uhh ocarina of time had the fairy fountains and the different types of arrows and a bunch of upgrades & stuff you never had to get. Majora’s mask had a bunch of that + the masks.
Plenty of zelda games had rewards that weren’t rupees/temporary items. I’m not going to say other zelda games had like…fantastically interesting rewards…but they had better rewards than rupees and breakable crap.
Over the course of 40+ hours, a dozen powers and nothing else is weak sauce. Those are all big boosts but heart containers, like missile pods, are weak sauce. The Majora Masks are sometimes neat but the few that aren’t useless are mostly nonfunctioning toys.
I think one reason there aren’t a lot of powered rewards in BotW is that the player is empowered from the get-go. You don’t need a special lantern to make fire, you can do that by virtue of Prometheus’ gift. Those emergent systemic interactions cover most of the discovery of drip-fed powers while the flat progression discourages completionism in a lovely way and attemps to return to Zelda-1-style microcosms, where each player traverses only a subset of the mysteries.
Or,
If the game no longer feels rewarding,
Stop playing it so much hoping it’ll force a numbers-based compulsion loop on you because it’s purposefully avoiding that. If you think you’re out of content, good! Stop!
Yeah I mean again…eliminating the NEED for upgrades…doesn’t make the game more rewarding? You can take away any in-game reason for there being powers, but there’s still an external reason: I’m not going to crawl around looking in all your caves if there’s never anything in them. There’s 900 thing-os. They want you looking for stuff. There’s no stuff to look for.
He did. I said that in my first post.
Hopefully somebody else shows up to talk about this tho. You’re really aggressive & offputting about the thing you like, and the way you call things “weak sauce” makes me feel like you’re about to ask me if I want to sign up for a rewards card or something.
edit: To put this more in perspective, my friend collected all the flags in the original Assassin’s Creed and 100% cleared that Mad Max game, so for collecting something to be so dull he stopped is kind of an achievement.
Sorry, I don’t mean to come off that way; I enjoy working through how I think about this game (which like a lot of modern Nintendo stuff I can’t pull close but can mostly appreciate from a distance) and only certain people at work are stimulating enough on this and I just put a third of my responsible time into new Mass Effect and boy did that make me angry and give me a headache.
This game is fun because it feels good to run around and climb around and glide around and hit gerblins with a stick until your stick breaks. The stuff you pick up just facilitates that kind of fun.
I mean, it is very Skyrim but if Skyrim had allowed for any actual creativity in how you move around and do things and had an avatar that didn’t control like ass garbage.
Not that “there isn’t much major treasure as motivation to do things” isn’t a valid complaint. I think the game expects you to come up with your own motivation most of the time. Not to offend anyone but it’s a very ADD game: you start to head towards something that looks interesting then go HEY WHAT’S THAT and head towards another thing and HEY LOOK AT THAT and then 10 minutes later you forget what you were originally doing. I guess if that doesn’t appeal to a body, it doesn’t appeal.
I also kinda see the pockets of sloppiness this game has as something to hope they fix next time, since this is only the first Zelda of its type and is otherwise 90% the Zelda i’ve wanted to see since Twighlt Prnecsss proved the old formula was out of gas.
there is no way that collecting shit in botw is duller than collecting shit in assassin’s creed
Remember when Skyrim came out and then Dragon’s Dogma came out and a bunch of us played Dragon’s Dogma because it felt better to play? Hey @spacetown is that how you remember it? Because that’s how I remember it.
Okay, now I have diagnosed the problem.
I did the plateau again on the Switch version (after communing with Satan at Gamestop to transmogrify my Wii U) and I think I’m going to wait until hard mode to play it again. It’s nice but I think I have just one more go in me.
it sounds like it’s the same just AC has less Nothings to collect
I think there’s discovery in what you can do with the starting tools. This takes a particular style of play to find rewarding, but I really liked pushing the limits of the “chemistry” system and using stasis and magnesis to mess around. If the game gave me “activities” with icons next to them I’d never do them, but figuring out hidden ways to get somewhere or accomplish something is a great feeling.
I think this is the first Zelda game since perhaps the earliest ones to have a not completely broken economy. A decent chunk of this was them finally realizing that having to upgrade your wallet or putting an upper limit on what you can hold in terms of moneys was counterproductive, with a helping of “maybe we should give them better stuff to buy”. I wouldn’t say it is perfect or a stunning achievement in the history of game economies, but I can’t understand why one would go “eh, no reason to even look at treasure chests anymore” here unless they were doing it in all the previous Zeldas as well.
