So I finally managed to obtain a Game Boy

Expect many BotW tweets I guess

Thus far by far the hardest aspect of the game is remembering that A/B and X/Y are backwards on Nintendo consoles

This hasn't *traditionally* been a problem since I skipped the Wii u and Wii/GC/N64 all had unique button layouts

Pro Controller's effectively just an Xbox controller designed by psychopaths as far as my muscle memory is concerned though :/

Also the dock is like... alarmingly flimsy? Console just kinda balances on top of the USB-C port and rattles around if you bump it :|

Anyway I died in the first shrine by dropping an enormous iron door on my head so A+ videogame

Spirit Orbs

...

Sporbs

BotW has set a new bar for videogame splash sound effects

it's got that really solid bassy kTHOONK sound where every other game is swishier

Basically stomping a boot into two feet of water sounds different from jumping bodily into a pool and only Zelda has acknowledged that

Can't get a good screenshot but: Rain appears to use some zbuffer trickery to do anime-style splashes

like you know that look where there's like a haze of dots along the edges of surfaces that face upwards

Best screenshot I can get. Capture buttons' super low-res but look at the upper edges of the grass and Link's head

I think it's effectively zbuffer edge-detection but only along one direction, which is then used as a mask for an animated dots texture

It's not particles; it doesn't show up on regular surfaces such as the ground itself; only above edges where the depth gradient is large

Speedruns of this game are gonna be really Souls-ish huh

I never owned a 1, 2, or 3DS, nor any of the preceding Games Boy, so gonna try out this "play videogames in bed" thing I keep hearing about

Update: this is uncomfortable

BotW zoras are surprisingly cute

Avoiding posting screenshots for the sake of ppl who haven't played it yet, but the zora elders are some really cool designs

Also glad to see BotW maintains the Zelda tradition of "absolutely every female character wants to bang Link regardless of age or species"

Whoa this game has volumetric light shafts

Not like the UE3 screenspace zoom-blur trick; they're actually 3D

I don't really know how to calibrate my expectations re: graphical power here. Like it's essentially A Large Phone right?

Like nothing in this engine seems terribly groundbreaking but there's a ton of expensive stuff I'd never expect to see from mobile hardware

Guess I should think of it as roughly 360-equivalent, in keeping with the tradition of portables having roughly the last console gen's power

Obviously a massive over-generalization but as a loose rule of thumb for governing expectations it seems fair

I think that cross-hatching effect is less of an "effect" and actually just some lines painted into the gloss map

which is funny bc they've got a ton of really interesting NPR stuff all over the place and then it's like hey check this out: SPECULAR MAPS

Also sorry for the weird post-screenshot-then-quote pattern. It's the only way I can think of to keep screenshots threaded

Trying to avoid what happened with FFXV where all my tech-art discussions ended up in 200 separate threads so I'll never find them again :/

Unexpected downside to open-world structure: constantly meeting characters that explain the basic premise of the plot over again

BotW has probably the most stable, solid-feeling physics engine I've ever seen in a game?

Heavy stuff just clonks into place; no squishing

Crysis: I touched a barrel and it catapulted through my chest at 300mph

Zelda: Build a tower of physics objects then do platforming on them

They also totally throw out all the "avoid interactions between objects with large differences in mass" advice and it's still flawless

Also mad props for getting instant-response N64-style character movement that still allows walking/climbing on totally dynamic physics objs

Interesting that after around Crysis/Red Faction era, AAA mostly gave up on the HL2 promise of Physics Everywhere instead of pushing further

Really love the implication that Mipha has to intervene from on high every time Link finds some absurd new way to accidentally off himself

Link: *skateboards off cliff, dies*
Mipha: really dude

BotW is fantastic but I've been #gameing for almost 30 years and this is the most trouble I've *ever* had with complexity of controls

Like I'm 20 hours in and still occasionally dying from hitting the wrong input in emergencies

Clutch weapon switches in particular are hell

Like if you've managed to design a system that necessitates shift-inputs, often, on a controller with 16 buttons that's... maybe a red flag?

