The Press Box - Ep. 277: ‘Achievement Oriented’ - 'The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild' and the Nintendo Switch

Episode Date: March 10, 2017

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion bring on Kotaku news editor (and author of the forthcoming book 'Blood, Sweat, and Pixels') Jason Schreier to discuss reviewing great games (1:00), how 'Breath of the Wild' departs from and improves upon previous 'Zelda' installments (8:30), what lessons developers can take from the game's open-ended structure (34:00), and the Switch's post-launch outlook (40:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From legendary game designer John Van Canigam, creator of the Heroes of Might and Magic series, comes Creature Quest, an adventurous RPG that brings a new level of depth and strategy to mobile games. It's available on the app store, Google Play, and at Amazon, so download Creature Quest for free today and be a part of the best turn-based collectible RPG. Your quest for creatures is paved with adventure, so quest on. Oh, and welcome to Achievement-oriented Ringer's official video game podcast. My name is Ben Lindberg, and I'm a staff writer for the ringer.com. and on the other line huddled in his Brooklyn apartment without a Nintendo Switch where he's feeling the fomo and trying to convince himself desperately that Zelda isn't actually that good. It's my colleague, Jason Concepcion. Zelda is bad.

It's an original take. Yeah, I haven't heard that one's saying that. No one's saying that. I'm here. I'm going to say that. Zelda's bad. No one is asking these questions. All right. So thanks to everyone who has followed us on our new feed at Achievement Oriented.

If you're not already subscribed, you should be. Thanks to those of you who have left ratings and reviews and followed us on Twitter at the Watchpod. We have a lot to talk about. I know that you've been enjoying Horizon Zero Don even more than you were when we discussed it last week. And you've got Ghost Recon takes. So we might have to do multiple episodes next week.

A lot of people we want to talk to. But we are going to devote this entire episode to the legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild. and to the Nintendo Switch. So are you ready to talk about a game that you sadly haven't played? I've never been more ready. This game's trash. All right.

So we are joined now by Kotaku News Editor Jason Schreier, who has been playing or writing about or talking about Zelda for, what, a solid two or three weeks at this point? Are you tired of talking about Zelda yet? I don't think I'll ever get tired of talking about Zelda. this might be the most talkable game. I've played in a long time because there's so many stories you can tell from there and anecdotes that everyone has from their own adventures in Breath of the Wild. It's pretty cool.

Yeah. So you wrote a book, which is coming out later this year. It's called Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, the triumphant, turbulent stories behind how video games are made. People can pre-order it now. I'm sure we'll talk to you about it when it gets closer to release. but it's about video game development. So we're going to focus, I think, on what people can learn from the legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, what it does differently or better. But before we get to that point, and we'll probably talk a bit about the Switch, too, but I wanted to ask, when you're reviewing a game like Zelda or Final Fantasy 15, for instance, it's a game in a storied franchise that you've been playing.

We've all been playing since we were kids. It's been a constant in our lives. You know coming into it that it's probably going to be good, at least with Zelda, because it has just about always been good. How do you approach the review? Are you trying to sort of strip out all of the franchise history and the baggage or benefit that goes with that? Are you trying to review it for someone who has never played a Zelda game before? Because it's a different experience, right? If you've been playing Zelda your whole life, every little audio cue or item,

or person you meet has extra resonance because you remember all of the other Zelda games you've played and you have that nostalgia factor, which really does enhance the game, but not everyone is coming to it with that, of course. So how do you approach that? That's an interesting question. So with Final Fantasy, I was very explicit in my review.

I actually included a bunch of anecdotes from like my own personal history playing Final Fantasy games before that. And I mean, I don't think there's any way for me to strip out my personal experiences and try to be, quote, unquote, objective because I don't really think there is such thing as objectivity, especially when it comes to game reviews, which is just an inherently subjective thing. So anytime I approach reviewing a game, I'm always kind of looking at it through my own biases and my own personal video game history and my own preferences. And those preferences are all influenced by games I played in the past, including old Final Fantasy games and Zelda games. Zelda specifically is a really interesting one because in many ways it makes you feel like those old Zelda games

were just limiting and not worse but more restrictive and one of the kind of the thesis of the review that I wrote of Breath of the Wild is that those old Zelda games they were very much about telling you what you can't do so you see a body of water and oh no you can't go swimming until you find the flippers

they'll let you go there or you see a crack in a wall somewhere and you know you can't open it until you find the bombs that will let you blow it up. And in many ways, that was a cool thing because it made you feel like the more progress you were making, the more of the world you could see and explore and the more things you could do. But it also feels kind of obsolete now, now that after playing Breath of the Wild, which is very much a game that tells you, hey, you can do everything. It's a game that says yes to everything you want to do. So you want to go swimming. Oh, yeah, go swimming. You don't need to wait to get flippers before you do that. You want to blow up some walls. You might not be able to dive.

