I do like environmental story telling, but I find it has, in the games I've played at least, tended towards being a little too unsatisfying?
Games that do environmental story telling will, by definition, not give all their lore and history in text. A lot of their lore and history will be given through just... things scattered throughout the environment. The clear remnants of past events. Architectural design which clearly changed over the eras.
With the answers of "what happened in this world" not spelled out, there is inherently going to be a lot of inference to come to the answers. You aren't going to come to any definite conclusions. But in a well crafted world, you can at least come to a well justified conclusion. In my mind, I would prefer there to be a correct answer, something we can puzzle out from the clues.
But sometimes developers simply... do not give us all of the puzzle pieces we need. So we can not possibly come to a satisfactorily justified conclusion about the history of the world. In fact, frequently the developers won't have an answer themselves, either. Which is just... ok, great, at that point you're not telling a story, you're just throwing in stuff that looks cool to imply a story. I am not personally a fan of that.
And sometimes, people might catch onto a particular environmental detail that just... really confuses them. Because the developers seemingly didn't really... consider the implications of it. And it makes no sense. Because it doesn't work. Because there wasn't an actual answer.
So everyone is asking about that detail. To the point it comes up in an interview. And then, put on the spot, the director gives an answer that makes absolutely no sense and is so completely unsatisfying to me that I cannot, personally, conceive of how it could be anything other than made up completely on the spot.
Because what the fuck do you MEAN that the Sheikah technology in Hyrule just fucking VANISHED FOR NO REASON WHEN THE CALAMITY WAS STOPPED?
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they did write it out and this was the answer and the director didn't just make it up on the spot. Maybe they did write out a full history and didn't just throw "cool stuff" together.
But holy crap that answer is so incredibly unsatisfying to me that it killed the one part of TotK that I truly enjoyed. I was so interested in piecing together the history of the Zonai, but if that's the type of lore we're going with, then I have little confidence that there is a history to uncover.
