Breath of the Wild

[ParadoxicalZen]

It isn't technically confirmed, but there is a hint in the first album memory. I just can't wrap my head around the timeline, period. Where do people even get the idea there's 3 anyway, I could ha e sworn its fan-made anyway

[Left]

1 hour ago, AnanasSpren said:

It isn't technically confirmed, but there is a hint in the first album memory. I just can't wrap my head around the timeline, period. Where do people even get the idea there's 3 anyway, I could ha e sworn its fan-made anyway

It's in the Hyrule Historia book, an official encyclopedia ish book. Before the book was released we had basically zero idea that there were as many as three timelines. 

I like the idea of a reconvergance of the timeline, from the articles I've read it would make the most sense. 

[Who Sharded?]

Pretty sure most fans thought there were 2 timelines until the Historia book came out.

[Retsam]

Yeah, the "Split Timeline" theory with two lines, (one for "Child" Link and one for "Adult" Link) was popular, but pretty much nobody had a "Ganon Wins" timeline.  

Frankly, I think people make a bigger deal of the timelines and chronology (and general continuity of the series) and stuff that it deserves.  At best, I think each game's relation to other games is an afterthought to the developers, and I suspect that the whole timeline system was actually probably just retconned in.  They made the games they wanted, then just retconned an explanation to fit them.  (And actually, the interview cited as the source of the Split Timeline theory says that there were "two endings" to Ocarina of Time: so it seems like the third timeline was definitely a retcon)

[Dunkum]

5 hours ago, Retsam said:

Yeah, the "Split Timeline" theory with two lines, (one for "Child" Link and one for "Adult" Link) was popular, but pretty much nobody had a "Ganon Wins" timeline.  

Frankly, I think people make a bigger deal of the timelines and chronology (and general continuity of the series) and stuff that it deserves.  At best, I think each game's relation to other games is an afterthought to the developers, and I suspect that the whole timeline system was actually probably just retconned in.  They made the games they wanted, then just retconned an explanation to fit them.  (And actually, the interview cited as the source of the Split Timeline theory says that there were "two endings" to Ocarina of Time: so it seems like the third timeline was definitely a retcon)

this has always been how I view it.  it is sort of interesting to consider how the timelines split, and what is happening in each one, but it mostly doesn't make any difference.

[Pagerunner]

There's definitely strong mytharc overlap between Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild. SS starts things off, and BotW wraps them up. Lots of references to Hylia and explicit mentions of the cycle of heroes and Link and Zelda being reborn. I'm not terribly knowledgeable about Zelda, but my understanding is that past games haven't been so big-picture, and that there's a more recent emphasis on the overall fight between Link, Zelda, and Ganon over the ages. So, analyzing older games for how they fit into the timelines, you can handwave stuff away as retcons. But for Breath of the Wild, it's built in from the get-go, so I'd say it's still relevant.

As far as converging timelines, that makes no sense. Splitting timelines, you have identical histories that diverge at a specific point, where they are no longer identical and can in fact very quite drastically. To do it in reverse, you would have various timelines that would all become the same; the timelines get similar and similar, until they eventually reach a point where they're all identical again. But since there are references to all three timelines, that would mean that different versions of each game would need to happen in all three timelines, defeating the whole purpose of having multiple timelines in the first place.

Not a literal merger of timelines, then, in my mind. But there are clear references to each of the three timelines, from characters to places to legends. Somehow, Breath of the Wild is drawing on lore from separate histories and combining them together. Sure, it may just be an out-of-universe phenomenon, where the developers wanted to reference everything. But I think it could be the in-universe reason as well; if Hyrule of Breath of the Wild is an artificial simulation designed to capture Ganon across all timelines. I'm still getting my details in order, but if BotW is the Matrix made by Sheikah who can move freely between the three timelines, then there's no problem incorporating references to games that did not take place in the same timeline. It fits well with all the time-freezing (he's just pausing the code for everything else), the teleportation, spirits, all that stuff. Link needs to recover his corrupted files (a.k.a. memories) before he can completely finish his mission (a.k.a. programming). Calamity Ganon is less human because he takes very different forms across all three timelines, and the combination of Ganon from all three timelines takes their least common denominator. Link and Zelda are always more similar across the games, so they're much more normal as embodiments of all three timelines' characters.

And that would ultimately get back to the game's theme of Tech vs Nature. They can't just lock Ganon in a prison; they need to make an entire world to contain and defeat him.

