Nintendo Is Learning All The Wrong Lessons From Breath Of The Wild.

I recently played through Echoes of Wisdom and overall enjoyed my time with the game.
Yet the whole time while I was playing the game I felt like there was a shadow looming over the game.
And this shadow is Breath of the Wild.
Echoes of Wisdom tries to copy lots of ideas from Breath of the Wild - just like Tears of the Kingdom did before.
But both games ended up misunderstanding what it was that made Breath of the Wild so great to begin with.
In this video we will take a closer look at this.
We will investigate how all the flaws of Breath of the Wild make a sudden reappearance in it’s sequels, we will discuss what it was that made Breath of the Wild so great to begin with and in the end we will take a look at what the potential future for the series could look like.
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Help content like this to survive on KZbin: patreon.com/ceave
---------- / Links /
Link to the Tears of the Kingdom Retrospective
• Tears of the Kingdom -...
----------- / Credits for the Music /
-------Nintendo
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time OST - “Gerudo Valley”, “Goron City”, “Great Fairy Fountain”
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild OST - “Great Fairy Fountain”, “Kass’s Theme”, “Corrupted Dragon”
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask OST - “Mayor’s Meeting”,”Title Theme”
------Kevin MacLeod "Adventure Meme"
Kevin MacLeod incompetech.com Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 creativecommons...

[@reedlewis2968]

Iirc the one of the devs said in an interview that the menus were kept bad on purpose because they thought it would encourage people to experiment and use something else rather than scrolling all the way to the end of the list to use the thing they wanted. Which is uh, silly i think

[@Gwynhyvr]

dominant strategy, and all that

[@PrismTheKid]

Sounds like post-hoc rationalisation to me

[@Alloveck]

The tedium is a feature, not a design flaw!

[@Wendy_O._Koopa]

Whoever said that is huffing copium...

[@borstenpinsel]

Instead they let you sort by most-used thus actively discouraging players to try new things. The thing they always use is most easy to reach (or maybe that's totk only, it's been a while since I played botw)

[@TimeSpaceWormsNow]

Upgrading armor is one of the biggest offenders of the "interrupt everything for a cutscene you've seen 100 times before" problem that the cooking has.

[@partlyawesome]

You know what was worse? Trying to find enough of the ingredients to even do it

[@olive4998]

It's honestly not as bad imo because you don't get many armour upgrades, but do a ton of cooking

[@kenabi]

shakes.. having to redo the combo _every time_. nah.

[@19TheFallen]

​@@partlyawesome Especially in TOTK.....It could be tricky enough in BOTW, but TOTK ramped it up by ten!

[@partlyawesome]

@@19TheFallen I thought that too, I had enough resources in BOTW, but I barely upgraded any armour in TOTK

[@koelee]

TWO Ceave uploads in 2 weeks?? What year is it???

[@sackboyjr0775]

2024

[@Yosh-00]

2006

[@darqed]

2019

[@Marinealver]

I guess 2023. Turns out there was a year break.

[@blixten635real]

It’s 2000 BC, though I miss 4000 - 3000 BC. Kids nowadays have stuff like ‘pyramids’, back in my day we didn’t have kind that kind of fancy shenanigans.

[@kepler6873]

For BoTW/TOTK’s late game enemies, they could have made environmental damage deal percentile damage instead of flat. A boulder dropped on a foe’s head deals 75% of any bobokin’s health. This isn’t great for a red but is enormous against a silver or gold, encouraging abusing the terrain against them For bombs, have an enemy use a shield to absorb the blast if they are aware. This keeps surprise attacks effective and, mid fight, means that while bombs aren’t nearly as powerful they can force an enemy to open a window for you to finish them off or force them off balance so they can’t block the blast

[@usernametaken017]

This, while definitely an improvement over poking a moblin to death, makes the excess swords you get _even more_ useless

[@aurtosebaelheim5942]

Percentile +X would probably work better. I don't know the health pools, so let's say 20% +10. If a red moblin has 12 health the boulder will 1-shot (2.4+10 = 12.4 damage from a boulder). If a blue moblin has 30 health the boulder will 2-shot (6+10 = 16 damage from a boulder). If a black moblin has 500 health, the boulder will 5-shot (100+10 = 110 damage from a boulder). Likewise, a silver moblin with it's 68 billion health will still be 5-shot by a boulder. That feels like a smoother difficulty curve as opposed to everything dying to X number of boulders.

[@micahrobbins8353]

I like the way you think

[@f145hr3831jr]

@@aurtosebaelheim5942 I wonder to what extent Nintendo playtests their games. All these numbers need extensive playtesting to be adjusted for a satisfying result, there is frankly no other way. Nowadays it's no secret anymore that game studios rarely do any internal playtesting and either use early access or betas for players to playtest everything for free, or settle with the safest and most by-the-books game designs possible.

[@ShuckleII]

There is even more you can do with this. I've seen many games use a combination of flat (addition and subtraction) numbers and percentage numbers for damage calculations. They can add minimal functionality and stat scaling to motion values (attack strength multipliers, 1.2x), they can make early-game enemies take a certain amount of damage but be slightly more resistant if they have high max health. Listen, I know large modern games overuse multipliers and that multiple multipliers increase exponentially (1x4 vs 1x2x2x2), like in Elden Ring, which breaks balance, but BotW is on the opposite end of the spectrum, it hates multipliers so much that health and armor function in stupid ways. Too litle armor and an enemy does 15x the ideal damage, too much armor and the enemy does 4% of ideal damage. You can use multipliers, they are borderline essential in games that handle numbers moving up and down, just use them sparingly.

[@prisma.]

Having a seasoned team of veterans making games is one of Nintendo's greatest asset. When they make games, they make good games. But it also means they are old fashioned in the way they design them. You already touched the topics of menus, options and accessibility. Old games don't have all those modern features, and so they have never taken them into great consideration. The games they make are far more similar to the games they made 20 years ago than the games other developers are making today, for good and bad.

[@pirilon78]

You can be a veteran while learning from blatant mistakes just saying

[@thenabbitgamer]

@@pirilon78That’s exactly the problem though. They don’t. Menus are a great example of this.

[@pirilon78]

@@thenabbitgamer I know. The original comment felt like it was excusing/explaining it

[@randomgamer-te8op]

wasn't echoes of wisdom made by different people actualy? Grizzo company specificaly (i can be missing something but idk)

[@thenabbitgamer]

@randomgamer-te8op It was co-developed. And, knowing Nintendo, they probably called most of the shots. Nintendo doesn’t own Grezzo, but Grezzo almost exclusively works with Nintendo.

[@umbaupause]

Hmm. In terms of menus bad, there was a video which explained that actually, the menus are good... But not for the switch. Instead, they seem to be designed all around the Wii U's touchpad controller. It makes sense - scrolling through those menus would be much faster if it worked like swipping through your photos on your phone, and picking many items for cooking also would work perfectly for the big screen of options all at once where you'd probably just tap the stuff you want and be done in a few seconds at most.

[@Ross516]

Oh shit, that's a really good point. You (/ the video you got the video from lol) are totally right

[@youtubewontletmetypeagoodu8128]

That’s actually so true lol

[@MrAmazingAwesomeness]

That video was on Ceave's other channel lol

[@umbaupause]

@@MrAmazingAwesomeness ...Oh. Goes to show how long it's been! Still, it was a really good point indeed, so I just wanted to bring it up here.

[@amandaslough125]

Of course. It's how they used cards for Paper Mario Color Splash. Even still. WW had a similar quick select menu for picking elemental arrows on the fly (they used magic to use). It was only 5 total slots but worked fine. When you have a bloated item list, it doesn't work. The main problem is just the core disposable weapons that didn't work in PM and doesn't truly work here.

[@ripopol]

Im going to disagree on the "BOTW doesnt litter its map with the same thing over and over again" hypothesis. Bokoblin camps? Everywhere, Shrines? Everywhere. Yes there are some nice big setpieces sprinkled in, but the repetition is as real in BOTW as it is in Skyrim, Witcher or Dark Souls. Like this argument requires you to ignore the Daedra Shrines and multiple setpieces in Skyrim. And while i dont play Witcher or Souls games i know by reputation those two have a lot of big setpieces, special locations and truly unique secrets as well.

[@mjc0961]

Yeah, BotW was a classic Ubisoft game. Big map that's mostly empty except for a handful of repetitive enemy camps and Korok "puzzles" sprinkled in. They even copy/pasted the stupid "test of strength" shrines way too many times.

[@longlivethe9989]

>Repetition in DS. Now that, I won't stand for. Aside from (sigh) Izalith, DS had small, well-polished and thought out maps without repetition. It's not really an open world or even a big world and it absolutely doesn't have the same thing over and over.

[@xXFoiXx]

I think you meant Elden Ring not Dark Souls.

[@malxantholos7727]

I mean, he adresses that point at 22:50. He says that BOTW has repetition as well, but enough unique elements sprinkled in. He never said that there is no repetion in BOTW (or at least i never heard it in this video). There are obviously repeating enemy camps, blood moons, etc. But at the same time a lot of unique and memorable things that are not copy pasted.

[@wiremesh2]

This. Honestly the unique setpieces in BotW were so few and far between that I had mostly forgotten about them by this point. Even though Elden Ring (which I assume you meant) does rely on repetition, it has better enemy variety and every encounter feels engaging. By contrast, once the enemies leveled up in BotW/TotK, I just avoided combat entirely because it wasn't fun anymore, just tedious. And while there are a few points in ER's open world that are a bit more lacking, the legacy dungeons make up for it, imo.

[@cinnamonnoir2487]

You know, looking back on the last three major Zelda releases in hindsight, it's fascinating how much their overall control style seems to be designed primarily for running, jumping and just generally getting around, secondarily for solving puzzles, and practically not at all for engaging in combat. All of these games feature hours and hours of combat, but the menu system, the ability to switch between various weapons and tools, and the freedom to engage with the combat system in a unique way are all horribly underdesigned. When I look back at Wind Waker and consider how fluent and enjoyable combat with enemies feels in that game, it's stunning to think how much we've lost in this latest incarnation of Zelda. It almost feels like Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom all started off as physics simulators with no combat, and the menus and other control elements were designed solely based on that build rather than a complete version of the game with all systems accounted for. I can't help being reminded of the anecdote about Shigeru Miyamoto spending days on end during the development of Super Mario 64 just tinkering with Mario's basic movement mechanics in an empty level until it felt just right. The result was that the _movement_ in Super Mario 64 is incredible, but fighting enemies in that game is also really boring! I honestly can't think of another explanation for why all the mechanics that involve combat in these three games are so clunky and ignore really obvious knowledge about how to make combat in adventure games feel fun. It might also explain the lack of enemy variety in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom; if you design most of the game without considering how it affects fighting enemies, why would you spend a lot of time designing unique enemies? P.S. This is my favorite video you've released in more than a year. Thanks for working so hard on your channel lately!

[@agent3689]

Okay, I'll take the bait and challenge your point on Super Mario 64 a little bit. I don't know what you expected; it's *Mario*. Since the NES, combat was never really the point of Mario, it was the platforming. The challenge lies in the tight platforming and navigation of the level, not how fast you can stomp every Goomba or yeet every Bob-omb. The enemies are just another obstacle in your platforming, like the bottomless pit or a tall wall.

[@cinnamonnoir2487]

@@agent3689 It wasn't "bait". And yes, I realize that neither combat nor enemy variety are traditional strengths of the Mario series. My point was that a game where getting around feels as good _on its own_ as Breath of the Wild suggests that the developers had certain priorities, of which combat isn't one. That may explain why some of its systems don't do a good job of facilitating combat, in the same way that Super Mario 64 was built around platforming and thus has uninteresting combat. I don't see how your point refutes mine.

[@WeeG-bwc77]

Here I'd give my left nut just to be able to run and swing my damn sword at the same time. Over 7 years of development - and I still can't even move and swing my sword at the same time. Unacceptable imo.

[@michaellane5381]

​@@cinnamonnoir2487I disagree that combat(in BotW/TotK/EoW) isn't emphathized, it just lacks diversity due to the games preset patterns of encounters and lack of space on cartridges.

[@TheBrazilRules]

Stop lying. Wind Waker's combat is: wait, press A, wait, press A. It all comes down to spamming B and pressing A when the game tells you.

[@mushroomfusion245]

If this keeps up, I worry the next big Zelda game will be Animal Crossing New Horizons levels of “Too much freedom, but nothing to do with that freedom.”

[@KitteridgeStudios]

What I found very interesting (I haven't played the Zelda games after Triforce heroes) that you can't cook stacks of food, which is also a huge critique point in New Horizons where you can't craft more than a singular material or item at a time.

[@WeeG-bwc77]

At least we have Ubisoft towers to climb to unlock more of the map! Just what Zelda always needed....

[@celestialspark5697]

I think one massive flaw with Breath of the Wild's design that you didn't mention, which is also a massive flaw in Tears of the Kingdom's design, and Echoes of Wisdom's design, is that the same solution will work for far, far too many "puzzles". When your problems are too open-ended and your tools too versatile--like being able to climb anywhere or fly through the air--you don't feel rewarded as a player for overcoming obstacles in the same way over and over, but other options often just feel slower, or you'll never find out about them because of the dominant ones. After a few hours of fun with the more open systems, their fun diminished greatly, and I felt a much greater joy from the more tightly designed puzzles that only had one solution, or the riddles with only one way to solve them.

