#oneaday Day 26: Breath of the Wild

Andie bought me Breath of the Wild for Christmas, as I believe I've mentioned already, so I thought I'd fire it up and give it a bit of a shot today.

I came away very impressed with the experience.

I've spent the last couple of years thinking I don't really like open-world games all that much, when in fact a few hours with Breath of the Wild today made it pretty abundantly clear that I don't like Western open-world games all that much.

I've been over this on the podcast a few times, but the main problem I have with them — primarily if they unfold from a first-person perspective — is the sheer feeling of "weight" to movement. And I don't mean this in a "weighty, satisfying combat" sort of way — I mean it's a real chore simply to move around in a lot of cases.

Rockstar games are a prime offender in this. In many open world games, I really enjoy moving around on foot in preference to faster forms of travel — it enables you to seek out interesting viewpoints and perhaps find a few secrets here and there. But in Rockstar games the physics on the player character are so painfully exaggerated — or perhaps they're just "realistic", and that's the problem — that it's just a chore to get around sometimes.

In Breath of the Wild, the controls are delightfully responsive. Push a direction, Link goes that way. Walk into a wall, Link will try to climb it. And he can climb most walls. This gets around one of my main frustrations I had with games like Skyrim and The Witcher 3: knowing the place you want to get to is on the other side of the big-ass mountain that is right in front of you, but not having the ability to actually climb that mountain and get over it, necessitating a long and irritating orbit of the base, hoping to find a pathway. In Breath of the Wild, assuming you've got enough stamina or can find suitable ledges to rest on on the way up, you can simply climb up the cliff face and hop down the other side if necessary.

Although this brings up another interesting point: although I'm early in the game so far, at no point have I felt that is necessary, because simply navigating around the world "as intended" makes so much sense. There are plenty of landmarks and pieces of interesting scenery to navigate by — there's even a "Pro" mode where you remove the minimap and compass if you so desire — and the game's core gimmick, the "Sheikah Slate", allows you to easily set waypoints by line of sight, not just by dropping pins on a map. Delightful.

The game also nicely sidesteps the "map covered in dots" thing that Ubisoft games in particular tend to run afoul of, but is also evident in Rockstar games, titles like Horizon: Zero Dawn and even The Witcher 3. Rather than the game world feeling like a checklist of things to do, in Breath of the Wild you appear to discover things naturally and organically. Yes, there is a "main quest" to follow that takes you to various different places, but in the often long journeys between main story beats, there's plenty to see and do just by going "I wonder what that is" and discovering something interesting.

I also really like the special "Rune" abilities. You unlock several of these quite early on, allowing you to create climbable icy pillars in bodies of water, manipulate metallic objects using metallic fields, freeze something in time for a few seconds and build up kinetic energy ready to release it when its time unfreezes, and summon both spherical and cube-shaped bombs. Between these abilities — and there's a few more still to unlock, I believe — your options for getting around and manipulating the environment are considerably more interesting than in many other games of this type, and they allow for some creative solutions to problems.

In one situation, for example, I was coming up on a group of Bokoblins around a camp fire. Rather than rushing in with one of my rather fragile weapons swinging, I noticed a metallic crate nearby, grabbed it with the magnetic rune, then simply "swept" all the Bokoblins off the top of the cliff they were camping on, removing any need for me to actually fight them conventionally. While it is possible to get into situations like that in Skyrim with some creative use of magic items, in Breath of the Wild you have the capability to set up entertaining incidents like this pretty much from the outset.

I'll provide a more detailed write-up on MoeGamer when I've played a bit more (or, more likely, actually beaten it) — I doubt I'll do a full Cover Game feature on it as it's not exactly a game that "needs" any more attention than it's had to date, but I'm definitely having a real blast with it so far, and I approve of it heartily as my Christmas present.

Now, I better get some sleep. Fingers crossed my friend(s) will be available for podcasting tomorrow… we shall see!