Play's Too Great: Critical Anal Success in Baldur of the GUILE
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
but that's also really just an "are you gay" check
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
PART 6: WEAPON DURABILITY
"Ah," you say, as you read the above sentence. "At long last we've arrived at the great Sin Breath of the Wild committed that Friday has been cockteasing us about for like 10 novels now that holds it back from true greatness."
Well, yes. But also no. Well, sort of.
Uh.
Yes, but not for the reason you think. It's related, though!
So, I was playing Breath of the Wild and my fucking weapons kept breaking. Because they had durability. And not durability in the sense that you had to go back to the shop and repair them for some gold every so often, like in Diablo. But permanently breaking and vanishing from my inventory.
This irritated me.
Especially in the early game, when the damage on your weapons is low and so is their durability. It's not an exaggeration to say that weapons will break, full to zero, before you can even kill a single enemy with them. This is, honestly, pretty bad game design.
Later on you start finding better weapons with more damage and more durability, and then toward the endgame you have a huge stockpile (thanks also to Korok Seed inventory expansion) of high damage high durability weapons that allows you to take out 2-3 camps worth of enemies before a single one of your 12 weapons breaks.
But even then, at the endgame, it's still an irritating mechanic. Especially if your weapon breaks mid-combo, which forces you to select a new one, breaking the flow of combat.
But the thing is, it doesn't really matter.
Weapons are plentiful. The game even makes the weapons you find from random chests better and better as the game goes on so you always have a supply of strong things to hit monsters with. It's not really interfering with your ability to fight shit. Once you get the Master Sword, it becomes even less of an issue. Now you have a 30 damage one-hander that goes on a 10 minute cooldown, so you can use that a lot of the time to save durability on your other weapons.
So in the end, this game design choice doesn't actually matter much mechanically. You hoard your strong weapons for bosses and strong enemies and use your weaker weapons on fodder. I don't think I ever was even once close to running out of weapons completely.
So the wheels in my mind started turning, from a dev perspective.
If this doesn't really matter, why have the feature at all? What good can possibly come from putting weapon durability and permanent weapon loss into your game? This isn't 1985, we're not in the experimental phase of video games anymore when the devs had no idea what players would like and what they wouldn't. Well, not as much. At least we know that people fucking hate weapons and gear breaking forever. Some people might not mind it, but that's the best you're going to get. Some that don't mind, most that hate it. Even if it doesn't really matter, it's still an irritating splinter in the player's mind.
So I didn't understand for a long time why it was in the game. Why not just, I don't know, have weapons that you can find that last forever? I talked about it to my friends and one of them pointed out that if you did that, experienced players could go to a higher level zone right away and grab a powerful high attack weapon immediately, thereby bypassing a ton of content and planned upgrades. This was a good point, but it had two problems. The first was obvious, a first time blind player would not know where to go and would be unlikely to find a powerful sword or whatever early. The second problem is a far deeper one, and it's linked to The Great Sin.
Here's the thing. The Devs wanted players in Breath of the Wild to be able to do three things all at once:
1. Go anywhere right from the start.
2. Explore a vast world.
3. That wasn't empty. Meaning, it was full of hidden chests and rewards for killing shit.
This is actually difficult to achieve. A lot of games try and fail. Tons of open world games have a lot to explore, but nothing or not much to find in it. Daggerfall is famously the biggest game ever made in terms of sheer mileage, but it's fucking empty. Just a bunch of copy-pasted grassy hills. It's not worth exploring because they're nothing to find. Compare that to Skyrim, which is much much smaller but actually has shit in it. In fact, each Elder Scrolls game has followed the trend of becoming a smaller, but denser, world.
So the question is, what to fill your world with? It can't all just be crafting materials and gold/rupees. You have to have something to find.
And for Breath of the Wild, this something was weapons.
But in order to make finding weapons consistently worthwhile, you had to make it so that no weapon was permanent. And so, the durability system.
What the Devs of Breath of the Wild did was put in a feature they KNEW players would dislike in order to solve a problem.
And you know what? It works.
It just doesn't work well.
It causes a few problems. In the early game, attacking enemy camps is worth your time. You will come away richer and with better weapons than when you started. But by the mid game, camps of enemies are something you just walk right on by. It's not worth your time to kill them. They're not worth exp and you have so much monster parts and money that you don't need more. And whatever weapons they have will not be better than what you're already carrying. At best you might replace what you used, leaving you exactly where you were when you started. So you learn to just ignore them.
So the game actually leads you to ignore it, to disengage from the mechanics. That's not a good thing. But that's a minor thing compared to the Sin.
I touched on this before, but the Sin is simple: Finding stuff in Breath of the Wild is not exciting.
That's it, that's the big reveal. You can all close the thread now.
Think about it. Korok seeds work pretty well in the early game, I suppose. Your weapon slots are upgraded with 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and 12 seeds. That's a total of 31 seeds for six more weapon slots. But then it takes 17 and 25, a total of 42, to get just two more slots.
What this means is that early on, finding a seed is a pretty big deal. But as you find more and more, they very quickly become nearly meaningless. You have to get a shitload of them just to get one more slot. Finding a seed ceases to make my brain fire any chemical at all.
