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A li'l Lapra

she/they

A gotey goober

@Caley-Cales1/1/2024, 8:24 AM

Holly Wednesday (Dr.)@doctorwednesday

Snao @Snao12/30/2023, 9:02 PM

I played the game wrong and it annoyed people

With Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, I played these games under the following rules:
Do not ever teleport until it is required, or the game seems to force you to do it, and only teleport back to Ground Plataeu and/or Castle Town Ground.
ie: specific tutorial in the first hours of the game, or if you're stranded in some wacky story arena.
in BOTW, teleporting was never required.
in TOTK, I think I had to teleport twice. 1: Tutorial 2: Stuck in Lake Whirlpool Cavern

For some reason, when I describe this to a few people, it annoys them to no end. They think I'm trying to imply that they're the ones who played the game wrong.

I'm not sure where they get this idea from because I mean. I'm not sure how ignoring QoL features is playing the game correctly. I just like being inside of an open world game and becoming familiar with the open world's landmarks and features, and making the game artificially difficult.
...
This was weird in Tears of the Kingdom, especially because of the Ascend power. That power is QoL incarnate, and even I used it all of the time. However, I still refused to teleport unless I was truly stuck.
This annoyed the hell out of a few select people I talked to....
because they believed I was telling them that they were the ones playing the game wrong????? or that I was wrong to "not trust the developers" ? ? ????
...
And then they accused me of using some kind of "hover bike" and while I did end up using a quadcopter design around the 160 hour mark of my 190 hour playthrough, it had a flight time of like 10 seconds before I had to recharge my battery over and over again, or use a big-charge to extend the flight time....
which is a vehicle design that the devs placed in-world in several sections of the game.

And the vehicle I used to leave the Depths, when an ascend column wasnt an option, was a hot air balloon with a triple rocket launch boost since.. Idk.. the armories have all those vehicle parts ready-to-use... and there were still a few depths chasms that were still too deep for that to work before the balloon expired lol.
...
What a frustrating conversation to have while admiring the game for its creative spirit and its nearly absolute open design! There are very few mainquest requirements limiting access or progression. Very fun.

#Zelda #tears of the kingdom #breath of the wild

Holly Wednesday (Dr.)@doctorwednesday12/31/2023, 9:18 AM

There is absolutely something to this, and has been for a long time.

When I designed the core layout of a certain MU*, I was aware that teleporters and teleportation reduced the solidity of such environments, made them feel less like real, tangible places, and that many such venues had been reduced by these features to a series of idle rooms that people bounced between. So I tried to design the topography so that users were obliged to occasionally walk from place to place, learn the lay of the land, start to visualize these text-based environments in their heads in the way they would a real place.

Okay, so forget the past. I play a lot of Minecraft, and I just do not use the elytra (the flying wings) except for specific use cases (bouncing back and forth between two sites repeatedly with a tight time constraint, not dying while building something really tall, etc) because they make the world smaller, they literally take you out of the world you've built and hold it at a distance. If I travel on the surface, the physicality of the world actually matters to gameplay, and furthermore I am motivated to craft the spaces between two points into something worth seeing and experiencing. I've become so aware of this that I've started to eschew the use of portals to get to my newer sites... I'd rather spend half a day boating out to a build site than bounce there through the portal system, because having to journey there makes it feel like a real locale, and in turn makes the world feel more like a real place. I've even considered building rail lines again, although there are faster modes of travel, because there is something gained by taking your time and really seeing the places you're traveling through.

And if you aren't always teleporting around, you start to notice something interesting: that you actually get to know the terrain, you learn landmarks, you reach a point where you know exactly where you are at all times in this sprawling procedurally-generated wilderness. You don't have to look at a map; this place is your home and you know it as well as anything you made with your own hands.

