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Next Zelda Title Delayed Again
John Callaham writes "Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime has officially confirmed that the long awaited Gamecube title Zelda: Twilight Princess will be released this fall." From the article: "File-Amie also said that the game would be a Gamecube title and that there were still no plans to turn it into a game for Nintendo's next-gen Revolution console." He also took the opportunity to mention that the original DS will be phased out in late autumn, in favour of the DS Lite.
It will be a Gamecube game, but from what I hear they want to release it when the Revolution ships because of the backwards compatibility that the Revolution should have. I mean why not? right? New Zelda, might as well get that cool new system to play it on. I'd do it.
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Probably just the typical production-manager-has-no-clue-and-is-guesstimatin g syndrome.
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...During a time when consoles and games are both rushed out the door before they're ready, Nintendo is taking its time with their products. Sure it may aggravate some people, but only the hardcorest of the hardcore gamers.
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"A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." -Shigeru Miyamoto
...am glad it will be delayed. Usually this means that the game will be that much better. Going by Nintendo's track record, it will be true.
Honestly, if they're delaying the game, then it's probably 10% P.R., 90% Game/Technical. Zelda has always (yup, even Wind Waker) been worth the wait.
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The headline is misleading, saying that the game has been delayed "again". Saying it was delayed again implies that they had delayed it, set a new date, and then delayed it one more time. They never set a date after the first delay. A better headline would have been "Delayed Zelda Arrives in Fall".
This seems very unlikely to me. Two AAA Zelda games being released within 1 year of each other? It could happen, especially if Zelda Revolution is radically different from Twilight Princess and is being worked on by completely seperate development teams, but I would think that the Twilight Princess delay would at least somewhat push back the release of the next Zelda beyond the release of the Revolution, unless the Revolution is delayed into 2007 (I don't even want to think about that happening).
Twilight Princess will likely sate our Zelda craving for a while, so releasing a new Zelda game soon after almost seems like a not-good idea. I may still be striving to unlock everything and do all the miniquests when the Revolution comes out, so I won't be starved for a Zelda game the same way I'm anticipating the next real Mario platforming game (which the GameCube rather lacked -- I thought Sunshine was a let down), a Super Smash Brothers Melee, a Mario Party (the type of game that is just perfect for the Revolution) and a Metroid, which seems like a franchise that is evolving in such a way that it also is an ideal Revolution title. Give me all or most of these games at our near launch, and I'll be perfectly content to wait a year for a new, awesome Zelda game.
Please. Wind Waker was an awesome game. They did an incredible job with the graphics, and an even better job with the game engine and game play. However, a bunch of thick skulled people apparently were feeling a little insecure about their masculinity, and thought they couldn't play something with cartoon graphics (even though the fact that you are portraying a kid in the game fits well with the kid-cartoon style graphics) and some fun/creative puzzle solving (yes...not EVERY "puzzle" requires chopping someone's head off or doing a hooker) made them feely a little too much like girly men.
As a result, Nintendo had to scrap a brand new rendering engine which had just been written from the ground up for Wind Waker. The process of rewriting it from scratch AGAIN probably accounts for a significant portion of the delay of this title.
But OOOOOHHHHHHHHHH!!!! This ones going to have realistic look graphics. What a totally new concept. Not like we've ever seen that before. Heck, the coders could take a dump in the box and everyone would love it as long the poo was photorealistic.
If you take the time to explore all the details of the game, it's PLENTY long, too.
Thats part of the problem with many gamers behavior. If you set up a giant world, filled it with fun things to do, and just happen to put the finish line a little too close to the start line, then a number of gamers will make a mad dash to a finish then cry that the game was too short and boring.
On the other hand, if you force everyone to go through each of your fun little things, a number of other gamers start sobbing about how long and drawn out it was, and how the game was so linear, when they would have wanted to wander off the beaten path and find cool things on the side.
You can't appease both groups simultaneously, so Nintendo decided that there were more gamers in one group than the other and made a choice that they thought would offend the fewest number of gamers.
I pretty much agree with you, and I loved the game, but it is also pretty clear that the entire Triforce search aspect was tacked on to increase the number of hours in the game. Remove the necessary sailing around to the islands, and then to the locations where you grab the Triforce pieces, and you've probably knocked 20% of the length of the game off.
Not that you can't spend a lot of time trying to find everything if you so choose, and not that a shorter game is really that bad. Beyond Good and Evil was fairly short, and I think it was better than Wind Waker in pretty much every way. Forcing the game to be longer by adding in a non-optional time-sink was a bad decision, imho.
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As a disclaimer: I don't hate Wind Waker. I highly enjoyed the game, and it's a lot better than most third-person adventures. But there were noticeable gameplay flaws with the game, and it was a bit of a letdown after the excellence of OoT and MM. To suggest that anyone who finds fault with it is a "graphics whore" is just plain shortsighted.
It was really cool for the first few hours, and then after a while, it became a total chore: play the wind song, wait 20 seconds for the wind song to play, point in the right direction, put down controller and wait 5-10 minutes, pull up to island. After a while, when you get that song of gails, or whatever the one is that gives you warp spots, it becomes a little faster, but it's also one more song you have to play. After doing this 40-50 times, it gets old really fast, especially in a series where you traditionally have to go back and forth across the map just to figure out what you're supposed to do next, it really killed the joy of adventure.
I don't mind having to go all the way across the map all the time, from one task to another, that's what the series is based on. But give me some terrain, give me something to do, something to look at while I'm doing it. It's difficult to make endless blue ocean, "exciting" or even interesting after you've done it for 10 hours.
Another problem was the abuse of the song playing system. In Ocarina and Majora, the system was near perfect: you only needed to play a song every once in a while, there was something "quick and simple" about it. I found myself having to play the wind changing song, like, every 2 minutes while I was searching out my next objective in WW, and the sequence of playing + animations just seemed to take forever.
The dungeons were on par with the rest of the series, especially the last two regular dungeons, the storyline was fun, the puzzles were great. But I hated the saling, which made me not want to explore, which really sapped a lot of the enjoyment out of the game for me.
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That'd be nice, all that 3d stuff is hurting the games.
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Here's another rumor I heard.
People that work at game stores are full of shit. They definitely don't have any industry connections. Treat their insider knowledge the same as the idiots from Best Buy/Walmart and you'll go far.