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

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.

They're of paramount importance to the exploration and dungeoneering; by exploring you encounter new situations and elements through which you discover the game's physics and chemistry systems, while the dungeons revolve primarily around the use of said physics.

The simple fact is, BOTW is not meant to be a traditional Zelda. After so many years with minimal change, traditional Zelda had grown stale. The whole point of BOTW was to reinvent the series and make it fresh and relevant again, and given its stellar critical and commercial success, it's hard to argue they didn't succeed. I get that you would've rather it stayed the same, but its impossible to please everyone.