Nintendo Switch Topic; #byebyenx

[Lemonray]

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."

The weapon durability began to get on my nerves early on too. I have the Master Sword now so perhaps it will be less of an issue (it "recovers", apparently by regenerating after several minutes of being broken) but this is something they could absolutely have done better.

I would have gone with something more like the Morrowind system, where weapons have a visible amount of durability which decreases fast enough that you will be forced to repair it after a bit of time. Which, in Morrowind you could do through a smith NPC or yourself with the various repair hammer tools. The weapon/shield/helmet/etc. was preserved while broken, so if you found something nice like an ebony shortsword a few hours in, you could potentially use it forever and take it all the way to Dagoth Ur. Not so with Breath of The Wild. I have one sweet looking Sheikah sword in my inventory that is just sitting there because I don't want to break the thing in combat- I only take it out to look at it and I don't think I'll use it at all until the final boss.
Just imagine if the Great Fairy's sword in Majora's Mask broke forever after fifty uses. That would have been terrible.

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So, the dungeons. They are done differently this time, instead of the usual dungeons

Spoiler

You're inside huge mechanical animals, which operate like huge puzzleboxes for you to explore and manipulate. I really like this. It feels new and genuinely enjoyable.

As usual there are the dungeon bosses. It seems they're mostly gimmick free, I've only fought one but I just had to damage it enough to kill it. Which was easy enough since there was still a weak spot, in this case one vulnerable to being shot. I used a few bomb arrows, which seem to be super effective in this game because the last third of the thing's health bar went away in seconds when I started using them.
There are also boss enemies you will encounter in the overworld- the first one I found was a golem that I couldn't kill that early in the game because I only had low tier weapons, and would have broken them all before the boss died, so I had to go back later for him. There are also centaurs and cyclops giants.

Another replacement for the standard dungeons are the shrines. They give you a single room with one or a few themed puzzles or sometimes a robot miniboss to fight, essentially they're individual dungeon rooms seperated and spread across the entire map. I like these a lot. I'm not sure how I feel about the spirit orbs- I think the traditional pieces of heart would have been better with the stamina upgrades being totally seperate, but whatever.

Regarding the combat- It has been simplified. Now Link can't be made to do vertical/horizontal/diagonal/thrust attacks, instead the attack button will execute the standard attack animation of the type of weapon you're holding. You can also do a running attack, jump attack or spin attack. That is it. There is a Dark Souls shield parry move you can do, which is one positive addition, and a rush attack which can be triggered by dodging an enemy attack at the right moment. Also, unlike Twilight Princess Link, BoTW Link cannot swing a weapon while moving. Skyward Sword also dropped this- I don't know why the developers decided to remove something so simple from the post TP games.

Avoiding enemies to preserve weapons aside, I rather like the exploration. The glider is neat, but I would have liked if there were a couple of little upgrades for it, besides just being able to glide longer by increasing Link's stamina meter. Climbing is okay but potentially annoying if something is just out of reach.

Having multiple clothing/armours is something I've wanted for a while in a Zelda game, BoTW does it okay and I hope future Zelda games expand upon it. It works more or less how you would expect, though I actually wasn't expecting the hands/body equip slot to be shared- I was hoping we would get the golden gauntlets or something like that.
There are some very nice equipment sets, though. There is a Sheikah set, a Hyrule Knight set, a Zora set and so on, as well as a climbing set to improve Link's climbing speed and other things that boost his abilities and temperature resistance, etc.

So the game is pretty good. But honestly, probably not the kind of thing one could sink hundreds upon hundreds of hours into the way some people can with, say, the Elder Scrolls games.

Edit: Also the framerate issues are certainly there. They don't break the game or anything but they're easy to notice. Supposedly both the Wii U and Switch versions suffer from drops, hopefully Nintendo will release performance patches because otherwise people will never stop experiencing this.