I think what that comment was alluding to is the fact that basically no new Switch units seem to have been shipped since the console's release two weeks ago. So the current rate at which they are shipping product is 0.
(Obviously they are actually producing something, but it's not arriving anywhere yet, so there's no evidence of consoles being produced.)
It's good, but not perfect. The weapon fragility is driving me mad, and I'm 10+ hours into the game. It shouldn't take this long for the game to get good.
I think that's good advice. In this game you shouldn't fall in love with items, armor or weapons. Plenty of them come to you. Every now and then something more special comes your way and you should use that more difficult opponents but you just need to come to grips with the game play which is you will constantly acquire new things. Use things as you find them to make the game fun.
If you want to play portably, Switch is the only way to do it. Apparently, it plays well on Wii U, but at a lower resolution (720p vs Switch's 900p docked).
It's not that simple. The resolution is slightly lower (almost unnoticeably so) but in some areas of the game the frame rate is actually a little better than the Switch.
I have it on the Wii U. Link looks pretty aliased, there's obvious slowdown at points, and the screen looks overly blurry with its post processing graphic effects at times (It's actually made my head hurt a few times).
I really like my Wii U, but I don't think this is the prettiest game it could be. Honestly I think Wind Waker HD has much cleaner graphics (albeit not as technically good). It is a very fun game, though.
The snark is unnecessary. Of course they exist. Whether they are "dirt cheap" and whether the associated trade-off in quality expectations is worthwhile are entirely legitimate debates.
For example, I saw refurbished Wii U consoles for $200 the other day, and I'd be hesitant to spend $100 or $150 on a device with no warranty. But for $200 it's not crazy to think you might as well go for the Switch at $100 more.
Prices for used Wii Us are around 200 EUR in my region. I'd say that's not a bargain and makes the idea of a new Switch for an extra 100 bucks way more attractive.
WiiU has a lot of great games you can play right now and it will take Switch few year before it reaches a similar level in it's life cycle. Also, it's the best console to play Wii games right now (and possibly ever) and there's plenty of games available from Nintendo's older consoles available on eShop. Considering that in few months it will be nearly impossible to buy a new WiiU I'd say it's the perfect moment to buy it.
I'd disagree. I like having a bit more direction in the main quest and being able to skip over all the side quests, mainly due to time constraints (which are very little compared to someone with kids, long commutes, etc), the linearity of older Zelda titles was never an issue for me. With BotW you seem to have to do many house of side quests just to be able to take on the main one.
I've sunk about 30+ hours in now and I don't think I would have come this far had it not been a Zelda game, a series I've been playing for 25 years.
It's certainly not a bad game, but it's not one for people that can't make serious time commitments.
It's more that the side quests are a mixed bag in terms of how compelling they are, yet they aren't really side quests but required for the more interesting parts of the game.
The rush is so that I can do the million other things I want to do in my spare time. I much prefer the old way of doing the main quest and coming back to side quests for an hour or two here and there.
Is it so important that you need to finish the game in order to have your spare time back? So what if it takes you 2 months to finish the game, playing a couple of hours here, a few hours there?
I have two kids (one is only 2 months old) and also have a long commute, demanding job, etc. I also don't have a lot of time to play games. But the Switch just makes it so easy to play. It's the first console I can play in bed at night without bothering my wife and newborn.
Thus, with its portability, it makes it extremely easy to just play anytime I have time.
Also, why rush? 1 to 2 hours a day is more than enough. This game is a slow burn and I'm loving every moment of it!
The Wii U can be used in this way, but only if your bedroom is right next to the room that you normally have it connected to the TV and you have thin walls, as it is limited by the wireless connection range, which struggles sometimes even within large rooms.
Though, you can actually have wherever you want, if you don't need it connected to a TV, I've seen photos of people playing the Wii U in an airport lounge, all you need is a plug socket.
My issue with the New 3DS is that the buttons are incredibly clicky. Like using a mechanical keyboard while someone is trying to sleep. The Switch seems a bit quieter in that regard.
Exactly. I rarely understand people who begrudgingly dismiss large, epic games due to their limited time. The size of the game becomes irrelevant if you can save and continue at any point. Feel free to progress as slowly as you prefer. Your quest log sums up what's going on in case you forgot since your last session a few weeks ago.
I bought The Witcher 3 on release and have been playing it since - 2 hours here, a free evening there, maybe on a lazy sunday. I'm still not finished.
To me that just means that I'll be able to enjoy the game for a very, very long time.
Gets tough when time gets really short, and you occasionally miss an entire week or two. You forget WTF was going on, how the controls work, and so on. Kills your connection with the characters in games where that matters.
You can have a game that takes a long time, but it would need a LOT of story in it's missions and sidequests to keep it interesting. If you stretch a 10 hour story over 80 hours of gameplay it gets boring real quick because the pacing of the story will simply be too slow.
don't have the game, but i was under the impression you could walk over to the final boss fight in 15 minutes. are you maybe doing some min maxing to avoid that fight?
I very much doubt that's the case, at the very least I doubt it's possible for all but the most freakishly talented. There are regular enemies all over the world, even in the tutorial area that can single hit you, even after you've upgraded a lot.
I mean, sure, they're probably crazy good, but i doubt you're 30x worse than they are. Watch a video or two. I don't think you'll set a record or anything, but i bet you'll be able to finish the game real fast.
actually me and my friends did it like the video (we actually entered the castle in a more regular way, using a raft and then using the rails) and came to the first ganon bosses.
I let them play and everytime one died they needed to switch controllers, they played all previous zeldas but never botw and they came really really far in something like 4 hours, while switching the controller.
(of course they skipped all the main quests).
That's just not how games like this work, and it's not that normal gamers are worse. It's perfectly reasonable that a normal gamer might take 30 hours to complete a game that a speed runner can complete in an hour. One's goal is to play the game, the other's goal is to use their existing game knowledge to cut out as much content as possible.
You can't expect to do a speed run on your first play through without following a guide, and if you do that what's the point in even playing it? Unless beating games as fast as humanly possible is your thing.
So, a simple "run to the final boss and then die" is 12 minutes [0], but actual speedruns routed for completion have quickly dropped from 1.5 hours to under 1 hour just within the past week. [1] Speedrunners are very gutsy and innovative and are basically guaranteed to find ways to dramatically reduce times on a game this popular.
> With BotW you seem to have to do many house of side quests just to be able to take on the main one.
What? Why? I did almost no side quests until after doing all the divine beasts. There's some minor things to get into the relevant towns, and to get to the beast, but they were generally fun/interesting and part of the main quest. I don't see a reason you'd have to do any of the more boring ones.
I've noticed that BOTW which is different things to different people. I mean you could just run straight up to Ganon and finish the game in under 1 hour. Or you could play it linearly, only going where the quests take you.
Personally I just ran around finding shrines, and only finished the main quests after unlocking most of the world and many shrines.
Breath of the Wild has far more in common with the original Legend of Zelda than with the more recent games.
Some may consider that this game approaches the difficulty of the NES/SNES Zelda titles a return to form. Though, I suppose that those are not really 'Normal' Zelda games anymore.
I thought so too and that was my first boss and when in finally took him down I thought to myself "that was way Way WAY too hard for a Zelda game". Thats when a hint in the game finally made sense so I restored to test and yea, it was relatively easy if you do the right things.
Similarly with other combat I thought it was way harder than other Zeldas. When I was near finishing the game I went online and checked "how to fight a lynel" (the hardest enemy imo). Watching that opened up some ideas and combat got much easier and more exciting. I kind of wish I had looked it up earlier. I was literally at Hyrule Castle on my way to complete the game when I looked.
I thoroughly enjoyed the game but my previous Zelda experience also limited my thinking about what's possible. I feel like I missed a large part of the game play because of that
the linearity of older Zelda titles was never an issue for me.
The thing is that the first 3 Zelda's were not linear. I remember being so frustrated that Ocarina of time went out of it's way to stop me from exploring new areas, and how navi ruined all the exploration. I think Breath of the Wild is the first 3d Zelda that feels like the classic games.
They were more linear than you realise, too progress in dungeon 3 you needed a weapon from dungeon 2, etc. OOT wasn't a radical departure from that and was about as open. The Wii ones were the most linear and that was a reaction to the criticism for lack of story.
This isn't really all that true. In Zelda 1 first quest I think only two dungeons are item locked to dungeon items. People who are good at the game can do them pretty significantly out of order. There's still a difficulty progression that makes this hard, but you can be good enough to overcome it.
Zelda 2 I'm less familiar with, but it has fewer items to lock you out in general with. I think once you get the hammer you have a lot of run of the overworld, again largely being constrained by difficulty ramping and leveling up which you can do anywhere.
Zelda 3 is considerably more linear though, it's true. You can sequence break the dark world a fair bit, but it's a lot clunkier by this point. Still, it's not anywhere near as rigid as the 3d Zeldas have been.
I'm the exact opposite. I don't care about main quests and such. In terms of gamer persona I'm more of an explorer and just like poking around and seeing what's out there and what I can do. For that, BotW has been perfect.
FO3 felt too linear and too hand held. FO:NV on the other hand was actually decent.
FO4 is not fun at all if you want the open world RPG element. It's a shooter more than anything else, and you have to avoid settlements completely. The survival difficulty mode was decent in difficulty, but it lacked "oh shit" mechanics so random encounters don't just kill you at will for the first many hours of gameplay until you get some gear.
This makes a lot of sense. 3 and New Vegas are remakes of 1 and 2, which were respectively linear and open. 4 is the first one where Bethesda hasn't had earlier work to use as a reference, and it sounds like that really shows.
Have you played them FO1 was not linear at all? 3 and NV are not in any way remakes of the originals. But NV was not made by Bethesda, but a different studio with some of the orignal developers and that really shows.
I have played them both several times, starting not long after they came out. NV is much more like 2 than 3 is like 1, fair enough - but I don't think it is unreasonable to characterize 1 as being much more linear than 2. "Remake" is probably overdoing it a bit, though; the similarities aren't quite that strong.
I've played both, but The Witcher 3 didn't engage me at all. In gameplay it felt like a poor imitation of Skyrim. Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, is repeatedly delightful and entertaining, and has me exploring just for the sake of discovering what's out there far more than any other open world game ever has.
I can kind of understand why The Witcher 3 won a load of awards, but it just wasn't my thing (and I kept getting stuck on collision boxes where I really didn't think there should be any, which is utterly infuriating).
I am expecting to see Breath of the Wild winning absolutely truckloads of awards. How it will stand up in the future remains to be seen, but in this moment it's a fantastic new milestone in the history of the open world RPG.
I found Skyrim devoid of meaning and context. Being "anybody you want" actually means you are nobody. It takes a while to actually realize how well written Witcher 3 is, and how engaging even the smallest side quest can be.
Besides, Witcher 3 had an intimate sex scene on stuffed unicorn.
The Bloody Baron quest is a great example of the depth of the side quests. It's tragic and discusses important topics in a way that isn't just black & white.
Bloody Baron is a main quest, though. Anyways, side quests are indeed very well written. The werewolf quest in Velen comes to mind. The one where where you help Cerys an Craite on her own quest is also amazing (the one with the oven).
> It's tragic and discusses important topics in a way that isn't just black & white.
That's why I love the Witcher lore. It's one of very, very few fantasy settings where ethics are fuzzy and ugly. It makes other fantasy settings look like rom coms.
Blame Tolkien's World War I trauma, with which he coped by writing a series of therapeutic novels where ethical nuance quite understandably wasn't on the menu - novels which inadvertently inspired a genre that has tended mostly to be more of the same sort of flight from modernity, but without the originator's nigh peerless world-building skill.
(I used to write Quenya and Sindarin in the tengwar! Probably still could; I'm sure I kept those notes. Brilliant languages, if heavily systematized in the same unrealistic way as Esperanto. But I still to this day can't make it through the main trilogy without running out of patience. Would you believe, I used to think I was the one with the problem?)
Just finished reading the whole LOTR series to my daughter night after night. It is very long winded, yes. But she actually had little problem with it, and she actually preferred the portions that many consider long winded and tangential (Bombadil and Scouring of the Shire for example) But he was trying to do something with the English language that others haven't got, trying to bring back an Anglo-Saxon poetics to it. It is quite lovely when read aloud, tho the landscape descriptions... oh my long winded.
But yeah, the good vs evil stuff is pretty ham-fisted and always was. And there's some pretty racist stuff in there.
Agree. The Bloody Baron in itself was a huge demonstration of why Witcher 3 is just so different compared to all the other games out there. It's so well written.
Already the first witcher contract about the ghost in the well blew my mind. Many great stories and two DLCs worth every penny. That whole storyline of Hearts of Stone may be the best ever in any game.
I have a WiiU but I still don't know should I get a Switch or buy the WiiU version of Zelda. I'm a massive Nintendo fan but mostly playing with a PC nowadays.
I bought the WiiU version of Zelda and will hold off on the Switch until they get more games and get the glitches out.
The WiiU version plays fine. A few frame rate hiccups on complex scenes here and there but nothing terrible. And I hear the Switch has this when docked anyways.
A.K.A. an emotionally engaging story, which would be very hard to do without some sequence of narrative. A complete sandbox is an endless timesink - if I'm building something freeform I'd rather do it using a medium which provides lasting value - art, 3D modeling, programming or such. But these are just personal preferences, I'm not claiming any objective value of one over the other (narrative v.s. sandbox).