[@NottSaying]

ah yes, those moments when I see a long, well thought out puzzle that can be completed in 5 seconds with recall.

[@Voidling242]

I was dissapointed when I found the cloud echo as I realized that I could infinately scale anything with zero effort. And I can't stop myself from optimizing the fun out of games.

[@Trianull]

It's especially egregious when the puzzle jingle plays after entering a trigger zone, happens a lot in TotK. Cross a gap in a shrine with damn near anything and the game wants you to feel like you solved a complex puzzle. Save the musical cue for when I actually have to think, game.

[@bobboberson8297]

it's crazy how many shrines in totk don't have basic anti-cheese features like walls that go all the way to the ceiling, or a roof over the end of the shrine (some shrines have this but so many don't). also you definitely should not have been able to use fused shields in shrines. These 2 extremely basic things would have easily made the game much better. I was honestly surprised that either of these things were allowed when I played the game

[@cartermorgan7156]

This is definitely the biggest problem I had with the puzzles in Tears of the Kingdom. Ideally, open-ended puzzles would have many interesting and different solutions, but in practice I felt like there was always just one obviously intended solution, or I could skip the puzzle with a rocket.

[@JetBalrog]

I'm at 17:14 and have realized that Nintendo was not joking when they said Breath of the Wild was the new Zelda formula. I thought they were talking about one or two specific things, but no, they just... took every single idea, good and bad, and just slapped it in there. All the things people loved about the past games, just... replaced with things that often wind up making a worse experience over time. Bleh...

[@cleverman383]

Yup. The old Zelda is dead. This is what Zelda is now.

[@JetBalrog]

@@cleverman383 Honestly, if the next Zelda game is like this AGAIN then I hate to say it, while Link's Awakening was the first game I ever played that was my own, I might just stop caring. I really hate that I'm considering that. If Metroid Prime 4 isn't great, I might just stop caring about Nintendo games all together.

[@SenderBender63]

Tbh botw is my favourite Zelda game but I don’t think it’s healthy to base it as a template for the series. I think Zelda could be more open ended but more emphasis towards balancing, variety and dungeons as the new Zeldas difficulty in terms of combat and puzzles is all over the place. Simply incorporating the best of traditional Zelda and new Zelda could shorten the gap with the split fanbase

[@tloz171nfs]

​@JetBalrog unfortunately I've already given up on my favorite series. I went from looking up every scrap of info on Skyward Sword before release to not even caring that Echoes of Wisdom came out. BOTW was such a disappointment and TOTK was only a small improvement.

[@JetBalrog]

@@tloz171nfs I seriously feel like Nintendo has no idea why people liked their games at this point.

[@drackyslime]

From my perspective, pre-botw zelda was like eating your favorite food from a veteran chef every day. It’s great, you love it, but over time it definitely can and will get a bit old if it’s all you eat Botw was a lightning-in-a-bottle, creative new recipe cooked by a new wandering chef that isn’t even close to the same thing, but is so exciting, refreshing, and tastes great Zelda post-botw is the old chef going “well, they liked that new recipe- I guess I gotta try and make that from now on” despite not knowing the recipe enough to recreate it, nor being experienced enough to innovate in a meaningful way Maybe that dish recreation will still be good a couple times, but when the excitement and freshness wares off- you start missing your old favorite. Something new was welcome and very enjoyable, but just because it was new and exciting doesn’t mean it should’ve been a replacement Currently I’m at a point where I just don’t want to go to that restaurant anymore. There’s always food to eat (and games to play)- I don’t need to stick with something that isn’t what I want just because it’s from the old restaurant I liked

[@zacastica]

Wow this is such an amazing analogy, I feel the exact same way!

[@shinysilverstardust]

I'm really tired of the "1000 solutions to 1 puzzle" feeling. In BOTW it isn't as prolific, since the runes are more situational, but in TOTK and especially EOW there weren't any puzzles that felt that satisfying. Why should i bother thinking of a creative way of puzzel solving if ultrahand is a more convenient solution, and where ultrahand is the intended solution, it feels kinda lame. Oh we stick thimgs together again, for the 852th time, how fun. In EOW on the other hand, figuring out how to get a certain heart piece or stamp mainly just became, "eh, I'll just use water blocks."

[@maxcorrice9499]

“1000 solutions to 1 puzzle” yet, 1 solution to 1000 puzzles

[@PhantomOfficial07]

I kind of liked it. When I played BOTW I loved trying to work out a slow convoluted solution that was 100% less efficient than the intended way, but it was still fun because it felt like I was outsmarting the game. I like that feeling.

[@JetBalrog]

I never naturally learned I could make a paddle boat in Tears of the Kingdom because I just brute forced the shrine that was supposed to teach that to me by just making a really long bridge. I just brute forced so many puzzles and then found out the intended method was actually somewhat simple. I just... yeah.

[@PhantomOfficial07]

@@JetBalrog lol same. Instead of making a boat I just connected every object in the shrine together and made a really long bridge. It took a while and was very inefficient, but I liked the feeling of completing the shrine in a way the developers didn't intend you to.

[@pacattack2586]

Don't get me wrong 2 or 3 solutions are fine, but I agree here.

[@TraceFiveHundred]

The notion that BotW has cool things around every corner while other open world games just have variations on a few points of interest is a strange one. One of the biggest issues with BotW is that every time you come across some intriguing mystery, you already know how it's going to end: with a shrine. I also think the idea that every 3D Zelda until BotW was just some new iteration of OoT ignores that Skyward Sword, for better or for worse, feels pretty dramatically different from prior entries in a lot of ways.

[@JPG_3000]

Why just Skyward sword? They all made shifts in how you interact with the game and its world. That's not exclusive to Skyward Sword, and it's not even the best example. Aside from a few high points (some of which I really loved), Skyward Sword is by far the most structurally and mechanically flawed Zelda game, and I'm not talking about motion controls. I actually liked them (even though they also weren't as consistently accurate as they needed to be). Simplistic story, threadbare tone, and deceptively shallow character development be damned, that game has major problems with pacing and game world continuity/consistency, among other things. It showed more negative signs of being rushed than even other games like Majora's Mask, a less than 2 year development fever dream. That said, you're right. It's strange to make the cutoff be strictly at BOTW. They were all individual steps, it wasn't just completely flat until jumping up a floor with BOTW. He literally shows Windwaker Link flying around with the Deku Leaf... They all have dramatic differences, and there are even several aspects of BOTW that are more derivative than any of the prior 3D Zelda's. They're just outshined by the newer gameplay loop.

[@algernopkrieger7710]

I believe it was Polygon who had a nice video on Nintendos pacing which I am reminded of when you talk about the crafting/cooking being slow, and how it was actually intentional if you can believe it. The thinking was, the video said, that it was something like a reminder to take a break when you've been playing a while, but instead of a pop-up message, they decided to... Deliberately impede gameplay with an intentional grind. I'm not expressing it as well or concisely as the video did, but it really demonstrated that their priorities for their games are often directly opposing their fanbase.

[@prettyoriginalnameprettyor7506]

That's so stupid, Why discourage people from playing? I can decide when I take my breaks 💀💀💀

[@pokefreak2112]

I respect that tho. This makes me think of how pokemon fangames often add some kind of superspeed feature to help with backtracking and grinding because those are seen in a negative light, but really it just destroys the game design and turns the entire game into a grind. Adventures can't be nonstop action, it's in that contrast of fast vs slow / high intensity vs low intensity that you often find the most memorable and rewarding experiences.

[@thegreatgoobert5847]

Honestly I find that insulting because it's nintendo just flat out admitting that they don't respect your intelligence or time. Also just because these games are made for kids doesn't mean the game gets to talk down to you since kids aren't dumb either.

[@Mr_Mimestamp]

do you have the title of the polygon video? i can’t find it

[@aurtosebaelheim5942]

@@pokefreak2112 I agree with that aside from how it ends up playing out. Cooking in BotW would be a relaxing break in the action, but getting to a cooking pot can be a pain in the ass and running out of food is annoying, so you're encouraged to do ALL your cooking when you find one. The cooking becomes a hectic bout of button-mashing because I really do not need to see that cutscene back-to-back-to-back-to-back. Given the choice, players will always optimise the meditative portions out of the game. If it was a longer cutscene but I could cook multiple meals at once or if food was a longer-lasting buff that couldn't be spammed (more like Monster Hunter meals than a traditional consumable), fine, but as it stands, what should be relaxing is spent frantically mashing buttons and wrangling menus.

[@trashtuber6021]

I deeply disagree that BotW was less predictable than the other open world games you mentioned. The game became extremely predictable because all you'd find were either: shrines, korok seeds, enemy camps, treasures or the occasional dragon. Eventide island lead to a shrine, the dragons lead to a shrine, typhlo ruins lead to a shrine, Kass's quests lead to a shrine, and any kind of ball fetch quest lead to a shrine. Most of the interesting things and locations lead to a shrine. And to make the matters worse, most of the other things you found were either korok seeds, treasure chests or the copy pasted or very similar enemy camp with the same small selection of enemies, etc. The game ultimately became very predictable after a while, so I have no clue why you said otherwise in this video.

[@TeaIngyer]

Breath Of The Wild is like ordering a pizza, and getting an incredibly good burger delivered. Nintendo has fostered a love and craving for Zelda in me since childhood. Now they are delivering me something incredible that is not Zelda, and gaslighting me when I say I'm still hungry for Zelda... It's not crazy to say that I want both an open world exploration game, and a separate semilinear action adventure game with a linear narrative, item based progression, and dungeons.

[@SkyeStormChamp]

Really, I don't see why we can't have both. Imagine the open world of BOTW with its mystery, fantasy and intrigue coupled with the set pieces, dungeons and story of something like Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword. It absolutely baffles me that Nintendo refused to do this with TOTK. Picture entering a random cave and you find out it's like one of like 6 entrances to a massive dungeon, I think that would fit in line so well for the open world idea they're going with

[@vyran7044]

@@SkyeStormChamp The only potential problem there would be that you either limit every dungeon to JUST the item you get in the dungeon (or those you can somehow garantie the player has) OR you need to add optional sidepath/shortcuts/alternative solutions unlocked by items you get elsewhere. And thats just the main dungeons. Imagine you come to a random dungeon, spend 30+ min fighting and puzzeling your way through it... only to then run into an obstacle you cant clear because you dont have the item yet. It would be increadably frustrating and demotivating. Especially if you dont have a propper ingame way of marking your map and adding notes to remind yourself what you need ot continue. And thats just the best case sczenario. Imagine this happening 3+ times per dungeon. But at the same time you cant make all puzzles solvable by all items otherwise it becomes pointless getting said items.

[@zero1343]

@@vyran7044 Honestly i think that is fine to some extent, many metroidvania style games do halted progression like that requiring upgrades from vastly different parts of the map.

[@Ironpecker]

I was in the same boat and I've been trying really hard to find other games that scratch an itch similar to old zeldas. And I was very lucky to find one that is quite good, it's called Crosscode and it's an indie game that is all about great setpiece dungeons. Plus it has got a lot of stuff that traditional zeldas don't do too well, like: combat that is engaging, a progression system for said combat, a very colorful cast of characters and a protagonist with a lot of character. I'd also love if Nintendo woke up tomorrow and announced like a new Zelda game with dungeons like Twilight princess' or Skyward Sword's, but I think it's very important to also try to look around and see if there are other developers that are trying to develop those games.

[@Ironpecker]

​@@SkyeStormChamp That's like asking a chef to do a sweet, but also salty, hot but also fresh, solid but also liquid dish. Having a satisfying story and linear dungeons kinda pulls away from the freedom of exploration and physics system from botw and totk. I think the closedt thing to your idea is a link between worlds, which is a great game but its exploration isn't as strong as botw and totk

[@Sekacnap_]

I would love to see the next Zelda take some cues from A Link Between Worlds. The structure of that game was great, but getting all your items from the same shop felt bad. Imagine an open world Zelda game with classic item gating and you have to find those items out in the world through sidequests and mini-dungeons instead of buying them or getting every tool from the start. Because I'm getting a lot of the same replies. Yes I'm aware ALttP (and even Zelda 1) is also similar to this, I used ALBW as an example because it is even less linear than ALttP and expanded on the ideas in that game already.

[@TrixyTrixter]

I like this idea.

[@mjc0961]

It also sucked that ALBW had a flat line for a difficulty "curve" because if you can do the dungeons in every order, then every dungeon could be someone's first dungeon. Sometimes open ended design is bad and linear is good.

[@aboi5]

It wouldn't really be an "open world" if it is gated by the items you get. If you need to visit a temple or a do a sidequest before you can go into a certain area then you're following the linear path. Unfortunately this type of gated progression is directly at odds with open world design.

[@Sekacnap_]

@@mjc0961 oh I agree, LBW definitely has issues in that regard. I also thought the things you get inside the dungeon were pretty lackluster. But I do think they could find ways to make difficulty progression better too, like harder dungeons requiring items you find in earlier ones, so there's multiple tiers. Personally I'd rather have a tiered semi open design than fill open world again.

