Slashdot Mirror
Grumpy Gamer Disappointed By New Zelda Footage
Ron "the Grumpy Gamer" Gilbert has up an opinion piece discussing his frustration with the new realistic footage of Zelda shown at this year's Game Developer's Conference. He makes some excellent points counter to most opinions I've seen up so far. From the article: "If you look at the trailer, it's filled with creatures, textures and buildings that could be seamlessly exchanged with any other 3D boy-mass game, which in my opinion, is the real failing of 3D games. This crazy quest to attain realism just serves to water everything down until it is all indistinguishable from anything else. An off-white paint that covers the walls of cube-like apartments in cookie-cutter neighborhoods."
First off, that was barely an article and nothing at all for the masses to be made aware of.
His complaints are more with the inherent nature of realistic games, but Zelda still isn't at that point. It's pretty clear that despite a more realistic look, almost everything in the game is stylized to a degree.
Some people complain just to get attention, the least he could have done is have a decent arguement.
I don't care much whether the graphics are "realistic". What worries me about this trailer is that the graphics look crappy. The designers seem to be trying quite hard to create a "beautiful" Hyrule, but the result is artificial. The characters look boring (though a few of the monsters are interesting). The animation is just awful. And I see nothing interesting gameplay-wise.
For reference, I thought A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time were awesome. And I loved Wind Waker's graphical style but hated hated hated the gameplay.
It's about time Nintendo comes up with some interesting new gameplay elements. Fludd (in Super Mario Sunshine) was brilliant, the stupid boat and the boring sea in Wind Waker were not.
Really? I never thought that. Zelda games have always been pretty boring to me, in gameplay. Especially since all the 3d games are basically Ocarina of Time + new instrument/tool which doesn't really change gameplay at all. Wind Waker was the first 3d Zelda game that I had a lot of fun with, mostly because it was fun to look at and explore. The gameplay was still almost exactly the same as OoT.
But I'm still holding out hope that maybe they'll do something innovative with the gameplay in this new zelda game, for the first time for the series in about 7 years.
When Nintendo showed WindWaker for the first time, there were idiots who were saying "hey, it's not realistic, ergo, it sucks!".
Now, when Nintendo shows a realistic zelda, idiots complain that "it's too realistic!".
Windwaker was great, by the way. It had three problems:
-It was too easy.
-It was too short.
-It had too many maps search in the main quest.
Other than that, it was a great and beautiful game.
I don't see how the characters/objects in Zelda can be considered realistic. They certainly don't look like anything I've seen in my life. I suppose what he means is that a more typical approach was taken to use a more natural color pallete for textures as well as a visual style that is higher in detail than the bright, water-colored, cell shaded Zelda that is Windwaker. Personally, I am looking forward to the new (or old depending on how you view things) visuals in the next Zelda.
SIGFAULT
I would love to hear more about how not using cel-shading or some derivative rendering style automatically makes a game photo-realistic and redundant. If you watch the trailer, it is blatantly obvious that Nintendo kept MANY things from Wind Waker - the stylized enemy defeat explosions, the crisp stylish enemy design (especially the jumping statues), and more. Just because it's not a flat shaded 'toon game, it doesn't mean that it's Zelda: Source.
I give credit to Ocarina of Time, but the best Zelda is still the NES classic Link's Adventure. The side scroller adventure had level gaining, non-linear gameplay. I can't tell you how many other games were based off this formula afterwards.