I don't enjoy the default Skyrim game all that much. However, the Requiem mod which gives it more of an old school feel allows for more emergent stories. Because it's not on rails and combat is intense you will spend 15 minutes running away from something and not always make it to safety. One of my strongest memory's is a fight that took all of 8 seconds but I was riding the edge of death the entire time. This was not chasing some boss for epic loot, this was just not dying.
I feel better now. I actually played Skyrim recently and thought "Man, do I just not like video games anymore?" It's nice to see people describing how I felt and why I stopped playing it.
Skyrim is a fun game to pick up once in awhile, but it gets very easy and very empty quite fast. I should be enthralled by the appearance of a dragon, and it should be a significant challenge to take it on, but after a few encounters, it becomes rote and mundane. There's also no consequence for dawdling on completing various objectives - I took a good few days to go to Kynesgrove after Delphine told me to get there ASAP. Little things, i guess, but they all add up to a pretty hollow experience.
What I love about the Witcher stories are how well they can be looked at as a fantastical commentary on modern life, especially with business and politics.
Right now I’m playing through 3 and seeing Geralt as a monster-slayer consultant that occasionally has to deal with deadbeat clients. Interesting to see how he protects his finances before and after these encounters with the buyer (there’s only one quest I can recall where he actually asks for a deposit, since the quest giver reeks of thievery and corruption).
well Skyrim has that with the globalist vs nationalist debate represented by the empire vs stormcloaks. That's the only political issue I can remember from it though
Indeed, the depth of storytelling and characters is really special. Visual helps too. I just started Hearts of Stone addition, and it's consistently better than any RPG I played is last 24 years... for me.
Looking for Blood and Wine!
Witcher 3 is you doing things whilst exploring the world.
BOTW is you exploring the world whilst doing things.
There is no handholding or quests you must be complete in a particular sequence or being locked in a particular part of the map. You can just go anywhere and do anything. And everyone you do go is incredibly well designed, polished and interesting.
It isn't on par for me with Uncharted or The Last of Us for the depth and quality of the story but it is a pretty damn good game.
The Witcher 3 was a solid game, but it's the kind of game that doesn't really have a lasting impact beyond rounding out a platform's lineup. Typically you have a few of those on each platform every year. This is like Tier III on an imaginary scale that I just created.
The general consensus on Breath of the Wild so far is that it's at least a tier above that - the tier that defines a console generation. Games like Mario 64, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, stuff like that. That's Tier II.
In Tier I are the games that are in consideration for the greatest games of all time: Ocarina of Time, Link to the Past, Final Fantasy VII, etc. Some people think it'll end up here, but we won't know that until we look back on it in a few years.
I'd say Witcher 3 was a little below or on par with Mass Effect, Fable, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Fallout or a Final Fantasy offering and combined you likely see at least one of those a year on average.
I've played all of the mentioned games except modern Final Fantasy titles and I think it's a big disservice to the TW3 to say it's at best on par with those games.
The only way I could imagine saying that is if you focus only on the mechanics of the RPG game loop and ignore world design, dialog quality, voice acting, characters, breadth of content, quests, etc.
Quite frankly, I feel Skyrim and the Mass Effect series blows Witcher 3 out of the water in regards to the criteria you just listed. I found the game rather boring given the limited character customization and rather linear skill progression. I couldn't bring myself to complete it and it sits on my shelf gathering dust.
Wait, what? "Regards to criteria you just listed"? His criteria was "dialog quality, voice acting, characters, breadth of content, quests, etc.". And you cite something completely different (skill progression, character customization)?!
In 2015, Fallout 4, MGS, The Witcher 3 and Bloodbourne split the GotY awards, so game critics think there were a couple others that year.
Had The Witcher 3 come out in 2016, it would have certainly been behind Overwatch. Had it come out in 2014, it would have certainly been behind Dark Souls II. In 2017, it would be behind Breath of the Wild, and it's only March. There are equal or better games every year.
> Fallout is certainly nothing like w3 quality and mgs 5 was flawed in many ways and unfinished. Next?
Well, a lot of game critics disagree with that. Many of them gave GotY to MGS or Fallout instead, and MGS has a higher metacritic score than W3. I'm not going to debate beyond that because it'll devolve into complete subjectivity, but it's pretty clear W3 isn't a once-a-generation game.
GOTY awards and game ratings in general are such a corrupted payola system that they can't even be taken with a grain of salt. And even mediocre games in established IPs will be lauded to high heaven, out of all proportion to their quality or enjoyment value.
Luckily, there are people who aggregate this kind of stuff. I don't think the data supports your claims at all. Witcher 3 won an extremely high proportion of the awards in its year. Almost double what the three other 2015 games you list got combined if you look at awards from critics, and even more lopsided if you looked at fan awards.
> I don't think the data supports your claims at all.
I'm going off of Wikipedia's GotY list, which includes only more notable publications. That lists adds in a ton of small gaming blogs and regional user's choice awards, which I don't think gives you better data. In Wikipedia's list, TW3 is winning, but a little less drastically.
I think you're attacking a claim I'm not making, and we're not even disagreeing, though. I didn't claim TW3 was worse than other contenders in 2015, I said it's one of a few solid games that come out every year. Everything you're saying and everything I'm saying supports that.
Edit: GotY is a decent signal, but discussions about which videogames are better are always going to be highly subjective. The Walking Dead won in 2012 and most people don't consider TWD to be on the same level as a lot of the other GotY games.
completely, fully and utterly agreed on Witcher 3 (although only 24 years of gaming). there is depth and quality everywhere I look, and it's just so different than anything else
> How does it stack for example against The Witcher 3 which won a landslide of awards?
I would not compare a game aimed at kids (Zelda) vs a game which is clearly more adult-focused (Witcher 3). It's like comparing a Disney movie vs an Aliens episode and asking which one is the best.
But I think we can agree that Alien 3 is a pretty mediocre film, while Wall-E, Up, or Inside Out are superb film making that at least I would recommend to just about anyone.
I don't think the target audience really matters. Film critics regularly cite Disney fare like Snow White, Fantasia, and Pinocchio as some of the best films ever made. Analogous lists of video games are pretty much required to have some Mario games on the list. Good is good.
Why wouldn't you compare games aimed at to similar audiences? And that analogy is pretty weak, I'd say Zelda is aimed at kids to adults, Witcher 3 aimed at teens to adults. I'd say it's more similar to Harry Potter vs. Lord of the Rings. Both "dorky" things to outsiders but slightly different range of audiences.
I'd second that the game is good enough to warrant a Switch purchase on its own, assuming you have that disposable income.
[BOTW puzzle spoilers below]
Comparing it to the Witcher 3 is actually a great way to highlight its strength--the insane depth of the mechanics. It feels almost like you're playing Nethack or Dwarf Fort in terms of how deep the mechanics go and how much the game designers allow you to do. Not _as_ deep, nothing's as deep as Dwarf Fort, but deep enough that I can make the comparison.
For example, both TW3 and BOTW have a mechanic where you can mix different ingredients together to give yourself stat bonuses. They both have you harvest the ingredients from the in-game world. Very similar so far. But in TW3, you mix them by going through some menu screens and clicking on the appropriate items. In BOTW, you take the items out of your inventory, hold them, and return to normal gameplay while holding them and can then choose to drop them anywhere in the outside world (ideally in a heated cauldron). But you can choose to drop them just in an open flame, and while you can't get potions this way, you _can_ cook ingredients like apples and meat to have them restore more of your health. But if you leave them in the fire too long, they'll catch fire themselves. And if it's a dry day and you're standing in the right (or wrong) kind of terrain, the grass underfoot may catch on fire, too. And it may spread (and start interfering with enemies--but that's another story). And there's more to it than that--if you drop certain ingredients in snowy landscapes or icy streams, they'll freeze over and give you heat resisting properties when they didn't before. And if you drop them in areas that are too hot (think side of an active volcano), they'll start cooking immediately, as if you had dropped them over an open flame in a standard area. You can distract certain a certain type of enemy by dropping food in front of it too.
The entire game is like this. For example, in another dungeon I got stuck on a puzzle that clearly wanted me to put two magic electric orbs on two switches, about 5m apart from each other. But for the life of me I could only find one of the orbs. After fifteen minutes of running around, I remembered that my metal weapons conducted electricity--I had found that out because I had gotten killed by a lightning strike while I was flying through a storm earlier, I ignored the warning sparking around my back and had to reload a save. So I dropped every metal weapon I had and dragged in a metal chest from another room in the dungeon and made a circuit from one switch to the other with the single electric orb in the middle. And it totally worked to solve the puzzle. (Looked up where the second orb was later and I was blind to not notice it, whoops.)
It doesn't have the depth of writing that TW3 does, the characters are more cartoonish and less nuanced and the plot itself is much more straightforward and doesn't have a tenth of the subterfuge. But the writing isn't poor, either, it's done extremely well for its style. It comes across as very Ghibli-esque to me. Zelda's character in particular is nuanced and an interesting examination of their old tropes without fully subverting them, and the way they reveal the story to you is through a series of clever small vignettes that overwhelmingly choose these small intimate moments that manage to imply so much more than they outright say.
It's unabashedly 11/10 GOTY and maybe "game of this generation" to me, though I'm trying to give myself some time to get over the initial rush before I make that kind of call. Blows TW3 out of the water, and I loved TW3.
Yeah, it's all about the Mario for me. Since the washout that was Super Mario Sunshine they have been brilliant, though I thought SMG2 was a bit hard (as I couldn't finish it!). I still reckon I can remember my run for "Luigi's Purple Coins" in SMG1, and SM 3D World is just a great game, which I completed again in strict course order this year.
You should give it a shot beyond the first couple bosses (first hour of play?). They kind of make you fight the same boss 3 times back to back, which is kind of a big barrier to entry if you're not into that mechanic. There's a lot more exploration and barely any stand and spray besides much more spread out boss fights after that.
It does always seem so divisive. I’m in the ‘enjoyed Galaxy but I think I actually prefer Sunshine’ camp. The new Mario looks really great, too, though.
The entire back-half feels like an unfinished rush job.
The music is cool and the setting is refreshing. The FLOOD gimmick is fine; it's nice to have some variance in Mario's move-pool. The weird tone can actually be endearing.
But it's not enough to make up for the in-intuitive level design and wild difficulty swings. A Mario game is expected to be one thing above all else "Fun Running And Jumping Puzzles" and Sunshine simply doesn't deliver.
> I thought SMG2 was a bit hard (as I couldn't finish it!)
same for me, but I admit that for me, as a not-anymore hardcore gamer, SMG was simple an amazing piece of art; awesome in all aspects of gaiming: gameplay, innovation music/art, fun.
I heard people say this and thought it was a bit short sited, but the value proposition is actually quite good. I've heard from most friends they have clocked around 70 hours playtime, and the cost of a Switch here is 249 + 50 (Zelda) making it around £4.40 per hour of play. Not bad. And Zelda isn't the only thing I will be playing.
Of course there are even better value propositions out there in gaming. I've got well over 100 hours in (seriously fun) Crashlands gameplay, and I paid a grand total of $20 for that ($5 for mobile, $15 for the cross-save-compatible Steam/PC version). I'm also 70 (maybe somewhat less fun overall) hours into Stardew Valley, which cost me less than $15.
* The shrine dungeons are novel, but get tiresome quickly.
* As you can pretty much do everything off the bat, there's no "oh a boulder, can't move it, better come back later" element to the game. (This is my biggest gripe I think, a big part of the Zelda games was doing a dungeon and getting a gimmick to unlock new places).
* Weapon durability is an annoyance as there's no feedback of how much weapon there is left until the end.
* As my gear improves, I don't feel any stronger.
* Cooking could be 10x easier.
But I seem to be the odd one out thinking this, so maybe I just have bad taste.
I'm not saying it's mandatory to like Firefly, but if you haven't kept interested past episode 2 then you've missed the good stuff.
I understand why you'd stop there, IMHO the first two or three (or even four) episodes aren't actually all that great. It's definitely worth persevering though, they get markedly better and Episode 6 is an absolute corker.
My advice: stay away from Battlestar. I'm still mad at the writers these many years later. They kept pulling you on, making you believe they had any idea whatsoever about plot. They didn't.
Same, although I'm not so much mad because I realized what they were doing and dropped the show before I'd invested much time. The BSG pilot miniseries is excellent, and I can recommend it in isolation, but don't bother with anything else about the show.
I enjoyed it, then I became suspicious, then I saw where the show was going and bailed. There's nothing special about writing yourself into a corner after all.
I agree with him and I still love the game. I feel like they could have made it so much better without too much effort by simply making a couple different decisions in terms of gamplay.
I agree with much of what you've said. The game had an initial wow factor for me but I'm growing tired. I can't work up the excitement to go on to the Goron and Geruda divine beasts. The story telling in it is also ham-fisted more than the usual Zelda games.
I like it even love it but it's not the best Zelda I've ever played. I still like Wind Waker better.
But honestly it's better than Skyward Sword, which I found tedious and annoying.
I love BotW, but Wind Waker is also my favorite. Tetra is one of the most interesting Zelda characters, the combat mechanics are great, and exploring the sea with the King of Red Lions as lightning fills the sky feels even more epic than the best moments of BotW. Not to mention the final battle..
Yep, I can still feel myself 15 years ago in my old loft apartment sitting in front of a CRT TV with my brand new Gamecube with the boat out on the water and the zelda dawn theme playing as the sun rises. The game has really stood the test of time, I really enjoyed playing the HD re-issue on the Wii U too.