No, that's true. You can't actually go underwater in this game, which is interesting. I think it might be one of the first Zelda games that doesn't let you go underwater. So yeah, so it's the type of game where it's just like you see a wall, and instead of trying to figure out how to get around that wall, you just climb over it, which is incredible. And it's such a key piece of design ethos for this game. And so I don't think, I don't know, I feel like I would actually be worse at reviewing it

if I couldn't bring in all of the history I have with Zelda and just memories I have of LinkedIn, the past and the original Zelda and Arkrain of Time and so on and so on because those games so clearly influenced this game and therefore coming into it as a reviewer, those games can influence my opinions on this game because I can see the evolution of this series over time and how it all kind of culminated in this game. So I think that there's there in terms of the writing of the review and constructing it and presenting it for people, there are definitely, I have to be careful about approaching it so it doesn't seem like a total fanboy gushing of like, oh my God, I love the heart containers in Zelda, so I'm going to be obsessed of this game. But I don't think

that it would be effective for readers. Like, I think it would be a disservice if I tried to separate my previous Zelda history from the review, because that makes it better. As a person who did not pre-order does not have a Switch played Zelda for a short period of time at the Nintendo event here in New York City and regrets all those experiences that led me to say this sentence, including the decision not to pre-order, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What are some of the really terrible things about Zelda's to make me feel better about the game? Well, so if you play it, you might not be able to play other games because that just feels so bad compared to it.

No, I don't know. I got a ghost recon review code while I was playing Zelda, and I was just like, no, This is going to have to wait. Even, it's funny. So I was just listening to you guys talk about Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a fantastic game. Great game. And revisiting it after playing Zelda, it's like, oh, this game is really pretty. It does a lot of things really well.

But Zelda is just so, like, transcend it. It just feels like such a special game, a game that. Sorry, sorry, Jason. Here's actually one thing that will make you feel better is that my Switch, I am one of the many people suffering from the left joycon like connection issues. So, yeah. Good, good. I do have the pro controller, which is really good.

Is the dock scratching your screen as well? Any dead pixels? Yeah, no, no dead pixels, no dock scratching. But I can't use the left joicon to play it because like if there's a water glass in front of my joycon, it just, but I'm using the pro controller, which is actually even better and makes the game even better. So really there's no downside here. Sorry, it's just perfect in everywhere.

There is a lot of crafting and cooking, which, you don't like, Jason. We can get into whether that works in a second. But one of the reasons I asked about considering the history of the franchise when you're reviewing this game or playing it is that on the one hand, we have to hold any Zelda game to an almost impossibly high standard because if it's not the best game on that console or one of the best games in that generation, it's a disappointment, basically, just because so many of the past Zelda games have made it to that mark.

On the other hand, I feel like we almost can grade this game on a curve just because Zelda has been slow to change. And so any hint of newness is almost amplified by the fact that it's coming from this series with almost 20 installments that have largely followed the same formula. So when I'm playing Breath of the Wild, there's actual speaking in this game. There are characters who talk. And in any other game, that would be, well, yeah, of course. characters talk, there's voice acting. In Breath of the Wild, it's amazing. I'm taking aback. People are actually speaking just because Zelda and Nintendo have so long held to that standard of text-based communication or strange little exclamations while reading text. And so

that feels groundbreaking, which it wouldn't in any other game. And I wonder whether there's any of that with the reception to this game. And I absolutely love it. But are we making too much much of how few limitations there are just because we are contrasting it in our minds with Twilight Princess or whatever, some game that was very linear and formulaic. And because it's Zelda and it's open world and lets you explore, it feels that much less restrictive? I don't think so because I don't think there are any games that do what this Zelda game does in that.

So there are a lot of games that let you explore, but very few of them let you explore with no limitations to the point where you see a mountain. And instead of being like, okay, how am I going to get up this mountain? You're just like, oh, I aren't just going to jump on it and start climbing. In game designery, like high-level terms, people always use the word verbs to describe what you can do in a game, right? So the gameplay actions that you could do. Often the verb of a game is shooting.

You just shoot people on the head. And that's the most popular verb in yimmy. But in this game, it's like there's this verb of climbing. There's this verb of your ruin abilities using the magnet and freezing objects. and building pillars out of water. And then there's a verb of power gliding where you can just kind of use your hang glider to float down anywhere.

And then all combined, all these combined, in addition to what the directors of this game call a chemistry set, which is where they have all these effects like fire and lightning and water, and they all have actual physical attributes to the point where if you throw a metal object at a monster in a storm,

and you guys should try this. Well, not you, Jason, sorry, but Ben, you should try this. And if it's storming out and there's lightning striking, you'll see sparks come out of your metal objects. And then if you throw one of them at monsters, lightning will strike the metal object and then kill all the monsters around it. So this kind of sandboxy combination of things, I haven't seen it done in any other video game. I guess Far Cry 2 might be closest. Minecraft has some elements of this, but it's really just like, I don't know. This game does

things not only, I mean, I don't think people are really complimenting and that much for the voice acting and for the stuff that is just modern game, the type of things you would expect from a modern game, I think it's more about the things that this Zelda game does that nothing else has done. I mean, I can't think of any games where I'm just like, I'm exploring, and

I see something in the distance, and I go there and instead of like finding another cave full of Skyrim zombies, I know that I am going to find something interesting or a cool puzzle or like something, some cool chemistry set thing that I can do that will feel rewarding in a way,

that even the best open world games haven't done yet. It almost takes that Ubisoft collectathon thing that I know you guys were talking about with Horizon Zero Dawn and kind of makes it even better because you're always just finding these interesting, rewarding, satisfying puzzles that just feels so much different and so much better than any Ubisoft Open World game I've ever played. Yeah, really, there's never a sense that you are killing time in this game

or that you are, when you're traveling from place to place, It really, I mean, it's a cliche, but it really is sort of about the journey because you never know what is going to be over the next till. There's always some little puzzle you encounter along the way or some sort of miniboss style encounter or just really pretty geography or weather or something is always happening. And this map is gigantic, but it still feels very dense and populated and designed, which I guess is something you can do if you're. Nintendo and you have a team of very experienced people working on a game for years. I don't know to what extent other companies can emulate this and say, let's make a world that is as rich as Zelda's because it really does stand out in that respect. Yeah, it's one of the rare games where I finished reviewing it.

