u/Lanky-Background8516

Playing Wind Waker for the first time rn(on original hardware), and I have been exploring the world since the tetra reveal. I also played BotW and beat that game (not 100% completion). And this might be sacrilegious to say, but despite not having beaten the game yet, I’d say Wind Waker has the better designed open world, or at least it has better open world rewards.

BotW is indeed beautiful, with gorgeous landscapes and physics systems that make regions not only have character, but a challenge in survival at times. But one of my biggest issues with the game is that many of the rewards I receive for exploring feel less than satisfying after the first 10 times I receive the same reward, be it a korok seed, a weapon that might be weaker than what I have or will will easily break, a shrine puzzle or some materials.

Whereas with Wind Waker, if I explore around a random island, what I might find could be in the form of a treasure chart, rupees to use for tingle or beedle, a piece of heart, a character who could be useful at some point as a merchant or part of a side quest, or a unique item like an empty bottle, or even a fairy fountain. I feel sufficiently rewarded for exploring different parts of the ocean. It also helps that there aren’t the hundreds of items to collect like in the Wild era games, and they also aren’t locked behind the same activities over and over again.

So while BotW and TotK may have more beautiful and varied open worlds, I find myself more interested in exploring wind waker and feeling like I’m rewarded more for exploring the islands rather than getting an Amber/opal in a enemy camp chest or a korok seed for the umpteenth time. Echoes of Wisdom felt similarly rewarding to Wind Waker with its world design despite being able to go anywhere. If Zelda insists on continuing open world design in their future games, I’d rather them take inspiration from Wind Waker over BotW/Totk. Did anyone else feel this way?

This is my first time playing Wind Waker, so I’m going into this mostly blind apart from some stuff I’ve heard from people or the internet. I just completed the 2nd dungeon (Forbidden Woods) and have returned to windfall island to ask some pirates about Jabun. The first two dungeons were somewhat okay. I liked the atmosphere aesthetics, and the boss fights were really cool and well designed despite being early bosses. The only slight issue I’m experiencing right now is the way you progress through the dungeon. Particularly in the Forbidden Woods, it felt like I was going through a very linear path through the dungeon, which is not helped by the way the dungeon map is designed. Dragonroost Caverns were not as bad as Forbidden woods, but the progression through it still felt somewhat linear. I know it’s a tradition in Zelda 3D games up to a point that the first few dungeons are easier to solve than the later ones (examples like Deku Tree/Dodongo’s cavern in OoT, but these two feel almost too linear at times. Not entirely too easy, but enough for me to notice.

So here is my question, do the dungeons get as close as possible in difficulty to OoT (ex. Forest Temple), or do they use the same design in all of them, a more linear approach to the dungeon puzzle.

I’m just wondering, is the textured foil cover art they are talking about for the first print run like a steelbook, or is it something completely different? If someone could provide examples of what a textured foil cover art packaging looks like for any previous games released by Nintendo or what it would look like in general , I’d appreciate it.

So when watching the Avatar Aang movie, I noticed that there were similarities to the SH trailer, particularly a bit of music that matches with the music used for Avatar Sonam. And the Eternal Storm feels similar to the storm in the SH trailer. Could it just be convenient that they used similar visual and sound motifs for these two projects since they released so close together, or could these two works be related to each other in more direct ways? If the latter, what connections do you guys think could tie Pavi and her world to the Aang movie? Could the events of the movie have direct effects on the cataclysm that destroyed the world in Korra’s time, it was just delayed by decades? Or maybe some other connection is there?

So this is a question for those of you who played AC2 when it first came out. And I mean within the first few months of its release. I played the Xbox 360 version many years ago and I remember in the spot where the dlc was supposed to be, the Battle of Forli/Bonfire of the Vanities, there was a dialogue from the modern day group (Shawn/Rebecca/Lucy/Desmond) while in the animus that said these sequence files were corrupted, and that was the canonical explanation given if you didn’t have the dlc and suddenly skipped to the last sequence. But I’m curious, for those who played the game before the dlc was ever announced, if that dialogue was still there in the original launch of the game, or if it was added in later via patch download to explain why players suddenly skipped two whole sequences?

