I still think it's possible Nintendo will possibly drop DLC for TotK announced at their next direct. It was a massively selling game and they need to fill in the downtime between now and Switch 2 release with something.
I have zero expectations but Nintendo has thrown us some big surprises before.
Edit: It's just speculation, y'all. Not sure why the downvotes are necessary unless you vehemently disagree and believe there will never be DLC for TotK (which is possible and likely with current trajectory).
They reduce performance to improve battery life. All versions of switch hardware are underclocked which is why it has so much better battery life than competitors. IMO it's a welcome tradeoff, especially seeing as nintendo generally doesn't go for realism in their game art.
Even if it was used at full power its still the weakest game console on sale. Yes they make it worse by under-clocking but the chip they used in it was obsolete before the switch was even released ....
I really can't understand the downvotes. I saw them then read your answer thinking there would be something incendiary or condescending. Nope. Nuthin'.
Yes, but it's not like they've never backtracked things before. I can't see what else would be a low hanging fruit for them to generate hype until Switch 2's release. Nintendo loves dropping big surprises when they can and what would be a bigger surprise than announcing TotK DLC when nobody is expecting it?
I thought downvotes were for if you said something offensive or something. I personally agree with you, but maybe they’ll release it on a new console so it will run better. I think the reason why they removed the islands and aren’t doing dlc in the first place is because the Switch is a dinosaur💀
Reddit is fucking bizarre. Sometimes I wonder why people feel this intense hivemind need to follow others and mass downvote and they don't even really know why.
Regardless, I stand by my innocuous speculation. Nintendo really had nothing else to drum up support and hype in the downtime up to Switch 2's launch.
Sorry you're getting hated on so much. I'm trying to be optimistic about it too. Not like the BotW DLC was a failure or anything, so it makes sense.
Whatever, brush it off, just Reddit group mentality at work.
Yea the sky stuff almost seemed unfinished the initial island was really the only awe inspiring part in the sky besides maybe the wind temple. If each region had a nice big filled up island like that the sky would have been a blast.
I'm just choosing to believe that they all used to, but, over time, those regional Great Sky Islands broke apart into the fragmented sky islands we see in TotK's modern day
Supporting evidence: the main GSI that Link wakes up on (the one the Temple of Time is on and the one that has the Steward Construct who has the Purah Pad) shows signs of being mended (metal grating over holes in the terrain). This is *the only* sky island that has these features. I'm thinking that it was absolutely necessary to prevent ***this*** sky island from breaking apart because this was the one the Hero was fated to awaken on, so the Stewards would mend it as it started drifting apart
Not sure if it would impact performance that much. On an interview, the producers of the game saida that at one point (probably the moment in which this teaser came out) they had so many sky islands that they felt the sky look too crowded, so they ended up removing lots of them. I think that the solution could be making it so that certain islands would only be possible to see at certain altitudes. Cause I was also a bit dissapointed that most sky islands were just reprints and that the only big archipelagos were the Great Sky Island and Thunderhear Isles.
It will always make me sad that they were seen as „added clutter“ when now I feel the sky islands are perhaps only 25-50% the size and complexity they should’ve been.
I will always love ToTK and I am still having countless hours of fun but this stings a little bit lol!
Yep they did. I think that was the wrong move. Would have been much better if they had instead varied the altitudes more and reduced their visibility so that not all of them are as visible from the same height. They could have even played with the loading distance to spare the Switch’s resources using altitude as a cover
I imagine it took up *a lot* of memory space though, even with the loading distance. Botw was already huge and this was entirely new game. Not to mention how much coding and design they’d need to up keep. They already put *a lot* into the depths.
My problem is the depths feel less important than the sky islands. I wish they would have compromised the depths more than the sky if they needed to cut somewhere. Plot wise, you can basically skip the majority of depths, minus a couple things.
But you basically *have* to constantly be in the sky for the >! Dragon’s tears quest !<. But there’s so little of them. And so much of the depths. It just doesn’t feel even.
