I Live For Nintendo Showing Off New Zelda Mechanics

Usually, exciting game trailers are built around vibes. When Rockstar finally debuted 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Grand Theft Auto 6, its (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:honestly incredible) gave little indication of the new mechanics that will be added this time around. Instead, it sells you on the setting, the story, and what it will feel like to be there. With over 204 million views on Rockstar Games' official YouTube account, it’s clear that offering a vision of a world where players will want to live is more important than giving them any hint at what they'll do there.

Of course, we know the basics of what we'll do — it's GTA 6, not GTA 1 — but if you hadn't played a GTA game before, you wouldn't learn much from this trailer.

Vibes Are Easy To Understand

When a game's pitch is mechanical, it tends to be a big, overarching, structural pitch. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth was sold as an open-world game. Concord is marketed as a live-service game with a serialized story. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin's Creed Shadows' 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ubisoft Forward presentation highlighted its dual protagonists. These pitches are communicating the basic gist of what you'll be doing in the world on the whole, but not what you'll be doing minute to minute.

Games are usually sold on vibes because, mechanically, you know what you’re getting into without too much explanation. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield's 'Skyrim in space' pitch was exciting because it was easy to understand. Less so if you actually dug into the nitty gritty of what you'd be doing moment to moment. But when the pitch is vague, it allows you to imagine that everything you like about Skyrim will be there and everyt♔hing that annoys you about Skyrim will be left on the cutting room floor.

With Echoes Of Wisdom, Nintendo Pitches Zelda With Mechanics

Nintendo's recent Zelda trailers are a rare case of game advertising that is intensely focused on mechanics. The marketing campaigns don't usually start this way, though. Nintendo released several vibes-based trailers for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom before it entered the final push, be♏ginning with the horror-ti🤡nged teaser at E3 2019. It only gave fans bread crumbs and had them speculating for years.

But, once the game's release date was actually approaching, Nintendo began to sell it explicitly on the cool new things you would be able to do in Hyrule this time around. You could Fuse items together, Ascend through the ceiling above your head, build vehicles, structures, and more with Ultrahand, and Recall items to their previous positions. Hearing was the main thing that got me stoked for the game in those final months. Sure it was set in the same Hyrule as Breath of the Wild (albeit with many, many small changes), but Link was different this time around.

Echoes of Wisdom is making a similarly mechanics-forward pitch, and it has been since its reveal. The new 2D Zelda had two big selling points out of the gate: 1) you're playing as Zelda this time, and 2) you can store Echoes of objects and place them anywhere around Hyrule to solve puzzles in your own inventive ways. The new trailer adds a few new wrinkles. You'll be able to Bind yourself to items. So, if a boulder is too big to move with Zelda's physical strength, you can attach yourself to it through magic and it will move when you move. There's also the inverse, Reverse Bond, which lets you move with an object or creature. Reverse Bond yourself to a bird, and you can effortlessly fly through the air.

In a way, this is a kind of vibes-based pitch, too. The Zelda games have always challenged you to use your brain. From A Link to the Past through A Link Between Worlds, that meant using assigned tools to reach prescribed solutions. I love those games, but Nintendo has pivoted hard toward allowing Zelda players to figure out their own solutions. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Echoes of Wisdom's trailers are telling you that the same is true here. It's offering a mood, too, but a mood based more on what you do than what you see.