I would be remise not to talk Breath of the Wild. The only problem is, the game pretty much speaks for itself, quality and qualities wise, doesn't it? Yet, since last I posted, I completed Final Fantasy XV, so it's not a bad idea to talk abot how these two ancient giants deal with awakening in today's gaming world.
-I wasn't immediately floored by FFXV, but the sort of chill, super-realistic setting of magical pretty-boys and roadtripping in hostile territory quickly won me over. Talking abot it's story is both a laughably sort excercise and a maddingly long one, so I'm going to simply say: It's quite good, and quite incomplete. If you haven't played FFXV, just wait till all the updates and DLC are out, you'll get the full experience.
+I wasn't immediately floored by FFXV, but the sort of chill, super-realistic setting of magical pretty-boys and roadtripping in hostile territory quickly won me over. Talking about it's story is both a laughably short excercise and a maddingly long one, so I'm going to simply say: It's quite good, and quite incomplete. If you haven't played FFXV, just wait till all the updates and DLC are out, you'll get the full experience.
What FFXV truly was to me, was a fantasy of travelling around a lush green environment and mowing down wildlife and roaming weaponized armor troupes. The open world element, I realized, was simply a part of the mood. I could hardly go wherever I liked, and trying to explore, rarely revealed anything surprising. FFXV was, like so many earlier entried in the series, about it's combat. I'll get to why that's more than ok.
I haven't finished Breath of the Wild yet, but it's not trying to hide where it'll end up, so it doesn't require a lot of confidence to say that I see the bigger picture by now. BotW gets open world design. It gets it like no game before it. Everything is traversable and though there isn't a purpose to going all places, neither does it ever feel like a time waste. The level of detail in both the big picture and the smallest iota, is astounding. To be fair, BotW doesn't play much different from so many other games. Instead, it seems to say "This is how you should do open world", drops a mic and let's you play.
Both FFXV and BotW initially appear to be entering the modern world by seemingly accepting how Western developers design games: Real-time combat, ultra realistic graphics (FFXV) and go-where-ever-you-like, play-how-you-feel-like (BotW). Instead they both end up adhering to their roots in decidedly new ways. The Zelda puzzles, space-comprehension-requiring dungeons, grunting NPCs, tangible environments. It's all there, but in a far greater and smoother scale.