Having just played BOTW on Switch before playing this game, the performance is for sure improved. It does get a bit chunky when using the ultrahand or when a bunch of stuff is happening at once, but in general the game seems to run much smoother outside of those situations. You can actually run through the grass in Hyrule Field or most forests without the FPS dropping to sub-20 now, which makes a big difference. Kakariko Village is still a bit poor but not nearly as bad as in BOTW where it basically never ran anywhere near 30 most of the time you were there. The texture quality can be rough, but the fact it looks as good as it does on what is basically a console slightly more powerful than the Wii U is impressive enough.
Oh, and the one thing I did notice is that there's a dramatic difference in performance in docked versus handheld mode, much more so than other Switch games. When docked it runs quite smoothly. In handheld it's much more likely to drop to 20 FPS.
2. I watched Jeff's full TOTK stream Friday and came away thinking the game is more like a DLC add on and upgrade to BOTW instead of a full sequel.
I think the fact that it's very much "more Breath of the Wild" at its heart is a valid criticism but we can't just call things DLC because they're similar.
Definitely. During the tutorial island I was in the camp of "This seems like BOTW with a few new additions" but then a couple hours later after making it to the mainland my opinion completely changed. There's a whole bunch of new systems, locations, items, vehicle concepts, and other things you don't see or learn exist on the tutorial island (the largest of which one of the tutorial bots vaguely hints at but without context doesn't make sense until you find out for yourself later). The temples (at least the ones I've done so far) in particular drive home just how dramatically different this game is in terms of mechanics. My brain was still in BOTW mode when I played my first temple and I immediately got stuck for about 30 minutes. I had to stop thinking of this game in terms of only BOTW mechanics to make progress.
I think a valid comparison for this game is Saints Row 3 to Saints Row 4. If you do the first bit of Saints Row 4, it just seems like more Saints Row 3 but with a few changes, but after a couple hours it's a completely different game that just happens to have the same map. If you wanted, you could still drive around the map and use basic guns like in SR3, but why would you when you could jump over buildings, fly, and use superpowers in combat.
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