Breath of the Wild BoTW didn't give us more freedom... it gave us less

[Tilinis]

Disclaimer: This probably won't make any sense...

BoTW has been almost universally lauded by game critics for the freedom it granted players. From the moment you start it up, your only limit is the great plateau, and from there, the opportunities are endless!...
Or are they?!?

I would argue this understanding largely misconstrues what BoTW does and what its greatest accomplishment is. (If you don't like philosophical discussions, this may not be for you)

First, BoTW doesn't really grant you that much more freedom than previous Zelda games. To understand this, we have to determine what freedom means. Beginning with Kant, philosophers have often conceptualized freedom in two distinct senses. Isaiah Berlin did an excellent job drawing the distinction and coined the first type as "negative liberty." Negative liberty (I'll refer to liberty as freedom) is the kind of freedom we experience when there are no limits or restrictions on our actions. The other kind, Berlin called "positive liberty." Positive freedom is a little more difficult a concept to grasp, but it essentially means that there are certain things unattainable without certain limits, restrictions, or preconditions that have to be to enjoy or obtain certain things. Additionally, the preconditions for positive freedom are inherently in conflict with negative freedom.

This distinction can be demonstrated by the following example. A young child with no guardian or person to prevent them from doing whatever they want could be said to have a great deal of negative freedom. After all, nobody is stopping them from going left, going right, or jumping about like a crazy kid. Still, the freedom that young child can experience seems less than that of an adult who has gone through a full education, perhaps has a career, and has the advantage of other elements of a structured society that grant him more options and greater access to those options than the child is able to enjoy. To acquire these additional options and therein freedom, the adult has submitted herself to certain limits or had/has certain restrictions imposed on her which in turn grant positive freedom. (I'm not the best at explaining this, so if you have further questions check out Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty.)

So, what does this have to do with BoTW? It has everything to do with BoTW!!! BoTW claims to grant you freedom, but what it actually does is grant you negative freedom. Sure, it's still a kind of freedom, but is it really more free than having a balance of positive freedom and negative freedom? By leaning toward negative freedom, BoTW substantially reduced the amount of meaningful choices a player could have had in lieu of granting them near infinite variations of essentially the same limited types of choices. What this means is that while you can go anywhere and do anything on the map, there's less value in doing those things than if there were additional components that are required for positive freedom. Additionally, there may be things you don't have on the map as options precisely because you haven't subjected yourself to certain restrictions or limitations. In other words, BoTW grants you options A,B,C and D, but you can't do X, Y, and Z, because you don't have the structure that is necessary for X, Y, and Z. For an even more illustrative example, imagine BoTW as it currently is compared with BoTW with a few additional full-on dungeons (some optional others required). Give the game to two different people, and ask yourself, which player has more options, which game has more value, and ultimately which player has more freedom.

Second, BoTW's greatest accomplishment is its ability to hide the limitations it places on the player in such a way to make them think they're free. While old school Zelda games required either the acquisition of an item, the unlocking of a door, or the completion of a dungeon/temple to progress, BoTW merely replaced the item/dungeon dynamic with the stamina bar (s), hearts (h), player skill level (p) and the expansion of negative freedom talked about above. The result was a bigger world where you could immediately go just about anywhere so long as s, h, or p didn't get in the way.

But how are the obstacles associated with s, h, or p any different from any other obstacle presented in previous Zelda's? The answer is that these kinds of obstacles allowed for an illusion to be created that made it appear like were no limits or obstacles. This is largely because players have never been granted this kind of negative liberty in a Zelda, and that my friends, is exciting.

Under this illusion, Zelda was exciting and breaking new ground! But, there are some questions for the future. Will the illusion wear off? What will happen if it does? Will people be happy to replace the old obstacles with the new ones on a more recurring basis? Will Nintendo return to form or try a hybrid approach?

Only time will tell, but I'm excited to find out.

 

[beste-spellen]

You could go straight to the final boss if you would want to. See the numerous videos online on YouTube, Twitch etc.

I think you're not giving the game enough credit if you say that BoTW does not grant you a lot of freedom. You can almost go wherever you want; if you do not have enough stamina or hearts, you could fill up your entire inventory with meals to increase both accordingly.

There is also a thing that these kind of games can never have unlimited freedom: If that would be the case then you could kill the final boss immediately without a lot of effort, which would not be fun either. If the first part of the game wasn't scripted, you would be even more clueless about what to do. But between the start and the final boss, you have the freedom to finish the Devine beasts in any order (I took the "wrong" order apparently), or go search for a lot of shrines first to make the journey a bit easier, or - if you have lots of free time - you could even go and collect the koroks.

