Nintendo Switch Topic; #byebyenx

[Kriven]

To be honest, BotW really doesn't deserve all the high-praise it gets. The world they want you to explore is a vast expanse of copy-pasted environments, so there isn't any reward for the exploring but exploring itself. Sometimes that can be fun, but more often than not it's disappointing to find out you climbed all the way up this peak only to... see more peaks to climb. But okay, they wanted to make a game where the main point was simply to explore for the sake of exploring (which would have been more fun if there was any actual character to the environments [there really isn't] and if it didn't take ten fucking minutes to run across a bridge), and they mostly did achieve a game which makes the exploration fun enough that it almost qualifies as "Everywhere is the Dungeon." Unfortunately they built a good thing and then immediately ruined it with entirely unbalanced enemies. It isn't fun to hike for half an hour, get one-shotted by something you didn't even know was there, and then find that the autosave hasn't kicked in for forty minutes. The fact that the enemies scale with the player makes this worse, because it means you're never going to get that feeling of growth as you play through the game. The enemies are always going to be the same relative strength to Link that they were at the beginning of the game... which means they can one-shot you no matter how much health you've got (and the way their upgrade system works, you won't have much of it). Then they decided that adding a feature where the rain makes cliffsides too slippery to climb was a good idea for a game where the entire point is to climb up cliffsides. Oh, and lightning which can spontaneously one-shot you. Fantastic.

I think matters could have been helped if they didn't remove so much of what makes Zelda fun. Just as an example, there are no Heart Containers to collect--you have to buy them with Spirit Orbs. Which I know are essentially the same function, but "Find Spirit Orb, Find Fairy Fountain, Sell Spirit Orb" isn't as exciting as opening a treasure chest or completing a shrine to watch Link excitedly dig through his spoils and hold up that bejeweled heart container. With its immediate reward, at that. Right now it just feels like: "Oh boy, a yet another same-looking shrine, with a same-looking dungeon, with a same spirit orb." I also think it was a mistake to remove the Heart Containers randomly scattered around the map, which was always a good reason to go exploring in the older titles. Now in the one that is literally ALL ABOUT EXPLORING they put those Heart Containers in easily identified shrines. Come on.

It would have also made the current balance a lot more bearable if enemies dropped hearts like they do in the other games. The whole "eat food to heal" mechanic really isn't Zelda, and kind of makes the established food items (like Lon Lon Milk) seem less special. Although I am enjoying the cooking and seeing what I come up with... it would have been nice if Link could record the recipes you've tried, though. I mean, he has a literal tablet strapped to his hip at all times. There's no reason not to keep track of this. It would be another way to reward the player for exploring (the culinary arts). But yeah, defeated enemies should drop health, and living ones should deal less damage in general.

They tried to force players to experiment with different weapons types by adding a Fire Emblem-esque breaking mechanic to each weapon, but all this really does is serve as yet another negative consequence to exploring. Items break far too easily, and it's all too often that you'll run out of them halfway through a task... and now you're shit-out-of-luck. Go all the way back to one of the few towns and restock. Then start completely over. This problem could have been mitigated by giving the player more weapon slots right off the bat (although I hear you can earn more... I can't seem to find too many of the things I need to do so) if they didn't want to give every single weapon a durability buff. As it is now, the tactic for killing most things is "Stay away from archers, throw bombs at everyone from some cheap place."

tl;dr: The developers wanted to emphasize exploration and to make just exploring in and of itself fun, and then they ruined it by adding a whole shitload of features which are entirely negative consequences for exploring. They wanted to make a Zelda game and then removed a lot of the features that make Zelda special (features which would have still worked in the greater scope of the game).

All that said, the game must be doing something right, because I keep playing and thinking about it. Which is more than I can say for Skyward Sword.