I played both and found Botw boring. Huge areas were nothing was happening, but they looked nice. Except the divine beasts, they were boring as hell, gameplay wise and optical. For this they got rid of cool dungeons? The challenge shrines repeated often and were not really interesting at all. And the weapons broke permanently. After a short while I simply rushed through this game. I can see the love poured into this game but the gameplay was just soon boring to me.
Then came Totk. I was sceptical at first, but then came the building of stuff. Suddenly it was okay when weapons broke, because you could try other interesting things with them. Dungeons were back. The challenge shrine were mostly puzzles for the build mechanic. The whole freaking world was filled with build puzzles where I could get lost in shenanigans. So they basically addressed most issues I had with the first game and as a result I liked it more.
Storywise I would place them both in the category “about okay”.
Godot quickly became one of my favourite open source projects to watch. I played around with it for a bit when 3D was clearly an afterthought and seen continuous improvement ever since.
I am a bit sad for what could have been. But I am not surprised at all.
The game basically always stagnated and content came way to slow. Cosmetics and the battle pass were updated regularly though. Anyway since the game was dying, they brought an “big rework” and brought the game, previously only available on Epic, to Steam.
The big rework changed most of the game into a grindfest/paywall, especially for new players. Old players were shafted as in weapons, builds, armour they spend time grinding for was removed from them to enable a “fresh start”.
That obviously did not turn out well with new and old players. And now they are going to the live service game graveyard. Anyway fuck Phoenix Labs (and more specifically Forte Labs, a bunch of cryptocurrency twats who bought the former studio), another company blacklisted and I will never buy anything from again.
Very, very cautiously. It looks better than previous games on Switch, but still not good. On the other hand: maybe they are showing this footage from a Switch 2.
Sadly it doesn’t seem to add the possibility of whitelisting/blacklisting games. I do not want to share porn & VAC games, not even with adults, since the bans are shared to the account actually owning the game.