To an extend its tolerable. I never did mind it much in Divinity OS and Bloodborne. But when its overdone and combined with an excessive amount of generic looking weapons and armor like in TES im out.

YOu could also use a wooden shield. If you just stand there with your wooden shield out and take the arrow shots in the shield, as soon as you put the shield away you collect all the arrows. 

Well, you can also watch the ending on youtube. If that's your approach to games, then why care at all, right?

I think he makes really good points regarding breakable weapons.

For instance... .in an open free world you can go everywhere and even to places with difficult enemies. From there you could grab a really strong weapon and go back to the easier accessable parts of the game and just run through it. Thus having breakable weapons adjust and balance the difficulty level of the game and will still make it a challenge.

As I heard you can do this already with the Shield. Better game design would be to have restrictions what weapons can be equipped, like the yalready do with the mastersword. It worked just fine in all other Zelda games with a host of different tools to use and the stronger swords and armor behind dungeons or quests. Making the weapons breakable was an unwanted fix they implemented to mitigate an unwanted enemy design.

Justifying terrible game design as mitigations to other terrible game design decisions doesn't really work that well.

Everything I'm reading are just tries to somehow find reason in the changes that were made instead of asking why those changes were necessary in the first place.

The video is at least 10 minutes long. You posted 7 minutes after I did my post. So you probably needed 2-3 minutes to post which could make you hit the reply button after 4-5 minutes after me posting the video. And also adding the time of actually finding this post and checking what's new on this site.

So, I conclude that you simply didn't watched the video.

Better game design? The lifted all the restriction to the world so you could actually go anywhere and kill anyone and equip their weapons. A restriction like that would restrict the freedom in this game.

Just watch the video plz. It also addresses your issue.

I love the fact that there isn't restriction on where you go or what weapons you use. It's at the heart of the game.

I totally disagree with this because it's a matter of balance, in the end. It's good that he does like the system, but I don't really find the virtues he points out; again, I have not played the game yet, so my comments don't hold that much of weight. This being said:

· Grabbing an overpowered weapon early on; to begin with, it's not as easy as "going into" a dungeon and fetching said weapon. He oversimplifies this also with the fact that, apparently, new players already know where the overpowered weapon lies, when basically whenever you start an open-world game you have zero clue about things. Unless you're using guide from the start, but players with guide are already spoiling themselves, so their experience is already lessened. Did someone know where to find daedric weapons in Oblivion once you leave the prison at the start? Did players know the requisites to unlock higher damaging weaponry in Red Dead Redemption once you gain control of John? You know behind which sidequest the Legendary Guitar in Deadly Premonition lies? No, of course not, because you're experiencing these things for the very first time. There's no way a person would know how to overpower himself that quickly with weaponry.

There's also the fact that he might come across as a high-level dungeon from the start, but what are the chances he successfully completes the dungeon and grabs the overpowered reward at the end? Not to mention, games like Dark Souls, you can find a lot of early overpowered weaponry that, if you're in the correct class, you might be able to equip on the go. Doesn't mean much. The game won't stop being a breeze because ultimately it's an open-ended game that relies more on skill than just mere raw stats. The weapon in this case becomes a sweet relief, but not a salvation.

· He claims the fun in Breath of the Wild lies by collecting all that weapon that keeps breaking. Now I haven't experienced this for myself, so I can't develop much here, but this resonates with the point I claimed earlier: weapons in Breath of the Wild lack personality. You want them for a quantity reason, to have plenty of weapons to spare when fighting, not because you attach yourself to the weapon (and some people in this thread has stated as such, too). There's no charm or added value to them, just the raw number of how many you can carry so that you then have many weapons to use from. It's not fun, it becomes the mundane task of collecting anything you can grab in your hand. Not saying it's a boring mechanic, but I'm not saying it's charming, either. There's no reward in waiting for enemies to drop their weapon to use them; it's just a mechanic gameplay-wise to keep the flow of the combat. You don't think much of the weaponry outside these first instances where you find the nice weapons. I don't think any player looks forward to getting more arrows for their bow with enthusiastic loot interest, but rather, because they keep running out of them and need to restock. Same principle is added to the weapons.

· Horrible item management can happen in any game in regards to how cumbersome the player is, but it's not suddenly a big issue if the weapons are unbreakable. You can stock your inventory in Diablo on a chest if it becomes too big. You can leave items in Oblivion at your house. Just because you want to carry around a worn-out weapon until you fix it doesn't inmediately mean that the inventory management becomes tedious. Not to mention you can also have a game like Bloodborne, who doesn't feature that many weapons (12 in total, I think), so not only you want to carry them all with you because of their uniqueness, there's nothing cumbersome about managing them in your inventory. Honestly, making weapons so rare and unique is much more enticing, imo, than finding any weapon over and over when yours keep breaking like he says in the video.

