I brought this up in discord last night.
This is by no means a topic intended to criticize or hate on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but a discussion piece that came to my mind last night after a friend explained to me that he felt Zelda has strayed too far to "modernize" itself. He feels that this game simply just tried too hard to be something it's not, and has put itself in direct competition to already existing open world games, which he feels there are just better games to play in that genre. I think he was specifically referring to The Witcher 3 since that's probably the only game he likes in the genre. lol
Now his opinion aside, this got me thinking.
There is a part of his argument that made me realize that this game does take a lot of tropes and trends popular in the genre that you'd find in games such as The Witcher 3, The Elder Scrolls (and Fallout), and Far Cry.
Now this makes me think. Wasn't Nintendo's intention here to make this Zelda game feel like Zelda 1? and when I really look at it. This game feels much more like those games that I listed above than it would ever give me the Zelda 1 experience.
Some would argue that this point is moot because "Breath of the Wild is just better than those games listed above", but that'll just be your own personal opinion. So I want to make the discussion with that bias aside (that includes Metacritic reviewer bias too. Metacritic reviews doesn't add objectivity to this discussion), did Nintendo really lose focus here? In their attempt modernize itself with popular tropes in the genre today, did it completely stray from it's original plan to be similar to Zelda 1 in regards to the core concept.
Don't get me wrong, it's okay to modernize yourself, but something tells me they leaned too far modern, and too less their own original goal.
Please discuss.