Dex

Big hearted fluffdragon...

...fictional ex-90s platformer mascot, nerd, plural, ΘΔ.



britown
@britown

I have felt the pull of the new Zelda game and it has led me places. I should start by saying that I have overall unfavorable memories of BotW. I recall playing it for 40+ hours, beating it, really liking climbing on stuff and gliding around and finding new horses and chopping trees, and disliking just about everything else.


Codarobo
@Codarobo

As someone who has very fond memories of BOTW, this post still rings pretty true and is one of the main reasons I don't like the weapon breaking. It's impossible to pick up my old endgame-y save and want to play it at all, because it occurs to me that if I use any weapon besides the master sword, I'm just going to be throwing it into a wood chipper for the sake of a few hits of dopamine for smacking an enemy a few times, which will set me back way more than it'll propel me forward in terms of game progression/resources. So it makes me just use the master sword... which... defeats the purpose of the weapon breaking system, or the weapon system more in general.

If they had made, say, most of the endgame weapons repairable instead of just a few, I think that would have helped a lot. I'd be fine with a temporary inconvenience of having to repair something. But you really generally have no idea if taking out a weapon and swatting something a few times with it will just cause the whole thing to poof into smoke or not, which discourages me from, well, playing and experimenting, which feels like it is the opposite of what they should want players to do.


Dex
@Dex

Yeah, I've spoken about this before, but the second I got the Master Sword, it was my solution to everything including chopping down big trees, and basically any form of combat outside of areas with lightning strikes.

I'm not getting TOTK at launch partially because I don't know how that's going to be, and partially because it feels like the most likely candidate for a Deluxe version on whatever Nintendo's next hardware ends up being. Maybe I'll feel the pressure to get it before then, maybe I won't.


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in reply to @britown's post:

I'm kinda jealous you even found something to pull you back as far as TotK goes. As someone who gave BotW a fair chance (I did every single shrine and beat the game at around 100-ish hours), I still didn't really like it and my opinion on it has only soured over time, to the point I doubt I'll ever touch it again haha.

Everything I've seen of TotK just felt like Nintendo doubling down on all the things I didn't like the first time around (all the survival/crafting/sandbox elements), so it's the first mainline Zelda I decided to skip since getting into the series 😅

Yeah I've definitely been very hard on it since I put it down. Fully expected to just disregard the sequel. The thing that pulled me back in is remembering that I really loved the exploration and discovery of the first half of that game. It didn't scale at all into the second half but hey if I could get that from the new one maybe that'll be fun!

So I think it’s definitely intentional that the game rewards you for avoiding combat; I personally played it like a sneaky archer 90% of the time. If you don’t enjoy that aspect that’s totally fine I think!

On the other hand I actually think when I did engage in combat, BoTW threw sooooo many good weapons at me I could never store them all. I never felt like I was running out of stuff, but more felt annoyed at the inventory limit than anything! I wish they had if nothing else made better ways to store your cool stuff.

Yeah the menu shuffling around dealing with full inventory was definitely a pain. I think the promise of constant flood of quality weapons to replace them as they break was mostly successful in the first half of the game but then it just really fails to scale into the endgame where you get really bogged down with the management.

I recently picked up my endgame file, and I’ve found it’s a very different game once you’ve got all the shrines and fought all the bosses. The only thing of any real interest is Lynels, who make for some decent field bosses — maybe about as good as a decent early-game Elden Ring one. There’s patterns to learn and techniques to practice. Other than that it’s just a collect-a-thon, making sure to get every Hinox (they’re all chumps now, Urbosa’s Fury will eat them), looking for korok seeds and improving my speedrunning techniques (BLSS, windbombs) so it’s not dreadfully dull getting between places. I guess if I keep at it enough that I could take on a field boss on three hearts the only place to go next is bona fide speedrunning.

Anyway, I’m not a game designer or anything. I just kinda think it’s neat that once you can windbomb about the place the world shrinks enough that you can treat what used to be absolute barriers, and then field bosses, in a similar way to how you treated ordinary mobs at the start of the game. That might be one solution to the problem.

This is an interesting perspective I never considered - personally, I don't like combat in games much, so BotW is almost perfect for me, but I can totally see why it might frustrate players who both enjoy and want to experience combat!