In my own personal game time news, I finally ended up near the castle for the first time after doing one of those flashback things and was struck by an in-character moment of “screw this, I’m gonna go save her” despite the fact that I only bothered to deal with one beast and neglected a few other seemingly important things. I made it all the way to the Sanctuary where I seemingly had to battle all the divine beats possessors I didn’t bother to go find (eventually fell the the fireball throwing one as I couldn’t figure out how to hurt him in his second half mode). I even climbed to the top spire. I’m not sure if it would have let me beat the game outright if I could have figured that out, but it was definitely a cool run. Now I’m back to chasing the horizon.
From what i’ve heard you can defeat Ganon and save Zelda from the moment you leave the plateau if you’re ridic skilled + lucky enough, though it’s near impossible to do. But it’s not gated by anything except your gear loadout
There’s a very specific trick to fireball ganon’s second phase and i only figured it out in time to die anyway on my first run there. I think I might go there again soon anyway since I’ve got like 11 hearts now and better arrows and more food.
I’m really wishing there was a single way to store weapons other than “in your inventory.” I have about 6 weapons I don’t use at all because I’m saving them for Ganon, plus a torch and a korok leaf. It effectively means my weapons inventory is 2 slots. I know this is not the way that the game was intended to be played, but I’ve only found a few 50+ damage weapons, and I’d really like to hold on to them.
The best part of this game is still “seeing a place I would like to go and planning a route, and then having something bad happen along the way.” I think this is how the game will best be remembered: the simplicity and universality of movement systems encouraging actively thinking about terrain, and the complications that happen during the best laid plans.
I’m actively avoiding approaching another divine beast because the first one I did was so dull.
Oh, and the economy is pretty good in this game. I keep thinking “Oh I’ve got enough rupees to buy everything I want!” Then finding some set of armor that will take 90% of my rupees to buy. It means that when I find 100 rupees in a chest, I actually get excited. Or when I find a pack of Moblins, or even Bokoblins, I have a pretty good reason to hunt them down and collect their parts, like some sort of entrepreneurial serial killer.
I wonder how much of this would work without the Zelda layer! I don’t think I would have given this game the time of day had it not been a Zelda game - the first hour or two really is a drag, the combat is pretty okay (but not great), and the voice acting is a real turn off. Plus the aforementioned weapons inventory issue.
But since it IS a Zelda game, I gave it time to sneak into my brain and really lodge itself there, and yeah, it’s a truly neat game.
So far my favorite moment happened in the first 5 hours: I encountered a giant skeleton in a random swath of forest and it murdered the shit out of me
Just cure yourself of too-good-to-use disease and use your good weapons. It really doesn’t matter. There’s more 50+ weapons than you think, and anyway Ganon isn’t that hard and it’s just a change of pace to have to use a weaker weapon for a bit. The only things I find somewhat precious are x3 30+ bows and ancient arrows.
For rupees seeming precious, it’s kind of a weird, related trick the game pulls. You get overall way way more rupee value out of monster parts and gems, and strictly speaking it’s worse to get rupees directly. Yet, because you fear the items may eventually be needed for something else, you mostly hoard them instead of selling them off, so rupees still feel scarce.
Also, make sure to buy every vanilla arrow for sale that you see, even if they feel a little overpriced and you have to sell a few items to scrape up the rupees. You never get enough of those as drops in the field, it’s another point of weird scarcity and it feels bad to be forced to use fancy arrows on a Korok or shrine target.
Yeah this is great advice. buy em up
I’ve been keeping a healthy stock of monster parts (10-20 a piece) and selling the rest but gosh, I wish I could find the next great fairy so I could find out the actual requirements for upgrading stuff,
there is a single way!
[quote=“VirtualClint, post:612, topic:1983, full:true”]I wish I could find the next great fairy so I could find out the actual requirements for upgrading stuff,
[/quote]
When you do find the last one, get ready for sticker shock on the unlock requirement. It’s off the charts, but I was still able to make it by selling off a ton of the junk I accumulated all game. Which of course was nervewracking as I didn’t know if I was about to learn 2 minutes later that some of it was a requirement (I suppose I could’ve save scummed, but in the event I didn’t make any mistake I cared about). A+ good spreadsheet design