So this is a question for those of you who played AC2 when it first came out. And I mean within the first few months of its release. I played the Xbox 360 version many years ago and I remember in the spot where the dlc was supposed to be, the Battle of Forli/Bonfire of the Vanities, there was a dialogue from the modern day group (Shawn/Rebecca/Lucy/Desmond) while in the animus that said these sequence files were corrupted, and that was the canonical explanation given if you didn’t have the dlc and suddenly skipped to the last sequence. But I’m curious, for those who played the game before the dlc was ever announced, if that dialogue was still there in the original launch of the game, or if it was added in later via patch download to explain why players suddenly skipped two whole sequences?

So, after slowing down the footage in the dlc trailer, it looks like at least two new weapons we are getting include a giant hammer and a giant axe, which are called a otsuchi and a masakari respectively. I also noticed a close up shot of an outfit before those weapons appeared and it looks like they have a mask that appears to resemble a wolf, so maybe this is a new mythic tale outfit or a new enemy type? Any thoughts?

As someone who prefers physical games, I was really disappointed that Sony made their announcement on discontinuing physical games in 2028. Given how Guerilla is currently working on Hunters Gathering, is it too much to hope that Horizon 3 could be released before Sony stops making physical games? I really don’t want to buy any more PS games if I can’t have a physical copy, it’s why I bought the launch day physical copy of Ghost of Yotei instead of the collector’s edition bc the latter didn’t have a physical disc, only a download code. And especially with Sony no longer allowing future first party titles to have a delayed release on Steam doesn’t help either.

As much fun as reading some otome isekai can be, I’m looking for something where the FML preferably has no blue blood lineage, or knowledge of the future to basically cheat the story in her favor. She has to rely on her own skills/abilities to rise higher in society. I’m even okay if said MC has to use questionable methods to rise higher in the story. Any ones I should look at?

Hey, I recently started playing Octopath, and it’s completely sucked me in. It’s such a fun and beautiful game with amazing characters, and I haven’t even started chapter 2 for most of the character stories. I just tarted it this week and have about 24 hours put into it so far and I’m still enthralled. When I finish it, I’ll definitely be playing Octopath 0 and 2. Which makes me ask, is there any chance of an octopath 3 in the future from Square Enix? I can see this becoming a main franchise for them like Dragon Quest due to how beautiful and fun it is, with so many charming characters so far in my play through. Any hint of rumors that they will be continuing this series or are possibly working on another game in this franchise?

Plz, hear me out real quick, I understand this is a bit of a hot take but bear with me. I’ve been playing Legends ZA recently, and while it’s more fast paced than traditional turn based combat, I just didn’t jive with it as much. Now I know there are fans that like this new combat system and all the power to you, it’s just not for me.

So then I tried turning on my old DS and GBA games and tried understanding what it was that made them feel more memorable for me. And that’s when I replayed Emerald’s battle frontier and I realized why I preferred the old turn based combat system, and why both the old and new turn based games have this fundamental problem.

It’s not that the turn based battle mechanics are too easy, at least for me, it’s that the rest of the main story in most of the games doesn’t fully utilize the mechanics in the way the battle frontier does. When playing through the main story of older and newer games, I rarely had to consider elements of the battle system beyond things like level, type matchups, stat buffs/debuffs or certain abilities. If I had a particular problem with a gym leader or main story fight, I could just overlevel my Pokemon and brute force my way through it. It wasn’t until the battle frontier that I had to deeply consider things like abilities, held items/berries, EV/IV’s, status conditions or even special moves like skill swap or trick room.

Pokémon’s turn based system has had this level of complexity and nuance since at least generation 3, the rest of the game’s solo campaign just didn’t evolve along with it. I think a possible way to remedy this is to treat more trainer battles, and particularly main story battles like puzzle boxes the players have to solve. And these puzzles get progressively harder as the story moves on. These “puzzle box” fights would have trainers using specific kinds of strategy that the player either has to learn or even counter, whether it’s a team that is focused on using weather effects, a team that tries to do a battle of attrition with status effects and a wall, a team that maybe uses baton pass to buff a sweeper, or a team that incorporates abilities and or held items to affect the battle.