[@Sekacnap_]

​@@aboi5 I have to disagree, many open world games gate off entire sections of the world based on your progress through the story, specific missions or difficulty, I don't see a difference. Perhaps a better term would be "non-linear" rather than open world, but I was just trying to quickly get a feeling across without writing an entire design document in a youtube comment. I don't think BotW or TotK would have felt any less open world if there were some things you couldn't do the first time you come across them.

[@nickk3077]

This might sound hyper nitpicky, but I kinda hate the new arial font used in the newer games' menus when oler games put so much style into their UI.

[@hotgirledits2000]

oh my god thank you-- this has been driving me insane!! it seems like such a small detail, but the menus in older games are designed with so much charm and care. it really adds to the feeling of immersion when all the UI elements serve an overall, cohesive artistic vision. for the life of me i cannot figure out what the thought process was behind scrapping all of that bespoke design and replacing it with generic menus with the most boring, inoffensive font imaginable. it makes me feel like i'm updating my iphone and not being swept away on a fantastical quest

[@NerdMiGerd]

Same 1000%. I was so disappointed when Pikmin 4 retired the stylish bubble text it just feels soulless now visually.

[@RicoElectrico]

OoT used Chiaro from Fontworks. In general game typography seems to be going in the bad direction for a while. DIN font feels so out of place in Witcher, to give only one example.

[@SirBiscuitman]

One thing I will say about healing: nintendo generally designs their games for all skill levels, and I feel like healing is there for people who don’t want to continuously die to a boss to learn to dodge their attack patterns. I do think a good way to fix it is to make it so that healing is harder specifically in the master mode. Also, overall botw’s master mode was pretty flawed imo with how the scaled up enemies ruin the world’s balance, because you don’t have high enough damage to deal with the enemies you are fighting.

[@kotori6938]

Master Mode was the one "Hero Mode" in Zelda that I did not find fun for that exact reason

[@wesnohathas1993]

Perhaps what Master Mode should have done instead is apply stricter inventory limits on food. There's really no need to be carrying around 999 of every material and 60 cooked meals. Maybe disable eating and fast travel while in the middle of combat too. Not really fun when the mode makes it so you literally can't fight because your finite weapon stash doesn't have enough potential damage to outlast monster health pools.

[@SirBiscuitman]

@@wesnohathas1993yeah, I think maybe limiting it to like maybe 5 food items could work. It could also add strategy to the table, as in ‘do I bring healing items or should I bring potions to increase my stats?’

[@JetBalrog]

@SirBiscuitman That would even add more weight to food and potion prep for just purely exploration, on top of the other points.

[@BusinessSkrub]

Cheating and duping your entire inventory to 999 of everything so you can cook an obscene amount of food isn't a game design problem lol

[@xsubzerox3412]

Around 19:00, its pretty insulting you mention all those other games and say they become predictable after a couple of hours in their open world, when Botw and Totk literally do the exact same thing. No matter where u are in the open world, whats over there, a korak seed, woah new cool ruins, i wonder whats at the end, shrine puzzle and spirit orb, etc. After the unique, dragon section you mention, u literally just get another shrine

[@zero1343]

I don't see how the dragons in elden ring are really different either, you often suddenly come across them and its a boss fight you weren't expecting, be it on the lake or out in the frozen fog, guarding the academy key etc.

[@xsubzerox3412]

​@@zero1343 nah I think what he's getting at was the dragon was unique and there's only 1 encounter with the corrupted dragon. But the whole section implies that the other open world games don't have their fair share of curve balls and suprises. And acts like botw doesn't commit the exact same sins

[@hotgirledits2000]

i really don't get it when people say that the exploration is what makes botw entertaining. it's fun for the first handful of hours, but at a certain point it sinks in that the reward for exploration will always, invariably, be either a korok seed or a shrine. you will never stumble upon a bespoke side quest with an interesting story, uncover a unique piece of lore, or be given new weapons or abilities that aren't littered elsewhere on the map. those first few hours while you look out over the horizon and wonder where your journey will possibly take you are incredible. but that feeling is short-lived and sours quickly once you realize that there's really not much of substance out there to explore.

[@brooklyngray1527]

another thing about the cooking system is that any recipe that gives you extra hearts must also replenish the rest of your health as well, making it really easy to make food that gets you to full HP.

[@olive4998]

And then they just randomly add a location with 30 durians Right next to a tower so youn can insantly warp there after a blood moon And just get nearly infinite healing It's a cool find but terribly executed because it ruins all game balance

[@Daehpo]

It's also the same for stamina regeneration. Energizing dishes & elixirs will replenish part of an empty stamina wheel. However, the Enduring effect fully replenishes the stamina wheels and provides extra stamina that is only consumed once regular stamina is fully depleted. Due to how the cooking system works, dishes/elixirs can only have one "Special Effect". "Energizing" & "Enduring" were separate special effects that couldn't be combined in the same dishes. Energizing ingredients require cooking to use their special effect, but so do Enduring ingredients. So all Energizing ingredients were made redundant once the player finds Enduring ingredients... like Endura Carrots near Great Fairy fountains in BOTW.

[@JMurrinYT]

Given BotW/TotK's armor leveling system, "hearty" foods fully replenishing/overfilling HP is both intentional and necessary, given that the games would be unbalanced otherwise by punishing players for upgrading their health early on, making it harder to regain full health, and thus leaving the player susceptible to one-hit kills. In fact, this exact criticism was made by Ceave in his TotK video, where he noted that players should focus on upgrading stamina first, and that adding hearts without first upgrading armor can counter-intuitively harm the player, although he neglected to mention that "hearty" foods are an attempt to address this by allowing players to instantly refill all of their hearts, however many that may be. No doubt there is a better possible system, but simply removing "hearty" foods would not improve BotW or TotK... The opposite, in fact.

[@Alloveck]

@@JMurrinYT Yeah, that whole "absolute one-shot immunity as long as your health was full" design decision really messes up/complicates a lot of other aspects of the game. I still remember first playing BotW, not yet having realized that you have absolute one-shot immunity at full health, and being confused by how and why the game seemed to have gotten harder after a while. Obviously, in retrospect, it was the point where I started adding hearts instead of choosing stamina for my first couple upgrades, and as a result, stopped healing to full nearly as often.

[@ceilyurie856]

@@JMurrinYT yet they made "hearty" foods MUCH, MUCH HARDER TO MAKE IN TOTK. They even removed the damn durians!

[@Boomblox5896]

I watched a video from Arlo about how Miyamoto hates story, and his influence always seems to creep into any game that's in development. Since Japan is a very seniority-centric culture, nobody can really say "No" to him, so the staff end up folding under his pressure and doing as he "suggests" when he comes in to influence the development. Most of the time when we have a deep story, the devs have to sneak it in, like in the case of Rosalina's storytime in Super Mario Galaxy.

[@SebbyWest]

None of this is true. He’s a supervisor, yes, but he rarely has any direct, major influence on the games. The devs sometimes go to him for advice. That’s really it. And that story about Rosalina’s backstory is just blatantly untrue. It was directly presented to Miyamoto before it was implemented into the game. The reason it’s so out-of-the-way is so it didn’t interrupt the flow of the game. It’s so annoying seeing people blame Miyamoto for things he has little to no involvement in.

[@Boomblox5896]

@@SebbyWest Well then I guess we'll see who's right and who's wrong when Miyamoto dies and then Nintendo can't lean on their crutch anymore. We'll see if the games get more story or not. We'll see if the games get more creative freedom from the strict norms or not.

[@Breeze926]

It's not so much that Miyamoto orders for a game to not have story, but the youmger devs and directors knowing what pleases the higher ups like Miyamoto and Aonuma and doing what they will like.

[@paul-nj1ig]

​@@SebbyWest A backstory was planned for Galaxy 2 but Miyamoto didn't want it because he felt it would get in the way of gameplay. I'm pretty sure this is on Wikipedia so I don't think it's false. That is directly on him

[@carbvan]

This video is 100% spot on. You should read up on what Aonuma and the Zelda has said about this open world formula . They legitimately think it's flat out better, Aonuma even said something close to "Why would you want to play a game designed any other way?" I believe the Zelda team doesn't know why BotW was so good and are just trying to copy it because it was a happy little accident.

[@kotori6938]

That interview crushed my soul man 😭

[@carbvan]

​@@kotori6938The Zelda series is dead to me until that man retires I think

[@wesnohathas1993]

Seeing what they did with Majora's Mask 3D is where it really set in for me that Aonuma does not know what makes a good Zelda game.

[@ShadowMage223]

TotK was so clearly trying to duplicate a lot of what they *thought* made BotW tick while also clearly entirely missing the actual mark. I didn't know there was such an interview but it is sad that they've essentially confirmed it. I had originally thought BotW was genius intentional design but now it's clear it was lightning in a bottle, a fluke.

[@Gwynhyvr]

BotW was lightning in a bottle. i can STILL go back to that game and enjoy it. i've tried three times to go back to TotK and i just... can't. as soon as i saw EoW was more of the same, i just passed on it. seeing it was LA with Ultrahand made me glad i did.

[@QuartzRoolz]

I will argue on one point: I think the dragon example in Breath of the wild vs other open world games is a bit cherry picked. there is plenty of cool, hidden, off the beaten path stuff to discover in pretty much all open world games, on the same level of the dragon. the Fallout Series, New Vegas with Wild Wastelands enabled especially, is full of it. Meanwhile for all of the repetative stuff you bought up in other games, its the same with BOTW with the shrines. shrines are everywhere, you cant walk 5 ft without tripping over another shrine. they are as repetitive, if not moreso, than Dwemer Ruins. other than that very solid video. sorry for being so negative I just dont think that point really stands tbh.

[@degove7466]

That's the one thing I think this video has wrong. BotW had seemingly endless enemy encampments, koroks and a fourth of the shrines were just defeating the same enemy. Meanwhile exploring in Elden Ring let me reach Siphora River, gave me access to volcano manor or let me start the Starscourge Radahn fight

[@thaunzero1251]

let's also remember that one of the rewards after beating that exact dragon is access to a shrine. I definitely enjoyed this video but I do agree this one point had me a lil bit frustrated.

[@OtakuUnitedStudio]

​@@degove7466 Agreed. While the content in BOTW may be technically different, it's not _meaningfully_ different most of the time. Especially since 1/3 of all shrines are "fight those ONE robot and get some junk for your efforts." The one exception was the shrine where you thought it would be a Major Test of Strength before bait and switching you into a full on mini dungeon with multiple puzzles, keys, and a challenging mini boss fight against half a dozen Guardian Scouts of varying strength.

[@theoaremevano3227]

Plus in Skyrim, you find permanent one of a kind items that set themselves apart from the formulaic loot that scales to your level. You might even fi-- A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE BEACON!! ... well, yeah, but there are some other interesting things out there too, like rare enchantments. XD

[@throwbackcat]

Honestly one of my favourite memories in any open world game is finding the Oasis and Harold in Fallout 3, for much the same reasons that they talked about with the dragon. Finding memorable setpieces as a reward is all over the entire genre, don't know why they pretended that was something unique to Wild.

[@saxor96]

There's something Aonuma said that made me realize the Zelda formula is doomed. He read all the criticism about BotW and TotK... And said that people only say those things and liked the old games today because of nostalgia. Yes, nostalgia. For Aonuma and by proxy Nintendo, "Open World Zelda" is an "objective evolution of the 3d Zelda formula with no drawbacks". It's not a branching path, it's a replacement that, for them, has no flaws. For them, older 3d Zeldas are obsolete. They mistook an Open World Game as being the same genre as a Linear Adventure game. As long as they have that misconception, they won't ever fix their mistakes. And with this they've shown they also don't think 2d Zeldas are actually a good branching path either, and they're trying to "BotWize" the 2d genre as well.

[@alejandrocastaneda8470]

i agree with him, its pure nostalgia, just go and see the critics at the time, people cried way way way worse because the old formulae, nobody wanted to play a zelda with the original formula again, they where fed up of it, and they poked the balls of nintendo over and ver and over like you all doing with TOKT and EOW right now for me this kind of videos are only deja-vu, people crying just because they can hoping that nintendo hears them, and when they do, the games basically ends up trashed because people doenst even know what they really want in the first place ending with a game with no soul or nothing, just another generic popular game...

[@saxor96]

@alejandrocastaneda8470 So you watched the entire video pointing out clear design flaws and that's what you understand of it? The problem isn't that this formula is bad. The problem is that *it's not a perfect tool for every single type of game in existence*. This formula is made so an open world game can work, but *that makes it bad for a linear, non-open world game!*. Heck, it even needed some improvements that were not addressed at all (as you can see in this video). It's also very important to understand that *we can have BOTH open world Zelda and 3d linear Zelda*. Both have their strengths and weaknesses that come with the genre, and are for different kinds of audience. Open worlds were never an improvement over linear experiences, just *different* experiences.