The weapon durability kills me. And the fact that it doesn't auto switch to your next best weapon when it breaks. I have no clue how to cook anything whatsoever. There was never a guide in the game so I'm getting farther in the game without any special powers.
Bows that break after shooting too many arrows, ugh...
The weapon durability one makes me feel like they took the worse parts of Skyrim and left out all the good ones. I really wish we could repair weapons and craft new ones. With the way it is you can easily end up in a situation where you have no weapons and a bunch of ennemies in front of you. I recently did the shrine dubbed "Major test of strength" and I literally when through 4 melee weapons and 3 shields, all because the damn guardian had 3000 hp. It's just ridiculous.
I kind of want to be on your side about the weapon durability. It annoyed me at first. But by the first beast I almost found it to be the other way around. I leave so many weapons behind because even after doubling my weapon inventory size I'm still constantly full of high caliber weapons. Especially after getting the Master Sword.
All of the guardians I have faced in the combat shrines drop weapons that at least equal (usually exceed) the total damage/durability consumed to defeat them.
Also: Shooting the guardians in the eye stuns them giving you a long window of respite during a fight.
I don't mind weapon durability too much, it forces you to manage your weapons a bit instead of always using the strongest one you have. I do wish it'd auto-switch in the heat of battle.
For cooking, pick an ingredient and select Hold, select the others, then go stand in front of a pot over a lit fire (of which you encounter plenty). The game will tell you to press A to cook. To restore health, just put a bunch of mushrooms and meat in a pot. Some mushrooms, herbs, crabs, fish, etc. tell you that they'll make you faster/stronger/less cold/etc., just throw them in with the meat. For elixirs just mix butterflies, lizards, etc. with boko horn, tooth, etc. Also if you get hearty radishes, you can throw them in a pot without anything else and it's basically full restore + extra hearts. It's broken.
By the way, the old man does give a cooking tutorial in the Great Plateau, but you have to seek him out for it. Cooking is encouraged there as a way to deal with the cold to access one of the shrines. You can either cook hot peppers to make something to keep you warm or you can find a special recipe in a cabin; if you make the recipe for the old man (determining in the process the unknown third ingredient), he'll give you a warm doublet which will prevent the cold from damaging you.
If you want to learn more recipes, simply read people's diaries when you go into their homes. Like in Hateno village, one of the first houses, you can break in and learn a pumpkin stew recipe by reading those diaries.
> As you can pretty much do everything off the bat, there's no "oh a boulder, can't move it, better come back later" element to the game. (This is my biggest gripe I think, a big part of the Zelda games was doing a dungeon and getting a gimmick to unlock new places).
I feel the same, it might seems counter intuitive but those limitation are what I liked the most about previous Zeldas. I miss the feeling of 'I wonder when I'l finally be able to go there'
> As you can pretty much do everything off the bat, there's no
> "oh a boulder, can't move it, better come back later" element to
> the game. (This is my biggest gripe I think, a big part of the
> Zelda games was doing a dungeon and getting a gimmick to unlock
> new places).
I feel the other way around. Having to rewind back so that I can fulfil the given gimmick is the reason why I end up dropping all metroidvanias.
Same here. I have no patience anymore for artificial game-y boundaries, so being able to go anywhere in BotW (even if that means getting my ass handed to me) felt very liberating.
Funny, I very much like Metroidvanias exactly for this aspect (the world feels much more like a puzzle, which grants you a feeling of reward once you "solve" it).
On the other hand, I've always loved Gothic[1] for it's gating mechanism. If you got mangled by raptors ore some ork, that meant the area was certainly not meant for your level.
I guess it will be interesting how I'll feel on BotW once my Switch arrives...
Your Gothic example sounds much more natural. I never liked the typical gating mechanism because it takes away your choice. In a sense, this still does the same thing, but sort of gives you that illusion that you're deciding not to go that way and get slaughtered, rather than just being told no.
Your Gothic example sounds much more natural. I never liked the typical gating mechanism because it takes away your choice. In a sense, this still does the same thing, but sort of gives you that illusion that you're deciding not to go that way and get slaughtered, rather than just being told no.
BotW does this to an extent... if you die of heat exhaustion in a desert, you probably want to come back later when the story's gently guided you into acquiring heat-resistant clothes.
Or you could locate the ingredients for heat-resistant elixirs, make some yourself and just plough on anyway.
This is a game which takes "open world" quite seriously, and lets you go and fight the final boss straight out of the tutorial area if you want. Although you'll probably die almost immediately, the choice is yours. I rather like the blend it gives me of freedom and guidance.
Oh and someone in the ancestry mentioned the cooking UI is poor. Indeed, the cooking UI is very poor. A few things like that and some issues with characterisation and voice acting would hold me off giving this game a perfect score.
I'd have liked to do all the puzzles in the Tomb Raider reboot, but most of the temples or whatever were locked behind "you need to have gone to the next area and then come back with the thing you acquire" idiocy.
I don't want to endlessly retrace my steps to re-find places I've been before because there's a gating mechanism. If I'd organically had to go near to the places again maybe I'd forgive them - but I'd literally have had to go to old areas for no other reason.
I love that gimmick and play lots of metroidvanias, but it's also refreshing for the Zelda series to try something else. They've been locked into a very specific formula for 2 decades. I haven't played BotW yet, but Link Between Worlds remixed the formula a bit (no mandatory dungeon order etc) and I loved that game.
That's probably just bad game design that you've run into.
Done well, an "unlock" ability should either grant access to more space off a central hub (that you'd be returning to anyways) or give optional minor rewards if you want to be the completionist back-tracker - zelda pieces of heart, or max mana upgrades; metroid missile capacity; even raw cash.
Being forced to backtrack (especially without fast travel) to an arbitrary area _to progress the game_ is bad design.
I'd argue the game doesn't really have that either. Combat feels really simple and hasn't changed for me over the course of 10 hours of play; swing, jump back, dodge, swing..
I'm not sure how you're surviving on just a swing sword and dodge strategy. If the enemy has a spear, you can't just run up to them. If they have thick armor you have to parry their attacks, maybe shoot a weak point. I just fought a giant monster who started covering his weak spot after I shot it one time.
I really like what they've done with progression here. You still kind of get the standard RPG linear progression with armor upgrades, but it's the preparation aspect of the gameplay loop that really shines for me.
ex.: You get to a new region, something in the environment prevents you from exploring easily (for instance, cold). You can either tough it out and spend a lot of time/resources, or return later once you've acquired some meals/weapons that help you deal with the situation. I see this system as a really clever alternative to classic logarithmic power creep curves.
It also feels more natural and, well, realistic, than having XP bars and attribute stats, which really are just a vestige from the paper based DnD games of yore.
You get better weapons, more hearts, more stamina, and the most import thing is that you actually get better at combat. It would be interesting to spend a substantial amount of time with the game, beat it, and then start from the beginning. You'd be able to do everything, no need to learn it all.
I want to watch one of these 1hour speed runs, but only after I complete the game. I can only image how good those guys must be
> As you can pretty much do everything off the bat, there's no "oh a boulder, can't move it, better come back later" element to the game. (This is my biggest gripe I think, a big part of the Zelda games was doing a dungeon and getting a gimmick to unlock new places).
I was actually considering getting it, but you might have just changed my mind. I like an open world, but the reward of progression is often a key to enjoyment for me in many cases. Do they make up for this in any other ways (ie: unbeatable monsters until you're high enough level/have better gear or something)?
Yup, you get better gear and some monsters are unkillable until you get better gear + life. You also become better in combat with experience, how to dodge, how to fight on a horse, how to combine many weapons and the landscape around you etc... It's definitely not your typical leveling up RPG. It's based more on your ability to solve puzzles and to play well rather than your attributes.
Yeah, I haven't played many Zelda games in the past because they seemed fairly reflex and puzzle based rather than strategy and combat tactics. "Playing well" in those games often amounts not to thinking but to just muscle memory which I don't care for much. The puzzles I can appreciate but I have a limit. I did like Twilight Princess... maybe just something about the mood if it though.
The way I've felt this effect the most is with traversal. Climbing is a problem until you get better gear, craft better food, etc. I'll see something on a mountain peak that I want and think "I'll need to increase my stamina and prepare before I attempt that!"
There are other kinds of traversal that feels this way too, but I'll leave the discovery to you.
> As you can pretty much do everything off the bat, there's no "oh a boulder, can't move it, better come back later" element to the game.
Many people (myself included) see that as a good thing. Every time I come up to an obstacle, I know that the only thing keeping me from getting past it is my own skill; I know there's no contrived McGuffin that will come along later and trivialize the time/effort spent working my way around it.
> As my gear improves, I don't feel any stronger.
Really? I'm about the same place in the game as you (i.e. two divine beasts down), and I can take on all sorts of enemies that I couldn't before. I definitely feel stronger than I did at the beginning of the game (e.g. I don't have to run in fear every time a guardian lights up, I can quickly go to the "test of strength" shrines whenever I need new weaponry, etc.)
> Cooking could be 10x easier
It could certainly be faster (I'd love to be able to batch my recipies instead of having to cook 10 meals, one at a time)
or just install cemu ... I will not buy a console, waste material in order to play ONE game. This is an old model and should be banned. This make some much electronic waste. I like how playstation made their switch and now with "playstation now" you will be able to play from PC. This is a revolution, Nintendo even with all the fame will lose the game.
Not right now. I'd argue with only a handful of casual game ports, and no sport games, that requires a 300 eurodollar investment (as opposed to 200 for a PS4/XBone), it's not a casual gamer's console.
Actually it would only make sense as a purchase right now if you're a hardcore game dying to play Zelda.
You can have an PS4 too, not only PC. You can be an hardcore gamers too but buying the console for one game it's for me too much waste.
I made this mistake with gran turismo on PS3... I have only the PS3 for Gran Turismo and clearly was a waste.
I can understand the hype over Zelda but like many of other game because of his content that is cheap, boring start to degrade now. See the live streaming on youtube, almost every youtube guy that stream is on the end. Two weeks after. In 1 months we will not talk more about Zelda.
- it will take quite a while until you'll be able to play BotW via CEMU w/o any bugs
- can't take a playstation on the train/plane/subway/car
- can't stream Playstation Now on the train/plane/subway/car
If this iteration of Nintendo's console would have a been your standard home console, I wouldn't have bought it. It being a hybrid made me pull the trigger, and I'm sure I'm not alone there.
I think you will produce less waste by replacing a Nintendo console every ~5 years than by replacing a CPU/graphics card(maybe motherboard+ram) every ~5 years.
The switch is smaller than my current graphics card. The switch + ALL of its accessories is (rough estimate) slightly less material than what is inside my PC case. Certainly far less electronics. Most of the Switch accessories are just plastic.
edit: If the one metric you want to maximize (or minimize) is electronic waste, the ONLY device you should own is a high-end smartphone that you carefully maintain so that you can replace it only after at least triple its expected (2 year) lifetime.
Ok, but there's a lot of accessory therefor that need to be counted. Totally true about smartphone but I have replying about buying one console for one game, if you have plenty of game, why not but for one game it's a waste for me and this model of exclusivity fail. Why I would buy the copy of an old game for the same price? come-on! I pay once, and I own the game not matter the support!
Plastic are a big waste. Most of my computers made 10 years or more, always find someone that need one, or a part that can be reused. No need for new GF every year...
I agree that with the current library of games on the Switch it functions more as a single-use device which does make it vastly more wasteful. But the expectation is that new software will be developed for it going forward.
Plus the more modular nature of the components/accessories means that it is possible (though unlikely) that upgrades for different components may be made on a module-by-module basis. Which translates to less waste overall.
In terms of computers/consoles made 10+ years ago I think the same comparisons still apply. There are plenty of old consoles still in use today. Though old consoles were certainly less modular than old PCs.
No need to replace your console either, they tend to last for ages. We still play our Game Cube and N64 regularly (as well as Wii/Wii U), so total lifetime is pretty huge. It's enjoyable to play these old systems, where a video card isn't really that interesting 5 years later.
Unfortunately not the case for a lot of us Gamecube owners. There is some weird laser alignment bug that has cropped up on mine, and others. Where it no longer plays games. Thankfully Wii plays them.
I've been playing Zelda on CEMU and my advice to anyone who actually wants to play BotW is to not even bother with the emulator outside of morbid curiosity.
A few of the glitches in the game:
- Water doesn't exist, you just walk on the bottom of lakebeds, all the fish behave as if they're on dry land
- Magnesis and Stasis do not work (but you can just walk underwater to get to those chests)
- The game locks up often, typically during auto-saves
- Graphical glitches, big cyan and magenta polygons, flicker constantly on screen
- All humanoid characters, including Link, sink about halfway into the ground
- Animals will randomly disappear, AI behaves weird around the non-existent water
- Frame rate is extremely troubled
- You can't beat many of the shrines, including the first few, so you need a save file to escape the first area
So imagine trying to play through the shrines without Magnesis or Stasis. What do you do? The game itself is actually pretty flexible: instead of lifting metal boxes and spheres you can use bombs to knock them in the direction you need. You can use arrows and other weapons to knock around far away objects. Still, many shrines are impassable.
CEMU is not anywhere close to a substitute for the console, and it will be months to years before it has the same accuracy as say Dolphin.
BotW just came out and the Cemu people are actively working on it according to their patreon.
