Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

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Breath of the Wild Sequel Is Offically Titled The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Out in May

The sequel to Breath of the Wild will be officially called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and it's out on May 12, 2023.

The title was revealed as part of a new trailer at Nintendo Direct today, which also showed off exploration, new stasis powers, and lots of the sequel's still-unexplained shattered Hyrule.

A nice direct but a grand total of 3 minutes of Zelda at the end so not exactly a great deal of information.

A bit of a naff name but I can't wait to see how they expand the ideas of BOTW.
I literally don't think I need to see anymore as I want the surprises to be my own & not through seeing something in another gameplay trailer leading upto release.

One thing I did notice is the gameplay footage looked nowhere near as crisp as the E3 2021 gameplay trailer but ah well it's still gonna be something special.

Spikeout wrote:

I literally don't think I need to see anymore as I want the surprises to be my own & not through seeing something in another gameplay trailer leading up to release.

Yep. This is one of those for me as well. I'll probably try to avoid most media and news about it until launch. Can't wait!

Hoping for proper dungeons!

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Mr. Aonuma Gameplay Demonstration

*Yuck, yuck, yuck. 7 Minutes in...I don't want forced building mechanics. I know it is popular with Fortnite and other games but I don't play those, I don't want those things.
If they are minor I can live with it but if it is a large part of the game I may be out.

farley3k wrote:

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Mr. Aonuma Gameplay Demonstration

*Yuck, yuck, yuck. 7 Minutes in...I don't want forced building mechanics. I know it is popular with Fortnite and other games but I don't play those, I don't want those things.
If they are minor I can live with it but if it is a large part of the game I may be out.

I'm totally in for The Legend of Zelda: Nuts and Bolts.

Oh I think they may be reading the market correctly, but it isn't my jam.

At least they seem to have somewhat addressed people’s complaints about weapon durability.

I concur, that building in games is typically too fiddley and puts me off pretty quick.

So much of the rest looks great, though. Looks like weapon durability is somewhat addressed, traversal looks to be sped up in a lot of instances, and they've added some diversity to combat.

I liked the weapon durability system. Unlike in something like the older Bethesda games, it wasn't just a time-wasting system where you had to drop into a menu every hour to repair your guns/armor. Rather, it was a way of constantly cycling through different weapons and never getting too attached to any one combat style. I never* found myself in a situation where I didn't have 10 different choices of what to use. But as is always the case, people complaining are going to be much louder than people who think something is fine, so whatever. It's not like it was a key part of the game, though, so changes are fine, if pointless.

*Except early on in master mode. But I think that mode teaches you very quickly that the early game is about either using the environment or avoiding combat all-together since your weapons won't last long enough to take on anything but the lowest-level enemies.

There are two types of gamer: people who use consumables, and people who hoard them "in case I need them later" and end the game with 50 million potions in their inventory.

It feels to me as though BotW, through the durability system, turned weapons into consumables - which was a nightmare for those of us who get anxious when we feel forced to use a consumable. I actively avoided combat so that I wouldn't have to "use up" my weapons and could keep them until I might really need them.

I acknowledge that this is a "me" problem and not a BotW problem, per se.

Even so, one of the main defenses of weapon breakage was, "It forces you to try different weapons!" You know another way to get people to try different weapons? Make each weapon unique, fun and interesting so that people want to try them all. That's what the Souls games do, after all (and yes, I'm aware durability exists in some of those, too, but degraded weapons can be fixed easily).

Tasty Pudding wrote:

Even so, one of the main defenses of weapon breakage was, "It forces you to try different weapons!" You know another way to get people to try different weapons? Make each weapon unique, fun and interesting so that people want to try them all. That's what the Souls games do, after all (and yes, I'm aware durability exists in some of those, too, but degraded weapons can be fixed easily).

But did you try different weapons in Dark Souls? I guess I did at the beginning as I looked for a moveset I liked, but after I found the Balder Side Sword, I never used anything else the rest of the game.

billt721 wrote:
Tasty Pudding wrote:

Even so, one of the main defenses of weapon breakage was, "It forces you to try different weapons!" You know another way to get people to try different weapons? Make each weapon unique, fun and interesting so that people want to try them all. That's what the Souls games do, after all (and yes, I'm aware durability exists in some of those, too, but degraded weapons can be fixed easily).

But did you try different weapons in Dark Souls? I guess I did at the beginning as I looked for a moveset I liked, but after I found the Balder Side Sword, I never used anything else the rest of the game.

Yes, multiple playthroughs specifically to use different weapons. Lots of people do that, because the game is very different if you're a speedy dex character versus, say, an unga-bunga strength-enjoyer, and the movesets are so varied.

You're right, though: if someone only does a single playthrough, it's unlikely they'll be chopping and changing weapons.

billt721 wrote:

I liked the weapon durability system.

As did I. I was constantly throwing away barely used weapons because I'd find new ones faster than I could break the old ones. I stopped using the Master Sword almost entirely because it just led to more weapons I had to toss at full durability.

Alas, aside from a lack of proper dungeons, weapon durability was far and away the biggest complaint people had about the first game. I'm not surprised that it's being addressed.

Edit: It might be important to note that I didn't watch the video, so I'm not even sure what has been changed. I'm on Zelda media blackout until release.

Dyni wrote:

Edit: It might be important to note that I didn't watch the video, so I'm not even sure what has been changed. I'm on Zelda media blackout until release.

Me too. BotW was such a pleasant surprise -- and a large part of that was the joy of discovering everything in the world -- that I want to know as little as possible going into this one.

Well, I was not exactly hyped about the new game. BotW is great and everything, but eh... Lots of other games this year, and the coming months, I would be way more interested in.
That new video made it look quite amazing however.

