Gaming Perfection...? Breath of The Wild

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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild has been anything but a simple exhale this past couple of weeks. It has been a titanic sized tornado that has blown away a significant majority of those that happened to be in its presence. It has truly been a long time since we have seen a game be this polarizing or have such an enormous presence in everyone’s daily buzz. And it has been longer still, that we have had so many critics and gamers alike asking themselves just what makes this experience so enrapturing.

In the essence of gaming, what do we look for regarding what makes it great? What do we seek to take from it in our experiences? Who is it for, and is it better if it does not even ask that question? Or could it be that instead, it has all the answers to questions you did not even know you had? Breath of The Wild raises questions in the skeptics’ minds while it seems like the blatantly obvious answer to everyone who has played the game.

We can start finding these answers in one of the most common themes I recognized in all the surrounding buzz of this New Zelda game. Let’s look first at this quote from Jason Schreier’s review at Kotaku.

Kotaku Review - Paragraph 3&4 said:
“For decades now, Zelda games have been about what you can’t do as much as they are about what you can. You can’t pick up that rock until you find the Power Gloves. You can’t go swimming until you buy Zora’s Flippers. See that big gap? You can’t cross it until you get the Hookshot. Since Link to the Past, just about every Zelda game has followed this same rhythm: You start off in a narrow world that gradually expands as you make progress. – Skip to paragraph 4


The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, in contrast, is all about what you can do. This is a game that says “yes” to anything you ask of it. From the very beginning, you can swim in any lake, pick up any boulder, and cross any pit. When you try some crazy experiment, the game will oblige. You can climb up any wall, mountain, or tower in the world, which allows you the freedom to explore the map in a way that no Zelda game has matched. Breath of the Wild never asks you to wait for a new item before you uncover its secrets. It just keeps saying yes.”


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Kotaku's review standards.

In gaming’s current state we have been surrounded lately by this faux sense of freedom that all of these new open world games offer. We are supposed to marvel at the crowded and spattered excessive sidequests we have the ability to take on, the vast empty plains we can traverse to get to our next objective or these elongated stories that only the best of the best manage to keep enticing enough to continue all the way through.

Rarely do these games give the absolute sense of freedom that remains the biggest buzzword the masses of PR throw in your face. And yet, we have this game here that appears to have finally achieved just that. Looking at IGN’s review of the game it is the very concept Jose Otero leads off.

IGN Review - Paragraph 1 said:
“The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s sheer freedom and sense of adventure is a remarkable achievement. Right from the start, the vast landscape of Hyrule is thrown completely open to you, and it constantly finds ways to pique your curiosity with mysterious landmarks, complex hidden puzzles, and enemy camps to raid for treasure and weapons. The fact that you can tackle any one of these things at your own pace and almost never get pulled to the main path is liberating, but the way all of Breath of the Wild’s systems fit elegantly into complex light survival game is even more impressive.”

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From IGN's Gameplay Showcase at E3 2016

The very same is echoed in a majority of the reviews for Zelda. You may be thinking that it could be the freedom alone that became the big buzzword for this game and led to its success. And while it is certainly a driving factor, there is a lot more at work in this machine that is Breath of The Wild.

Nintendo knows that Zelda is a childhood franchise to many. It’s what sparked a lot of creative wonderment in the minds of those that first picked up a controller in their youngest years. In their efforts these past few years, there has been a hollow sentiment that Nintendo was banking on nostalgia all this time and that the magic was too difficult actually to recapture. So as the gamer had to grow up, so did Nintendo. Zelda itself needed to strip itself of the aging green tunic for modernized mechanics. But the real beauty of it all was modernizing itself in a way that didn’t leave behind the quirks and mechanics that made it so enchanting in the beginning.

Nintendo Life Review - Paragraph 2 said:
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild delivers the revolution that has undoubtedly been desired within Nintendo and, it seems, among many fans. This is still quintessential Zelda, but the old formula has been drastically overhauled to the point that it's almost been ripped up and re-written from scratch. What we have, then, is the most ambitious title in the history of the franchise; most importantly it delivers on its staggering potential.”

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DualShockers Review - Paragraph 2 said:
A true return to form and tour de force for Nintendo’s unreleased console, the Nintendo Switch, and Wii U. Returning to the roots of an unknown environment, pure adventure, and intrinsic difficulty, Breath of the Wild is far more linked with the original title than any of the games that would follow after. And indeed, all of those qualities turn out to be strengths for the game. Without a doubt, this is how The Legend of Zelda franchise should have progressed all along.


When I look at Breath of The Wild as an outsider, I see the core of a Zelda game that I recognize from my youngest memories in gaming. As I progress and continue to explore the world and its smallest quirks, I appreciate how expertly crafted it is.

