Aonuma feels that Breath of the Wild’s freedom needs to be maintained in future Zelda games

[MTZehvor]

curl-6 said:

MTZehvor said:
Mixed feelings, tbh. I liked a lot of what BotW did, but it also suffered from a horrendously broken difficulty curve and some repetitive design choices that I suspect were due to the open world approach. I think I'd support scaling the freedom back a bit; maybe have a world as big as BotW's Hyrule, but still have an intended order for dungeons and progression.

How so? I mean, yeah running into a Lynel for the first time is a rude shock, but its not like the game gates your progress with these high tier field bosses, so it's more of a "come back later" than "haha, you're stuck now."

I wouldn't say it ever gates your progress, but I do think it does a very poor job of creating a smooth feeling of progression, which is exacerbated depending on which order you do the divine beasts in. For example, if you do Naboris relatively early on, the game will demand a relatively high level of skill and combat mastery to get past Thunderblight which just isn't present for any of the other bosses. In other words, the game makes you get pretty good at combat, and then every other boss for the rest of the game is an utter pushover because you've improved so much and they don't require anywhere close to that same level of skill.

On top of that, the abilities you gain from defeating the Blight Ganons, along with the huge amount of healing items you can take with you, make it far too difficult to die mid game onward imo. There's a degree of challenge present in the early game that just disappeared for me from Naboris onward. Being able to heal from essentially anything, along with three free shields on any attack and a respawn + extra hearts for your first death make it way too difficult to die.

Perhaps the difficulty curve smooths out a bit if Naboris is your last divine beast, but that just feeds back into the issue of the openness of the game allowing for the curve to be distorted.