The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild arrives on Wii U and NX in 2017
The first trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was shown off at Nintendo’s E3 coverage last night and boy does it look good.
Nintendo first showed off the trailer you see below before cutting over to about an hour of Pokemon Sun and Moon – after that little diversion we were back with a Breath of the Wild demo. Bill Trinen from Nintendo of America, was joined by Eiji Anouma to run through some of the basics.
The demo started off from the start of the game with link awakening from a pool of water in The Shrine of Resurrection. A voice tells Link to wake up, and as he does and approaches the exit of the shrine tells him again (with real voice acting) that;
Link… You are the light — our light — that must shine upon Hyrule once again. Now go..
And then this;
That’s it, there’s no hand-holding and no tutorials – you’re just off and ready to go.
The first demo that was on early this morning showed off a few of the games new features and changes to the Zelda formula. For one, Link can now jump – sure Link could jump before but now there’s an actual button. This new jumping ability means it’s easy for Link to now climb! Pretty much any surface that looks like you could climb up it – you can. There’s a gauge on the screen that shows how much stamina you have so you can’t climb and hang forever like Nathan Drake – but it does open the world up vertically.
The game is completely open world as well, the map below – take a look;
The portion of the map with the yellow markers is the portion of the E3 demo – huge.
There’s also big changes to the inventory, the environment and how it affects Link. First up, most weapons in the game will degrade and be destroyed over time. Each weapon also has a different amount of attacking power and shields have different numbers of defences. Enemies too also have a certain amount of HP, so you can see in advance if you want to take on a group of moblins or not.
Screenshots
The game has also done away with random hearts in the environment. Instead Link will now need to eat, hunt and cook to stay healthy. The weather and environment will also effect Link, at one point in a demo he begun to shiver and take damage until a quilted piece of clothing was put on to warm him up. They’ve really added survival aspects to the game here.
Over the three hours of the live stream there was so many things to point out and notice, we can’t cover them all but we can’t go without talking about the Sheikah Slate – Link gets this ‘tablet’ device when he awakes and it has the map on it, it has a scope and even works to unlike trials. There are 100 different trials littered around Hyrule to try out and these points on the map count as warping points later on in the game.
We’ll continue to update this post as the day progress and we learn more.
Trailer
Artwork
Boxart
Colour me hyped! It’s everything we wanted, just wished it was this year for wii u 🙁 but hey, gonna get it day one for NX
The trailer had me very happy, then the first few gameplay bits they showed off had me a bit disappointed. But then I woke up now and watched some of the combat bit and it’s eased my fears a bit.
Basically what I liked is how much this feels like a world, a proper wild world. No issue with the graphics though they do need to be tightened up before release, which I’m sure will happen. Exploration, yes, after Skyward Sword that is very very welcome. Lack of tutorials, fuck yes, although it still looks annoying how the game will take control away from you when Zelda/Goddess talks to you, this is a lot better than the start of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword.
What I didn’t like was how few bad guys there seemed to be. I know Zelda is more focused on puzzles these days, but I was wondering where the action tension had gone. Why are bokoblins such jokes to fight against. I was probably expecting too much from the first enemy of the game. Then I saw how much damage the laser from the guardian did and that got me excited again. Instadeath if you’re not careful.
They’re saying 100s of these shrines all over the world which is cool, but they look a little dull at the moment I understand they teach you how the runes are applied to puzzles in the early part but there’s an easy way to make them more exciting. Add more bad guys! Would love to see these shrines demonstrate the combat usefulness of these runes as well. Which in that sense the runes seem cool so far, they aren’t just puzzle solving tools.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about the survival aspects at first. But it’s grown on me a little, especially if you need to be hunting for hearts in some of the more difficult areas. Vook mentions the weather damaging Link as well, which is a cool touch, don’t go to the snowy area without warm clothes! It’s like an advancement of the idea of coloured tunics.
Big fan of the added RPG elements, different weapons, shields, bows etc, I really hope things like the hookshot and elemental arrows return and are upgradeable. I temper how much I like the RPG elementa by saying I hope those stronger weapons are actually required as you advance.
Happy to talk about my thoughts with anyone, tentatively excited at the moment for this.
Also, just thought of this now but I want to expand on how dumb Bokoblins are. Why? Because I don’t feel like they deserve to die. They’re too stupid, I feel bad for killing them. Enemies that make you want to kill them are far more effective than dumb comic enemies. The skeleton versions are a bit cooler but again, pretty dumb. Even when the bad treehouse players were playing and they’d miss their attack, the Bokoblin would miss too. It’s not like they do much damage when they hit the target anyway (maybe turned down for the demo?) so why not make them at least a little bit threatening? Heh, sorry I’m just really not a fan of Bokoblins.
I like the elements of survival and I can appreciate a big world, but honestly, I enjoy structure and story over open-world freedom, so I’m a bit worried this is all coming at the cost of a cohesive narrative (even one of the same quality as Zelda titles usually get). It’s like how I love the idea of No Man’s Sky’s galaxy-sized playground; awesome in theory, and probably fun, but I always prioritise a story over game play, so I’d probably play a lot less than I’d like, just because being too free to do what I want doesn’t interest me if it’s not all working toward unlocking the next bit of story.
Hopefully they are working on that, too, as if so it’d probably be my favourite title in the series (well, who am I kidding, unless it’s got time travel OoA’s always going to be my favourite).
To be honest, I respect you opinion and preference on that type of game but I feel you might be in the minority here. How did you feel about Skyward Sword? I imagine you liked it because it was a tight story experience? From my point of view, I really disliked it because it removed the exploration of a world that made Zelda fantastic going back. So I am super keen on doing things my way in this one. It harkens back to the old style of Zelda games.
Having said that, it seems like if you’re not keen on exploring the world, you can just follow the instructions of the voice and it’ll quite literally tell you where to go to advance the main quest.
Also sidenote: I really disliked the people who were playing on the treehouse stream. Why? They were doing boring stuff most of the time! I don’t need you to do camera pans, we already get how awesome the world looks, show me all the things we can do in it. Show me all the cool ways we can be ass kickers! Anyone else feel like this or just me?
Soeroah don’t want to sound mean but you should never prioritise story over game play because it’s a videogame not a movie nor a novel. The main concern to the player of a videogame should be how it plays, having a cohesive narrative should only be considered a bonus not the main reason why you play the game. Expectation to this of course goes to games like ace attorney, thriller games like zero escape and most role-playing games.
That trailer looked amazing. No wonder Nintendo wanted to do an all-in at E3 with Zelda. Jesus.