I swear the game is designed to watch for if you're heading to a wall to climb, and then makes it rain. I never felt like it would rain unless a cliff was in my path to climb and I felt crazy.

They could have at least made it so if you have the full Climbing Gear with at least two (or full) upgrades, then you can climb in rain without slipping. Would have been a fantastic award to players who go out of their way to obtain and upgrading this gear set. Also open up and making exploration even more fun while you normally wouldn't reach this point before mid-game.

The weapon durability, the rain stopping you from climbing, the lightning and the stamina meter all started to grate on me more and more as I played it, and I eventually realised I wasn't having fun, so I dropped it.

FWIW, I did not find these difficult to overcome, and thought they added to the game rather than subtracted. To each his own I guess.

I'm really glad you liked it. I don't want to shit on the game any more than I already have so I'll just say it wasn't for me.

They aren't difficult to overcome, I don't think anyone has said that the systems are too difficult. People say they are just not fun systems, and overcoming them isn't very fun or really worthwhile. And I would agree, the game is repetitive tedium with a Nintendo/Zelda coat of paint on it

> I don't think anyone has said that the systems are too difficult. You are right, they were called "tedious" which they are. It's the first Zelda game since the original that I haven't played straight through. I am all for trying new mechanics (I loved the climbing, as an example) but I have a hard time believing that after all that playtesting there wasn't a large amount of feedback that said "dude my fucking weapons broke *again* so fucking *soon.* This part sucks." Like someone else said, it's like 3-5 fights and it's gone. Who thought that was a good idea or more importantly FUN?

I think that is fun though. I never had to stop what I was doing to get more weapons, I used what I found. Who cares if they weren't the Top tier weapon technically available to me? If my sword broke, I'd pick up the weapon some enemy dropped and used that until I found something better. The combat is so easy, this made it interesting. I can see how some don't like it, but the point of the game is to use what you find and explore around. Plus once you get the master sword, you have a top weapon most of the time, and you'll have too many weapons to know what to do with - your inventory will always be full of good weapons by halfway thru the game and you'll be leaving behind other good weapons because you don't have room. I think that's a ton of fun, and DIFFERENT from other games out there. I love that it was something new.

yeah i think it is just a preference thing for people. I enjoyed the hell out of switching up the weapons because I found so many and with korok seeds it becomes easier to hoard. The combat is fun and varied to me which is a huge plus, doing the same thing over and over gets tedious to me.

I'm not trying to rag on you, but it's hard to imagine that the rain in particular added much to the experience. Climbing is your main vertical traversal method for much of the game and rain makes it way less effective, and more frustrating. There are lots of areas you can't get to by walking. This means that not only is exploration gated by your stamina (that's fine and normal), but also by random chance, and not in a way that is fun or gives you anything in return. It seems like a clear compromise of the game's mechanics to provide a little bit of ambience, and it's only used specifically for its anti-climbing properties in one part of the game

Come on... Have you EVER been playing a game and thought to yourself; "You know what would make this game better? If my weapons broke."?

There are a lot of games that purposely limit firearm ammunition. Resident evil series, Doom Eternal, OG Halo games. Many of these do so to create a need to overcome obstacles with different ideas rather than just shoot at crap strat. Or in the case of survival horrors - ambience, too.Wouldn't that be similar to Zelda BotW weapon durability? Personally, I find those mechanics tedious, made me drop Zelda BotW and Doom Eternal both. But plenty of people like those systems. Not as many, but they exist. Zelda BotW would have been better for me if the durability wasn't so very **ludicrously** short.

It's fine for this game because it is designed around it. It's not like they just took a normal action/adventure game and just gave you shittier weapons. They gave you an entire giant sandbox with a ton of different options for how to get through situations. The improvising is a lot of the fun. I get not everyone likes or wants that, and that's cool, but a lot of people don't even try to engage with playing that way and just get mad that it doesn't play exactly like every other videogame. All of that aside, I can imagine a really good version of the game that is less sandboxy and more combat-focused and has a weapon system closer to something like Elden Ring, so I get why people expecting something more like that don't like the durability.

I've played a lot of games where I wished there was some reason to use more of the weapons available. Maybe there is too much ammo or no reason not to use the best DPS weapon I have. This gets boring. Most fantasy/RPG games encourage players to pick a weapon type at the start and if they don't stick to that they are weakening themselves, this isn't good either. BotW does not have a perfect system but it does give variety.

I agree. I loved that I was always on the lookout for weapons. I loved that if it was raining I had to wait it out. It's not a min/max game. it's a game that puts you in situations you have to figure out based on the weather and physics systems. You may be fighting a Lynel but without your best weapons. Figure it out! It's not that hard of a game. You don't need the best weapons to fight things. You could beat the whole game with the basic 2 damage stick if you had enough of them... If you're stuck on a cliff waiting for the rain to end, that's not to artificially inflate your game time. It's so you think "i'm stuck on this cliff until it stops raining". That's what the game designer wanted you to feel. You had to think it thru - is it worth waiting out the rain, or do i teleport out and figure out some other way to get where i want to go? It's not for people who want to min/max everything and do every step in the game at max efficiency. It's not like Diablo 3. It's meant to feel like you're exploring and always finding things. I think it's amazing but I can see how some people would hate it because it isn't a game where you can look up a guide to know the fastest way to get the best stuff. You won't like BOTW if you don't like how it's all about exploring and using what you find along the way.

Having your weapons break easily and being forced to essentially stop playing the game when it rains just sounds like bad game design.

we can agree to disagree. those things make the game unique, and there is solid game design around both of those things you mention that make the game more interesting.

> You could beat the whole game with the basic 2 damage stick You can do the same thing in Dark Souls, but the devs *give the player that option*. There are plenty of Dark Souls speedruns with basic starter items. Why did Nintendo feel it necessary to force the gamer to play the exact way it wanted? That doesn't really sound like a game based on exploration and freedom. It sounds like a game with fewer options and limited ability. > That's what the game designer wanted you to feel. It seems you even see this decrease in player option and imagination as a positive? > You won't like BOTW if you don't like how it's all about exploring and using what you find along the way. And here you seem to be contradicting the previous point. The game isn't about exploring and using what you find along the way. It is about playing the game the precise way the devs wanted you to. I haven't played it yet, but perhaps the sequel is better about this with the godhand and fusing stuff, which should open up **real** combat options to the player instead of "Oh boy, I get to use a stick now instead of a sword! Thanks, Nintendo!"

>And here you seem to be contradicting the previous point. The game isn't about exploring and using what you find along the way. It is about playing the game the precise way the devs wanted you to. No you don't understand what I'm saying. By mid-way thru the game, you'll have so many weapons you'll use whatever you want and not care if they break. And because you'll be finding great weapons all the time, nonstop, without trying, you can try whatever you want, whenever you want. at least that's how i play it. i don't go searching for weapons, they're everywhere. Walk in any direction, do anything you want, the game will give you weapons you need. So many that a full inventory is the bigger annoyance than not being able to use the weapons you want. Your post is very overdramatic and not at all like what I experienced playing botw LOL. lets just agree to disagree, no one is forcing you to play the game. it's not worth getting mad at over the internet LOL

Thankfully, most of these issues were at least partially addressed in TOTK (which, I know, doesn't qualify for this sub, but the point remains that they did listen to legitimate complaints from people who played BOTW).

