I’ve had this for a while but only really started playing it regularly in the last 2 weeks. It’s a great game to relax to at night after work and the baby is in bed. My wife will stay and watch for a while and then go to bed and I’ll keep playing for an hour and head up myself.
One thing that I’ve really enjoyed, besides the vastness of the world, is the sound. It’s minimalist and fits the themes of the game very well.
Anyway, it’s just such a lovely game. It kind of takes me back to playing Link to the Past as a child.
I finished the last Divine Beast. I’m glad I left the one in Gerudo desert for last, because it was the hardest one, so it felt appropriate.
But let me comment on them and their role in the game. I think they exemplify a lot at the issue I was talking before. The game is 85% an exploration based open world game with total player freedom with some interesting solid systems for interaction. In that context, I actually imagined the Divine Beasts as things that would roam the open world more, in a big patrol, as you would have to follow them, and think where it’s possible to attack them and get in, with a few different locations and ways to possibly do it inside the possibility space that the big patrol would be. But instead, as you know, it’s just a linear setpiece quest the way you enter each, which is basically the opposite of what I imagined.
edit: for example, for the one who flies maybe you should have to attract it somehow to a place near the highest peaks so you can board it by gliding. Or another could shoot you on sight but overheat and shutdown when doing it, so you have to enter in the volcano area where it overheats for more time; or maybe use a foggy valley to be able to get close without being seen. Etc.
Uh. I was going to make a post criticizing the harsh difficulty jump of the game, but I was in the wrong. After finishing the 4 divine beast dungeons, a new Quest popped up so I thought that was the next main quest to do, but not, it’s an optional DLC quest line where you are limited to a single piece of heart, no divine beast powers, etc etc. I got the 4 fights and one of the dungeons before noticing my mistake, lol.
So after several attempts at getting my son interested in this game, it finally hooked him. And so I finally get to see more of it.
In my previous attempts, it was just me exploring a bit, finding some enemies, picking up their weapons, and using those to kill more enemies. And exploring some, and finding nothing.
Well, this time he took the controls from me, and he found something! There’s these ruins with laser turrets or something, and he got away from them and it was exciting! And then we found the first tower and set the story in motion, and he always skips all dialog since he can’t read yet, so I only have a vague idea of what’s going on, but it’s interesting to see him finally get hooked on this the way I got hooked on the original Zelda when I was visiting my cousin who had a NES back in the 80s. He really didn’t want to go to sleep the last couple of nights. He wanted to keep exploring.
It reminds me a LOT of the original game. Much more so than Link’s Awakening.
Yes, that’s why I know that we’re looking for four spirit thingies so that we can get the old man’s paraglider thingie. Thank god for spoken, and not easily skippable dialog!
I got him to the fourth temple yesterday. The first three were very easy. This one had me stumped. So I told him, let’s stop here for the night and think about it and maybe we can figure it out.
Now as I think about that seemingly impossible puzzle, I guess I’m at a crossroads. If I’m not able to figure it out, should this be a case like Ocarina of Time, in that, this is where we drop this game and stop playing it. We’re not smart enough to figure it out, so let’s move on to something else? I wonder if a 5 year old is even capable of taking that as an answer gracefully? Is that a good lesson to teach?
Or, since this is now the age of the internet, if I can’t figure it out, I should just cheat and look it up and right?
Well, in the old days you’d get stuck, go to school the next day, ask your friend, and get your answer. Or you’d get stuck for a month, and then read the answer in your Nintendo power magazine. So today the internet, what’s the difference?
I think it’s only an issue if your kid runs to the iPad without even trying it for a few minutes… my daughter started doing it playing Wii Harry Potter and my wife got irate with her that she wasn’t even trying. I sat down with her and worked her through problem solving but you know, some games are pretty obtuse.
Not sure I got stuck on BotW, but it’s very dependent on using an item in just the right way, like most of the games. But I’ve played almost all of them… I can see it being harder without that life experience.
In Ocarina of Time, I remember years later seeing someone, for example one puzzle, wave a stick at a fire, which lit the stick on fire. And I was just so surprised that was it. I mean, sure, that would be how it works in real life, but with game objects and the limited way things interact. In Ocarina of Time if you swing a big weapon against a wall, for instance, the wall doesn’t break, unless it’s programmed to. So having something arbitrary like that which wasn’t even part of my set of tools available to me, (as far as I knew) be the solution was just so off-putting, even though I found out about it years later.
