Breath Of The Wild Is Barren?

It was a little crazy to me at first to see so many people being negative about the new Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild because it looked so bare and boring.  I've always looked at this game as feeling like it has life and looking pretty lush; but I can see where people are coming from with all of the Nintendo Treehouse footage.
They were trying not to really show a whole lot and intentionally not only locked you into the plataue, but also took towns and NPC characters out as to avoid spoilers.

Now that's where it gets weird for me.  They outright said that of course they took that out and there is much more to this game than they are showing, but people are still very upset by it.  We have a really high bar with games like Witcher 3: Wild Hunt out there and when you have Zelda boasting that it will be of that ilk, it's hard not to be worried.  So, it's weird because you know they took a lot out and they were only showing off new mechanics and ideas so why are we fretting so much, but then you think about how this game isn't super far away so why don't they try to showcase more.  While I get what they were going for, maybe they did need to combat the worries head on that people may have had with a "barren world".  But I guess that's where I don't see eye to eye with 'the internet'.

When I saw the trailer for this game, I saw life.  You see the deer, you see the ducks and the horse that you can jump on and start taming and riding, you even see a giant of some kind walking around on a cliffside- but yet people didn't get to see that really in the Treehouse streaming.  But for me, I know that will still be in there, and from what we can take away from the gameplay, those will all be important.  Traveling on foot with the massive world they created will take a very long time, so why not go find yourself a horse?  You'll need good slabs of meet to craft good food to get buffs and extra hearts to prepare for dungeons or crazy exploration, so hunting deer and boar and all of that will be vital in some cases.  These are all things that, while we didn't see all of those animals from the trailer make it into all the showcase, we know will be in the game and those creatures will fill the world along with villages and people and all sorts of things.  I mean, we even saw a Korok in the first stream!

But even still, when they were not just piddling around and wasting time for translations as well, we got to see enough little things here and there with the camps of enemies and items to find that I don't fear for lack of content or a barren landscape.  We also had moments where we are going to find new items and weapons and how those are approached can be simple and fun.  It didn't feel overpacked (something that the Witcher can feel if you actually go out and try and complete every quest you can get off message boards and such) and it didn't feel too spread out.  Them taking content out to avoid spoilers and everything could also mean that if you did feel like it wasn't full of life, it could very well be when the final game is there.  

We also got to see some cool random giant fight happen in the middle of a field. This thing looked like it was a pretty tough enemy that maybe you wanted to make sure you were prepared to fight (which is where getting good equipment and weapons along with cooking the right types of food buffs would come into play).  And being able to set different styles of stamps on the map allows you to tag it with a skull icon to make sure you knew you tagged that as an enemy and not a location or item.

But as I've said - I get it.  I can see the reason that people would be concerned; Zelda is still playing catch up in a sense to games before it like Witcher and Skyrim.  It's coming into an era that is well established, and while it's not breaking new ground from what we have seen yet, I still think it's silly to get upset that it's now in the modern take on these open worlds.  However, this is a callback to what Zelda used to be with that original NES release, which is exactly what they are going for.  It's hard to make an argument for our perspectives (even though that's kinda what I'm doing) as people will see things differently or with different context, but I'm genuinely excited for this game more than any other game at E3.  I have some worries about how dungeons and your normal items from them would work out as you get stuff like bows and fire rods as normal items/weapons in the world, but they did pull it off with Link Between Worlds well, so we shall see.

At the end of all of this though, I do want to say that having a lack of something can be a really cool device for letting you explore and extrapolate the story within it without it being told to you directly - Think Dark Souls.  Zelda has this world with Breath of the Wild where you see the Temple of Time in ruin with some guardians totally destroyed and some ready to take you down.  You have Ganon's troops out in the field and you awake in some sort of technological crazy bath that was probably devised by the Sheikah.  I think they will have a big roll in this game and the technology is part of their whole deal.  But in this one area of a huge world (which, by the way, they are saying is like 1% of the game they were showing off at E3) we already have a good amount of wonder and curiosity about what is going on in this land.  That to me, can be really interesting.

-Eddie

p.s. - I forgot that the Stalfos come out at night as well and it was awesome/hilarious when you would break any part of them off and realize that they were trying to put themselves back together.  One guys head could be trying to go to another one's body while you are using the hand that's trying to crawl back to another one as a weapon to smack them in the face with!

p.p.s....... Can we also all be happy that when the first time you get an item there isn't a long drawn out item showcase and description and a lot of the normal Nintendo fluff like that is absent from this game?