Aunoma said this is a game based on the original Legend of Zelda, my dream game. A Zelda game that just drops you into a world and lets you go.
This represents everything video games could be to me. Yeah that game was 8-bit sprites but this is what I saw. This promise that one day we can play through a world like that. Aunoma specifically made the start of this game after that image. You go to the edge of a cliff that looks just like that and they added the twin peak mountains in the distance. They made that image a dream come true.
Why are the things I posted so special, because the way Zelda handles things compared to other games, it is exactly what I want from games. Giant open worlds have been done before, we play them all the time. Games with physics and emergent gameplay are all over, none of this is new. There are game worlds far more detailed than the empty plains of this game. Games with better combat. But no game does it all, no game puts all those elements together. No game focuses on the puzzles, the level design, the moment to moment gameplay where its number one concern is WHAT IS THE PLAYER DOING.
Playing Witcher 3 you are going to get a grand story, maybe that is what you want. You open your map and see hundreds of icons, things to do. It tells you exactly where it is. You stroll along fighting random grunts the same way over and over. Reach the point where you see your goal, if you don't you will hit a button and a giant glowing line will hand hold you to the spot and you just grab what you want. You go into a random cave and its just that a random cave, there wont be anything special, there will be a monster and a treasure that's it. It will be a series of random hall ways and paths with no real design to it. The player is being pushed and guided every step of the way, no real freedom, no real care as to what the player is doing, its purpose is to get you from one story point to another.
Zelda is mostly the opposite of that. No markers at all in the world, you see something you figure out how to reach it. Sometimes you have to solve a series of puzzles to get it, Sometimes you wont even have the item needed to reach it so you mark it and save it for later. YOU do this., you are the one actively searching, not some glowing line, not a stupid marker, YOU. See a shrine, the equivalent of a cave in most open world games of this kind, well here they give you brand new world altering abilities. The ability to manipulate time, water, metal. These shrines are built with specific puzzles to solve, to use your skills in various ways to get the prize. Each one different from the last each hand crafted for a unique gameplay experience. The world is filled with emergent gameplay possibilities, with all kinds of enemies and different ways to combat them. It isn't a rigid set of melee attacks and spells, you can roll a boulder from above, set traps with bombs and fire, you can use items in various ways like using water to create pillars of protection or maybe raise you up into the air so you can come down with a sword strike. This is player freedom, the freedom to make the gameplay your story.
Yeah sure it wont have a big story, who cares, I want to have interesting gameplay, that is why I play. I know Zelda is going to have loads of great mini games, it will have all kinds of varied gameplay moments, it will have massive elaborate dungeons, huge epic boss battles, incredible puzzles. It will have all the elements I want in a game mixed in the exact way I want it mixed. This looks like my dream game.
A few things do worry me, the emptiness of parts of the world. It maybe just for e3 but where are all the NPCs that have small quests, the majoras mask like influence you have on the world. Where are all the fun things you can easily find to do in every corner of the old worlds. Where are the heart pieces? Will the difficulty continue to be a huge problem? Will there be enough major dungeons? Will it be paced well? We shall see but in Nintendo I trust. For now this is easily my most anticipated game.
