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.

I assumed I was safe from ToTK but I found myself watching a lot of trailers and footage and feeling a pull to go back to the previous game. SO six fucking years or whatever after the fact, I jumped back into my old save to try and jog my memory about just what I didn't like so much. Why did I feel such a pull to a game I have just held in such low esteem for half a decade? Well because it's really good! The things I recall hating are still there and I still hate them, but there was just so much to love about that thing and I just wish it hadn't been soured by so many things that aggravated me.

ANYWAY, I was talking over some grievances with a friend and we both wound up talking about how there's very little reward for doing anything in the game killing enemies and in the late game this is exacerbated by not wanting to break any of your end-game weapons because they are presumably constructed out of porcelain. You break your royal broadsword over the head of a moblin and are rewarded with a club. This of course is mitigated by being strategic with which weapons you use for different fights, saving your good stuff for hard encounters, but overall I recall just stopping engaging with enemies altogether. There was really no reason to fight. Maybe there's a zero-sum anti-war message here somewhere...

My friend suggested some kind of experience system like a soulslike just so you have some reason to take out enemies. To me, though, you can make a game that doesn't have leveling up, where your power is determined entirely by your equipment. In fact, I'm making a game that does just that! So I started thinking, is Chronicles going to have the same problem? Is avoiding enemies going to be the best strategy? Why expend resources to defeat an enemy if you're not going to get mats or points or numbers?? And my thought on that is yes!!! Exactly!!!

I'm going around in circles a bit but let's talk about Dark Souls. That game has experience points, you get stuff for defeating an enemy always, you can choose to re-do areas just for the points. However, I'd dare to say that the vast majority of the time, the reason you're killing an enemy is not to get souls, it's because that enemy is standing between you and an objective location. They are a threat to you getting further into the area. The real goal is bosses and chests and progression. The enemies are obstacles.

In BotW I feel like this was very rarely the case. Outside of Hyrule Castle and some dedicated combat trials, combat was fully optional. Enemies are scenery. Yes you can unlock chests by clearing a camp, but the rewards were such that it was hard to justify the loss of resources after a certain point in the game. Elden Ring had some of this issue in its open world as well! Why futz about with a group of enemies on the open world when you can horsey past them. Granted the resource investment dynamic was a lot different there.

Chronicles' larger design (outside of the in-progress combat demo which shows off none of this, coming soon!!!) is designed to force the player into risk/reward scenarios where you have to be heavily invested in a run to achieve victory. Avoiding an enemy should be strategically optimal in a lot of situations! After all, like Dark Souls, these characters are threats to you progressing. They are not scenery for you to optionally engage with.

I should add a final note here that I think BotW achieves a whole lot and is very clearly succeeding at what it is intending to do! And a lot of people really like how the combat is structured! And that's great! Anyway, I just needed to vomit out a series of thoughts and design anxieties while I continue to not actually write any code for the game I keep designing.