There were some Dark Souls comparisons going around before the general public was able to get their hands on the game. It looked like it was mostly in regards to the increase in difficulty expressed as "The Dark Souls of" Zelda. It wasn't until I got the game at launch that I realized how well the comparison fit for the way I play the game.

1) Most enemies can one shot me.

I played the Soulsborne games with very little health to keep me on the toes. I want to feel like I need to pay attention and Breath of the Wild was able to deliver that in the first few hours. I still haven't picked up any health upgrades (going full stamina) in the 50 or so hours I've played this game.

2) The enemy AI is actually trying to kill you.

One of the very first things that stood out to me in Dark Souls 1 was that a group of enemies did not stand around waiting to take their turn to launch an attack. They would surround you and attack at all times. Breath of the Wild does the same thing with enemies launching simultaneous attacks.

3) I don't know where I should go.

A lot of people who played Dark Souls ending up fighting skeletons or ghosts without realizing they were in areas that were way above their current Souls Level. With Breath of the Wild I just picked a straight line in a random direction and just glided away on my glider. It wasn't too long before I encountered my first Lynel. After several deaths I was forced to retreat and go somewhere else.

4) I don't understand and/or know all the mechanics.

It took me a while before I felt like I had a good grasp on all the Dark Souls mechanics. With Breath of the Wild I know that there is still a lot I don't know about and I've already put in 50+ hours. I keep hearing about new techniques that are possible with the physics of the game.

5) I want to know more of the lore.

I love the lore in Soulsborne games. Item descriptions and environmental cues certainly are a strange delivery mechanism, but it made me feel like I was discovering the history of the world. Breath of the Wild is doing a similar thing with the photo memories and other similar things.

Do other Soulsborne fans feel the same way?

I feel like this is a stretch. True, in the first 10-20 hours I died more than I probably have in my many playthroughs of all the other Zelda games combined. However, once you start upgrading armor, expanding your health, building an arsenal, and stocking up on food and elixirs, the threat of dying kind of goes away. I'm right about at the end of the game, and it's been several dozen hours since I've died.

It's great that you've found a way to enjoy the game the way you want, but artificially limiting yourself like that makes the difficulty your own doing, not the game's.

All I can do is laugh.

I agree with all of your points though there is a caveat about the lore. I am curious to learn about what happened before the game starts, but not if that means listening to more of the terrible, terrible English VO. Seriously, it's like mid 90's anime bad. The mixing is all wrong and everyone is emoting weirdly and talking with a strange cadence.

8-4 considered Dark Souls to be the new adult Zelda, always commenting that the Soulsborne games were the adult Zelda game that everyone wanted with their dungeons, difficulty, and bosses. I see where you are coming from but I see more of a comparison between Dark Souls and the older 3D Zeldas than I do with Breath of the Wild. This is because how you move from one dungeon to the next is more linear in those older Zeldas. The open world nature of BotW makes it a completely different beast. Maybe it's that your comparison fits with things that happen in the open world during the beginning, it's just when you are doing dungeons and exploring later on, I don't see many comparisons.

Not to take away from the Soulsborne game comparison but I've been seeing a lot of people saying the devs were inspired from a bunch of other games when they made Breath of the Wild. I can't prove they weren't, but BotW feels so organic to me that while they certainly had knowledge of other games that informed their decisions, I don't think they picked an idea from one game, a different idea from another, and crammed them together. I feel like they started with the blank template "open world zelda" and went from there and along the way they thought of ideas that had a lot of similarities with games that were already out. I don't know, I just feel that those people who say that they took ideas from other games for BotW seems really reductionist because of how naturally everything joins together and interacts in BotW.

No

I love this game to pieces and I doubt anything will topple it for my personal GotY, but let's be real here. The only thing difficult about it is getting one-shot from not having enough armor and health in the beginning. At any point if you have less than full health, you can go into the menu and come out of it with full health, regardless of what state you are in, barring being actually dead. Going into all the boss fights, I could probably top my health off 120ish times if I had to. Every time a day passes, you can grab 3-4 fairies from a fountain, so not even that will give you a game over at some point.