Edit: I suppose if the solution in this case in BotW is similar then basically I just need to try a bunch of random stuff, just so that I know what Link is capable of and what he isn’t. I need to just throw random stuff out there as much as I can until I figure out what exactly is my toolset that’s actually available to me. In this case about how a column of water is supposed to work when frozen and raised up.
Or you walked away frustrated, because there were no magazines, there were no other friends with computers that you knew, for instance. Sometimes you can’t solve it so you have to go do something else.
You’re still on ‘tutorial plateau’ yeah, and don’t yet have the glider? You’re probably just missing something simple or overlooked a mechanic, so look it up if it comes to that (like here).
From memory each of the first four focuses on one of the powers you have, so you’ll go ‘aha!’ and be better equipped to face the hundred or so other shrine things in the game. :)
We figured it out on our own. As usual it was not satisfying because it was a case of the interface being poor at showing you your tools. Oh well, we’re past it, that’s what matters.
Can you go into details on where you got stuck? I think most people were actually overjoyed at the lack of tutorializing in botw. More recent previous games were annoyingly too hand holdy.
It was the trial where you turn water into a pillar of ice. The first thing I thought was putting the pillar under or on the other side, but the interface seemed to indicate that I couldn’t do that. So I created pillars on our side and tried climbing them, but they didn’t go high enough. So then we slept on it and we thought, well maybe some of the walls are climable, so we tried to jump on the walls to climb them but that didn’t work. Then I tried slowing down time on the gate while putting pillars in front of it, and somehow a pillar got created under the gate, lifting it up, even though I thought that was impossible.
My son was obsessed with this game all weekend, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t right there with him. I honestly can’t even believe this is from Nintendo. The same company that gave us Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess, the last two Zelda games I played.
For one thing, I’m still coming to grips with this huge world they’ve created here. And the many ways to traverse it. The Glider is one thing, I think that’s been done before in many games. The real unique feature in this open world is the ability of Link to pretty much climb whatever he comes across. I suppose you could say the Assassin’s Creed games have that, and … I guess that’s fair, kind of. Here it feels really different though, what with Link having limited stamina. Putting a limit on climbing somehow has the reverse effect of making it feel limitless. I can’t explain that. I’ll have to think about it some more.
And then what is with this game constantly trying to kill you? Again, is this really from Nintendo? It adds a sense of danger to the world that’s so uncharacteristic of them. Sometimes I’m only half paying attention to what my son is exploring as I look down at my phone to read articles or news or watch something on Netflix, so I sometimes look up and am baffled. Like when he was mining some minerals by bashing them and picking up the resulting loot, and he found this one rock that turned into a giant Gollum that tried to kill him. We reloaded that save game a dozen times as I tried to kill that thing, but we just don’t have the fire power and gave up. And then we come across this person who tells us about a clan that’s basically the bad guys and then tries to kill us. So we reload a save game and try to avoid people like that. And then last night we came across this shrine. We’ve successfully done about 12 shrines now and were feeling cocky. This one was called “A modest test of strength”. Holy shit. Talk about trying to kill the player. We used up all our melee weapons, and this thing still won’t die. Once again, we basically had to reload a save game and avoid it. We’ve had to do that a lot in this game, I tell ya. It’s crazy.
This game is magical. Just amazing. I know I keep coming back to the original Zelda on the NES, which doesn’t hold up these days, but that’s what this game feels like to me, in spirit.
Those Talus things are cool. They’re very resistant to most weapons but have a weak mineral spot on their backs. If you choose the right moment you can climb up their bodies and smash the spot with a hammer!
The game has so many amazing little interactions in it. Pretty excited for number two in a couple weeks! :)
Watch the Making of… stuff on Breath of the Wild when you’re done. They literally built this game as an NES-style Zelda before they made what you’re playing now.
This game is really something else. We find this giant enemy sleeping, so I’m trying to teach my son that I found that the left stick button let’s you sneak around, but of course that only makes him stubbornly not want to use that. So he takes our best sword and starts swing it around, as if practicing to take down this large monster.
Only his random swings bring down a giant pole by cutting it down. D’oh! The giant is awake! Run! As he runs, he looks around at the giant, who is groggy and looks around and sees the fallen pole and picks it up as a weapon and starts heading towards us! What?
Also, reading some of this thread earlier, and they really let me skip the tutorial about how to cook on the peninsula? I’ve been waiting forever for the game to teach us how to cook. I guess I’ll be waiting a long time.
We’ll see. I kind of like that we’re figuring everything out, even the game mechanics. It’s weird. Like we still haven’t figured out how to use the bow.