 

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

After reading through you initial post, I must disagree with large chunks of it.

First I would like to point out that many 3D Zelda do not offer freedom, especially more recent ones. They guide you through hallways, restrict your movement, and create a linear experience that hides beneath the mask of an adventure. They open up sections of the game to you over time by locking them with items, which act as little more than keys.

Breath of the Wild offers plenty of meaningful choices, it just doesn't advertise them through map icons, quest pointers, and cutscenes. Said choices are meaningful because they directly affect your gameplay experience. It is meaningful to complete shrines because they offer a tangible reward that benefits the player and that the player can see. Unlike in previous games where bosses and dungeons are forced, the player's choice to complete them directly affects their experience.

I would also say it is inaccurate to say that Zelda removed the sorts of obstacles we are used to. What it did was replace them with obstacles that require the use of tools always at the player's disposal and the ability to think through a problem.

 

[Tilinis]

BoTW definitely grants you a lot of freedom, but my main point is that it's negative freedom (don't think negative freedom is inherently a bad thing. Many who agree with Berlin think both positive and negative freedom are good so long as they are in balance). Beyond that, you both bring up really good points, but I think some still fall under negative freedom, which is what we most commonly associate with freedom. I titled the thread a little too strongly, and that may have resulted in my argument coming across as antagonistic toward BoTW, which wasn't really what I was going for... (my bad) A very general point of my argument is that some of the value that previous Zelda games had was lost due to the abandonment of some more traditional Zelda (and video game) elements, and that the loss of that value can perhaps be characterized as a loss of freedom.

Depending on whether or not you accept Berlin's distinction between positive and negative liberty, you might be able to characterize the loss of traditional Zelda elements as being a restriction on the player's actual freedom, albeit positive freedom. A lot of people don't accept Berlin's distinction and argue that freedom really means only negative liberty, and that positive liberty is something else entirely. If that's the position you hold, then BoTW would certainly grant more freedom, and I wouldn't have much of an argument.

I wouldn't expect most people or players to accept or agree with what I wrote, but I think it could offer an alternative and perhaps accurate glimpse into why some players miss certain elements of older Zelda games, and why in some cases, some players may have even felt like they had less freedom.

 

[Dio]

The fact almost everything was available from the start diminished the sense of accomplishment of doing things which in other Zelda's would have been a proud moment.

In the past getting to the final boss would be an achievement you could only attain through hours of progress. In BoTW you could get there right away and finish the game in an hour.

I did not find when playing the game that it offered anything that I felt other Zelda games had restricted me from doing that I felt negatively about. Never have I felt that Zelda games were made worse by the fact I couldn't fight the final boss right away, that I couldn't go to the desert right away.

 

[Tilinis]

And in reply to Wombat Veteran, I totally agree with your first point. More recent non-BoTW 3D Zelda's have used too much positive freedom, in the way of making things too linear for what Zelda should be in my opinion.

Ultimately, I think even that is very subjective as to how much positive vs. negative freedom Zelda should have. For some, I think BoTW had too little positive freedom where as for others it still may have had too much.

At this point, you're probably thinking this positive/negative freedom distinction thing really is just an over-complicated way to state the freedom vs structure debate. It definitely has some strong similarities, but I think Berlin's characterization and others before and after him does provide value to how we characterize freedom in ways that make it different than freedom vs structure. If his positive/negative freedom distinction doesn't really make sense or doesn't seem any different than freedom vs. structure, that's totally on me and my inability to explain it.

 

[DarkestLink]

1) Hearts, stamina and player skill will never get in the way. You can eat through stamina limitations, there's a damage cap on enemies that scales with your hearts, and on top of being easy, the game scales down so players have little risk of fighting anything out of their league. Durability on the other hand...can get in the way.

2) I think it'd be more accurate to say that freedom in BOTW is meaningless. It objectively has more freedom than previous Zelda games, but none of it matters and it ends up sacrificing too much to give the player meaningless choices. Choosing which order to do the Divine Beasts has as much impact as deciding whether you'd like a bag of red M&Ms or blue M&Ms. The outcome is the same. The enemies are the same. The traversal and gameplay at the same. You will find the same things (shrines/koroks) regardless of which you choose.

3) Although I will admit that, compared to most other Open Worlds, BOTW is pretty lacking in freedom.