Nah.

Difficulty and lore isn't the only thing that defines Dark Souls. There's a huge community aspect there that I personally never engaged in, but which really drove those games. And I'm not just talking about invasions and covenants and stuff. I'm talking about people figuring out the mechanics, people figuring out the lore, people figuring out the best ways to do things, and so on and so forth. Zelda has bits and pieces of that, but I don't think it has anywhere near enoughof that to really invite comparisons to Dark Souls.

Also, the open world in this game isn't particularly conducive to multiple playthroughs and there's no such thing as a "character build" in this game - you can choose to forgo a few hearts in favor of full stamina or a bit of stamina in favor of full hearts, otherwise you can wear any armor and equip any weapon you please.

Are there comparisons? Sure, in the same way that you can compare pretty much anything to Dark Souls in some way because Dark Souls is all about exploring fundamental video game mechanics and ideas. But no, I wouldn't compare Breath of the Wild directly to Dark Souls.

The finest of IGN titles

nah, its way more fun (but much less combat focused) than Dank Souls. What is so good about Dark Souls is the combat and while it is better than what it ever been in Zelda by far it doesn't really match up to the best of Souls games.

I literally have never ever died playing BotW. Sure, I've reached 0 hearts quite a few times, but I basically just relied on fairies and the resurrect power to heal me as I didn't want to bother with the cumbersome healing system.

As for gameplay comparisons, the majority of my time playing zelda was either doing tool-based puzzles in shrines or traversing a big open "boundaryless" world, neither of which is anything like Souls games at all. Add on to that the loot system and I'm having a hard time seeing what part of the experience would make anyone think "this is really similar to a Souls game". Sure, they both have melee-combat games I guess, but even that part is fairly dissimilar.

@teddie: "About damn time, boys!"

On the contrary: I don't enjoy Dark Souls at all and BotW is rapidly becoming one of my favorite games of all time. On a personal level, I find that there's something fundamentally opposite about the two experiences even if some superficial trappings and mechanics are similar.

Being able to save everywhere and not actually losing progress.

Not even close.

The only experience you could properly compare between the two is the sense of unknown, but I feel breath of wild did only as much as MANY other open world games. Consider any of the recentish elder scrolls or fallout games. They have some intro stuff with way more story then plop you down and have an initial quest marker (aka BotW after tutorial area) and you can do whatever. The biggest difference between BotW and most other open world games is the lack of an immediate town within close proximity to the tutorial area along with minimal dialogue even in the tutorial area, though the large dialogue dump is basically all the game will ever tell you about the story outside of character interactions (whom I could careless about because of story spoiler reasons). So it does feel more "unknown" since they tell you less and have no towns to ask people stuff for quite a bit, but if you simply don't go to towns in these other games its pretty similar.

I think the difficulty is incomparable to a souls game. Yes, at first most enemies one shot you, but then you get to a town, buy armor, upgrade it once, get a few hearts and BAM suddenly you become a god. This doesn't even consider that brokenness of food results in being able to carry around 60 INSTANT full heal potions that can also quadruple your health or provide massive combat buffs. I can't even comprehend why armor has 4 tiers, outside of providing a larger grind/game padding, when just tier 2 basic armor makes you mostly invincible, let alone using the higher armor pieces or specific anti-x pieces. I mean ya if I purposely limit myself by deciding to never put points in health and don't abuse the food system the game can remain challenging, but if I apply arbitrary limits to any game I can make it as hard, let alone the overall combat and enemy variety really limit the competitiveness and fun of the challenge.

Overall I think BotW and Dark Souls aren't even comparable outside of the initial "unknown" of the tutorial area that, in retrospect, is ruined by the MASSIVE dialogue dump at its end, but MANY games do this better then BotW. For instance, Hollow Knight recently came out before BotW and it reminds me of EXACTLY how I felt when I first played Demon Souls.

how dare you compare such filth to a pillar of crystallized gaming excellence!!!