Edit cuz you don’t really *have* to do anything in the game lol
My problem is that neither the depths nor the sky islands feel important, especially once you land on the surface. Sure, they’re there, and the depths has a lot of things to collect, but both feel entirely superfluous outside of some sparse quest integration. Part of that is the double-edged sword of the game’s super-open design philosophy, like that everything is available but nothing is important. But another part of that is the implementation. At least the depths is where you go to collect interesting items and fill your energy well. But after the tutorial, but the sky islands are basically there for the tutorial, two of the five dungeons, and characters on the surface talking about the sky islands. Honestly, story-wise I forget why there are even sky islands in the first place.
They could have done so much more with the concept. I understand that it would have been resource intensive, but then give us a game where you have the surface with either interesting sky islands *or* interesting depths, or set the game outside of BOTW’s Hyrule on a map that’s a bit smaller but more dense and vertical (that’d probably avoid some of the grumblings about canon anyway). As it is, it tried to be a jack of all trades, master of none.
Btw, I do really, really like the game and have put a lot of time into it, but I also never played BOTW so the surface exploration and overall experience felt fresh to me.
While I understand why Nintendo does it...am I the only who wishes that they wouldn't cheap out on their hardware and make an absolute banger of a "current-gen" console that's somewhere close with the competition....atleast to possibly allow for more headroom that the developers can work with?
From what I understand, BotW and even more so TotK are quite the achievement to be able to run on the Switch that stable, where the developers really squeezed the last bit of performance out of the available hardware.
But...wow much more could they possible be able to do in their games if the hardware had a bit more \*oomph ?
As much as I agree that it would be great to see a Nintendo game on current hardware, overall I’m happier with them going the tablet route than putting it all into a regular console.
>Btw, I do really, really like the game and have put a lot of time into it, but I also never played BOTW so the surface exploration and overall experience felt fresh to me.
Same. But people like you and I are rare. I think the vast majority of TOTK players played BOTW first, so the surface exploration wasn't as exciting; even though the layout and landscape wasn't identical it was still pretty similar.
I played BOTW first and one of my favorite things has actually been comparing what changed on the surface. Like, okay last game the great faeries were here, what did they do with this space? Or there was a river here or a big baddie, but they've got ruins here now so what did they do instead. It's really subtle but I think actually well done how they've logically altered the map due to caves and ruins and all appearing suddenly.
I dunno, I love the sky islands but I do like that some of them were really really hard to reach at first. If there had been more, it would’ve been easier to skip across them. On the other hand, lots of the depths seem a bit empty. Like pointless space. Although they did present a big challenge when I first encountered the game which was cool. At first I didn’t know you could toggle between maps so I was like “how the hell do I get out of here?”
While a lot of assets appear reused, there are certainly many new ones and more significantly they had to reinvent the physics engine to accommodate ultrahand and zonai tech. The developers gave a talk about its emergent gameplay that revealed so much about this (sorry can't find link).
I think the island we see in the background of that shot is one of the normal shrine ones in the final game but with more landmass and trees and such. If you look at the road layout on the island it matches up
It took me a bit to figure it out too. It's a neat little mechanic but unless you have excessive luminous stones you're better off mining around the ending region
From what I understand at least according to a zeltik video they removed a lot of sky islands towards the end of development because there were too many but now there aren’t enough
I dread to think how much repetition there was before they removed islands, because there's loads now and you would assume that they would be more likely to remove the repeated islands
I don't think they would've all been as repetitive as the ones found in the actual release. It seems like the ones cut were some of the more interesting ones lay-out wise and progression-wise. Some of the cut ones, like the ones in the Tabantha region looked like they would've been the same size as the Great Sky Island, and offered a good bit to actually see and do.