There's something similar going on with weapons. Early on, finding powerful weapons is cool and fun. But even then you quickly realize "oh, shit. I can't actually use this or it'll break. I need to save it for a tough enemy." So the fun thing you found is put away on a shelf and maybe taken out later when it's no longer the best weapon you have or for a really tough fight. In any case, weapons are all very samey. There are three types: Spear, One Hander, Two Hander. That's it. There is also blunt damage type that matters for some enemies, mainly the Stone Talus. And I guess there's elemental weapons too. But all in all there's nothing mysterious about weapons. They're just ammo for your "hitting monster" attack. You are never really excited to find a weapon beyond maybe the first five hours of play. Your brain turns finding a weapon into something about as exciting as finding a stash of ammo in another game. Because that's exactly what weapons are in Breath of the Wild. Useful, but boring.
Bows, obviously, fall into this same category. And shields. Some are cooler or better than others, but all of them are basically the same and they will all eventually break.
So now we start to arrive at the crux of my problem.
Next time:
Part 7: Played Too Late.
"Ah," you say, as you read the above sentence. "At long last we've arrived at the great Sin Breath of the Wild committed that Friday has been cockteasing us about for like 10 novels now that holds it back from true greatness."
Well, yes. But also no. Well, sort of.
Uh.
Yes, but not for the reason you think. It's related, though!
So, I was playing Breath of the Wild and my fucking weapons kept breaking. Because they had durability. And not durability in the sense that you had to go back to the shop and repair them for some gold every so often, like in Diablo. But permanently breaking and vanishing from my inventory.
This irritated me.
Especially in the early game, when the damage on your weapons is low and so is their durability. It's not an exaggeration to say that weapons will break, full to zero, before you can even kill a single enemy with them. This is, honestly, pretty bad game design.
Later on you start finding better weapons with more damage and more durability, and then toward the endgame you have a huge stockpile (thanks also to Korok Seed inventory expansion) of high damage high durability weapons that allows you to take out 2-3 camps worth of enemies before a single one of your 12 weapons breaks.
But even then, at the endgame, it's still an irritating mechanic. Especially if your weapon breaks mid-combo, which forces you to select a new one, breaking the flow of combat.
But the thing is, it doesn't really matter.
Weapons are plentiful. The game even makes the weapons you find from random chests better and better as the game goes on so you always have a supply of strong things to hit monsters with. It's not really interfering with your ability to fight shit. Once you get the Master Sword, it becomes even less of an issue. Now you have a 30 damage one-hander that goes on a 10 minute cooldown, so you can use that a lot of the time to save durability on your other weapons.
So in the end, this game design choice doesn't actually matter much mechanically. You hoard your strong weapons for bosses and strong enemies and use your weaker weapons on fodder. I don't think I ever was even once close to running out of weapons completely.
So the wheels in my mind started turning, from a dev perspective.
If this doesn't really matter, why have the feature at all? What good can possibly come from putting weapon durability and permanent weapon loss into your game? This isn't 1985, we're not in the experimental phase of video games anymore when the devs had no idea what players would like and what they wouldn't. Well, not as much. At least we know that people fucking hate weapons and gear breaking forever. Some people might not mind it, but that's the best you're going to get. Some that don't mind, most that hate it. Even if it doesn't really matter, it's still an irritating splinter in the player's mind.
So I didn't understand for a long time why it was in the game. Why not just, I don't know, have weapons that you can find that last forever? I talked about it to my friends and one of them pointed out that if you did that, experienced players could go to a higher level zone right away and grab a powerful high attack weapon immediately, thereby bypassing a ton of content and planned upgrades. This was a good point, but it had two problems. The first was obvious, a first time blind player would not know where to go and would be unlikely to find a powerful sword or whatever early. The second problem is a far deeper one, and it's linked to The Great Sin.
Here's the thing. The Devs wanted players in Breath of the Wild to be able to do three things all at once:
1. Go anywhere right from the start.
2. Explore a vast world.
3. That wasn't empty. Meaning, it was full of hidden chests and rewards for killing shit.
This is actually difficult to achieve. A lot of games try and fail. Tons of open world games have a lot to explore, but nothing or not much to find in it. Daggerfall is famously the biggest game ever made in terms of sheer mileage, but it's fucking empty. Just a bunch of copy-pasted grassy hills. It's not worth exploring because they're nothing to find. Compare that to Skyrim, which is much much smaller but actually has shit in it. In fact, each Elder Scrolls game has followed the trend of becoming a smaller, but denser, world.
So the question is, what to fill your world with? It can't all just be crafting materials and gold/rupees. You have to have something to find.
And for Breath of the Wild, this something was weapons.
But in order to make finding weapons consistently worthwhile, you had to make it so that no weapon was permanent. And so, the durability system.
What the Devs of Breath of the Wild did was put in a feature they KNEW players would dislike in order to solve a problem.
And you know what? It works.
It just doesn't work well.
It causes a few problems. In the early game, attacking enemy camps is worth your time. You will come away richer and with better weapons than when you started. But by the mid game, camps of enemies are something you just walk right on by. It's not worth your time to kill them. They're not worth exp and you have so much monster parts and money that you don't need more. And whatever weapons they have will not be better than what you're already carrying. At best you might replace what you used, leaving you exactly where you were when you started. So you learn to just ignore them.
So the game actually leads you to ignore it, to disengage from the mechanics. That's not a good thing. But that's a minor thing compared to the Sin.