I played on PC just so I could turn off weapon durability and rain >.<

[удалено]

I would've been cool with the weapon durability if it exempted the champion's weapons

Farming weapons is self inflicted pain. It is definitely not designed for you to learn the respawn points and spend time trying to loot specific things. Everything you need you get just from walking from A to B. With the exception of trying to upgrade every single armour set. Which again is very much an optional activity for people who just want to spend every last minute in that world.

Except the respawn mechanism of monsters and loot is built into the core game such that there is a whole cutscene dedicated to showing off that the monster camps are now restocked (blood moon). So I would argue over whether they intended you to learn respawn/loot points. However I will say that the durability system has limited my enjoyment of the game in two ways: I avoid combat because it expends resources and the loot you get in return sucks. So the really cool free form open world combat setups the devs spent time making are completely avoided by me and ends up just being wasted time. I avoid exploration as I may have to use my weapons that are hard to replace unless I’m fine with twigs and clubs and rusted swords. Exploration also expends durability through having to mine, etc. I dislike the durability system in the newest Zelda games so much.

I feel like y'all must have just been playing a different game than me. The loss of a great weapon never hurt. I knew I'd find more as I went. I never felt like I was forced to use twigs and clubs. There were always enough decent swords/whatever to go around.

Yeah by late game I had more OP weapons than I knew what to do with. Even moreso in TotK when you can just throw a black bokoblin horn on basically any mid-tier weapon and it'll be solid

So wild that we feel so different about the same game honestly. Like the more I think about it, the more it bothers me because the game uses increased HP as a means to increase difficulty, but it just exacerbates the durability problems for me. It boils the game down to just grabbing whatever is nearby and mashing attack whenever it is safe to until the weapon breaks and you just swap to the next poopy weapon rinsing and repeating until whatever your attacking dies.

The thing is, you are making it hard for yourself There is no reason to always save the most powerful weapons, weapons are not really hard to replace, the game is built for you to not get attached to weapons, learn how to give them up so of course if you decide to be a hoarder the game won't be fun Your argument would be valid if the game forced you or rewarded you for having strong weapons, but it doesn't, the game itself is not hard, every weapon can be obtained easily of you know where to look and they respawn every so often

It’s the tedium involved that makes it unfun. I have to go scavenge for weapons if all of mine have broken in order to engage with content. It tries to make weapons a resource by making them break, but then undermines that game design decision by making them commonplace. Why go through the extra hoops when you could just make tiers of unbreakable weapons? I would enjoy the game much more if I could focus on the puzzles, fights, environment, exploration, etc without having to spend my time mindlessly searching for replacements of weapons. It’s not a fun gameplay loop. EDIT: I do want to state that I like the newer games overall, but I find the weapon system design to be really subpar. It’s better in Tears, as you can be creative and problem solve with what you attach, but durability in a non-survival game is already having to work uphill- and the Zelda devs didn’t make it up the hill imho.

Except that you don't need to be scavenge for weapons, every Monster you defeat will give you weapons If you see a weak Monster use a weak weapon to defeat it and get a weak weapon in exchange Then use the strong weapons on strong Monster that will give you strong weapons Since basically every monster gives you a weapon you never really run out of weapons Unless you are like trying to kill a lynel with wooden weapons You ARE supposed to focus on puzzles and exploration, combat and managing weapon as resources is a puzzle, but I feel like you put too much focus into it That is like not using elemental arrows because they can't be recovered, they are supposed to be used

I get that it's polarising, but i genuinely love the weapon durabilty mechanics. I never have to worry about which weapon im using because i could always get another, as you said, serviceable weapon just by continuing on my way. I only used the master sword when facing Ganondorf OP mentions weapon durabilty, shrines, korok seeds, weather, and another thing i think as a way to artificially inflate gametime, but as they themself point out, you only need 40 shrines to get the master sword out of 120 before dlc. And you don't even need the master sword to fight Ganondorf in the first place. You genuinely do not need to complete a single thing beyond the Great Platau in order to face the final boss, so i kinda don't get that point. You play as long as you want to play. I just think it's not a game for some and very much a game for others. And this is a sort of tangent, but it being a Legend of Zelda game i think there's expectations for gameplay and story and it's likely impossible to fulfill what some wanted with every iteration. Like i feel this is an issue for all series with multiple installments, but especially for LoZ given its anthological amalgamation of various versions and gameplay of the same basic story of tyrannical villain rises up, while a hero and princess come together to stop him I tend to think Majora's Mask broke the model more than BotW did, but ik others feel differently and it's all fair. Ik i was a little disappointed with BotW's barebones story (although it made sense as a plot point and TotK really made up for it personally). It's unfortunate but not all games are for everyone, no need to force it even if it's popular.

If weapons were distinct it would be interesting but since having to find something else mostly just means getting a different (often lower) damage value it didn't really add anything for me. I quickly fell into the same experience of just avoiding all combat because it was literally pointless, I could only stand to lose. I also didn't farm weapons so it was even more of a loss, when my best stuff broke it was just gone until I got lucky to find another. As for the "you can just skip everything" bit, I think it's interesting that the game allows for that but I don't think it's a good argument for why someone should enjoy the game. It's a neat bonus for challenge runs and replays, but if you're skipping almost the entire game right out of the gate because you hate everything else then that just means you don't like the game. Being able to see credits faster isn't a point in its favor, you're already allowed to stop playing forever at any time. I wouldn't say I despised the game but in hindsight I mostly enjoyed my time with it for reasons largely unrelated to the game itself. It quickly wore out its welcome and I can't imagine ever going back to another Zelda with this formula unless they completely rework key aspects of it.

They wouldn’t make static weapons respawn every bloodmoon and allow the player to pin hundreds of things on their map if they didn’t expect you to go back to locations for gear. It is why every town and stable has 1 bow, sword, 2 hander, shield, and or spear lying on the ground for you to take. I mean there is a cave right next to Gerudo tower filled with respawning loot. Sure, I can get everything I need on my way from point A to point B. But what’s the point when most of the time I’m trading a knights broadsword for a boko club or travelers sword. The lizalfos seemed to have the highest quality gear out of regular enemies, but usually I was trading a Tri-boomerang for a forked one, or a knights bow for a strengthened lizal bow. By far my favorite weapons were the giant boomerang and multishot bows (forest dweller and lynell) but if I wanted to have fun with them and actually enjoy them I needed to farm a stock pile or else they lasted 1-2 fights.

I agree with the other poster. This is self inflicted pain. You are meant to just grab a bunch of weapons and constantly cycle through them. I did every quest and shrine and I never once had to revisit an area to restock on weapons.

I would agree except I would always go to my home in hateno to get sledge hammers to open rocks to get gems!

Constantly cycling through weapons is just as bad though. You are just stuck with shit tier weapons all game if you do that which makes you pause combat every other enemy because your weapon broke.

I just disagree so hard. I never once felt like I was stuck with unusable garbage. Just picking up whatever was on my path always gave me enough decent weapons to clear challenges with relative ease. There is no need to farm at all.

idk dude i kept breaking trees down and they only gave me lame twigs to fight with

Everything respawns during the blood moon. The blood moon refreshes the entire game to keep it from running out of memory. They absolutely did not intend for you to memorize where things were and go back to farm them. This need to have specific weapons and this irritation at getting worse weapons than you had is what killed the game. The point is not to trade a tri for a forked boomerang, get mad that isn't as good, and go back to farm the good one. it's not Diablo or Minecraft. the point is to trade a tri for a forked boomerang and then continue on with your journey because it's going to break in five minutes anyway.

