The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild releases March 3 and we’re excited enough to pre-order. That being said, it’s healthy to go into any new experience with a degree of skepticism. Having seen so little of the game, here are five lingering concerns about Link’s next quest.
1) Performance Dips: Breath Of The Wild demos have always suffered from imperfect performance across Wii U and Switch, so we hope those issues don’t have a drastic impact on the finished product. The Wii U E3 build was choppy in high-action sequences, where the Switch seemed to struggle most with grass effects in TV mode.
Those problems have never been obvious enough to hurt the gameplay in a significant way, but, because so much of our time has been spent on the Great Plateau, there’s no way of truly knowing how other environments will respond to hardware strain. Nintendo historically releases polished games, however, so we’re staying optimistic.
2) Empty Worlds: Something that’s been a bit odd about Breath Of The Wild since its E3 reveal is how empty its open-world environments look. Sure, there are populated villages and stables to explore, but on the whole, the Great Plateau is full of open space. Nintendo has claimed NPCs were removed from demos to conceal spoilers, but is that just a PR-friendly white lie to bury its flaws?
The Breath Of The Wild map doesn’t need to have life at every turn, but games have matured from the days of being totally amazed by something as empty as Hyrule Field. That aesthetic may be something Nintendo and Zelda purists enjoy, but 2017’s game is all about offering change and modernizing the franchise. We hope this world is as active as it is big.
3) That Last-Gen Feel: Breath Of The Wild can ostensively be called a last-gen game because it’s releasing on Wii U and the fairly limited Switch hardware. With that in mind, we don’t want this game to feel like it’s still trying to play catch up with modern RPGs. It appears lots of mechanic and system cues are being adopted from Skyrim, but Skyrim is nearly five years old. Will its menus feel clunky? Will equipment maintence get tiring?
Link’s big adventure is releasing just days after Horizon: Zero Dawn, a new open-world RPG with a blend of concepts we’ve never seen before. Comparisons will almost certainly be made. Will Zelda feel inferior to such a recent take on the same genre?
4) Wonky Controls: A lot has been said about this game over the past nine months, but one issue many journalists seem to repeat is that Breath Of The Wild’s control scheme feels significantly more complex, and possibly a little odd, compared to what you might be used to. For example, Link’s new jump button is mapped to X at the top of the control pad, while Sprint is B, where something like jump would intuitively be.
Any new control scheme has a learning curve that can be overcome. Might this unique setup with so many moving parts, from bows to Sheikah Slates, be too weird to manage?
5) Will Its Story Flow Well? One of the greatest challenges for any open-world game is to craft a story that’s both engaging and able to respond to the player’s every whim. Because games in this mold can be completed in any number of ways, it’s hard to maintain a consistent plot. Having never really dealt with this issue before, we’re curious to see how Nintendo responds.
From this author’s perspective, games like The Witcher 3 managed to build a world so rich that its main narrative almost felt seamless when hopping between sidequests. For Fallout 4, the implementation was entertaining but a bit dated and clunky. Where will Breath Of The Wild fall ?
The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild comes to Nintendo Switch and Wii U on March 3.
Do you think any of these issues will drag down Breath Of The Wild? Will some be a small enough deterrent to never truly matter? Tell us in the comments section!
