So, picking up from the Switch thread:
But I do like these kinds of games, and Zelda very specifically did sell me a system! (100 hours in Skyrim, 150 in Witcher, 200 in various Souls games).
The bit in your description I’d argue most strongly is the combat. It’s nothing like Dark Souls. First, on average you get to use a weapon for maybe 10 hits before it breaks, and has to be replaced with something else. This means that combat is punitive rather than rewarding. What’s the point? It also means that you’re constantly jumping from one weapon to another, so it’s hard to learn the moveset, or how to counter specific enemies with specific weapons. Given weapon X, do I have an advantage in reach over this bogoblin with a weapon Y? Who knows, odds are it’s a matchup I’ve never tried before. Another thing I’m finding really clunky about the combat is only having a dodge available when locked to a target.
Of course a system doesn’t need to be like Dark Souls to be good. But for whatever reason I haven’t been enjoying the combat in Zelda anywhere near as much as the average melee combat game.
Wacky emergent gameplay never happens to me in any game, or at least not at least anywhere as often as to some people :( It’s a bit like reading other people’s accounts of Crusader Kings 2, where they seem to have 50x as much stuff happen in game. So the failure to engage fully with the sandbox systems is almost certainly my failing, not the game’s.
Fans of Zelda seem to describe this wonderful world dense with delightful little surprises that really make you want to explore every nook and cranny. I’d love to see that, but instead it feels like I must be playing a different game :-/ To me the world is empty, boring, and meaningless. There’s no sense of place at all, nothing that makes me care about the world, not even any spectacular vistas to ooh and aah over. (Ok, it might have a bit more character than Shadow of Mordor did. But still, it’d rank pretty low on my list of great open worlds)/
“Tight” is really not how I’d describe it. The main gameplay components I’ve seen are map traversal/exploration, combat, and puzzles. I touched on combat earlier. What about the other gameplay?
The problem I have with the exploration is that all movement in the game is soooo sloooow, which takes all the fun out of it.
For years we’ve mocked third person action games for the ridiculous parkouring climbing systems that provide only an illusion of player agency due to having a few pre-set and signposted paths. But turns out that there’s a pretty good reason why designers do that: it lets the players get to actual gameplay faster. Yes, it’s cool that you can theoretically climb anything in Zelda, with good route selection and stamina management. If climbing was 5x faster, maybe that would be true in practice. But climbing in the game as implemented is so tedious that I never want to climb anything again.
Of course there is a faster climb in the form of the jump, so it obviously wouldn’t break the game. It’s just that it’s artificially locked behind a draconian stamina cost. Likewise you’re locked to a painfully slow walk, since the sprint is also artificially limited. Yes, I could any upgrade points to stamina to mitigate this, but that’s going to take a lot of time. There’s something to be said for making the player feel a sense of progression by starting them off weak, but these kinds of quality of life things are just not the right way to do it.
Likewise the puzzles are really kind of sloppy. The puzzles mostly have solutions that are trivial to see, with the main challenge being a fight with the controls to implement it. So for example freeze a metal ball in place, beat it with a hammer to store momentum, look at the results. Repeat until you guess the right angle and strength. Or the Korok seed “puzzles”, where it seems the only thing you need to realize is that a puzzle exists in the first place. (Though even so this is the strongest part of the game; just don’t think it’s a particularly good example of puzzle design).
Oh, wait. There’s one more gameplay component. Inventory management and crafting. Unless I’m missing something, both of these are really clunky. The inventory UI is disastrous even by the low standards of the genre, and I don’t remember seeing a crafting system that forced you to select the individual ingredients from an unsorted menu every single time.