Just to add another factor to the ongoing discussion: artistic talent isn’t uniform and never was. Just because only/mostly “immature” art survived from a certain century of human history, doesn’t mean that there literally was no realistic art present at the time. Since you mentioned the statues already…

These are from the same era (around 200 BC), but as you may have guessed, made by different artists =P The statue is called The Dying Gaul by the way.

As for painting examples, I guess the Rothschild Canticles^[1] book illustrations represent best what most people nowadays would call medieval art. Not exactly realistic, a little goofy … perspective? Never heard of it. Proportions? Who cares. And who needs shading anyway?! As long as you can still distinguish a human from a cupcake, it’s “eh good enough”.

I guess that was also what you meant by “immature” art, because it is the same art style as those goofy weird pictures of knights fighting giant snails and rabbits riding cattle into battle and the like.^[2]

That book is dated to be around 1500–1520 so it would be easy to assume that people at the start of the 15th century didn’t have a realistic art style yet. But you know what else was made in that same era?

The Mona Lisa (1503–1506).

One dorky meme-esque style, and one realistic, modest and easy-on-the-eyes style in the same century, probably even the same decade. But they were used by different artists.

Now you might be thinking that those art styles might have been intended for their respective purpose or something along the lines: that the goofy, simple art style was used for nothing but amusing little pictures, and the more realistic style was for “proper” art, because noone in their right mind would spend 100+ hours painting highly detailed nonsense just for sh*ts and giggles, right?

May I introduce you to Joseph Ducreux?^[3]

I guess most of you will have seen that meme by now, but this is a real painting made by a real artist - and it is far from the only one. Ducreux created an entire series of similar self-portraits in … unusual poses and situations.

… so yes, at least that one guy DID indeed spend dozens if not hundreds of hours (plus material costs) painting amusing nonsense for his own entertainement. He was, in a way, the victorian era equivalent of a shitposter (and I mean that in a good sense!)

Long story short: one can’t just claim that “they didn’t have X art style in Y century” because the truth is much more facetted than that. It is way more likely that each and every era of human history has had people with insane talent who were able to create art as realistic as possible with whatever tools their lifetime had to offer, and also a bunch of “eh good enough” art or stuff that was deliberately stylized for fun. How we percieve said art today depends mainly on what artworks have survived up until now, and/or how popular the surviving art is. (Everyone and their grandma knows about the Mona Lisa, but how many of y’all knew about the Rothschild Canticles?)

If we don’t know about any realistic art from a certain period of time, it doesn’t automatically mean that there was no realistic art. It may have been lost, forgotten or it exists but it’s just not popular enough to be well-known.

Sorry for the late reply, I wasn’t online for a few days … but I see you figured it out ;) I can’t speak for other instances, but at least on lemmy.world, the thumbnail is blurred and the post marked as NSFW.

Wikipedia claims they’re quite popular.

whoever handed those out is probably a bigot

That explains so much. Their usual mental gymnastics have a similar “order” to them …

I have no idea, sorry. I just found that picture in an imgur dump.

Thanks! I was sure that I had added the NSFW tag initially and wasn’t aware that it wasn’t showing.

I allowed myself to build a hoverbike… and haven’t looked back

Hear, hear. I love the horses in these games so much that I can’t fathom completing a full playthrough without owning at least one, but it is kinda hard to still find them useful and convenient when there is a free pile of Zonai stuff lying around behind every corner and Autobuild exists. Plus all the restrictions … the desert? Off limits. The Depths? Off limits. The Sky islands? Off limits. The sea? …you get the idea. The areas where horses are even allowed to be are already rare, and on top of that you have dozens of chasms, blockades, “Monster Forces” blocking roads, uneven terrain, rivers, lakes, tunnels, caves, wells, mountains that are almost impossible to cross without leaving your horse behind. Trying to find a rideable path around all of that becomes annoying pretty fast.

Personally, I think it was a very bad call to remove the Ancient Saddle & Bridle. Most people were already struggling to keep an interest in horses in BotW because even WITH the saddle it was a hassle to get your four-legged buddy back to your side after you had to glide somewhere, but now that TotK is three times as vast and has a LOT more vertical travel - where the teleportation feature would really shine - they nuke the ONLY way to summon your furry means of transport to your side whenever you want? C’mon, guys. Seriously.