And I think I put something like 60 or 70 hours in the game in total. And I just don't want to keep going back to it because there's still entire chunks of the map that I haven't explored. and I feel like they're going to be cool things that I will discover there. Like, I won't spoil things because part of the fun is discovering it, but I found this island in the southeast corner of the map and landed on it. And some crazy things happened, like something that I totally did not expect to happen, and just change the gameplay for that island, which is really cool.

And the fact that I'm still discovering things like this, even after beating the entire game, is just mind-boggling. And there's still two entire chunks of the map that I haven't even, unlocked yet, let alone started wandering around. It's pretty wild. And so you guys were talking last week about how you want games to be shorter. And

this game is like, I'm totally with you there. I'm also playing persona 5, which is another 200-hour game. And yeah, I'm totally with you guys and like wanting experiences that aren't going to suck up my entire life. But with the Zelda game, this is one of the very few games where it feels

like it justifies the size and it justifies the size of the open world and it justifies the fact that you will spend 100 hours in this game, if not more, and you can just keep finding new stuff. It's not like you're spending all this time just trying to catch every single coraxeat or whatever that you can find in the world. You're actually just continually discovering new things, which is incredible. It's an incredible achievement. Could you talk a little bit about just like the recent evolution of Zelda that has brought us to this place and what it is about Breath of the Wild that's really such a leap from previous titles of the franchise?

So have you guys played, I assume you guys have played Skyward Sword? Yes. And then have you guys played Link Between Worlds? I did not. Okay, so this is an interesting kind of evolution of Zelda, right? So Skyward Sword came out in 2011, I want to say, or 2010? One of those two. And that was a Wii game.

And that was a very linear, well, linear in the sense that it kind of funneled you along one path. There were parts where you could explore, but it was a very traditional Zelda game. It put a lot of focus on the motion controls. and the items you could get, and it was this kind of the style that they've been doing since Okary and of Time, since Link to the past, since even the original Zelda in some way,

where every dungeon has an item, and you get that item, and then it lets you progress more through the dungeon and explore different parts of the world, etc., etc. And that game got panned a little bit because the tutorial took two hours. And also, you had fee or phi, whatever it is, the spirit that lived in your sword,

and kept popping out and giving you hints and stuff and telling you not to do things. Man, she was really annoying. So that game got some... Zelda game that got panned as a 93 on Metacritic. Yeah, it's funny. I think Zelda, well, Zelda games tend to get an inflated review score. But yeah, I mean, panned by players in the years since then.

I mean, I remember Dragon H-2 came out and it got tens all over the place. And then people are like, wait a minute, this game is not very great. But yeah, so after Skyward Sword, Aegeanuma, who was the producer of the Zelda series and kind of oversees it in general, he was saying, he was talking about how he was wants to experiment with non-linear gameplay. And then they release Link Between Worlds, which is a successor to link to the past, and it's set in the same world, except it has a totally different structure. So with Link Between Worlds, the way it works is there's an item shop in the middle of the map,

and you can rent or buy any item at any time you want from there. So each dungeon is assigned to a specific item. So there's the Bomb Dungeon, and then there's the Fire Rod Dungeon, etc., etc. But you have to get it from that shop before going into the dungeon, in the first place. So you go to the dungeon and you know you're going to need the bombs. And so every puzzle in that dungeon requires the bombs. And it was kind of a clever way of giving you a Zelda game where you could do the dungeons in any order because it doesn't, all you have to do is go get that item from the shop and then go to the dungeon. But the downside

is that it made the dungeons a little too easy because you go into the bomb dungeon and you know that the only way you're going to be able to solve things is with the bombs. So that was a great game, but it was also kind of flawed in some interesting ways. But it was really experimental like cool way of trying out nonlinear Zelda gameplay. And then you can see a lot of the influence of that in Breath of the Wild because with Breath of the Wild, they took a similar sort of approach and then they wanted to be able to do things in any order. But instead of assigning one item to each dungeon,

they just front-loaded all the items to you right away. So you get the four main ruin abilities that you need to solve every puzzle in the game before you leave the first island, the Great Plateau. So once you do that, you can just explore in any direction. that. Yeah, you're ready a clip. It's cool. Yeah, like Horizon Zero Dawn does that kind of where they give you like the better

perk unlocks. I'm just going to talk about a game that I've played. You want to feel included. Like some of the better skill tree unlocks, like some slow motion stuff for combat, etc. You don't have to wait like, you know, 40 hours into the game to unlock. So I'm just, I'm a fan of games that give you stuff up front. Yeah, which I'm sure is even more difficult from a design perspective, right?

because you'd think maybe that it would be harder when you're incorporating more items and you have more types of puzzles, but probably it's easier, right? Because you have a different dungeon for every item and you can craft puzzles around that item, whereas in Breath of the Wild, you get these main four things and you can upgrade them as you go and you gain powers here and there. But for the most part, you can go in any order and do any puzzle at any time that you want with these same basic abilities. and it's even more impressive that they manage to keep finding new ways to be devious, basically, even though they're not really introducing new core elements. Yeah, it's really interesting because they somehow managed to never make it feel like it's too easy. I think that's because the difficulty is just kind of ramped up from the beginning. It's a hard to Zelda game.