[@chapface]

​@@alejandrocastaneda8470 I personally haven't seen anyone complain about the old formula, I've definitely seen people complain about various aspects of each game, but nothing overlapping accross them all. And I dont think it's that people don't like the BotW formula anymore either. People like it, that's why BotW got so big in the first place. But a fully open world as in BotW is not an "objective evolution of the 3d Zelda formula with no drawbacks", as the op pointed out. There's some distinctions between both formulas with pros and cons on each end. A more linear game, there's more possibilities in what specific events can do, because you know most of the parameters of what the player can have. You can have earlier dungeons require minimal items and later dungeons require your full arsenal with no consequence because you know what they'll for sure have for each dungeon. Thus allowing for more creative obstacles and puzzles without having to introduce something brand new on the spot. Another example, is that it allows for a stronger narrative story. You can afford to have longer segments of major changes to the world or how you have to play before it just gets in the way of exploration. And I guess a final example I could think of, the developers end up getting more incentive to hide more secrets or just add more in general closer together. Instead of large empty areas with things sprinkled around. More saturated content, perhaps. The cost of this formula is of course the freedom to choose the path of progression and what to collect to varying degrees, as well as limiting your ability to go wherever you want. In a more open world game, you have a lot more freedom to not do things in a predictable order, to go where you want when you want, ect, ect. And though this is good in many ways, it also has some limits. For instance, they either have to make you unlock everything needed for all of the dungeons right off the bat, or you have to unlock very specific tools right before that dungeon (in which case that item likely wouldn't have any use in other main progression areas you can do before it). Of course, if the game is tailored towards being open world, that's probably not what you're looking for anyway. I would perhaps compare this to the various Mario formulas there are. And I would compare them mistaking the open world formula as being a replacement instead of an alternative formula to if they decided to get rid of the 2d mario platformer formula because the Mario Odyssey formula is a simple upgrade. When really they are two different formulas each with their own pros and cons. If every future mario game used an Odyssey formula, it would lose a lot. Not because the formula is bad but because the other formula was valuable in it's own right.

[@WeeG-bwc77]

That's unfortunate. I didn't like BOTW for what it removed (good story arc, music, dungeons). And I liked it even less for what it added (breakable items, stamina system, shrines). I didn't bother buying TOTK because I saw right from the beginning that it was just more of the same.

[@alejandrocastaneda8470]

@@saxor96 no, i mean i agree with aounuma, right now we feel nostalgia for the old style while we get more new open world zeldas... we getting fed up with the new ways and missing the old, still we will celebrate just one of the old style at much, cuz people will remember why they gotr ''bored'' in the first place, thats why nintendo needs to advance and find a new formula, maybe an hybrid of old+new style??? maybe something completely new??? thing is, sadly, yeah, sometimes nintendo bore his fans repeating the same formula over and over and over with little to no changes, has happened with marios, (like maker/3d world style) its not a zelda specific matter, is a nintendo flaw that always have hunted them...

[@yeethuus7009]

As a veteran Nintendo-player, I can honestly say that I have no interest in Nintendo games as they have become on the Switch for one simple reason: I like puzzles - not sandboxes

[@SLightningHedgehog]

Same! I don't know but outside of FE and Metroid the games on nintendo switch felt extremely shallow. I frequently go back to everything Wii U and older and enjoy it WAY more. The switch feels like a bunch of cool ideas on paper that end up terribly boring in execution. the distinct nintendo feel is gone for me. Also the DS was peak nintendo creativity.

[@francescocanton9311]

22:04 Funny that you say that because I had the opposite experience. After a while of playing botw I got tired of all the shrines and korok seeds everywhere on the map, but when I played the witcher 3 I was amazed by all the different sidequests and contracts available, it made it feel to me like there was actual content in the world instead of the same puzzles over and over, but to each his own.

[@Primalmoon]

I assume that the shrines and korok seeds were part of what Ceave was referring to at 22:52 when saying that BotW also repeats content. This would be a very different video if every random mountain Ceave explored in BotW just happened to be another korok seed puzzle or samey shrine rather than occasionally having something like a massive dragon boss / good view / oddity that makes you question "how did a lynel even get up here?".

[@vadoslink446]

What different sidequests? Witcher 3 has absurdly bad quest design. The stories are interesting, but all quests amount to the same old "Follow dotted line to point A -> use witcher sense to follow some stink trail -> fight monster in a shallow combat system where most fights feel the same -> get a pitiful amount of XP or a weapon that's worse than what you already own".

[@mr.m1785]

Honestly, I can sorta relate to this, though I've never played any Witcher game. The world of BotW and TotK feels kinda empty. Exploring it is novel at first, but becomes a chore long before the game is over. All there really is to look for is korok seeds and shrines anyway.

[@Mirage475]

Problem is witcher doesn't really do much besides combat and narrative. It doesn't encourage much exploration when it has a bunch of question marks on the map telling you where to go. It is a great game and is fantastic at what it does, but you can't really compare the 2.

[@Earthquake_D]

I just want OG Dungeons back..

[@Ghoats]

yup..

[@filiflo]

Tears of the kingdom makes the menu select problem even worse by making items throwable. Armor select is laughable since you have to go into the inventory for it every time you want to change your bonus effect. You cant even equip the whole armor with a button but have to select every piece. Nintendo having long animations that are unskippable is not new but baffling nonetheless. Great video. Felt a lot of points here.

[@wesnohathas1993]

The menu problem isn't even confined to just the Zelda series. Too many developers seem to assume that only being able to scroll one item at a time through a single file list that contains well over 100 entries is okay.

[@FlameUser64]

@@wesnohathas1993 And it's insane because _GBA and Gamecube_ games could get this right! Just use a grid! Or use menu pages where left and right advance by a page of items while up and down scroll one at a time, or flip that sideways so left/right move by one at a time while up/down move by a full page.

[@jennaphantom7969]

Maybe I'm a weirdo but I don't find the menus of BotW and ToTK to be bad with the exception of the throwables. I was trying to redesign the throwables menu as I was playing. I don't really use throwables like ever when I play because I'm already killing things with weapons well enough and hate the controls for throwing items.

[@Jenson_Beach]

I think your dragon story hit the nail on the head, I now know why I loved Botw while I only liked Totk. When I played Botw I didn't know what I was running into, but the game showed me massive and immense cutscenes, the dragon, the massive mazes, the mystery I really enjoyed. Where as in Totk I found myself heading immediately towards the Yiga clan, the shrines, the mazes. Simply because I felt as though there would've been something rewarding and maybe new, but I never really did. The only thing that I can say surprised me was the Yiga, but thats because I found them elsewhere instead of the yiga hole first. I also found the 5th spirit area before I was supposed to, but it didn't feel rewarding, it just felt like another sky island but with fog. I wish there would've been more cutscenes and things to discover instead of finding old places I already knew would be important. I think the Forge Island would've been a really good spot for something, but it just felt like another challenge area.

[@amaryllis0]

A huge part of that experience is that BotW is a game about exploring the world, you have to actually traverse it on foot and horse and by climbing, and _experience_ it. TotK's sky islands, the abysmal quality of their content aside, ruin this aspect of the game because you can very easily get very high up - using one of its amped up launch towers, or warping to a sky shrine - which just let's you paraglide straight to wherever you need to go, right over the actual world. Need to go to Gerudo? Just glide off the GSI and you've skipped over half the journey. TotK ends up being a very hollow and shallow game that keeps you addicted only by virtue of the fundamentally fun systems that BotW invented

[@JoshTigerheart]

@@amaryllis0 Kind of a shame too. Like, trying to navigate the flooded Gerudo Canyon while dealing with the heat is pretty fun, but there's so many tools that just let you skip over it and it really doesn't help it's more efficient to do so unless you're trying to 100%. Same with like Zora's Domain. If you take the route BOTW made you take then it's a pretty interesting experience. But it's far too easy to just hover bike your way there and skip it all.

[@Shinntoku]

I felt extremely rewarded finding the 5th spirit early myself. I used Riju and the lightning helm to find my way through the island without dispelling the fog and it was amazing, I felt so clever for making my own way through it

[@CiaranMaxwell]

In TOTK, I navigated the fifth spirit sky area in the storm. I explored by moving until I could see the edge of the island, then placing pins with the binoculars to locate other islands to reach. I used the pins on the map to figure out the shape and distance of the island. It was a challenge, and frustrating... and because I didn't have the other spirits yet, I didn't know what the area was for. And there was nothing to tell me I wasn't supposed to go there yet. So, I figured there was something INCREDIBLY POWERFUL there because it was so difficult to navigate. Yet, after exploring it thoroughly, I concluded nothing of interest was present other than one shrine and left, bitterly disappointed. When the storm cleared up, I finally understood and went back. I was surprised that I had missed something. There was no mystique because I had already explored the area pretty thoroughly. Just another quest marker. And the spirit was horribly underwhelming. And that, I think, is a problem. I feel like I would have had a better experience if the area had, in fact, been blocked off entirely until I was supposed to go in there.

[@Ozymandias-vy4kl]

​@@Shinntokuhow do you dispel the fog?

[@Bluelightzero]

The biggest gripe I have with BOTW/TOTK isn't that things break, but that it forces me into a menu when they do. MENUS SUCK.

[@user-sl6gn1ss8p]

maybe an "automatically pick the most similar thing" option?

[@Bluelightzero]

@@user-sl6gn1ss8p Maybe or: - Increase durability - Decrease number of weapon slots (2x8 so it can be a wheel for instant pick, see Skyward sword for example) - Get rid of weapon categories, just let me have swords only if I want. - Instead of breaking have them just become weaker (so switching is optimal, but not necessary). - Have pickup drop what you are holding. (So you switch to slot you want to put item, then pickup) Then you can have entire fights without looking at your inventory, just PURE muscle memory.

[@pretzel1313]

I personally don't mind menus, because my mind does not process things as fast as the average person, so they give me a chance to think about what I'm doing and not make horrible decisions. However, in BotW, menus bad.

[@Bluelightzero]

@@pretzel1313 I think they have their place, but I am disappointed that nintendo didn't find a way to eliminate them entirely. If they got rid of them, then the player would need to rely on the environment way more. For example, they could add a bag item for collecting ingredients, then when you use it it just dumps them all over the floor or into a cooking pot in one go to make a big stew.

[@MettanAtem]

You're going to hate the older Zelda games then. Gotta open the menu every time you switch items, which is a lot.

[@davedood679]

I really think BotW/TotK would benefit from a healing system similar to Crosscode, where: A. Consumable/healing items take time to use, and can be interrupted by attacks, meaning you have to be careful when you use them during combat (some items even take less/more time to activate in exchange for less/more healing respectively) B. Successfully using a consumable item applies a cooldown before you can use another item, so there's a lot of weight in player choices of "should I focus on using buff-applying items right now, or wait until I get hurt to use a healing item? If I'm damaged, should I take a quick, small heal right now, or risk a slow, big heal and be better off later?" While probably not appropriate for BotW/TotK, there's also another mechanic in Crosscode that REALLY lends itself well to the above two systems: C. When fighting non-boss foes, there is a combo system. The player heals automatically while not in battle and a combo isn't active, but players who risk the lack of healing to keep up their combo get vastly better monster drops (some drops are even only available if the player has a high-enough combo). This means even fighting a bunch of low-level enemies can be exciting, as it's fun to see how far you can push a combo before you bite off more than you can chew and die.

[@davedood679]

Additionally, getting into an S rank combo makes the music and visuals go ballistic, and your other party members will comment things like "woah! Shouldn't we slow down??" to further emphasize the adrenaline rush an S combo is. 's great! Very surprised Crosscode isn't talked about more

[@illyon1092]

CrossCode is an excellent piece of game design, but I've unfortunately seen more people talk about its pacing than the aspects it truly excels at. A no-nonsense approach to gameplay flow starting from the beginning of the tutorial that refuses to waste your time, flawless puzzle design leaving room for unintended solutions and speedrun-friendly physics, a solid (albeit admittedly unbalanced) core combat system that feels extremely satisfying to play in, and the most efficient accessibility tool I've seen in the form of one difficulty slider each for puzzles and combat; CrossCode is a truly amazing object of study. Big fan.

[@MC_CN]

The game everyone wants to play: Poorly designed File Explorer!

[@superrobotfish6701]

I disagree that elden rings world becomes predictable after a while. It's actually the opposite for me. Breath of the wild became boring really quickly when I realized how little enemy variety there is and how bland the dungeons and shrines are.

[@zero1343]

I agree, sure on repeat playthroughs you know what to expect, but the first time through, every area is really intriguing and has so much to explore. The dlc brought back that feeling too. Whereas i never felt the need to ever explore or go out of my way to fight enemies in open world zelda because i know what the rewards are going to be and that they just wont be worth it.

[@javiervelez9329]

Yeah i thought complaining about the evergaols, which arent very common compared to the shrines and korok seeds, was pretty silly. Elden ring had FAR more exciting set pieces just randomly exploring the world. Botw had a few nice surprises with its exploration but 99% of it was the same bokoblin camps and tedious shrines. BOTW is practically a glorified Ubisoft game with a zelda skin and a little Nintendo magic sprinkled in.

[@vadoslink446]

The catacombs and caves of ER were much worse. Not just because they constantly reuse bosses and interior structures, but also because they all play the same. After getting ambushed by a stone gremlin that's standing around the corner for the millionth time, it stops being an ambush and instead just turns into tedious encounters. The fact that most non-boss enemies fall victim to simple R1 spam doesn't help either. BotW on the other hand designed any shrine that isn't a test of strength around significantly more varied challenges, and even though the enemies have less variety, there are significantly more options to deal with them.

