Jem wrote:
How is this different from any Zelda game ever? The next bit of game in Zelda is always the other side of the map. The key difference with BotW is that you don't have to do it in the order that is dictated, and once you're off the plateau you really don't have to do anything at all - you could go and kill Ganon straight up if you so desired.
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding and that's the actual problem for you? Idk.
I haven't actually played a Zelda game since A Link To The Past on the SNES (which I well and truly maxed out), I've never been massively invested in the series TBH and I've missed some Nintendo consoles over the years as well. (I didn't have a 64, Gamecube or Wii, although I did buy several of the handhelds Nintendo produced during those years.)
Anyway, I'm not criticising the new Zelda game for what it is - (although I stick by my opinion that the controls are awful) - or saying I think it should change (as both Mr Fop and Bamba correctly identified in their rather more thoughtful and polite replies than certain people could muster), all I was trying to articulate is how, for various reasons, these more 'meandering' open world games don't particularly appeal to me anymore.
I want to be doing 'the thing', not travelling across a big map to get to 'the thing'. I entirely appreciate that for many people that travelling, 'the journey' as Mr Fop titled it, is very much part of 'the thing', but for me it just isn't anymore.
But as I also explained, I'm not entirely done with open world
style games, I was fine with God Of War, which is a more tightly constrained and controlled experience than Zelda. Maybe my tolerance level will change again over time and I'll lose patience with that too, I mean, it wasn't supposed to be a confrontational post or anything, I was just saying how I felt about a game and why, that's all.
EDIT - And there's also the point about how a lot of the trappings of these open world games are very familiar to RPG players, as I said, we were kind of doing a lot of this stuff in WoW over ten years ago, and it was far more involved too as you could make stuff for other people and pool your talents and resources for the good of a wider group, or your guild, and so on. I mean, I get that you're supposed to have a real connection to your horse in RDR2 but I was taming and caring for pets, feeding them, stabling them, levelling them up and going on grand adventures with them and improving their abilities over time on my Hunter character in WoW in 2008.