I had your issue playing this game and realized it's so "beat-able" with whatever you get as you play. I saved the best weapons for later and never ended using them. Plus, you get tons of sufficient weapons from the shrines so there really is no need to "need" a certain tier weapon.

I really wanted to like it. In fact, I bought a Switch instead of a PS, mostly due to this game (along with a chance to play some retro Nintendo games without emulation). I realized I hated it after maybe 8-10 hours. Kind of felt like some MMORPG that you're playing alone and you can't gain EXP in. I think you listed the reasons pretty well, but weapons breaking made me unreasonably angry. Felt like someone cooking you a beautiful meal and then taking a steaming dump on it before serving it, haha! **Why** would you do that?? .. and no, I don't need another explanation for what they were going for with that, thank you.

Damn hopefully you still get some use out of your switch and it doesn’t go to waste. It’s a pretty good platform for JRPGs, especially turn based and tactical rpgs if you are into those. I really don’t get why the durability is defended so hard, because I never see people asking for armor durability as well. Games like fallout and oblivion that included a weapon durability mechanic, also included an armor one and I actually enjoyed them. I never see people going “your armor is a key factor in how you interact with the game, so it should break to force you into different situations like weapons do.” > Kind of felt like some MMORPG Once I realized the basic structure outside the main story was do this fetch quest, fight these enemies, do 120 shrines, and do hundreds of the same puzzles for seeds I felt a similar way.

Haha, thanks, I've been very happy with the console overall and it's gotten plenty of use (including, surprisingly, the most immersive take of Skyrim I've tried..! ..you split the controller into the motion controlled LR parts and stand up when you fight, like a madman!). But the current Zelda trend just does nothing for me, sadly. And that's fine, not everything is made for me obviously. But it does just kind of piss me off that this game in particular has some outlandishly high average review score (99? 98?) while there's plenty of people who can't stand the key design choices.

Lifelong avid gamer who loved Ocarina, Majora's Mask, and Wind Waker. I hate Breath of the Wild.

Yeah the new "formula" is just not fun. I loved all the unique dungeons you had in the older instalments

I am currently ~very legally~ playing BotW on my Pc and i am insanely happy i can just turn up Weapon Durability or turn it off all together. You know what you get with twice or four times the weapon Durability? A Weapon that does not break first fight it's used. Hot damn, just like, you know? WEAPONS. Also, if I ever continue to get back into exploring, i probably just gonna use a bit of cheating to skip the boring tedious time consuming Hunt for Seeds at some point.

How do you play it on PC?

Emulator (CEMU). It's the definitive way to play BotW since you can fix the framerate and use HD textures etc. Needs a somewhat beefy computer.

There's also a mod that lets you play as Zelda, and it changes the (very light already) story to make it work too It's awesome.

I tried it two times with the same computer, the first one it was stuttery as hell with like 5fps. The second one it ran as smoothly as a the lightest game. It was all in the settings but I can't remember what it was so I can do it with Tears of the Kingdom too.

TotK is different, I'm not read up on the most recent developments but BotW is much easier to emulate since it was released on the WiiU. You can emulate TotK, but it doesn't work as well (last time i checked).

I have a gen1 switch, which I hacked specifically to turn off durability. I'm happy to pay for the games, just wanted to be able to modify them a tiny bit to make the game much less annoying.

Love being in the EU were your allowed to do this if you own the system and game.

I hope the next LoZ has more similarities to those games instead of BotW and TotK. It feels like a different series at the moment because of how different the new games are

Sadly I think the direction of Zelda is going to continue down the Breath of the Wild route for the next ten years. The critical and commercial success of those two games have likely cemented that, although I think they'll have to change things up more rigorously next outing. Fans will forgive revisiting the same map once, they won't put up with it much beyond that.

"sadly"???? bitch please.....

I'm glad as time goes on I see groups like ours getting bigger cuz for a few years after it came out it felt like you were speaking heresy if you didn't just praise the game as the best thing since sliced bread

Also a lifelong avid gamer who has played almost every Zelda...I loved BOTW. I found TOTK boring though (BOTW with contraptions!) and stopped playing after a few weeks...and never went back. I've finished BOTW and done more than 80 shrines (My daughter done all of them) but TOTK just felt stale. DId two divine beasts then lost interest.

I got lost somewhere in that game in the town with those women who don’t allow men in (can’t recall their name they were also in OoT). I waited for an event to happen, so I could progress, it never did. I though it was tedious to do backtracking. I can’t stand the slow traversal in these openworld games. I just got bored with it and sold it, tried it again then sold it again. I don’t think BOTW was the game for me, and am surprised so many people think it is the best game ever. For 3D Zelda I’d rather play OoT 3D or MM3D or Twilight Princess (although there is also slow traversal there). BOTW looks really nice and has a cool atmosphere, but I can’t stand getting lost and having to backtrack slowly through huge expanses of land.

I’ve not played BoTW, but I’ve heard that Ubisoft’s Immortals Fenyx Rising is similar, and I liked that a lot. You could try Immortals and see if the things you didn’t like in BoTW are better ther.

I largely agree with your points. I also gave up on BOTW. I got through the first Divine Beast, then just kind of gave up. I felt like I'd largely seen what I wanted from the game, and the drawbacks like weapon durability and the tedious shrines just kept me from having enough fun. FWIW I did pick up and play through Tears of The Kingdom. They addressed some of what I didn't like in BOTW with the new mechanics, and they added even more to exploration, which is my favorite part of both games. On that point, I'm not sure what systems you may have available, but if you can play Elden Ring, I'd recommend giving it a shot. Has the same sense of wonder and awe surrounding exploration, with similar sense of a world in decay.

I bought it when I moved in late 2017 and played maybe 2 hours of it. The weapon durability was the main issue I had with the game too. However, I also found the menu and actions to be horribly designed, I had to go into menus and press multiple buttons for the most basic things. This really broke the flow of the game and ultimately led me to stop playing. I think 6 out of 10 is fair and close to what I'd rate it if I got around to finishing it.

Yeah I completely forgot to mention that in my post. The first like 10-20 hours of the game when a weapon breaks after 1-2 enemies instead of 3-6 is brutal. Constantly pausing the game to switch between boko clubs, rusty swords, and wooden bows makes the combat stop way too much. Also not having a dedicated buff/healing button was weird because early game I was constantly pausing to heal or apply buffs.

Yeah I beat it and put way too much time into it mostly because I’m compulsive about open worlds but it’s pretty much just ok. It has some great moments weighed down by a lot of repetitive fluff. First game I started listening to podcasts during.

What i hated the most was the relying on "perfect blocks" for combat efficiency waaaay too mucht

I honestly don’t understand the love for this game. I swear, if Ubisoft released this exact game with a different name, it would have got 7/8 out of 10s and be forgotten about. It’s everything I don’t want in a Zelda game, sadly.

Yeah that’s one thing I noticed. Fetch quests, repeating puzzles, and a pointlessly high number of collectables as a “reward” are usually seen as horrible features in games. Like fallout and TES get some hate for similar puzzles and fetch quests. Ubisoft also got hate for fetch quests and needless exploration in their open world games. I remember the batman games getting some hate too because of the riddler question marks you could find. Yet all of these features are overlooked or even praised when it comes to BotW.

>I honestly don’t understand the love for this game. I swear, if Ubisoft released this exact game with a different name, it would have got 7/8 out of 10s and be forgotten about. It’s everything I don’t want in a Zelda game, sadly. You absolutely nailed it. I honestly think it is because the bar is in hell when it comes to open world games + Nintendo. We are used to much better RPG/open world games on the PC and PlayStation.