[@markobucevic8991]

@@vadoslink446 Nah

[@vadoslink446]

@@markobucevic8991 It's the truth 🤷‍♂

[@Toksyuryel]

This video finally helped me to understand why the Animal Crossing New Horizons devs were so committed to their slow crafting system. They were following the directive to make it like Breath of the Wild's cooking.

[@chiusan1528]

I Said it once I say it again, breath of the wild and it's consequences for gaming have been a disaster

[@Christo_glenn]

Based. People think that Deku Seeds and shrines are good rewards to fill an otherwise empty world.

[@tumultuousv]

You're objectively wrong.

[@chiusan1528]

@@tumultuousv he said spending half an hour fighting trough a dungeon just to receive a stick that breaks in two swings

[@Christo_glenn]

@@tumultuousv Imagine thinking that shrines and deku seeds are an onjectively good reward... Oh, also finding weapons and equipment that break after a few encounters sucks. No matter how you put it, the shrines suck, the new temples in TOTK suck (they're glorified shrines, lol) and the sword play sucks.

[@ctheworld21111]

I think the biggest problem I had with TotK was actually unique to it: grinding took forever. I didn't want to grind a bajillion Zonite rocks and wait for them to be refined to upgrade my battery. It makes me very worried that Big N is trying to artificially inflate $/hr or take the wrong lessons from the rise of grindy games like Minecraft etc. But I will say, even as someone mildly apathetic to TotK as a whole, I disagree with comments (not that Ceave said it) that TotK doesn't have magical moments. I did [the midgame thing] while wandering around because I thought it was just some minor environmental puzzle but was floored when I found an entire temple out of sequence. I might forget and forgive the grinding over time, but I won't forget that moment. Nintendo should allow more sequence breaking like that.

[@stopit6229]

So true!! The grinding in that game is miserable. I genuinely stopped playing after the duplication glitch was patched 💀

[@LockeTheAuthentic]

Btow lacked consequence. It didnt really matter if I went exploring - all the weapons are temperary. It didnt really matter if I did sidequests - rewards barely exist and the world didnt really change. Even the main quests were uninspiring such that whether you free the divine beasts or not, the difference is super minor.

[@spookdot]

I loved the big world of BOTW, but none of the exploring really felt rewarding because the rewards were either little or temporary, and that makes it just feel empty

[@safebox36]

That's one thing of the reasons I loved the Tarrey Town sidequests, you got to actually see the world change over time. In TotK they also had noticeable changes to the world with the Zora getting rid of the poison mud, the Rito going from snowy to summer, the Gerudo moving out of their bunker, Lerelin getting rebuilt, and Lookout Landing getting populated with more people as the story progresses.

[@dotXyore]

The "story" being mostly exposition via memories was the final straw for me.

[@alexandros5412]

true, the giant maze in akkala was a big disappointment there was nothing there and then when i bought the dlc i had to go BACK to get the teleporter but i just wish there was more stuff

[@megcanby]

The lack of consequence is intentional, because it lets you self-direct. When there’s nothing particularly important for you to do, you’re free to just wander and take everything in, and the way BotW’s minimalist design encourages the player to do that is by far the game’s greatest strength. BotW wasn’t groundbreaking because it was open world, we’d had plenty of those for years, it was groundbreaking because it didn’t litter the map with tons of objectives to keep the player busy, and instead let them just vibe. (Also, for what it’s worth, the game does have consequence. Towers unlock parts of the map, you get fast travel points when you discover things, shrines upgrade your health and stamina, korok seeds expand your inventory, finding a good horse is permanent if you can get it to a stable, armor is permanent, and finding more great fairy fountains lets you permanently upgrade that permanent armor even further. Like, yeah, weapons break, but those aren’t the only things in the game. There are plenty of different rewards in BotW, and a good deal of them are permanent).

[@613-shadow9]

i hate how, no matter how cool the discovery is, it always leads to a shrine.

[@rafaelmoura2103]

I have been saying this for some years already, all i care about is better dungeons, if they would just allow for locked doors and keys, i guess the dungeon design would feel a lot better, lets see how the next one will be, the fact that they used locked doors in echoes of wisdom makes me optmistic

[@kotori6938]

I was very disappointed by the divine beasts as well, and the dungeons in tears of the kingdom just felt tedious imo

[@JHamron]

Thank you for this, it honestly feels like you reached for the things I was most thinking about but couldn't put into words. I think there are a few things here that I would honestly consider much more understandable for Breath of the Wild than Echoes of Wisdom. For one, the controls. Being a complex 3d game, BotW kinda necessitates having different buttons for different core actions, i.e. running, jumping, collecting. This combined with the fact that shoulder buttons are relegated to bows and Sheikah abilities, effectively does kinda create three item buttons. EoW, on the other hand, does not have that same complexity and definitely makes having just one echo available at a time feel really limiting. The menus themselves, because they're split up in BotW are a bit more reasonable. They're designed to have as little impediment on action as possible, and are split up between different weapon/item types. While it's not perfect, having a dozen items to choose from is definitely different from having over 100 items. I think this really is a carry over from TotK, which had that attach mechanic where you could put anything on your arrows, using that same menu. Item Durability, while often complained about, did highly encourage the player to try out the many toys that BotW had to offer, and to constantly be adapting to the environment, which I think helped make the game a lot more engaging overall. Between the overcrowded menus, the overabundance of barely usable options, and the frankly completely unengaging combat, I wonder if Echoes really would have benefitted from echo durability

[@Zorothegallade-rpg]

I once asked myself why I have more fun with computer roguelikes than with BOTW/TOTK, and one of the answers was...roguelikes optimize your menuing to keep you in the action as much as possible. They have keyboard shortcuts, different inventory screens, sometimes they even have search filters in the item menu to let you find what you need without scrolling through your whole inventory. You want access to an item or a spell, you can find it in a couple seconds. Meanwhile the big Zelda games made by one of the top companies in the world haven't been playtested enough to realize no player will want to ever build a campfire the "intended" way if they have to scroll through 100 items to find a piece of firewood, drop it, then scroll through the inventory again to find a flint, drop that as well, and then switch to the weapons inventory to grab a weapon they can afford the durability on to strike the flint and light the fire.

[@dominicballinger6536]

You just ignoring the traditional inventory menu we can open which let's us select both to hold without the linear menu? Or the sorting system that lets you organize your own items to where you think they'd be best accessed for your convenience in both the quick and regular menus? It sucks yeah, but you kinda made it out to seem much worse than it really is.

[@danielbeldin6319]

After hearing multiple quotes from Nintendo developers about how most Zelda games will be similar to BOTW/TOTK, I knew this would happen. BOTW hooked me for a long time, but I just can’t get into Zelda anymore. Never beat TOTK. I probably won’t play Echoes. I don’t want Zelda to be a sandbox game. Was it a surprise, subverting expectations? Absolutely. But it’s not Zelda. It takes away from the adventure. I don’t care about crafting. I don’t care about a massive open world. I want carefully crafted story. I want carefully crafted set pieces. Dungeons that actually feel satisfying to explore. Items that actually function meaningfully and are unique. Permanent upgrades and secrets that make exploration meaningful. I just want a “Hero goes on quest and finds ancient gear along the way” game. Nintendo is taking Zelda in a way I don’t really care for, and I have a hard time summoning interest in playing them. If it makes them money, I guess that’s what matters, but this video basically confirms that Nintendo won’t make ever Zelda games in the traditional manner, like what I and many others grew up with.

[@swordrush]

It was clear to me, seeing just trailers and only minutes of gameplay, that Echoes of Wisdom had carried over many of the problems I have with their design direction(s). You did a great job spelling some of that out--glad to see some vids from you Ceave (although apparently I need to pop over to your other channel). I would only add that Tears of the Kingdom not only repeated problems, it has shown Nintendo is very clearly ignoring everything fans of Zelda have said. What you talked about here wasn't unknown or left not discussed when Breath of the Wild came out, but somehow we're two games deeper and the problems are rapidly compounding.

[@BusinessSkrub]

It's because the reviews all get 9/10 and huge success promotions, because they pay off the journos and rating sites and trick everyone into thinking EVERYBODY loves the game and you HAVE to get it or else you'll miss out on this EPIC, AMAZING GOODNESS! And that inflates the numbers because let's face it, botw and totk sucked. They were both boring asf and I can't even pretend I want to open either game again since I beat them each the first time

[@jbvann05]

I wonder how much of the similarity between BotW and EoW is explained by the devs trying to convert BotW/TotK fans to "classic" 2D Zelda rather than thinking those UX systems are the best systems in the world or what made BotW good. There are a lot of new Zelda fans who never played Zelda before the Switch era and I'm wondering if Nintendo thought the best way to convert those fans was by using the same UX for a different genre of Zelda

[@cato3277]

Jakob’s Law of Familiarity at work. I’m really not surprised given that BoTW is most modern Zelda players’ introduction to the series that they’d design the UI/UX of BoTW around BoTW/ToTK’s conventions. I hate to trash classic Zelda fans, but the classic Zelda framework would be forced attrition for a lot of Wild era natives.

[@PhantomOfficial07]

That makes a lot of sense, actually. If there's a new 3d Zelda not connected to BotW, I bet it will be a fusion between "classic" 3d Zelda mechanics and BotW style open-ended solutions and whatnot.

[@LiamNajor]

@cato3277 when that system is just better for the task at hand, the forced attrition is in fact making the oldies who wanted the old back deal with literally the worst part of tears of the kingdom besides dynamic resolution.

[@cato3277]

@LiamNajor What Zelda game are most fans familiar with? BoTW is the best-selling Zelda by a mile. They'd be stupid to NOT design with those fans in mind over classic fans, who are sizable but not as much as newer fans. Some things are outright bad and need major revisions, I won't lie, but I also can't fault them for the bridge they were trying to build.

[@VulKus117]

So glad to see you uploading again Ceave!

[@brimstoner982]

I'm pretty sure he had a second channel that he was uploading on.

[@Koushakur]

@@brimstoner982 He does, Ceave Perspective, linked to in the description, and he has been reguarly uploading there ever since he started it

[@Termulus]

11:49 I can think of a few more problems the combat has. 1. The flurry rush. It's way too easy to pull off and trivializes combat. Either remove flurry rush or make it much harder to pull off. 2. Parrying is completely useless unless you're fighting a guardian. Perhaps we could have a rudimentary riposte system where an enemy after being parried has a few seconds where they take double or even triple damage. 3. Not enough enemy types. Make each region of the game have a unique set of enemies that you face only in that region. Including Hyrule Castle, which could have Dark Nuts for example. 4. Not enough weapon types. Add a bigger variety of weapons. Hammers have a unique moveset. Same with curved swords. Maybe have each region have unique weapon types that befit the race that lives there with unique movesets.

[@ultraenzo]

10:00 I used to agree that pausing and healing was bad design but honestly as a veteran player i started to put restrictions on myself such as only pausing to heal when outside of battle so I dont remove any tension as you mentioned. I also understand a younger audience should be able to enjoy this game but idk how my little 8 year old cousin would feel if this game forced a no pausing during combat similar to Elden Ring. But I can certainly agree that the "quick menu" is not that quick and needs a rework.

[@pretzel1313]

You can actually technically pause during combat in Elden Ring, as long as you're not online. You'd just have to be very good at navigating the menus to do so quickly enough to avoid getting smashed in the face lol. That's a skill any seasoned Souls game player should practice, honestly, because it really can save your virtual life.

[@CodeRed0]

@@pretzel1313 Yep, this used to be huge in PVP, and it still is, but less prominently. Back in the day when souls 3 was the most populated game I remember me and my friends parrying people, swapping out our entire armor set and weapon, then riposting. Or in a more useful way, unequipping your non-parry weapon extremely quickly to become able to parry, then re-equipping it for the riposte. (requires an empty left hand at all times though, so this is definitely a playstyle/build specific thing)

[@JohnSmith-xv1tp]

Not to mention, that's always kinda been a thing with Zelda games. You can always pause to equip a red potion, and you're not likely to die in the half second it takes to unpause and use the potion. Heck, in some of the games, like Wind Waker and I think Ocarina of Time, the enemies all pause while you drink anyway. A number of open world games have this issue. I think the way to fix it would be that some type of quick eating animation has to complete without interruption to get the heal. That way there's some actual risk/reward in the heat of combat

[@matteojames2312]

I actually think Skyward Sword handled healing best of the 3D games. Bottles share inventory slots with your shield, ammo expansions, and the various medals. Having a bottle in your inventory means that you actively had to choose it over other benefits like an extra heart container or more arrows. Consider that players only start with 4 inventory spots and the other 4 required exploration. If you used a shield and had like two bottles, that's only one other spot to hold something. On top of that, there weren't just red potions this time. There was also rejuvenating potion that repaired your shield in the field (so most players would want one), guardian potion that increased defense (or completely nullified damage once upgraded); or even the helpful Stamina Potion that decreased the rate of stamina loss. It wasn't just a decision to use a spot in the pouch for a bottle, it was also a decision in what to fill it with. Oh and the basic Heart Potion only refilled 8 Hearts. Good enough for early game, but if you want better in late game, the player needs to seek out bugs to upgrade the potion. And on top of that, there's no pausing the game to equip the potion. There's not even pausing it to drink it like in older titles. You have to manually dodge with Link while you fumble in the real time menu to grab the potion and drink it. Oh yeah, and once the potion is out, Link puts away his weapons so drink fast. Fairies also aren't very useful. They're very rare in the game and only heal SIX hearts on revival. It's barely worth it to bottle them at all. Obviously, Skyward Sword is a very easy Zelda game but the way players are forced to moderate how much healing they bring with them as well as making healing in combat an actual process all while keeping the good healing locked behind some side questing is a much more fun way to do it. If it was put in a much more combat focused Zelda, it'd be incredible.

