LogFAQs > #972156722

Yellow posted...

It's not that they aren't good anymore, it's just that they don't change things up to keep things fresh for long term players and they just rely on a constant influx of kids/teenagers

The director of Zelda outright said Zelda wouldn't survive if it didn't change up the formula, Say what you want about BotW, but it succeeded in keeping people interested.

I might argue that S/V did about as much for the Pokemon formula as BotW did for Zelda. The shift to focusing on exploration in an open world was a pretty substantial change to the core gameplay element of "explore the world and catch fantastic creatures," given how linear and restrictive prior games tended to be in that regard. The battle system didn't change meaningfully (sure, tera types add an extra layer of prediction to competitive play that's mildly interesting, but there haven't been any core improvements), and I won't pretend that the transition to open-world design happened seamlessly (notably, keeping the classic "you need this many gym badges to use pokemon caught at this level or higher" mechanic threw an unnecessary wrench into that freedom), but Gen 9 was a pretty substantial paradigm shift for the series that ties in well with why Pokemon Go was so explosively popular (namely, people like the idea of just running around and collecting Pokemon).

Now, BotW did more to change the Zelda formula than just shifting to open-world exploration. ALBW might actually be the better analogy, where the basic formula was preserved, but the player was free to explore the whole map pretty much right away and tackle dungeons in whatever order they liked best. But I don't think anyone would have liked BotW less if it had more robust dungeons, and in fact that would likely have cut down on the fairly common "good game, but a terrible Zelda" response a lot of people had to it. You don't need to change up a series that much to keep people's interest. People don't follow series to find games that are unlike anything they've played before. People follow series to find games that are familiar and predictable. There's still certainly a need to mix things up so you're not just selling the same game with a new coat of paint every time, but if you're looking for a change in how a series fundamentally works, it might be time to just accept that you aren't actually interested in that series and shouldn't expect your nostalgia fix to also satisfy your desire to play something brand new.