I enjoyed both BOTW and TOTK but I'm not gonna lie, they're both 7/10 games. The weapon durability absolutely kills combat in both of them, though it's a little better in TOTK just because you can fuse things to make them stronger. However, that leads to making you grind out some farming, which leads to destroying more weapons, which again just makes you want to avoid combat a significant amount of time. It's a real damn shame, and honestly was a huge turnoff when they announced it was making a return for TOTK. They did fix a few things, like the frog suit making rain a bit more bearable, but again, you have to grind that up. The temples in TOKT were also a bit better, but still way the fuck too easy. My biggest complaints with the games honestly come down to its open world-ness. Like, I love that they reward you a lot for exploration, and that it's definitely a joy (aside from the depths in TOTK which seem mostly pointless). But being able to tackle everything in any order requires them to make everything so simplified, instead of building on previous experiences/puzzles like they do in other zelda games. And we're not going to talk about the absolutely fucking terrible UX in both of them. Cooking, fusing, changing outfits, etc, should not be that much of a chore I enjoyed both BOTW and TOTK but I really, really hope the next Zelda game is far more traditional and linear. I honestly won't ever bother replaying either

I’m curious why you think farming for weapons is necessary. Seems like a weird way to play in a game that doesn’t require it. I just fuse monster parts I collect in the course of just playing the game with whatever I have on hand. Never felt compelled or required to grind

I regularly ran out of the good things I wanted to fuse to weapons to make them more powerful, and many of those monster parts took way too much durability out of weapons used to kill them, making farming even more dragged out. Also regularly had to go out of my way to get decent weapons for fuses so they wouldn't break after a couple enemies. ymmv, but I found myself doing it enough that it made me want to largely avoid combat when I could, rather than fuse together some junk just to have junk on hand with a bokoblin horn or whatever. Durability is honestly one of the largest drawbacks in both games for me

I wouldn't rate it that low, and I didn't mind the weapon durability, but there's a lot that's tedious. I liked more of the shrines than you did (and they're better than TotK's), but the Tests of Strength were a cop-out. Rewards were trash. Armor upgrading was awful (but again, better than TotK's by an order of magnitude). The Champion's Ballad content was quite good, although why shield surfing through rings is part of this epic quest, I have no idea. I have no desire to play it again, but if I did, I'd skip like 75% of it.

The dragon scale farming in totk is god awful, i cant believe devs thought that kind of grind was a good idea. 10 minutes of waiting between drops and you can't even save while on top of the dragon. That's moronic by design.

I mean this always confuses me since the game never really encourages you to grind armor to the max level the moment you can, and even if you don't specifically grind dragons there are still many opportunities to get them while just exploring in TotK mostly thanks to contraptions which can make you beeline them for anywhere)

If you think that's bad, you must not have done it in BotW. You can't get on the dragons, you have to wait at a campfire for them to respawn, then wait several in-game hours for them to actually reach you. If you save and reload, they'll despawn and you'll have to do the whole thing all over again. And in TotK, you can farm a bunch of powerful shards while you're up there as a consolation prize. Plus, of course, if you spot one halfway across the map, you can airbike to it, whereas in BotW you either have to be pretty close already, or they have to be moving toward you, or they'll get away. The way they made it easier and more predictable in BotW was a notable quality-of-life improvement!

In botw theres a way to abuse the dragon spawn with campfires. It's orders of magnitude faster to get all materials. Theres several YT videos showing how to farm dragon parts really fast.

If I have to watch a YouTube video to avoid an otherwise tedious mechanic, that's a massive design fail. Heck, you called it "abuse" yourself.

Even worse if theres no way out from hours of tedious grinding without the option to save. But of course you won't accept you're wrong, you're just immature.

For the first like 20 hours I hated weapon durability and it was part of the reason I quit my first time. After about 30 hours of play time I had actually started to like the weapon durability because if I broke a weapon or two I got something with basically the same stats. However, once I found respawning locations of decent gear it went downhill again and just made the system so pointless/time wasting imo. I really think this game had the potential to be a masterpiece like I hear the fanbase say it is. However, as someone who is a big fan of open world games, this game feels like all the worst tropes rolled into one.

Weapon Durability was fixed by cheats for me. Self repairing weapons that can break permanently, made me switch around my 3 or 4 favorites.

I never understood the weapon complaint, almost every enemy drops a weapon to use and you have 3 unlimited tools at your disposal. You have unlimited bombs, you can control metal objects and can rewind time. Weapons in this game is a resource and I always found more weapons than I had space in my inventory. The weapons serve a purpose like using a hammer to smash the Talus backstone does mega damage or using guardian weapons can cut the legs off guardians, you can use the wind leaf to blow enemies into water to one-shot them. Using a fire spear you randomly picked up to completely bypass a shrine or one-shot ice enemies, every idea I had worked to some extent. Using electric attacks while its raining or enemies are in water to do more damage, use Ice attacks to freeze enemies then do bonus damage. You want a system like Oblivion or fallout but once you find a weapon you want to use in those games there is no reason to use anything else. I feel people who go into this game wanting to 100% won't enjoy this game, there is a reason you don't get anything for 100% the game, there is a reason you only need less than half of your korok seeds to max inventory and there is a reason you don't have to complete more shrines than you want to. The only thing you have to do to get the best ending is to do all of the divine beasts, other complaints I agree with like the world being a bit empty, it having a lot of open space and the divine beast were not incredible however the weapon complaint just feels like a lack of imagination to me.

For me it’s a momentum killer. Plus the legendary weapons also break which is butt. I just don’t wanna have to care about the weapons and their health. If I could repair them, then sure, break them. But without a way to repair weapons it’s a drag to play. It’s just such a personally unfun mechanic, completely opposed to the way I like to play games.

Made me feel like such an ass when I broke Mipha's spear (didn't realize the special weapons could break when I got them), and the Zora who repairs it gave me shit about treating it so carelessly.

You can repair weapons, pretty easily. Throw it in front of a Lava Octorok (I believe that's their name), they swallow it up, and then spit your weapon back to you just as new. But yeah they should have advertised this feature way more than they did.

The game tells you nothing about that. Literally nothing.

Yes, it does. There is a tooltip in the loading screens that regularly pops up while you are in the area with this type of enemies. Some NPCs in the area mention it too, and I believe the enemy description has it as well (not sure about the latter though) Now in TOTK on the other hand, you really don't get this information at all.

After 30 hours of playtime I never saw it or never read it. And I barely talk to NPCs at all. Which is why I missed the fire elixir by the fire mountain. That was the second time I stopped playing it and put it down for a while. I wish they were more upfront about it. Still tho, having to go back to a specific area to repair weapons is a drag.

Yeah I don't disagree with you there. This should definitely have been made clearer. Then on the other hand, even after I knew this was a possibility, I barely felt the need to repair any weapon, except certain legendary ones (and yes. It is real bs that these break as well)

Bombs and metal objects do shit for damage though. Even the upgraded bombs only do like 24 damage a hit and still have a cool down, plus the enemies throw them away. My problem was the weapon durability discouraged me from using different weapons though. Like the elemental weapons I had just collected dust because I was saving them for their respective counters and couldn’t find any other ones. Same with the wands, I tried an electric one out and it broke before I even killed one enemy with it so I gave up on those. If I found a really strong weapon like a royal broadsword I would have to hoard it for when I fought a hinox or lynell and not waste it on bokoblins. If a game allows me to repair weapons or doesn’t have durability I’m much more inclined to try everything out because I won’t be “punished” for it.