I touched on this before, but the Sin is simple: Finding stuff in Breath of the Wild is not exciting.
That's it, that's the big reveal. You can all close the thread now.
Think about it. Korok seeds work pretty well in the early game, I suppose. Your weapon slots are upgraded with 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and 12 seeds. That's a total of 31 seeds for six more weapon slots. But then it takes 17 and 25, a total of 42, to get just two more slots.
What this means is that early on, finding a seed is a pretty big deal. But as you find more and more, they very quickly become nearly meaningless. You have to get a shitload of them just to get one more slot. Finding a seed ceases to make my brain fire any chemical at all.
There's something similar going on with weapons. Early on, finding powerful weapons is cool and fun. But even then you quickly realize "oh, shit. I can't actually use this or it'll break. I need to save it for a tough enemy." So the fun thing you found is put away on a shelf and maybe taken out later when it's no longer the best weapon you have or for a really tough fight. In any case, weapons are all very samey. There are three types: Spear, One Hander, Two Hander. That's it. There is also blunt damage type that matters for some enemies, mainly the Stone Talus. And I guess there's elemental weapons too. But all in all there's nothing mysterious about weapons. They're just ammo for your "hitting monster" attack. You are never really excited to find a weapon beyond maybe the first five hours of play. Your brain turns finding a weapon into something about as exciting as finding a stash of ammo in another game. Because that's exactly what weapons are in Breath of the Wild. Useful, but boring.
Bows, obviously, fall into this same category. And shields. Some are cooler or better than others, but all of them are basically the same and they will all eventually break.
So now we start to arrive at the crux of my problem.
Next time:
Part 7: Played Too Late.
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
Oh also random gripe: Why the FUCK is Link such a drama queen when he gets hit? I swear to god he takes fucking FOREVER to get back up after being knocked down. This can get fucking ludicrous if you're anywhere near a slope. I swear to god one time a Moblin hit me and I rolled for a full solid hour with Link moaning and groaning the whole time, flashing red, until he finally s l o w l y regained his feet.
Shit, while I'm at it, why do monsters get fucking FLUNG when you finish a combo or kill them? There's so much verticality in this game. I lost count of the njumber of times I had to jump down a fucking cliff and climb back up it just to get the loot from a dead mob. Like imagine in Doom if every time you killed a shotgunner he flung his shotgun off a cliff and you had to go down and then back up to get it. whyyyyyyyyy
okay minor gripe over
Shit, while I'm at it, why do monsters get fucking FLUNG when you finish a combo or kill them? There's so much verticality in this game. I lost count of the njumber of times I had to jump down a fucking cliff and climb back up it just to get the loot from a dead mob. Like imagine in Doom if every time you killed a shotgunner he flung his shotgun off a cliff and you had to go down and then back up to get it. whyyyyyyyyy
okay minor gripe over
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
I just also wanted to say that right after BotW came out, or at least like in the same year after its release, I heard plenty of complaints about the lack of monster variety. TotK doesn't even add very many to be honest, and while there's plenty of very intricate little monster-camp setpieces, there's also still just random Wizzrobes out in the middle of nowhere by themselves, which aren't interesting to fight at all.
okay I should just do a point by point reply I'm gonna Thad your stuff because I have my own thoughts about BOTW but I never wrote them down
okay I should just do a point by point reply I'm gonna Thad your stuff because I have my own thoughts about BOTW but I never wrote them down
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
That's fair. In preparation for this thread, I watched three separate hour+ long length retrospective reviews of BotW, most of them prompted by TotK coming out.
Only one of the three reviews of BotW I watched even mentioned monster variety. None of them, not one, talked about rain making shit slippery and unclimeable. But I admit that once shit cools down people tend to be more rational about stuff. Maybe six years from now someone will make a 3 hour review of Elden Ring and spend maybe 20 seconds mentioning how it reused enemies and bosses while using the rest of the runtime to jerk off about how cool the game was, I dunno. All I know is from what I have seen, people were vastly more critical of Elden Ring's faults than they were of Breath of the Wild's. And in general, people are a lot more likely to look the other way when it comes to Zelda games in general due to emotional attachment.
Though of course, as I myself mentioned previously, it's not like emotional attachment clouding rational criticism doesn't exist for Souls games. It absolutely does as well.
Even I, in this thread, am biased emotionally. I have allowed my general distaste for how much OoT is worshipped to bleed into my opinion of the Zelda fandom as a whole. In the end, what I'm writing about here in regards to Breath of the Wild is just a subjective opinion. I put my creds up as a game dev first because I wanted to try to be as objective as possible, but like, it's totally valid if someone says "the rain shit didn't bother me" just like it's totally valid that I say that it bothered me or when I talk about how Red Dead Redemption 2's flaws don't really matter to me given all else that it achieves.
However, I will defend my statement that finding a weapon in BotW is exactly as exciting as finding ammo for your gun in other games and if you disagree you are a weirdo. Transitory equipment will never be as exciting as a permanent upgrade. It's slightly more interesting to find a cool sword (that will break) than it is to find 10 arrows, but only in the same way that it's slightly more interesting to find 10 bomb arrows.