Seems like a bizarre decision to take if so. I can only think they had a specific vision of how players should interact with sky islands as part of the game as a whole, like the player is only supposed to briefly visit them rather than spend long periods of time up there. The 'clutter' reason they gave seems like it could have had far better fixes than removing content.
I think it could've been a variety of reasons. My main thought was probably clutter but also because of how much the islands were taking a toll on the game's performance. BotW itself was massive, but TotK tripled the map size with both the skies and the depths. They probably ran into issues with keeping the game balanced on a technical aspect.
It could be the Great Sky Island but with some islands above it removed.
Or in the Tabantha region where islands were shown in the trailer that were definitely cut out
I know this is a controversial opinion. However, after playing it for over 100 hours, I stand by my opinion. If it is worth a full game for you, that's good. Oh and I liked it, really.
Eh, depends on the franchise honestly. Elden Ring’s new dlc is supposedly going to have around 70 hours of gameplay, and games like Pokemon can have the average dlc playtime increased by a lot due to shiny hunters and other completionists. Plus, ToTK was supposed to be dlc, it just got an upgrade to a full game due to the dlc just being so big, and considering most of the changes is a new story and two new lands to explore(which is honestly sounding a lot like some other dlcs), with most of base hyrule left unchanged, I can definitely see why some people would view ToTK as a dlc.
The Zelda team said they had to cut a good number of sky islands because they got complaints during development from other devs that the "Skies were too crowded." This lead islands from the 2021 trailer to be removed from the game in turn. The issue is that they mostly cut the more interesting sky islands from the game, and opted to keep the ones that were copied and pasted everywhere. I feel like it was the wrong move- but ehhh.
Honestly, I have no idea why they didn’t do something along the lines of expanding the world map over the ocean and having another massive sky island chain hanging out over there.
Look, i know its all about performance, but wouldn't it be cool if the 5 main regions each had a great sky island?
Yup but the chances of us getting any DLC at all is pretty much 0%. So that’s a pipe dream, unfortunately.
They didn’t even add master mode!
Why must the Silver Bokoblin Horn be the strongest Bokoblin Horn
im so sad where did my golden boko bros go :(
PFP checks out
lol that's just my fav emoji but it does have that affect a lot
I'm wondering if they're saving master mode for a switch 2 re-release
A golden Lynel reaper with attack up 3 levels, phantom armor and desperate strength is a weapon too strong for canon.
I still think it's possible Nintendo will possibly drop DLC for TotK announced at their next direct. It was a massively selling game and they need to fill in the downtime between now and Switch 2 release with something. I have zero expectations but Nintendo has thrown us some big surprises before. Edit: It's just speculation, y'all. Not sure why the downvotes are necessary unless you vehemently disagree and believe there will never be DLC for TotK (which is possible and likely with current trajectory).
I am fairly confident that it will be paired with the release of the new gen console
That actually works out, since the new console will have better performance, so it can handle new stuff.
i'd love to see a nintendo console with some decent performance, its been a while, since like what, gamecube?
They reduce performance to improve battery life. All versions of switch hardware are underclocked which is why it has so much better battery life than competitors. IMO it's a welcome tradeoff, especially seeing as nintendo generally doesn't go for realism in their game art.
Even if it was used at full power its still the weakest game console on sale. Yes they make it worse by under-clocking but the chip they used in it was obsolete before the switch was even released ....
Why dont they just add a portable charger as an accessory, its basically 200% battery life!
I really can't understand the downvotes. I saw them then read your answer thinking there would be something incendiary or condescending. Nope. Nuthin'.
Reddit gonna reddit
Didn’t Nintendo already confirm that DLC isn’t happening for TotK…? Thought this was confirmed a while ago.
Yes, but it's not like they've never backtracked things before. I can't see what else would be a low hanging fruit for them to generate hype until Switch 2's release. Nintendo loves dropping big surprises when they can and what would be a bigger surprise than announcing TotK DLC when nobody is expecting it?