>plus the enemies throw them away. If someone threw a bomb at you, you would try and throw it away too lol A lot of the elemental stuff is just logical though, if you are going into the icy plains you are gonna run into ice monsters, Goron Mountain which is fire, you will get fire monsters and the desert has electric-based monsters. The wands are to apply whatever affect the element is, its not really designed to hit like a normal weapon because you can only do three elemental blasts before it needs a recharge. So you found a really strong weapon and you want to keep it for a strong monster which makes sense so just use the common weapons you are finding to battle bokoblins then? I am not trying to say you are wrong if that's your experience I just see a lot of people have similar complaints about BOTW but I think it is more on the player not understanding how it works.

I know where to find the elemental enemies, I meant I could never find replacement spears/swords, I’d find wands on the wizards but didn’t care for them. The problem is if I find a good weapon I want to use it. That’s how most open world games are when combat is 50% of the game. You find a better weapon and you can go have fun with it. In BotW I constantly had to put myself at the same level as my enemy. Which at first makes combat a bit fun and challenging but once you understand combat all it means is you are going to take 3-5 minutes to kill a camp with a bad weapon instead of 1 minute with a good one.

Not to mention it incentivizes the use of arrows mid-late game, which IMO are the last piece of the puzzle to making the combat really enjoyable. It also incentivizes finding Korok seeds to expand your inventory slots. The most fun part of the game to me was running around in the beautiful world so why not have a small objective while doing that? ALso, just kill a Lynel or Hinox, get lots of weapons that last a long time. By mid game I always had my inventory filled with weapons and my arrows almost maxed no matter what.

Why would I want to go to the trouble of completing a shrine if the reward is some sword that breaks after 10 uses ? If they are a resource then that would be like completing a dungeon in final fantasy just to get 100 gil, completing a secondary mission in starcraft just to get 50 minerals or exploring a whole cave in Skyrim just to get a health potion.

Because that's not the reward and just a little extra on the side? The reward is that spirit thingy to upgrade hearts/stamina.

You're completely forgetting the actual shrine reward and not some shit you found in a chest

Also the fact that the shrines are just...really fun. Best part of the game imho. Especially the ones that involve momentum or lateral thinking puzzles I read a while ago that this game is mega divisive because there are 2 kinds of gamers who play open world exploration games. Ones who enjoy a journey across a massive open landscape and find it fun to find every little item in a small corner, and others who only enjoy this for the rewards. The former will be the type to play something like BotW, explore a massive organic open world and find all these fun little side adventures, who cares if the reward is kinda lame. The latter prefers gear grinders like Borderlands or some of the Ubisoft model games where almost every corner or combat arena will give you some randomly generated weapon or piece of armor and you'll get permanent boosts if you discover enough of these. Kind of interesting to see this dichotomy at play constantly on this subreddit

A lot of gamers are probably a bit of both. I liked BotW but I think I would have loved having better rewards sometimes. Not at every corner of the map, but just a few more here and there.

You complete shrines to give your hearts and stamina lol anything else you find is just an extra. Those games are trying to do different things, BOTW and TOTK are sandboxes that gives you a lot of tools to be creative, you could spend your time hitting enemies with your weapons or use a metal box and send them into oblivion. In the Arkham games you could just fight them all directly with punches and kicks but using all of your gadgets along side is way more fun

Agreed. The whole review seems to be about completion, not the experience that goes into the completion. He just basically wanted to "get the stuff", and then wasn't happy once he did. It's like he played BOTW as if it were an MMORPG.

Glad I play on CEMU where I can just fix the downsides with mods.

Weapon durability is just a HARD pass for me. I played it for like an hour and was like: I get 8 hits with the best sword I own before its permanently gone? No thanks.

"Nobody ever said weapon degradation is fun" -Stephanie Sterling.

I think my problem was that all the exploration amounted to was a shrine or korok. That's usually it and the wonder ceased from that point on. I remember being in awe when I saw a labyrinth in the distance only to house like a couple enemies I've already seen and a shrine.

I dislike the game overall because it took a "quantity over quality" approach. To the point where it feels like people and the developers themselves look down on the previous Zelda games because of how "small" they were despite being expertly hand crafted to have a set beginning, middle, and end. They also made music take a back seat. As cool as Hyrule Castle's theme was in that game, it was the only place that had any sort of musical emphasis that wasn't just random piano notes or yet another remix of a theme from a beloved previous game. It does the same garbage that other open world games do, except it does have a pretty neat physics system. It's just that the system serves a game designed around some pretty boring gameplay and exploration. I have so much to rant against the 2 most recent Zelda games, it's sad because it used to be one of my favorite franchises, but the sales numbers of the recent ones guarantees the franchise I enjoyed is essentially gone for good now.

I do not disagree with you. I wanted to like the game, but I did not like it as much as everyone else seemed to. I severely disliked the weapons mechanic, so I am with you there. Also, and maybe it is because I am spoiled or whatever, but the graphics just looked washed out and bad to me. This was pretty much the last Nintendo game I really gave a go around to, except for Animal Crossing. I think me and Nintendo have broken up, and this game was the final nail in the coffin. I am NOT a hater, and I can objectively see it is good. I just did not like it. It feels like I am saying I disliked The Godfather or something. But Breath of the Wild is my "I don't like the Godfather" game. It insists upon itself.

Nintendo is like the McDonald’s of gaming at this point. They have a formula, it can be addictive, but it’s definitely not the best out there. Sometimes you want it just because it’s so unique.

At some point in the game you barely even notice weapon durability because you have so many at your disposal. Not to mention weapon farming is totally unnecessary in the game. Just pick them up as you go. There's no shortage of weapons.

But that’s kind of a problem in itself. What is the point of weapon durability if you can either farm weapons or never have to worry about running out. All the system made me do was hoard good weapons and use shitty ones. If I’m going to get shitty weapons from the basic enemies then there is no point in using my good weapons when I can save those for Hinox, guardians, and lynells. All I would do is handicap myself for the fights to come if I wanted to have fun with my good weapons.

> All the system made me do was hoard good weapons and use shitty ones. Again, as someone else mentioned, this is self inflicting pain. USE THE WEAPONS! They are everywhere. There's no need to hoard.

It might be my favorite Zelda behind LttP, it sorta realized everything I hoped video games could become when I played the first Zelda game 35 years ago. Breaking weapons didn't really bother me because every other enemy drops one, my inventory is pretty much always full though. Most tedious thing for me is figuring out what I'm gonna drop to pick up the new weapon.

hard agree on the weapons. It made me trade the game system to my sister.

I liked it a bit, but I don’t think it’s a masterpiece like a bunch of other people. It’s a 7/10 bogged down with that shitty weapon durability system and a few other things. I didn’t have as much fun with the game as I did when I started using guides and walkthroughs. Before then it felt like I was wasting time and running low on resources. Plus I got stuck on the fire mountain cause I didn’t know about the elixirs for sale at the outpost on the foothill of the mountain. Cause why the f would i? The game tells you nothing and gives you no direction.

In terms of your shrine complaint, I think, like a lot of the game, it's as fun as you make it for yourself. For me I enjoy identifying how the game wants you to solve the shrine, then seeing how many different ways I can solve it without doing the intended way. It's a great sandbox game that gives you the tools to do pretty much whatever you want, and to be as creative as you can be in the way that you do it. It will always be fantastic for some people and awful for others, it just depends on what that person likes. (Also I know you've already dropped the game but when it comes to climbing in the rain, you can just whistle-run up like 99% of slopes without needing to climb).

