other companies have achieved so much more in all facets from graphics, to gameplay to storytelling, it seems to be a major deal to Nintendo fans when Nintendo finally decides to catch up.
"Link has a jump button now." He finally does, and people were ready to jump each other just to try it.
I would agree on your points about other developers being leaps and bounds ahead of Nintendo in the story and graphics departments, but I strongly disagree with the notion that they're lacking in terms of gameplay. Nintendo still has an old school mindset when it comes to game design which can be both a virtue and a vice, but one area in which I do feel it works very much to their benefit is the unrelenting focus on fun substantive gameplay above aesthetics or flash. Nintendo trailers rarely impress or get me hyped like the ones for other games do, yet most of the time when I actually sit down to pick up the controller and play, I get more enjoyment out of them than most other AAA developers.
ReplyDeleteI think the open world trend to level design is massively overrated and it actually ruins the pacing of most games. I'm literally starting to groan every time I see another game announced that is open world, because usually this translates to a lot of copy-pasta trees and rocks, and filler fetch/kill quests designed to simply give you something to do in a specific area of the map that you would otherwise have no reason to ever travel to. Sure being able to look far off into the distance looks pretty, but it's all flash and generally adds no real substance to the game, especially because most open world games include fast travel anyway, eliminating much of the sense of scale to the environments. I would much rather have a focused linear experience if it keeps the story moving along at a steady pace and keeps the gameplay feeling fresh.
Having said that, I'm continually disappointed by the artistic direction Nintendo keeps going with Zelda's aesthetics and most of their games in general when it comes to storytelling. Square proved with Mario RPG way back on the SNES that you can even tell an involving and fun story along with great gameplay in a Mario game, and I think the early parts of Skyward Sword really showed the potential for much better storytelling in Zelda until Link left Skyloft and the game fell into boring Zelda conventions. Nintendo needs to get it out of their head that gameplay is the only thing that matters anymore, because their games could be so much more if they kept that fun Nintendo gameplay but also had a great story and beautiful artistic direction on top of it. As it stands right now, I think the new Zelda's graphics look a little bland and flat, and the hybrid Skyward Sword / Wind Waker design just doesn't work. I would be fine with a cartoonish design if it was more anime-like such as the way the DBZ Budokai/Tenkaichi games do it, but really, they should have just kept going in the direction of Twilight Princess and the tech demo they originally showed with Wii U, because Zelda's audience has matured and Nintendo keeps failing to realize that they still have an audience willing to come back to them if they understood what modern gamers are looking for.