...

(zelda deserves better ;) )

@silversaint: Welll to be fair in Dark Souls you can carry around what, 99 humanity? That will instantly restore your health and you can trivialise the game with overleveling and gear.

I dont think the games are similar but I think the difficulty of the series has been overblown.

No, because Dark Souls was already very much a new 3D Zelda.

I don't really feel like the similarities between the two franchises are any stronger than Zelda having Ubisoft towers.

I don't know about you guys, but having my Bloodborne character in this Zelda game sounds like a really fun and dumb time. Visceral attacks for days.

Yeah not really. It's refreshing how BotW respect's the players intelligence in a way previous titles didn't, but nothing specifically feels like souls at all.

This thread was inevitable...

Nevertheless, the more interesting version of this thread (to me anyway) is about how in the next five years we'll be hearing the phrase "like Breath of the Wild" with the same frequency has the last five years has been dominated by "like Dark Souls". The two released at critical points where, while none of the individual mechanical pieces are wholly unique, both coalesced ideas in a way that the industry has been experimenting with for many years (and now will be seen as the blueprint for their execution for the foreseeable future).

Dark souls is nothing like any zelda game, Dark souls is a 3d metroidvania. I think people are thinking of Darksiders, which is a completely different game and actually was an Adult Zelda lol. Also something being a bit difficult does not make it darksouls.

Man this video is on point lol.

The comparisons are apt, but it still feels like a stretch. Breath of the Wild for sure, for sure, for sure takes inspiration from the Souls games (which ow a lot to Zelda in the first place) but it has such a strong sense of identity that comparing it to anything ends up feeling wrong. SOOOO many journalists have struggled to come up with a way to describe it for this reason.

Oh absolutely. Game Informer did a podcast with several game developers (including Ken Levine) and even they were as stunned by the game as everyone else. There are many lessons in game design to be learned from it. I can see a lot of people using it as a jumping off point to explore new areas of design. I really think we're witnessing a massive redefinition of how open world games work.

I think the world and how it's used to present the games narrative is pretty Dark Souls.

Otherwise no.

I really hope not. While there are certainly parts about this game that makes the open-world experience great I can definitely see developers trying to ape this game and making the most god awful regressive open-world games. If you don't absolutely nail the world design and freedom of movement mechanics this is a game with an obtuse content delivery system and with way too much repetitive content. And even if you don't fuck it up it's almost impossible to rely this heavily on visual cues in more complex settings (like the city-style setting a lot of popular open world games uses).

If this becomes the new model for how to make open-world games I think we're gonna be in for a rough time. I can easily see this becoming a WoW situation, where one game comes in and does something brilliantly and then everyone starts trying to mimic that and just fail miserably at it. Even though there's been a lot of hate for open-world games in the last few years it's a very successful "genre" that's been steadily growing and improving year after year. Trying to coat-tail one very successful game instead of just evolving and refining what's already there seems like a very risky move to me.

I still think it's a lot more similar to Dragon's Dogma.

• Open World
• You can climb on monsters
• You can jump/parkour
• Emphasis on exploring the overworld vs dunegons
• Bokoblins packs are basically the same as Goblins packs, generally the open world encounters play out in similiar fashions. Lot of variability and occasional insanity (like blowing stuff up and knocking bad guys off cliffs)
• No Corpse Runs
• Difficult combat at times that doesn't really punish you if you lose
• Go anywhere, do anything emergent story telling

But it definitely pulls from a lot of games. I see influences from Monster Hunter, Minecraft, Skyrim, Batman : Arkham, previous Zelda titles and of course Dark Souls

lol

I can see where you are coming from, but I disagree.

• No build variety
• Open world is very open, no 'interesting' level design (in quote marks because I'm not suggesting Zelda isn't interesting, but it is completely different)
• Combat isn't as deep
• No stat management
• Not the same type of combat
• No death penalty (blood stain, hollowing and such)

I do agree it has some similarities though. But they don't translate to the same type of experience, that's the thing that matters.

