Friday, January 20, 2017

Hyrule Blog & Breath of the Wild: Spoilers, Adventure Log


Breath of the Wild will be released soon, in six weeks to be exact, and we got a major outlet about the game one week ago with the Switch Presentation Trailer. Ideally, Nintendo will just let us have the game now without any further spoilers, but that's not how things usually go down.

So, how will Hyrule Blog proceed from now on? I will keep analyzing the materials, which Nintendo has shown us so far, so there will be more posts incoming with observations, speculations and theories for a little while. If you feel like the latest trailer has already shown too much, then you'd might want to stay off this site for now, though I will hide any major leaks and reveals under spoiler buttons.

I'm not sure, if I will look at anything that Nintendo might show from now on. With Skyward Sword they had the bad habit of showing pretty much the entire game in advance with the exception of the final dungeon. But even the final boss was there in the form of some artwork. It looks like they've learned from their mistakes and only want to show the early game, but we can't be sure right now. It's still fun to analyze the trailers and images, so I'm not entirely sure, if I will really avoid all of it. You'll see.

But I will definitely want to avoid any press materials. This is usually the really bad stuff, because these sites want clicks and to show as much as the NDAs allows them to. This was a disaster with A Link Between Worlds, where the press was allowed to show everything except for the final dungeon (again) and you could find all Lorule dungeons online in video form, before the game was out. How Nintendo could allow this, was beyond me. Previews might be coming up soon and reviews hopefully won't be published before the release week. But this is the phase, where I want to shut myself off from the media and don't want to learn anything new. Comments on Hyrule Blog will be disabled for that time.

Good news is that I will be able to take a vacation from March 3rd to March 13th - that's 11 days, where I can solely focus on playing the game and blogging about the experience. I will call this the "Breath of the Wild Adventure Log", which will be happening on a daily basis. During that time I might still keep the comments disabled or I will simply ignore them to avoid spoilers. And hopefully 11 days will be enough to explore most of the world and to beat the whole story.

4 comments:

Marandahir said...

I don't know how you'll manage to complete the game in 11 days of play.

But I'll be following along as usual. Might hold off on reading your blog posts if you get ahead of me (and you probably will, since I most certainly won't beat it in 11 days, given my work schedule and other life stuff).

TourianTourist said...

How? By simply playing all day long. :-D

For Zelda games so far this has been more than enough. Of course Breath of the Wild has a much larger world, but I doubt it will be so overwhelming that you can't beat the game in 11 days.

Marandahir said...

Well, if the game is roughly 2x the content of Skyrim, I know that in general it takes about 20 hours to complete the main quest (though a speedrunner has done it in 39 minutes), and maybe 60 hours if you complete the major guilds and daedric quests and whatnot.

So assuming Zelda has 2x as much content (a big assumption), that's 120 hours. Assuming you DO sleep 8 hours a day, and an hour is taken for various quick meals and bathroom breaks and whatnot, you have 15 hours a day, or 8 days. So I guess it is reasonable if this is your full-time occupation for those 11 days.

Gotcha. When we get to March, I'll probably check back in to read your adventure journals once I've experienced enough of it myself. I don't want to spoil it, but I do enjoy your takes on these things. :)

TourianTourist said...

Well, you can always read it, as soon as you're done with the game. It's just about sharing the experience and that won't ever be outdated.

I also wouldn't want to get spoiled, which is why I will probably disable or ignore comments while playing the game.