[@niconeedsanap8130]

in short, they copied the whole body, but forgot the vital organs like the heart and lungs

[@magentaballthepolandball5130]

"released 7 years ago" way to make me feel old...

[@KlammBand]

The lack of weapon and mob variety is also a pretty big issue for more (with a larger impact on TOTK, though). There may be some at first glance "unique" events spread around the map, but in the end they mostly end up being a replication/variation of something you can find a bunch of times, which for me resulted in a feeling of being grinding all the time, in the end. This is even worse in TOTK - since it's so similar to its predecessor, I got this feeling of cumbersome grinding way earlier.

[@lunarkomet]

I'm so glad more and more opinions like this are finally surfacing I really felt alone in my frustration after totk's release

[@VinceOfAllTrades]

I didn't find the BotW exploration meaningful. As you said in the Catastrophic List of Catastrophies, there are no meaningful rewards, so there's no real reason to look for things. The world is pretty and interesting, but so is Elden Ring's. And in that game, I get gear, lore, or quest progression. At the very least, exploring in Elden Ring presented a challenge, rather than a resource drain.

[@celestialspark5697]

I both agree and disagree for the same reason Ceave did. Breath of the Wild is absolutely full of very cool things to find, mostly from the sheer number of puzzles, riddles, and quests (which are largely very well-designed in that they ask you to observe and interact rather than repeat a task, though there are exceptions.) Shrines (other than the landmark ones used to warp to stables and towns) are overwhelmingly interesting in how you uncover them. However, there are huge swaths of the world, especially the mountains in the northwest, where you can explore for a couple hours and find pretty much nothing but Korok puzzles you've seen before, useless monster nests, and some random treasure chests to not care about.

[@Icebrick2]

Yeah, I found it bizarre to say ER's content is copy pasted everywhere while BotW has unique stuff. ER has some repitition for sure, but personally I felt it WAY more with BotW. Everywhere I go know what I'm going to find: a Shrine or a Korok. While Elden Ring has new weapons and spells that interesting even if I don't use them, and while minor dungeons don't have unique boss fights, they'll usually at least have some fun twist to them.

[@celestialspark5697]

@@Icebrick2 But you only just "find" about a third of the shrines. Most of them are behind puzzles or quests, all of which are unique. The uniqueness of those puzzles is the reward for the exploration, as well as many of those shrines having additional puzzles inside. I don't care about video games throwing a bunch of loot my way, whether it's unique or not. I play games for the experience. I care about the uniqueness of the environments and fights in Elden Ring much more than the rewards they provide.

[@Icebrick2]

@@celestialspark5697 Sure. I think Elden Ring also has many more unique enviroments and fights than BotW, which has only has like 5 actually distinct regions and 6 bosses (+3 overworld ones).

[@megcanby]

@@Icebrick2 I just can’t fathom typing this. Sure, the Korok seeds are largely copy-pasted, but the majority of shrines are fully unique, small challenges. Just because they’re all shrines doesn’t mean they’re interchangeable. Like, by that same logic, you could easily say that all those spells and weapons in Elden Ring are copy-pasted, because they’re all spells and weapons, so clearly it’s just the same thing over and over again

[@savetehpolorbearz]

Great video! Its always frustrating to see how stubborn Nintendo can be. I just finished Echoes of Wisdom and was a little disappointed as I love the 2D Zelda games and was excited for one with building and puzzles. You addressed pretty much every issue I had. My main problem was with the lack of creativity the platforming puzzles required due to certain echoes being objectively better (water blocks early on and clouds later for literal infinite movement). The most fun I had was early on trying to get to really high places by having to use combinations of trees, crates, and trampolines, and tables where it required destroying old blocks to place new ones but after I got the water echo, movement became brainless.

[@ausgod538]

Nintendo isn't a person

[@blarneystone38]

Every take in this video is spot on. BOTW was such a success because it was fresh and new, despite having some major flaws. It’s no wonder that TotK was such a dud in comparison, if you get rid of the newness and simply leave the flawed systems you just end up with a middling game Nintendo should have taken the success of BOTW as a sign that players wanted the series to go in a new, exciting direction every time. Sadly, they instead seem to have decided to repeat the “stick to the formula” approach, but with BOTW as the guidepost instead of OOT. And as this video pointed out, BOTW was way less fundamentally solid than OOT was

[@capgorski]

Stories have popped up that Nintendo sets certain, seemingly nonsensical restrictions on developers with reasons left unexplained. I wonder if the menu system was one of those requirements. Grezzo was allowed to develop the next Zelda game, but to keep costs down or to keep the game tied to BotW, at the least aesthetically, the menu system must be basically wholly imported. Or maybe not. However, It's hard to imagine the developers seeing that menu system and thinking they nailed it.

[@wiremesh2]

I have for a long time thought the Zelda team needed a serious shakeup. Each game since OoT for me has been simultaneously very good in many ways, but also deeply flawed and disappointing. I still need to play EoW, but those menus are already causing me pain.

[@zplazma5557]

This breadth instead of depth problem is something I talk about a lot in relation to Minecraft. The menus and inventory suck, and the progression is linear and potion crafting is largely useless because it takes too long. Instead of adding more dynamic ways for each existing item in the game to interact with other existing items they just add more and more new items, which makes the inventory and menu problems WORSE

[@Hiushisan]

Making a new Zelda game with new mechanics, screen layout and controls is one thing. Forgetting what made the series great up until that point and modeling all future titles after the new game is a problem.

[@BetterNicholas]

Way I see it first there’s no arguing the wild games aren’t great, there opinions and if you don’t like them that’s chill, but you have to understand that the vast majority of people love them, but the main thing I wanted to say was about changing game series, I feel like people always try to force this loyalty to the past of the series and I’ve never understood that, if the devs want to do something with the series then that is still the same series, because the devs are the artists so they control what the series becomes, so like idc if the next Zelda game is a fucking Call of duty clone of the devs chase to make the series that and it is good, then that’s my Zelda and the same Zelda as always

[@buildinasentry1046]

@@BetterNicholas For it to be Zelda, it’s has to have atleast some specific things. What you have here is the ship of Theseus. The removal and replacement of all things that make a “Zelda” game, while still using the Title and characters.

[@Kefgoeroe]

That’s exactly why I much prefer playing Metroidvanias and Zeldalikes as Death’s Door than actual modern Zelda games. Plus the Sky islands and the Depths feel as hollow as the marriage of my parents. Your video is spot on Ceave Gaming. Thank you for your content!

[@lunarkomet]

Lol, spot on Tons of content to brag about but with little to no incentive to actually visit

[@VinceOfAllTrades]

While BotW/TotK/EoW do encourage you to use the food system, it's definitely not mandatory. I played through all 3 of the games without using them outside of specific scenarios (weather avoidance and final boss battles) and it added a nice difficulty boost to parts of the game while saving a ton of menuing. That said, many modern games have these food-like systems and seem to design enemy encounters with the buffs in mind, making encounters slog along when you're not using consumables to increase stats.

[@Valstrax420]

No one cares how YOU specifically set restrictions on yourself for a problem that shouldn't exist to begin with.

[@thedankhold8443]

This talk about BOTW not being as predictable as other similar games is confusing to me because it is far more predictable than some of the examples on your list. You're talking about the game with korok seeds, where the only four dungeons are short and look/play similar and the shrines are bite sized and look the exact same at best and are a test of strength at worst. Bokoblin camps are copy pasted everywhere and there's like six enemy types that change color when they have more health and damage. You even say the real strength of BOTW when you're talking about this, the emergent gameplay that comes from the sandbox type features they've added. None of the structured content in BOTW is very engaging or rewarding but if you're creative you can have a lot of fun with the systems such as the physics and weather.

[@WeeklyComedian]

Good video but even as someone who prefers BOTW, eldin ring has way more hidden surprises. The dragon moment was cool, but eldin ring is constantly shocking the player with new locations and bosses

[@marcuslaurence8528]

I enjoyed your work on this! As someone who recently dropped Echoes of Wisdom at the halfway mark due to the horrible menu UI, I feel very seen by this video (: I stopped cooking entirely for the same reason.

[@joebot86]

My solution to.the menu UI was only using about 3 echoes....

[@alejodavies]

Breath of the Wild did amazing things with all the systems that play into it, but it feels like it tried its best to make them useless by the midgame. There's so much attention to detail and they really worked on the physics and interactions of objects but it all becomes useless vs a white bokoblin. It feels like a really cool tech demo, but they didn't put a Zelda game in it. Shrines and Divine Beasts were no replacement for proper dungeons and the open world nature of it made it difficult to weave in a compelling story. Then they announced Tears of the Kingdom and I was hoping they'd finally slap a Zelda game ontop of BotW. Instead they added Garry's Mod. Again it's technologically impressive and I love putting 24 trees end-to-end to solve any sort of puzzle, but it felt like a really cool tech demo. They forgot the game though. Koroks, shrines and bokoblin camps got boring after a couple hours of BotW. There's no reason to kill all the mobs in a camp; you'll just wreck your weapons and get rewarded with a blue rupee from the locked chest. Giving the player all the tools right from the get go only to have them become increasingly useless as the game progresses feels terrible. Exploring is cool until you activate a tower and then there's no reason to see what's around the bend since the map shows you. You want that shrine? Teleport to the high ground and fly over to it. Or try climbing wet cliffs, I guess. I hope they use all the work they put into those games to build the foundation that the next (mainline) game will be on. They need to make a game though, not just a cool tech demo in an open world. I guess it's an issue shared with many open world games. Being able to go everywhere doesn't make the game interesting on its own. At worst it detracts from the experience. Take Elden Ring; its biggest flaw is the open world. Remove every area you can summon Torrent in and what's left is the game. Open world games thrive if the open world serves a greater purpose. It makes sense in an RPG game or simulation heavy games (Warband, X4 or even the Stalker games that have A-Life) or games like Minecraft, but they aren't an indicator of good games on their own.

[@Kurell171]

So i would say elden ring has all the good stuff of botw, (except maybe the freedom in approaching combat) while also reducing a lot of the flaws. 120 shrines that feel nearly identical, vs elden rings caves and catacombs of which the latter do feel repetitious sometimes, but literally every single cave in had a unique identity. Elden ring also has much better enemy encampements. They are placed with purpose, not just as another attentiongrabber to keep the player from getting bored. Weapons not breaking but being upgradeable encourages exploration, while the plethora of builds and unique weapon specific movesets stop your build from getting stale, because progressing in the game also means newer and better weapons. Enemies in botw are fine, but in elden ring they are phenomenal, especially since they dont just use 3 enemy types and scale up their health to make them harder. Elden ring also has more interesting and varied biomes. Botw looks amazing, elden ring looks absolutely gorgeous. I get that elden ring and botw are for different types of players, but from the (mostly) objectively measurable aspects, elden ring wins by a longshot. All this to say: playing elden ring ruined tears of the kingdom for me. And i dont see myself enjoying another open world zelda all that much, unless they do something REALLY innovative

[@ender7278]

It's weird how Breath of the Wild provided a solid foundation but lacked fleshing out and instead of actually fleshing it out the subsequent games just doubled down on all its worst mistakes.

[@evilgoose6190]

Ceave, I’d just like to say, I really appreciate the “gentle people in general” you put in your introduction. It’s such a small thing, but it’s really nice when people do stuff like that. Thanks! :)

[@Megidolaon999]

You are a female CHILD. God forbid why at your young age you don’t feel like you don’t identify with your gender. You should think more about this stuff, okay?

[@PhantomOfficial07]

no problem!