Having watched a streamer doing the final boss fight I really wouldnt call this game a dark souls like. While the difficulty of bosses isnt the only factor in making a game a dark souls like game it seems to me a bit of a stretch to compare zelda to a dark souls game.

Think that at this point people that like zelda a lot just want to associate it with any other game that they like. Even dying in zelda is pretty merciful compared to dark souls games where you can lose all your hard earned souls.

Well, I'd much rather take a bunch of this type of open world than the typical waypoint driven, map icon clutter, HUD reliant open world games that make up the bulk of the genre.

There actually is quite a bit of level design in Zelda's world. It's not just a big world designed to appear solely as a realistic environment. There are many areas with clear and apparent level design. It's actually one the many reasons I think it's one the best open worlds out there. I'm not even talking about the dozens of environment puzzles, but areas of the world such as death mountain, zora's river, the lost woods, and the hebra trail that feel like proper video game levels that happen to exist in an open world game.

The game world is much more than just a bunch of open spaces.

(For the record, I'm not saying this game is anything like Dark Souls, it's just that one point you made stuck out to me.)

@ll_exile_ll: I understand. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, 'interesting' is most definitely the wrong word but I couldn't find something better. Souls games are designed in a very dense way. If you're walking somewhere, chances are above it is another area that only later connects to the place where you are currently walking and whatnot. Zelda is more open in that sense that is less dense. Not less interesting, not worse, just different.

@ll_exile_ll: You say that until you play a bad one of those, and then you go "fuck that!". A bad Zelda clone would basically be what open-world games were 10+ years ago, which has since evolved into what open-world games has become. Have they gone a bit overboard and could benefit from scaling back the direction a bit ? Sure, but do we really want to go back to AC1 days ? Just think about it, Korok seeds is basically AC flags done right. So what happens if you don't absolutely nail the visual cues ? Ye, you're back to AC flags.

A bad game will always be a bad game. A poorly made game will be that no matter what, whether a game attempts to emulate Breath of the Wild and allow the player to discover the content on their own through the world and visual design, or emulates Ubisoft and guides the player every step of the of way with neon sign UI design and hand-holdy map markers/quest design. The problem is I barely want to play the "good" games that overuse the hand-holdy ubisoft style open world.

Getting hung up on the bad games that will come out of developers taking inspiration from Zelda is missing the point entirely. The promise of great developers learning the right lessons from Zelda far outweighs whatever bad developers will do with those ideas. They'd be making bad games anyway, just different bad games.

This may be the hackyest comparison to dark souls yet and that's saying a lot considering basically all games and most media is compared to dark souls nowadays.

I am going to say that BoTW is not similar to Dark Souls. The complexity of the enemy patterns aren't really threatening and kinda gets redundant after a certain point in the game. There wasn't a moment of "oh I haven't this guy before, I wonder what he does?" I think that is why I find Dark Souls thrilling. The bosses are intimidating and so are some mobs. I find that lightning is the most opposing foe in my playthrough. :p

As for the lore building bit, I find it funny at times, but I never felt engaged by it. Most of time, I am just skipping over cutscenes just to get to the playing part. The voice acting in this game can be hit and miss. Still a fun game, but it isn't challenging.

You and your hack journalism, making a thread

@ll_exile_ll: Well ye, bad games will always be bad. That's not really what I was trying to say though. I'm saying bad as in "not able to achieve the excellence BotW had". Going back to the WoW example, it's not that every other MMO coming out after it were bad games, but they all did the same thing and never achieved that extra step of quality necessary for that thing to work. It's like a house of cards, you might do a very good job, but then if you don't completely nail the execution the whole thing crumbles.

BotW without the absolutely perfect execution on exploration is not a great experience. It's the entire linchpin to what makes the game functional. A game trying to mimic BotW that doesn't manage to reach that level will fall completely flat. A game trying to mimic AC on the other hand can have certain parts that are better and others that are worse (like say Horizon or Tomb Raider) and still come out fine, since there's so many "safety features". You know 80% of the game will be fine, even if you don't do an amazing job at it, and then you can nail that last 20% and still have a good game. Sure, you might not be super enthused about it, but these games are still very popular and doing more than well.

