Posts by Joshua

    Discord is a godsend for many reasons. Like a blend of IRC and Ventilo/TeamSpeak and Skype. But free, without ads, extremely reliable, and very customizable. The only downside is I have seen it significantly replace other means of communicating over time. A lot of communities that were primarily forum based or so exclusively talk in Discord servers instead of their actual community forums leaving them a bit dead. ?(

    To answer the original thread: I used Skype daily for many years, but began loathing it after Microsoft continued to drive it into the ground. There was seemingly no really other good alternatives for group-based chats and group voice calling. Discord changed all of that and I, and all my friends quickly made the switch and I cannot see myself going back. Skype is pretty dead to me. Back in my days of running Zelda Oracles I remember talking to everyone through MSN... No one wanted to adopt Skype since it was the "new kid" on the block. I remember not understanding why so many random people I didn't know kept calling me until I learned what the "Skype Me!" status meant. :rolleyes:

    I have almost completely stopped using Skype. I think I used it twice last year. My adoption of new tools tends to rely on what the Zelda community requires. I only ever installed Skype because Zelda Universe and Zelda Wiki were using it for team communication. It was awful. We had dozens of different group chats for different subjects, and everyone had to be individually added (or removed) from each group. And the mobile version was never in-sync with the desktop version.

    Even so, because I had Skype for Zelda Universe, I also used Skype for friends.

    Zelda Universe was an early adopter of Slack for team communications. We picked it up basically the moment it was available. It is a godsend. I don't know how we ever made it work with Skype. Because of that, my interest in using Skype for anything basically faded entirely. I had a couple of friends I was keeping in touch with via Skype, but they've pretty much all moved to Facebook Messenger now.

    Discord is nice for gaming and for community discussions. I used Ventrilo for World of Warcraft a lot when I used to raid, but I haven't been a really active team-player since Discord took off. I suspect it is much better. It is a shame that forum communities move to Discord-only sometimes, but I have also seen them co-exist well. Zelda Universe definitely has users that are active on both the forums and Discord, but Discord is also home to many people who would never join the forums.

    I never had an issue with Skyward Sword's motion controls when I was playing through the game originally. On subsequent playthroughs, I ran into a few problems with things like rolling bombs. But, in general, the biggest problem is simply that I don't want to do it anymore. I like how motion controls enhanced aiming in Breath of the Wild, or how they were used for little puzzles here-and-there, but I'm just done with motion controls as the primary method of controlling a game.

    I think Skyward Sword could be reworked to use an analog stick for swinging the sword. Some other games have already done similar things. Otherwise, they could automated some of it. That is, let me opt-in to a motion-free "casual mode" version of the game where the computer just figures out which way I need to swing. Some people would probably complain about dumbing down the experience, but I would rather just have fun playing and not need to deal with the motion controls. I think they could maintain some of the challenge by just re-implementing the Z-targeting combat from the previous games and making sure that players correctly choose a vertical attack, horizontal attack, or stab, and then let the computer figure out the exact direction it should be.

    Alternatively, they could just rework the enemy AI and puzzles to not require anything more complex than vertical, horizontal, and stab, but I think that would be more effort for the developers.

    Yeah. I do remember I used to watch Zeltik's videos in BotW. If I recall correctly he is one that made some cool analysis on the guardians lights colours and possible meanings.

    I haven't seen his videos recently. I should get a dig. Do you have a favourite video by him, Joshua ?

    Honestly? It's probably his reaction video to the final Breath of the Wild trailer.

    I am not generally into reaction videos like that, but something about that last Breath of the Wild trailer just makes me wants to watch how others reacted. I love reliving that moment...a lot.

    I really wish Nintendo would just adopt an account-wide digital game library like everyone else. if I bought it once, I bought it, period. Doesn't matter if it's the Wii, WiiU, DS, 3DS, Switch, or Switch 2.

    As for WiiU ports, I am a little more sympathetic in this case than I would be otherwise. The WiiU just did not sell. We're in a very small minority of people who actually bought the console and played the games. They're porting games because they never reached their full sales potential because they were released on a dead console.

    I still think that if we bought them digitally then they ought to just move over, no questions asked. But I think asking full retail price for a game that was released on a dead platform before is fair game.

    The Switch sold more in a year than the WiiU did in 5 years. It's a completely different situation. The WiiU has alot of great games that would just be lost without being ported.

    I think The Wind Waker HD, in particular, is a sad story. It was already released on a platform that did not sell well, and then they re-released it hoping to correct the problem and made it even worse. I would be happy to see The Wind Waker released again to really give it a shot. However, I'm afraid that this time it would be overshadowed by Breath of the Wild.

    Hyrule Warriors is a great game, and in the end I'll probably buy it again on Switch just to have it in my collection, but I'm really not excited for it at this point.

    I already bought it twice - on the WiiU and again on the 3DS - and the Switch game is not adding anything significant. The 3DS version added a lot of new content, but it forced you to play through the entire original game to get to it. By then, I had already played through the original WiiU game multiple times.

    At this point, I am really not interested in playing through the same game again.

    I would very much like to see Skyward Sword remade to no longer require motion controls, but that's probably a pipe dream.

    Aside from remakes (because I always want to play every Zelda game on every platform), I would also like to see a brand new 2D Zelda game that uses some of the open world ideas from Breath of the Wild. I think they could build a huge open world in 2D and breath some new life into that genre as well.