Immortals: Fenyx Rising is Ubisoft’s take on a Breath of the Wild-style open world game. With a colorful stylized aesthetic, open world that you traverse through climbing and gliding, and puzzle based “Shrines” in the form of Vaults, the influence is clear. But that also invites an enhanced level of scrutiny into how this structure meshes with the game’s moment to moment mechanics. We discuss how Immortals feels in light of it’s source of inspiration, revisiting Umurangi Generation, and more on this episode of Waypoint Radio. You can read an excerpt and listen to the full episode below.
A lot of BOTW’s most daring design choices are neutralized when put through the Ubisoft player empowerment pipeline. Individual moments matter less because you’re preoccupied with macro-level progression, there are no meaningful choices to make at any give time since the clean frictionless design prevents mechanical experimentation, not needing sightlines to mark points of interest leads you into box-checking open world mode instead of indulging in curiosity about the space, and so on.
BOTW’s greatest triumph was in capturing a sense of adventure and wonder, by pushing against the content treadmill mindsets of nearly every other open world game. An entity as large as Ubisoft has no way of ever processing an idea like that, and the results are what you’d expect.
You’re probably right, but I enjoyed the Immortals combat in the hour I put into the demo a lot more than I did the hour I put into BOTW and I also appreciated that the weapons didn’t break. If I’m not going to get to the mountaintop, I’m content to take the Dr. Pibb to Nintendo’s Dr. Pepper.
From some youtube reviews I’ve watch it looks like it just cut out all the stuff I didn’t like about Breath of the Wild and condensed the world to make a fun theme park ride through lighthearted Greek mythology. I can dig that!