So it never feels like you've just gotten too powerful and can steamroll everything, and it never feels like you're stuck in a situation where you don't have the tools to solve a puzzle. because you haven't gone to that dungeon yet and you haven't gotten that item yet. It's just a very clever way of approaching that. And I actually spoke to the directors last week at GDC and one of the things they told me was that they were experimenting with all sorts of things,

experimenting with other abilities, like the hookshot. And one of the things they said they experimented with was the link between world style approach of like putting the symbol of the item you need on each dungeon. So for example, if you got off the plateau and you found one dungeon and it said, you need this item, You might have to go somewhere else and get that item.

But they said it kind of was contrary to the spirit of this game, which is they want you to be able to do anything you want, which is, man, such a crazy concept because it's like, if you're a game designer and you're like, all right, I want to make a game where people can do anything they want, that's such a tough task. It's such a ridiculous goal. But like somehow they pulled it off.

It's really like, I don't know. I feel like I'm gushing so much about this game. Thanks a lot. Yeah, Jason, I hope that. And this conference, I don't know if there's still switches available in New York. No, they're not. And I've been checking while we're doing this podcast. We have an extra one in our office, but you can't have it.

I actually beg the Nintendo PR lady for like any kind of inside information. She's like, didn't answer my email. Oh, no. I'm surprised they haven't sent you guys like a review unit or something. Yeah, we're not important. We're not. So maybe I can lend you mine when I'm finished with Zelda because I don't know that I'll be playing Switch for a while after that. but we can talk about that in a minute too.

But were there any moments you mentioned a puzzle that impressed you in the beginning of your review? And you mentioned a couple moments since we've been talking. But was there something early on or at any point, just a little moment, I guess we don't have to spoil anything, although it's Zelda, you fight Gannon and save the princess. So, spoilers. But maybe the first time you played it was there one little moment that set this apart? I'm trying to think. I think the first time I got to a dungeon, one of the real dungeons, was really mind-blowing for me. And sorry in advance. I mean, this is kind of spoilery. So apologies in advance if you haven't played the game. But so the way the dungeons work is that they're just totally different from any other sort of Zelda dungeon. Like a traditional Zelda dungeon is you get in and there are a bunch of puzzles and a bunch of lock doors and you have to go find keys and you have to go kind of progress through the dungeon in a somewhat linear fashion. and some of the dungeons in Zelda have been incredible, and they're just incredibly well-designed

and make you feel super smart after you beat them. But these engines are totally different. These dungeons, the way these work, all four of them are inside of these giant mechanical animals, and you go in, and the way it works is you have to kind of find a bunch of terminals throughout each dungeon, and to do so, you have to solve puzzles using your abilities, but also by kind of moving the dungeon around,

rotating it using specific points and each dungeon functions differently but you have to really play with gravity and physics in some really interesting ways and the first time I did that was the Zora dungeon and it's this giant elephant and you have to move its trunk

and I won't say much more but yeah it was pretty mind-blowing in some cool ways because I don't I wasn't even sure upon playing Breath of the Wild like starting it I wasn't even sure if there were going to be any dungeons like how how do you do a dungeon when there no items the way that you would get in previous audience.

But yeah, this was pretty cool to see. And they're all self-contained. So you can beat them all in any order from the get-go with the abilities that you get from the plateau. And if there's anything that's been divisive about this game, there isn't really. But to the extent that there is, maybe it's the... I think this game is bad. What's divisive is that Jason doesn't have it.

But the durability system, I think, at least when people, hear about it. They don't like the idea of it, which was a concern of mine when I heard that all the weapons were going to break and you were constantly going to have to be replacing them. That sounded annoying to me. I don't know. I like my weapons to just be weapons that I can use and worry about what I'm killing with them, but not about the weapons breaking. And everything breaks in Zelda, even the really high-level weapons break. and I guess there are positives to that. You get to try out a bunch of different weapons

and you sort of use whatever you come across. The negatives are that when you get a really cool one, personally, I hoard it. I guess you could have the opposite reaction, which is that every weapon breaks, so you might as well just use it when you get it. But I end up getting these cool weapons and then not wanting to use them because I want to preserve them.

Did you appreciate that addition to the game? Yeah, I don't know. I thought I wouldn't like it at first, But as time went on, as I played the game, I didn't really care that much because you can find so many weapons everywhere. And it just, I mean, there are a lot of cool weapons. If you were just hoarding every single cool weapon you found, you would just run out of inventory space immediately. Because if you go in through, if you do a bunch of the shrines that are scattered all throughout the world, you can, there are chests in the shrines, normal chests in the shrines, and then also hidden chests in the shrines, which often contain really cool weapons. And so there's just so much of that stuff that it's just I never really felt like, oh, no, I just broke this cool weapon because I felt like there's always going to be another cool weapon just over the horizon, just over that mountain, or just in that puzzle shine.

So it never really bothered me. As much as I thought it might. Yeah. And there's a lot of cooking. You collect items wherever you go. There are things growing all over the landscape. And you can basically throw everything into a pot and make it into something. something else. And for a lot of the time, I've been playing Zelda, I just didn't do any of that.

I'm terrible at cooking at real life and it just kind of carried over into the game world. And that was okay. Like, I died a lot, but I think you have to die a lot in this game. You can get by without really cooking and crafting and worrying about recipes. But if you do, I guess it adds a new level of strategy and gives you more to do while you're wondering around the world. So you didn't cook at all? Implemented well. Not really. No.

Wow. I mean, I collected things so that I could get more heart containers, but I didn't really worry all that much about buffing my stats before a fight or whatever. So, Ben, so how did you get past the freezing cold mountain at the beginning in the plateau? I just, I carried a torch. That's so funny. So, okay, so we were trading stories about that section of the game at Kataku. And so, like, one person was like, oh, I carried the torch.