I have watched streamers route speedrun paths that contradict others but save the same amount of time. I have seen casual players die over and over to seemingly unfair enemies while I saw the elite conquer areas without so much as losing a single heart. I watched a man throw his metal sword in the middle of a bunch of monsters during a storm and watched the lightning strike it to kill the enemies. I’ve observed that fire swords can keep Link warm in cold weather, and noticed the minute changes to his expressions in varying weather conditions.


It’s this culmination of all the small things that truly complete this massive game and set the standard for why it’s so bewitching. It did not have to do anything new to succeed. It had to refine and nail what makes its competition so successful and put its charm into those elements.

Giant Bomb Review - Final Paragraph said:
“This sense of wonder is something that I haven't felt so strongly since I played A Link to the Past when I was seven years old. Ocarina of Time was able to capture some of that same magic in my teenage years. Now that I’m in my thirties, I don’t think that I expected it to be possible for a game to make me feel like that again. I’ve been reviewing video games for twelve years now, and I’m used to describing games in a certain way. “This game controls well. This mechanic is innovative. The graphics are stunning. The skill tree feels limited.” That type of language doesn’t adequately convey how Breath of the Wild made me feel. Nintendo may have changed so many long-standing traditions of the Zelda franchise, but the spirit of discovery is as strong as it’s ever been no matter your age. I didn’t think I’d feel the Zelda magic this strongly ever again, but I couldn't be happier to be proven wrong.

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Jontron 10/10

With all these adjectives that tug at your heartstrings, you’d think the game truly was this untouchable angel of a game that had no issues. But not everyone is so easily pleased and with good reason. Critics and opinions are what drive developers to continually innovate, fix issues, and stay away from huge mistakes and unwanted mechanics. We’ve seen this argued consistently within our community, a sentiment that while I do not entirely agree with, can find understanding.

Gbatemp's Review - Paragraph 4 said:
Another mechanic is the re-introduction of weapon/shield durability, and let me just start off by saying it's easily the worst gameplay mechanic Nintendo has put in the game, and I hope whomever made the decision to make it so awful was fired. The biggest problem is that every weapon, shield, and bow in the game breaks. Period. Not a single weapon you come across in game actually lasts more than a 4-10 enemy kills, depending on the health of the enemy and if your weapon has a durability buff. The super cool, special Hylian Shield? Breakable. The super special Lightscale Trident wielded by the champion of the Zora's, Mipha? Breakable, but can be re-acquired. Every bow you come across? Breakable. But surely the Master Sword at least lasts forever, right? Y'know, the Master Sword? The ultimate weapon? The one thing that can can stop evil in the world of Hyrule? WRONG. IT'S BREAKABLE. It's not even as durable as some of the other weapons you get, some weapons have a durability up buff that lasts longer than the Master Sword does. Thankfully it's not as bad as other weapons, because when your Master Sword “Runs out of energy (AKA breaks), it'll recharge after 10 minutes. But that's simply something that shouldn't happen in any game, let alone a Zelda game where it's the ultimate goddamn world changing weapon. It's not even that difficult to fix! Nintendo's solution to the durability problem is the simple and wrong one, pick up everything you see until you run out of inventory space.

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GBAtemp's Review Banner for Breath of The Wild

Just as the smallest things can bring a game together, the minor things drive a rift into your enjoyment that you take from the experience. I don’t think Tom’s review, or Jim Sterling’s review, or anyone that had bad impressions to take away from Breath of The Wild, are inherently wrong in their thinking. I, in fact, give them credit for being willing to discuss the things that irked them enough to put that effort into bringing them to light for other people to see. And even with those critique’s, they still enjoyed the game enough to think of it highly. They still managed to take something away from the game that made them enjoy it, even after their heaviest complaints.

Sure, their voices were cynical. We know who they are, we understand how they feel, and there is a sort of endearment to how they have such sharp tongues and angry approaches to things, but that shtick is still valid in a critical atmosphere. It’s necessary even to keep companies always driving to do better and better things for their games.

Your expectation of others opinion does not define overall experience. The beauty of gaming is its ability to personally craft experiences for every individual that encounters that game. Something many games struggle to do, and others do so immensely it stirs up the conversation we are having at this very moment.

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Breath of The Wild's current standing on Metacritic

Breath of The Wild ranks among the greatest video games of all time on Metacritic, which seems to mean a lot to people. Do you know what it was standing side by side with before a couple of reviews took it down to 97?

Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2.

Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast.