To compare, I've been playing Super Mario 3D World at 4K and it's gorgeous. It looks and performs far better than the Wii U version once you install a precompiled shader cache.
So while BotW is currently unplayable on Cemu, I suspect that won't be the case in 6 months or so.
I think right now the answer is no, the controller might work through Bluetooth but the screen doesn't forward. You have to hit a key to change the main output window to show what would be on the controller's screen.
I personally always thought the screen on the controller was dumb, I owned a Dreamcast and thought it was annoying then, so it didn't bother me. But you might feel different.
I loved A Link to the Past, but I switched to PC gaming after the SNES/Genesis era, so I didn't really play another Zelda game until Twilight Princess (until much later on an emulator).
I didn't like Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword very much at all.
I love the game. However, my recommendation would be to get a Wii U instead. Far cheaper, and the Wii U has at least a half-dozen other games that should interest you. The Switch has one good game and maybe one or two more on the horizon and costs at least $100 more.
I have it for Wii U as well. It runs pretty well, though 1080p would be nicer than 720p. If you don't have a Wii U already, getting into the system might not be easy right now unless you can find good used stuff. Many of the major retailers just cleared out of Wii U systems and official accessories.
Really? The game is so good that it's worth spending $300+ on a single game? I'm sure Zelda is great, I've enjoyed past Zelda games, but I don't understand how they always seem to be reviewed better than other games and justify this hype.
I've been playing Horizon on PS4 and it's fantastic, plus the console actually has value outside of a single game.
For some input from someone who's never been a Zelda fan (me), when watching this game, I think I understood the hype. Previous Zelda titles never interested me, but this one looks like it takes some of the best elements from the Dark Souls and Monster Hunter series gameplay and applies them to the Zelda universe, with the bonus of a huge open world ready for exploration. It has me considering a Switch just for this one game as well. It looks like an incredibly enjoyable to me as a fan of those aforementioned game series, though of course I haven't personally played it yet.
I love the game. My only gripes are around the draw distance for things with logic -- animals, enemies -- seems to be pretty shallow. I understand why it is that way, but I find myself floating into an area only to find out that I should had prepared better for the situation. Also, I think that if you stop climbing up a wall and just rest, a little stamina should return. It is the reason why people take breaks. This would probably drastically change the game though.
I just beat the major test of strength, time to get one of these beasts.
Same here: best Zelda, best game ever. Don't play a lot but with BOTW spent the first days playing continuously without noticing it was already dark outside.
There's plenty of stock in smaller countries. I live in New Zealand and if I walk into any electronics retailer, I'm guaranteed to see a bunch of these in the gaming section. I've heard similar stories from people that live outside of the US.
But it kinda does justify the view that they are bungling this release if they have stock left on shelves in those countries while those in US / Japan (where I am) can only resort to buying in secondary markets.
It could be that the capacity necessary for the smaller countries is insignificant, and that giving them a large number of consoles to last a while was more effective
Not here in Belgium... I had to hunt one down a week after release - everywhere out of stock, and it doesn't seem like the stores were restocked sufficiently and all new consoles went to pre-orders.
Even phyisical copies of Zelda are very hard to find, and with Nintendo's crazy download pricing - I wanted a physical copy (70 eur for the downloadable version of the game vs 60 for the physical - really?).
They seem to be restocking in small batches and selling out immediately, at least online. According to nowinstock.net, in the US, Best Buy's been getting shipments most consistently, and received one as recently as last week. Some people find out what days they get shipments and just wait outside the door for them to open.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the Nintendo Classic is a device made out of the opportunity of some really cheap discontinued parts that were being totally liquidated and that's why they can't just easily increase manufacturing.
Edit: or possibly it was made out of a surplus of unused parts from other products.
The problem with the Wii U was Nintendo did a very poor job marketing it. There were almost no ads for it and they failed to make the consumer understand what exactly it was.
It was out for about a year before I finally figured out that it was an all new console. I thought it was a wireless tablet add-on for the Wii.
Yep, the Wii U is basically what the original Wii should have been and it's my favorite console right now. I've got 3 kids and also own a PS4 and an Xbox one and the Wii U definitely gets the most play.
I don't really see what the NES classic has going for it, personally - the interface is basically the only thing it has over any pi-based solution, and even that's debatable, depending on how much of a retroarch loyalist you are.
Emulation is not inherently illegal, and even if it was I'd imagine that the people who just want to play some NES games probably don't give half a shit.
Not really. This heavily depends on jurisdiction. Downloading isn't universally illegal (especially if you have the license for the material you're downloading), sharing is.
Is it really difficult to see why this wouldn't have value for non-technical users? I'm a developer and I still enjoy it because I don't have time to mess with a pi-based solution, and I love the original NES controller.
They're trying to sell them, they just did it badly and are now scrambling to catch up. That said, they are slowly catching up. Restock frequency has been slowly increasing.
If you want one, set up alerts on brickseek.com, nowinstock.net and zoolert.com. Every few days they pop up somewhere online or locally. They're still scarce but it's possible to get them. Amazon had stock for almost an hour when I bought one a few weeks ago. Using these alerts I got two in the last month. One for me, and a second just for the controller. The official controller is even harder to find than the console.
I notice you've been banned for quite awhile. Some of your comments are pretty good. Some are not-so-great, mostly the outrage/political comments.
It's none of my business, but have you considered emailing hn@ycombinator.com, apologize for whatever got you banned, and promise not to do it again? The mods are more than fair and in my experience that will earn you a second chance.
More than that, though, your account is named HeavenBanned, so presumably you created it after your previous account was banned. It's also an amusing name since you may have been fully aware that new accounts which are created to circumvent bans are quickly banned, so HeavenBanned would quickly become a self-fulfilling name.
Therefore it seems like you're fully aware of your status, but you still comment on HN knowing that almost nobody will see your writing, except the few that have showdead turned on. While your comments are certainly welcome, I am moved by curiosity to ask: What compels you to keep commenting even though you know you're banned? Anything in particular?
The phenomenon is pretty common. There are a lot of banned accounts with dozens of pages of dead comments. Sometimes the comments are meticulously written or otherwise took a lot of effort to write. But the most curious aspect is that the authors know they're banned, yet they continue to write.
I've seen at least a dozen accounts like that over the years, and I've always wondered why. Why waste time writing something no one will see? Is it therapeutic, like writing in a private journal?
Again, it's not unwelcome -- the dead/vouch system works quite well, so it's perfectly fine for someone to write as many autokilled comments as they want. But I love a good mystery, and so I have to ask: what drives you to do it? What drives dozens of people to do it?
(It would be ironic if you had no idea you were banned and this was how you found out.)
I vouched it, which flipped the comment from dead to alive. (Vouching is one of the coolest HN features, but I worry that if too many people know about it, they'll start using it injudiciously.)
> (It would be ironic if you had no idea you were banned and this was how you found out.)
It's called shadow banning or stealth banning [1] and it's probably the most effective way to keep a community clean; explicit bans will anger the user and make them try and circumvent them by using proxies and multiple accounts, often to the point of just posting porn or other offensive stuff. Very hard to get that fixed. Shadow banning on the other hand hides the offensive content from the users, without the user doing it knowing - they can troll all they want, but shadow banning takes away their audience and thus the fun of it.
But yeah, telling people "ur banned" defeats the purpose and I'd really like people to stop doing that. The HN system isn't obvious though. Should have a help link if you can see hidden comments at least.
I asked dang last year whether it was ok to do this, and he said it wasn't a big deal. I was careful to choose someone who knew they were banned -- my entire question revolves around the fact that people who know they're banned still post a lot of HN comments, even for months. They do it in spite of being banned, which is curious enough that I'd like to ask them why.
It was a joke. Their name is HeavenBanned, so they're obviously fully aware of their situation.
This subthread ended up being boring and cluttered up the main topic. If the mods have a problem with what I'm doing, they'll say so. In the meantime, you have both a downvote button and a flag button to employ. I think there was nothing wrong with what I did, right up until it spawned a useless subthread about whether what I did was ok. At this point it's worth detaching, which is frustrating: I really wanted to know the answer to the original mystery! Since I have to vouch a banned user's comment in order to ask them the question, there's no way to ask them without also spawning an offtopic subthread. I was hoping that people would see that it's an interesting subthread and worth giving some leeway to see where it leads.
In general, it's ok for subthreads to veer off topic as long as it's intellectually interesting and substantive. Some of the most interesting comments are generated by that kind of process. But it's easy to push it too far, and it doesn't work if people get caught up in metaquestions.
The problem with shadow banning is the lack of notification regarding rule breakage as well as some harmful psychological effects. People who are shadow banned may not realize they did something wrong / against the rules so they may continue saying the same types of things, without getting flagged / downvoted, thinking maybe it's okay. When they find out they were shadow banned it's easy to feel like an idiot especially if the site allows you to review what they posted while shadow banned.
I know reddit has taken the stance lately to only use it against spam accounts as it's highly effective against those.
I'll be brief because I have a class to go to, but...
Let's say for the sake of example, we're at a party. It's not just any party. It's a party for developers. 99% of the conversations at this party are routine, most people will say predictable things and things are kept very, very professional. As it should be! These are professionals, talking to other professionals about professional topics. Discourse is maintained and curated at a high-level at this party/conference.
But, for whatever reason, they've now offered a special "room" for certain developers who want to say things that might be unprofessional, that might incite anger in some users, that might be politically incorrect, that might be not appropriate for a party setting. But! And here's the caveat: this special room is actually populated by many developers and some of the elder party-goers can VOUCH for good party-members when they see them making good points and bring the conversation out of the VIP room into the broader party. Moreover, they can keep the private conversations private and maybe nod their heads at some comments that are particularly insightful but that are taboo. It's a source of honey for the type of developers I would be talking to in real life anyway. I wouldn't discuss Marxist politics with a mealy-mouthed developer who can't even spell Afghanistan, so why waste my breath in the main room trying to convince him of a radical academic topic that uses expletives and other politically incorrect things?
So let's recap: I can still go to this party. I can still have my comments seen by the people at the party who I WANT them to see. AND on top of that, when I say something insightful I have the ability to have my conversation taken out of the VIP room and into the broader party.
In the meantime I would only like to talk to the developers who are a.) politically incorrect (so they turn show-dead on) b.) value minority opinions (so they turn show-dead on) and c.) enjoy giving me an upvote donation when I'm not rabble-rousing (so they turn-dead on).
I'm betting on the fact the nintendo switch will be able to browse the web and reproduce music and video (youtube, netflix).
I understand that they didn't officially support this at launch probably because of time constraints and priorities but it just doesn't make any sense for the switch not to support this in the longer term. It's form factor is perfect for it.
I'm not convinced that's true at all. At this point most people have a plethora of devices that will get the exact same Netflix content on their TV. My TV has like 4 things connected to it right now that will (TV itself, ps4, chromecast, fire stick).
Yeah, but one of the main appeals of Switch is how portable it is. And when I carry around a device I expect it to not only provide games, but content consumption as well. Otherwise I can carry an ordinary tablet - it might be not ideal for games, but as a multipurpose device it would be superior.
Everybody is already carrying a much-more-multipurpose device with them everywhere they go (smartphone). Carrying around the sort-of-portable bit of the switch doesn't seem that much more convenient than having a laptop. Doesn't fit in your pocket.
This is probably the clincher for our family, if it can operate as a general purpose tablet for media then we'll get it by Christmas. Having note seen it I'm much less viewing it as a WiiU replacement and more as the evolution of the DS line.
I'm a sucker for getting lots of gadgets and then shelving them, the switch is the first game console / handheld I actually genuinely appreciate both for its quality and for its marvellous simplicity since the game boy advanced, it's truly wonderfull. It's has its flaws in that there aren't many release titles but Zelda is amazing and it's just a joy to use. Mad rep out to Nintendo for pulling one out of the hat.
And here I am still waiting to buy a NES Classic. Maybe next year...
Looking forward to getting the Switch because I always liked Nintendo's handhelds and this qualifies. Just hope they work out the design/quality issues by the time stock catches up to demand.
Same here. No way I am paying those ridiculous resale prices. This was something I really wanted, it is baffling they released it -- then didn't produce a ton more when they realized the demand.
A friend of mine built a pi based emulator, I played around with it the other day -- it was actually very nice. The controllers he used in the setup were bluetooth (8bit brand?).
Based on what (admittedly little) I know about at-scale production of consumer electronics, it isn't exactly easy to just "produce a ton more" when they realize the demand.
It is also difficult to tell what the cap on demand is. If they think they satisfied maybe 70% of the total demand for that product with the N-Number of units they produced, they may consider that "good enough" and not worth launching another production run.
Why would you go out of your way to support Nintendo if they show no interest (massively underproducing) in supporting people who want to pay them for a product?
I decided to check that claim, and I'd say it holds up reasonably well: http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Biggest_game_system_launches I admit I'm eyeballing it there, but there isn't a great correlation between launch day/week sales and ultimate success.
Zelda at launch was a strong boost...and I suspect they will get another boost at holiday season when Super Mario Odyssey comes out. But there are a lot of months in between that are not filled in with much...
Since the console is not likely to get any 3rd party AAA games Nintendo is going to have to court nearly every indie dev + churn out as many first party titles as possible.
Also I'm hoping for a $50 price drop after Christmas...
If they fix up the browser and ship a YouTube and Netflix app I think they will also be a killer low-cost tablet. An Amazon fire hd + mario and Zelda is definitely worth $300 + cost of games.
