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curl-6 on 13 October 2018
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HoloDust said:
curl-6 said:

Was just coming here to post this, thanks for saving me the hassle.

The fact that people are still figuring out new interactions and possibilities in the game's physics engine this long after release says a lot about the game's depth and sophistication. Heck, there are even multiple different flying machines people have built, from rafts carried by Octo Balloons to the old Mine Cart + Metal Crate + Magnesis trick. People have even made speed boats by wedging a sword against the mast with Magnesis and using it to push the boat forwards.

I think dismissing this complexity as just "fucking around" or "pointless" misses a big part of the whole point of BOTW; to blaze your own path through the world, to explore and discover. It's a game that truly lives by the old adage "it's about the journey, not the destination". It's not supposed to be a sprint to the end goal of toppling Ganon, learning how the game's living, breathing world works through experimentation is just as core to the gameplay as beating shrines and guardian beasts.

Yet, for me, after 10-15 hours of fucking around with those mechanisms I felt they are mostly pointless - yes, few of them are nice, but some of them are there just to be "cewl".

You can chop and bomb trees, but you can't chop and bomb puny bokoblin tower?
Lighting will go for you, although you're just beside massive tower?
You can burn grass and animals, yet you can't burn trees?

They are extremely limited and nowhere near what they should've been if they wanted proper physics in the game.

The game was built for the Wii U, a system running a 1.24GHz Tri-core PowerPC 750 CPU, essentially an overclocked triple core Gamecube processor. Obviously this limits the sheer quantity and complexity of interactions that can take place.

And yet, in what other game out there can you set a bear on fire and ride it through the forest setting bushes and grass alight as you go? Or shoot a bomb arrow at an enemy causing an apple tree nearby to fall and its apples to be roasted in the fire, and then use the updraft of that fire to take flight and rain arrows down on your enemy from the air?

That thrill of discovery when you find a new way to interact with the world is as much a part of the core gameplay as conquering Shrines or finding the hidden memories. to call it pointless is as inaccurate as calling the story pointless in The Last of Us or Bioshock, or the sidequests pointless in The Witcher 3.

HoloDust said: 

- powering raft with leaf or magnesis trick - sorry, that's not how physics work

BOTW's physics are not meant to be totally realistic; you can use a giant leaf to fan your sail boat along after all, like the graphics, the physics are supposed to be exaggerated and stylized.