Interesting. Opposite for me. Playing BotW reignited the feeling of playing OOT and MM for me.
I think I might have beaten one or two of the beasts and probably about half the shrines. And most of that came in the tail end of my many hours of gameplay. Yet I'd been all over the world, and had all kinds of fun adventures.
I also grew up with OoT, absolutely obsessed and life-defining in many ways. Now I’m a certified Old, and while BotW didn’t click for me initially, I grew to love it and soon understood it to be one of the greatest games I’ve ever played.
That did require me to consider the context though, and force myself to play it with a type of ‘beginner’s mind’.
A few months ago, I decided to give Ocarina a play via the Nintendo Switch Online N64 emulator and—I couldn’t do it. With modern games to compare it to, the graphics, the frame rate, the controls, etc. was just not a good experience and I had to stop.
Same thing happened with Goldeneye. I can’t believe this was tolerable way back when. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
The kids growing up on BotW/TotK will have the same rose colored glasses for those games as many of us have for OoT.
I can’t wait to get off work today and fire up TotK.
I played dozens of hours of Goldeneye back in the day (a friend had it, and I spent a lot of time at his house) but it very nearly wasn't tolerable to PC gamers. Its sole redeeming feature was that it was far more social than PC shooters. Playing it felt like going backwards 5-10 years in graphics, level design, gameplay, et c., plus the controls were astonishingly terrible (unless played in dual-controller mode, but that was no good for multiplayer). About the only feature it had going on that was up-to-date for the time were the multiple hit-zones on enemies (different animations and amount of damage depending on where you hit them).
Perfect Dark was a huge improvement in every way (and in many ways is still unsurpassed), and with modern controls on the XBox 360 port, I still play it to this day. Going back to Goldeneye from Perfect Dark, though? Oof. Even at the time, Perfect Dark's release seemed like it straight-up obsoleted Goldeneye, aided by the fact that it included renamed clones of some of the best Goldeneye multiplayer levels and many of the weapons (though, why would you play with them when you have Perfect Dark weapons available? They're so bland)
And then I played BotW. Since the late 90s there were only 2 other games that I put in more playtime than it and those were Ultima Online and WoW. And this was a single player game. It was the most amazing experience for me.
For me Zelda was always more of a puzzle game than an adventure game, and I feel like those puzzle aspects are much more amplified in the last two entries, though in a much more "freeform" way.
