Is everything expensive? Not wrong. Even with video games: Many publishers hardly hide their desire to take more and more money from their most loyal players. But not all the time. Here are three titles that give you more bang for your buck.
Nintendo Switch. The hidden depths of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
From the tutorial to the final challenge, the action of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom takes place on the floating islands above Hyrule and in the legendary kingdom itself. Link still ventures into the imaginary depths of the kingdom once or twice.
Players who are in a hurry to complete the official storyline will not return to it. Others will spend entire evenings and weekends in these depths as they represent a game within a game. This barely hidden universe invites you to get lost in caves, tunnels and caverns, where there are mostly very secondary quests to discover, entertaining and difficult enough to make the detour worth it.
The depths of the kingdom are as vast as those of the kingdom of Hyrule. This was already more than twice the size of the environment created for the previous work Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That said, don’t immediately jump into the void and hope to end up under your aegis in this more or less well-hidden game from Link’s First Steps. The magnitude of adversity has a lot in store for you. It’s best to play through the basic scenario first, perhaps halfway through, before exploring the cave more freely.
However, if you’re prepared to stay up late, prepare to have a great time there. Someone calculated that while the average player can complete Tears of the Kingdom’s main quests in 60 hours, it would take 236 hours to complete everything, including clearing the kingdom’s gloomy basement.
Hidemaro Fujibayashi, the director of Link and Princess Zelda’s latest adventures, recently explained that these lower levels were created to satisfy great explorers. This isn’t the first time Nintendo has done this. It harkens back to the original Legend of Zelda from 1987 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Once the game was over and the freed princess appeared…a second quest.
Xbox. Starfield and procedural generation
It’s difficult to compare an interstellar RPG like Starfield, which has just landed on the Xbox console and in Microsoft’s gaming environment, with the medieval environments of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and yet. On video game blogs, Skyrim nostalgics are tearing off their virtual clothes to criticize what they see as Starfield’s overuse of procedural generation, an automated technique for creating new environments from simple basic rules.
However, publisher Bethesda is known – largely thanks to Skyrim – for creating spectacular open environments filled with improvised quests or scenarios just complex enough to make the player lose track of the great story that underpins the entire game . And that’s good: that’s exactly what Starfield offers. Perhaps the frequent loading delays spoil the enjoyment of the game a little, but you have to have been sleeping under a rock for the last half century to imagine that video games are not – at least a little – monotonous in the long run.
The space exploration game consists of around 1000 planets and 100 galaxies. It’s hard to imagine that we couldn’t use automated generation in this context. Apart from the fact that this of course makes each of the not so naturally created worlds a little superfluous. You can still spend about twenty hours there if you limit yourself to the basic scenario, or almost 150 hours to complete 100% of the missions, or even more to visit the thousand planets.
PlayStation. Assassin’s Creed’s shortened mirage
Was Ubisoft afraid of seeing the player stray? The playable universe of Assassin’s Creed Mirage is significantly more limited than Valhalla, the previous title. The main quest is completed more quickly, at around fifteen hours, and completing all tasks takes around thirty hours. In fact, it is half as much as Valhalla, which took about sixty hours to traverse from start to finish. In fact, those looking for maximum playtime are recommended to visit 11th-century England as Eivor, rather than the 9th-century Baghdad of Basim Ibn Ishaq.
However, we can get a little lost in AC Mirage’s Iraq. Those who have followed the series since its first game in 2007 will likely spend more time with it. As well as exploring a world carefully crafted by a team of designers and historians, there are also plenty of nods to previous titles in the series and a sort of return to basics that fans will enjoy. Of course, downloadable content extends your playing time – as long as you pull out your wallet.