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in reply to @Snao's post:

Hx Or-Fi-S @Or-Fi-S12/30/2023, 9:08 PM

it's such a like, specific genre of conversation, where one person hasn't ever thought about this thing, but you have and chose to do things different than them, and suddenly they have a knee jerk defensive reaction about it?

Snao @Snao12/30/2023, 9:12 PM

That is the jist of it yes. They think I'm bragging I guess. When most of the time, this play style forced me to waste a ton of time looking for physical shortcuts or farming replacement resources after an experiment failed. ... instead of just teleporting freely.

DannyYote @DannyYote12/30/2023, 9:31 PM

That seems like a really good way to accidentally 100% the game by the act of just stumbling over everything in your travels.

Snao @Snao12/30/2023, 9:36 PM

Kind of, but also not really. There's so many quests and side quests and stuff, and even most of the main quest involves wandering. It's great!

WRAITH @Welwraith12/30/2023, 9:39 PM

I played TOTK without upgrading my armor once because the game is piss easy otherwise

Snao @Snao12/30/2023, 9:40 PM

I eventually had to upgrade my armor because I never got the parry / perfect dodge timing down. :,)
I ate healing items a lot. I ate through the pain.
I am bad at video games.

Sil @Silkanor12/31/2023, 11:15 AM

I did something similar actually!
I noticed when I played BotW that after a while, I used fast travel so much the world stopped feeling big. All of a sudden, when I was told to go somewhere on the map, it was no longer an exciting adventure but just a commute from the nearest fast travel point.
So, when I played TotK, I only allowed myself to teleport from a fast travel point. Just enough of a restriction to not feel frustrating, but so I wouldn't abuse fast travel to the point it made the map's size irrelevant.
But in the end, everyone enjoys games differently! Which people don't seem to get on the internet, it's either you agree with me or you hate my guts.

River @Duskknight12/31/2023, 10:39 PM

I tried doing that too! I figured if the game had vehicles then I should be USING them, rather than teleporting around all the time. Then I went into the depths for the first time and could NOT make a vehicle that got all the way back up without HOURS of trial and error. I managed it ONCE just to see if it was possible and then said, cool, never doing THAT shit again. Really bummed me out how short the hot air balloons lasted. The NPC'S can obviously use them indefinitely, so why can't Link? In the end, I ended up just teleporting and using the hoverbike everywhere to save my sanity. Pretty much my only major gripe with the game. That and ascending through the depths ceiling doesn't work in most placed, iirc.

Snao @Snao1/1/2024, 12:18 AM

Yahhhh it's honestly poor design on their part to not allow a regular hot air ride able to reach it. It had to have rocket-launcher-assistance on top of it. And even then, there were several areas where it came up short lol

@Seth651/8/2024, 5:21 PM

I don't know the context of the conversations, but I can see the defensiveness coming about because saying "I never really used fast travel" can come off as you telling them they're playing the game wrong, as if your way was better and they were wrong for skipping all over the map. Even though you're just stating a fact and simply sharing how you enjoyed the game. Such is the way of internet discussions I suppose. Too many people being elitest buttheads that it's just assumed until proven otherwise, but good luck getting that far as it's often not worth the bother.

lilycove @shiny-ralts2/15/2024, 4:37 PM

i worked out a design at one point for a gizmo that, as far as i know, can get you up out of any chasm. it's really slow and a little expensive, so i use it as little as possible, but as far as i know it makes warpless 100% completely viable.
stabilizer in the center, two fans facing down on either side (there aren't snap points for this, so try to line them up as best you can, every pixel matters), control stick on top. you'll still have to adjust your position a little on the way up to avoid hitting walls or worse, roofs, but i've tested it on every intended-inescapable chasm on the map (except hyrule castle, which needs way more testing)

in reply to @doctorwednesday's post:

Snao @Snao12/31/2023, 10:07 AM

Ya that's a big thing in Death Stranding, too. You're more or less forced to deal with the terrain directly, and eventually build infrastructure for the severely unforgiving mountains.