Both games can be difficult and you use weapons, yeah.

We have no indication games inspired by Zelda are doomed to fail. Designing and executing on this concept is certainly harder than dumping a bunch of icons on a map but it's not an impossible task. Nintendo just executed on the concept very well in their first open world game ever. Maybe we wait for someone to try before we throw up our hands and go back to the dying AC icon barf model?

I'm still very eager to know the lore of this Zelda game, but I know it surely wont be as deep as Dark Souls.

For the people commenting I really wasn't trying to make the 1 to 1 comparison to Dark Souls (it's not) since it's true that Dark Souls was in many ways one possible evolution of where Zelda could have gone. With the 5 points I wrote in the opening post I believe they hold true for Breath of the Wild and Dark Souls. I thought about what elements truly make the Soulsborne games shine for me and that's pretty much how I see it. The Soulsborne games certainly don't have the most complex enemy AI or movesets in the industry, but it strikes a balance that I find very appealing. The same goes for all my other points. They don't have "the most" or "most complex" iterations of those points, but they mix in such a way that just seems right on the mark.

It's a hard thing to explain. I'll think more on it as I continue to play Breath of the Wild.

EDIT: Another approach may be in how Lords of the Fallen tried to be Dark Souls, but failed due to lack of quality and that special combination of various things that makes Dark Souls feel right.

Nah. Zelda is actually good. I bounced off Dark Souls because I like having a sense of where to go. Like I don't need a waypoint, but the Soulsbourne games let you go anywhere so I'm never sure if I'm progressing right, so I have to use a guide.

@dudeglove: Oh, I do love Far Cry 2 as the super-secret best Far Cry. I mean, the last leg is confusing but I'll just put that down to, "This protagonist is very ill and Africa is fucked."

@slag:Let's not forget that Dark Souls also turned the repetitive and rigid re-spawning of enemies into a game mechanic itself , a Groundhog-Day-like, by not even bothering to create a lived-in dynamic world. Comparing open world games to Dark Souls isn't really flattering.

Dragon's Dogma - Bitterblack Isle expansion was very much their take on Dark Souls, and it was less compelling than the first open world part, IMO. Although there is something to be said about repeating stuff over and over again until you get really good at it or good at runnig past it. Bitterblack Isle also failed, because they started throwing bosses at you over and over thus cheapening the experience, something Dark Souls wisely avoided.

Come to think of it, Zelda appears to be, correct me if i'm wrong, very rigid and scripted. I also suspect that the size of BotW serves to geographically isolate mobs, so the don't run into each other much, without visible leashing.

+1

From the storytelling/lore perspective, it blows my mind how people try to compare BotW to Dark Souls. BotW tells a very straightforward and frankly basic and shallow Zelda story whereas Dark Souls is minimalist and incredibly deep, lore focused story. People seem real eager to compare the photos in BotW to the storytelling in Dark Souls. In Dark Souls, you read 2-3 sentence item descriptions on seemingly unrelated items and draw your own conclusions; in Zelda, you navigate to a place given to you at the start of the game (and there's an NPC who tells you exactly where each spot is) at which point you watch a fully voiced cutscene that shows you exactly what happened in that spot. There's nothing left to interpretation in Zelda's story, and that's not a bad thing; I just don't think it's right to say these games do anything similar in terms of storytelling.

Zelda's a good game and it certainly borrows one or two elements from Dark Souls, but to say BotW is the "new Dark Souls" or "the Dark Souls of Zelda" is really reductive and discounting a lot of the things both of these games do. They share a focus on open world exploration and a lack of handholding, and that's it. Besides that, I think it's not really fair to compare the two as they're radically different games.

Knack is the Demon's Souls of Zelda games.

I think it's closer to Dragon's Dogma than Dark Souls. Even so, it's a Zelda game. It's not going to be actually difficult or have anything interesting in the lore.