Only one of the three reviews of BotW I watched even mentioned monster variety. None of them, not one, talked about rain making shit slippery and unclimeable. But I admit that once shit cools down people tend to be more rational about stuff. Maybe six years from now someone will make a 3 hour review of Elden Ring and spend maybe 20 seconds mentioning how it reused enemies and bosses while using the rest of the runtime to jerk off about how cool the game was, I dunno. All I know is from what I have seen, people were vastly more critical of Elden Ring's faults than they were of Breath of the Wild's. And in general, people are a lot more likely to look the other way when it comes to Zelda games in general due to emotional attachment.
Though of course, as I myself mentioned previously, it's not like emotional attachment clouding rational criticism doesn't exist for Souls games. It absolutely does as well.
Even I, in this thread, am biased emotionally. I have allowed my general distaste for how much OoT is worshipped to bleed into my opinion of the Zelda fandom as a whole. In the end, what I'm writing about here in regards to Breath of the Wild is just a subjective opinion. I put my creds up as a game dev first because I wanted to try to be as objective as possible, but like, it's totally valid if someone says "the rain shit didn't bother me" just like it's totally valid that I say that it bothered me or when I talk about how Red Dead Redemption 2's flaws don't really matter to me given all else that it achieves.
However, I will defend my statement that finding a weapon in BotW is exactly as exciting as finding ammo for your gun in other games and if you disagree you are a weirdo. Transitory equipment will never be as exciting as a permanent upgrade. It's slightly more interesting to find a cool sword (that will break) than it is to find 10 arrows, but only in the same way that it's slightly more interesting to find 10 bomb arrows.
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
Friday wrote:Spoilers for Wakanda Forever:
Like the best part of Wakana Forever is when Killmonger shows up in the afterlife and Shuri yells at him and he's like "lol hahaha what the fuck, y'all only doin' shit now because I woke you up to how direct action is not only needed but morally obligated, y'all were a bunch of coward pussy little bitch fucks"
My biggest problem with that whole bit is that Killmonger would be totally down with Namor's plan. Like, is he just mad that Namor attacked Wakanda? Because everything else Namor wanted to do is exactly what Killmonger wanted to do.
Another interpretation is that Shuri is right and that's not really Killmonger appearing to her from the afterlife, it's just a drug-induced hallucination, and Killmonger is merely a manifestation of her own subconscious. As a fan of the comics I don't subscribe to this interpretation -- in the comics the Djalia is definitely real -- but I think it's a valid interpretation, and as good an explanation as any for why Killmonger's all "kill Namor" instead of "Namor is right."
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
Yeah, that whole part was iffy. I just liked that specific aspect of it.
I also like how they fixed a problem with the first film and portrayed the CIA as, you know, fucking awful. A big criticism of Black Panther was how it made the CIA out to be the good guys in a story about how colonialism fucks colonized people over.
Again, it blows my mind that a mainstream Disney movie would have the line "the President wants to attack Wakanda. Destabilize it."
But like, that's fucking exactly what the CIA did. And does.
I also like how they fixed a problem with the first film and portrayed the CIA as, you know, fucking awful. A big criticism of Black Panther was how it made the CIA out to be the good guys in a story about how colonialism fucks colonized people over.
Again, it blows my mind that a mainstream Disney movie would have the line "the President wants to attack Wakanda. Destabilize it."
But like, that's fucking exactly what the CIA did. And does.
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
Yeah, and while I love Martin Freeman I really don't understand how the irreverent comic-relief state department attache based on Chandler Bing who was introduced wearing the devil's pants became a CIA agent and badass air combat vet who's introduced torturing Klaw. Why even call him Everett K Ross instead of, say, Henry Peter Gyrich?
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
Friday wrote:Oh also random gripe: Why the FUCK is Link such a drama queen when he gets hit?
have you ever MET a twink
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
Nothing you said has been wrong, people who cannot disentangle their emotional attachment to something from its aspects as a work are irritating! And sadly common. Like come on even me a dog can stop and think and go "I sure didn't enjoy OoT *because* of its intense combat, I just thought it was really cool that it was 3D and complex, and u could like swing the sword back and forth in different directions"
I might've brought this up before, but it's literally science that whatever you played when you were 13 is the best thing in the world? I could make a whole thread about this but Spotify ran their data on users birthyears vs the year their favorite songs came out and there is just this huge spike of stuff that came out when people are 13
This is really true and another reason why BotW's endgame bogs down compared to its beginning. The only thing that helped my mentality about the actual weapons was suddenly going "It's a beat em up". Like everything was just designed to be picked up and bashed into shit until it snaps and then you grab another one.
But then all my shields are still there like even in TotK where they "fixed" a lot of the issues with the weapon system I still have 6 Royal Bows and like 5 Royal Shields and it's just like please, stop giving me this stuff, and the game's like no you love opening treasure chests
and guess what those treasure chests are a billion times more exciting when they have a piece of armor in it because it's a permanent upgrade
anyway I love Breath of the Wild to death and am glad you enjoyed it but it has some absolutely maddening flaws, like the UI looking nice but being functionally awful like every other Nintendo game
I might've brought this up before, but it's literally science that whatever you played when you were 13 is the best thing in the world? I could make a whole thread about this but Spotify ran their data on users birthyears vs the year their favorite songs came out and there is just this huge spike of stuff that came out when people are 13
Friday wrote:However, I will defend my statement that finding a weapon in BotW is exactly as exciting as finding ammo for your gun in other games and if you disagree you are a weirdo. Transitory equipment will never be as exciting as a permanent upgrade. It's slightly more interesting to find a cool sword (that will break) than it is to find 10 arrows, but only in the same way that it's slightly more interesting to find 10 bomb arrows.
