Breadth of the Wild
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it took them 32 years, but i’m glad they finally found a way to improve on the best feature from A Link to the Past
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First one was pretty great, big world where exploration is usually rewarded with a fun portal style puzzle. Just great to try things out and experiment with and see how reactive it is (because it’s pretty damn reactive).
It wasn’t coming off Skyward Sword, it was coming off the masterpiece Link Between Worlds which was a soft pilot on all the main game ideas of BOTW in a more compact and traditional structure (In a lot of ways, TOTK feels like it’s building on that as much as BOTW). It’s one of the best games in the entire series. BOTW then came out of the gate being an open world game where being an open world actually kinda meant something.
So like Rudie said: Game owns
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This really resonates for me. As soon as I think of something fun to do like climb a really tall mountain when I probably don’t have enough stamina, I get to the top and there’s a fucking korok there.
It’s funny how finding a korok totally devalues the exploration for me. I guess exploration in games for me is partly about defying the game and partly about doing something “original”. Like, when you’re playing Shadow of the Colossus, you start to think, “Hey I wonder if I catch those lizards?” “Holy shit, I can!” And it increases invisible stats! Then you think, “Oh man, can I, like, grab the bird and fly?” And it’s really fucking hard–but you can! And flying becomes its own triumphant experiential reward.
On the other hand, getting no reward also rocks, because it means you really weren’t supposed to do it. In Shadow Hearts there’s this unbeatable embodiment of death that pops up sometimes, but the battle system in the game is such that if you do everything right, there’s no reason it has to kill you. So midway through the game I spent a day repeatedly fighting it and fucking with the roulette wheel fighting system until I beat it. And then…nothing happened! Success! Beating unbeatable bosses in the Lufia GBC game gives you rings named after the boss, which have no buffs (in a game where every item does something). If you REALLY go somewhere you’re not supposed to, you just fall through the floor–and that always feels great. Mario’s minus world is legend.
So, it’s like, a unique reward feels good. No reward also feels good. But a korok or a shrine feels awful. A korok is selling a painting you worked on for a month for $50. Giving it away would have some ineffable value. Keeping it would make it yours. Selling it for $50 makes that the worth of your sweat and creativity.
If I climb a mountain too early and nothing’s up there–hey: I fuckin did it! I wonder how many others did? But if there’s a korok up there, it’s like, “Oh. I guess in some way I was supposed to be here. I guess…nothing I’m doing is interesting or original. I’m just…collecting coins or bolts or whatever.” Doing something you thought was original and self-directed and finding a korok tells you that whatever effort you put in was worth 1/900th of whatever collecting them all gets you. The super master sword or whatever.
It just removes all the mystery and replaces it with rinky-dink baby’s first open world game.
Okay, I’m sounding a bit harsh and overwrought. But yeah: so far the game has this weird feeling of being both empty and teeming with lame baubles.
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So is the new one worth playing if I get half way through BotW and am still not vibing with it?
Definitely, TotK takes a decent but not stellar game and elevates it by refining every element.
I think a key to satisfying exploration is a feeling of being surprised by what you find and TotK definitely delivers on that for me in a way that BotW never did.
Strangely, it still uses mostly similar rewards but the way they’re implemented feels more thoughtful. Less “every mountain has a korok at the top”
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This is actually the one thing the game does right. Your reward for collecting them all is golden poop
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botw’s extrinsic rewards are terrible but the intrinsic rewards are fantastic if you’re wired for it. it could have no quests, combat, words, or puzzles and delight me by giving me magic tools to hike with
if it needs combat it could just be metroid 2 and have you hunt 100 guardians across the map
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I’ve also been bouncing off BotW for the same reasons BigHead mentioned. I’m up to the torch-run errand for Purah, and I dunno, it’s weird to have little direction. You follow points of interest, and then find that you’re not supposed to be there, then keep searching around.
Like, after doing the torch thing, I wandered into a coliseum, faced enemies way too powerful for me, meaning I wasn’t supposed to get here I guess, then ran into a boss, so I built a stack of explosives and laid a trap for him, but explosives don’t really do much damage, meaning the game wants me to find the right weapons and armor before coming here. So I fled, searching for where I was supposed to be right now. I get that they want to make this open-world, but you can’t actually interact with most of the stuff out there until you’ve got some gear that I’m guessing you can’t find until you progress the story more.
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BOTW is maybe the only open world besides Morrowind that I enjoy doing multiple playthroughs of. It is very simplistic and sparse compared to other open world games, and especially its sequel, but that’s kind of what I love about it? I appreciate how few systems there are and how none of them are in any way prescriptive. As soon as I’m off the Great Plateau I have access to all the major verbs and am free to define my playthrough however I want, whether it be a speedrun for Ganon or a more leisurely jaunt where I observe wildlife and fill out the compendium. Too many open world games for my liking push you into engaging with their content in ways that eventually stress me out and make me lose interest but I’ve never had that frustration with BotW. Its happy to let me be.
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there’s very little straight-up “not supposed to be there” once you’re a little ways into the game… like when you’ve got 5 or 6 hearts and your armor sucks and so much stuff can kill you instantly a lot of places are highly abrasive, but going in any direction at all and doing Stuff will get you better armor and more hearts and weapons, and really pretty early on you hit a point where you can kind of go wherever you want if you’re a little bit careful (not that there aren’t still certain enemies that will mess you up, etc)
you get some cute perks for doing msq stuff but none of it is at all mandatory to doing whatever you want
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Okay, the game is clicking with me more now, and I think this thread really helped.
Before I had this feeling like I was playing the game wrong by playing it totally open world. I had no interest in going to the first town, but felt like, “Well, I guess I probably have to. If I try to explore too much I’ll just hit walls.”