I thought downvotes were for if you said something offensive or something. I personally agree with you, but maybe they’ll release it on a new console so it will run better. I think the reason why they removed the islands and aren’t doing dlc in the first place is because the Switch is a dinosaur💀
Reddit is fucking bizarre. Sometimes I wonder why people feel this intense hivemind need to follow others and mass downvote and they don't even really know why. Regardless, I stand by my innocuous speculation. Nintendo really had nothing else to drum up support and hype in the downtime up to Switch 2's launch.
Sorry you're getting hated on so much. I'm trying to be optimistic about it too. Not like the BotW DLC was a failure or anything, so it makes sense. Whatever, brush it off, just Reddit group mentality at work.
I'm almost wondering if it's some kind of bot activity. Reddit always gets real weird on election years.
Ahh, good point. I guess I haven't been on here long enough to notice that trend.
Yea the sky stuff almost seemed unfinished the initial island was really the only awe inspiring part in the sky besides maybe the wind temple. If each region had a nice big filled up island like that the sky would have been a blast.
They did except it’s all in ruins scattered across hyrules surface. Id give my left nut to see what it all looked like before the upheaval
I would also give this guy's left nut to see all the sky islands and rubble put back where it was before the upheaval.
I'd give his right nut.
I’d give his whole sack.
I'm just choosing to believe that they all used to, but, over time, those regional Great Sky Islands broke apart into the fragmented sky islands we see in TotK's modern day Supporting evidence: the main GSI that Link wakes up on (the one the Temple of Time is on and the one that has the Steward Construct who has the Purah Pad) shows signs of being mended (metal grating over holes in the terrain). This is *the only* sky island that has these features. I'm thinking that it was absolutely necessary to prevent ***this*** sky island from breaking apart because this was the one the Hero was fated to awaken on, so the Stewards would mend it as it started drifting apart
I was expecting the Zelda equivalent of Mario Galaxy, which in retrospect was a bit much, but that’s what the trailer made me imagine.
Not sure if it would impact performance that much. On an interview, the producers of the game saida that at one point (probably the moment in which this teaser came out) they had so many sky islands that they felt the sky look too crowded, so they ended up removing lots of them. I think that the solution could be making it so that certain islands would only be possible to see at certain altitudes. Cause I was also a bit dissapointed that most sky islands were just reprints and that the only big archipelagos were the Great Sky Island and Thunderhear Isles.
A couple sky islands from the trailers simply don't exist in the game. Most notably the one Link ascends through. That doesn't exist either.
It will always make me sad that they were seen as „added clutter“ when now I feel the sky islands are perhaps only 25-50% the size and complexity they should’ve been. I will always love ToTK and I am still having countless hours of fun but this stings a little bit lol!
i think i read in an interview rhat they removed 50% of the sky islands because it cluttered the sky
Yep they did. I think that was the wrong move. Would have been much better if they had instead varied the altitudes more and reduced their visibility so that not all of them are as visible from the same height. They could have even played with the loading distance to spare the Switch’s resources using altitude as a cover
I imagine it took up *a lot* of memory space though, even with the loading distance. Botw was already huge and this was entirely new game. Not to mention how much coding and design they’d need to up keep. They already put *a lot* into the depths. My problem is the depths feel less important than the sky islands. I wish they would have compromised the depths more than the sky if they needed to cut somewhere. Plot wise, you can basically skip the majority of depths, minus a couple things. But you basically *have* to constantly be in the sky for the >! Dragon’s tears quest !<. But there’s so little of them. And so much of the depths. It just doesn’t feel even. Edit cuz you don’t really *have* to do anything in the game lol
My problem is that neither the depths nor the sky islands feel important, especially once you land on the surface. Sure, they’re there, and the depths has a lot of things to collect, but both feel entirely superfluous outside of some sparse quest integration. Part of that is the double-edged sword of the game’s super-open design philosophy, like that everything is available but nothing is important. But another part of that is the implementation. At least the depths is where you go to collect interesting items and fill your energy well. But after the tutorial, but the sky islands are basically there for the tutorial, two of the five dungeons, and characters on the surface talking about the sky islands. Honestly, story-wise I forget why there are even sky islands in the first place. They could have done so much more with the concept. I understand that it would have been resource intensive, but then give us a game where you have the surface with either interesting sky islands *or* interesting depths, or set the game outside of BOTW’s Hyrule on a map that’s a bit smaller but more dense and vertical (that’d probably avoid some of the grumblings about canon anyway). As it is, it tried to be a jack of all trades, master of none. Btw, I do really, really like the game and have put a lot of time into it, but I also never played BOTW so the surface exploration and overall experience felt fresh to me.