Also we're all sick of Souls comparisons but it's genuinely weird playing a Zelda game with low-HP enemies that take off 4 hearts in one hit

Mobs of weak enemies are super dangerous unless you pick them off carefully. V unlike typical Zelda combat and v much like That Other Game

Also while we're discussing combat the weapon durability thing has this weird effect whereby you basically carry a finite quantity of damage

Like it never shows you the number but each weapon hits N times before breaking, doing X damage, so inventory represents an exact damage #

I died to a Lynel bc it has more HP than I can physically carry in damage right now

which is a very weird thing to happen in a game

Whole Rito section was, like... bizarrely easy?

No challenge to get to the village, no quest to get access to divine beast, dungeon's p straightforward and boss is all slomo arrows

Did Zoras first; took forever. Did Gerudos second and that boss was crazy hard. Assumed boss difficulty scaled dynamically but I guess not?

I guess if you did Rito stuff early you wouldn't be able to afford the cold-resist armor so managing food resources would make it harder

Check how the snowy terrain intersects the shrine. Some kind of soft depth-compare trick to fade out seams?

Can't screencap it but you can see it shimmer a little bit at grazing angles when the camera moves; def suggests zbuffer precision stuff IMO

Also it doesn't take the emissive param into account. Can see the actual poly intersection on the glowy bits

If I make a game with a day/night cycle I'm making night like 1/3 the length of day bc every game that has one feels like Infinite Darkness

like it becomes legitimately depressing over time

There are exactly two (2) "screaming deer" sound effects that exist and they are each present in every open-world game ever made

If I sell all my gems to pay the fourth great fairy I'm going to immediately find something that needs like 20 rubies or whatever right

Dunno how else I'm supposed to amass 10k rupees though. Being starved for money in a Zelda game is super weird

So BotW's Zelda is basically Princess Bubblegum

this owns

Okay for the amount of effort Dinraal's Scale took I was *really* expecting a better reward than one measly sporb

BotW's version of Kakariko feels transplanted directly from Okami

Speaking vaguely here bc spoilers but: Farming materials to upgrade the Champion's Tunic by far is the least fun I've had in this game

like what a mundane waste of something that initially looked like it was going to be *incredibly* cool

I know it's a Zelda staple but between the strong supporting cast and the addition of voice acting, the silent protagonist thing really jars

Silent protagonist in general feels like a weird vestige of a much older style of game writing. Feels increasingly incongruous as we go on

It works where the "protagonist" is mostly just an avatar of the player's will (Skyrim, Dragon's Dogma, etc), but that's often not the case

Like Link's an actual *character* in BotW. He has relationships with people, and a degree of implied personality/characterization

TBH I've never really liked the idea of protagonist as fantasy self-insert. Emotions work vicariously and stories are better with characters

(in fairness it can work well as a conceit, i.e. Myst framing itself as Literally You Yourself finding the book and exploring the island)

also it leads to the *incredibly weird* pattern of characters like Midna or HL2's Alyx acting increasingly affectionate towards silent char

I mean *I* have a giant crush on Midna so her tsundere personality arc worked as intended in my case but that wouldn't be true for everyone

Just letting the character have their own emotions seems like it'd be a lot more reliable than hoping the player feels them themselves

Saving the actual Zelda theme music for Hyrule Castle was a p cool decision

The anxiety of the weapon durability system does a v good job of making the Master Sword feel as awesome as the games always tell you it is

Finished Zelda

rot13 spoilers:

gurl fubhyq unir uhttrq

Anyway it's extremely well designed and extremely unlike previous Zeldas

Gonna be a while before I can arrive at an Opinion I think

Ending felt a bit underwhelming tbh? At least in comparison to how emotional most of the plot stuff leading up to it was...

I guess that's always kind of a peril of trying to work a plot-based conclusion into a fundamentally nonlinear game structure

Anyway BotW Zelda is by far the cutest Zelda so it's got that going for it

gonna watch the SGDQ run for closure