This session I embraced full exploration and enjoyed it a lot more. I jump off one of one of the twin peaks and flew to the tower in the region, opposite of where I’m supposed to go.
I saw horses and tamed one, then barrelled throw some iguana dudes, lost my horse, found the stable, killed the bandits that can kill me in one hit, learned what the horse stuff is supposed to be, then went to the jungle tower.
I was excited to reveal the whole map before even going to the first town, but the jungle tower has some serious friction. It’s too high for me to climb with just one stamina upgrade, and a giant swarm of bats attacks me and makes me fall.
So there goes that plan I guess. I could spam my way up, but I’d have to do a lot of cooking in advance, and cooking isn’t exploring. Maybe I’ll go back and go to the town now. I mean, I literally have three hearts, one extra stamina, and no armor. Pretty much anything can kill me.
I like how fast travel is an easy way to get out of jams. It feels kind of broken, but then game also makes it SUPER easy to avoid enemies altogether. I never liked stealth games, because they’re usually so constraining about what counts as “stealth”; but BOTW has a more generous form of stealth that lets you be more creative.
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A protip that might appeal to your sequence-breaker mindset: you can climb to the top of a lot more than it seems with a basic stamina wheel and no food by pressing B to let go while still holding forward when you come across a not-entirely-a-sheer-cliff part of the slope.
This is because the climbing mode is overly “sticky” and often continues to waste your stamina on many slopes that are actually kinda-sorta walkable. When you do this, you will often begin to slip off and need to quickly slam B again to avoid plummeting, but you will have regained like 15% of your stamina in the interval instead of spending down another 5%, so it was worth it
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yeah exploiting the climbing mechanics is like, what i live for in this game.
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Maybe this is saying too much but most of the towers in the game have some little “trick” to them that makes you able to climb any one with unupgraded stamina.
For the jungle tower iirc:
There are secret air flow currents around it that can carry you up the cliffs next to it and eventually almost all the way to where the tower balconies start. They were usually located in small ruin like structures and covered with the slab rock things that you can hit away using your stasis ability.
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I like this sentiment. I respected but did not enjoy BoTW the first time through.
When I eventually gave it another go, I just walked from the northwest part of the map to the northeast, trudging over the snow and stopping for things that seemed interesting. I rode a bear.
I decided that the game was actually very cozy. It doesn’t hook or compel most of the time, but it distracts in a pleasant way.
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One thing I felt very keenly abut BotW and still feel about TotK is that weapon durability combines with inventory management in annoying ways. I couldget behind a streets of rage style thing where you are just constantly discarding broken weapons and using whatever is available but here its not really about adapting and using what’s around at any given moment as it is making sure you have a decent enough stash of rock breaking weapons, and a few elelmental damage weapons, maybe an axe for cutting down trees, etc.
It makes weapon durability into yet another resource monitoring minigame instead of letting me feel like Jackie Chan (though still better than the Silent Hill game with weapon durability that ended up with you carrying half a dozen TVs to throw at things at any given moment), and that is made worse by not letting Link have any unarmed attacks at all. One of my first deaths in BotW was just doing a flying tackle at a bokoblin hoping it would drop its club and I could snag it, and just sort of bumping into it uneffectually before it one shotted me.
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Yeah, I don’t really like the breaking weapons. I always knew about them and knew they were a common complaint. But I always thought, “Well, I’m sure the balanced around them.”
And, well, they DID. But… it’s still kind of annoying. I mean, I get it: if they’re not destructible, you probably want to have some kind of huge inventory. That leads to hoarding, which is seen as a negative player behavior and probably requires quality of life features like alphabetized sorting or something. Worse than that: either you don’t allow the player to sell equipment or you balance everything around them being insanely rich. Or you make enemies harder. Or you can’t steal from enemies.
It becomes a different game pretty quickly, so I assume the breaking weapons was an early decision.
That said, hoarding weapons would definitely make the game stickier for me. I think people look down on games like Diablo for basically having a light gambling mechanic and encouraging obsessive behavior. But personally collecting weapons/armor/spells is something that really makes a game stick for me. Battles are more fun when there gatcha aspect. And hey: add a mechanic where I can smelt two swords together (basically armor cooking), and I’ll have fun with that! I think the simple cooking system in BotW is good, but right now using a temporary boost feels like a copout, and I don’t see myself using buffs much. And you’re already having me collect fucking koroks! Let me collect something useful!
I’d be happy with having a limited on-body inventory and an unlimited remote inventory, accessed like the stables. That way you could pack a load out, which is always a lot of fun.
Wait. Did I just invent Genshin Impact? I genuinely don’t know. I stopped playing that when I realized you actually had to pretend to care about NPC problems.
1 Like
Oh btw, I wanna double down here: I think a big part of why I was bouncing off BotW was the early hand holding.
If I compare it to Genshin Impact, which I immediately loves, the big difference with the first hour is that Genshin Impact fully dropped you into the world with no real context. That was great! They just give you a safe place to try the buttons with plenty of little worthless collectibles around. So basically you start out by making your own Rare platformer. Then, like, an hour of wondering later you get to someone who explains cooking and a town. I don’t even think there are enemies in the first hour.
I KNOW the handholding isn’t for kids. Kids learn games extremely quickly and like to experiment. And it’s not for gamers, who are basically the same as kids. So…what? It’s for someone who has never played a game before. I dunno man. I’m very into inclusivity, and I guess “Morrowind for everyone” is a good pitch. But…look, you either like exploring or you don’t like this game.
I think starting with training wheels was a big mistake.
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grossss
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