I disagree specifically about this, because this is my favorite thing about BotW.
One of the main problems with the classic Zelda model is that rewards are terrible. In classic Zelda, a reward can either be :
- rupees, useless
- heart piece. Kind of nice, but severely diminishing value over time. And each incremental one makes no difference.
- bottle. Literally the best thing in the game, but there’s only 4 of them, and you know they’re gated behind something significant.
Disposable weapons means that there’s always a class of rewards that could be useful. Each one might not be specifically, but there is always at least potential for something useful. I think that in general, weapons are a little too easy to come by, so theyre diluted a bit, but the design is sound. (Eventually, you get easy access to the colliseum, which lets you farm and elemental weapon you want endlessly, but that’s kind of an end game problem.) I think a version where you always had a shitty version of the master sword would have worked better, because weapon pickups could be slightly rarer but generally better.
Also, I think they did a good job with clothes as high value, but non game breaking rewards.
I generally agree with a lot of the other critiques, but I felt they were mostly minor w/r/t to the overall experience. They grated on me by the end, but that was after like 60+ hours, so it’s hardly surprising. Everything in the game has diminishing returns, but without some RNG-equipment, I don’t really see how you fix that
The rain thing is, I think, the worst decision they made. Aside from the perma-rain zone, which was useful for level design purposes, there should have been a way to use sticky resin or some kind of consumable to counter rain. When so much of the game is built around the climbing /exploration experience, it just wasn’t a good idea to block that off for large chunks of time. In theory, the design could have told you “go do something else, like combat, until the rain ends” - almost like a day/night cycle, but the world layout meant that you were unlikely to be in a position where you could easily choose one instead of the other, and if you were halfway up a climb, well, sucks to be you I guess.