This is really true and another reason why BotW's endgame bogs down compared to its beginning. The only thing that helped my mentality about the actual weapons was suddenly going "It's a beat em up". Like everything was just designed to be picked up and bashed into shit until it snaps and then you grab another one.
But then all my shields are still there like even in TotK where they "fixed" a lot of the issues with the weapon system I still have 6 Royal Bows and like 5 Royal Shields and it's just like please, stop giving me this stuff, and the game's like no you love opening treasure chests
and guess what those treasure chests are a billion times more exciting when they have a piece of armor in it because it's a permanent upgrade
anyway I love Breath of the Wild to death and am glad you enjoyed it but it has some absolutely maddening flaws, like the UI looking nice but being functionally awful like every other Nintendo game
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
anyway what I meant to write there before I got all effusive was "They made an entire game to prove your hypothesis that permanent upgrades feel better when you open a chest and it was called Elden Ring"
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
"I sure didn't enjoy OoT *because* of its intense combat, I just thought it was really cool that it was 3D and complex, and u could like swing the sword back and forth in different directions"
OoT is a product of us being 13 and also it being the first 3D Zelda game. It's impossible to express to a Gen Z just how amazing seeing a really fully 3D game was in those early years. FF7 has basically the same thing going on.
anyway what I meant to write there before I got all effusive was "They made an entire game to prove your hypothesis that permanent upgrades feel better when you open a chest and it was called Elden Ring"
it's a bit more complicated than that, but basically yeah
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
PART 7: PLAYED TOO LATE
Well, let's start this part off with a bang.
If I hadn't plated Elden Ring first, if I had played Breath of the Wild back in 2018 or whatever, I would have probably written about how it was one of my favorite games ever made.
As it stands now, I wouldn't even put it on my top 100 favorites.
Yeah, you read that right.
Before you come charging into my house to kill me and my entire family, rest assured I would put it on a top 100 games list I considered "best." That's a list I will probably never make, because it comes with such a higher level of scrutiny that I don't even want to attempt it. The amount of work required is a lot more. With a favorites list, if someone objects to a game on it or demands why such and such isn't there, you can always shrug and just say "my list, bitch. Make your own." Not so much if you're claiming to be rating games on some sort of objective benchmark. Personally, I don't think any list anyone makes of "best" games is really valid. Subjective opinion will always creep in no matter how unbiased you're attempting to be, so just make your list of favorites and move on instead of trying to rate the best 100 games of all time or whatever.
All that being said, I think it's pretty much a given that Breath of the Wild would be near the top of such a list.
But it's not on my favorites. Why? Fuckin' Marble Madness is at 100 Friday just replace Marble fuckin' Madness with BotW what is wrong with you
Here's the thing. Sometimes in life you gotta do shit in order. And the reason is simple: It's hard to go back.
Example: A while back when I was a Dark Souls virgin I asked these boards what game I should start with. The prevailing opinion was that despite Dark Souls 3 being perhaps more friendly for newbies, I should start with 1 and then 2 and THEN 3 simply because if I started with 3, going back to 1 and losing all the QoL and UI upgrades would feel really bad.
Sometimes similar has happened in my brain with Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild, though it's not about the UI or even QoL. If anything Breath of the Wild has better QoL, after all, Elden Ring is a souls game and on some level souls games are designed to hurt you. That's sort of the opposite goal of "Quality of Life."
As I mentioned, this is because upgrades in Elden Ring are permanent. But believe it or not, that isn't the core reason, the ultimate sin. It's a little bit more complicated.
In Breath of the Wild, exploration will get you shrines, Korok Seeds, and random chests with rupees/crafting/weapons/bows/shields.
We've gone over Korok Seeds and how they diminish as you find more of them, and we've gone over weapons/bows/shields. Let's talk about Shrines!
Shrines are great. I like them a lot. You find a Shrine and it's got a neat little puzzle to solve. In fact, though I liked finding "Blessing" and "Test of Strength" Shrines early on, later on I hated them. Especially Blessings. For those of you who haven't played, a Blessing Shrine is a Shrine with no puzzle or combat. Just a chest and the reward for completing a Shrine. They are generally Shrines locked behind a Shrine Quest, meaning you have already solved a puzzle or done a bunch of chores you get inside. But still, by the mid-game and especially the endgame, I was annoyed every time I found one. Because I was no longer doing Shrines for the rewards. Rewards didn't matter to me anymore. I wanted more fun content. Tests of Strength were a tiny bit better but since they are all basically the same thing they quickly became equally boring.
Anyway, that's Shrines. A+ to all the normal Shrines, C- to combat, F to Blessings.
(I should mention here that you actually can, very rarely, find Armor pieces in Shrines. Including the incredibly powerful Barbarian set, the super useful Climbing set, and a few others that offer elemental resistances. They are by far the best and most exciting things to find in the game, but they are so incredibly rare to find that I basically do not count them. But it would be remiss to not mention that Breath of the Wild does indeed have a few very good things to find in chests. However, they are always in Shrines, and the Barbarian set is always in a labyrinth, so they still have a problem.)
