The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

The Legend of Zelda™: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Official Site

An epic adventure across the land and skies of Hyrule awaits in The Legend of Zelda™: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo Switch™. The adventure is yours to create in a world fueled by your imagination. In this sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the …

www.nintendo.com

I pushed the buy button yesterday, and it downloaded to my Switch. I’ve got some travel coming up, and hope to begin playing soon.

 

[Bryan^H]

Bought it, tried it. Just like BOTW, I can't get into it. I love the top down Zelda games so much ( A Link Between Worlds is one of my favorite games in recent memory).

So happy I bought physical for this. Will sell it later in the week.

 

[Edwin-S]

I read it's better than the first one, but it shows up how dated the Switch is hardware-wise. I have the WiiU version of BOTW, but it just never caught on with me. I've tried a few Zelda games and I lost interest in all of them pretty fast.

I'll probably skip the next iteration of Nintendo Switch, because I have hardly used the first one. XBOX1 and NINTENDO Switch have basically become expensive e-waste for me.

 

[DaveF]

I went to start playing tonight and found it hadn’t downloaded because I was out of storage. Half an hour later of archiving games and transferring Diablo 3 to the SD card, and I set to download. And thanks to fast internet, 16GB downloaded in maybe half an hour. (And I’ve got a 128GB microSD card set aside in my Amazon card for later when I want to move all my games to bigger storage card.)

I played the intro up to the start of actual gameplay. I’m ready now for my trip.

I wonder if Nintendo‘s strategic plan was for Tears to launch on a new console? At initial launch, it’s a bit weird that it looks exactly like Breath. Maybe Breath was late enough in the Switch’s lifecycle there’s nothing more to eke out graphically?

But, I don’t play my Switch for cutting edge visuals. It’s a great system for planes and hotels and bedrooms. I should be be playing Tears off and on for the next year.

 

[Bryan^H]

I went to start playing tonight and found it hadn’t downloaded because I was out of storage. Half an hour later of archiving games and transferring Diablo 3 to the SD card, and I set to download. And thanks to fast internet, 16GB downloaded in maybe half an hour. (And I’ve got a 128GB microSD card set aside in my Amazon card for later when I want to move all my games to bigger storage card.)

I played the intro up to the start of actual gameplay. I’m ready now for my trip.

I wonder if Nintendo‘s strategic plan was for Tears to launch on a new console? At initial launch, it’s a bit weird that it looks exactly like Breath. Maybe Breath was late enough in the Switch’s lifecycle there’s nothing more to eke out graphically?

But, I don’t play my Switch for cutting edge visuals. It’s a great system for planes and hotels and bedrooms. I should be be playing Tears off and on for the next year.

Breath of the Wild basically launched with the Switch in 2017. I can't believe it has been 6 years ago already.

 

[Morgan Jolley]

Breath of the Wild was a Wii U game that they forced onto the Switch as a launch game. It was likely not really pushing the Switch to its limits.

The world of BotW was used for Tears of the Kingdom to allow the development team to focus on everything else instead of rebuilding the world. I'm a couple hours in (I'm on the ground now, if that means anything to someone playing the game) and I think reusing the existing world map was a good idea, especially since they expanded a LOT on that and added sky/underground areas. This game is absolutely MASSIVE.

I'm still very early in it but I'm enjoying it. Breath of the Wild was damn-near perfect and this feels like an evolution of that. The graphics are beautiful and the game runs fine (not perfect, but I'm not having any issues that make me want to stop or complain). The online rumors/speculation is that a new Nintendo console will come out next year with a patch and/or DLC for TotK, which would basically fit Nintendo's MO in the past relatively well (Zelda games have somehow become cross-gen launch games).

 

[Hanson]

I have been playing BotW for so long and logged like 400 hours, so I know that game inside out. I have restarted multiple times and can zip through a lot of the game with just three hearts up until it's time to get the master sword. The last game I restarted ended up with me killing Lynels for sport. I was so familiar with the map that Hyrule got really really small for me.