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The current top 4 ranked games on Metecritic

Is this truly how we measure gaming perfection? The half-assed, tacked on numbers at the end of a review? Or is it in fact much more important to go back and read the words that make up the review itself. See the sentiments and base your opinions on that? Share the experiences of the bigger voices and create your own with your voice and your playstyle?

I asked a lot of questions at the beginning of this long article. “In the essence of gaming, what do we look for regarding what makes it great? What do we seek to take from it in our experiences? Who is it for, and is it better if it does not even ask that question? Or could it be that instead, it has all the answers to questions you did not even know you had?”

Ask yourself this when you look at Breath of The Wild. Ask yourself this when you read a review you don’t agree with right before you leave that snide comment. Ask yourself what your experience seeks to benefit from one voice over others.

Is Breath of The Wild a perfect game? If you ask the majority, it seems to be pretty damn close, and the gameplay sure does speak for itself. But that leads me to my final question.


Is it perfect, simply, to you?

 

FranckKnight

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A game can never be perfect.

But it can perfectly do what it should, entertain you, surprise you, make you react.

Zelda is doing that for me. Objectively I could probably find lots of faults, like the weapon durability is a bit weak, they definitely don't last long enough to my taste, but does that make the game unplayable? Not at all, you learn to work with it. This is a designed difficulty.

This is different than having a game's difficulty artificially or accidentally inflated because of bad controls, coding bugs or stuff like near invisible ledges you that you need to somehow figure out. Sure, technically it's still a design problem, but Zelda doesn't make it feel like it was an accident or that QA didn't do their work.

And that's perfect enough for me.
 

guedesbrawl

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"but i simply can't see how ANYONE would ever give this a 10/10." & then "It's to me a 9/10 like almost every zelda."

Kinda answering your own question there buddy.

No...

I just listed a bunch of the game's issues. I can see it's an amazing game, but with those flaws people still give it a 10/10? it's just ridiculous.
 

gamesquest1

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For me to turn on 5 terminals only and defeat a boss cannot be considered as a dungeon
Yeah I think they could have at least added some classic Zelda style dungeon, even if they made them optional to appease the people who just want a walk though the park experience

Idk I miss the traditional Zelda format, I would imagine they could have easily added some end game tradition dungeon style dungeons, maybe we will get that in the dlc, for me that was the only big issue for me with botw is that they have scrapped what was imho one of my favourite parts which was the new items per dungeon keeping things fresh and challenging dungeons
 

Fotonick

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Not sure what leads you to those conclusions. The villages are absolutely reminiscent of other Zelda games. The cuccos are still there. Shrines and puzzles are 100% Zelda but slightly more difficult.

Honestly, what's difficult in botw?
Respect to the classic dungeon of past Zeldas I see no difficulty, even the 4 colossuses are embarassing by how much easy and boring they are. :/

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

For me to turn on 5 terminals only and defeat a boss cannot be considered as a dungeon

Expecially when all 4 are practically the same. :/
 
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Ritsuki

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I had a very long discussion with a friend a few years ago about that. The biggest problem with scores imho is that there are things that cannot be rated because it would not make sense to rate it, but in the same time, those things can be really important parts of the experience. In a perfect world, every game should be rated with it's own set of criterias. But I think that with the democratization of indie games, we're starting to get a grasp of how to make those tests more reliable, or at least interesting.
 

Spider_Man

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dont know how you can call it gaming perfection when loads of people are having lagging issues.

also how can you call it freedom to roam when all games regardless if its open world, playing the game you are on a fixed track from A to B.... just you have the option to run around aimlessly doing nothing but killing random bots.

all nintendo have done is seen of recent how popular open world games have been and thought, lets make zelda like this.
 

skawo

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also how can you call it freedom to roam when all games regardless if its open world, playing the game you are on a fixed track from A to B....

This is the strangest argument I think I've heard to date.
 

frogboy

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if it was a perfect game, i wouldn't have any complaints about it

that's not quite the case here, but it is pretty good.
 
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tbb043

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There's just no way that Zelda:BotW is worth a 10/10 as it isn't a flawless game

10/10 doesn't mean it's flawless, since there's no such thing as a flawless game. It just means best of the best, a must have.

BOTW is not close to flawless, but it's certainly much closer to 10/10 than 7/10 to anyone but some hack troll looking to piss people off (and then crying when mission accomplished).
 
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Saiyan Lusitano

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10/10 doesn't mean it's flawless, since there's no such thing as a flawless game. It just means best of the best, a must have.

BOTW is not close to flawless, but it's certainly much closer to 10/10 than 7/10 to anyone but some hack troll looking to piss people off (and then crying when mission accomplished).
10/10 is a perfect score which also means flawless. It's neither.
 