[Andy92]

When I first started playing the game, I assumed it took place some few hundred or even thousands of years after Windwaker. You have a lot of references to characters from that game including the Rito and Koroks. In Windwaker, Hyrule was flooded as a way to seal away Ganon. Once Link had to travel under the ocean to defeat Ganon, the purpose of keeping Hyrule flooded as a seal was no longer needed. So, you end up with a post-flood Hyrule where the landscapes are vibrant with nature, and cultures are generally primitive outside a few major cities.

References to the other timelines in this game is what causes the biggest hole in this theory, but I feel like a post-flood era makes the most sense from what I can come up with. 

Haven't finished the game yet. Might change my mind after I get through all the memories, but knowing Nintendo, I doubt there's going to be much revealed in concerns to a timeline lol. 

[Modal Seoul]

I think that Breath of the Wild will bring the absolutely beautiful CDI games into the timeline. Those great games deserve their place in Zelda fame.

JK. Definitely not.

[Who Sharded?]

BotW did indeed connect with the CD-i games.

[Pagerunner]

I don't get it. I've conquered all the divine beasts. I've beaten Ganon. I've completed all the shrines. Guardians merely annoy me now. Even Silver Lynels, I have down pat. I'm just going through and finishing up side quests and armor upgrades in prep for the DLC.

So why on earth do I still not know the controls for this game?

Don't get me wrong, I know what every button does, I know what the character is capable of. But, for some reason, there are two things that I still do wrong all the time. First, I try to change armor using down on the d-pad. With all the armors that have separate abilities, there needs to be a quick way to change it out. I definitely change armor more often than I do bows, arrows, shields, or runes. (Only weapons get changed more often, and even then, it's close. Dress for the job, that's what I say.) So, it would make logical sense to have all four d-pad directions be item menus, with 'down' being what isn't covered by the other three directions: namely, your armor. But, no, it whistles for your horse. Something I have used exactly twice for that purpose. (Although I have used it to get enemies' attentions to fight on better terrain, and once even managed to drown a Bokoblin by whistling at him. Good times, that.) I haven't perfectly learned which d-pad button does which thing, since the rest of them all stop time. When I need to change out in a pinch, I just throw one down, and then think about which menu I'm looking for. (Oh no, Lynel, change weapons. No, I don't need to change weapons, I need to change arrows; that will be RZ and d-left.) Whistling on the d-pad is just so counterintuitive, and I've been killed before by standing there with my fingers in my mouth like an idiot as a Guardian comes tearing at me because my brain extrapolated that d-pad down must change armor and won't learn that it instead is the eminently useless art of whistling. But you could have kept whistling if you rolled all weapons and shields into the right d-pad (vertical choice of type, horizontal choice as it is now), and then used the left d-pad for armor. Either way, the lack of a quick way to change armor is a big missed opportunity.

The other thing I do wrong is with horses. I don't like how the sprint button for walking is the 'get off' button for horses; on the rare occasions I find myself needing to use a horse, I never get anywhere, because my 'go faster' muscle memory just tells Link to dismount. Normally, not a big deal, but trying to complete one of the horse challenges, being a few seconds away from success, and stopping the horse and getting off instead of sprinting is frustrating, to say the least. (The mounted archery challenge is my least favorite part of the game, by far. Lots of yelling at my TV. And I still have to do it once more to round out my Knight's equipment. Not looking forward to that.) I'd have just used the 'jump' button for all dismounts, used in combination with the control stick to tell if you're jumping off or dismounting, and on which side. That would have freed 'A' up so you can actually interact with stuff on the horse. I learned on my way to Kakariko Village for the first time that killing chumps from horseback is no fun if you need to stop and get off to collect your loot. On the whole, just everything about the horse controls are a little off, and it's really discouraged me from using horses in general since it's not worth the time to learn an alternate control scheme. (Which doesn't make those horse challenges any more fun, either.)

But back to the first one for a tangent. Not a controls problem, but I've noticed that the inventory system, as a whole, is pretty flawed. There is no way to organize things, armor especially. When I want to switch from climbing armor to ancient armor, I need to scroll through three pages which each have 20 items, picking out the specific pieces of armor that I want from an order that changes every time I upgrade something. There are colored symbols that are supposed to help you pick out what you need, but the armor itself is all so colorful that they get lost in the noise. Furthermore, there's no way to select a whole set, even though by the lategame that's all you're going to be doing. And there's no way to organize the screens, to get them in a useable order or pattern, without being absurdly organized pretty much from the get-go. (I've gotten it to the point where I only upgrade all three pieces together, but that doesn't change that my ancient armor is separated by my girl clothes, dark clothes, fully upgraded Hylian clothes, and unmodified Zora and Electric stuff I'm still working on upgrading.) And of course, dyeing doesn't change the order, otherwise I'd dye everything the color it normally is in a precise order to give me organized screens.

