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I've not yet finished Horizon Zero Dawn or Breath of the Wild, but I've been sitting on my tongue for the last few days. There's so much I want to say about them - both in their own right, and in comparison to one another.
And now? And now I can "park" my "waggler" no longer.
You see, I started playing the new Zelda immediately after playing Horizon Zero Dawn. I was startled by the similarities between them - literally startled; I fell off the sofa, and had to hide beneath the dining table for ten minutes, chittering.
Both feature protagonists who wield a bow and melee weapons. Both are set in a vast open world. And both require the player to gather materials and craft things.
And yet, while the basic ingredients are the same, and they are essentially the same recipe, they present them in vastly different ways. Where Breath of the Wild takes its ingredients and prepares a dish with great care, in which every ingredient has a place - and the space - to contribute, Zero Dawn just chucks them all in a mixer, pours the resultant slop into a bowl, and grates a whoopee cushion over the top.
And now? And now I can "park" my "waggler" no longer.
You see, I started playing the new Zelda immediately after playing Horizon Zero Dawn. I was startled by the similarities between them - literally startled; I fell off the sofa, and had to hide beneath the dining table for ten minutes, chittering.
Both feature protagonists who wield a bow and melee weapons. Both are set in a vast open world. And both require the player to gather materials and craft things.
And yet, while the basic ingredients are the same, and they are essentially the same recipe, they present them in vastly different ways. Where Breath of the Wild takes its ingredients and prepares a dish with great care, in which every ingredient has a place - and the space - to contribute, Zero Dawn just chucks them all in a mixer, pours the resultant slop into a bowl, and grates a whoopee cushion over the top.
IMPORTANT BIT
For the record, before I came to Zelda, I was enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn. It's an unquestionably beautiful game, and though it is fundamentally striving to be photorealistic, there's some really quite lovely art design going on. Also, a lot of dull forests and mountains, which look like all the other forests and mountains in all the other games.
Still, as much as I sort of like it, there was also much about Horizon Zero Dawn which was getting right on my tit-tays. Specifically, it was to do with the way Horizon Zero Dawn tried to tell its story.
At its core, it's actually a decent enough little tale, playing out in a compelling world - set years after an unspecified apocalypse, where robotic wildlife now dominates the landscape. However, in telling this tale, it strives for grandeur, and epicness, and portent, and it merely serves to underline how needlessly bloated video game storytelling has become.
It certainly doesn't help that the voice acting is all over the place. Even within one tribe there's no consistency of performance. You'll get teens who talk like they're hanging around a bus station butting up against wannabe Vikings. The dialogue is tiresome and dull, characters are fundamentally unlikeable and difficult to root for, and the cut-scenes might as well just be a deafening klaxon, and somebody shouting "THIS BIT IS IMPORTANT!" over and over.
And then I played Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and got the answer to a question that I didn't even know I wanted answering.
For the record, before I came to Zelda, I was enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn. It's an unquestionably beautiful game, and though it is fundamentally striving to be photorealistic, there's some really quite lovely art design going on. Also, a lot of dull forests and mountains, which look like all the other forests and mountains in all the other games.
Still, as much as I sort of like it, there was also much about Horizon Zero Dawn which was getting right on my tit-tays. Specifically, it was to do with the way Horizon Zero Dawn tried to tell its story.
At its core, it's actually a decent enough little tale, playing out in a compelling world - set years after an unspecified apocalypse, where robotic wildlife now dominates the landscape. However, in telling this tale, it strives for grandeur, and epicness, and portent, and it merely serves to underline how needlessly bloated video game storytelling has become.
It certainly doesn't help that the voice acting is all over the place. Even within one tribe there's no consistency of performance. You'll get teens who talk like they're hanging around a bus station butting up against wannabe Vikings. The dialogue is tiresome and dull, characters are fundamentally unlikeable and difficult to root for, and the cut-scenes might as well just be a deafening klaxon, and somebody shouting "THIS BIT IS IMPORTANT!" over and over.
And then I played Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and got the answer to a question that I didn't even know I wanted answering.
SURPRISING ADVENTURE
What's surprising about Breath of the Wild is just how much it has been influenced by games of recent years. What is really lovely about that is how Nintendo has cherry-picked the parts of the open world genre that it likes, but ignored most of it. Unlike the spineless approach of most developers, they had the guts to trust that less is almost always more.
It's like they created a game specifically for me. Everything I've raged about in recent years, about tedious cut-scenes, bad acting, awful characterisation... I can't criticise any of that in Breath of the Wild, because it simply isn't there.
Your main character is a blank slate. There's no bad acting, because everything is conveyed through text. The cut-scenes are kept to a minimum, and when they do appear they're utterly charming - because they're not pretending to be movie clips. There's something wonderfully life-affirming and optimistic about everything that Breath of the Wild does.
However, perhaps its greatest accomplishment is in how it has humiliated the entire video games industry. It has shown them exactly where they've been messing up in trying to emulate cinema. It has shown them that their bloated storytelling is thoroughly unnecessary.
If you follow the story in Breath of the Wild - and you don't even have to do that, if you don't want to - you'll be treated to a tale which is all the more epic and spine-tingling and magical for the economical way in which it's being told.
