I've attempted to play through BOTW a couple times and ended up giving up due to weapons breaking, endless shrines, generally rather boring gameplay. The hype here is fascinating. I guess nostalgia and liking what everyone else says they like is a powerful thing. I just finished Horizon Zero Dawn, which I found to be a far superior open world game, the graphics alone are jaw dropping, the gameplay is exciting, quite an incredible production. I'm curious if any of The Zelda fans here have played it?
I guess nostalgia and liking what everyone else says they like is a powerful thing.
This is a cognitive distortion you should be very mindful of.
e.g. If X is true for you, X is true in general, and therefore what else is "true" must be so given X.
In this case X is Breath of the Wild being "boring".
By failing to correctly recognize that there can be things about the world other people experience, that you do not, you are forcing yourself to assume others must be
liking what everyone else says they like
Which paints an unnecessarily bleak view of your peers and incorrectly orients you to them.
When something is true for you... that's it. You can't draw many conclusions from that single data point. You necessarily need to include the perspectives of others to properly triangulate what might be before attempting to draw any conclusions.
There are so many infinite ways the video game Breath of the Wild could be popular without that negative and misleading worldview needing to be the reason, but you limit your capacity to understand those other reasons, and empathize with others, if everything you subjectively experience must also be objective fact.
The low weapons durability encourages the player to use all the weapons instead of a small set of his favourite weapons. Notice how even though your weapons break all the time, you (almost) never [1] run out of weapons. You can steal weapons from the enemies or pick up whatever is around and use it as a weapon.
Initially, I did not like this mechanism, but I have come to appreciate it. It reduces your comfort, but you experience more of the game.
[1] Fighting a Lynel and "consuming" all your weapons before he even reaches half his health has happened to me a couple of times.
Lynels are intimidating but aren’t unmanageable after a few encounters. Mostly they’re just annoyingly consuming weapons. On defense, upgraded armor, stasis and actually USING the shield is good enough. For offense, urbosas fury + mount and strike gets most of the health down. Bonus points for flurry rush.
Hope you pick it up again, if you’re at the castle you probably don’t have too much left.
Using the glider to chain critical arrow shots is a great way to take out a lynel quickly, too. There's only a few places where lynels appear where you can't use that tactic.
Lynel are a "skill wall" where you have to learn dodging to pass them.
Once you can dodge and hit back reliably, they become much easier (still hard, but not impossible)
Lynels really annoyed me because there was such a big skill jump between them and everything else. I saved close to a Lynel and practised for several hours to get the hang of dodging. Once I nailed that, they became much easier. Then you just keep the weapons they drop to kill the next Lynel, since they're so powerful and durable.
Think of fighting a Lynel as if you were fighting a challenging opponent in Punch-Out!, it's all about timing, and once you get it done not particularly difficult
Played both. I played Horizon first, Zelda second. Both were enjoyable.
I found horizon to be visually beautiful but the open world aspect not all that interesting personally.
Zelda, I came to it after hearing people praising it as the best game ever made. For me it’s a solid 8/10 game but definitely not all that incredible. Some of the mechanics are frustrating like the breaking weapons as you mentioned. I found the open world lacking in life. You can explore, sure, but there’s not much to do.
Vast parts of it are just empty stretches with enemies here and there and nothing really happens in that world.
I think both are excellent games but neither of them made me want to immerse myself in the worlds they were set in and neither made me want to come back for more.
The weapons durability bothered me at first. I kept thinking I'd eventually be able to repair them or something. Eventually I realized it was kind of fun because it forces you to try new weapons constantly. The only mechanics that I find tedious are buying/selling and cooking. I'd way rather a Skyrim style interface to set up a transaction with all the items you want and then confirm it. BOTW is exhausting when you want to unload a bunch of junk or cook 100 hearty durians.
I also really don't like the BotW cooking mechanic, but mostly because it's so tedious to sit through the mini cooking cut-scene.
Cooking and crafting in Stardew Valley have zero ceremony, you just click on the recipe and boom you're done, it's exactly as fast as any other inventory operation.
I don't know why certain cooked foods in BotW stack and some don't. Searing meat is a good way of stacking up a huge amount of cooked food, because it stacks.
I kinda like the charm of the cooking animation. I feel like it's more fun than other games that turns crafting into "just press the button in the menu". Especially with the environmental cooking methods, why shouldn't I be able to cook my meat on the ground with a flaming sword?