But armor is nothing compared to materials. You've got food materials, potion materials, upgrade materials, and miscellaneous stuff (wood, flint, and octo balloons, mostly) that are all just lined up in the order you get them. I know why they didn't split them into separate screens; they want to trick you into ruining food by combining food and potion stuff, and upgrading armor uses both food and potion materials. But it makes it impossible to cook, since you have to scroll through eight pages to find what you're looking for. And, like I said earlier, the order changes when you use your last of something. When I try to actually figure out the nuances of the cooking system (I know it's all documented online, but I want to puzzle it through myself), I'm probably going to start by selling down so I have 1 of everything, then dropping and picking up it all so it's in a reasonable order (I've already made a key), and then go collect from scratch again and never use my last one of anything. Because, in the end, it will be less work than rummaging around through chaos to find my sizzlefin trout whenever I want to cook something with it.

This could have been solved with two changes, one very easy, and one that probably wouldn't have been too difficult. The easy would have been to leave an item in your inventory at x0, so you could learn an order and never see it changed. The more complicated would have been to let you rearrange the order of things in your inventory. When you select something give it a 'Move' option, that will trade places with whatever's on its left or its right by using the control stick. Hit 'A' again when it gets where you want it. Probably not too hard to do, and then you could put all your Climbing armor together, all your Hearty food ingredients together, your three useable items on the first page. It wouldn't have given away information the game wants you to learn on your own (oh, I see there are two open spots for Hearty ingredients, one of which is a fish and one of which is a plant; I'll need to find them). But it would let you organize stuff however you would prefer. Maybe you want all the fish together, all the beetles together, all the shrooms together. You can organize it like that if you want. Maybe you make one recipe all the time, and want all the pieces on your first page. You can do that, too.

Breath of the Wild, I loved at the beginning. Now, even though I want to finish everything, it's just taking too much busy work to do so. It feels like it takes longer to make a couple meals and switch out to my cold armor than it does to actually teleport to Hebra and fight a Lynel. I could just wear climbing armor all the time and drink potions, if potions themselves weren't so time-consuming to make. (A quick-cooking option, like maybe a stove in Link's house, would be another major improvement, but I'm sure someone else has said something about that before.)

[ParadoxicalZen]

On 28/03/2017 at 3:26 AM, Pagerunner said:

I don't get it. I've conquered all the divine beasts. I've beaten Ganon. I've completed all the shrines. Guardians merely annoy me now. Even Silver Lynels, I have down pat. I'm just going through and finishing up side quests and armor upgrades in prep for the DLC.

So why on earth do I still not know the controls for this game?

Don't get me wrong, I know what every button does, I know what the character is capable of. But, for some reason, there are two things that I still do wrong all the time. First, I try to change armor using down on the d-pad. With all the armors that have separate abilities, there needs to be a quick way to change it out. I definitely change armor more often than I do bows, arrows, shields, or runes. (Only weapons get changed more often, and even then, it's close. Dress for the job, that's what I say.) So, it would make logical sense to have all four d-pad directions be item menus, with 'down' being what isn't covered by the other three directions: namely, your armor. But, no, it whistles for your horse. Something I have used exactly twice for that purpose. (Although I have used it to get enemies' attentions to fight on better terrain, and once even managed to drown a Bokoblin by whistling at him. Good times, that.) I haven't perfectly learned which d-pad button does which thing, since the rest of them all stop time. When I need to change out in a pinch, I just throw one down, and then think about which menu I'm looking for. (Oh no, Lynel, change weapons. No, I don't need to change weapons, I need to change arrows; that will be RZ and d-left.) Whistling on the d-pad is just so counterintuitive, and I've been killed before by standing there with my fingers in my mouth like an idiot as a Guardian comes tearing at me because my brain extrapolated that d-pad down must change armor and won't learn that it instead is the eminently useless art of whistling. But you could have kept whistling if you rolled all weapons and shields into the right d-pad (vertical choice of type, horizontal choice as it is now), and then used the left d-pad for armor. Either way, the lack of a quick way to change armor is a big missed opportunity.