People forget that the ps2 was many familie's DVD player. That kind of extra utility goes a long way into driving purchases imo.
yeah...it's just that a lot of people already have at least a 5" smartphone and/or tablet (tablet sales have been shrinking due to this) so I don't know how much of the tablet aspect is appealing nowadays...3 years ago it would have been a bigger deal
Nintendo should just cut the crap and market the switch as a portable. That seems to be driving demand. Any positive review or discussion I see about the switch (that isn't specifically about zelda) refers to using the device as a handheld.
I play Zelda in TV mode 90% of the time. Being able to take it with me to bed, or on the train is just icing on the cake. I'm willing to bet most people are spending the majority of their time with the Switch in TV mode as well.
Late again. Nintendo is comically bad at meeting demand.
Every time they have a highly anticipated product release, there are many multiples fewer products on the shelves than there is demand, for months at a time, and meanwhile, eBay prices spike to 200%+ retail. Meanwhile, consumers are disappointed/annoyed, scalpers profit, and Nintendo leaves money on the table.
I wonder how many Switches haven't been sold since people got tired of waiting and just picked up Breath of the Wild for the Wii U, which is now going for fire sale prices?
Nintendo refuses to take a loss, so they are extremely conservative with their inventory. I'm sure they have their reasons for doing this, but man I wonder if it's going to seriously hurt them long term.
Yeah I agree, I know some who stopped bothering to ring up stores and ask if they had switches in stock and just bought something else.
They've under-stocked by a large margin and I wonder how much they've lost doing that.
Was it true that Nintendo held back some of its production of earlier consoles to spike demand? I remember it specifically with the Wii[0], but I seem to recall that their production was always playing catch up. Do you think it's an industry tactic?
I repeatedly hear that something being limited in some way gets Japanese customers really excited. Supposedly that why you even see themed cafes that only pop up for a limited time.
It can't be addressed quickly. Takes months to make more. Seems like having enough when folks are buying makes more sense, than a little free press and then maybe they'll still be interested in buying in a few months.
The retro NES console that Nintendo released in November still cannot be bought in stores. Around the holidays, it was impossible to buy the DS, a system that is around 7 years old.
Nintendo is a billion dollar company. They've been around a long time. They could produce adequate supply if they wanted. It's seems pretty clear that they are not interested in satiating demand.
I don't think anyone outside of Nintendo knows for sure. It could be that they are just very conservative with their estimates. They don't want a bunch of unsold hardware sitting around losing value.
This is their M.O. It happens with almost all of their hardware releases. They do it to generate hype by being able to say that they sold out, even if there were few units made.
Also I imagine it cuts down on assembly line costs.
I love this console, haven't been able to sit down and play for long hours in decades and here I am.
I love that it's handheld, I travel a lot and so far I've played that in the plane and in various airbnbs, splitting the controller in two and playing snipperclips or bomberman with my girlfriend.
It's probably the best console I bought since the N64. I see a lot of skepticism here, but I assume it is mostly from non-buyers. I predict that this is going to be the biggest christmas for Nintendo this December.
As for general battery life, based on these figures you'll get somewhere between 2 hours and 45 minutes to 3 hours and 15 minutes playing Breath of the Wild, depending on the settings you use.
To the GP, Nintendo products have this effect on people. They're different enough that people don't know what to expect. You'll find similar sentiments about the Wii U (especially from Nintendo fans - the next Mario/Zelda/SSB is gonna put it over the top!).
I'm interested in wait and see. The hardware is mediocre even though the form factor is great. They really have to get more games out before the holiday season, though, and where they are at they're competing with both mobile devices and consoles. Parents have to justify spending $300 on this + full priced games against more games and better experiences on other consoles (MS IS launching a 4k console, too) and cheaper (much cheaper) games on mobile devices that aren't restricted to gaming. They're in a no man's land of markets where they compete with everyone (for good and bad).
For a while. Then the novelty/fad factor will wear off and people will realize that it's mediocre hardware, the screen scratches if you put it in the dock too forcefully, the battery life is abysmal compared to an iPad, and the game selection is arguably worse. Then sales will fall off a cliff, just like they did with the original Wii.
As a gamer, why should I explicitly care about the hardware? If the experience is good, I don't care what is inside it. The graphics appear to be "good enough".
Not the same games but Uncharted 4 multiplayer is 1080p 60fps and silky smooth. That's not even talking about PC games - it's dirt cheap to run CSGO at 90 fps and 1440p these days.
Bad performance detracts from the experience and it also limits what Nintendo can do with the console over the next three or four years.
I agree that performance is a pretty integral part of the experience. But I think the way it's being brought up in this thread is a bit disingenuous. Most people that are doing so seem to be glossing over the fact that the stutter is
1) rare
2) mostly resolved by the day 1 patch that Nintendo released
In prerelease reviews, there was talk of very occasional drops to below 30fps, sometimes even 20fps. It's my understanding that, post-launch that a lot of people (reviewers and people on Reddit, etc) are reporting that this happens a lot less. Rose-tinted glasses?
> Not the same games but Uncharted 4 multiplayer is 1080p 60fps and silky smooth.
Uncharted 4 is only 900p 60fps in multiplayer, and 1080p 30fps in single player (on a regular PS4)
But regardless, if your going to switch up the games, Fast RMX runs at 1080p 60fps on the Switch, even in multiplayer mode.
Yeah, the Switch does not hit the performance of a PS4. But the Switch has just 1/3rd the power draw of a Slim PS4. (Roughly 30 watts average for the Switch, compared to roughly 80 watts average for the Slim PS4). It's not bad hardware at all, when you consider the power budget it's required to operate under, in order to be portable.
That's the thing. The experience is either 720p or 900p, at barely 30fps. Dropping to 20 and below many instances, WHILE DOCKED. The graphics are fine, the performance is unacceptable for a brand new console.
People do care, it's just that when it comes to Nintendo, it's apparently expected. Other native Zelda games on the previous consoles, ran poorly as well. Nintendo needs to be a triple A third party developer for other consoles, and give it up with their gimmicky hardware.
No, I'm happier with a console that just does it's own thing. Nintendo doesn't build shitty watered down PCs. They just build a thing to play some games on.
That really makes no sense. Are you suggesting that because the Switch launched nearly featureless, that is POSITIVE? For less than the cost of the Switch you can buy a "shitty watered down PC", that has MUCH greater performance, plays Blu-Ray, Netflix, and whatever else you want. I understand there is hardcore Nintendo fanboyism, but come on.
Can you play it anywhere on the go? Can it play the nintendo games?
The only reason to get a console these days, besides the switch, is for the exclusivity. With the switch you also get a handheld console in addition to exclusivities.
> For less than the cost of the Switch you can buy a "shitty watered down PC", that has MUCH greater performance, plays Blu-Ray, Netflix, and whatever else you want.
Can you link me to where I can buy this other portable gaming console which apparently even has a Blu-Ray player despite the small form factor?
BOTW absolutely does not 'run poorly' or anywhere even close to it. I'm approaching 70 hours with the game and haven't come across a single performance issue.
I'm not going to argue with you. Day One reports were issues with serious frame rate drops, specifically with the docked version of the game. This has been discussed, analyzed, and recorded to death. Breath of the Wild has framerate issues.
If you're going to pretend to make authoritative statements on the basis of "it's been discussed to death", then you should say, "Breath of the Wild, whatever its issues, is one of the best games ever made".
See how unconvincing this approach is to someone who disagrees?
holy shit you are annoying as fuck. go back to reddit with this grade school trolling. even if you had a point it is long over shadowed by your tone and lack of reading comp.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Are you giving me proof that there are no performance issues, based upon the overall metacritic scores being high? Just about every Nintendo game I can remember has had performance issues, remember the NES? "Nintendo slowdown" was part of the game play! I gave proof above, I didn't say I was authoritative. Stop your condescending attitude.
That the "it's been covered extensively, see how these random internet people have written at length about the viewpoint I agree with" line of argument goes both ways, but more against you than in favor.
The only condescending statement here is the one you made: "This has been discussed, analyzed, and recorded to death. Breath of the Wild has framerate issues."
No, that actually is a fact. With proof from multiple sources, and frame rate graphs. Until you show me otherwise, it's objectively factual. While on the other hand, game scores are ENTIRELY subjective. Of course, game scores have absolutely nothing to do with the performance issues, so I still don't understand your argument.
Next you'll tell me humans never landed on the moon. I'm done!
The framerate itself is an objective measurement, but the word "issues" is a subjective assessment.
If you want to provide facts, say what the framerate is, don't say that there are framerate issues. To continue my comparison, it is a fact that a certain reviewer assigned the game a certain score. Whether that is indicative of the quality is opinion, as are the reviews themselves.
Right, because exceeding sales expectations and apparently having a hit on their hands means they've failed at hardware and need to move on.
It's funny. For as many fanboys as Nintendo has, they also have an apparent equal number of detractors who have a conniption if a game drops to 28 FPS and feel the need to obsess about it.
People have been saying this at least since the Gamecube era and Nintendo was already over a century old by that point. People also said that the PS2 would sink Sony because of the rocky launch and the myriad production issues they faced in the first year. And that Microsoft didn't understand this industry and that the Xbox would be a brief sojourn into it.
Suffice it to say, gamers tend to have poor crystal balls.
The fact that it's Zelda and not some mediocre third party title is all the more concerning. First party means all the hardware nuances are pretty well known to the developers.
Except that development ostensibly originally started for WiiU in or before 2013 when the game was announced. The difference in architecture between the WiiU and Switch is significant enough to make porting it a non-trivial affair. When combined with the other evidence that the Switch was rushed to launch (e.g. lack of browser, Virtual Console, etc.) even if you consider the "hardware nuances [to be] pretty well known to the developers" it's doubtful that they had the time to work around the differences between the two platforms as well as they should have.
You do realize that other games have been in similar circumstances before, like FF7, and they have coped with it much better.
My sources all tell me it is because the hardware is woefully underpowered (I don't think I can share any details), not because the software engineers were rushed (most game development is done under what you would consider "rushed" timelines, compared to the rest of the software industry as a whole).
Yes, I do. Though I disagree that FF7 is a good example of a game in similar circumstances.
Although FF7 began life on the SNES game, both that and an N64 version were completely scrapped before work started on the PSN version. I'd submit that starting an engine from scratch is a more straightforward task than getting partially through development on one platform, then having to port the engine and ensure it works reasonably well on both the old platform and a new one.
Regardless of whether or not FF7 is a good or bad example, I agree with the general sentiment that there are other developers that have done a better job porting games across disparate platforms.
My comment was merely to point out that having knowledge of hardware nuances isn't the same as being aggressive in optimizing for those nuances.
I also don't consider a Tegra X1 to be woefully underpowered in the Switch's form factor. Given that and the other evidence of a rushed launch, it seems more likely to me that insufficient optimization is to blame.
But I look forward to additional details, post-mortems, etc. becoming available (from you and others) as NDAS and such expire.
The Wii was unique, and will not happen again. It was the right place, the right product, and the right time to capitalize on the exploding definition of "Games" and "Gamer". That's over. People have either moved on to their phones/tablets, or they're the type who are still playing with their Wii.
The assumption that those many new gamers would behave like a "core" market was laughably wrong.
As for the portable, Nintendo is the best in the game, benefited from being up against Sony (the worst in the mobile game... they practically assassinated their own platform), and they have the benefit of a built-in market at home.
The Switch isn't a DS... it's not a pocket gaming platform. It isn't as useful as an iPad. It's as powerful as a console. What is it exactly, other than some kind of massive compromise rendered on substandard hardware?
I hope you're right; this is a situation in which I'd be more than happy to be look back in a year and eat my words. I grew up with Nintendo, and was a loyal customer through the Gamecube. I still love their mobile offerings.
I would like an excuse to come back to a console, but so far this isn't it, for me.
Is the battery life really worse than an iPad? iOS devices will last a long time if it's mostly idle, but when playing high-end games they generally only last an hour or two.
I'm not sure what you mean by the hardware is mediocre - are you expecting a desktop class GPU in a tablet form factor? What is your comparison? The Nvidia SOC is quite powerful, and handles 4k output just fine on the Nvidia Shield. I've had no complaints beyond the kickstand and I am loving my Switch so far.
It's pretty obvious why he's saying the hardware is mediocre. It can't run a 1ST party launch title consistently @ 30FPS, the console industry standard of minimum acceptable performance for probably at least a decade. I've heard lots of people say the drops in frame rate don't bother them. That's great, but lots of people are bothered by it. In my experience, 30FPS seems barely acceptable and when games randomly fall below that performance feels very choppy.
It's not enough to make me not want a switch. I'm planning on getting one as soon as I can find one, but I'm frustrated by the fact that there's no way to play BOTW smoothly on any system, and when it does play smoothly it will likely be in an emulator on a PC.
It's not just about how Zelda plays, it makes me concerned for the long term viability of the Switch.
Okay...in a vacuum, the battery life complaints sounded ridiculous. But this...this is straight up bonkers to me. Are there any widely played Ipad titles that are an apples-to-apples comparison to BOTW?
> the screen scratches if you put it in the dock too forcefully
as this actually happen to anyone?
> it's mediocre hardware
> the battery life is abysmal compared to an iPad
I cant comprehend your comment, it's the best handheld console on the market. For TV console, it's an experience focused on the game. If I wanted something for the graphics I would have bought a desktop computer not a console in the first place.
