Tears of the Kingdom Critique: Open Worlds Are Dead

The path to the Wind Temple was more memorable than the temple itself.

Putting only 4 short simple Temples on this 3 layers massive map is pure trolling to me.

“Open world” shouldn’t mean massive fucking map by default. We can have an open world game in a smaller map. It’s okay.

If people react with "if you don't like it, then just skip it, it's optional" to every single aspect of the game, that just means "skip the game".

I've grown so tired of the current "linear = bad" discourse. It seems like every developer has taken a page out of Ubisoft's playbook for the last five years or so.

Nintedo's recent run of "so much freedom" games feel more like flipping on God Mode. It's fun sometimes to turn on God Mode and go on a rampage, but it stops being fun when there are no stakes or challenges.

the shrine/temple issue in BotW and ToTK was solved in previous zelda games. They were called dungeons.

I miss the linear games. Resident Evil 4 Remake was actually refreshing to me because for once it wasn’t open world

Between the release of botw and totk I had two kids. My general feeling seeing this game was “I already spent 100 hours doing that, I don’t have time to do it again”

TotK should've just been a new game+ expansion as a DLC, not a full game.

I think nowadays there's a lot of underutilized fun to be found in restriction and simplicity. The original LoZ may not have been as restrictive as it was by choice, but it definitely knew that. When I "solved" a shrine with a rocket-shield for the fifth time in one playthrough, I started wondering "why bother?". If self-imposed restriction is the only way to keep the game fun... maybe the game wasn't very fun to begin with.

What is odd to me is that many of the complaints I had in BOTW were both not addressed and exemplified by TOTK. I'm glad someone put many of the complaints I had in more eloquent words than I could, very good video.

As a child, I wished for expansive, open world games you could just explore and immerse yourself in... sort of a Monkey's Paw thing now in hindsight with how empty and boring all of them are. These days I much more appreciate focused and condensed experiences. Open world games would be much more enjoyable if the open world didn't also strive for such expansive landscapes to explore, if you were free to explore in a small world that always had something new and interesting instead of the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V of the modern day "Open World." My feelings largely reflect your own: I too am done with open world games. If a game is described as expansive, open air/world or "endless" in some regard, I just avoid it now. Tears of the Kingdom was the last chance for me to love open world games again, I thought if anyone could do it, it would be Nintendo, but clearly they were too busy making "Nuts and Bolts" to focus on making interesting content that interacts with these new systems.

The shrines feels like a training to something that we will do around the map.... but in the overworld the puzzles are more simple than shrines.

The Breath of the Wild games just made me appreciate Ocarina of Time, Majoras Mask and Twilight Princess even more.

The truly ironic thing is that Nintendo really did not need to go this far with the freedom. It was an over correction from Skyward Sword which was so strictly linear and handholdy that it may as well have just been a guided tour through a museum or aquarium. Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time both allowed you to do dungeons in different orders once you did the first three dungeons, and they did it without sacrificing world design or story or filling the game with bloat. Hell, even Wind Waker opened up the entire world to you once you completed the first three dungeons. I think Breath of the Wild was a great game, but Tears of the Kingdom proved that its formula does not hold up well beyond it. The problem is these games are SO free and with SO many options that it makes the games feel not like something that's a hand crafted experience but a sandbox demo where you're thrown into a big place with lots of tools and told to go screw around. It has its appeal, but it gets old eventually.

Weird little rule I've noticed in the last few years: Games that call themselves "Open World" or brag about their big open worlds tend to be empty soulless trash. Yet the games that actually have great open worlds like Dark Souls 1 or Link between worlds aren't even considered when people talk about open world games. Open world is the biggest red flag in gaming right now. Watch out: "We were to lazy to create an engaging world filled with content and an interesting story so we'll give you this auto generated wasteland instead. What? It's empty and boring? No... it is REALISTIC... Here is a Horse and fast travel so you don't have to waste your time with this trash :)"

What's especially disappointing about the game snatching the impact of Zelda's sacrfice away is that, out of so many big, long-running video game series, Zelda is probably one of the few that could've gotten away with making a permanent change to its world and characters. Every game in the series has a self-contained story, and aspects about worlds, characters, mechanics, lore, etc. change on a regular basis. They could've easily kept the consequences of Princess Zelda's choice intact while also being able to ignore them for the next Zelda since it'll likely take place in its own world. It's a rare opportunity to be able to literally have your cake and eat it too, and this one was unfortunately wasted.

I dont know when the games industry unitedly decided open world= better game but 🤷🏼‍♀️

All of the issues you're describing are present in BotW as well, but TotK somehow makes all of those problems worse which is.. just baffling.