Now. Let's look at something interesting. What do Shrines, Korok Seeds, and random weapons/bows/shields all have in common?
You know what you're gonna get.
Aside from the very rare armor pieces in Shrines, every reward is static. You know you're going to get a Spirit Orb for every Shrine you complete. Sure, you can earn a chest in the Shrine by doing a harder puzzle or being observant, but inside (aside from those incredibly rare armor pieces, 3 of which always are in a Labyrinth so you know you won't be getting them) is just another weapon or maybe some rupees. Korok Seeds are always Korok Seeds. Spirit Orbs and Korok Seeds always do what they do. Weapons are more exciting, but since they're temporary, it's hard to get excited about finding one.
There's no discovery.
Now let's contrast Elden Ring.
You're exploring. You find a dungeon entrance. Anything could be inside. Literally. A new weapon that could last you the whole rest of the game. A cool armor set that you prefer. A trinket you'll use for most of the rest of the game. A new Spirit Ash that you fall in love with. A new awesome spell that carries you for the next 40 hours of gameplay.
And you never know what you're gonna get.
Oh, you managed to climb your war into a ruined tower hidden off in a remote section of the world? The chest teleports you to the capitol city. Another chest there has a trinket that gives you regeneration, an extremely useful thing for the early and midgame.
You found a ruined caravan guarded by monster dogs in Caelid? Here's Gut's sword from Berserk, one of the best weapons in the whole game.
While in Raya Lucaria, you navigated an intense series of jumps on rooftops and then wound your way back into the main school building before fighting a tough enemy guarding the best staff for high int casters in the game.
Note how none of these things are 1/4 of a piece of heart. And you don't know what you're getting in advance.
Discovery requires that you do not know what you're getting in advance.
That's it, that's the Sin. I faked you out before. Now you can close the thread. The Great Sin that Breath of the Wild carries that holds it back from true greatness is that it lacks discovery.
It's got exploration, absolutely. It's fun, absolutely. But it has very little actual discovery.
When I play an RPG, I want to find an item and go "ooooh, what's that do?" and immediately open my inventory to read the description. I don't do that in Breath of the Wild.
I do it constantly in Elden Ring. I did it all the way to the end of the game. Even right before I fought Malenia, I was still finding new, weird shit.
My dream game doesn't need Souls combat. It needs exploration, a huge beautiful world, and discovery.
"But Friday," you say, scratching your head. "You said earlier when talking about Hawaii/Lurelin Village that a place doesn't need to have shit in it to be cool. You even made fun of those players who complained about it."
True. Breath of the Wild is still cool. And to some extent, having places in your games that are "pointless" can add to your game in the worldbuilding sense. Exploring just for the sake of exploration is still fun. I had a lot of fun at that one pond I talked about, knowing that some dev had poured their heart and soul into making it as intricate and beautiful as possible. But you know what would have made it better? A cool ring at the bottom of the pond that you could Magnesis out and go "ooooh, what's that?" and then read what it does.
"But Friday," you say, still scratching. "95% of what I find in Elden Ring is trash."
True. Absolutely true. You're not going to use 95% of what you find in Elden Ring because it's actually bad, or too weird, or you just don't like it, or it doesn't fit your build. Hard to use a staff that rewards high int if you're playing an unga bunga club build that only pumps Str and Vit. And likewise, hard to use a giant hammer if you're a caster. But that doesn't matter, because still anything could be around the next corner.
You are compelled to move forward, to keep exploring and clearing out the whole game obessively right into the endgame because anything can be anywhere.
By contrast, by the end of Breath of the Wild, I was actively skipping content because I knew there wasn't anything to miss. Or rather, I knew exactly what I was missing when I did skip. I was missing Korok Seeds.
If I had played Breath of the Wild when it came out, I probably would have put it on my list of favorite games where Elden Ring is now, at number 3, right under Undertale and Red Dead Redemption 2.
But I played it too late. I have a game that does what it does better.
Elden Ring has it's own problems. Maybe someday I'll do a thread dedicated to that game too. Probably not. It is my favorite game ever in terms of mechanics, Undertale and RDR2 are above it only because of my love of their stories. But if you want the simple version, I love Elden Ring because it's a magical, beautiful world to explore and you can and will find anything at any time, anywhere.
I merely like Breath of the Wild because it's a magical, beautiful world to explore.
Well, let's start this part off with a bang.
If I hadn't plated Elden Ring first, if I had played Breath of the Wild back in 2018 or whatever, I would have probably written about how it was one of my favorite games ever made.
As it stands now, I wouldn't even put it on my top 100 favorites.
Yeah, you read that right.
Before you come charging into my house to kill me and my entire family, rest assured I would put it on a top 100 games list I considered "best." That's a list I will probably never make, because it comes with such a higher level of scrutiny that I don't even want to attempt it. The amount of work required is a lot more. With a favorites list, if someone objects to a game on it or demands why such and such isn't there, you can always shrug and just say "my list, bitch. Make your own." Not so much if you're claiming to be rating games on some sort of objective benchmark. Personally, I don't think any list anyone makes of "best" games is really valid. Subjective opinion will always creep in no matter how unbiased you're attempting to be, so just make your list of favorites and move on instead of trying to rate the best 100 games of all time or whatever.