Another person was like, oh, I found this raft that let me circumnavigate the area. And I was like, oh, dudes, there are like these spicy peppers right in front of the entrance. And you can just cook them and take the, eat the peppers. And then bam, you're like frostproof for 10 minutes or something. So it's funny that you can just get around. And I haven't even thought about that. Like, I'm sure you can beat the entire game without cooking once, even though it's such a pivotal part of the game. All right.

We have many more questions about Zelda and Switch. Let's take a very quick break, and we will be back with more Breath of the Wild. All this month, we're asking you to tell a friend about a podcast that'll love. Right now, think of a friend, your mom, anyone you care about. What podcasts would they really love? Maybe it's achievement-oriented, but not necessarily. Got it? Now do it. Tell them about it in real life or on social media.

And if they don't know how to subscribe to podcasts, show them how. Tell us what you recommended with the hashtag Tripod. That's T-R-Y-Pod. Thanks for spreading the word. It strikes me with a game like this. Like there's always some kind of mechanic that is in place in order to break people's progressions to make sure they get more out of the game. And it seems like the way you're describing the game, where they give you some of the best abilities up front, ability to move around, things of that nature, weapons accessibility. It really speaks to like a confidence in their content overall.

And I've heard you talk a lot about how, you know, you're still playing the game. You're going to still play the game. You haven't exhausted the things of interest within it. How do they diversify the experience enough to make that possible that you will keep playing this game even after you finish the main missions? Man, I almost don't want to answer that because I don't know when to spoil things. I mean, well, fine. But like, okay, so you're walking and, like, I was climbing Death Mountain at some point,

which is the big fiery mountain with all the lava and the gora and guys, the dudes who have rocks on them and eat rocks for fun. So I'm climbing there and I'm in this area and I see like a tiny little island in the lava, right? And so I think, okay, why don't I just go there and see what's up? And I get there and there are these three kind of valuable mineral rock points. So I smash them all and collect the rocks and I'm like, cool, this will get me a bunch of rupees and I can use them to buy some stuff later. And then suddenly right next to me in the island this giant fire rock monster pops up. and it's just me and him alone on this island.

And so he kills me immediately because he just one-shots me. And then so I come back to the island because I'm like, I'm not going to let this guy stop me from collecting these rare minerals. And so I figure out eventually that I can use this frost rod that I picked up earlier to freeze the fire that's surrounding his rock body. And then I can get around behind him, climb up on his body, and hit the mineral thing on his head, which looks like the other valuable minerals,

but this is his actual head, hit that a couple times with the sledgehammer and then take him out that way. So I just kept doing that. It probably took me like four or five times just to take him down because I had low health at that point in the game. And this is just like a half an hour

of my Zelda experience just on a tiny little island fighting a rock monster. And that's just the type of thing that you find. Like everywhere you'll just find these little tiny puzzles or experiences or fights that you just want to find a way to do. And there are so many ways to do everything that it just never really gets old because there's ever a point where you're like, oh, no, just another bunch of mobins that I have to whack them my sword a bunch of times to kill them.

Because there's so many ways that you can kill them. You can take out a bomb and create some sort of crazy, like, what's the, what's the frame, Rube Goldberg, a contraption to blow a bomb with one of your leaves and have it hit a ramp and make a boulder fall. And there's so many things you can do. I bet there are going to be so many YouTube videos from this game of people just coming up with incredibly crazy ways to defeat monsters and solve puzzles. And it's just a combination of those things. It's like the fact that you can find all these different encounters and the fact that you can solve them all in so many different ways, that just adds up to this experience where you just never want to stop playing, at least for me. And for a lot of people, it seems like a lot of people are loving this game. Again, Jason, this is the best game ever, and it's really a travesty that you don't know.

Do you know how quickly it's possible to beat this game? Because I know people are doing speed runs already. And one of the interesting things is that the final quest, basically, like, defeat cannon is on your quest screen from the very beginning of the game. I assume you can go attempt to do that. And it must be really difficult or impossible at the beginning of the game. But do you know how quickly you can beat this if you want to? Yeah, I think speed runners have gotten it down to around an hour.

I think they're trying to get it. during an hour. It's for a normal person, I think. Well, so first of all, if you do it that way, you technically beat the game. That's no hacks. That's no. Yeah, no, no cheats. No, no hacks whatsoever. So I think if you, yeah, if you beat it that way, you don't get the full story. There's like a true ending that you got only if you go collect all the memories that are everywhere. So you don't get the full story. But yeah, you can beat him. It's not that hard to get to Gannon. You just have to know which way to which ways to go to navigate all the monsters that are in your way surrounding Hyrol Castle where he is. But yeah, beating him is hard. I'm pretty surprised at how fast.

I mean, I guess I shouldn't be that surprised because speed runners are so, have gotten so incredible at doing all this stuff. But yeah, it's pretty hard to beat him. And I will not be shocked if someone figures out how to do it in like half an hour or 20 minutes at some point. Just because these speed runners have gotten so good at fine-tuning and finding skips and glitches and stuff. I don't know if there's a way, I think the big question will be whether people can find a way to get off of the Great Plateau, the starting area, without having to do all the shrines that you need to do to get the glider so you can get off in the first place. If people can figure out how to do that, then they'll be able to beat Ganon pretty quickly, which is going to be incredible to watch.

