Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I thought that’s what Ocarina was. I hadn’t played any Zelda game before so I downloaded the rom. Imagine my disappointment when I saw there wasn’t even a jump button

botw now the greatest motocross game

So anybody know how this DLC gets integrated into the game? Is it like Fallout where you find a single macguffin that takes you to a completely separate area where all the new content gets stuffed into or is it somewhat more seamless?

Really wish life right now would allow me to start a new Hard Mode game like I planned to explore all this new stuff all at once.

For anybody looking to dig this back out again for the DLC you may be interested in this:

It breaks down the cooking of the game to the nitty gritty numbers and while that takes basically all the discovery aspect out of it I’m still happy to have it considering all I wanted by the very end of my playthrough was to figure out how to get 30 minute speed boost elixirs.

Some things I learnt:

  • There are no hidden combinations that synergize to create better effects. Each ingredient has a some stats and when cooked it all just adds together. The recipes you see in the inns are really only visually distinct.

  • Ingredients that add a special effect all have a certain points value to them. Add enough of these points together and you pass the thresholds to go from for example +1 armour bonus to a stronger +2 and eventually +3 armour bonus. Generally it’s the different fish that have the most potent effects.

  • All effect-adding ingredients add the same amount of duration to the length of the effect. The more the longer. Certain ingredients like eggs, spices, flour, butter, etc add an even longer duration to the meal but might dilute its potency. In elixirs it’s the monster parts that play this part.

  • Guts, tails, Keese Eyeballs and Guardian cores add the most to the duration. It generally doesn’t matter which monster species is used, just what type (Bokoblin and Lynel horns have the same effect for example)

  • The only way to get 30 minute long MAX effect is to either use Monster Extract (which randomizes things) or to use Dragon parts.

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Finally (!) playing this on the Switch. There’s something kind of funny about a game franchise that memorably featured a bug-catching net and fishing minigame before Animal Crossing even existed turning around and abandoning the fishing rod and net as items altogether, only to double-down on the importance of bugs and fish to a degree never previously seen.

I feel like people glossed over how good the towns are in this game. Yeah, the open-world design kind of overshadows this, but the fact that a Zelda game has more than three major settlements with NPCs following schedules and offering quests in real-time which are integrated seamlessly into the landscape would have been a huge deal in any other game. The dialog system is obviously a minor focus, but it keeps surprising me with how well-constructed so many of these conversations are. It’s good that I no longer feel as strong a drive as I once did to talk to every NPC, or I’d have given myself fits with this game.

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Def agreed that the towns are an underappreciated highlight of the game. It’s bizarre and beautiful, to me, that the game simultaneously puts such a large emphasis on solitude, emptiness, and nature, while also having no less than… (spoiler) 8 towns? One of the towns I found tucked away in the last place I hadn’t yet explored, dozens of hours after thinking I’d seen most of what the game had to offer, and it was a wonderful surprise. And they all even have their own music!

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shit I don’t know if I even found a single one of these towns of which you speak. I really need to get back to this game

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And architecture, and costumes, and adult, children, and elderly models… It’s shocking magnanimity from the penny-pinching Nintendo. I was genuinely astounded

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Never got tired of warping in to the shrine up by Kakariko and shieldboarding down the hill to buy arrows

My favorite town is Birb Town though. It looks cool and it’s vertical af and the rito are adorable

i have the DLC and i want that motorbike. but another part of me wants to just wipe the slate clean (literally lol) and do a hard mode runthrough, and get the motorbike later. idk. Jumping back in to a game i’ve put down for a long while is hard for me, i usually just restart so i can build some momentum, but this game feels less conducive to that approach.

it doesnt help that i got all the shrines and i want to keep that classic tunic… why the fuck didn’t the DLC add a NG+

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be like me and play it 4 years later after everyone has determined the optimal settings for a one-and-done playthrough :bbcool:

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Unfortunately, I’d say you’re in the worst position (the same position I was in) to play the DLC. It’s really good, but I think it’s aimed at people who haven’t already gotten all the shrines and played a zillion hours of the game. Many of the things the game makes you do in the DLC sorta feel like “hey, a lot of players may not have gone to this location or done this optional task, so let’s introduce them to it!” and if you’ve already done everything it drags a little. Plus, the motorcycle (and other rewards), while excellent, is obviously a lot better if you actually get to use it to accomplish goals! i was just talking with a friend still early in his first playthrough, and my suggested order was Defeat Ganon->DLC->then do all the other shit (if they like the game enough to keep playing that long of course).

Anyway my point is I think doing a hardmode run now or at some point in the future, and saving the DLC for then, is a great idea!