I haven’t watched any press for the new game so I was wondering if someone can answer a question for me.

Somewhat shamefully, and despite adoring the game, I’ve never finished the original. My initial playthrough got cut off by Final Fantasy XIV, my second attempt got cut off by Monster Hunter World.

Is there a benefit to trying to finish the first game now, before the new one launches? Beyond the narrative stuff that I could probably get from an hour on YouTube.

I fired up BotW today for the first time in a while and it’s a hard game to re-learn on the fly. I have the wind and water powers so half of them, but no idea how to go about getting the other two and I don’t feel great about just consulting a walkthrough video.

Blind_Evil wrote:

I haven’t watched any press for the new game so I was wondering if someone can answer a question for me.

Somewhat shamefully, and despite adoring the game, I’ve never finished the original. My initial playthrough got cut off by Final Fantasy XIV, my second attempt got cut off by Monster Hunter World.

Is there a benefit to trying to finish the first game now, before the new one launches? Beyond the narrative stuff that I could probably get from an hour on YouTube.

I fired up BotW today for the first time in a while and it’s a hard game to re-learn on the fly. I have the wind and water powers so half of them, but no idea how to go about getting the other two and I don’t feel great about just consulting a walkthrough video.

I’m only guessing, but I don’t think you’ll have needed to complete BotW to enjoy TotK. Seeing as this is a standalone game and not an expansion it wouldn’t make sense to require people to have played the former.

Also, the last video didn’t indicate what the story is, but it did show that…

Spoiler:

we'll effectively be starting over with Link. In the video Link only had four health hearts, one ring of stamina, and was using basic weapons such as sticks and branches.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Early Map Comparison
*wow, they really didn't update the graphics much. I understand it is the same engine but usually in the course of 6 years they find ways to optimize better, etc so that things look better.

farley3k wrote:

*wow, they really didn't update the graphics much.

99% of Switch games still don't look as good as BotW or Mario Odyssey. They clearly maxed the output early on.

I really don't mind the lack of improvement in that area. The first game still looks great. It's the performance I'm a bit nervous about.

Now that every other platform I play games on pulls off smooth frame rates with ease, dips below 30 FPS bother me much more than they did when I was playing BotW.

Dyni wrote:
farley3k wrote:

*wow, they really didn't update the graphics much.

99% of Switch games still don't look as good as BotW or Mario Odyssey. They clearly maxed the output early on.

I think that's a function of the Switch using a 2-year-old (at time of Switch release) off-the-shelf mobile chip, which was already being used in game-playing devices (NVIDIA Shield). By the time the Switch came around, everyone had a pretty good idea what the silicon could and couldn't do.

Oh here we go. New Switch OLED preordered. Game bought with voucher, plus I got the eShop cards for 20% off. About as cheap as you can get a day 1 Nintendo game. Or a day 90 Nintendo game for that matter.

One month plus a couple days.

*Legion* wrote:
Dyni wrote:
farley3k wrote:

*wow, they really didn't update the graphics much.

99% of Switch games still don't look as good as BotW or Mario Odyssey. They clearly maxed the output early on.

I think that's a function of the Switch using a 2-year-old (at time of Switch release) off-the-shelf mobile chip, which was already being used in game-playing devices (NVIDIA Shield). By the time the Switch came around, everyone had a pretty good idea what the silicon could and couldn't do.

Yup, the monkey's paw curse of Nintendo.

You'll always get top tier game design, but anything with even modest technical ambition will always be hamstrung by the fact that ever since the Wii (two Gamecubes duct taped together) their hardware is already antique tier when first released, to say nothing of six years later.

Granted, the Switch wasn't QUITE as bad as the Wii U (two Wiis duct taped together -- or four Gamecubes, if you prefer -- but with an extra screen for some reason!) but still, disappointing.

That said, Tears of the Kingdom looks it will be great, even it LOOKS like warmed over hot garbage compared to what it deserves.

Line me up for cursing! I have loved my Nintendo systems since the GBA and I have never felt anything but happiness from them.

zeroKFE wrote:

Yup, the monkey's paw curse of Nintendo.

You'll always get top tier game design, but anything with even modest technical ambition will always be hamstrung by the fact that ever since the Wii (two Gamecubes duct taped together) their hardware is already antique tier when first released, to say nothing of six years later.

As progress has slowed and new hardware generations provide diminishing returns, though, the fidelity delta between "Nintendo hardware" and "modern hardware" has become less severe.

It takes increasingly more compute power to provide smaller and smaller steps up in visuals.

Of course, at some point, Nintendo might just start lagging behind an extra generation to compensate.

Feeling so ready for this game.

zeroKFE wrote:

but with an extra screen for some reason!

To be fair, of all the control gimmicks that Nintendo has come out with the second screen on the WiiU controller was the one that took the least amount of flack when it was first previewed. The Wii's motion controls and the Switch's detachable controllers were mocked endlessly, but the reaction I saw to the touch screen was "huh, there's probably some interesting stuff they can do with that."

The WiiU's problem was the OS was sluggish and that made it feel awful to use. Some of that is surely on the hardware, but it's difficult to say how much. The actual games tended to be pretty darn good, but by the time you got into one you weren't happy.

I guess I never noticed the WiiU's OS. I only was in it long enough to click on the game icon.

Me too, but that took way too long. It felt less bad when they managed to make the initial boot faster at the expense of the games launching slower--not sure why that helped but it did--but it was never as snappy and responsive as the Switch.

As for the machine being under powered in general, I played BotW on WiiU for over a hundred hours and aside from some dropped frames in Kakarikko Village it actually ran just fine...

I will be watching but hyping 3 minutes of gameplay seems a bit much.

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