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HoloDust on 02 August 2023
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SvennoJ said:
HoloDust said:

I get where he's coming from, I don't like fast travel in games as well - initially I've tried to play it without (as well without climbing), but once I figured out structure of the game, I just gave up and played it the way it forces you to play it. I did try to get it over as soon as possible once I realized I don't like it very much, yet still without rushing it, so I think I clocked around 60-70 hours. But you got to give SvennoJ a credit for persistence...:)

Haha yeah persistence is my drive! The way I played FS2020 sums up how I approach games, methodically, extensively, critically, finishing the task I set myself to. https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/exploring-the-world-in-the-beechcraft-bonanza/266981

I played that for well over 3,000 hours and rate it 7/10. I didn't hold back on my frustrations with that game either while playing. And in that journey I added all my notes where you can see how many times I had to restart (109 times, 4-5 minutes to restart that game each time) and everything else that went wrong along the way. But nothing so bad it stopped me from enjoying the game overall. I did eventually stop playing due to frustrations with ATC and other bugs, but only after I had explored the entire map and my goals had shifted from exploration to actual sim flying. (Which FS2020 just isn't very good at without tons of external paid mods)

I approach TotK (and other openworld games) the same way. For me it's about creating a continuous journey. The journey is the prize and TotK delivers the opportunity for amazing journeys. But it can be rough, and the developers didn't seem to have any faith in creating anything continuous so the game over relies on teleportation methods. The Switch's limitations likely play a big role as well. The system simply can't keep track of half finished quest parts, thus anything that doesn't trigger a scripted checkpoint simply resets again. Plus it seems they didn't think people would find stuff if they didn't scatter stuff around?

I get that, though I never really bought into "journey is its own reward" mantra, I was always more of "how about both, journey and prize?" type of guy. So for me both BotW and TotK are very mediocre exploration games due to how subpar reward system is.

I was honestly amazed by some things in TotK when I started the game, looking at some of the distant islands in the sky, but that was my 35+ years of playing RPGs talking, and hoping for major changes from BotW, not the reality of the game. You know, when you see something in the distance and it looks amazing, like it holds a piece of very important information, or some ancient weapon or shield or armor or new spell that you will be using for next 30+ hours in 150+ game? Or a terrible evil you need to overcome to initiate response from BBEG, thus progressing the story? Yeah well, after 15-20 hours in I realized that will (almost) never be true, and most of the times prize for getting somewhere will be equivalent of proverbial middle finger - so I decided to cut the losses and went on to finish it mainly focusing on Main quest and some exploration for things that seemed interesting (and there were still quite a few interesting things).

Ultimately, I don't think Zelda could ever be fully satisfying exploration game - it would not only need to change its genre to full blown survival RPG, but also not just be open world, but open ended as well. And I don't think that is really good fit for LoZ - I think it would completely loose its roots based in monomyth and become something else. Which is perfectly fine if they opt to make a new IP based on experiences with BotW/TotK, just not for LoZ.