[PurpleRamen]

There is no big secret to this. They just don't go all out. They don't take big risks. They just see what works elsewhere and polish it until it shines brighter than everything else. And they only add (or take away?) until they have the necessary minimum of gameplay. For example, Zelda BotW is by far not the best survival or crafting-game which was around at release, but it was the most pleasant experience for casual gamers and Zelda-fans, because it left out all the unimportant grind which is not relevant for a Zelda-Game.

Notable in that regard: Apple did the same under Steve Jobs. Focus on the important part, and don't play around.

[flatiron]

Personally I think BOTW wasn’t “seeing what works everywhere else and polishing it” it really felt like a new game nobody had ever done before.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

I don't think it had any new mechanics or concepts, but it def felt new. Do you feel like there were new mechanics or concepts?

[d23]

I would invert that question and ask what, to you, would qualify as being sufficiently new that it doesn’t have? To me, there are tons of things. The death / checkpoint system, weapon durability, the massive non-linear open world, the recipe system, the puzzle dungeons, the fact that, if you want to, you can essentially go challenge the final boss immediately. If these things aren’t new enough, I have to wonder what is.

[filleduchaos]

Most of those things have been fairly common elements of games for decades? For example "puzzle dungeons" is just a staple of Zelda as a franchise, there's a whole genre of games designed around being able to rush the final boss as quickly as possible even though there's plenty of other content to explore (Metroidvanias), and I can't even think of anything particularly remarkable about BotW's death/checkpoint system other than that it's fairly generous with the autosaves.

[d23]

My point is these are new for a Zelda game, and they've put them together in a complete package in a way that's not been done before. If the bar is "something no game has ever done before," it's rare that anything in life is ever going to reach that bar.

Even if you take a completely different profession, like music, revolutionary artists still have their influences and build on instruments and techniques that are 99.9% the same. It's not like they are suddenly playing flutes made out of loaves of bread. And even if they were, most of the time those sorts of things just come across as gimmicks to me.

[djur]

I'm surprised to see "Metroidvania" described as a genre where you can rush the boss quickly. Neither of the two defining games that name the genre, (Super) Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, allow you to reach the final boss without having explored a substantial amount of the world map and collected the majority of available upgrades. Both games do have low% and any% speedruns that skip a lot of stuff, but those require the use of glitches. Do you have an example of a game you're thinking of?

[filleduchaos]

Neither low% nor any% speedruns of Super Metroid or Castlevania: SotN require the use of glitches. From personal experience, Super Metroid is beatable with less than 20% completion without using any glitches at all. Sequence breaking is not a glitch (which is an actual bug).

But also Hollow Knight, Salt and Sanctuary and Axiom Verge are some pre-BotW games that I've personally played where you can rush the credits without experiencing a significant portion of the game once you've gotten out of the early game.

shout out to Chrono Trigger and Super Mario World which, while not metroidvanias, have the same "rush the final objective once you can with minimum exploration" vibe that many of them have.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

> what, to you, would qualify as being sufficiently new that it doesn’t have?

I don't understand the question, like what's a game play mechanic that it doesn't have?

[neogodless]

Are you talking about different things?

Those all sound like things I've seen in lots of games, but not necessarily in Zelda games.

[urthor]

Most good things in life are like this.

Execution. Not originality.