I'm excited to see what people do. Yeah. Yeah, and there's a lot of kind of aimless wondering that's almost required or there are many moments in the game where I haven't really known where to go yet. I mean, there's always something you can do. There's sort of those four dungeon beasts you mentioned. You can go check those out at any time. But you mentioned the memories that you have to collect to restore your memory, which has been lost at the beginning of the game.

And all you have to go on really is snapshots of places in this world where you can get those memories back and you have no idea where most of those things are because the world is gigantic. And you can find people who will give you clues and hints and lead you to them. So it's not totally just needle in a haystack. But there are a lot of times when it's just like, well, I'm not sure what to do now. So I will just go to this area because I haven't been there yet. And there's probably something interesting. And there always is.

And it's like when you pull back on the map screen, like sometimes I'll forget. that I'm not looking at the entire map at one time. Because you can zoom in twice on the map screen and it still looks huge. And then I'll remember that that is just like a tiny sliver of the map and you can pull back twice. And it's just enormous. It's huge. Yeah, it's unbelievable. I mean, the fact that I played like 70 hours and beaten the game and beaten all four dungeons but haven't unlocked two giant sections of the map is just like absurd.

It's intimidating. Yeah. So if you could go back to all the people you interview. while you're working on your book. And I've played Breath of the Wild now, and I know how to make the best video game ever. Here are the lessons I will impart to you from the latest Zelda game. I'm sure we've touched on a lot of them. But to what extent is this replicable, like take this mechanic or this level design philosophy

and stick it into other games? Step one, work for Shigero Miyamoto. Yeah, it's tough because so often game projects, so why don't I start by telling everyone what my book actually is? So it's called Blentzwind, and Pixels. It's the kind of running thesis of the book is that making games is harder than people realize, and here is why. And so the way that I approached it was I pick 10 games, and each chapter focuses on the behind-the-scenes story of that game. So it's 10 chapters, 10 games. Some of them are AAA, some of them are indie, and everything in between.

And so a bunch of those stories are like, you can kind of see by reading them that these games turned out the way they did because of time pressures, because of money constraints, because of resource constraints in terms of staff and who had to do what and who disagreed on what and all these other kind of creative conflicts that come up in this high-pressure cooker that is game development. And I think with Nintendo games, they have a lot of benefits that other studios might not have.

They have a lot of resources. They have kind of the luxury of being able to delay games as long as they need. You guys might remember that this Zelda was originally announced as a 2015 game. So it was already delayed two extra years.

And I'm sure that the amount of crunch and long hours that had to go into this game was just beyond belief. Like I'm sure there were a lot of designers and directors and programmers and artists at Nintendo HQ, just working 16-hour days for a very long time to make this game happen. So in terms of being replicable, I mean, there's a reason that Zelda has always been just the best

and just known as the top-tier game series or one of them in the world. And that's a combination of talent. It's a combination of resources. It's a whole lot of other factors that we're not even privy to because game companies tend to be so secretive about how they do their games. But also, it's kind of, this game would not have been possible if it hadn't learned, if the designers that Nintendo hadn't learned from Western games that tried similar things.

And you can tell that there's a lot of Western influence on this game. So it's kind of like game development is still learning and building and iterating and so on and so on. But something I think that a lot of people don't realize about game development. And we can talk way more about this when closer to the release of Blood Soot and Pixels, when we can actually get into it and whatnot. But another running theme of this book is that there is no standard uniform way to make video games. And by that I mean that if you're making a movie, for example, you have a lot of formulas that have been kind of time tested over the past 100 years or whatever it is. And you can follow those to make a movie.

That doesn't mean you're going to make a good movie, but at least you have a blueprint, right? So there's the three-act structure. There's the fact that every screenplay is going to be the same length. There's the fact that every camera is going to function the same way, right? You're still going to point a camera at people. And there are a lot of things that you can do that just movie makers have been doing for decades, and you can follow that. In games, it's a lot different because one equivalent analogy,

if you're using the film analogy, is that it's almost like you're making a film, but you have to make a new camera at the same time that you're making a film, and you have no screenplay. It's just such a different thing because you're all. also making all this technology and working with the engines and the code and the programming that turns a game from a non-linear cinematic experience into something where I as a player can interact with the game and type something in or press a button on my controller and allow the game to interpret that and turn it into something that happens on the screen, right?

So an action game or a Zelda game, for example, might function totally differently and has completely different technology from, I don't know, Horizon Zero Don. And so the people at Gorilla Games are using their own proprietary technology that they've built just for this game. And then the people at Nintendo are using their own proprietary technology that they've built just for Zelda. So it's hard to be like, hey, Gorilla Games, why can't you be more like Zelda? It's just totally different worlds. It's like saying to an author of a book, J.R. Tolkien, why can't you be more like Peter Jackson making Lord of the Rings? You're talking about apples and oranges, even though they're all video games, just no game is made the same way. And you often hear this about engines, which is kind of this colloquial term for the program, the code that runs video games. And so many companies use their own engines and just have their own styles that even if you're a designer working at Nintendo and you were told, hey, come to Ubisoft and work on this game at Ubisoft, it would be like walking into a foreign country and having to learn an entirely new language and currency and all that stuff because you're just

working with something totally unfamiliar. It's not like you can just pick up a camera and point it's something and know what you're doing. You have to know the programming. You have to know the code. You have to familiarize yourself with each company's different technology. So that among many, many other reasons is one of the reasons that you can't just be like, oh, why don't you guys learn from this? I mean, and all that said, I think a lot of designers will be learning from Zelda

and will be learning from the things that Zelda does really well. But it's not as easy as being like, oh, let's all copy them and do what they do. You know? Yeah. Every console has to have its kind of like hammer launch titles. You know, Xbox at Halo, the Wii had Wii Sports. Breath of the Wild is definitely the Switches. What happens after Breath of the Wild?