The other thing I do wrong is with horses. I don't like how the sprint button for walking is the 'get off' button for horses; on the rare occasions I find myself needing to use a horse, I never get anywhere, because my 'go faster' muscle memory just tells Link to dismount. Normally, not a big deal, but trying to complete one of the horse challenges, being a few seconds away from success, and stopping the horse and getting off instead of sprinting is frustrating, to say the least. (The mounted archery challenge is my least favorite part of the game, by far. Lots of yelling at my TV. And I still have to do it once more to round out my Knight's equipment. Not looking forward to that.) I'd have just used the 'jump' button for all dismounts, used in combination with the control stick to tell if you're jumping off or dismounting, and on which side. That would have freed 'A' up so you can actually interact with stuff on the horse. I learned on my way to Kakariko Village for the first time that killing chumps from horseback is no fun if you need to stop and get off to collect your loot. On the whole, just everything about the horse controls are a little off, and it's really discouraged me from using horses in general since it's not worth the time to learn an alternate control scheme. (Which doesn't make those horse challenges any more fun, either.)

But back to the first one for a tangent. Not a controls problem, but I've noticed that the inventory system, as a whole, is pretty flawed. There is no way to organize things, armor especially. When I want to switch from climbing armor to ancient armor, I need to scroll through three pages which each have 20 items, picking out the specific pieces of armor that I want from an order that changes every time I upgrade something. There are colored symbols that are supposed to help you pick out what you need, but the armor itself is all so colorful that they get lost in the noise. Furthermore, there's no way to select a whole set, even though by the lategame that's all you're going to be doing. And there's no way to organize the screens, to get them in a useable order or pattern, without being absurdly organized pretty much from the get-go. (I've gotten it to the point where I only upgrade all three pieces together, but that doesn't change that my ancient armor is separated by my girl clothes, dark clothes, fully upgraded Hylian clothes, and unmodified Zora and Electric stuff I'm still working on upgrading.) And of course, dyeing doesn't change the order, otherwise I'd dye everything the color it normally is in a precise order to give me organized screens.

But armor is nothing compared to materials. You've got food materials, potion materials, upgrade materials, and miscellaneous stuff (wood, flint, and octo balloons, mostly) that are all just lined up in the order you get them. I know why they didn't split them into separate screens; they want to trick you into ruining food by combining food and potion stuff, and upgrading armor uses both food and potion materials. But it makes it impossible to cook, since you have to scroll through eight pages to find what you're looking for. And, like I said earlier, the order changes when you use your last of something. When I try to actually figure out the nuances of the cooking system (I know it's all documented online, but I want to puzzle it through myself), I'm probably going to start by selling down so I have 1 of everything, then dropping and picking up it all so it's in a reasonable order (I've already made a key), and then go collect from scratch again and never use my last one of anything. Because, in the end, it will be less work than rummaging around through chaos to find my sizzlefin trout whenever I want to cook something with it.

This could have been solved with two changes, one very easy, and one that probably wouldn't have been too difficult. The easy would have been to leave an item in your inventory at x0, so you could learn an order and never see it changed. The more complicated would have been to let you rearrange the order of things in your inventory. When you select something give it a 'Move' option, that will trade places with whatever's on its left or its right by using the control stick. Hit 'A' again when it gets where you want it. Probably not too hard to do, and then you could put all your Climbing armor together, all your Hearty food ingredients together, your three useable items on the first page. It wouldn't have given away information the game wants you to learn on your own (oh, I see there are two open spots for Hearty ingredients, one of which is a fish and one of which is a plant; I'll need to find them). But it would let you organize stuff however you would prefer. Maybe you want all the fish together, all the beetles together, all the shrooms together. You can organize it like that if you want. Maybe you make one recipe all the time, and want all the pieces on your first page. You can do that, too.

Breath of the Wild, I loved at the beginning. Now, even though I want to finish everything, it's just taking too much busy work to do so. It feels like it takes longer to make a couple meals and switch out to my cold armor than it does to actually teleport to Hebra and fight a Lynel. I could just wear climbing armor all the time and drink potions, if potions themselves weren't so time-consuming to make. (A quick-cooking option, like maybe a stove in Link's house, would be another major improvement, but I'm sure someone else has said something about that before.)

You can organise the menu screens by pressing either Y or X I believe. It arranges the armour into either sets or piece type, similarly to materials, groups by type I.e ores, bugs etc.

[Pagerunner]

2 hours ago, AnanasSpren said:

You can organise the menu screens by pressing either Y or X I believe. It arranges the armour into either sets or piece type, similarly to materials, groups by type I.e ores, bugs etc.

Oh my goodness, it says it right there in the corner of the screen. Thanks for pointing it out; now I feel pretty foolish. I'll stand by my comments about controls, though.