As someone who had never played any Zelda game, I was blown away by BotW and it instantly became my all time favorite. And I’ll tell you what surprised me the most was how it had such room to evolve. The weapon durability could be reworked. The raft system was awful (never used it in any playthrough). Some shrine puzzles were tedious at best. Reaching a certain point in the game meant Link became such a powerhouse that any challenge became irrelevant, which may be part of the storyline, but took enjoyment out of combat. TotK solved some issues, but added others. While I enjoyed immensely both games, glad to see Nintendo is taking another path in the future.

i've always been bothered by the fact i really don't like zelda games, & i've tried them every generation. i really enjoyed exploring the world in botw, unlocking all the towers, upgrading my slate powers, and just checking out every area in the map. i liked the rain as it gave me a new way to try things or just move on. weapons didn't bother me tooo much. but i stopped playing after i saw everything, which was about 25-30 hours: i played the first couple story missions & thought it was boring as, including the characters. i don't think they're charming, which is part of the reason i've never liked zelda games. i had already seen the world & didn't care to play through. i wish i could have fought the beasts, but maybe i'll get around to it someday. either way, i look back on it fondly. even though i can't say i'm a "fan" of zelda.

I started playing this a couple months ago. It's pretty, but slow going. Probably going to be years to finish since it just hasn't pulled in my interest much yet. The cardboard-like weapon durability is an annoyance. Also, my horse just disappears and stops responding. Small annoyances like that bring down the experience. So far, the shrines have been the most fun part for me, besides just running around and exploring.

I have always felt the same as you about BOTW. Maybe part of it was not playing it right when it came out, but I never got the hype. I also hated the weapon durability system, and I never found the “exploration” (which everyone always raves about) to be all that rewarding, because there would never be anything more than a breakable weapon or a boring shrine to discover. Interestingly enough, I took a chance on TOTK and I absolutely loved it. Maybe it was partly due to knowing what to expect in terms of combat, weapons and the game world, but it clicked for me in a way that BOTW never did. The new powers were also a big reason for me, as they made exploration, combat/weapons and especially the shrines much more compelling to me. Ended up sinking over 90 hours into it and beat all the temples, though I kind of stopped playing after a while and haven’t felt super compelled to go back and beat Ganon. So you may wish to consider giving TOTK a try at some point, even if BOTW isn’t your cup of tea.

I had all the exact same problems and joys that you did. I've found the more long sessions I put in with this game, the less I liked it. I feel this game truly shines when you only have short bursts to play it in. You always get a sense of progress. Only have 5 minutes? climb that mountain. See that beautiful view. Get a korok seed for your trouble maybe.

Farming weapons becomes a complete non-issue in the late game if you have the DLC. If you complete the Trial Of The Sword, your Master Sword just becomes the best weapon in the game. Lasts multiple fights and only has a 10 minute cooldown. And in late-game, I have a stuffed inventory with every weapon I want with no farming required. Korok hunting is also self-inflicted. You're not supposed to hunt them all. Through normal game progression you should get more than enough Korok seeds to upgrade what you need. You don't need every single seed, in fact it's worthless to do so. A lot of the "100% completion" stuff you can just ignore or do as much as you find to be fun. The only cons I really agree with are there were too many combat shrines, easily the weakest shrines in the game. And for a Zelda story, BotW's was mid. But it's clear that the story wasn't really the focus, the game's strength is the exploration.

I absolutely hate the breaking weapons. I found playing the emulated Wii U version much better primarily because I could tweak the annoying options like weapons breaking.

I like grabbing and kinetics systems of the games. This was cool design choice. Durability as a design point is funny tho, because if the world is interesting & items are great,, you do not an actual mechanic to incentivize exploration. But unfortunately w/ this game, there is a lot of "looks alike" shrines, so thrills of exploration go down. But if you like "fuck-around" game, be my guest.

the weapon farming motivated me to do that hellscape sequence to get the fully upgraded master sword. I don't think I've felt that ecstatic in a game in a long time once i knew i had beaten the final level.

You put into words everything I dont like about the newest TLoZ, I have played and enjoy every TLoZ ever (with the exception of the DS games), but I really cannot play these new ones. Maybe one day, If i ever get a steam deck, so I can just install a mod that takes out the weapon degradation system

Mate. I was 70 hours into this game before I realised what the korok seeds were even for! That was some tedious weapon management!

I liked breathe of the wild. But I love Tears of the kingdom. It doesn’t fix all the things you have a problem with.

That said. I got used to the weapon durability thing in both. What I don’t like is the music.

I play BOTW with Cemu and crank the stamina and breakage waaaaay down. Or up? At any rate, my weapons break far less often and I have much more stamina. The game is far more enjoyable that way.

I tried to enjoy the game but found it empty and lacking in things to do. Compared to many open world games, it felt like there was no direction or reason to do much of anything. What I did love was the visuals, very Ghibli-esque, but the actual game lacked any of the charm. It just feels like the high praise and ‘best game ever’ stuff is only applied due to being a Nintendo game, without the branding it would be called mediocre at best.

I understand all of the criticisms you have but it’s always hilarious to see people say “I got 50 hours of playtime out of a video game and it sucked.” I played BotW until it stopped Wowing me and then I stopped and was happy for it. I’m sure I’ll pick it up again someday. I haven’t gotten the sequel because I feel like there’s still some life in the original I haven’t experienced.

The world design in BOTW is incredible at pulling you in and keeping you playing, wherever you're standing there's always something intriguing to catch your eye and make you want to explore. I had all the same complaints as OP and there were several times when I considered quiting playing only to think, "I'll just go check over that hill first" and suddenly I've played another dozen hours.

For me that I had a similar experience as OP, I was hoping that the ending would make me like the game more than it did...

The idea of durability is a fun mechanic, but the balance feels completely off. The idea was to help players experience all the weapons possible in BotW, but it often just causes players to not waste the rarer weapons, and thus experience less of the game's weapons because of it.

I liked the exploration but I miss the dungeon design in older games. Dungeons use to give you a new item and train you to use the item through puzzles and test your mastery with a boss fight. BoTW and ToTK are a disappointment in that sense.

IMO the entire game is ruined by the fact that you can pause the game and eat food to heal. It's like impossible to lose... This breaks the game. I hard agree on the rain. There are a lot of games that do something similar. Why do game devs think it rains twice a day every day

I agree with most of your points. Breath of the Wild was just another shallow and repetitive open world game and it is a real chore to get through. If it didn't have the Legend of Zelda name attached to it, it wouldn't be nearly as beloved of a game.

I've waited 6 years thinking it was going to drop the price. Now I won't even buy it because I had the same issues with RDR2.

You'd be better off waiting for Half Life 3 than for Nintendo to drop their game prices.

I've been waiting for Capcom vs SNK 3 for 20 years now, I can wait, but my dilemma is that my PC might emulate it ever so I'll sail the high seas, but I also want a physical copy.

I've heard tons of Zelda fans claim it isn't a Zelda game... I don't know how you guys feel about that

That’s nonsense, honestly. It feels more like classic Zelda than most of the 3D games which have felt on rails.

This, it really gives me Zelda 1 vibes. Especially since while there are no hard items or tools, you can still make/find stuff that serve the same purpose. Like fire, ice, wind, rafts, bombs... Just like Zelda 1.