What's the next game that comes to fill that space that makes the Switch a console that people have to buy? Or do they have that yet? Well, Zelda's there. I really like the new Shovel Night stuff. I don't know if you guys have played that. Spector Knight is the new, it's like an old school style platformer. It's one of the few games that are available on Switchdown. And it's really good.

There will be a couple of others. There's Mario Card is coming. Spatune 2 is coming. For me, the biggest thing is going to be Mario Odyssey in the fall. I think that'll be it unless they announced some big surprises. We're still waiting to see what they do with the virtual console. And you would think that like after the giant, massive, enormous success of the NES classic, they would be like, hey, we got to get in on this and get some.

some NES games on this Switch thing, but they still have not said anything about how their service for buying and downloading old games will work on the Switch, which is too bad. Because that could be such a good filler. Like, imagine if between now and Mario you could download all these like NES or SNS or GameQ games on your Switch. It would just turn it into such an incredible system. But alas, they have not done that yet. It's still very early.

I mean, I still like move back and forth when people ask me, should I buy a switch just for Zelda? I really don't know how to answer them because there's so many unknowns right now about what will happen with the system. So it's hard to say. I'm still carrying it around every day and playing it pretty often. But that's because I'm not done with Zelda yet. I like the feel of the system. I like the way that it controls. It seems like there are a bunch of cool indie games coming to it.

It seems like it has a lot of potential, is what I'm saying. And I don't know if we'll know whether it's realizing that potential for another few months. So it's very much a wait-and-see sort of situation. So I guess if you are in the market for a switch and Zelda hasn't sold you, then don't get it yet. Yeah, right. Are you willing to spend $300 plus on Zelda? That's the question. Yeah, I think you get a grace period.

Like if you had a Wii U, then maybe it's not worth buying a switch just for Zelda because it doesn't seem to run that much better on Switch. But if you didn't and you get it and you play Zelda, it does kind of get a grace period. I think just because Zelda is so good and it lasts so long that it's okay. If it takes a little while for the next great game, I won't feel like I was ripped off because Zelda was worth it almost on its own. And I haven't had any hardware issues personally. And I guess it's hard to tell how widespread they are because maybe every console ever has had the same amount of hardware failures, and we just are more aware of it now because everyone

who has an issue can tweet about it or post on Reddit, and it looks like it's a bigger problem than it is. I don't know if we have a great way to say, oh, this is bad relative to other console launches or not. Well, there's no way that it compares to the Xbox 360 Red Ring. RedDap. Yes, that was unbelievable. Everyone I know suffered at one point or another who had a 360 suffered from the ring death at some

point. I did. I tried to repair it manually, but the surgery did not go well. How do you do that? I don't know. I voided all sorts of warranties. But the core, I don't want to call it a gimmick because that minimizes how cool it is. It's just the core appeal of the system.

Being able to take the same game wherever you go is great. For me, it's not that valuable because I don't commute and I don't travel that much. And so I don't need to play it in handheld mode all that often. but if I did, it would be amazing to be able to take Breath of the Wild with me wherever I go in not at all a compromised form. That is a really revolutionary leap. So if they can supply the software, then I have to think the thing will be worth it eventually once it's built up a library. And perhaps maybe once they've released some sort of revision or firmware update or whatever it takes to minimize some of the early issues, people have encountered. Yeah, and I think there are a lot of little games that Nintendo,

well, so the biggest thing about the Switch is that now instead of making handheld games and console games, Nintendo can kind of converge them and put them both on the same platform on the Switch. So for the 3DS, for example, there are all these tiny, bizarre e-shop games that Nintendo releases for 10, 20, 30 dollars, and they're all really good. Boxboy, for example, is this great puzzle game. That was one of my favorite games of the past couple of years. and Pick Ross is another really great puzzle game. There are a lot of weird small games that Nintendo can put on this thing that I think will be appealing to people who own it.

It might not have the kind of market force of a Horizon Zero Dawn or anything equivalent of like a giant AAA console game. And there's no way that we're going to see the big third-party console games on this thing. Like the new Assassin's Creed, the new Destiny 2 is not coming to the Switch. But as far as like if the Switch can carve out that niche of, A, Nintendo games, B, indie games, three C, Japanese games, it could do really well. And it could be, I mean, personally, those are totally my jam. So it might be my most played system if it winds up like filling that whole, almost like the Vita is now for people where it's like a bunch of Japanese games and indie games come to that and nothing else.

So, Sony, except with actual first party support as well. So it could be really good as that kind of system. And yeah, the on-the-go thing is pretty appealing to those of us who do have to get up and go on the subway every day and commute to our jobs and don't just get to sit at home and play video games all day. You sit somewhere else and play video games all day. Exactly. I have to sit in the office and play video games so I can bring my switch and just play it there. Yeah, but in that sense, it's appealing. The whole vocal multiplayer thing could be a good sell for people.

Yeah, I mean, this thing has a lot of potential. I think there are a lot of little things about the hardware that bother me now that I think Kirk Hamilton hit really well in our Kotaku's review of the Switch, which you can look up on Kotaku. But I think that's stuff that can be fixed in another iteration of the hardware. Some of it can be fixed over time with more stuff that they add to the menus and the e-shop and whatnot. So, yeah, I'm pretty bullish on the Switch in general. I think it has a lot more potential than the Wii U ever did. And it just feels so much better.

