Revisiting Breath of the Wild

[Jumpin]

HoloDust said:

Jumpin said:

Ocarina of Time was phenomenal for its time, but admittedly it does not hold up well today now that we can recognize all of its flaws due to their repetition through future Zelda games

Hopefully, not as many iterations of BotW formula will be needed for "us" to recognize all of the flaws of BotW. ;)

There are things that they can add to Breath of the Wild to improve it; such as shrine themes and more towns; which are not really flaws, and more like additional content that would benefit the game; give the player the option to have the game pause after weapon/shield breaks). Open worlds can always be larger as well. Breath of the Wild has expansive lands to cover, but increasing the size of the map team could mean a lot more land. Maybe in another part of the world there will be a different culture besides the stables? Perhaps there will be something like the Nopon villages or Research Stations (Those Xenoblade Chronicles X items served the exact same purpose as stables, basically mini-towns to help give players a resting/base location in the middle of wilderness); for example, perhaps there will be some Kingdom outside of Hyrule and they have little watch forts around their lands. Perhaps some mini-games can help the player grow them through severale stages into thriving cities (ala Terranigma towns, or Terry Town in BotW).

A few of the flaws I found with Breath of the Wild:

1. The main dungeons were a little too vast and vague, but not as bad as previous games. While I know there are some who like the dungeons of previous games, with a few small exceptions (such as the Forest Temple in Ocarina of Time - which was generally good because it was A. very short, and B. Lacking the sort of vague puzzles of other dungeons), I found the dungeons to be very unenjoyable experiences due to their vastness and vagueness. This is unlike dungeons from 2D Zelda games which I often found to be universally fun. IMO, the further we can get away from the vast'n'vague dungeon styles of older 3D Zeldas, the better. Having a few hundred LTTP length and paced shrines that are completely optional is much more enjoyable.

2. The item system can be a little overpowered. Basically, you can go into a boss battle and get your ass kicked for 14 hours straight, but you've got a ton of healing items, so it doesn't matter. Hard to say if this is a true flaw or not, because it actually takes a lot of grinding in order to activate it; it's also a flaw that exists in most RPGs.

3. UI with the item system can be a little cumbersome. Some improvements: A. Allow the user a few toggles (as in optional UI settings) with weapon/shield breaks, such as auto-equip the next in stack, and pausing the game after a breaks; second is a better handling of cooking, allow something more streamlined, allowing players to repeat cooks with a single button rather than returning into the item screen every time. These are items that a lot of PC game designers (like Paradox) allow in their games: you can basically customize your messaging however you want, allowing certain types of messages to pop up and pause the game, and others to slide by with merely a sidebar notification.

Last edited by Jumpin - on 20 July 2019