Weapon degradation was my least favorite part of BotW. It wasn’t the lack of weapons as much as it was spending fights flipping through menu screens 20 percent of the time. TotK obviously still has this, but once you fuse a weapon it does seem to last quite a bit longer. Also fusing weapons to see what they’ll do is a fun new angle.
The current system still does leave me with the issue of weapons that are ‘too good’ to use. There have also been a couple of quests where the reward is intended to be a special weapon, and my attitude has been ‘yeah I’ll get to that later’.
Since hearing this, I’ve taken a hard stance against saving special weapons and shields. There’ll always be a new one on the horizon, and I have yet to find myself in a combat situation where I wish I had a weapon I’d wasted on an easier fight.
The only exceptions have been making sure I have an axe to chop trees (for some reason, I haven’t found very many and nothing else seems to work on trees?) and a glowing shield to ambiently light dark places.
Also, I avoided the underground areas initially and that was a huge mistake!
(Not sure how spoilerific we’re intending to be, so just basic open world and power spoilers) It is absolutely chock full of resources compared to the surface and tha first quest down there gives you the final ability wheel power that is a huge convenience.
I think I played BOTW with a 2x durability mod. A decent balance between keeping the original spirit of the game, having to change weapons more or less commonly, but with a duration that made it less annoying.
I’m playing with an infinite durability mod now. Much less annoying, honestly.
Supposedly there is a way to repair non-unique weapons; you throw them into a monster that eats them and spits them back out. This is deliberate because sometimes it actually improves the weapon, giving it an attribute like +crit. It’s nice that’s there but again, I can’t be bothered with that inventory durability micromanagement crap.
I imagine that’s the case! But balance wise is an issue. Good weapons in the game are like consumables in other games, they are supposed to give you a boost in combat for x seconds (or x hits in this case). With infinite durability, once you get a really good sword, you can abuse it for the rest of the game.
I think the weapon durability mechanics are more about pushing the player to experience more things. If they really cared that much about combat balance they wouldn’t let you use infinite food items during combat, a mechanic that basically means once you build up a stockpile you can’t really die.
Yeah, agree. It feels like the world is a little more fleshed out than BotW (which was also a good game), and there is loads of room for imagination in how to approach obstacles.
It’s not just a cool game, it’s clever. Its use of emergent physics is unlike anything else, reminds me of halflife 2 when it first released. It constantly offers new ways to use those systems. Not in a metroidvania “you unlocked the new ability” sense, since you get everything but autobuild in the tutorial, but in new applications of those same abilities which you could have used since the beginning. It’s a merger of sandbox construction survival open world games (which I hate) and a free roaming RPG and it somehow works.
And absolutely none of it was required to make a Zelda game. The development and particularly QA for this enormous game must have been wild. They couldn’t improve the graphics so they went a different way.
There’s a growing consensus in response to this game. It’s just too good to be constrained by the switch hardware. Nintendo needs a switch 2. Even many Nintendo fanboys are buying the game just to emulate it like me.
Idk I’m blown away at how well it runs tbh. Sure, could be better (constant 60 would be ideal ofc), but so far I only had one instance of it slowing down to the point that it became a problem. And that went away for some reason after I died and respawned.
I would try emulation, but since I can’t transfer my save…eh. Not starting over. Also playing in bed is too comfy.
I do hope that the Switch 2 boosts performance of Switch 1 games, which, assuming they stay with the architecture (probably whatever nvidias “Thor” is?), at least should be possible
e: afair BotW ran only good on a WiiU emulator, since the engine was built and optimized for the WiiU. Do people overcome that with TotK with raw horsepower? I.e. what rig would you need to run this at a constant 60
So far this game has been a joy to play. Played several hour abs have clearly not made much progress on the main quest, but who cares when there are so many interesting little places to explore. It’s all very chill. And unlike the UbiMap model, I’m discovering things on my own.
I can’t get enough the the Support the President activities. It’s so silly but somehow I always want to help that guy out.
I have not looked at spoilers for fusing so I was tickled to find that fusing a honey comb to a weapon produced the expected results.
To say that I am not a fan of the building emphasis is probably an understatement at this point, 30 or so hours in… except for these. I love President Hudson! He should always be supported!
aw man, he seemed really energetic during the VGAs! Fun piece though, good overview. And that Nuts&Bolts line chef’s kiss
The bit about timelines and Aonuma being cagey makes me feel vindicated. Zelda timelines are pointless and made up on the spot.
Also
He’s worked on every title since 1998’s “Ocarina of Time,” often called the “Citizen Kane” of video games
So I’m a lot of hours in at this point, and still having a blast. My latest achievement was capturing and registering a Big Horse.
After a lot of trial and error, and using too many stamina potions to try and tame the damn thing, I’ve learned something about taming horses: tap L as fast as you can to soothe them once jumping on. I was relying on soothe animations to let me know when I should tap L again, but rapidly tapping it faster let me tame maybe the most difficult horse in the game with only my normal two circles of stamina.
The only persistant complaint I have is that sourcing and making meals and potions continues to take too long, even with the helpful recipe guide. After a drawn out adventure where I’ve depleted my stocks, it’s a bummer to have to plan out how to resupply.