Jumping into TotK is absolutely disorienting. On one level (literally) it's the same map. But it's not. It's like, wildly different. And I died so many times. I died more in the first 10 hours of TotK than I ever died in all of my BotW playthroughs. There are so many added mechanics it's almost overwhelming.

But it's just as addicting, which distractions and side quests around every corner. There are large stretches in BotW where Hyrule is simply terrain to travel through. But TotW feels like there's something happening everywhere you go.

If you loved BotW you will very likely love this game.

 

[Ruz-El]

I plan on getting this when it's eventually on sale, but I'm mighty tempted. If I hadn't recently started Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PS5 I would have gotten it.
As far as the graphic limits of the Switch, I don't really see them. Nintendo has a style of it's own and it was never really hyper-realism. I had no issues with the look of BOTW or other Nintendo properties.

 

[DaveF]

I plan on getting this when it's eventually on sale, but I'm mighty tempted. If I hadn't recently started Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PS5 I would have gotten it.
As far as the graphic limits of the Switch, I don't really see them. Nintendo has a style of it's own and it was never really hyper-realism. I had no issues with the look of BOTW or other Nintendo properties.

"eventually" is going to be a while, I expect.

Gaming trumps graphics, I bought TotK at $70, and will be playing it later today on an airplane. But there's no value in willfully denying that the Switch is now literally a decade behind on graphical capabilities. What I notice now, in graphical limitations, is the lack of details and lower resolution. And that's ignoring the lack of ray-tracing and all the amazing stuff that gets demo'd for new PC-based GPU systems. ToTK looks good, and the cell-shaded style makes good use of the hardware's capabilities. But it's definitely a prior gen system that was behind the tech even when it launched.

 

[DaveF]

I got into the actual gameplay last night. My initial experience is verging on frustration and boredom: I can’t do anything but wander aimlessly. I don’t feel like there’s nearly as much to do in the intro level as there was in BOTW. And the map is even more inadequate for the new elevation changes.


I don’t dislike it. But I’m going to have to get online help to make necessary initial steps to enjoy the game.

 

[Morgan Jolley]

Dave - the game actually does tell you where to go at the start, just follow the quests that you get right away and explore the world a bit as you go from marker to marker. BotW dropped you into the world with basically 1 goal (go to the castle to beat Ganon) and no other direction. TotK is actually a lot more directed (there's a main questline that has you going to actual dungeons) but it only tells you something like "go to this spot" without a ton of information. You're meant to explore the world and get lost for fun.

I'm enjoying the game and it's very addictive. The one thing throwing me off is that there's a TON of new stuff and changes from BotW, but there's also some things that haven't changed at all (mostly sounds, music, animations) that make it sometimes feel like a really big DLC episode instead of a new game. Really, it's the same thing that Majora's Mask did.

Ruz-el - Nintendo's first-party games RARELY go on sale. You may be able to pick TotK up for $50 in like 3 years.

 

[Hanson]

I am many dozens of hours in TotK, and probably like 20% complete. I finally upgraded my battery so I can now build vehicles that travel for more than 5 seconds. But I still haven't done anything complicated or cool yet.

After shaking off the early stages where you die (a lot) and feel like death is around the corner, I have established a base level of combat competence and strategies to keep myself out of harm's way. With that, I can now say this is a better game than BotW, with more polished and diverse game mechanics. Yes, there are grinds for materials that are a bit of a slog and if you're in for playing out a story there's not a lot of meat on the bone. But if you loved the open sandbox nature of BotW, TotK is BotW on steroids.

 

[DaveF]

Dave - the game actually does tell you where to go at the start, just follow the quests that you get right away and explore the world a bit as you go from marker to marker. BotW dropped you into the world with basically 1 goal (go to the castle to beat Ganon) and no other direction. TotK is actually a lot more directed (there's a main questline that has you going to actual dungeons) but it only tells you something like "go to this spot" without a ton of information. You're meant to explore the world and get lost for fun.

No way to get to those locations so far after an hour or two of fruitlessly exploring the world.

I’m not getting this early part of the game. I’m just not finding anything to do. And the mission points seem inaccessible.

