I used Mighty Bananas as well. I never even thought of using Stasis. Pretty clever.

I never used Stasis on monsters myself but I did read about others who did and it seems like it'd be useful for stopping Lynels and getting a critical headshot on them with an arrow to stun them.

So I beat the game yesterday! And wtf was up with the final boss. First form is good, not my favorite final boss but a good fight. The second form was not a boss fight at all, it was basically a slightly interactive cinematic cutscene. There is no challenge, there is no actual battle. That is so unzelda like. It's cool as hell though but very disappointing. The story is totally pointless, bad by zelda standards.

HYrule castle was brilliant though and desperately what this game needed more of. I'll have my review up in a day or so but this is my least favorite 3D zelda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6NkNgI1ssw&feature=youtu.be

Digital foundry on the patch performance increases. On switch it's greatly improved. The Wii U patch however doesn't do much for framerates.

Worse than SS and WW. Those games at least had structure and dungeons.

Forget structure, Vader.  Go free!

I agree with travo/vaders mashed up post. There is no need for it to be open world vs dungeons. They could just have dungeons in the open world like normal Zelda. But I'm guessing the manpower needed would be immense. So imagine if there were 7 dungeons. Could they be able to do 120 shrines too? And if not would the open world be less interesting with far fewer shrines and only big dungeons to head to?

Also I don't get peoples beef with Skyward Sword, it's easily the best designed Zelda ever made. Sure it lacked epic cutscenes, but it did a lot that was new, including a new motion control method. An HD SS would be better than BOTW for me.

I also don't get what BOTW is doing that is so revolutionary? I watched a brief IGN gamescoop discussion asking when BOTW influence would show up in other games? And all they talked about was about no hand holding or direction and the ability to climb anything.

To me, mid-way into BOTW it felt like Ass creed perfected i.e with decent controls and a bit more freedom.

Traditional Zelda used to be a design masterclass. Like these guys would come together every few years to remind people that they are the best designers in the business. I haven't played Darksiders but I can't imagine anyone other than Retro studios producing labyrinth like interconnected dungeons with all those puzzles. Making it so polished and ingenious.

SupremeAC said:

GG, I didn't mean to say that what armour you've got doesn't matter, I'm just saying I've seen the same thing happen, regardless of what armour I'm in.  Be it the flimsy Gerudo disguise or something more sturdy.

That's odd. Outside of the great plateau I've never been one hitted to almost death. Two hits yeah.

SupremeAC said:

GG, I didn't mean to say that what armour you've got doesn't matter, I'm just saying I've seen the same thing happen, regardless of what armour I'm in.  Be it the flimsy Gerudo disguise or something more sturdy.

My thoughts exactly.  I think at a certain point they made the decision to sprinkle parts of dungeons all over the map in the form of shrines, to keep things interesting.  Perhaps in the next main game in the series, we will see an equally interesting overworld, but with more true dungeons.

The only solution would be to make the team bigger and give equal priority to both aspects. It would take ages to make the game. The problem is as I see it, is that this game got so many 10/10s that Nintendo will see this game as an unmitigated sucess with no flaws. Aonuma already said that this open air style is the Zelda formula going forward. If more reviewers complained about the short dungeons we might have seen them address that in the next game.

SupremeAC said:

Team size doesn't need to rise.  They probably spent a lot of time experimenting to get the basic gameplay loop as close to perfection as they could.  Since they do not need to do that again for the next Zelda, assuming they make a game in the same mould, that frees up a lot of time to design more dungeons, without the need to sacrifice the time it takes to create any of the other content.

Are you underestimating how much work it was to create that bespoke open world? They can't just fart it out next time and spend all their time on dungeons. The Elder scrolls had to use procedural generation.

gamingeek said:

Are you underestimating how much work it was to create that bespoke open world? They can't just fart it out next time and spend all their time on dungeons. The Elder scrolls had to use procedural generation.

I think you're underestimating how much time they would have spent on experimenting with the formula.  Sure, development doesn't start out with a 300 man team, but I wouldn't be surprised if Aonuma spent half a year or more just brainstorming and trying to get the gameplay and physics system to work.  If they don't completely overhaul that underlying governing set of systems, that's at least a couple of months spared that can be used for creating dungeons and whatnot, without lengthening development time.