> the game selection is arguably worse
for a launch console no
> Then sales will fall off a cliff, just like they did with the original Wii
At the very least, with Nintendo it pays to wait and see, and with their mobile line (which this is probably a part of in a sense) there is always a "DS" and "DSL" edition to come out.
You rarely are burned by waiting and seeing with gaming these days... the games stick around, they come down in price, and their content expands.
As someone who has been playing BotW on a WiiU I was very jealous of the guy in the row in front of me on the plane last night playing on the Switch. It made me briefly consider getting one.
The great news here for Switch owners is that it means that Nintendo sees the platform size trending to point that will be large enough to start to attract attention of 3rd parties. The Wii U never got to this point and really suffered by essentially being a system of only Nintendo games.
I sure hope that they come out with a hardware revision, fast. I expect there to be a class-action suit regarding the left Joy-Con issues and the screen scratching issue, barring a recall.
I find your post difficult to take seriously. Nintendo was aware of the hardness of their screen throughout the design and when they shipped. The joy-con problems are unfortunate, but seem like the kind of glitches discovered on wide release. I'm not sure how fixable they are either (no amount of technical rejiggering will make bluetooth transmit through the human body better).
I don't know that I would have made the same trade-offs, but Nintendo was clearly aware of the trade-offs they were making. A recall seems really unlikely and a class action seems very difficult (how much can you get in damages for an occasional technical glitch in some configurations?).
The Joy-Con issue affects all units and has nothing to do with the human body, although that obviously makes the problem worse. After five or so feet away from the console, the Joy-Cons begin to respond intermittently, making proper gameplay impossible. (This is with nothing between the console and controllers.) The issue lies partially in the design of the antenna. The right Joy-Con has a better antenna, which alleviates the problem to a degree. I don't know how this could not be caught before release. A hardware mod can fix the antenna issue; a courageous user can solder a bit of wire onto the antenna to significantly extend the range.
The point is that the left Joy-Con is poorly designed.
They may be able to solve this issue by raising the gain on the antennae, at the expense of a significant amount of battery life. I don't know if they'd have to go through the FCC for this.
The screen issue isn't that the screen is plastic, it is that the dock itself damages the console. It takes a day or two with heavy use.
If you travel a lot, then this is for you. If not, then PS4 Pro with a 4k TV cannot be beaten.
Unfortunately, many "gamer" critics (like Colin Moriarty) are always flying all over the US. So all these reviews are heavily biased on being able to travel easily with this.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] thread(Obviously they are actually producing something, but it's not arriving anywhere yet, so there's no evidence of consoles being produced.)
> Company plans to manufacture 16 million or more in year starting April 1, up from an initial plan for eight million
In practice they are practically identical.
I really like my Wii U, but I don't think this is the prettiest game it could be. Honestly I think Wind Waker HD has much cleaner graphics (albeit not as technically good). It is a very fun game, though.
For example, I saw refurbished Wii U consoles for $200 the other day, and I'd be hesitant to spend $100 or $150 on a device with no warranty. But for $200 it's not crazy to think you might as well go for the Switch at $100 more.
Out of curiosity, other than standard Wii games which ones are you including here?
I've sunk about 30+ hours in now and I don't think I would have come this far had it not been a Zelda game, a series I've been playing for 25 years.
It's certainly not a bad game, but it's not one for people that can't make serious time commitments.
The rush is so that I can do the million other things I want to do in my spare time. I much prefer the old way of doing the main quest and coming back to side quests for an hour or two here and there.
I have two kids (one is only 2 months old) and also have a long commute, demanding job, etc. I also don't have a lot of time to play games. But the Switch just makes it so easy to play. It's the first console I can play in bed at night without bothering my wife and newborn.
Thus, with its portability, it makes it extremely easy to just play anytime I have time.
Also, why rush? 1 to 2 hours a day is more than enough. This game is a slow burn and I'm loving every moment of it!
What about WiiU and the 100s of handheld consoles?
Though, you can actually have wherever you want, if you don't need it connected to a TV, I've seen photos of people playing the Wii U in an airport lounge, all you need is a plug socket.
Exactly. I rarely understand people who begrudgingly dismiss large, epic games due to their limited time. The size of the game becomes irrelevant if you can save and continue at any point. Feel free to progress as slowly as you prefer. Your quest log sums up what's going on in case you forgot since your last session a few weeks ago.
I bought The Witcher 3 on release and have been playing it since - 2 hours here, a free evening there, maybe on a lazy sunday. I'm still not finished. To me that just means that I'll be able to enjoy the game for a very, very long time.
Information density.
You can have a game that takes a long time, but it would need a LOT of story in it's missions and sidequests to keep it interesting. If you stretch a 10 hour story over 80 hours of gameplay it gets boring real quick because the pacing of the story will simply be too slow.
I mean, sure, they're probably crazy good, but i doubt you're 30x worse than they are. Watch a video or two. I don't think you'll set a record or anything, but i bet you'll be able to finish the game real fast.
You can't expect to do a speed run on your first play through without following a guide, and if you do that what's the point in even playing it? Unless beating games as fast as humanly possible is your thing.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=samulGnaDVg
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYa2eAZ718
[0] http://kotaku.com/far-cry-4-has-a-hidden-bad-ending-16589899...
What? Why? I did almost no side quests until after doing all the divine beasts. There's some minor things to get into the relevant towns, and to get to the beast, but they were generally fun/interesting and part of the main quest. I don't see a reason you'd have to do any of the more boring ones.
I've noticed that BOTW which is different things to different people. I mean you could just run straight up to Ganon and finish the game in under 1 hour. Or you could play it linearly, only going where the quests take you.
Personally I just ran around finding shrines, and only finished the main quests after unlocking most of the world and many shrines.
It's a much harder game than normal Zelda's.
Breath of the Wild has far more in common with the original Legend of Zelda than with the more recent games.
Some may consider that this game approaches the difficulty of the NES/SNES Zelda titles a return to form. Though, I suppose that those are not really 'Normal' Zelda games anymore.
Similarly with other combat I thought it was way harder than other Zeldas. When I was near finishing the game I went online and checked "how to fight a lynel" (the hardest enemy imo). Watching that opened up some ideas and combat got much easier and more exciting. I kind of wish I had looked it up earlier. I was literally at Hyrule Castle on my way to complete the game when I looked.
I thoroughly enjoyed the game but my previous Zelda experience also limited my thinking about what's possible. I feel like I missed a large part of the game play because of that
The thing is that the first 3 Zelda's were not linear. I remember being so frustrated that Ocarina of time went out of it's way to stop me from exploring new areas, and how navi ruined all the exploration. I think Breath of the Wild is the first 3d Zelda that feels like the classic games.
Zelda 2 I'm less familiar with, but it has fewer items to lock you out in general with. I think once you get the hammer you have a lot of run of the overworld, again largely being constrained by difficulty ramping and leveling up which you can do anywhere.
Zelda 3 is considerably more linear though, it's true. You can sequence break the dark world a fair bit, but it's a lot clunkier by this point. Still, it's not anywhere near as rigid as the 3d Zeldas have been.
I wonder, what other games are you comparing it to / which have you played?
How does it stack for example against The Witcher 3 which won a landslide of awards?
I don't normally like open world games, but I loved the Witcher 3 and Fallout New Vegas.
The world of the Witcher 3 feels more real, but Breath of the Wild is more fun to explore.
FO3 felt too linear and too hand held. FO:NV on the other hand was actually decent.
FO4 is not fun at all if you want the open world RPG element. It's a shooter more than anything else, and you have to avoid settlements completely. The survival difficulty mode was decent in difficulty, but it lacked "oh shit" mechanics so random encounters don't just kill you at will for the first many hours of gameplay until you get some gear.
I can kind of understand why The Witcher 3 won a load of awards, but it just wasn't my thing (and I kept getting stuck on collision boxes where I really didn't think there should be any, which is utterly infuriating).
I am expecting to see Breath of the Wild winning absolutely truckloads of awards. How it will stand up in the future remains to be seen, but in this moment it's a fantastic new milestone in the history of the open world RPG.
Besides, Witcher 3 had an intimate sex scene on stuffed unicorn.
That's why I love the Witcher lore. It's one of very, very few fantasy settings where ethics are fuzzy and ugly. It makes other fantasy settings look like rom coms.
(I used to write Quenya and Sindarin in the tengwar! Probably still could; I'm sure I kept those notes. Brilliant languages, if heavily systematized in the same unrealistic way as Esperanto. But I still to this day can't make it through the main trilogy without running out of patience. Would you believe, I used to think I was the one with the problem?)
But yeah, the good vs evil stuff is pretty ham-fisted and always was. And there's some pretty racist stuff in there.
I have a WiiU but I still don't know should I get a Switch or buy the WiiU version of Zelda. I'm a massive Nintendo fan but mostly playing with a PC nowadays.
The WiiU version plays fine. A few frame rate hiccups on complex scenes here and there but nothing terrible. And I hear the Switch has this when docked anyways.
A.K.A. an emotionally engaging story, which would be very hard to do without some sequence of narrative. A complete sandbox is an endless timesink - if I'm building something freeform I'd rather do it using a medium which provides lasting value - art, 3D modeling, programming or such. But these are just personal preferences, I'm not claiming any objective value of one over the other (narrative v.s. sandbox).
Right now I’m playing through 3 and seeing Geralt as a monster-slayer consultant that occasionally has to deal with deadbeat clients. Interesting to see how he protects his finances before and after these encounters with the buyer (there’s only one quest I can recall where he actually asks for a deposit, since the quest giver reeks of thievery and corruption).
This article[0] goes into detail on why I think it's so great, but contains spoilers.
[0] https://killscreen.com/articles/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-att...
There is no handholding or quests you must be complete in a particular sequence or being locked in a particular part of the map. You can just go anywhere and do anything. And everyone you do go is incredibly well designed, polished and interesting.
It isn't on par for me with Uncharted or The Last of Us for the depth and quality of the story but it is a pretty damn good game.
Usually doing 'a' while 'b' means you are primarily doing 'b', and 'a' is a bonus.
The general consensus on Breath of the Wild so far is that it's at least a tier above that - the tier that defines a console generation. Games like Mario 64, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, stuff like that. That's Tier II.
In Tier I are the games that are in consideration for the greatest games of all time: Ocarina of Time, Link to the Past, Final Fantasy VII, etc. Some people think it'll end up here, but we won't know that until we look back on it in a few years.
Really? I don't think there is ANY game of the quality of Witcher 3 coming on a yearly basis...
The only way I could imagine saying that is if you focus only on the mechanics of the RPG game loop and ignore world design, dialog quality, voice acting, characters, breadth of content, quests, etc.
Had The Witcher 3 come out in 2016, it would have certainly been behind Overwatch. Had it come out in 2014, it would have certainly been behind Dark Souls II. In 2017, it would be behind Breath of the Wild, and it's only March. There are equal or better games every year.
Well, a lot of game critics disagree with that. Many of them gave GotY to MGS or Fallout instead, and MGS has a higher metacritic score than W3. I'm not going to debate beyond that because it'll devolve into complete subjectivity, but it's pretty clear W3 isn't a once-a-generation game.
https://gotypicks.blogspot.com/2015/09/2015-game-of-year.htm...
(And really, a suggestion of Dark Souls II as some kind of awards powerhouse is totally detached from any reality).
I'm going off of Wikipedia's GotY list, which includes only more notable publications. That lists adds in a ton of small gaming blogs and regional user's choice awards, which I don't think gives you better data. In Wikipedia's list, TW3 is winning, but a little less drastically.
I think you're attacking a claim I'm not making, and we're not even disagreeing, though. I didn't claim TW3 was worse than other contenders in 2015, I said it's one of a few solid games that come out every year. Everything you're saying and everything I'm saying supports that.
Edit: GotY is a decent signal, but discussions about which videogames are better are always going to be highly subjective. The Walking Dead won in 2012 and most people don't consider TWD to be on the same level as a lot of the other GotY games.
OOT, LttP, FF VII ar all decent games but not even close to "greatest games of all time". I'd classify them as Tier 3 at best.
I would not compare a game aimed at kids (Zelda) vs a game which is clearly more adult-focused (Witcher 3). It's like comparing a Disney movie vs an Aliens episode and asking which one is the best.
[BOTW puzzle spoilers below]
Comparing it to the Witcher 3 is actually a great way to highlight its strength--the insane depth of the mechanics. It feels almost like you're playing Nethack or Dwarf Fort in terms of how deep the mechanics go and how much the game designers allow you to do. Not _as_ deep, nothing's as deep as Dwarf Fort, but deep enough that I can make the comparison.
For example, both TW3 and BOTW have a mechanic where you can mix different ingredients together to give yourself stat bonuses. They both have you harvest the ingredients from the in-game world. Very similar so far. But in TW3, you mix them by going through some menu screens and clicking on the appropriate items. In BOTW, you take the items out of your inventory, hold them, and return to normal gameplay while holding them and can then choose to drop them anywhere in the outside world (ideally in a heated cauldron). But you can choose to drop them just in an open flame, and while you can't get potions this way, you _can_ cook ingredients like apples and meat to have them restore more of your health. But if you leave them in the fire too long, they'll catch fire themselves. And if it's a dry day and you're standing in the right (or wrong) kind of terrain, the grass underfoot may catch on fire, too. And it may spread (and start interfering with enemies--but that's another story). And there's more to it than that--if you drop certain ingredients in snowy landscapes or icy streams, they'll freeze over and give you heat resisting properties when they didn't before. And if you drop them in areas that are too hot (think side of an active volcano), they'll start cooking immediately, as if you had dropped them over an open flame in a standard area. You can distract certain a certain type of enemy by dropping food in front of it too.