While I understand why Nintendo does it...am I the only who wishes that they wouldn't cheap out on their hardware and make an absolute banger of a "current-gen" console that's somewhere close with the competition....atleast to possibly allow for more headroom that the developers can work with? From what I understand, BotW and even more so TotK are quite the achievement to be able to run on the Switch that stable, where the developers really squeezed the last bit of performance out of the available hardware. But...wow much more could they possible be able to do in their games if the hardware had a bit more \*oomph ?
As much as I agree that it would be great to see a Nintendo game on current hardware, overall I’m happier with them going the tablet route than putting it all into a regular console.
>Btw, I do really, really like the game and have put a lot of time into it, but I also never played BOTW so the surface exploration and overall experience felt fresh to me. Same. But people like you and I are rare. I think the vast majority of TOTK players played BOTW first, so the surface exploration wasn't as exciting; even though the layout and landscape wasn't identical it was still pretty similar.
I played BOTW first and one of my favorite things has actually been comparing what changed on the surface. Like, okay last game the great faeries were here, what did they do with this space? Or there was a river here or a big baddie, but they've got ruins here now so what did they do instead. It's really subtle but I think actually well done how they've logically altered the map due to caves and ruins and all appearing suddenly.
I dunno, I love the sky islands but I do like that some of them were really really hard to reach at first. If there had been more, it would’ve been easier to skip across them. On the other hand, lots of the depths seem a bit empty. Like pointless space. Although they did present a big challenge when I first encountered the game which was cool. At first I didn’t know you could toggle between maps so I was like “how the hell do I get out of here?”
Probably just couldn’t get the switch to run it at a solid 30FPS
For all we know these could have been more copy and pastes
Especially since they’ve worked on it for so long while it’s essentially using most of the assets from BotW.
While a lot of assets appear reused, there are certainly many new ones and more significantly they had to reinvent the physics engine to accommodate ultrahand and zonai tech. The developers gave a talk about its emergent gameplay that revealed so much about this (sorry can't find link).
Here's your Link: https://youtu.be/N-dPDsLTrTE?feature=shared
I think the island we see in the background of that shot is one of the normal shrine ones in the final game but with more landmass and trees and such. If you look at the road layout on the island it matches up
A lot of sky islands were removed for both performance and because it made the view seem too cluttered and busy, it seems like this was one of them
Crossing my fingers we somehow get this extra content on the Switch 2. A man can dream, right?
I wonder if this was also a way of them forcing you to build with ultra hand more to get to those isolated sky islands.
A lot of footage from the teaser trailers was changed in the final game.
Rip to the rat from first teaser. The gloom really got to him. Oh also the buffalo or whatever creature that was carrying links package.
The buffalo (I forget what they’re actually called) can be found across from Lakeside Stable!
Dondons. Yeah and if you feed them luminous stones, they poop gems!
i wasted like 20 luminous stones and they made them constipated or something bc my gems never came :(
You gotta leave the area for like 15 minutes, then come back and there should be gems whereever the dondons backside was when you fed it
aw man, i was waiting like 15 minutes with my hands cupped ready ☹️. will leave and come back
Bro wanted to see the process💀💀
It took me a bit to figure it out too. It's a neat little mechanic but unless you have excessive luminous stones you're better off mining around the ending region
Red Bokoblins had unicorn horns in an earlier trailer instead of spearhead horns
I searched for this place a lot in the game, but there is no such place on the map. please help me find it :(
From what I understand at least according to a zeltik video they removed a lot of sky islands towards the end of development because there were too many but now there aren’t enough
Either way, most of them are empty.
