@Sphensen said:
because this is going to be the best Zelda to date
We hear this every time a new Zelda game comes out, and then half the fandom always ends up complaining a year later about what a huge step backwards it was for the franchise compared to the previous game.
To a degree I agree with the TC. People always get excited about new Zelda games because they have so many unmet hopes and dreams about what the franchise could be, and whenever Nintendo announces a new game everyone is secretly hoping that "this one will be the one that finally makes the series amazing again." Compared to other modern games though, Skyward Sword was lacking, and Twilight Princess came out after I had already played Oblivion, and Oblivion made Twilight Princess feel empty and primitive by comparison. The new Zelda is going to be Nintendo's first open-world Zelda game, which is a bold step forward for the series, but at the same time it probably should have happened last gen, but it couldn't due to the Wii's outdated hardware not being up for the task.
Nintendo seems to have an issue of constantly being behind the curve, and I know I will be chastised for saying this, but this series is getting close to 30 years old and they still haven't added something as basic as voice acting. And don't give me the "it would be like the CDi games all over again", because that's bollocks. If Link talking is a dealbreaker, there are plenty of voice acted games that have silent protagonists, so I will not even entertain the idea that the two things are somehow mutually exclusive. Kid Icarus Uprising actually had voice overs and they were perfectly decent. In 2014 we are well past voice overs being this scary new untested thing that is too dangerous to use in a beloved franchise like Zelda.
On a more relevant note to what was actually in Nintendo's presentation though, I am worried that we are going to end up with another Twilight Princess in that I am not sure if Nintendo really knows how to fill a big open world with enough content to keep players happy. Other devs have been doing open world games long enough that they've gotten this aspect down to a science, but the last "traditional" console Zelda game Nintendo made (Twilight Princess), despite being a game confined by doors and invisible walls still was a very large world with relatively little content. Hyrule felt like a hub connecting the different areas, and that hub just happened to be extremely big. With the new game being open-world, that world is going to be even bigger, and I am not confident that Nintendo is up to the challenge of being able to find enough content to fill it with.
I know I may sound like I'm being cranky and ungrateful, but with all of the deafening excitement the internet at large has been expressing about this game, I feel the need to temper it with some realistic expectations. This series has not been on the cutting edge for a fair while now, and just because it's Zelda does not mean that we should hold it to a lower standard than the other games we play.
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