If you pick up a Wii controller and put it next to a switch, the Wii controller feels like a Fisher Price toy. And the switch is like, oh, hey, this is like a real, like adult piece of hardware. It feels good in your hands in a way that the Wii you controller never did. And do you think that they can get more out of the system than Breath of the Wild even? Is this sort of the ceiling? Not that that would be a bad thing, really, because it's pretty technically impressive in addition to how impressive it is from a design perspective.

But I wonder just because, you know, there's frame rate slowdown here and there. And you wonder whether that's a symptom of it being a launch title and sort of a port from Wii U. On the other hand, this is Nintendo. They should be the ones who know how to get the most out of the system. So you kind of worry if they're having any issues. What does that mean for third parties? Will we look back at the end of the Switch's life cycle and say there's been progress made since then? or will we still look at Breath of the Wild

as, wow, this is one of the best-looking, most impressive games on the system even now? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, first of all, Nintendo has always been about art direction over, like, pure graphical fidelity, polygon counts and whatnot. I actually talked to someone from Nintendo about this, and obviously they have their agenda

and they want Nintendo to sound as good as possible, but I said that, I mentioned it to them, and they were like, yeah, it's all because this is a port from the Wii U version, and they weren't able to optimize it as much for the Switch. and the first Zelda game that's built ground up from the switch will just be way better, like look even better, just run even better than one of the same sort of frame rate issues. So I don't know.

I don't know if I believe that because the switch seems so underpowered. But on the flip side, it's pretty remarkable that you can run a game like Zelda on a handheld system. Like that in itself is pretty, like I don't think we've ever seen a game that runs that well, that looks that good, that runs that well on a portable system, especially, Look at the 3DS. The way that that, I mean, that can't even go past like 480P resolution, and everything that runs on the 3DS just looks all blocky and pixelated. So, yeah, I mean, it's just incredible that they got things this good-looking running on a handheld system in the first place.

But yeah, I don't know. I think Mario Odyssey will be a good test of that, and we'll have to see how good that looks. Nothing like Horizon Zero Dawn or Uncharted 4 is going to ever be on the switch just because it doesn't have. that kind of graphical processing power. But I do think that Nintendo is really good at making things look really stylish and look really good. I mean, look at Wind Waker, for example. That game still looks incredible, even though it's not the most realistic graphics. Just the art direction makes everything just pop and look really good in a way that some other games don't.

As an aside, almost, local multiplayer is kind of bullshit, isn't it? I don't know. I mean, come on. You know, it's like how many times in the lifespan of a thing that you've, that has been capable of local multiplayer that you've owned? Have you used it like two times? Like one time? It's bullshit. Well, if you're stuck inside all day with mono, then it's not going to be, you're not going to be able to use it that much.

I don't know. It's a good question. To me, it's, well, so, okay, I have an old and 64 sitting in my apartment and pretty fairly often, like once a month or twice a month. I will have friends over and we'll all just play Mario Party too. Yeah, I still play Smash for 64. Exactly. So if they can kind of appeal to that instinct and make games that are good enough that make you want to play split-screen multiplayer with them, then that could have some appeal.

I don't think, at least for me, just the fact that the most recent Mario Kart was on Wii U was the biggest problem because I had to go and figure out the controller situation, and it was always kind of a disaster. It's like, do we want Wii modes? so we want the pro controller? What are we going to do here? And it was always kind of a disaster in the way that the N64 was just like,

oh, got a bunch of N64 controller, super easy. I think that if there are games, if the new Mario Party that comes to Switch, whenever it comes to Switch is as good as Mario Party 2 is, then it could totally be a split-screen multiplayer thing. If there are other indie games that are really cool and fun to play Local Cobb, I think it could have appeal.

I'm also skeptical like you, Jason, but I do think there is some potential. I know, you're just looking for reasons to justify you're not getting on. Switch hater. Yeah. All right. Well, I just hope there is a Zelda game that's built from the ground up for Switch because that would mean two Zelda games in one console lifecycle,

which would be ahead of Nintendo's recent pace. Well, that's the thing. Now they have the handheld ones. So now they don't know, because the past cycle, they've had handheld Zelda games in addition to the console Zelda games. So now if they can put them all on this, thing, that would be incredible. Especially, you know what, if they get all the Game Boy Zelda games, which still hold

up really well and put those on the switch as well through the virtual console, that would be a phenomenal thing. Yeah, Oracle of Ages and Seasons. Oh, man. So good. So good. All right. You can listen to Jason talk more about Zelda if you want on the latest episode of

Split Screen, his podcast at Kotaku. You can read him at Kotaku. You can follow him on Twitter. where he tweets about how he has personally delayed your most anticipated video games. All of them. Jason Schreier. And you can pre-order his book, Blood, Sweat and Pixels at Amazon and all the other usual places. Jason, thanks for coming on again.

Super cheap. Thank you. Pre-order now. Yes. Thanks, guys. All right. If it's any consolation to you, Jason, I will say that the horse controls are trash and that some of the controls are kind of wonky. There's almost a last guardian-like confucian.

because you can't really remap the buttons and the labels on the buttons are different than Xbox buttons. And so I'm constantly crouching when I'm trying to do other things. So there are flaws. It's not a completely perfect video game. All right. So we will be back next week. You wrote something for the ringer.com about Horizon Zero Don.

It's up now. I wrote something about Zelda. It's up now. Our colleague, Victor Lukerson, wrote a great story about the Soros mask. We either have tweeted or will tweet all of those things from the watchpod. So find us there. Until next time. Peace.

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