The entire game is like this. For example, in another dungeon I got stuck on a puzzle that clearly wanted me to put two magic electric orbs on two switches, about 5m apart from each other. But for the life of me I could only find one of the orbs. After fifteen minutes of running around, I remembered that my metal weapons conducted electricity--I had found that out because I had gotten killed by a lightning strike while I was flying through a storm earlier, I ignored the warning sparking around my back and had to reload a save. So I dropped every metal weapon I had and dragged in a metal chest from another room in the dungeon and made a circuit from one switch to the other with the single electric orb in the middle. And it totally worked to solve the puzzle. (Looked up where the second orb was later and I was blind to not notice it, whoops.)
It doesn't have the depth of writing that TW3 does, the characters are more cartoonish and less nuanced and the plot itself is much more straightforward and doesn't have a tenth of the subterfuge. But the writing isn't poor, either, it's done extremely well for its style. It comes across as very Ghibli-esque to me. Zelda's character in particular is nuanced and an interesting examination of their old tropes without fully subverting them, and the way they reveal the story to you is through a series of clever small vignettes that overwhelmingly choose these small intimate moments that manage to imply so much more than they outright say.
It's unabashedly 11/10 GOTY and maybe "game of this generation" to me, though I'm trying to give myself some time to get over the initial rush before I make that kind of call. Blows TW3 out of the water, and I loved TW3.
"What are you talking about? Sunshine's like the best one!"
The music is cool and the setting is refreshing. The FLOOD gimmick is fine; it's nice to have some variance in Mario's move-pool. The weird tone can actually be endearing.
But it's not enough to make up for the in-intuitive level design and wild difficulty swings. A Mario game is expected to be one thing above all else "Fun Running And Jumping Puzzles" and Sunshine simply doesn't deliver.
same for me, but I admit that for me, as a not-anymore hardcore gamer, SMG was simple an amazing piece of art; awesome in all aspects of gaiming: gameplay, innovation music/art, fun.
I feel (2 'divine beasts' in):
* It's very repetitive.
* The boss dungeons are unrewarding.
* The shrine dungeons are novel, but get tiresome quickly.
* As you can pretty much do everything off the bat, there's no "oh a boulder, can't move it, better come back later" element to the game. (This is my biggest gripe I think, a big part of the Zelda games was doing a dungeon and getting a gimmick to unlock new places).
* Weapon durability is an annoyance as there's no feedback of how much weapon there is left until the end.
* As my gear improves, I don't feel any stronger.
* Cooking could be 10x easier.
But I seem to be the odd one out thinking this, so maybe I just have bad taste.
I understand why you'd stop there, IMHO the first two or three (or even four) episodes aren't actually all that great. It's definitely worth persevering though, they get markedly better and Episode 6 is an absolute corker.
Same with Battlestar Galactica.
Certainly, I still go back and watch the first two episode pilot at least once a year. So. Damned. Good.
I like it even love it but it's not the best Zelda I've ever played. I still like Wind Waker better.
But honestly it's better than Skyward Sword, which I found tedious and annoying.
Bows that break after shooting too many arrows, ugh...
All of the guardians I have faced in the combat shrines drop weapons that at least equal (usually exceed) the total damage/durability consumed to defeat them.
Also: Shooting the guardians in the eye stuns them giving you a long window of respite during a fight.
For cooking, pick an ingredient and select Hold, select the others, then go stand in front of a pot over a lit fire (of which you encounter plenty). The game will tell you to press A to cook. To restore health, just put a bunch of mushrooms and meat in a pot. Some mushrooms, herbs, crabs, fish, etc. tell you that they'll make you faster/stronger/less cold/etc., just throw them in with the meat. For elixirs just mix butterflies, lizards, etc. with boko horn, tooth, etc. Also if you get hearty radishes, you can throw them in a pot without anything else and it's basically full restore + extra hearts. It's broken.
I feel the same, it might seems counter intuitive but those limitation are what I liked the most about previous Zeldas. I miss the feeling of 'I wonder when I'l finally be able to go there'
On the other hand, I've always loved Gothic[1] for it's gating mechanism. If you got mangled by raptors ore some ork, that meant the area was certainly not meant for your level.
I guess it will be interesting how I'll feel on BotW once my Switch arrives...
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_(video_game)
Or you could locate the ingredients for heat-resistant elixirs, make some yourself and just plough on anyway.
This is a game which takes "open world" quite seriously, and lets you go and fight the final boss straight out of the tutorial area if you want. Although you'll probably die almost immediately, the choice is yours. I rather like the blend it gives me of freedom and guidance.
Oh and someone in the ancestry mentioned the cooking UI is poor. Indeed, the cooking UI is very poor. A few things like that and some issues with characterisation and voice acting would hold me off giving this game a perfect score.
I'd have liked to do all the puzzles in the Tomb Raider reboot, but most of the temples or whatever were locked behind "you need to have gone to the next area and then come back with the thing you acquire" idiocy.
I don't want to endlessly retrace my steps to re-find places I've been before because there's a gating mechanism. If I'd organically had to go near to the places again maybe I'd forgive them - but I'd literally have had to go to old areas for no other reason.
It's just bad design
Done well, an "unlock" ability should either grant access to more space off a central hub (that you'd be returning to anyways) or give optional minor rewards if you want to be the completionist back-tracker - zelda pieces of heart, or max mana upgrades; metroid missile capacity; even raw cash.
Being forced to backtrack (especially without fast travel) to an arbitrary area _to progress the game_ is bad design.
I don't see this as a problem. I'd rather a deep or skillful gameplay system where I get better and gear upgrades are incremental or side-grades.
"Avatar strength" is boring.
ex.: You get to a new region, something in the environment prevents you from exploring easily (for instance, cold). You can either tough it out and spend a lot of time/resources, or return later once you've acquired some meals/weapons that help you deal with the situation. I see this system as a really clever alternative to classic logarithmic power creep curves.
I want to watch one of these 1hour speed runs, but only after I complete the game. I can only image how good those guys must be
I was actually considering getting it, but you might have just changed my mind. I like an open world, but the reward of progression is often a key to enjoyment for me in many cases. Do they make up for this in any other ways (ie: unbeatable monsters until you're high enough level/have better gear or something)?
All which was definitely progression. Just not like you'd traditionally think RPGs are: but more of a "real-life" acquisition style.
There are other kinds of traversal that feels this way too, but I'll leave the discovery to you.
I still feel that all of the good sides of that Zelda still makes it one of the best game I ever played.
Many people (myself included) see that as a good thing. Every time I come up to an obstacle, I know that the only thing keeping me from getting past it is my own skill; I know there's no contrived McGuffin that will come along later and trivialize the time/effort spent working my way around it.
> As my gear improves, I don't feel any stronger.
Really? I'm about the same place in the game as you (i.e. two divine beasts down), and I can take on all sorts of enemies that I couldn't before. I definitely feel stronger than I did at the beginning of the game (e.g. I don't have to run in fear every time a guardian lights up, I can quickly go to the "test of strength" shrines whenever I need new weaponry, etc.)
> Cooking could be 10x easier
It could certainly be faster (I'd love to be able to batch my recipies instead of having to cook 10 meals, one at a time)
I think the Switch is particularly targeted at non-hardcore-gamers.
Actually it would only make sense as a purchase right now if you're a hardcore game dying to play Zelda.
I made this mistake with gran turismo on PS3... I have only the PS3 for Gran Turismo and clearly was a waste.
I can understand the hype over Zelda but like many of other game because of his content that is cheap, boring start to degrade now. See the live streaming on youtube, almost every youtube guy that stream is on the end. Two weeks after. In 1 months we will not talk more about Zelda.
- can't take a playstation on the train/plane/subway/car
- can't stream Playstation Now on the train/plane/subway/car
If this iteration of Nintendo's console would have a been your standard home console, I wouldn't have bought it. It being a hybrid made me pull the trigger, and I'm sure I'm not alone there.
The switch is smaller than my current graphics card. The switch + ALL of its accessories is (rough estimate) slightly less material than what is inside my PC case. Certainly far less electronics. Most of the Switch accessories are just plastic.
edit: If the one metric you want to maximize (or minimize) is electronic waste, the ONLY device you should own is a high-end smartphone that you carefully maintain so that you can replace it only after at least triple its expected (2 year) lifetime.
Plastic are a big waste. Most of my computers made 10 years or more, always find someone that need one, or a part that can be reused. No need for new GF every year...
Plus the more modular nature of the components/accessories means that it is possible (though unlikely) that upgrades for different components may be made on a module-by-module basis. Which translates to less waste overall.
In terms of computers/consoles made 10+ years ago I think the same comparisons still apply. There are plenty of old consoles still in use today. Though old consoles were certainly less modular than old PCs.
A few of the glitches in the game:
- Water doesn't exist, you just walk on the bottom of lakebeds, all the fish behave as if they're on dry land
- Magnesis and Stasis do not work (but you can just walk underwater to get to those chests)
- The game locks up often, typically during auto-saves
- Graphical glitches, big cyan and magenta polygons, flicker constantly on screen
- All humanoid characters, including Link, sink about halfway into the ground
- Animals will randomly disappear, AI behaves weird around the non-existent water
- Frame rate is extremely troubled
- You can't beat many of the shrines, including the first few, so you need a save file to escape the first area
So imagine trying to play through the shrines without Magnesis or Stasis. What do you do? The game itself is actually pretty flexible: instead of lifting metal boxes and spheres you can use bombs to knock them in the direction you need. You can use arrows and other weapons to knock around far away objects. Still, many shrines are impassable.
CEMU is not anywhere close to a substitute for the console, and it will be months to years before it has the same accuracy as say Dolphin.
To compare, I've been playing Super Mario 3D World at 4K and it's gorgeous. It looks and performs far better than the Wii U version once you install a precompiled shader cache.
So while BotW is currently unplayable on Cemu, I suspect that won't be the case in 6 months or so.
I personally always thought the screen on the controller was dumb, I owned a Dreamcast and thought it was annoying then, so it didn't bother me. But you might feel different.
How big a Zelda fan were you before playing Breath of the Wild?
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?snr=1_614_615_street-f...
I didn't like Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword very much at all.
I've been playing Horizon on PS4 and it's fantastic, plus the console actually has value outside of a single game.
I tried to buy a Switch and Zelda on launch day, but couldn't find one locally and settled for the Wii U version. I haven't been disappointed.
I'll probably buy a Switch when the new Mario comes out for it in like 6-10 months.
I just beat the major test of strength, time to get one of these beasts.
Put this on your bookmarks bar.
I get that they're a typical conservative Japanese company, they don't want to screw up inventory, blah blah blah, but it's getting annoying.
And slightly off topic, does anyone know what is up with the NES classic / Famicom mini? As far as I can tell that thing never restocked after launch.
You can see how it looks like Nintendo is majorly shooting themselves in the foot with these slow launches.
But it kinda does justify the view that they are bungling this release if they have stock left on shelves in those countries while those in US / Japan (where I am) can only resort to buying in secondary markets.
Even phyisical copies of Zelda are very hard to find, and with Nintendo's crazy download pricing - I wanted a physical copy (70 eur for the downloadable version of the game vs 60 for the physical - really?).
Edit: or possibly it was made out of a surplus of unused parts from other products.
Not to say it would be a good decision, but it would have been survivable.
It was out for about a year before I finally figured out that it was an all new console. I thought it was a wireless tablet add-on for the Wii.
Not quite what you're after, but I'm unsure about how cool it is to copy & paste the entire article here. FAQ is unclear. Any guidance?
Legality and the fact that anybody can have it up and running in less than 3 minutes from opening the box.
No, but downloading the game ROMs almost always is.
It's an urban myth that owning a copy makes it okay. Morally sure, but not legally.
If you want one, set up alerts on brickseek.com, nowinstock.net and zoolert.com. Every few days they pop up somewhere online or locally. They're still scarce but it's possible to get them. Amazon had stock for almost an hour when I bought one a few weeks ago. Using these alerts I got two in the last month. One for me, and a second just for the controller. The official controller is even harder to find than the console.
I notice you've been banned for quite awhile. Some of your comments are pretty good. Some are not-so-great, mostly the outrage/political comments.
It's none of my business, but have you considered emailing hn@ycombinator.com, apologize for whatever got you banned, and promise not to do it again? The mods are more than fair and in my experience that will earn you a second chance.
More than that, though, your account is named HeavenBanned, so presumably you created it after your previous account was banned. It's also an amusing name since you may have been fully aware that new accounts which are created to circumvent bans are quickly banned, so HeavenBanned would quickly become a self-fulfilling name.
Therefore it seems like you're fully aware of your status, but you still comment on HN knowing that almost nobody will see your writing, except the few that have showdead turned on. While your comments are certainly welcome, I am moved by curiosity to ask: What compels you to keep commenting even though you know you're banned? Anything in particular?
The phenomenon is pretty common. There are a lot of banned accounts with dozens of pages of dead comments. Sometimes the comments are meticulously written or otherwise took a lot of effort to write. But the most curious aspect is that the authors know they're banned, yet they continue to write.
I've seen at least a dozen accounts like that over the years, and I've always wondered why. Why waste time writing something no one will see? Is it therapeutic, like writing in a private journal?