 

[DaveF]

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom walkthrough and guides

Your fast track to becoming the Hero of Time

www.polygon.com

ok good: guides are available. My interest in enjoying Tears is colliding with my reality that I don’t know if I have time or interest to learn Minecraft + Zelda. Maybe I’ll make some progress in a couple weeks after vacation and see better what I think. Probably have to read guides to get me over this beginning portion, since I‘m not getting something basic and don’t know that I have time to figure it out on my own.

 

[Morgan Jolley]

Honestly, the whole point of the game is that it has extremely loose guardrails and never tells you that you can't do something. This amount of freedom can be daunting and make the game seem like there's no direction, but it really ends up being addictive because there's so much to do and tons of ways to approach everything.

Use a guide if you have to, at least to get started. I've been playing for a while and have only completed 1 of the dungeons so far because I keep getting distracted by everything else.

 

[Steve Y]

This is a game I'll be playing for a very long time. It's not an easy game to play in short sessions. If I don't play for at least an hour, it's more difficult (in the early game) to find or do anything noteworthy.

I'm concentrating on climbing hills and mountains, scanning for shrines and towers, and then traveling to them and opening as many fast travel points as possible. It becomes MUCH easier to try new things when I can zip around the map.

However, since I just finished Breath of the Wild, and the games have a lot in common despite TOTK being bigger and better, I run the risk of getting burned out, so I've limited my time with it to just a few days a week.

 

[DaveF]

I’ve only had a couple hours, worn out, in hotels, to get started.

Hopefully when I’m home I can give it a relaxing weekend afternoon to really get oriented and started.

 

[DaveF]

I’ve now had some quality play time. I escaped the sky island, am on the ground, and doing “normal” Zelda stuff. Maybe it was trying to game on vacation. IDK. But I didn’t enjoy the sky island intro. Now that I’m into the game proper, it’s what I expect and enjoy from Zelda.

I’ve unlocked a couple towers. I got my camera. I have a few major and minor missions to work towards. I found a horse (and then I found it had also stabled my horse from BOTW which was a surprise).

The fusing of items onto weapons is interesting: I like the bomb fruits a lot more than the prior bomb powers. Ascend power is such a radical new ability, I’m learning to remember it’s available.

The mechanical construction puzzles overall, at this early point, are meh. They’re fussy and kinda tedious. And the solutions that I think should work, don’t. The mechanics suggest a lot, but are frustratingly restrictive. The first one I played in a temple had all these wheels available, suggesting go-carts would be an elegant solution. But the actual solution was just gluing planks to span water. There was no way to actually make wheeled carts go. I feel like Nintendo wanted to be super clever but I don’t get it.

I also don’t want to spend time on the construction, because of the non-persistent environment. My experience is time spent on construction will be time wasted. I’ll cobble something together. Leave. Come back. And because of the internal world environmental resets, all that work will be lost. That’s the part I really don’t get about the new mechanics.

Still, I’m playing. I now need to go look up how to solve a Fire and Ice temple because I’m stuck and am not going to figure out whatever basic thing I’m missing.

 

[Morgan Jolley]

Dave - FYI, there is an ability you can find called Autobuild that lets you pull up previously-made designs (including some schematics that you receive from certain NPCs or any designs you add to "favorites") and automatically make them using materials you find nearby OR using Zonaite. This alleviates your issue with your builds disappearing.

 

[Morgan Jolley]

I spent almost all of the past weekend playing this and made a ton of progress on everything (side missions, story content, shrines, lightroots, outfits...). Then I learned today that once you finish the story mode a small "% complete" item pops up on your map to tell you how much of the game you've completed. I already got all the lightroots and almost all of the shrines, so I guess I'm going to try and polish off the main story quests so I can get that little counter and see what's left!

When I played BotW, I beat the game but didn't get 100% of everything because...it was massive and there's a ton of stuff. Tears of the Kingdom is even bigger and has even more stuff. The way I handled it in BotW was that I went back a year later and finished getting everything (even the Korok seeds). Final Fantasy XVI is sitting on my shelf, just waiting for me to get to it, so I'm probably going to end up doing something similar here.