Matthew "Queso" Niederberger

In July it felt like everyone I know was playing TotK, but I’m not sure any of them (including me) finished it

This is sort of in line with my experience, thinking back on it. There's definitely other things that contributed to my apathy in comparison to BotW - the reuse of the map diluted some of the exploration magic for me, the story feels like an afterthought - but I do think the zonai/player as developer stuff is definitely a major contributor. BotW felt like you could break or trivialize some of systemic interaction if you were clever about it; ToTK invites you to do it constantly. I think there was something rewarding about BotW's constraints and power sets that made it feel gratifying and special to find a clever or unintended solution to a thing; in ToTK, every solution feels unintended, because you have a backpack full of tools that can break the game over your knee whenever you want.

Every time I had to climb up to one of those sky labyrinths, which frequently involved me chaining hot air balloon platforms together because they would vanish after a certain point, I never really felt like I was engineering a clever solution as much as just stapling stuff together to get the job done.

They tried to make a zelda game where every puzzle was dumping a pile of lego at your feet and then playing the puzzle tune when you cobbled some garbage together. The problem is I didn't want to play legos, I wanted to play zelda.
Left my save game underground next to a pile of shit I didn't want to put together, later deleted the game so my kids could play fortnite

i remember one of my early reactions to TotK was shitposting about "attaching a cheese pizza to the end of my lightsaber", as an acknowledgement that this game just lets you do whatever. i almost never play AAA games at launch so it was fun to be part of that first week or so of euphoria over how jam-packed and full of possibility the game felt. and discovering the weird, hostile underworld of the Depths was genuinely special.

but ultimately that particular joke isn't possible: there are lightsabers in the game for sure, and you can cook pizzas now because they added tomatoes and cheese. but cooked dishes (that aren't themselves ingredients) can't be physically manifest in the world, they're pure inventory items.

if the game were on PC and moddable, i feel like that kind of shit is absolutely what fans would've modded in, someone would've made little in-world meshes for every single cooked food item, so you could have a shrimp cocktail as the hood ornament for your fire-belching wooden cadillac, or whatever. and people would add multiplayer and there'd be entire player-created apartment complexes full of roleplayers, roving griefer squads, a sex dungeon beneath Death Mountain, etc etc.

but it's obviously not a PC game, and never will be, not counting homebrewers and emulation folks who operate on the opposite side of the law from Nintendo. so until decades from now once Nintendo has fully lost interest in it, TotK will be this finite bag of toys that a lot of people got bored with sooner than they were expecting. Nintendo doesn't care obviously, it made shitloads of money and ticked all the "big sequel to big franchise" boxes they had. but i do think it will affect the game's legacy in a weird way that goes far beyond the relatively small sphere of people who mod console games.

I think you hit the nail on the head here, and it helps me understand why I had no interest in this game that everyone I knew was so excited about. Also why I hated the settlement building in FO4, and have zero interest in Starfield as a result.

I don't want to do the game designer's job for them. I can build a little post-apocalyptic settlement? That's your job. And, in fact, you already did that job, you're just leaving the last 5% of it to me, and the rewards aren't even mechanically interesting.

Both games feel like they landed in the wrong spot on a continuum between player freedom and dev guidance. If you had way more freedom to just build whatever, without other gameplay pressures, it would be a lot more fun to engage with. But because they also want to fit it into this other type of game... it just feels like the worst of both worlds.

It's me I'm the one over your shoulder that Nintendo is staring at

This perfectly captured why I chose not to buy TotK. I wanna play Zelda for Zelda, not janky "play around and see what you can create" vibes. That sort of sandbox vibe was my least favourite part of BotW, and having an entire game built around "here's the pieces, go nuts" just doesn't work with Zelda for me.

Oh huh. You found the right words to describe this intangible feeling of "why isn't this more fun" at the back of my skull. So much of the gameplay loop felt wildly anhedonic to me.

Like, it occurred to me way too late that the issue of weapon durability somehow got exacerbated by also having to find powerful items to fuse now. Suddenly I felt I couldn't waste the "good weapons" on weak enemies because I did not want them to break mid-fight on strong enemies. And strong enemies are the ones that drop the good fusing items… which I might also need for armor upgrades, so I'd hoard them anyway.

At least finding Koroks was still fun.

For me, the biggest flaw was how often assembling things was the wrong choice to solve a problem. Sure, you can make a cool car, but five seconds from now you'll drive it off a cliff, or into the water, and then you're back to using the same four tools because it's slightly easier. You could assemble a cannon array, or you can just sit back and fire fifty bat-eye arrows, or you can just run straight at the enemy's face and stab them and it's basically the same chance of surviving.

You can do a dozen different things, but all of them are slightly inconvenient so you just do the same stupid thing.

This is a simulator of being forty years old.