The Legend Of Zelda: breathe Of The Wild

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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild is getting a season pass and paid DLC, and Nintendo continues to cautiously open up its development bubble to the rest of the industry. It is not entirely unexpected news: Breath of the Wild is the first Zelda game to take on some conventions of other RPGs, and there's no reason to assume that DLC can't be part of this equation as well. And yet, in a fantastically meta way, the simple fact that this is news is news. 

Important caveat/clarification: there is absolutely nothing wrong with DLC, paid or otherwise, as a concept. Plenty of games have made excellent use of the format, and developers are only getting smarter about expansion as it become standard operating procedure in the industry. Erik Kain cites The Witcher 3, but there are scads of examples from all sorts of games.  If I've got a great game on my hands, I'm generally happy to get more of it.

And so in a broad sense, I'm excited about this idea for Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild as well. As a kid, I would have lost my mind for an extra dungeon in Ocarina of Time. And yet, it gives me pause.Nintendo has long eyed the rest of the industry with caution, and it generally means that it has a tough time when it tries to reintroduce concepts that other developers have been playing with for years.  It also means, possibly, that Nintendo will begin running into some of the same issues other developers have experienced, just as it has done in the past. Here's a relevant sentence in the press release:

Immediately upon pre-purchase or purchase of the Expansion Pass, three new treasure chests will appear in the game’s Great Plateau area. One of these treasure chests will contain a shirt with a Nintendo Switch logo that Link can wear during his adventure, exclusive to the Expansion Pass.

This sounds...weird. One hopes that the rest of the items in there are a little more normal, but the presence of this sort of thing just doesn't speak to a game with a strong handle on how to manage extra content. It is possible that the presence of strange content will not damage the rest of the game in any way, but it's just as possible that it's a symptom of confusion on the part of development. 

We remember that long development times do weird things to games, especially when they cross through different development trends and hardware generations. One of the things that bothered me most about my brief time with Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild was the game's reliance on an in-game item called the "Sheika Slate," a tablet-like device that makes an obvious and now pretty awkward reference to the Wii U. I just don't feel like Nintendo is great at the always difficult balancing act of breaking the fourth wall.

And this is why it feels shaky to me: an element of a system that Nintendo is not entirely familiar with, pushed into a game that appears to be taking a lot of internal risks on its own. And it's possible that this is just the kid in me who loves Ocarina of Time more than life, and worries that the developer will never quite get there again.