I know the game’s supposed to have some kind of secret experience scale to determine how difficult the enemies it randomly generates are, the strength of items it throws at you, etc, but I think it also makes frequent use of “this attack does damage equal to all of your health, minus 1/4 heart” damage scaling during the earlier parts of that scale. I’m positive that I’ve taken hits from enemies that left me at 1/4 of a heart that still left me with 1/4 heart after I visited a goddess statue and leveled up my health.
1 Like
that’s because the game has secret 1-shot protection. if you’re full health, you cannot die in a single strike.
7 Likes
But if you’re at full health does your sword shoot projectiles? I feel like this is sorely lacking from latter-day Zeldos
1 Like
Only certain swords, and you have to “throw” the sword to get the projectile.
2 Likes
The long eightfold blade gets you projectiles just by swinging.
3 Likes
My hat’s off to people who are playing this on a Lite or in handheld mode. It feels like too big of a game to play on that small of a screen.
There’s definitely some kind of scaling mechanic going on. At first I thought certain regions just had some hard coded difficulties but I’m at a point where almost every encampment, even areas close to center, has a silver bokoblin or moblin in the ranks and they are super spongey. To a point you just have to unload your high damage fusion materials if you don’t want to stay there for a few minutes but they create a strong argument for keeping some wind or pushing tools so you can shove them off a cliff or into water that just kills them.
2 Likes
i wonder if it’s simply related to the amount of dungeons you’ve done, because i’m still encountering nothing enemies and i’m pretty beefy at this point
this reddit post outlines how it works in breath of the wild
at the most basic level, it has to do with a hidden counter of the number of enemies you’ve killed with some parameters around enemy type, apparently. i’m not sure if the same thing is going on in totk, but anecdotally, my partner has been at least a few to a dozen hours ahead of me in playtime since the first weekend the game was out, but i started seeing silver bokoblins and moblins much sooner; also, i was attacking a lot more random enemy camps than she was
3 Likes
pretty mean to give us an explicit instruction to take a picture of every enemy and their horns and then make that a missable goal. i def avoid monster camps wherever possible for this reason
1 Like
is there no NPC who cares about my wildlife photography
2 Likes
maybe i’m misunderstanding ya but i was under the impression that (almost?) nothing in this game is missable
missed pictures are purchasable from an NPC later
1 Like
well yeah, i don’t think that’s even a spoiler, but that’sa bunch of potential outlay
2 Likes
In a game this big i wouldn’t be surprised something is missable but I think what I regret missing the most is all the incidental dialogue additions like being naked or missing NPCs pointing to something in the distance but is obscured by sun glare.
2 Likes
I like when you approach NPCs from behind and they very frequently have special “wtf you startled me” type dialog.
I also really appreciate the running gag of every NPC figuring out you have a quest item by smelling it on you. They get kind of creative with that in some of the weirder instances!
8 Likes
Now I’m swinging around to thinking maybe combat is too easy with all the new toys and ways to upgrade weapon attack power and durability through fusions. Also now every encounter (outside combat shrines) I’m using the Yunobo ability which makes taking out weaker enemies very easy, allowing me to focus more on the bigger, heavy hitters.
Also I really like how I can use both Tulin and Yunobo at the same time. And the cooldown times are way, way shorter than the abilities you had in BotW. I can’t wait to see what the other dungeons give me. I’ll be steamrolling through this game in no time. I wish I had Yunobo while I was exploring the cave system under lookout landing/hyrule castle. I went through so many fused hammer weapons lol when I could have just been using Yunobo the whole time but I didn’t have him yet.
But yeah the combat is a lot better since they’re so generous with the abilities and weapon fusions and zonaite items. I’m not surprised that there might be some level scaling going on. They’d have to now that they let you run around with flame throwers and laser beams.
1 Like
the laser beams don’t DO that much though… they’re good for rapid dispatch of little guys but it’s pretty piddling against anything big right?
I don’t know I’ve only just used my first laser beam in a combat shrine just now against a bunch of weaker enemies and a few stronger enemies I was able to chip away at from a distance. I imagine lots of lasers arrayed together can do some decent damage. Good for crowds at least.
The really big enemies are like puzzles unto themselves though. Like the big rock like Talus enemies where you have to get on top to hit their weak point. Those are more battles of attrition for me where I figure out the pattern and then just have to consistently execute for ten minutes or however long it takes to whittle them down. And if they have some smaller enemies hanging out on/around them it doubles the time. I’ve started skipping them until I either find better gear or figure out how to kill them quicker.
I been using that ascend ability to teleport on top of the taluses and it makes them pretty trivial, just remember to jump off before you get thrown.
3 Likes
Did not even occur to me! Yeah that would make getting up there quite easy wouldn’t it.
Game of the decade.
1 Like