Steena

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Metacritic is a joke and giving numbered scores is a joke. What's the point of measuring when the scale is completely arbitrary in the first place? Not only among different websites, but the same exact reviewer does not follow some sort of education, paper or standards to giving a score. There aren't even arbitrary pretend-standards among the crazy people. There is absolutely nothing objective in a review. Some people can appreciate little touches or having the best of X in flawed games (monster hunter) much more than they do bland/predictable but consistent and well executed overall mediocre games (uncharted/ac) and vice versa. On top of that, your experience with the genre of whatever you're reviewing will greatly influence your opinion on it. Is everyone expected to play every entry in a given genre? Or none of them? How many hours? Who decides this? What's the objective consensus here?

Besides, reviewers are mostly casual players with no experience requirement. No thesis on game design has ever been asked to anyone to become a game reviewer. Hell, most reviewers don't even know what game design is, nor the basics of game programming, which is incredibly helpful to establish how much effort went into a unique mechanic versus just padding something with higher numbers for example. So doing any sort of measuring is irrelevant at the basis of this alone.

Yet the children go crazy over these completely arbitrary numbers like they are objective, down to the decimals as if there were scientists carefully establishing whether a game deserved 97 or 98 through thousands of test runs in the lab.

And then you have the inevitable click-baiters who know how dumb the system is and want to exploit it for some easy visibility.

It's like a vicious circle of idiocy that feeds on itself and some sort of drama happens on every big release without fail. It's a giant retarded beast that got too big to kill now, and has too many issues at once to try and fix.
 

Bladexdsl

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if it didn't have that yiga clan sneaking bs it would have been perfect i HATE that SHIT. and that fucking shrine quest where
catch and ride the fucking deer which didn't show up half the time took me fucking days!
:hateit:

so i have it about 8/10
 
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FAST6191

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Besides, reviewers are mostly casual players with no experience requirement. No thesis on game design has ever been asked to anyone to become a game reviewer. Hell, most reviewers don't even know what game design is, nor the basics of game programming, which is incredibly helpful to establish how much effort went into a unique mechanic versus just padding something with higher numbers for example. So doing any sort of measuring is irrelevant at the basis of this alone.

And then you have the inevitable click-baiters who know how dumb the system is and want to exploit it for some easy visibility.

Was this click bait? I agree it is not the guy's first tangle with "low" scores ( http://gbatemp.net/threads/jim-sterling-gives-mario-kart-7-a-5-10.314755/ ) but it seems internally consistent.

Also while I don't disagree with much of what was said how many book reviewers have language or literature training, or film/tv reviewers have film making training, or play reviewers... I agree it is probably a higher proportion but it at no point strikes me as a prerequisite. Going further might this lack of such things result in a potentially more useful review to someone that is not steeped in game design and so forth, aka avoiding the film snob problem?
What does effort that went into something have to do with the final execution? Many a wonderfully complex or even basic and serviceable mechanic has been hose up by a tweak in base stats or something, and assuming we are not going to hack the game as part of a review it could stand to be noted.

That said I will take either of those games you mentioned over monster hunter -- I have still yet to find out why I dislike monster hunter (on paper is much I want from a game) but the whole is so much lesser than the sum of its parts, despite serious efforts to enjoy it.
 

xdarkx

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I am more curious as what those people who think this game is perfect would give to a another game that is similar to this Zelda game.

Let's assume the other game has all the same gameplay and whatnot. The only differences are the title, character models, and any UI in the game. Would people still give the game a perfect 10/10 or would they still overreact when someone give it a "bad" score like 7/10?
 

Spider_Man

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10/10 is a perfect score which also means flawless. It's neither.

I think these ratings are biased, how many times do you see nintendo get 10/10 on a zelda game, take wind waker, tho its visual layout was good, but the actual game i found very annoying having to do all that sailing.

I think people at IGN and what ever are from zelda fans and will give it 10/10 because to them, its the best zelda they have played and they love zelda.

Ive played alot of games that get good ratings but never a 10/10 when the game has been far better.

and this is why i never take reviews or ratings to influence me buying a game, mainly because these are done by fans of that console and/or game.

take for an example The Last of Us 2, tho it will be an epic game, i bet it will get excellent reveiws and rating but what has helped this title get its instant fame is that its from Naughty Dog.

dont get me wrong THOU is an excellent game, but i did find some parts of the first one rather dull, but because its a ND game people were able to ignore this and love the game.
 

Deleted member 331788

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It's an okay game, far from a perfect score ...it's is however a very repetitive game ...you are just doing the same things over ...and over.
Yeah sure the map is huge, but most of the time there's nothing around??
If feels like Zelda skins have just been added like Hyrule Warriors, well just because the Zelda brand sells more ...for me it's not real Zelda game.
 

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