Even if they wanted to get rid of all “ancient tech” then why not let Purah build a substitute? Or put a hidden secret Zonai saddle somehwere? Or make it an amiibo drop? DLC content? Let Robbie invent a special Travel Medallion specifically for horses? Or make Malanya reward the player with a magic flute or whatever?! It really isn’t hard to come up with an in-game, in-universe, lore-fitting reason for why a horse teleportation feature can exist.

Or just hide a special saddle with mechanical wings behind some late-game quest to make your horse able to glide.

Gesundheit.

If you mirror it tho, it makes even less sense:

Maybe Hyrule is a Discworld-esque flat map that rotates every couple of years and they’re now in the phase where the “map” is rotated by 180 degrees? =P

…joke aside, I’ve heard three theories about this that make a bit of sense:

1. The first setup was an accident and it was actually meant to be like in TotK right from the start, so the devs merely corrected their mistake.

2. The swap was done to make locations feel “off” and new, even the parts that weren’t actually changed much (like for example the Sanidin Park Ruins).

3. The swap was done to make the desert part easier, since now the Gerudo Highlands provide a lot of shade while the sun is north. It is already difficult enough to navigate in the Gibdo-infested sandstorm even if you’re not currently boiling to death, so the devs granted players a bit of mercy here.

None of these are in any way confirmed tho - they’re just fan theories.

The original “project” in BotW took a while to accomplish, especially since I also wanted to find out what time of the day the pictures were taken (so the shadows would be identical), and I did it more or less blind so finding the right spot wasn’t always easy either (I had the most trouble with the Eldin Canyon and Nameless Forest pictures). Took a good month of trial and error back then.

Since the locations haven’t changed between games, the “requirement” to get the weather AND time right no longer applies, and the fact that I know the BotW map by heart after playing basically nothing else for 6 years straight, the TotK version was a lot easier. Took me about a week, including the video version ;)

Oh…yeah, that does look a lot closer to it. Thanks for pointing it out ^^ I’m going to edit the post.

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That must have taken ages, wow … I admire your dedication ♪

I just went into this blind

Those are the best challenges anyway. Half of the fun comes from encountering problems you didn’t expect, and coming up with a solution to conquer them. Always feels a lot more rewarding than just following a script ;)

That’s seriously impressive! Did you swim all the way through the ocean with a single stamina wheel? Oder did you ride a raft?

Immediatly after the cutscene, you can still pick up the rock. If you revisit the location later, the circle will be completed and the rocks can no longer be picked up, but the Korok will be still present. I guess it’s some sort of safety measure so the player can’t just repeatedly solve the same puzzle.

That’s an interesting zero-effort way to farm clicks… I guess coming up with some actual clickbait to boost engagement was too much work?

Eat them dry while maintaining eye contact to assert dominance.

Shipping fictional characters in itself is completely fine with me. It can be nice to spin your own stories out of availiable canon material, and even nicer if future canon material also supports the ideas that have been spun, like in this case here. There is no harm in that. Fanfictions, artworks, tin foil hat theories, headcanon of any kind - 100% fine with me.

However, I fully agree about “ship wars” not being worth it in any way. It takes zero effort and no energy whatsoever to just chill and let people enjoy stuff they like even if it’s not your cup of tea, instead of going apesh*t aggressive when someone has a different view on things. Never understood the motivation behind this senseless hostility to make others miserable for no reason.

For example, I personally like the idea that there is no romantic interest whatsoever between Zelda and Link, and that they’re just very close friends that fully trust each other. The idea that those two have a crush on each other … nope. Don’t like it, won’t incorporate the idea into my own headcanon, ever. But that does not mean that I have the desire and/or right to tell others that they are somehow “wrong” for shipping those two. I’m completely okay with others thinking differently about this topic - To each their own ;)

That’s how it always should be IMHO. Just respect and acknowledge that not everyone likes the same stuff and don’t be a prick about it. (Which is the point that people engaging in “ship wars” grossly fail to understand for some reason)

It happens to the best, no worries ;) The good thing is, that it is an easy “fix” since you can just crosspost the older stuff to the new community and everything will end up in the same place.