General gaming discussion

So my biggest joy with TOTK is the lack of handholding. Now obviously parts are strategically placed early on but the more you get into it the less it occurs.

No certain colours to show exactly where to go or no protagonist or helper saying "what if I do this" 2 seconds after walking into a room. It's an absolute joy to have that level of creativity and freedom.

Going through similar playing BOTW for the first time. I cleared out a small enemy camp with a campfire. They had a cooking pot and an unlit torch on the ground. I knew cooking was in the game going by the item descriptions, so equipped the torch and held it next to the fire, then brought it over to the pot to light it which it did. Then held a few different items in my hands and dropped them into the pot. Boom, hearty grilled beef. No prompts or lengthy tutorial on how to do, was just able to do it myself.

Now, that said, the inventory system and controls to do it is a pain in the hole until you get used to it and I was definitely unsure that just dropping the items into the pot would work (I expected maybe a Cook button prompt when standing in front of the lit pot which would then bring me directly to the food inventory screen where I could just pick ingredients).

So far, it's similar to my opinion on the weapon degradation. I don't mind weapons breaking. It's fine. But the inventory and controls to switch weapons, drop weapons etc just feels clunky at times.

So it's the same as every other game, just no map markers? Go to A, collect/do B, repeat?

That's a bit reductive in fairness. I would say one of the key elements I've found is that the game doesn't really force you to certain locations for long tutorials on stuff that's fairly simple. Instead, you learn through gameplay and just experimenting.

Another example similar to the above I mentioned about cooking is I travelled to a shrine (not because there was a flashing map marker or NPCs telling me to go to it, I just saw it in the distance and went to it). There was a thorny overgrowth around the entrance which meant I couldn't enter it. I wandered around a little, and there was an enemy camp nearby. I cleared them out, and found a torch sitting beside a tree. I already had a torch in my inventory, but it gave me the idea to light the torch, bring it to the shrine, and I was able to set the overgrowth on fire to burn and clear it.

In many open world games, I'd have been directed to the shrine and probably reached a point where I couldn't advance the game further until I'd gone to it. There'd be an NPC there to explain that the overgrowth is weak to fire, there should be a torch nearby, light the torch by holding it in your weapon hand then press the attack button etc.

Obviously, Zelda BOTW didn't invent the concept of "trial and error", but a lot of open world games, as big a fan of them as I am, build so many systems on top of systems that are all meant to be used in very specific ways and experienced in the right order that they have little choice but to try and guide you through it all or use enemy difficulty to keep you away from areas until you're ready for them. BOTW, especially after the first four shrines where you get the bulk of your abilities, just feels a lot more "Here's the world, go do stuff!". Yes there are main story missions saying to go here, meet this person etc, but you feel far less railroaded into doing that in order to progress your character, than just wandering around trying stuff.

Last night I was gliding off a cliff, noticed a circle of stones on the ground with a stone missing so flew over to it to see why it was there. Found a stone nearby, carried it over and filled the gap in the circle. Got a reward. No map marker or beam of light or anything to tell me it was there. Just found a thing, did a thing, got a thing.

A few hours in and I’m pretty much blown away. Firstly, it’s a stunning looking game, the fact that it runs so well on such old hardware is amazing. The views from the sky islands can be phenomenal at times.

The Sky islands themselves are a great addition and kind of give me a wind waker exploration vibe.

On the ground, it’s nice to see early in that the world seems more fleshed out. More characters more quests. It has that thing that truly great open worlds have, distraction. There’s already been multiple instances of me going in a direction towards a marker, finding something else on the way and doing something completely different for ages. And none of it was due to npcs repeatedly telling me about things.

Weapon deg can be an issue but a smaller one than BotW - there are more high durability weapons around, and fused weapons seem to last a decent amount.

Just a few minor issues for me, item and weapon management are still a bit fiddly, as fusing can be(especially with enemies nearby). Cooking is still annoying too. The recipe cards are a nice touch but I wish they went one step further on it, I think once a recipe has been discovered you should see on that menu if you have the ingredients to make it or are missing anything, and if you can make it, pressing the card should automatically chuck the ingredients in the pot.

Also as wonderful as the sky islands can be I’m not sure how motivated I’ll be for all that cave exploring, but I could be completely wrong on that.

All in all I can already tell that it’s going up be the game that takes up virtually all of my gaming time this summer!

I'm sky diving and trying to spot shrines on the way down or stables have ended up in the Farron jungle and found a 40+ knights claymore then got eaten by a bear loving the just go out and explore aspect so far but hate the how easy it is to misjudge the drop and splat aspec. 😃

Deleting cookies and refusing when site is reloaded has definitely limited the intrusive ads for me FWIW

It's not overly complicated in BOTW anyway. Even just shooting the thorns with a fire arrow or bomb arrow would have done it, and you're already taught in the game that wood/grass/bushes burn when exposed to fire. It's a Switch game, so it's obviously as geared towards kids/casuals, and it allows trial and error repeatedly so easy without much punishment.

Compared to some of the stuff you can do in Elden Ring which even after seeing someone do it, googling how to do it, doing it, and then completing it.... I still don't understand it or how someone figured it out.