[jay-saint]

Agreed absolutely every element of this game is fun. They struck the perfect balance between ease of entry and play and a massive and complex world. They avoided pitfalls of many other RPG games that add complexity at the cost of fun. They also learned to not completely hold your hand as many other Nintendo titles have in the past.

[cgriswald]

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the relative lack of a tutorial and 'front story'. I've gotten games and then sat on them for months because I knew I'd need a good 45 minutes to even start playing the game and just never had the time or patience. This game was just such a great "pick up and play" experience; and it let's you learn a lot of stuff on your own.

The puzzles are amazing because they feel very natural. The game doesn't go out of its way to prevent you from "cheating" or solving the puzzle however you like. But it also doesn't feel like it was intended for there to be more than one solution. The intended solution is usually clear after the fact (even if you've solved it some other way); and it seems like the solution, but any other solution is also accepted. It feels as if I've really stumbled across this puzzle, and even if I can't figure it out, I can figure SOMETHING out, and that's alright.

[flgr]

And yet they kinda manage to still teach you things carefully. It feels like in the past they were afraid of making things to subtle, but if you look at the game with an eye of game design (just create a second user on the Switch and restart it from scratch) it's surprising how they still manage to steer you. The whole plateau is a tutorial, but it doesn't jump into your face as much.

And then there's that one annoying motion controlled puzzle with a way to bypass it that a bunch of journalists mentioned in their reviews, and it's as if it was designed with that trick in mind. So that journalists discover it and write about how this game is different.

Which is interesting. Almost like they thought of how to communicate that this game is different and how to best let people notice, and then they came up with that.

[cgriswald]

Agreed. You can definitely feel the 'steering' if you're looking out for it, and there are points later in the game where events happen and it gets a little hand-holdy. But compared to games where a character accosts you immediately, tells you exactly what button to press, then tells you exactly which button to press next, ad naseum (and usually tells me so much I don't retain any of it), it feels like it's not even there.

I think the motion control puzzle was a flub, though. The motion controls sucked. I ended up doing it the "right" way, but at no time did it feel like what I was doing to the controller and what was happening on the screen was correct; but I love that it's possible to find other ways.

[vanderZwan]

> You can definitely feel the 'steering' if you're looking out for it

The implicit steering is one of the things that Nintendo is famous for though. At least among game designers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE

What the video doesn't point out is that if you don't run to the right, the timing of the jump to avoid the Goomba makes you hit that first question mark block by accident.

[Pulcinella]

They also avoided the pitfall of open world at the cost of bugginess. Not to name names, but many open world games, especially on consoles, have been pretty buggy.

[Rapzid]

They did something amazing that at least I had never heard of in the game industry. In one of their making-of videos released today they said that every so often everybody would take a week break(at the same time) to play the game. This served as a check-in of sorts to see what everyone else was working on and to get company-wide exposure and feedback on each other's work.

It shows. I played the entire game through use sleep mode on the switch between sessions. Not a single game breaking or fun breaking bug. The consistency throughout is phenomenal... Well, the people work on Death Mountain killed it; looks better than the other areas IMHO.

[Agentlien]

I also saw the GDC video where they talked about this and it really resonated with me.

Where I work we are constantly reminded to spend time just playing the game and the whole studio (120+ people) regularly gather in the main meeting area, watching as someone plays through a mission.

What was mentioned in this video, however, is on a whole different level and it sounds amazing.

[Rapzid]

I got the impression from the making-ofs that they jumped into the deep end as far as innovation. Not just from a gameplay and design perspective, but from a process and company culture perspective as well. I get the sense that a lot of process was cultural and stagnant. However, when the opportunity arose to throw more change after good they jumped on it and made some very interesting progress. I can't help but get a strong impression that the experience of developing BOTW has had a transformative effect on Nintendo. I'm also getting those vibes from the Switch and double-down strategy on indie devs and turn-key game engines; if not already certainly over the life cycle of the system.

This particular process seems to have arisen from Nintendo's need to control quality. We've seen this in effect before with many games, but Metroid Prime and Retro Studios comes to mind. With a Warren Buffett like eye for potential Nintendo pulled on Retro to make Prime, and through sure will for quality helped guide their efforts and the final product into the amazeballs results of Metroid Prime. That need for uncompromising quality control, coupled with the challenges of a MASSIVE game(certainly more massive than anything they have undertaken) led them to try out this process that comes with obvious financial downsides. In the end, they are rightly satisfied with the results. Inspiring.

[on_and_off]

>They also learned to not completely hold your hand as many other Nintendo titles have in the past.

Except for some crucial passages in the game where it suddenly REALLY wants to hold your hand.

I am still loving the game but I would to see it stop shouting at me to shoot an arrow on the big glowing parts of [redacted]. I would have much prefered to figure that on my own.

[audunw]

I felt that this kind of instruction was more related to story than to gameplay. Story-wise it wouldn't make sense that you're not told what to do there. That's kind of a theme for all the "boss" battles.. there's another character who knows more about the boss than you do. It also gives sense that the battle is more of a collaboration rather than you just figuring out some way to kill it.

I don't think they were worried about people not figuring out what to do. In other parts of the battles you have to figure out much harder stuff for yourself.

[on_and_off]

Maybe. I guess that the main problem I had with this is that the French dialogs and dubs are awful.

Sadly the switch does not let you choose the language of a game the same way that most desktop games do.

The scenario and characterization are not great, but with bad translations and voice acting, it weakens these moments a lot.

[idle_zealot]

I can confirm that the English dubs are pretty bad too.

[eisrep]

Yeah, the voices I can live with. But the delivery and emotion (or lack thereof) are really disappointing.