Again, it's not unwelcome -- the dead/vouch system works quite well, so it's perfectly fine for someone to write as many autokilled comments as they want. But I love a good mystery, and so I have to ask: what drives you to do it? What drives dozens of people to do it?
(It would be ironic if you had no idea you were banned and this was how you found out.)
https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/
It's called shadow banning or stealth banning [1] and it's probably the most effective way to keep a community clean; explicit bans will anger the user and make them try and circumvent them by using proxies and multiple accounts, often to the point of just posting porn or other offensive stuff. Very hard to get that fixed. Shadow banning on the other hand hides the offensive content from the users, without the user doing it knowing - they can troll all they want, but shadow banning takes away their audience and thus the fun of it.
But yeah, telling people "ur banned" defeats the purpose and I'd really like people to stop doing that. The HN system isn't obvious though. Should have a help link if you can see hidden comments at least.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_banning
> I was careful to choose someone who knew they were banned
These statements seem inconsistent to me
This subthread ended up being boring and cluttered up the main topic. If the mods have a problem with what I'm doing, they'll say so. In the meantime, you have both a downvote button and a flag button to employ. I think there was nothing wrong with what I did, right up until it spawned a useless subthread about whether what I did was ok. At this point it's worth detaching, which is frustrating: I really wanted to know the answer to the original mystery! Since I have to vouch a banned user's comment in order to ask them the question, there's no way to ask them without also spawning an offtopic subthread. I was hoping that people would see that it's an interesting subthread and worth giving some leeway to see where it leads.
In general, it's ok for subthreads to veer off topic as long as it's intellectually interesting and substantive. Some of the most interesting comments are generated by that kind of process. But it's easy to push it too far, and it doesn't work if people get caught up in metaquestions.
I know reddit has taken the stance lately to only use it against spam accounts as it's highly effective against those.
Let's say for the sake of example, we're at a party. It's not just any party. It's a party for developers. 99% of the conversations at this party are routine, most people will say predictable things and things are kept very, very professional. As it should be! These are professionals, talking to other professionals about professional topics. Discourse is maintained and curated at a high-level at this party/conference.
But, for whatever reason, they've now offered a special "room" for certain developers who want to say things that might be unprofessional, that might incite anger in some users, that might be politically incorrect, that might be not appropriate for a party setting. But! And here's the caveat: this special room is actually populated by many developers and some of the elder party-goers can VOUCH for good party-members when they see them making good points and bring the conversation out of the VIP room into the broader party. Moreover, they can keep the private conversations private and maybe nod their heads at some comments that are particularly insightful but that are taboo. It's a source of honey for the type of developers I would be talking to in real life anyway. I wouldn't discuss Marxist politics with a mealy-mouthed developer who can't even spell Afghanistan, so why waste my breath in the main room trying to convince him of a radical academic topic that uses expletives and other politically incorrect things?
So let's recap: I can still go to this party. I can still have my comments seen by the people at the party who I WANT them to see. AND on top of that, when I say something insightful I have the ability to have my conversation taken out of the VIP room and into the broader party.
In the meantime I would only like to talk to the developers who are a.) politically incorrect (so they turn show-dead on) b.) value minority opinions (so they turn show-dead on) and c.) enjoy giving me an upvote donation when I'm not rabble-rousing (so they turn-dead on).
It's a win-win for me. Without a doubt.
I understand that they didn't officially support this at launch probably because of time constraints and priorities but it just doesn't make any sense for the switch not to support this in the longer term. It's form factor is perfect for it.
Looking forward to getting the Switch because I always liked Nintendo's handhelds and this qualifies. Just hope they work out the design/quality issues by the time stock catches up to demand.
A friend of mine built a pi based emulator, I played around with it the other day -- it was actually very nice. The controllers he used in the setup were bluetooth (8bit brand?).
https://retropie.org.uk/
It is also difficult to tell what the cap on demand is. If they think they satisfied maybe 70% of the total demand for that product with the N-Number of units they produced, they may consider that "good enough" and not worth launching another production run.
- http://www.gamezone.com/news/rumor-nes-classic-mini-reported...
- http://www.techradar.com/news/dont-panic-nintendo-nes-mini-p...
- http://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/gaming/767007/Nintend...
There was a rumor last month which Nintendo refuted.
I think they also missed an easy gravy train with expansion packs.
https://retropie.org.uk/
There is enough of a hardcore Nintendo fanbase to buy up initial launch supply.
Let me know of the sales in July.
Even the WiiU seems to have been at least a modest success upon launch: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/01/11/how-successful-was-th...
Still, I would definitely take a strong launch over a weak one if I had a choice. :)
Since the console is not likely to get any 3rd party AAA games Nintendo is going to have to court nearly every indie dev + churn out as many first party titles as possible.
Also I'm hoping for a $50 price drop after Christmas...
People forget that the ps2 was many familie's DVD player. That kind of extra utility goes a long way into driving purchases imo.
Either way, canceling the 3ds and focusing all their efforts on the switch seems like the best way to ensure this system is a success.
Every time they have a highly anticipated product release, there are many multiples fewer products on the shelves than there is demand, for months at a time, and meanwhile, eBay prices spike to 200%+ retail. Meanwhile, consumers are disappointed/annoyed, scalpers profit, and Nintendo leaves money on the table.
I wonder how many Switches haven't been sold since people got tired of waiting and just picked up Breath of the Wild for the Wii U, which is now going for fire sale prices?
[0]http://www.cio.com/article/2434123/supply-chain-management/n...
Especially when the "scarcity" problem can be addressed easily.
Nintendo is a billion dollar company. They've been around a long time. They could produce adequate supply if they wanted. It's seems pretty clear that they are not interested in satiating demand.
Also I imagine it cuts down on assembly line costs.
I love that it's handheld, I travel a lot and so far I've played that in the plane and in various airbnbs, splitting the controller in two and playing snipperclips or bomberman with my girlfriend.
It's probably the best console I bought since the N64. I see a lot of skepticism here, but I assume it is mostly from non-buyers. I predict that this is going to be the biggest christmas for Nintendo this December.
As for general battery life, based on these figures you'll get somewhere between 2 hours and 45 minutes to 3 hours and 15 minutes playing Breath of the Wild, depending on the settings you use.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/nintendo-switch-battery-l...
To the GP, Nintendo products have this effect on people. They're different enough that people don't know what to expect. You'll find similar sentiments about the Wii U (especially from Nintendo fans - the next Mario/Zelda/SSB is gonna put it over the top!).
I'm interested in wait and see. The hardware is mediocre even though the form factor is great. They really have to get more games out before the holiday season, though, and where they are at they're competing with both mobile devices and consoles. Parents have to justify spending $300 on this + full priced games against more games and better experiences on other consoles (MS IS launching a 4k console, too) and cheaper (much cheaper) games on mobile devices that aren't restricted to gaming. They're in a no man's land of markets where they compete with everyone (for good and bad).
....though it'll probably sell like hotcakes.
For a while. Then the novelty/fad factor will wear off and people will realize that it's mediocre hardware, the screen scratches if you put it in the dock too forcefully, the battery life is abysmal compared to an iPad, and the game selection is arguably worse. Then sales will fall off a cliff, just like they did with the original Wii.
Not the same games but Uncharted 4 multiplayer is 1080p 60fps and silky smooth. That's not even talking about PC games - it's dirt cheap to run CSGO at 90 fps and 1440p these days.
Bad performance detracts from the experience and it also limits what Nintendo can do with the console over the next three or four years.
I (and many other people) want to play Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart, etc., not silky smooth PC games.
1) rare
2) mostly resolved by the day 1 patch that Nintendo released
Uncharted 4 is only 900p 60fps in multiplayer, and 1080p 30fps in single player (on a regular PS4)
But regardless, if your going to switch up the games, Fast RMX runs at 1080p 60fps on the Switch, even in multiplayer mode.
Yeah, the Switch does not hit the performance of a PS4. But the Switch has just 1/3rd the power draw of a Slim PS4. (Roughly 30 watts average for the Switch, compared to roughly 80 watts average for the Slim PS4). It's not bad hardware at all, when you consider the power budget it's required to operate under, in order to be portable.
No one gives a shit anyway. If people cared they wouldn't ever bother with consoles.
I'd rather have their stuff than crappy pseudo-PCs.
The only reason to get a console these days, besides the switch, is for the exclusivity. With the switch you also get a handheld console in addition to exclusivities.
Can you link me to where I can buy this other portable gaming console which apparently even has a Blu-Ray player despite the small form factor?
Digital Foundry covered this extensively
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhoiGxl6bnE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpqaTdflkNU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yFON2UON3k
If you're going to pretend to make authoritative statements on the basis of "it's been discussed to death", then you should say, "Breath of the Wild, whatever its issues, is one of the best games ever made".
See how unconvincing this approach is to someone who disagrees?
It can be one of the greatest games ever made by subjective and objective measures and suffer performance issues.
The only way BotW does not have performance issues is if you consider sub-30 fps acceptable.
If you can't see one, why assume one exists just out of sight?
>The only way BotW does not have performance issues is if you consider sub-30 fps acceptable.
The popularity of the game implies that most people do.
The only condescending statement here is the one you made: "This has been discussed, analyzed, and recorded to death. Breath of the Wild has framerate issues."
Next you'll tell me humans never landed on the moon. I'm done!
If you want to provide facts, say what the framerate is, don't say that there are framerate issues. To continue my comparison, it is a fact that a certain reviewer assigned the game a certain score. Whether that is indicative of the quality is opinion, as are the reviews themselves.
It's funny. For as many fanboys as Nintendo has, they also have an apparent equal number of detractors who have a conniption if a game drops to 28 FPS and feel the need to obsess about it.
You love PC gaming. We get it.
Suffice it to say, gamers tend to have poor crystal balls.
My sources all tell me it is because the hardware is woefully underpowered (I don't think I can share any details), not because the software engineers were rushed (most game development is done under what you would consider "rushed" timelines, compared to the rest of the software industry as a whole).
Although FF7 began life on the SNES game, both that and an N64 version were completely scrapped before work started on the PSN version. I'd submit that starting an engine from scratch is a more straightforward task than getting partially through development on one platform, then having to port the engine and ensure it works reasonably well on both the old platform and a new one.
Regardless of whether or not FF7 is a good or bad example, I agree with the general sentiment that there are other developers that have done a better job porting games across disparate platforms.
My comment was merely to point out that having knowledge of hardware nuances isn't the same as being aggressive in optimizing for those nuances.
I also don't consider a Tegra X1 to be woefully underpowered in the Switch's form factor. Given that and the other evidence of a rushed launch, it seems more likely to me that insufficient optimization is to blame.
But I look forward to additional details, post-mortems, etc. becoming available (from you and others) as NDAS and such expire.
The assumption that those many new gamers would behave like a "core" market was laughably wrong.
As for the portable, Nintendo is the best in the game, benefited from being up against Sony (the worst in the mobile game... they practically assassinated their own platform), and they have the benefit of a built-in market at home.
The Switch isn't a DS... it's not a pocket gaming platform. It isn't as useful as an iPad. It's as powerful as a console. What is it exactly, other than some kind of massive compromise rendered on substandard hardware?
Edit: left out the "isn't".
I would like an excuse to come back to a console, but so far this isn't it, for me.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_sales
I'm not sure what you mean by the hardware is mediocre - are you expecting a desktop class GPU in a tablet form factor? What is your comparison? The Nvidia SOC is quite powerful, and handles 4k output just fine on the Nvidia Shield. I've had no complaints beyond the kickstand and I am loving my Switch so far.
It's not enough to make me not want a switch. I'm planning on getting one as soon as I can find one, but I'm frustrated by the fact that there's no way to play BOTW smoothly on any system, and when it does play smoothly it will likely be in an emulator on a PC.
It's not just about how Zelda plays, it makes me concerned for the long term viability of the Switch.
Okay...in a vacuum, the battery life complaints sounded ridiculous. But this...this is straight up bonkers to me. Are there any widely played Ipad titles that are an apples-to-apples comparison to BOTW?
as this actually happen to anyone?
> it's mediocre hardware > the battery life is abysmal compared to an iPad
I cant comprehend your comment, it's the best handheld console on the market. For TV console, it's an experience focused on the game. If I wanted something for the graphics I would have bought a desktop computer not a console in the first place.
> the game selection is arguably worse
for a launch console no
> Then sales will fall off a cliff, just like they did with the original Wii
wat
You rarely are burned by waiting and seeing with gaming these days... the games stick around, they come down in price, and their content expands.
Otherwise, the only incentive I have to getting one is Zelda, and I already have a Wii U to play that on.
And this was before the discovered flaws on launch: (Left joy con and scratching issue).
The left joycon is fine for me, the scratching I'm a bit more scared. But it's 300$, it's cheaper than an iPad/iPhone, etc...
I don't know that I would have made the same trade-offs, but Nintendo was clearly aware of the trade-offs they were making. A recall seems really unlikely and a class action seems very difficult (how much can you get in damages for an occasional technical glitch in some configurations?).
The point is that the left Joy-Con is poorly designed.
They may be able to solve this issue by raising the gain on the antennae, at the expense of a significant amount of battery life. I don't know if they'd have to go through the FCC for this.
The screen issue isn't that the screen is plastic, it is that the dock itself damages the console. It takes a day or two with heavy use.
Unfortunately, many "gamer" critics (like Colin Moriarty) are always flying all over the US. So all these reviews are heavily biased on being able to travel easily with this.