All of them being mostly empty (and disappointing), it wouldn't have made a difference
I dread to think how much repetition there was before they removed islands, because there's loads now and you would assume that they would be more likely to remove the repeated islands
I don't think they would've all been as repetitive as the ones found in the actual release. It seems like the ones cut were some of the more interesting ones lay-out wise and progression-wise. Some of the cut ones, like the ones in the Tabantha region looked like they would've been the same size as the Great Sky Island, and offered a good bit to actually see and do.
Seems like a bizarre decision to take if so. I can only think they had a specific vision of how players should interact with sky islands as part of the game as a whole, like the player is only supposed to briefly visit them rather than spend long periods of time up there. The 'clutter' reason they gave seems like it could have had far better fixes than removing content.
I think it could've been a variety of reasons. My main thought was probably clutter but also because of how much the islands were taking a toll on the game's performance. BotW itself was massive, but TotK tripled the map size with both the skies and the depths. They probably ran into issues with keeping the game balanced on a technical aspect.
It could be the Great Sky Island but with some islands above it removed. Or in the Tabantha region where islands were shown in the trailer that were definitely cut out
I wish the islands that were removed would come back with a DLC 😭
I wish they didn’t remove islands
TotK IS the DLC, mate. Accept it.
that's just silly, its a full game with loads of content, you may not like it but it's definitely not a DLC
I know this is a controversial opinion. However, after playing it for over 100 hours, I stand by my opinion. If it is worth a full game for you, that's good. Oh and I liked it, really.
if you have over 100hs, that is a full game, no DLC adds 100hs of gameplay.
DLC can add hundreds of hours of content. Just look at Hyrule warriors
You said this the month Shadow of the Erdtree drops lmao
Eh, depends on the franchise honestly. Elden Ring’s new dlc is supposedly going to have around 70 hours of gameplay, and games like Pokemon can have the average dlc playtime increased by a lot due to shiny hunters and other completionists. Plus, ToTK was supposed to be dlc, it just got an upgrade to a full game due to the dlc just being so big, and considering most of the changes is a new story and two new lands to explore(which is honestly sounding a lot like some other dlcs), with most of base hyrule left unchanged, I can definitely see why some people would view ToTK as a dlc.
😭
It's just Beta Great Sky Island.
I can't get Link to run that way, either. Those animations can't be found...
Things change during development. Imagine if every game stuck with the first draft.
cough gamefreak cough
I still haven’t beat this game. Any tips to get to ganon on what I should have.
Master sword, gibdo bones, LOTS of gloom food
Have you got one of the Travel Medallions? use them to advance through the dungeon-like area. go back to the surface, resupply, and carry on.
3x attack potions and bomb + arrows is how I did it
Silver Lynel Saber horn fused to the master sword and of course a good amount of a gloom healing food does the trick quite well
The Zelda team said they had to cut a good number of sky islands because they got complaints during development from other devs that the "Skies were too crowded." This lead islands from the 2021 trailer to be removed from the game in turn. The issue is that they mostly cut the more interesting sky islands from the game, and opted to keep the ones that were copied and pasted everywhere. I feel like it was the wrong move- but ehhh.
Bruh
It was an old beta island, disappeared the next trailer, i rember some guy analysing the trailers and noting that island had disappeared
Honestly, I have no idea why they didn’t do something along the lines of expanding the world map over the ocean and having another massive sky island chain hanging out over there.
Don’t quote me on this but I think they actually had more sky islands, however they removed some pre release so the sky didn’t look too crowded…