Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has explained to Japanese magazine Famitsu that video game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated in the future and that mergers…
Has Nintendo slipped in quality? Their practices aren’t the great, but when it comes down to it, they have some of the most consistently high quality games.
There’s one thing they did right that most other open world games do wrong: The map starts blank and it fills in as you explore. Others in the genre, you’ll Ubisoft that tower and then it fills in with all the icons of things to do here, so now follow the minimap to them all. In BotW, you Ubisoft the tower, you get the topology map, and now it’s up to you to find stuff in it, and when you do you get an icon on the map telling you you’ve done it.
I’m pretty sure the Rito quest wasn’t complete in time for launch so they had to rush to throw something together. The Hebra region is distinctly empty, I’m sure we were going to have to go on an arctic adventure to find Teba’s favorite cuttlefish bone or something, but they didn’t have time to finish it because the Switch was coming out so they said ‘Fuck it, build something that runs and ship it.’
There isn’t much variety in the enemy types, a lot of encounters are monotonous, a lot of the systems are so basic that they’re easy to break, and they were so afraid of telling a story out of order that the game doesn’t have a story of its own; “Link fucks around all over Hyrule for awhile then decides to defeat Ganon.” Meanwhile it tells you a different, somewhat related story.
Then there’s TotK, which they tried to make a sequel to BotW out of BotW’s bones, and it didn’t work as well.
They also have some of the longest tenured pros of game design and programming in the industry in its entirety… something sadly far more rare outside of Nintendo… but especially Japan.
Shigeru Miyamoto, for example, has been designing at Nintendo for literally 4+ decades at this point.
Turns out you can master a craft after doing it for a majority of your adult life.
But - in the US at least - the executives at publicly traded game companies would rather shut down literal smash hit dev studios like the guys who made Hi Fi Rush than cultivate a few master class devs of their own over a few decades…
Has Nintendo slipped in quality? Their practices aren’t the great, but when it comes down to it, they have some of the most consistently high quality games.
I thought BotW was pretty mediocre. They basically took the “bigger and better” strategy to one of their iconic games and made it “bigger and worse.”
It’s an unpopular opinion apparently, but that’s my take. Hopefully it’s notb the start of a trend of Nintendo following other AAA studio trends.
Mario wonder sucked
There’s one thing they did right that most other open world games do wrong: The map starts blank and it fills in as you explore. Others in the genre, you’ll Ubisoft that tower and then it fills in with all the icons of things to do here, so now follow the minimap to them all. In BotW, you Ubisoft the tower, you get the topology map, and now it’s up to you to find stuff in it, and when you do you get an icon on the map telling you you’ve done it.
I’m pretty sure the Rito quest wasn’t complete in time for launch so they had to rush to throw something together. The Hebra region is distinctly empty, I’m sure we were going to have to go on an arctic adventure to find Teba’s favorite cuttlefish bone or something, but they didn’t have time to finish it because the Switch was coming out so they said ‘Fuck it, build something that runs and ship it.’
There isn’t much variety in the enemy types, a lot of encounters are monotonous, a lot of the systems are so basic that they’re easy to break, and they were so afraid of telling a story out of order that the game doesn’t have a story of its own; “Link fucks around all over Hyrule for awhile then decides to defeat Ganon.” Meanwhile it tells you a different, somewhat related story.
Then there’s TotK, which they tried to make a sequel to BotW out of BotW’s bones, and it didn’t work as well.
They also have some of the longest tenured pros of game design and programming in the industry in its entirety… something sadly far more rare outside of Nintendo… but especially Japan.
Shigeru Miyamoto, for example, has been designing at Nintendo for literally 4+ decades at this point.
Turns out you can master a craft after doing it for a majority of your adult life.
But - in the US at least - the executives at publicly traded game companies would rather shut down literal smash hit dev studios like the guys who made Hi Fi Rush than cultivate a few master class devs of their own over a few decades…