Now not all trainer battles on regular routes or in special areas have to be like this, but maybe have a percentage of regular trainer battles have a specific team strategy/composition so that players have to figure out how to beat them, and the amount of these types of battles and their difficulty increases throughout the adventure. Gym Leaders could work as checkpoints for the players puzzle solving skills, where maybe in the road leading up to each gym certain trainer battles utilize the same tactics but on an easier scale, and rival/evil team battles do something similar but with more diverse teams. And the Elite 4/Champion would work as a final test for the players becoming intimately familiar with the battle mechanics since they’ve been learning it for the whole game. Maybe even the legendary Pokemon battles could work in a similar way.

All this to say, I understand that some fans think the battle system is too easy, but I believe the fundamental issue isn’t with the core system, it’s with the solo campaign that is built around it. I truly think that if the main story fully integrated the hidden complexity of the battle system with its progression, the core gameplay loop would hit a new level.

What do people think about future games adopting a level scaling feature mixed with a level cap for story checkpoints (mainly gyms but maybe major story beats too)? For example, perhaps between gyms there is a level cap so that your team's max levels are capped to the strongest pokemon on the gym leader's team? And further levels are unlocked once you obtain the badge. And in place of exp, pokemon at the max level cap instead earn extra EV or something so players can still use them if they want to?

And between gyms, wild pokemon and regular trainer battles are scaled to the level that is equal to the average of your team's levels? With story battles being at a set level close to your current level cap. And to prevent players from abusing that system to have easier fights, the average level that is calculated is only taken from team members that collectively have levels within a certain range and must include the highest level pokemon on the team. So for instance, if a player has a team that has the range of levels being (1, 13, 33, 37, 35), it would calculate the level of the wild pokemon/regular trainer encounter from the players pokemon that are level 33, 35 and 37 and assign the opponents level to be averaged from those last three levels?

Is this system too convoluted or complex to adequately input? I think this could be an idea to give the player a challenge from an exp level standpoint but also not be too daunting for newer fans to the series. So you can have battles that provide an adequate challenge for both sides of the fence. Any thoughts on whether this would be a good idea, and what could be useful things to adjust to make it possibly better?

At lot of my first Pokemon games were from Gens 1-5, and it is those games that started my love for metroidvania style world design. I love seeing something I can’t access yet and coming back to it to find whatever secrets lay behind the obstacle, especially if it’s good, or even finding a pathway to an earlier section of the game like Diglett tunnel or exploring mount coronet in gen 4. However, in a lot of retrospectives of the older games, and especially in gen 4, I see a lot of fans who didn’t like how HM’s were utilized, especially bc you often had to change out a party member to accommodate for certain obstacles. And particularly a good number of them praise later titles like Sun and Moon for the ride mechanic that removed HM’s, which honestly I’m not as big a fan of as they don’t feel as engaging as the old system did, especially when you had to solve puzzles in areas like the Seafoam lslands or make your way through gauntlets with moves like Flash to light your way. HM moves weren’t perfect, but I’m not sure if they’re as bad as some fans describe. If I had one criticism for HM moves, it’s that some like Flash, Cut or Defog felt like they didn’t have as good battle utility compared to the more OP ones like Fly or Surf. So I’m just trying to understand what about HM’s in the old games were so terrible to some fans, as I’d honestly prefer HM’s to S/M’s ride Pokemon or Sw/Sh bike upgrades.

This is more to do with the Jar that contains the hallucinogenic drug that poisons the City of Brass’s water. So I get why it’s dangerous in anyone’s hands, but why would Marlowe and her colleagues want it, especially bc they already have a drug that makes people do what they want for a time? Especially bc the drug in the jar makes people less predictable and more violent while under its influence. Did they just not know what it did, or do they consider it a superior version to what they use? Or was there something I missed?