It was bound to happen. I ran into a shrine for which the prerequisites to get to it are scattered over the world. Not succumbing to fast travel, I'll walk to the opposite corner of the world. TotK's quest design is pretty bad, BotW was much better. Let's see how long it takes to walk from Gerudo canyon to the NE corner of Akala :/

Dude, fast travel is there for exactly this reason. If you're going to refuse to play the game properly, you're only making it hard on yourself.

It really seems like you WANT to hate the game and are making your playthrough as artificially frustrating as possible just so you can complain about it.

If you're not enjoying the game, just stop playing. Or just stop placing such restrictions on yourself.

LOL agreed he has 200 hours in and can't stop playing the game but keeps complaining about it. Like i have my problems with game and think the next zelda could easily blow this out of the water, but i ain't putting more then 70 hours in this game and just wanna be done with it.

Made it and found some more stuff along the way. Which I would have skipped by using fast travel. This is exactly why I don't use fast travel, for the immersion and to experience the scale of the world. Fast travel turns games into to do lists.

However that doesn't mean I'll stop mentioning the bad quest design. Stuff to do with quests or prerequisites to enter a place shouldn't be scattered on opposite corners of the map. That's simply poor design. I guess the idea is that you find one piece and then look up where the rest is? More chance to encounter a 'quest' by spreading it out over the world?

Anyway I'll trek back along the North side to check out a part of another scattered quest. Also finally connected the source of the light scratching rumble effect, it's a Stone Talus waking up, not my controller acting up lol.

I ran by the bubblefrog dude and cleaned him out (turned all the bubble frogs in I collected). Now he wants the rest, but chances of organically finding them all are close to zero so will skip to avoid the frustration. Also ran by Lookout landing, stocked up on more Zonai devices but forgot to turn Korok seeds and blessings in. Doesn't matter, haven't ran out of weapons in a long time.

Anyway ignore my posts if you don't like me criticizing games relying on fast travel. I do use ascend now to get out of wells (at the well entrance) since it's indeed just making it hard on myself to build a platform on the water and rocket launch out the tiny hole. Plus Gerudo desert gives no choice, can't swim back up the sink holes. So many one way traps! (And so many NPCs that get stuck in them, there should be skeletons everywhere if you think about it)

what would you rate the game? i have seen some people play game over 100 hours and complain but imo of course any game that can play for over  100 hours is a 8 and over 140 is a 9, so that's why some might think like how can someone keep playing game so long and be sour on it.  Personally it's a 8 for me but it does really amazing things but it's tries to do to many things and doest really improve any of the problems BOTW had, and just goes for adding as much things as possible.

You're only being the architect of your own frustration. It's not like there's a cash prize for finishing the game, why invest dozens or hundreds of hours into something you don't enjoy?

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...:)

I don't rate games on how long you can play them. MMORPGs would all be 12/10 in that case. I've played games I rate a 6 for even longer, heck even Kung Fu Live which is not more than a 5/10 game had one section I ended up using for fun fitness and played that for over 60 hours.

Totk is a 8/10 game for me, although some things feel like 6/10, some like 10/10. (BotW sits at 9/10)

The Paraglider and climbing system (minus the rain) are perfection and make exploration immense fun. Running is also the perfect speed for exploration with long sprint burst on 3 stamina bars. Steering Link around feels wonderful (with the only snag him auto climbing when you don't want to) and bullet time is always fun to use (but sometimes tricky to initiate) Zelda nails the basics for exploration, which is navigating around the world.

What's holding it back is issues with the camera, the often very low contrast and resolution making it hard to see and over use of repetitive elements. The quest design is all over the place with variable execution. I love finding quests like the Construct Factory. It was contained to a smaller area, no backtracking (Although I suspect the quest really starts in Kakariko, but I triggered it on Dragonhead island which just looked like an interesting place to explore as it was shrouded) The quest itself is perfect, the execution has (small) problems due to limitations of the system or game engine.

Cause I obviously do enjoy it. If I didn't I wouldn't be so invested in it and criticize its short comings, I would simply ignore it and play something else. I enjoy it most of the time, but there are plenty things that hamper that enjoyment and some things that can annoy the crap out of me. But that's life, and every game has a ratio of fun vs frustration. Zelda is staying above the threshold where it's not worth playing anymore. Well above most of the time, but sometimes the clunky systems all conspire together to make it a negative experience.

The game is designed in bite wise chunks. So every time I play there are lots of good chunks and some bad chunks. Finding out (by having to resort to Google) that I need stuff from all over the map to gain access to a shrine is bad game design. It's a shrine, not a major story event. But it did confirm again to me that walking everywhere makes the game more fun as I found more fun things on the way. And instead of simply teleporting back to Gerudo, I'm side tracked exploring around the lost woods while on my way back to Gerudo. The ruins in the north there, awesome find. Exploring the sky there, also fun although it's copy paste from another sector. (The shrine quests in the sky are mostly copy paste)

That's where the game shoots itself in the foot a bit. There are tons of fun things, yet repetition dulls the effect of them. It's kinda hard to say, you should go there that shrine quest was awesome when it's copy pasted around the map several times with tiny variations. There are very few things that are unique in the world. Which makes it hard to have the positive things stand out. Repetition dulls the fun, just like re-using the same map dulls the fun of exploring that map.

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?

Yet apart from the combat, the repetition hasn't become detrimental (yet) Ofcourse it would be nicer to keep finding new stuff, but with a game world this size, that's never going to happen. The 'problem' is, every time you repeat an element, the annoyances get amplified since the discovery part loses appeal. Combat has sunk below the threshold for getting any fun out of it. (Still fun to watch a muddled boss figth all his minions) So I now steer clear of any camps or just keep sprinting. I've been on 999 fangs for quite a while, can't pick up the low level parts anymore. So many enemies!

My progress so far Sky and Surface (Depths is at 100%)

(The bar indicating over 200 hours played isn't accurate as I left the Switch on many times, in the replay Links stands still for long periods tons of times. I don't know what my actual game time is, but average about 90 minutes a day which would come to about 120 hours since release)

I think he has a point. Personally I also dislike fast travel in games and generally avoid using them, but that wasn't something I gave much thought to while playing TotK because yeah that would be torture without fast travel. I also used fast travel a lot in my first playthrough of BotW, the convenience is nice of course, but I played BotW many times over and pretty much never used fast travel after that first playthrough, it actually made the game more fun. TotK simply isn't fun without fast travel, I think that's a fair criticism to make.

Honestly  don't understand why this game doesn't have a great horse like Elden ring or GOT, traveling on foot is too slow. Horses and what ever you build controls are so sluggish.