If I was designing the Zelda cooking system:
- definitely some sort of bookmarkable known recipes book that gets brought up from the cooking pot instead of paging through the inventory
- asynchronous cooking; I don't mind the cooking animation, just give me multiple cooking pots and let me move around while it (quickly) cooks
- holding more than 5 items at a time, like hold 50 drumsticks to throw all at once onto a firepit to sear
- big batches (upgradable cooking pot sizes), why not throw 100 apples into the pot for 20 servings made at once?
TOTK added a recipe system where once you cook a meal, you can select an ingredient to view all meals containing it and automatically select all the ingredients for a specific meal. Which is at least part of what you want.
I would definitely agree that things like cooking 100 hearty durians gets really painful after a while though.
The cooking mechanic was kind of broken because there were a tonne of in-game guides and quests leading you towards the "mix and match different recipes, experiment and find the best buffs for a situation" when it became basically "four bananas" was the only one I ended up wanting to use.
it's a little bonkers that there were so many recipes in that game, but cooking a single yellow-heart item was more effective than any healing recipe, and there was no bonus effect for mixing or being thoughtful.
I've played both, and liked BOTW much more, although I also liked Horizon Zero Dawn. I also have the 2nd part of Horizon Zero Dawn (don't even remember the name) and tried to start it twice, but I guess I didn't get hooked into it and dropped it in favor of something else.
I guess they're two very different games. Even though both are "open world", I feel Zero Dawn is much more "on rails" than BOTW. I felt there's much more exploration and finding out by yourself on BOTW, while in Horizon is more about "go there, do that. Then go there, and do this other thing. etc".
Having played and completed (though not 100%'ed) both, I did like HZD's story more - though Zelda has never been known for the stories - but disliked/hated everything else, to the point of going from somewhat hyped for the second game to having absolutely no intention of ever playing it. The gameplay is just so... like everything else. It's a competent game, that's it.
BOTW, on the other hand, has the usual Nintendo good-vs-evil story, but everything else is basically perfect. The gameplay is incredibly fluid, the world is immersive, the soundtrack is great. Even "bad" mechanics like the weapon durability one have their place - they force you to experiment in the sandbox and try out more stuff instead of just killing one lynel and keeping his sword.
Played both, and they have their own quirks and irks. I agree Horizon's story is much more interesting, but the constant backseat and marked objectives are a bit of a turnoff for me. I've yet to finish it but I'm the kind of player who rarely finish the games they start.
Zelda, I just had to drop. The weapons breaking alone was just so annoying, and most of the shrines feel like a chore. I liked the exploration, but it felt like every game mechanic the game had to offer was here to get in the way of me progressing.
Yes I should have mentioned the story in HZD is quite well thought out and reveals itself to you well over the game. Whereas Nintendo has the eye rolling save the princes from the baddies, again.
Opposite experience for me, I preordered Horizon Zero Dawn and was really looking forward to it but quickly got bored and never went back to it.
I’ve played Breath of the Wild for many hours. I agree on the weapon breaking thing, probably one of the most frustrating parts of the game and I still don’t understand why they did that.
This new game looks even better too from what I have seen.
I’ve played both and I’ve also enjoyed Horizon more than BOTW. BOTW’s world felt more organic and I loved that the game encouraged having curiosity and rewarded them (Can I go there? Can I solve this puzzle this way?).
But in the end, I enjoyed Horizon’s tight combat system much more than BOTW.
I have yet to complete it but I fully enjoyed the game though that said the weapons durability always felt way to low and that admittedly did end up being very annoying
I did see a good video on why they have the weapons breaking; it's so that there's always rewards to be found when you go exploring. If you keep finding a weapon you already have, it won't be rewarding to go exploring.
This video was IIRC comparing it with Elden Ring, which has so many weapons, spells, armor pieces, summons, weapon skills, etc etc that it is able to fill up its world to a satisfying degree without having to resort to breaking weapons so you need to find a new one.
But it also pointed out that a lot of the items you can find are asset reuse; weapon skills were already present on certain weapons, but now you can find the skills separately as well. Most, if not all of the summons are also existing enemies or bosses, just with different AI. And a lot of enemies' animations and behaviours were lifted / borrowed from previous From Software games.