[Retsam]

Yeah, both my fiancée and I do a lot of accidental whistling, a lot of opening the arrows/bows menus when we meant to open the shields/weapons menus (and vice versa), and at least twice I've broken a really nice sword by accidentally throwing it while fighting Ganon.  Part of it is the controls being weird and just somewhat counter-intuitive, and I think part of it's just that I'm not very comfortable with the WiiU pad and don't think it's a particularly well designed controller.

Personally, I'm hitting the point where the content is really feeling pretty same-y.  Korok's feel like busywork, rather than anything interesting, only about half of the shrines are interesting puzzles, I'm really feeling the lack of enemy diversity.  On paper, I'm still enjoying the game, but I feel it's slipped into skinner box territory, where I'm playing more out of sheer addiction of completionism and that "seeing numbers getting bigger" feeling, more than a deep enjoyment.  (In related news, I still play Pokemon Go from time to time; despite how mechanically awful that game is)

And I haven't even played that much of it.  I've mapped five or six areas, done 30-40 shrines, haven't touched any of the dungeons, (but I have beaten Ganon, because I make somewhat poor life choices when it comes to games).  There are some real gems in this game, some great puzzles, some really interesting challenges (I really liked Eventide Island, it was especially interesting since I'm only playing with 3 hearts), but those aren't the majority of my experience with the game.

[soyperson]

Just finished Shrine 120. The reward is pretty damnation cool.

[ParadoxicalZen]

1 hour ago, bleeder said:

Just finished Shrine 120. The reward is pretty damnation cool.

I'm still!l tracking the last 20-. Damnation they are hidden fair!y well

[Who Sharded?]

My only problem with the controls is that during intense fights (Lynels) I'll press in the left control stick and crouch down.

[Modal Seoul]

6 minutes ago, Who Sharded? said:

I'll press in the left control stick and crouch down.

"And when you press the button down, you can make me do the duck walk! Cool, huh?"

Edited March 29, 2017 by Captains Domon

[Dunkum]

1 hour ago, Who Sharded? said:

My only problem with the controls is that during intense fights (Lynels) I'll press in the left control stick and crouch down.

this, all day long.  every time I fight a Hynox I end up doing this.

i do the accidentally opening weapons instead of bows pretty frequently, though I am usually good about arrows vs shields.

my biggest complaint at this point is that the Divine Beasts feel pretty small.  I think I would like at least one or two full size dungeons.  I love the shrines, and the mechanics in the divine beasts are interesting, but I'd like something a bit bigger.  I understand that that would be hard to do in a way that fits organically into the world, though.  and all that said, that is not a very big complaint.  so far (2 divine beasts in) I am still loving the game, though the addiction level has dropped fro that first couple weeks.

Edited March 30, 2017 by Dunkum

[jjwilbourne]

I'm so glad I looked at this thread. I would have never known how to rearrange my equipment and items. 130 hours in, and I just find this out.

[ParadoxicalZen]

885/900 koroks 

Edited May 15, 2017 by ParadoxicalZen

[Dunkum]

19 hours ago, ParadoxicalZen said:

885/900 koroks 

oof.  I've got something like 85/120 shrines and I'm not sure where most of the rest could be (haven't been exclusively looking or anything, but I have wandered over most of the map at some point, so not sure how I can be missing that many).  I can't even imagine trying to get all the koroks.  especially since I am terrible at the throwing a rock puzzles.

[ParadoxicalZen]

1 hour ago, Dunkum said:

oof.  I've got something like 85/120 shrines and I'm not sure where most of the rest could be (haven't been exclusively looking or anything, but I have wandered over most of the map at some point, so not sure how I can be missing that many).  I can't even imagine trying to get all the koroks.  especially since I am terrible at the throwing a rock puzzles.

I was in the same boat so I just looked up the rest

[Dunkum]

58 minutes ago, ParadoxicalZen said:

I was in the same boat so I just looked up the rest

I'm not at that level yet.  i don't get to play all that often, so I still enjoy just sort of wandering around hyrule, and there are still occasional surprises hiding around some corners.  also, I haven't even attempted Death Mountain yet, so there should be a bunch in that region that I haven't found...i don't even have the map there yet.

[Andy92]

I still need to find around 40 shrines and my play time is at 65 hours. I have no idea how you can fit 40 more shrines on this map but I guess it is pretty huge. 

[C. M. Hayden]

Incredible game. I bought a new console just to play it.

I'm kindof a Zelda nut.