[@alpha00zero]

What's fascinating about BotW is that the old Zelda formula is in it already: it's the Great Plateau! You get a quest to grab some McGuffins in dungeons that let you learn and play with an item gained within them until you are given the key item that will let you progress past the barrier into the rest of the world. The old formula can still work if they sectioned the giant map into sectors the player may not be able to reach or unlock until they get the key item associated with it or at least it could be seen as such. Something fascinating about Elden Ring is that when you first start playing it, you have the impression that you are gated within Limgrave because the game tricks you into following the light of grace, a lingering trail of runes that points you to your "main path". Which causes most players to run into Margit, the first big wall of a boss. Which makes them promptly turn around if left undefeated and most likely find Weeping Peninsula or northern Limgrave near Caelid. Get strong and beat Margit to get to Stormveil. So on and so forth. What the game doesn't explicitly shows you is side paths. You are not locked to Limgrave until you beat Godrick and Margit... no there's a side path hidden to the side of the castle that lets you bypass it into Liurnia, rewarding the player who looked/stumbled into it. In fact, you can also explore deep into Caelid, a mid-game scaled area, to find the 2nd half of a medallion that let's you skip to a further area called Altus Plateau, another mid-game area with lots of goodies! This means you have nearly 2/3th of the game available to you if you are daring enough to stick your neck in dangerous places. Apply this to the suggestion of gated sectors to a BotW-esque Zelda game and you still keep exploration rewarding if you look in the right places but not without it's challenges which would deter the players less inclined to take up that difficulty spike! Sure you're missing a key item but you gain access to far more of the map and it's resources, quests, etc. They would be more dangerous areas w/o them but the player already past the challenging side path, they got tempered by it so they would know what to expect beyond it.

[@mushroomfusion245]

Like Sonic Frontiers’s open zone system?

[@peperoni_pepino]

I disagree with your Skyrim take. Yes, there are multilpe Draugr ruins. And there are multiple Dwarven ruins - filled with dwarven robots, or with Falmer and their trained chaurusses. And the main enemies are dragons. And you often instead run into bandits, or wizards, or vampires. For how old the game is, and for how small the world is from modern open world standards, there is a surprising variety! And don't forget about how the DLC adds a drug den below a random shack, etc. On top of this, the exploration gives you Word Walls -- even if the walls themselves are the same, each one gives you new shouts to play with. So no, Skyrim has a very high unpredictable elements density. Meanwhile in BotW, it doesn't matter where you go -- if you haven't found a bed, you will be fighting the same annoying skeletons that will destroy all of your nice weapons and then just chase you for the rest of your night. I never found any of the special places your mentioned, after admittedly less then a dozen hours playing the game -- most of which spend trying to climb a tower to activate it while the two wizard thingies flying around it kept shooting me down (and I could not find arrows anywhere to shoot them down). I still do not understand what people enjoy in that game; the combat is meh, exploration gives no rewards, and there is no compelling story in the main quest. Even if I boot up BotW right now, I wouldn't know what to do. Walk around randomly, hoping I don't get mobbed by the skeletons? Or instead pause the game and go google where the interesting things are, since apparently you either have to comb through the entire overly large overly empty map for dozens of hours, or find the answers online? Or challenge those same few 'major test of strength' shrines that I unlocked when exploring south of the plateau, which are impossible to beat with bad weapons and no real armour? I truly don't get this game. And any game that becomes good after two dozen hours is a bad game, it should be good from the first hour.

[@BusinessSkrub]

Oof, botw is one of the worst games ever put on a pedestal, but you're just bad my guy. The game is bad, but it's so much more than being too stupid to realise you shouldn't be somewhere yet. I'm sorry lmao

[@dustinmartin6524]

Uh lad no offence but like I don’t think you understand how game progression works. “Why can’t I access the tower”, have you tried coming back later? “Why can’t I beat the shrine” it’s called a MAJOR test of STRENGTH, maybe get your strength to a major level. You know how boring BOTW would be if you didn’t need to get stronger to progress? Thats the entire addictive gameplay cycle, you start off extremely weak with limited resources at your disposal and as you get stronger you are able to deal with more significant obstacles and progress more thus getting even stronger

[@dustinmartin6524]

@@BusinessSkrubYou can not like BOTW, but can we not make everything a hyperbole? “One of the worst games ever” is silly and you know it’s silly. Millions love the game, how exactly are we putting that in the same tier as Concord. There are games that literally no one likes and that are actively offensive, obviously those are worse than one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time. Again, if you don’t like it then say as much but do so in a reasonable way

[@BusinessSkrub]

@@dustinmartin6524 "one of the worst games EVER PUT ON A PEDASTAL" aka, it gets way more praise than it deserves. Reading ist hard

[@dominicballinger6536]

What the hell man? You claim the story isn't compelling, and yet you say you've never found any special areas in the game. I don't mean to be condescending about this, but did you beat the game, get any major objective done, or see any story building cutscene from exploration that reveals the past in a nonlinear fashion? If you keep getting shot by wizrobes while climbing a tower and have no arrows, and you can't find a way to get up there without getting knocked off, why don't you go somewhere else for some arrows first and come back? The tower won't leave, and you can always put a pin in it on the map so you don't lose it. You can sleep at a campfire, which you can build yourself. If you didn't have the materials, maybe consider making a small stache of them for the future when possible. The rewards for exploration a lot of the time are story through flashbacks to the past, new weapon types to try out that you haven't used before, new horses to try and tame with differing stats and usefulness (unlike Skyrim), new spectacles everywhere to see and be immersed in be they secret dark islands, the lost woods, the mysterious statues in the desert, the grand snowy mountains, or even the massive and sprawling castle in the middle of the kingdom, and new npcs and side quests to interact with to build out the world or just have something to do. People can do the exact same googling to find anything they particularly want in Skyrim as in BOTW. If I wanted to complete the shout to turn into a ghost, or to breath fire, or to dash forward really quick, I could just google where to find the word walls for each and bypass High Hrothgar entirely. If I wanted to know where to go underground to find a good grindable stache of soul crystals I could search that up. If I wanted to know where a particular skill book was to level up my destruction magic I could search it up. That point in your rant about not knowing what to do is completely dumb man! Any open world game can have the exploration taken out of it by going to Mr Google and borrowing an Atlus for your game for a few minutes. I dont mean this next point as a criticism, but genuinelh just out of curiosity, what about the combat is sucky to you? I personally think it's pretty well made. It's very simplistic in the types of attacks you can make with a sword alone, but parrying an attack with a shield always feels satisfying and perfectly dodging an attack to engage in a slow mo flurry rush to punish a foe is very rewarding for your sense of timing. The fact that this slow mo carries over to archery as well when you aim your bow mid air is pretty neat too since it lets me aim much better and get off more shots in a short time. And the system is pretty conducive to different playstyles what with differently weighted weapons with different swing speeds, ranges, and heavy attack types. What parts do you find unsavory?

[@SpookySkeletonGang]

I just haven't been interested in Zelda since BOTW. I know a lot of folks love it, but to me, it and ToTK are just...okay open world games? Kinda barren, you gotta create a lot of your own fun, and I have other games I prefer for that. But traditional 3D zelda is where it's at for me, and it seems they've entirely given up on it. What a shame.

[@mb9484]

Yep. The advantage of a linear-progression world is that the devs know exactly where you'll be, and they can craft the puzzles and encounters (and even music cues) around that knowledge. The original Halo is a perfect example of this.

[@vulcwen]

I think ToTK absolutely nailed it's tutorial area. Botw did a great job there as well, but with the novelty of Botw gone, totk just immediately felt flat the moment the tight level design of the sky islands was removed in exchange of the open world.

[@internetguy7319]

Old 3D Zelda was mid. Almost no nuance in its gameplay, not interactive, not very fun. Wind Waker is the only 3D Zelda that is actually a great game because it gives you more to do outside of 1980s RPG level interactions. "Hold A on the boulder to enter the push boulder state and then watch the slow ass animations at a set speed", terrible.

[@Ross516]

yeah, like I could just go play Skyrim if I wanted a mid open world game, and that game actually has a proper options menu

[@lemmyboy4107]

​@@vulcwenfully agree and just points out how much the linear gameplay is still loved by many. I really hope they bring back real traditional doungens.

[@TS_Mind_Swept]

I didn't realize how much I missed the "laaaaat's do dis" from the beginning of the videos 👀

[@daracaex]

I want to push back on the breakable weapons making the exploration boring in Breath of the Wild. Huge open world games like this have a limited number of options to incentivize exploration. Either they create a system of dwindling resources that the player needs to constantly refill, or they need to have a HUGE variety of unique game objects. Breath of the Wild uses the former, Elden Ring uses the latter. I don’t think Nintendo is the kind to try to make hundreds of different weapons/spells/ashes/whatever, most of which the player will not care about because their build does not support it (though maybe in NG+). Removing weapon degradation without an entirely different system being in place would make exploration MORE boring, because what else new would there be to find? The weapons need to break so you can go find more weapons by using weapons that will break along the way to the more weapons!

[@oscarsaez7357]

But that creates a new problem, if my weapons break and I need to find new ones the game needs to have a ton of them lying around so you have a constant supply, and after some hours of playtime you realise that weapons (and shrines) is all you are ever gonna find. If what makes exploration fun is asking yourself "what else will I find?", then a game where the answer is always the same is gonna become dull. The solution would be adding more meaningful and permanent things to find, something unique that makes you feel like finding it was worth your time, but they didn't do that.

[@theoaremevano3227]

I think where the problem comes in is another issue on his list-- how ballooning enemy HP might make players see combat as wasteful. At this point, if the player does stop fighting, the weapons breaking also stops, causing the incentive to find more to cease as well. I think what they missed was having more combat in the main story objectives; dungeons in particular. That would help a lot by forcing the player to use some resources to make progress now and then, restarting the cycle, at least for a while. (The Master Sword also provides even more opportunity to avoid weapon usage in the few required boss fights that are there.)

[@rmsgrey]

@@theoaremevano3227 Late game BotW, fighting an enemy often costs you more weapons than you get from winning, and gives you worse weapons than the ones your were carrying. So you're left with the Master Sword and avoiding combat as the only sensible options.

[@theoaremevano3227]

@@rmsgrey : Yeah, it's hard to get around the fact that inherently, if you're more of a big picture person, you'll look at combat with totally breakable weapons as an expense that requires a reward. The problem is, even if that reward is enough to make up for what you spent, that still doesn't cover the cost to time. You could just ignore the enemies and get the same result. The enemies need to be strong enough to justify using up durability on a stronger weapon too, if you want to use one of those. You can't even use extra skill in combat to reduce the cost to your weapon durability resources (apart from a bug/oversight here and there, like mounted attacking on Lynels).

[@benjaminmeusburger4254]

"what else new would there be to find?" stories, set pieces, new monsters, strange bosses, sidequests This is the same in almost any RPG. There is a ton of optional side content that is not needed to complete the final boss. e.g. the side quest in Skyrim about the "Hangover" was not fun because of the completion/reward ...

[@Ventus_S]

I agree fullheartedly that BotW foundation is not solid enough for a sequel or other future game. I played BotW for hundreds of hrs, but cant bring myself to complete totk whatsoever. The magic is lost and the game just gets boring whenever i open it.

[@lunarkomet]

Sad, but same here... The machine crafting is useless if the world you're exploring is boring

[@OnlyTAS]

I'm sooo tired of crafting, open world, breaking equipment, cooking, faint ambient music...

[@WeeG-bwc77]

You don't want to climb a ubisoft tower to unlock more of the map? Surely you haven't gotten sick of that gameplay trope since the mid-2000s??

[@TsuladanGaming]

I think my biggest issue with BOTW is just... taking away all my cool tools and magic items and gimics and frontloading me with a tablet with a few abilities right at the start just... sucked the wind out of my sails. Once I realized that was all I'd be getting, that no dungeons were going to give me new gear or abilities and it was all just that handful of tools I'd had from the start. Past that it never felt like a Zelda game anymore it was just another open world exploration title with the Zelda assets mixed in. That and the literal 900 Koroks, and the shrines all being so same-ish due to the open world and lack of tools and gimics to make them more wide and varied and complex. Don't get me wrong, really fun game, but it didn't scratch that Zelda itch. Fun trick though you can just drop food in the Goron town and let it cook on the ground and pick it up again. It restricts you to one item cooking though but it's so much faster.

[@crimsonvale7337]

3:00 the opening music jumpscared me, I thought this was a ceave perspective video at first

[@chainclaw07]

OoT actually has a limited version of what I'd like to see in an adventure game - the world is open world BUT you need keys to traverse to certain areas. for example, I'd like MORE of the game to be open to the players and when the hookshot is found another part of the map is unlocked akin to how metroidvanias are open but locks away other areas with double jumps or dashes...

[@derpyduck264]

Before I watch the entire video (if and when I get to that point, maybe not today but in the near future) I would like to give my own take on what Zelda games should be in the future. They should be Skyward Sword without the awkward location beacons to separate the sky and the ground. They should be Twilight Princess with the creative range of usable items that interact with each other and with the environment. They should include elements of OoT such as those items that allow you to commit great feats, and make you feel wonderful (for example, it feels underwhelmingly easy to nab a couple of bomb flowers and win every fight; why shouldn't we have key items like the gloves that used to let you do so carefully enough to avoid blowing them up? New Zelda games should have the amazing dungeons that can be found in older games, of course, and they should also keep some of what they've added (I quite like the idea of the progress being kept by various types of statues and the great fairies, for example) What needs to be worked on, though, is the issue of making a big world that feels empty. The world is stuck in the past, literally. The plot of both major games in the direct timeline of BotW (so, unfortunately not including Age of Calamity, which is a great game but is not the same genre as typical Zelda games) has been entirely based on memories, and it sucks when you have effectively echoes of the past haunting you and reminding you that they're still VERY much dead. The somber tone is okay, I honestly sort of love those love-hate moments you get when you hear about Mipha's childhood encounters with Link, or Sidon talks about how he loved her - but the legacy of the Champions was lost upon the lore in TotK and the only real indication that they even existed in the first place is Mipha's Court in Lanayru. Admittedly, a much better effect is something like the Hero's Shade in Twilight Princess, which is implied to be the Hero of Time (I highly recommend watching a video essay about how/why a select portion of the community regards this as canon) and therefore includes these 'echoes of the past' as more than just a slap-in ability that could have been given directly to Link. We need BotW, seen from the perspective of the memories, basically. No more "this happened," and "he said, she said," let us live it, and live it proudly

[@Khorvalar]

I bought TotK hoping they would learn their lesson from the mistakes of BotW but they didn't and if Nintendo is going to continue designing games this way then I'm just not going to buy new Zelda games anymore.