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I searched the topic and wasn’t able to determine whether this has been posted already, and I didn’t really want to reread the entire thing for the third time this month, so I’m just going to risk reposting Joseph Anderson’s criticism video, “Not Enough Zelda”:

Despite my own rather lax attitude toward avoiding spoilers, for whatever reason I hadn’t watched this until tonight, but I finally put in the nearly two hours necessary to see the entire thing, and he raises some compelling points about combat balance and weapon durability.

Specifically, the issue is that weapon durability works the way it should during the Great Plateau and the early portions of the game, but once you start increasing the number of weapons you can carry and start finding elemental and other superior weapons, the drama and excitement of weapons breaking in combat and having to puzzle your way through enemy encounters drowned out by the constant inventory puzzle of “hey, what’s in this chest? Oh, another weapon; do I have something I should throw away in favor of this? Which weapons are closest to breaking? Okay, I tossed something, now I have to open the chest again.” You can only see whether you’ve never used an item or that it’s close to breaking; there’s no indication of how damaged it is otherwise, so you’re encouraged to completely use up one item at a time rather than switching between items frequently so that you never find yourself in the situation of having a whole bunch of swords, all of which are about to shatter.

At the same time, enemy and equipment scaling means that you can play this as an exploration game or as a combat game, but you can’t really play it as both; if you go off and solve a bunch of shrines, get some good weapons, and especially if you upgrade your armor a bunch and pick up the master sword, you’re rapidly going to turn the main quest into something completely trivial, ruining what should otherwise be the premiere content of the game.

Since all this was recorded before the expansions were released, can anybody confirm how well this stuff is dealt with by the DLC’s new difficulty mode and dungeon?

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All of that comports with my experience. The combat shines when you are playing creatively and scraping for gear, i think the core problem is that there isn’t enough variety of enmies or weapons to sustain it once you become a walking elemental knife drawer. And the defense boost from armor is REALLY strong. There doesn’t feel like a meaningful power curve, you just go from weak and struggling to all-powerful the moment you find a great fairy and upgrade a full set.

i haven’t tried hard mode yet, but i think playing the game with self-imposed restrictions on any mode (like say, only collecting 3 korok seeds) would keep it feeling a lot more fresh. Pity though, that part of the experience of Breath of the Wild is being excited when you first come across a random giant boss, and feeling sad ten hours later when you’ve realized there are only like, four kinds

This game has colonised the google image search for giant horse

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i haven’t tried hard mode yet

OK now i have. The hard mode bumps all enemies up a rank (red → blue → purple etc.), which functionally means they hit harder and soak more hits like in any other hard mode. OK, boring but fair enough. The other addition is much better: enemies regenerate HP, so you can’t wear them down with attrition (as easily, i mean you can still probably cook a hundred meals and outlast them if you want to).

What this means is there are fights you flat out cannot win early on. Rather than being a drag i think this is really cool, it means you have to rely on your wits more than ever and try to avoid combat as much as you can until you have some more hearts/stamina and better gear. The open-endedness and the kind of emergent play that can happen when you’re fighting or sneaking around a lot of enemies in this game helps even if i occasionally just get one-shot by a moblin with a lightning arrow.

It also means that when you CAN engage, you have to more actively try to use your special attacks and combo them. It doesn’t exactly make the combat harder but it brings out a little more of its fun kineticism.

PROTIP for evading hard enemies: carry an ice spear and ice arrows at all times. Hit them once to freeze them and then run for it. Very helpful for exploring Hyrule Castle early on.

oh and hard mode also adds archers on balloon platforms which is mostly just weird and entertaining. They do use them cleverly by putting them by bridges as chokepoints. They also do this for uhhh every bridge in the game apparently

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Once you have the rhythms of your stamina circle and movement down, the most fun way to play this is to drink 3x speed boost potions and skitter all over the place like a hyperactive little weirdo, all scrambling up rock walls and dumping bombs on bewildered enemies and gliding away like some kind of bat man.

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There are also more enemies in certain places, like one of the big horseboys on the tutorial plateau.

I need to pick this game back up

Oh yeah, i forgot to mention the big boy

i can’t even imagine fighting a lynel yet. i got pretty good at them on normal mode but the high level ones felt like they took days to beat

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I could see lynels being unbeatable until you get some weapons from the castle or expand your capacity for melee weapons.

I decided to go ahead and finish the game, even though I only found around half the shrines, so I can get the DLC in like a year when the software slump gets bad and come back for a hard playthrough. Fun game! I did wind up liking it a little better than Mario Odyssey, in the end.

Also, I don’t know if y’all saw this when I posted about it on Facebook, but the grunts and moans in the voice acting this time around is astonishing. Somebody with more video editing skill than me should make a video compilation.