Is everything expensive? Not false. In video games too: many publishers hardly hide their desire to extract more and more money from their most loyal players. But not all the time. Here are three titles that will give you more bang for your buck.
Nintendo Switch. The Hidden Depths of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
From the tutorial to the last test, the action of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom takes place on the floating islands above Hyrule and in the legendary realm itself. Link still ventures once or twice into the imaginary depths of the kingdom.
Players in a hurry to complete the official storyline will not return to it. Others will invest entire evenings and weekends in these depths, since they constitute a game within a game. This just-enough-hidden universe invites you to get lost in caves, tunnels and caverns where it is possible to discover mostly very secondary quests, but entertaining and difficult enough to be worth the detour.
The depths of the kingdom are exactly the same dimensions as the kingdom of Hyrule. This one was already more than twice as large as the environment created for the previous opus, Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That said, don’t immediately launch yourself into the void hoping to land in this more or less well-hidden game from Link’s first steps under your aegis. The level of adversity has quite a welcome in store for you. It’s best to advance through the base scenario first, perhaps halfway through, before exploring the cave a little more freely.
Once equipped to stay up late, that said, prepare to spend some quality time there. Someone calculated that if the average player can complete the main quests of Tears of the Kingdom in 60 hours, to do everything, including cleaning up a little in the gloomy basement of the kingdom, you need instead 236 hours of game time.
Hidemaro Fujibayashi, the director of the most recent adventures of Link and Princess Zelda, recently explained that these lower levels were created to satisfy great explorers. This isn’t the first time Nintendo has done this. It dates back to the original 1987 Legend of Zelda 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 hard to compare an interstellar role-playing game like Starfieldwhich has just landed on the Xbox console and Microsoft’s gaming environment, to the medieval environments of Tea Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and yet. On video game blogs, those nostalgic for Skyrim tear off their virtual clothes to criticize what seems to them to be an overuse in Starfield procedural generation, an automated technique for creating new environments from simple basic rules.
The publisher, Bethesda, is nevertheless recognized – largely thanks to Skyrim — to create spectacular open environments, filled with impromptu quests or scenarios just complex enough to make the player lose track of the big Story that supports the entire game. And that’s good: it’s exactly that Starfield propose. Perhaps the frequent loading delays will dull the pleasure of playing a bit, but you have to have slept under a rock for the last half century to imagine that video games are not — at least a little — repetitive, in the long run.
The space exploration game is made up of some 1000 planets and 100 galaxies. It is difficult to see how we could not use automated generation in this context. Except that, obviously, it makes each of the worlds created not so naturally a little redundant. You can still spend around 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 its thousand planets.
PlayStation. Assassin’s Creed’s shortened mirage
Was Ubisoft afraid of seeing the player lose their way? The playable universe ofAssassin’sCreed Mirage is significantly more limited than Valhalla, the previous title. The main quest is completed more quickly, in around fifteen hours, and doing everything will take around thirty hours. It’s half as much as Valhalla, precisely, which required around sixty hours to be crossed from start to finish. In fact, those looking for maximum playing time will be advised to visit the England XIe century in the guise of Eivor, rather than visiting the Baghdad of the 9the century of Basim Ibn Ishaq.
That said, we can get a little lost in the Iraq ofAC Mirage. Those who have followed the series since its first game in 2007 will likely spend more time with it. In addition to the exploration of a world carefully created by a team of designers and historians, there are also many nods to past titles in the series, and a kind of return to basics that will please fans. Obviously, downloadable content is sure to add playing time… as long as you take out your wallet.