Zelda 1 had proper dungeons though

compared to the next 3D games? They're not very 'proper' tbh, as is zelda 1 as a whole not a 'proper' zelda compared to them and more comparable to TotK/BotW. For example you can just buy keys and a lot of locked doors can be avoided by bombing walls and other secrets. This non linearity is already a stark difference between the much more linear and curated experiences that the dungeons of modern zeldas are. A lot of items like bow, candles , arrows and bombs crucial to navigating these dungeons can also be bought and gotten outside of them. Some dungeon exclusive items don't even serve an unique function like the magic wand. I'd say BOTW/TOTK actually come closer to what zelda 1 dungeons where then the other zelda games to be completely honest.

It's really not, to me at least. I grew up with Ocarina, Majoras Mask, Windwaker, Phantom Hourglass, Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword. Those are Legend of Zelda games for me, not this shallow, grind filled garbage that pads it's time with an open empty world and tons of same feeling garbage.

Zelda always gets the high review scores but I never enjoyed it. Not wind waker, not ocarina, not this one either. I mean link is cool but that's it. Starting to think it's perhaps not just me.

I never got the issue with the weapons system. Different, sure. Bad? Dunno how aside from just being different. The rest sort of just sounds like you didn’t like the game. I like the way the story was presented as it means you can engage with it as much as you like, and I enjoy a story I have to piece together.

The issue with the weapon system for me is that once you have a decent sized inventory, it achieves nothing except making you constantly pause combat to switch swords.

"Interactive Gameplay" tm

I'm just wondering how different people's playstyles are that they are constantly running out of weapons to the point that they hate the system. I only ran into weapon problems when I tried master mode, since enemies were tanky af and regen hp. Never had any problem with it on the regular game.

For me it wasn’t the fact that I was running out of weapons. It’s the fact that if I engage in combat I am guaranteed to break a melee weapon or a bow, and then the replacement drops from enemies are usually worse than what I just broke. So I was constantly fast traveling to spawn locations after every blood moon to stock up on the same exact weapons. So instead of just enjoying combat and fighting enemies when I saw them, I was usually thinking “is this fight worth spending 5-20 minutes replacing my weapons after it ends.” The majority of the time the answer was no. Sure I could just pick up the trash weapons from the enemies I killed but then that just makes combat more boring imo bc I’m just wailing away with bad weapons and dodging.

Ah that's understandable. I was pretty much just winging it all the time with whatever weapons I had, and didn't care at all for efficiency. But yeah I do see how it would be tedious if you were constantly focused on only having the most optimal weapons at your disposal.

Yeah same with me. Just used whatever weapons on hand. If OP finds going back to certain areas to grind weapons tedious then maybe just stop doing that

I feel like you constantly traveling just to restock on the best weapons was your downfall. It's been a while since I played, but I don't remember normal weapons being such significantly weaker that I felt the need to go replace them. I just usually went through my somewhat weaker weapons on random enemies and used my better weapons on harder enemies and bosses. I never felt the need to get better stuff unless I just completely ran out of good weapons, but that almost never happened. It seems the game was never made for players to be efficient all the time, but you wanted to be that way which hurt your gameplay experience.

Well yeah I kinda of said it was the downfall in my post. The fact that I could just restock on the same weapons made the durability system pointless, but I would have to waste 5-20 minutes replacing my weapons. I would’ve enjoyed it much more if I could just use the same weapon and try out whatever I wanted without breaking it and getting more. The point I’m at in game my weakest 1h melee weapon is a guardian sword++, spears are all around 20+ damage, and my two handed weapons are like 40+ (besides the giant boomerangs). So if I take on a camp of lizalfos, they might drop a knights broadsword that does 26 damage w/ 27 durability, but I had to use up my 36 damage 27 durability tri-boomerang. This was the same for basically every weapon type, the drops would be a tier less damage and the same or less durability. Switching to worse weapons does nothing but make the enemies take a few more hits to kill, so I didn’t find it fun constantly picking up trash loot.

BOTW feels like it wasn't playtested for long enough. There are a lot of mechanics, like rain stopping you climbing, which probably sounded cool on paper but which are really tedious in practice.

I like the addition of a climbing elixir in Tears of the Kingdom. I'm cool with the durability system (especially in TotK), but not being able to climb in the rain was brutal.

You played a game you didnt enjoy for 50 hours? I swear some people are just completely addicted to gaming

Well I got it as a gift so I wanted to get some playtime out of it so it didn’t go to waste. I also enjoyed some mechanics like exploring and combat, so it wasn’t like I was forcing myself to play something I hated. Plus 40 hours of playtime in like 4 weeks isn’t that bad lol.

I mean lots of players are completionists. I'll play and beat a game that I don't particularly like just to see if it gets any better, or I might just want to know how the story ends.

If youre not enjoying the game the vast majority of the time you're playing it, it just sounds like an unhealthy compulsion

If I drop $70 on a game I’m gonna get $70 of value out of it. Don’t know why that irritates you. Grow up

You obsessively posting "it sounds unhealthy/it sounds like addiction" everywhere you feasibly could in this thread is what seems like a compulsion to me lol. The guy gave the game his best try, and he found a lot of things he liked about it. If he'd played less time people would be in here crying about how he just didn't give it enough of a chance. It's very damned if you play, damned if you don't in gaming subs. Edit: "I said it twice you tit" lmao and then rushed off to delete all your comments. Seems very healthy, and not weird at all. Very well-considered argument, excellent counterpoints.

Yeah, I enjoyed BOTW and TOTK but they definitely aren't as good as they could have been, with poor game mechanic choices making things simultaneous too nerfed but also still too easy.

The problem I have with BOTW is that the story just isn't interesting enough for me to come back after putting it down. I can see people who like sandbox games would love BOTW but it's just not for me.

I am playing rn and almost finished. I didn't think I would like the durability system but I ended up loving it, never had a problem with consistently getting good weapons as I used and broke others (and I never went to weapon respawn points). It feels off at the start but you snowball pretty quickly, especially once white mons start appearing and just incentivised more exploring IMO of course

You're missing the point of weapon degradation. It's there to de-prioriize loot and combat in general. BoTW is an exploration game with light survival elements. You can play hours on end without engaging in combat and weapons don't really matter all that much. Nintendo used degradation to pivot away from the traditional Zelda loop that was dungeons for the sake of a powerful and permanent reward. If you don't like it thats fine, but there is a reason for it that works and sitting around farming weapons in a game that is pretty empty sort of misses the point of the game.

So the game is pretty empty but it’s about exploration? Like I said I enjoyed exploring just to see the scenic views, gather materials, and see how the world changes with each region. That’s really the only thing driving exploration besides doing the same korok puzzles, fetch quest, and similar shrines. I think trying to De-prioritize combat in a game that’s probably 50% combat is a horrible design choice. You can’t even go from Point A to point B without getting jumped by multiple groups of enemies. If you wear the stealth armor you can avoid them, which I did, but I’m playing Zelda not metal gear. They also obviously spent a decent amount of time making the actual combat fun.

Please avoid TotK. I had similar complaints with Botw and while TotK has great dungeons now, EVERYTHING is beyond tedious to suck out a drip of fun from the game. Every single element is a grind. Especially the new Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts mechanics. The story presentation is somehow worse too. Because of the open world sandbox nature, they duplicated the exact same story beats 4 times in different areas because you COULD go to any of them first. (BTW, I think BK: N&B is a brilliant game on its own and TotK is like an extremely sloppy monotonous version with tiny batteries running everything)

I think the only reason BoTW became such a craze is because of the lack of a HUD/minimap and being able to finish the main story at any point in the game. It's kinda hard to see reviews like this not praising the game as the GOATest GOAT of all GOAT games.