All that being said, I think it's pretty much a given that Breath of the Wild would be near the top of such a list.
But it's not on my favorites. Why? Fuckin' Marble Madness is at 100 Friday just replace Marble fuckin' Madness with BotW what is wrong with you
Here's the thing. Sometimes in life you gotta do shit in order. And the reason is simple: It's hard to go back.
Example: A while back when I was a Dark Souls virgin I asked these boards what game I should start with. The prevailing opinion was that despite Dark Souls 3 being perhaps more friendly for newbies, I should start with 1 and then 2 and THEN 3 simply because if I started with 3, going back to 1 and losing all the QoL and UI upgrades would feel really bad.
Sometimes similar has happened in my brain with Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild, though it's not about the UI or even QoL. If anything Breath of the Wild has better QoL, after all, Elden Ring is a souls game and on some level souls games are designed to hurt you. That's sort of the opposite goal of "Quality of Life."
As I mentioned, this is because upgrades in Elden Ring are permanent. But believe it or not, that isn't the core reason, the ultimate sin. It's a little bit more complicated.
In Breath of the Wild, exploration will get you shrines, Korok Seeds, and random chests with rupees/crafting/weapons/bows/shields.
We've gone over Korok Seeds and how they diminish as you find more of them, and we've gone over weapons/bows/shields. Let's talk about Shrines!
Shrines are great. I like them a lot. You find a Shrine and it's got a neat little puzzle to solve. In fact, though I liked finding "Blessing" and "Test of Strength" Shrines early on, later on I hated them. Especially Blessings. For those of you who haven't played, a Blessing Shrine is a Shrine with no puzzle or combat. Just a chest and the reward for completing a Shrine. They are generally Shrines locked behind a Shrine Quest, meaning you have already solved a puzzle or done a bunch of chores you get inside. But still, by the mid-game and especially the endgame, I was annoyed every time I found one. Because I was no longer doing Shrines for the rewards. Rewards didn't matter to me anymore. I wanted more fun content. Tests of Strength were a tiny bit better but since they are all basically the same thing they quickly became equally boring.
Anyway, that's Shrines. A+ to all the normal Shrines, C- to combat, F to Blessings.
(I should mention here that you actually can, very rarely, find Armor pieces in Shrines. Including the incredibly powerful Barbarian set, the super useful Climbing set, and a few others that offer elemental resistances. They are by far the best and most exciting things to find in the game, but they are so incredibly rare to find that I basically do not count them. But it would be remiss to not mention that Breath of the Wild does indeed have a few very good things to find in chests. However, they are always in Shrines, and the Barbarian set is always in a labyrinth, so they still have a problem.)
Now. Let's look at something interesting. What do Shrines, Korok Seeds, and random weapons/bows/shields all have in common?
You know what you're gonna get.
Aside from the very rare armor pieces in Shrines, every reward is static. You know you're going to get a Spirit Orb for every Shrine you complete. Sure, you can earn a chest in the Shrine by doing a harder puzzle or being observant, but inside (aside from those incredibly rare armor pieces, 3 of which always are in a Labyrinth so you know you won't be getting them) is just another weapon or maybe some rupees. Korok Seeds are always Korok Seeds. Spirit Orbs and Korok Seeds always do what they do. Weapons are more exciting, but since they're temporary, it's hard to get excited about finding one.
There's no discovery.
Now let's contrast Elden Ring.
You're exploring. You find a dungeon entrance. Anything could be inside. Literally. A new weapon that could last you the whole rest of the game. A cool armor set that you prefer. A trinket you'll use for most of the rest of the game. A new Spirit Ash that you fall in love with. A new awesome spell that carries you for the next 40 hours of gameplay.
And you never know what you're gonna get.
Oh, you managed to climb your war into a ruined tower hidden off in a remote section of the world? The chest teleports you to the capitol city. Another chest there has a trinket that gives you regeneration, an extremely useful thing for the early and midgame.
You found a ruined caravan guarded by monster dogs in Caelid? Here's Gut's sword from Berserk, one of the best weapons in the whole game.
While in Raya Lucaria, you navigated an intense series of jumps on rooftops and then wound your way back into the main school building before fighting a tough enemy guarding the best staff for high int casters in the game.
Note how none of these things are 1/4 of a piece of heart. And you don't know what you're getting in advance.
Discovery requires that you do not know what you're getting in advance.
That's it, that's the Sin. I faked you out before. Now you can close the thread. The Great Sin that Breath of the Wild carries that holds it back from true greatness is that it lacks discovery.
It's got exploration, absolutely. It's fun, absolutely. But it has very little actual discovery.
When I play an RPG, I want to find an item and go "ooooh, what's that do?" and immediately open my inventory to read the description. I don't do that in Breath of the Wild.
I do it constantly in Elden Ring. I did it all the way to the end of the game. Even right before I fought Malenia, I was still finding new, weird shit.
My dream game doesn't need Souls combat. It needs exploration, a huge beautiful world, and discovery.
"But Friday," you say, scratching your head. "You said earlier when talking about Hawaii/Lurelin Village that a place doesn't need to have shit in it to be cool. You even made fun of those players who complained about it."
