The Open World Review of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Why I am Confused.

I recently had the opportunity to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild video game on the Nintendo Switch. I had heard about its great acclamation's from many sources before but had never actually seen or played it. My knowledge of the Legenda of Zelda series was small compared to many who devotedly played the game, but I had watched my middle brother Duncan play them from Wind Waker to Ocarina of Times. This plus my secondhand knowledge of the Legend of Zelda lore made up my familiarity with the game. I only had a short time to play Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and was exclusively in the first area for all of it. All of what I say below should only be taken into account when talking about the very beginning of the game because I have not played the rest of it. The first thing I noticed with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was how different the game style was compared to the previous Legend of Zelda games. Breath of the Wild was an open world game where there was little instruction and a lot of player's choice. In previous Legend of Zelda games, there had been open worlds where players could move around and choose their own path but all of this was severely limited by the main quest. The game had helpers like Navi, a fairy, that would hint the player to their next goal. There were never many choices a player could have in straying from the main story, with a linear dungeon hopping style game being in the works. In Breath of the Wild the choices were numbered in the thousand, with no overarching helper to keep the player on the main quest. It is a huge world, similar in size to the likes of the Elder Scroll role-playing game worlds. There was the teleport option just as in the Elder Scroll games so that a player would not have to walk the huge distance between different points. Breath of the Wild acted as a role-playing game forgoing the normal structured path that Legend of Zelda games went down. All the fights I had with monsters were very interesting, and the physics and different motions in them were great. In addition, the climbing stamina based ability that Link has allows for the player to go to cool places that would otherwise be impossible to get to. This was an entertaining and a great feature, but it also comes to the main part of my problem with the game. I had a lot of fun just climbing, but why I was climbing was there was nothing else to do. So much of the starting world was empty, with very few enemies to face. This is different from the Elder Scroll worlds where they had big cities that had tons of quests and other side achievements to get. Even in the wild, there were tons of animals, and in some games dragons to fight. Open world games can be great, but they need enough action to make them playable. It can get tedious and boring playing a game where seventy percent of the time is just exploring empty lands. As games get larger in physical size, they have to keep the density of playable things the same. Small games can be loads of fun even if they are short because the time you are playing is filled with adventure. challenges, and mystery. Players must have enough to do to keep them hooked and into the game. I did not feel hooked by Breath of the Wild, and however much fun it was to explore the world myself, without having other player to player or player to computer interactions made me feel almost lonely. I can not say that this is the whole game because I have only played a snapshot of it, but the problem is the snapshot I played was the beginning of the game. This is the quick picture that everyone who plays it will get. I am not intrigued or interested in continuing to play it because of this enormous and empty world you are initially dropped into. While it is one thing to give players a lot of choice in their adventure, it is another to leave it only up to them to find entertaining things to do. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild looked wonderful, had awesome player movement, both in fighting, and climbing, but it lacked things to do, and became almost too open to keep me intrigued. The most interesting part of this to me is how all of my statements and my complaints fail in the face of facts. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been an enormously successful game for Nintendo and there is no denying that. I wonder what I am missing in this game then, maybe I just didn't play enough, but it did not make me want to play more. I generally like open world role playing esque games, but Breath of the Wild just felt empty. If anyone has played it I would truly love to know why you liked or disliked it, and what and or if any of what I have said feels wrong to you.