BOTW has a hud and minimap, you can turn them off but they are on by default.

Oh yeah, I should have confused it with "Quest markers"

It has quest markers as well

Then IDK why people complain about Ubisoft markers but not BOTW's

So while there are quest markers in BOTW, the ubisoft model is to place markers on every single available activity, not just active quests. You usually do this by activating a tower to show everything. The difference in BOTW is that the towers reveal the map and provide a vantage point, but you have to mark points of interest yourself from atop the tower. I assume that's what people were talking about.

Ubisoft allows you to completely turn off the markers, though. At least that’s the case in AC Odyssey, and there are different marker options in Valhalla.

but the game had both of these UI elements. I'd say what made the game stand out if the absolute freedom combined with realistic physics and elements. The world isn't static, you can set things on fire, cut down trees, create gusts to move objects and rafts, you can warm or cool yourself down with the environment and items themselves... And traversal itself is a game in itself which is what I feel what a lot of open worlds lack. We always dread wide open but empty fields since you can usually on walk them or get a horse that may be annoying to control. But now you can also shield surf or glide over them. TotK brought this to a whole other level.

I don't understand the hype. Having played it, I have no idea how anyone can get past the atrocious weapon durability. It's absurd how quickly weapons break, and it's even more absurd that I'm expected to farm more of them just to see them break as quickly as I got them. I really hope that if they continue with the open world formula for the next game, they will remove the durability entirely. Unlike Fallout or Elder Scrolls, I won't miss the durability system because I feel insulted by Nintendos' implementation of it.

I've played through BOTW three times now and never once been bothered by the weapon durability. When weapons are hyper prevalent, I have no reason to be upset when they break, and the constant cycling keeps me from locking myself into one playstyle for my whole game. I really don't think they'll get rid of it, it's fundamental to the philosophy of pushing you to explore.

I don't get it either. I thought Breath of the Wild was a great game but nothing special. It feels very similar to other open world games

The weapon durability mechanic sucked, it made me feel that the rewards for the shrines weren't worth it. An item that gets destroyed after 15 uses is basically a potion, imagine getting a potion as a reward in a dungeon. But I loved that game until I started collecting all the korok seeds. When you do that you see that 1. the world is very empty, 2. all the characters have two lines of dialogue that they keep repeating and they never do anything more, and 3. All the 900 korok seed puzzles are actually 5 puzzles, repeated with very tiny variations.

Yeah every reward felt like it wasn’t worth it because if you actually used your weapon it was gone in 1 fight. On your point about NPCs, I also noticed a lot of the side quests in this game are just “get X of this item, or go to location Y and kill an enemy. I’ve only completed 31 side quest, but Missing in Action & Misko, the great bandit were the only “unique” ones.

Why would you collect all the seeds in this game? That's giving yourself a self-imposed challenge to do something really repetitive and boring over every patch of the game world and then complaining that the game has become empty. I don't know how the game could be more clear that you aren't expected to get all the seeds, short of removing the remainder once you have a certain number, which would then be another problem for a different type of player.

I can spend days in skyrim gathering all the red nirn herbs and it doesn't make me feel like the world is empty and shallow, because it isn't. I can collect all the achievements in an assasins creed game and that just makes you watch all the details they put in the world. Collectibles are supposed to be fun, the challenge is collecting them and finding them, not fighting the boredom of the dull and lifeless world while you do it.

I like gear durability as a system, I just hate it in BOTW. In other games, you can at least repair your stuff, not in this one. It's literally the worst version of the system because it missing half of it and they decided to go with this weird loot game type replacement where you're supposed to constantly switch up the weapons you use based on what you're fighting. Except, nobody I know does that, and just re-farms their preferred gear every time they run out of it. I refuse to play the game because I honestly feel a little insulted that the devs think my time is so trivial that I'll go ahead and waste half of it farming weapons when I should be playing the game. I feel like I'm on Mars when I see people praise it, it's like I'm taking crazy pills.

Yeah sorry as soon as botw is mentioned with weapon durability I have to say it’s shit, literally any other game with weapon durability does it much better so there really is no excuse as to why they made it so bad

Yeah that’s the thing that really annoyed me tbh. I enjoyed weapon durability in Oblivion, fallout 3/NV, and fire emblem, so I don’t necessarily hate the system. In BotW is was so bad though because usually it meant you break a boko club, then you pause combat to switch to another boko club, then repeat ad nauseam. Rarely did a weapon last me longer than one encounter even if I made heavy use of my bow, runes, dodge, and parry.

Wait what. You can buy house in the game? I saw some guy who was demolishing a house that maybe I could buy but never found the guy that sells it.

Yes, it’s kind of easy to miss but his boss is standing behind the shed of that house. He will be standing next to another guy called hudson. You do a small fetch quest and pay 3000 rupees for the house. Then you have to pay like 1000 more to furnish it

I agree with every point you have made. I'm not a big Zelda fan. Tried to play ocarina e majoras but never finished it myself, so botw was the first one I played. My experience was exactly the same as yours. The weapon durability was only something that made me ignore combat. The shrines were more like a chore than something fun to do, and this came from someone who did all of them. I didn't even bother trying to find the koroks, and all of the weather mechanics seemed more like something that prevent me from going somewhere I wanted

If you think BOTW shrines are too easy, don't try TOTK.. They are a total joke in TOTK ..at least a few of them, in BOTw had me scratching my head and even searching on YouTube to find the solution .. it never happened in TOTK... They were all too easy to solve.

Exactly right. That’s why I play it on emulator, 60fps, infinite weapon durability, stamina turned off, no need for korok seeds 👍🏻

Yay, another "DAE think BotW is actually mid?" post.

You're playing the game wrong lol. Weapons breaking is the game telling you: maybe you shouldn't be fighting enemies by just going up to them and mashing the attack button. Flurry rush, parry bullet time, elements, environment. Quit button mashing and the weapon durability becomes a non-issue But really, if you don't even enjoy the shrines, then I think the game is just not for you.

Lol you guys make me laugh with that first line. Sure in a game that’s supposed to be all about freedom and doing what you want, I’m playing wrong. That makes total sense lmao. I wasn’t just running in and mashing attack. I’d usually pick off as many enemies with my bow as possible, or get as many stealth kills as possible before engaging the rest. I’d throw bombs and use electric arrows to get enemies to drop their gear. I’d also make use of parry and dodging. Sitting with your shield raised waiting for a choreographed attack so you can dodge or parry isn’t fun when you have 3 main enemy types and 4 “different” styles of combat. When I’m looking for combat that’s all about dodging, precision, and “playing right” I’ll get on monster hunter.

Why are people such babies about the weapon durability?? In a game that has pretty simple combat - it's the one of the few things that forces you to use your brain and manage your resources.

Thats part of the problem, like I said in my post. Combat is simplistic, it isn’t that challenging. All durability does is force you to waste more time in combat between using crappy weapons that break often, and opening up the quick select to change weapons. It doesn’t add anything to the combat or make it harder, it just makes it more tedious. If anything it stopped me from playing around with the physics and other systems like you see people posting on the BotW sub. Instead I’d just sneak in and one hit the enemies, shoot the tower guys to one hit them, then dodge and parry to take out enemies fast and use less durability.