I don't mean this as a full-blown critique. It's okay if people like this, but I can't find myself agreeing with the video.

I'd also abuse the world areas too. Want to kill a hard enemy. Trick them into the cold area. They die from it. Or get them in the water. Or wait them out. Since they'd have to also eat the heat food. While they heal, hit them.

You are side steping my point. They way the Zelda locked out the worlds in the past. Not to mention Zelda 1 having no breaking. Is still better than this system. Because I'll actually bother to go to extra areas. And not care if I get junk for it.

A point. But something I don't like. And really isn't better than the normal restrict areas, till later approach. Plus, you'd wouldn't know what's strong or not, when you first started the game. It also has a not caring affect. Since I'm getting mad at the annoyances. I'm not grabing a lot of weapons. Not caring that much to fight a harder enemy. So I wouldn't get getting a OP weapon. Unless just grab, by happen stance. It's still easier to avoid, and just do the temple.

The game is very simliar to Pokemon. If you have the patience. You can abuse the open world. I've done this. I've started the game. And stayed in the same starting area. I leveled my one Pokemon, to level 36. So I had its final form. I blew through the entire game. That's just playing the game smart. Did you know. If you fight every trainer in the first Pokemon games. You'll become OP regardless.

I could just avoid most enemies. Keep finding the shrines. I could become OP, without even finding OP weapons. Mostly: Max out stamina, max out inventory, max out health. Before I bother to even do the main quests. I prefer to abuse the games open world, to beat it. Since the game wants to abuse me, with crap weapons and stamina. Even if they attempt a balancing act. To block off certain shrines. There's a ton of them. I'd still become OP, at the starting point of the game. Yes, Patient to walk around and avoid. Than be patient, with the bad stamina and durability system.

I'm currently doing this. All because I'm sick of run, slow, run slow, run slow, break, break, break, break nonsense. This is not fun. Blocking off Lake Hylia. And requiring the hookshot, to clear the water temple. Is still my prefered way I like Zelda.

Obviously, no you don't know where the good and best weapon are if you play for the first time. But, that's also not the point. The point is, that you give the players actually not restrictions. So, if a player stumples by accident over a really powerful weapon and he can keep it for the rest of the game, than you created an exploit and all the other weapons loose their purpose and the game also looses parts of its challenge itself. After the tutorial level, you can just go to Hyrule castle and get all the good stuff. It's just lying around or are in treasures. You just have to avoid enemy encounters when doing so. You can see this being done in speedruns.

The dungeons are all the same level, because all the necessary equipment you need to solve them are there from the tutorial part of the game. I havn't tried it but I guess you can use your bombs to kill nearly every enemy in the game. The better weapons makes the enemies just a bit easier to kill, nothing more. So like mentioned in the video, weapons are just consumable, like ammunition for weapons. There are not a necessity, they just make your journey easier and in order for you not to exploit that, every weapon becomes breakable.

But how would you design a game without restricting players in what the can wear or not? You don't have level restriction like Witcher 3 for parts in your game and equipment. Even if the Witcher 3 is an open world game, you still are restricted in what you can do and at what time you can do that. Zelda Botw doesn't have such restriction at all.  You can do whatever you want in the game. And in order to keep a certain balance, certain mechanics have to be made to make it work. If you are allowed to keep the best weapon in the game from the beginning, why go on and explore the game? Being to powerful in the beginning will have no challengers at all and thus the game becomes boring as hell.

I am not saying that every game should absorb this mechanic. It's about what you want to achieve in your game. Diablo is about getting the best gear available and throwing the old ones away. But it also got different difficulty settings to make it challenging. Those doesn't exist in Zelda. And Diablo is also not an open world game without restrictions. It's similar for Oblivion. You have a level system, so better gear is only available with a better level to avoid explotation. But Zelda doesn't have a level system. It never had with the exception of Zelda 2. They just wanted to get rid of the linearity in the game and go back to where it all started with Zelda for the NES.

Zelda is not about finding the best gear, it's about the expierence you have with the game. And with this one, you get all the freedom you want without someone telling you, "Nope. You can't do that unless you are level blablabla". That's why they also give you the possibility to go and beat the game right after the tutorial part.