True. Breath of the Wild is still cool. And to some extent, having places in your games that are "pointless" can add to your game in the worldbuilding sense. Exploring just for the sake of exploration is still fun. I had a lot of fun at that one pond I talked about, knowing that some dev had poured their heart and soul into making it as intricate and beautiful as possible. But you know what would have made it better? A cool ring at the bottom of the pond that you could Magnesis out and go "ooooh, what's that?" and then read what it does.
"But Friday," you say, still scratching. "95% of what I find in Elden Ring is trash."
True. Absolutely true. You're not going to use 95% of what you find in Elden Ring because it's actually bad, or too weird, or you just don't like it, or it doesn't fit your build. Hard to use a staff that rewards high int if you're playing an unga bunga club build that only pumps Str and Vit. And likewise, hard to use a giant hammer if you're a caster. But that doesn't matter, because still anything could be around the next corner.
You are compelled to move forward, to keep exploring and clearing out the whole game obessively right into the endgame because anything can be anywhere.
By contrast, by the end of Breath of the Wild, I was actively skipping content because I knew there wasn't anything to miss. Or rather, I knew exactly what I was missing when I did skip. I was missing Korok Seeds.
If I had played Breath of the Wild when it came out, I probably would have put it on my list of favorite games where Elden Ring is now, at number 3, right under Undertale and Red Dead Redemption 2.
But I played it too late. I have a game that does what it does better.
Elden Ring has it's own problems. Maybe someday I'll do a thread dedicated to that game too. Probably not. It is my favorite game ever in terms of mechanics, Undertale and RDR2 are above it only because of my love of their stories. But if you want the simple version, I love Elden Ring because it's a magical, beautiful world to explore and you can and will find anything at any time, anywhere.
I merely like Breath of the Wild because it's a magical, beautiful world to explore.
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
Hey, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
I won't say END OF THREAD because I do have a few more unrelated things to talk about, including a pay to win thing that I had never experienced before and made me really fucking angry and also question how this will affect video games going forward. But the main thrust of my point has been made.
As an epilogue, let me just say that all of this bullshit has been, of course, just my own opinion. You are free to disregard it and continue to think BotW and even OoT are the gold standards of videogames or whatever. But I love game design and talking about it, so I decided to inflict my nonsense on you. If you've read all of it, doubtless I've said a few things that you didn't agree with, and that's okay. I'm sure if I read any of your essays about why Megaman is the greatest game series of all time or whatever, I'd find a few things to disagree with you too.
Oh, and I intentionally am not going to post my "fixes" for Breath of the Wild because I think the game isn't broken. It's a great game as it is. If I did talk about it, I would call it "improvements" because that's all they would be. But I've already written waaaaay too much about this and I promised at the start I wouldn't go full Tim Rogers and I feel like I'm close to crossing that line at this point
I won't say END OF THREAD because I do have a few more unrelated things to talk about, including a pay to win thing that I had never experienced before and made me really fucking angry and also question how this will affect video games going forward. But the main thrust of my point has been made.
As an epilogue, let me just say that all of this bullshit has been, of course, just my own opinion. You are free to disregard it and continue to think BotW and even OoT are the gold standards of videogames or whatever. But I love game design and talking about it, so I decided to inflict my nonsense on you. If you've read all of it, doubtless I've said a few things that you didn't agree with, and that's okay. I'm sure if I read any of your essays about why Megaman is the greatest game series of all time or whatever, I'd find a few things to disagree with you too.
Oh, and I intentionally am not going to post my "fixes" for Breath of the Wild because I think the game isn't broken. It's a great game as it is. If I did talk about it, I would call it "improvements" because that's all they would be. But I've already written waaaaay too much about this and I promised at the start I wouldn't go full Tim Rogers and I feel like I'm close to crossing that line at this point
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
Is RDR2 on there because of cowboys or because the game is eventually fun? I played the first 5ish hours and didn't particularly enjoy the initial core gameplay loop (so. much. talking.) or the aggressive railroading of what I played so far.Friday wrote:right under Undertale and Red Dead Redemption 2
is this like anime where you need to slog through several episodes before it becomes good
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
RDR2 is definitely not your kind of game. The gaming takes a backseat to the story and the "experience." I wouldn't have recommended it to you.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to grinding level 19-23 humanoid mobs in Hillsbrad for wool drops while leveling my lockpicking on the footlockers.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to grinding level 19-23 humanoid mobs in Hillsbrad for wool drops while leveling my lockpicking on the footlockers.
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
so what you're saying is the experience is cowboys
Also, WoW mostly taught me to never read video game dialog and to never stop optimizing. It was a great human-to-universal-paperclip-creation-engine pipeline.
Also, WoW mostly taught me to never read video game dialog and to never stop optimizing. It was a great human-to-universal-paperclip-creation-engine pipeline.
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Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
sei wrote:so what you're saying is the experience is cowboys
Also, WoW mostly taught me to never read video game dialog and to never stop optimizing. It was a great human-to-universal-paperclip-creation-engine pipeline.
Yeah, the inverse of your case is Friday highly recommending RDR2 to me, and selling it by boiling down her praise to a simple two-word description: "cowboy simulator".
Re: Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild
Oh, that reminds me. A while back you asked me which you should play first, RDR1 or 2. I waffled a bit and kinda gave you the "both orders are fine" bit. Anyway, since then I've rethought my position and I absolutely believe RDR2 first.
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