Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom – better graphics than the PS5? (pic: Nintendo)

A reader compares Horizon Forbidden West DLC Burning Shores to the new Zelda and how they each use the full power of their consoles.

Although it wasn’t technically a trailer, I think the 10 minute gameplay video for Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom may be one of the most effective piece of games marketing I’ve ever seen. It not only ensured I would buy the game as soon as possible but convinced me that it was going to be a top tier game just like Breath Of The Wild.

Most of the discussion I saw afterwards was saying the same thing, but I couldn’t help but notice a story a couple of days later where Twitch streamer xQc said the graphics were terrible and ‘telephones are better.’ Presumably he meant smartphones, but while an obvious exaggeration I have heard some people complaining about the graphics because they’re not better than Breath Of The Wild.

This is a reasonable complaint because Breath Of The Wild was basically a Wii U game and Tears Of The Kingdom is solely a Switch title. However, I think it’s obvious that Nintendo are not using the extra horsepower for the graphics but for the physics and the whole Fusing concept, which is completely unlike anything I’ve ever seen on a game of this scale, on any console.

The problem (not that I think that Nintendo is actually going to have a problem selling the game) is that that’s not obvious to the casual viewer that knows nothing about how games are made. It’s why things like AI never get better in games, because that takes up processing power that could be used on the graphics and you can’t show it off in screenshots or even necessarily videos.

Compare Zelda to the most unlucky video game franchise of the modern era: Horizon. Unlucky because it always manages to come out at the exact same time as a giant, critically acclaimed open world game from Japan, that instantly exposes how the Horizon games are all style and no substance. First it was Breath Of The Wild, then it was Elden Ring, and if not for the sake of a couple of weeks it would’ve been the Burning Shores DLC expansion as well.

I haven’t played Burning Shores, but I did get halfway through Forbidden West before giving up out of disinterest. I didn’t hate the game, but it’s not just shallow in terms of gameplay but the game world itself feels like you are exploring a diorama, an entirely artificial and almost completely uninteractive environment that is the exact opposite of Zelda.

The trailers for Burning Shores suggest it has even better graphics, because unlike the original it is PlayStation 5 only, but I cannot see any sign that the extra power has been used for anything else. Sony has taken the opposite approach to Nintendo and put all the power into the graphics and left nothing to make the gameplay more interesting.

So while Burning Shores looks better in terms of photorealism it’s really far less realistic than Zelda, in terms of being a recreation of a real, living world. For me that means not only is Tears Of The Kingdom a vastly more interesting game but it’s also a better looking one. It may not look as realistic but it plays more realistically and that’s what really matters… to me at least.

By reader Bighter

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A reader compares Horizon Forbidden West DLC Burning Shores to the new Zelda and how they each use the full power of their consoles.