Breath of the Wild’s equivalent to dungeons were the beasts, not the shrines. The activities in the overworld were only the same in that they ended in a shrine, but the things you did to unlock them were generally very different. Half of them aren’t even visible at first. The people who thought that world was empty just didn’t find what was hidden in the negative space.
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EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 months agoThis is broadly true, but I think that many older games that were much simpler, with a narrower focus and more fleshed out presentation have a spot on the leaderboards that won’t be knocked off any time soon. One example is the Legend of Zelda series. With Breath of the Wild and its sequel, it did some pretty innovating things. But in the process it sacrificed much of what made the earlier Zelda games great. We figured out how to make a game with “more dungeons” but they were uninspired and they all looked the same. Gone were the huge, sprawling, uniquely thematic dungeons with memorable bosses and iconic music. The overworld got much larger and they crammed more overworld activities into it, but now those activities were just the same four or five things copy pasted to every inch of the world, none of which did much individually besides making one of a few numbers go up by a tiny fraction.
New games innovate in what is technically possible, but they move backwards in other areas that don’t get the same attention. It’s more than just “These old games were good for their time”. In many cases they are still unsurpassed by modern games because the focus changed.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 4 months ago
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Breath of the Wild doesn’t have an equivalent to dungeons. There are only four divine beasts, and just like the shrines they are identical in appearance. They were just slightly more complex shrines with an animal theme. And the overworld doesn’t realistically have an awhile lot to find, by design. Since the game is entirely unstructured, you can’t put anything to find in the game, because you don’t know where the player will go and nothing to stop them from going anywhere. Thats why nothing amounts to anything more than a fractional stat boost or a temporary weapon. The outfits and the master sword are the only things worth actually finding in the game.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The divine beasts are not identical, though they are shorter than traditionally Zelda dungeons. The overworld has a ton to find; you just didn’t find it.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The divine beasts are in fact visually identical. As for the overworld, I found all of it. It’s just that “all of it” was for the most part just copied and pasted over and over with minor variation.
canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
I agree.
Even using my examples of KOTOR and ME, comparing them to (relatively) modern counterparts, Jedi Survivor and Andromeda, you can see that the storytelling has taken a back seat to the open world. ME 1-3 were all very tight corridor cover shooters, going from fully constructed combat environment to another. KOTOR has more deep RPG mechanics and overall a better story than Jedi Survivor, and I would agree it’s because the focus changed on providing sprawling open worlds over more bespoke environments.