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

That's like saying, in what other game can you grapple the passing car and tie the other end to the enemy and watch him/her be dragged along the road. Or set fuel tank on fire, watch it fall and set another one along the way, which explodes, making massive whole in outer wall and killing all the soldiers behind it? JC3, btw. Yet I have no delusion that those are just cheap thrills, since whole game is based on them, and that there is nothing more to it underneath them - which is fine for such game.

But I don't consider Zelda as a cheap thrills game, and, for me, most of those lauded mechanisms boil down to that - and when you scrap them, what is left is not really that great.

Plenty of games have realistic (or attempting to be realistic) destructibility physics. It's the addition of interwoven chemistry that marks BOTW apart; fire doesn't just deal damage or destroy things, it also changes the properties of items; an animal set alight will become cooked meat, an apple that rolls into a fire becomes a roasted apple, chuchu jelly becomes red chuchu jelly. Rain puts out everything from campfires to fire keese to the fuses of bomb arrows. A deer or chuchu killed with an ice arrow will become frozen meat and white chuchu jelly, same for meat or chuchu jelly dropped in freezing environments. Hit a wet enemy with an electric weapon and you'll get a lightning AOE.

These aren't just vestigial mechanics put there for "cheap thrills"; they power the core tenant of BOTW's philosophy; setting the player loose in a truly dynamic world and letting them discover how it works through experimentation and discovery. They can no more be separated from the game's identity than you can separate the Plasmids from Bioshock or gravity from Mario Galaxy.

Those are all fine examples of some of the good stuff. And yet none of them are of any importance for the core Zelda experience - of exploration and dungeoneering. You could remove all those mechanisms from some fictional BotW that is mix of Aounuma's Zelda and properly designed open-world and it wouldn't matter one bit. Remove them from this BotW and what you're left is a game that is severely lacking in many aspects - of course, IMO. That is the very reason I label them as cheap thrills, although not all of them are.

Make no mistake, I want game with full physics, that is logical, all the time and  on everything. BotW is not that game.