[@ratcatcher2048]

Ceave's ability to put into such extremely precise and well-articulated words exactly the problems I have with a lot of Nintendo games these days will never not amaze me, he's ridiculously well-spoken about all this and helps me find more productive and understandable ways of criticizing nintendo games without going on tired and abrasive rants. I don't support many people on patreon, but I'm proud to say I'm one of the gentle people in general to support this man on Patreon and, if you're reading this, you should do the same!

[@nonmagicalwitch]

i think another problem I have with nintendos modern approach to reworks / approach to classic styles of their games is the artstyle they chose. Pokemon Shining Pearl, Echoes of Wisdom and Links Awakening for the Switch all have more or less the same artstyle. Now, don't get me wrong, I think it looks cute and it's a cute thing to do for a game. However, I can't help but be worried about the future of Nintendos remakes. I really would love to see what their design team would come up with if their job wasn't to chibi-fy the pixelated look, but to interpret it in a new way. In that way, the games would feel a lot more fresh and not just like a "Pixel game HD". A few chibi games, fine. It's a really cute artstyle and entirely on brand with Nintendos family-friendly approach to everything.

[@trashtrash2169]

What if they did the oracle games with 2d animated sprites? Like classic Disney style? Or Ghibli? Nintendo likes Ghibli. Ni No Kuni's style would be perfect for the oracle games. I wish they would do overhauls, completely redesigning old worlds as new games. Imagine an expanded ocarina, or a detailed modern representation of the dying world in the first Zelda game. What would that even look like? There's so much to explore, but I know they'll never do it.

[@amandaslough125]

That's probably because everyone moved into one central Nintendo headquarters. "Company brand standards" is very common across the IPs now.

[@theoaremevano3227]

I really they will look at more BotW more critically when they move on to a new 3D Zelda game. BotW was incredible because of its incredibly fluid immersion; a factor which few games really had to such a degree. A fluid immersion example is how you can kill characters freely in Morrowind, simply by being permitted to swing weapons freely at characters. BotW has similar emergent mechanics, but baked into the world in ways such as rolling a boulder down a hill to crush enemies. It's incredibly fascinating to any players that love that type of immersive experience, as opposed to games defining most their experience through the walls they build to bar your path. (Some players prefer it that way, however.) I think your analysis of predictability is very accurate, but also applies to Breath of the Wild in plenty of places. It's not exempt from it because of the Shrines and enemy camps and the lack of dungeons outside of the Divine Beasts we already know about. What's this neat thing leading to? Do you really expect anything but another shrine? I majorly agree with the last point on BotW. (Though I question that you did not have that list be a Calamitous list of Calamities. XD ) The thing is, I couldn't ignore it that much. I found the base combat in BotW very lacking, and the way creative options scaled so badly later in the game did lead to me just ignoring combat most of the time. Even the more elaborate glitchy combo videos and such often left me thinking 'that's neat, but... I can't help but question how often that is a practical approach to battle, and how likely it is to work over and over with few resets.' It didn't have much practical draw.

[@witherschat]

As far as glitchy combos go, it's not optimal but can be viable with enough training. But then, I'm biased because that type of combat is my favorite part of BotW nowadays.

[@theoaremevano3227]

@@witherschat : I think it's that, because the game's content isn't built around those tools, you don't really feel the payoff until you get a lot of practice under your belt. You have to REALLY want to do it.

[@Grooviness]

Great video. For me, the flaws of BotW were already unacceptable, and I couldn't get past them to enjoy the game. So you can imagine my sadness when in their sequel, and unrelated side game not only replicate all those flaws but in some cases double down. It's utterly tragic that they've ruined what could be 3 actual series defining games by tacking on these terrible systems. Convinced they have no clue what they're doing anymore

[@batmanbud2]

What you hate, others enjoy. I still have yet to play BOTW and TOTK, but I genuinely found Echoes to be more enjoyable than LTTP. Keep in mind, this is coming from a die-hard hater of Pokemon.

[@shanonsnyder9450]

Things I don’t like ≠ flaws

[@Grooviness]

@@batmanbud2 it's mostly overwhelming disappointment. The gameplay loop of botw didn't grab me at all and simply adding machines to totk and changing nothing else meant that opinion wouldn't be different. I was genuinely looking forward to echoes but that feeling evaporated after the last trailer before release showing all these botw elements, meaning they are interested in just botw but 2d. All that said, of course people can enjoy these games, as in the video, despite these flaws, and that's ok.

[@rol9834]

19:07 You can really see how upset Ceave is by the fact that he uses opinion instead of onion here. Also, the onion is not humble.

[@browserjunior4707]

I also want to add that combat in both games don’t just amount to spamming your strongest weapons but also spamming the strongest strategies. Say you’re playing TotK and you wanna upgrade your armor and you find a Silver Boko Boss. The easiest way to handle them bar none is to shoot the silver Boko Boss with a Muddle Bud, wait for it to kill most of its allies, then toss puffshrooms everywhere so you can sneak strike them. Sneak Striking does 3x your usual damage so it preserves Durability and still keeps consistent damage. If you have access to a Durability+ Forest Spear, just fuse a Puffshroom to it. You’ve got one of the best setup weapons in the game from that alone. For BotW a similar strategy could be done against sleeping enemy camps. Have level 3 Stealth, sneak up to the enemy you want to kill, sneak strike, walk around them so that you’re directly in-front of them. In BotW enemies will turn around in the direction of where they were attack so despite getting up from the ground they’ll turn around to where you originally struck them. This creates a loop and like before it preserves your weapon durability and makes overworld fights boring if you have the ability to sneak attack. And an issue both games have in general is how strong Ice + Electricity as a group clear combo is. As long as you freeze 1 enemy, if you hit it with any electric elemental attack that enemy will create a massive AoE that stuns, and with proper rhythm you can do this infinitely. I would’ve preferred if they made it so that the explosion doesn’t stun and only stagger them, being able to stun a group for a good 3 seconds and repeating the process constantly lessens the tension greatly. The only times you’ll ever feel tension is with the overworld bosses but that’s heavily dependent on which boss. Gleeoks are a good test of skill and are threatening no matter what point in the game, however Taluses are barely a threat.

[@ButterApple249]

Honestly I think a full open world is just not a good direction for most games, it relies a lot on repetition, and it can't account for when people reach the areas. I always liked the idea of a Zelda game instead of giving a full open world give a layered open world, instead of giving everything at once give us one dungeon to complete, then with the item we get from said dungeon let us choose from 2-3 and go from there. The items being tools we can use to get to more areas and complete more dungeons. Echoes sorta did this but artificially locked dungeons which is more than fine but the open air free roam dungeons are not the way to go, I remember the aesthetics of each but nothing else really stands out since there's nothing to their designs because they had to be open ended. But I remember each section of the Forbidden Woods, the lobby of the Ancient Cistern, the entirety of the Snowpeak Ruins. I remember more about the first dungeon of Links Awakening than I do of any Beast or Dungeon from the Wild games, hell I remember more from the dungeons in Echoes than I do of any in the Wilds. Despite the fact we only had like 4 games in this era of Zelda I unironically think we just need to go back to the classic formula, that series burnout has long since faded and most series veterans seem to just be burnt out on the Wilds formula now if anything

[@dinolamb8400]

I am thinking the series should do is a proper metroidvania style super dungeon(not the terrible phantom hour glass one) that you explore with a small(like a quarter of botw size) open world on top to do side quests

[@ButterApple249]

@ honestly a metroidvania could be cool for Zelda, maybe something moreso like an overworld mixed with dungeons tho, the "hub" being the commonly visited overworld area you go through and unlock more areas with the items you get in dungeons. Just like normal Zelda but with more emphasis on that exploration but keeping that Zelda tradition. Could be a way to reintroduce Zelda2 stuff too lol (but I'd prefer something more like Metroid Prime in the third person lol)

[@Danthonyt]

I solved 90% of “puzzles” using the bed echo.

[@Orion_Fritz]

I agree with all of your criticisms about Echos of Wisdom except too much healing, and inflated health-pools. The issue with the combat in echos of wisdom does not in any way stem from them being fights of endurance. Their issue is with them being unbelievably easy. I think literally the only time I ever used any smoothie whatsoever was drinking a toughness smoothie during two or three of the bosses, and drinking a chili pepper smoothie during the snow storm on hebra mountain. I also have no clue what you mean about the enemies having inflated health-pools. Their health pools scale directly with their attack power. So enemies take like 3 hits early game with early game summons, and they take 1 to 2 hits late game with late game summons. The entire game was trivialized the moment I got my hand on the 5 power pip spinny boi, because he just killed 90% of all enemies in like 1 or 2 hits. Hell, even the lynal only took like 4 or 5 hits from him. The video you showed to prove this point was the equivelant of trying to kill the ender dragon with a wooden sword, then complaining about how long it took. Like, obviously bats, one of the worst summons in the game, are going to have trouble against one of the best mid-game summons.

[@redfly8797]

The point *was* that many of the summons become obsolete. The promise is multiple creative ways to solve puzzles, traverse the world, and fight, yet most of the summons either do the same thing or are just inferior to other ones. Why have so many when there's only a few worth having? I guess so you can scroll through each and every one of them any time you want to switch.

[@kirakat1535]

5:58 this moment made me realize how dang refreshing it is that Ceave doesn’t do sponsor reads

[@mb9484]

Skyward Sword is still peak. I can't wait for the "open world" fad to end in games.

[@Cajun_Seasoning]

One of the few games that made me appreciate linear gameplay and storytelling

[@Christo_glenn]

I hated that game when it first came out and dropped it many times, but I did have the chance of giving it a go again with little expectations that I’d like it… and I had an absolute blast with it! It has some of the best dungeons in the series.

[@greenberrygk]

Why are all of ceaves videos so negative? Like I know I can just not watch it if I don’t like it, but just in case ceave sees this, I hope he focuses more on the good in Nintendo games because there’s a lot of good to be appreciated, and I generally agree with him to an extent but all the videos are like “what’s the worst Mario game” or “nintendos biggest mistake”

[@_CNT_]

I have been following you on Ceave's Persoective, so I know you really weren't "gone". Still, it feels surreal seeing 2 uploads so close together

[@Feraligono]

Oof, that menu in echoes of wisdom looks like some sort of punishment. At least condense it with vertical scrolling for the options that are literally reskins of each other.

[@b3rnardTF2]

Du bist mein lieblingsyoutuber, ceave! Weiter so!

[@Sirfing_Wolf]

11:35 This reminds me of Skyrim’s system. Illusion magic and most forms of combat outside of being a stealth archer become obsolete too soon. And this is in a game that is so great at encouraging different character type role playing so this fact becomes all the more sad.

[@TheodorSt-tb1vm]

2 Ceave Gaming videos in one week????? Im litterally crying right now

[@probablynotdanny4384]

Right!?

[@thefongz2931]

At least two areas where I disagree: 1. Isn't it so weird to harp on about having to scroll through a long 1D list of echoes (and weapons in BOTW) when you can literally just press a different button to browse through a 2D list? The 1D list is simply there for extra convenience, and you can sort it by recently used, often used, recently acquired. 2. In neither game did I ever, _ever_ find myself thinking, "I would be enjoying this much more if I didn't have all these health recovery items." Dying in games is a misery; having to restart a long boss fight is a misery. Stocking up on boiled durians, radishes, and smoothies and having them there when you need them is a mighty good feeling. And if you want to challenge yourself, just don't do it. One thing that I think Nintendo definitely did learn from BOTW is that people love to come up with self-challenges when they're given a creative toolset. Who cares if 80% of the echoes are completely useless to most people who already have a core squad of 5 or 6 go-to's? Someone somewhere will decide that they want to defeat the game with Tektites and they can give that a try.

[@SirTowerOfZaid]

Bro came back from winter training straight up into a villain ark.

[@viavip1940]

dissapear

[@SparkBag]

I think you mean hero

[@egbertmilton4003]

@@SparkBag Hero? This is bad comedy. His criticisms of EoW are pretty bad, especially on the point of how he thinks that most of the time, it's only practical to use your strong echoes, and how the control are "bad", when he barely even touches on anything outside of the menus for Echoes.

[@SparkBag]

god forbid somebody has tastes that don’t align with you

[@egbertmilton4003]

@@SparkBag No, its not even taste, he's straight up incorrect about the combat and usage of cheap and expensive Echoes.

[@NymphieJP]

Hey, I thought Bowser upgraded to an ipad? Did Bowser Jr get tired of providing tech support?