Indeed, even when the story isn't being told, it still surrounds you. The sense of history in Hyrule is palpable - and despite taking place in a cartoonish, cel-shaded world, is far more evocative and convincing and consistent than Horizon Zero Dawn's misjudged, tonally wonky, hipster-populated, future.
What's surprising about Breath of the Wild is just how much it has been influenced by games of recent years. What is really lovely about that is how Nintendo has cherry-picked the parts of the open world genre that it likes, but ignored most of it. Unlike the spineless approach of most developers, they had the guts to trust that less is almost always more.
It's like they created a game specifically for me. Everything I've raged about in recent years, about tedious cut-scenes, bad acting, awful characterisation... I can't criticise any of that in Breath of the Wild, because it simply isn't there.
Your main character is a blank slate. There's no bad acting, because everything is conveyed through text. The cut-scenes are kept to a minimum, and when they do appear they're utterly charming - because they're not pretending to be movie clips. There's something wonderfully life-affirming and optimistic about everything that Breath of the Wild does.
However, perhaps its greatest accomplishment is in how it has humiliated the entire video games industry. It has shown them exactly where they've been messing up in trying to emulate cinema. It has shown them that their bloated storytelling is thoroughly unnecessary.
If you follow the story in Breath of the Wild - and you don't even have to do that, if you don't want to - you'll be treated to a tale which is all the more epic and spine-tingling and magical for the economical way in which it's being told.
Indeed, even when the story isn't being told, it still surrounds you. The sense of history in Hyrule is palpable - and despite taking place in a cartoonish, cel-shaded world, is far more evocative and convincing and consistent than Horizon Zero Dawn's misjudged, tonally wonky, hipster-populated, future.
WOKE
I'd love for Breath of the Wild to be a wake-up call to the games industry, but I'm not optimistic. While, in my opinion, Nintendo has shown how video games should always handle their storytelling - basically, how it used to be done - most developers seem addicted to their bloat.
Instead of asking themselves how video games can tell a story - through gameplay, through art design - there seems to be an endless quest to top the previous most-epic game. There's something depressing and spineless and unimaginative about it. It's the opposite of true creativity.
Apart from certain independent titles, and the games of Naughty Dog and - perhaps - Rockstar, I've not played a game in years which has been able to tell a story that could compete with the best cinema has to offer. Clumsy, leaden writing, and an utter inability to make the player feel for the characters, has now become the norm. Do we enjoy it, or have we merely learned to tolerate it?
The problem seems to stem from an obsession with trying to prove that games can stand shoulder to shoulder with cinema. Except... they hardly ever do. And the infuriating thing is that hardly anybody stops to ask whether trying is even the right thing to do.
By stripping away the sort of graphical clout of something like Horizon Zero Dawn, by reducing the narrative to its bare bones, Breath of the Wild is more emotional, more effective, more engaging, more epic than The Witcher III, Dragon Age Inquisition, Skyrim, and pretty much any other RPG you can think of. Not to mention the Call of Duty series, or... well, basically any game which forces us to suffer through a cut-scene.
Too often, video games are trying to be something else. Or - at the very least - feeding off one another, and not stopping to ask whether the games they're plagiarising from are getting it right.
Unfortunately for them, Breath of the Wild has just proved that they're all doing it completely wrong. It revels in being a video game, and the potential that offers. It makes abundantly clear that video games were getting storytelling right decades ago, before you all ruined it.
Thank Mumm-raa that Nintendo still realises it, and Gawd bless their integrity and stubbornness.
I'd love for Breath of the Wild to be a wake-up call to the games industry, but I'm not optimistic. While, in my opinion, Nintendo has shown how video games should always handle their storytelling - basically, how it used to be done - most developers seem addicted to their bloat.
Instead of asking themselves how video games can tell a story - through gameplay, through art design - there seems to be an endless quest to top the previous most-epic game. There's something depressing and spineless and unimaginative about it. It's the opposite of true creativity.
Apart from certain independent titles, and the games of Naughty Dog and - perhaps - Rockstar, I've not played a game in years which has been able to tell a story that could compete with the best cinema has to offer. Clumsy, leaden writing, and an utter inability to make the player feel for the characters, has now become the norm. Do we enjoy it, or have we merely learned to tolerate it?
The problem seems to stem from an obsession with trying to prove that games can stand shoulder to shoulder with cinema. Except... they hardly ever do. And the infuriating thing is that hardly anybody stops to ask whether trying is even the right thing to do.
By stripping away the sort of graphical clout of something like Horizon Zero Dawn, by reducing the narrative to its bare bones, Breath of the Wild is more emotional, more effective, more engaging, more epic than The Witcher III, Dragon Age Inquisition, Skyrim, and pretty much any other RPG you can think of. Not to mention the Call of Duty series, or... well, basically any game which forces us to suffer through a cut-scene.
Too often, video games are trying to be something else. Or - at the very least - feeding off one another, and not stopping to ask whether the games they're plagiarising from are getting it right.
Unfortunately for them, Breath of the Wild has just proved that they're all doing it completely wrong. It revels in being a video game, and the potential that offers. It makes abundantly clear that video games were getting storytelling right decades ago, before you all ruined it.
Thank Mumm-raa that Nintendo still realises it, and Gawd bless their integrity and stubbornness.
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