Breath of the Wild

Thoughts on Breath of the Wild

Like everyone else I love this game. I can't get enough of it and I might need to get another Switch just so my girlfriend isn't taking it from me so she can play. 

I've been told that I should share some of my thoughts on game design and this is as good of a game as any to start with. So here we go. I'm not going to talk about the story beyond the tutorial zone, but rather the mechanics and design choices that were made.

This game is great, they solve many of my grips about recent Zelda games and really focus in on the core experience. By this I mean exploration, adventure, and interesting combat. 

Removing unneeded items

In past Zelda games you would get an item from a temple and it would be little more than a glorified key, they rarely were any good in combat (looking at you Twilight Princess's Steal Ball and Top). The best example of this was the Biggoron's Sword from Ocarina of Time. It was a rather long quest to get this item, but in the end it was little more than a fun quest to check a box in your inventory for most players. It was never used, but was cool to get. 

In Breath of the Wild they toss that out the window, you get your standard gear (sword, shield, bow), to fight with. The only other item to carry over are endless bombs from your Sheikah Slate. A welcome addition as they aren't used for combat often. (You can drop them when gliding, and you do need to blow up some enemies that can't be hurt by standard weapons.) Their damage isn't impressing anyone, you risk hurting yourself, and they have a cooldown that is just long enough to make you want to use something else. That being said they do give you a way to fight back if you do run out of weapons or are to low to get close to an enemy. 

Other than that you don't have much in the way of items, its all about different weapons and arrows. This ties one of the things that I didn't like, the weapon degradation.

Weapon degradation

This has been the biggest complaint about the game itself, and I have been told that high tier items don't break but will still degrade (I haven't gotten any yet so I can't speak to this). As for the degradation itself I'm a bit torn, on the one hand it does feel crappy when your weapon breaks and you have to use a weapon you don't like. On the other it encourages you to experiment and be resourceful in a way that using a single weapon doesn't. It does feel good when you'r weapon is about to break, and you throw it at their head, knock them down then use their own weapon against them. But it also encourages you to use the weakest you have unless your in a major fight. It might be nice if they lasted longer or some sort of system that would drop a weapon that is almost broken for a fresh identical weapon if you find one. This would help keep you out of the inventory screen and back into the game play. This is clearest to me when you look at your shield, you can use this to shield surf and its really cool and helps movement feel nice. But it can damage your shield, good shields can be hard to find so it makes you think about this boring choice when it would be nice to just let me feel cool and get to my next objective faster.

Shrines

Shrines are cool, it is nice to know that you can do any shrine as soon as you find it. Many of them have a cool little puzzle for you to solve, but I found most of these slightly to easy, this is fine at times as you don't need a mini dungeon for everything. But the ones that use the Switch's motion controls for a tilt a ball game can be frustrating. I never liked those when I had the real thing in my hand and now with the disconnect that comes from using a controller it isn't any better. I assume that the WiiU version of the game uses the joysticks to move it around and I would love that option on the Switch. They are solvable and for many of the potentially more frustrating shrines the designers put in some cool tricks within the shrine that you can use to circumvent the puzzle that I won't spoil here. These require you to think outside of the box and were the real join to solve.

Openness Movement and guiding players

As I am sure you have heard you can do most anything right out of the gate, it's nice and lets me explore every glowing light I can find. I can even climb up any wall in a way that makes the old hookshot laughable. Shield surfing is fun, but I don't feel like I can do that as often as I want to. The most ingenious part of this is how the designers subtly guide you. Each tower is a goal and from each tower/high point in the world you are shown something that looks interesting. This causes you to want to head to another objective without the need for the game flooding your mini map or constantly harassing you with a fairy. I'm willing to bet that they looked at the highest points on the map and made sure to put several interesting things close enough by so that you always find something new.

This leads me to the use of color, often times in games you will see a ledge that is white/yellow means you can climb it. In Breath of the Wild you can climb anything, but they use bright orange as the primary guide color. The only places you see this in the game are with lava, fire, or if it is a map objective for you to follow. It's also bright enough so that when you are looking out over the world you can notice it right away enough when in a thunderstorm. Other colors (green and yellow mostly) are used to give a magical feel to a new area and can been seen off in the distance too, generally a forest or peaceful place where bright orange wouldn't fit.

I did want to mention horses as your mount is core to any 3D Zelda game. And I'm not sure how I feel about them yet, it is fun to sneak up on a wild horse and tame them, but in order to keep the horse you need to bring it back to a stable. These can often be very far from the horse you tamed and it just isn't worth it to bring them all the way back. This is exasperated by the fact that horses have three different stats (that I don't think you can change) and you can only find out what these are (other than speed) after bringing the horse back to the stable. Even then I'm not sure what the other two stats do. The game also lets you have more than one horse, but I don't see any reason to use more than one, they don't seem to need a break, to rest/heal up and in my experience a all their stats seem to be around the same level so you will never say "I'll take my horse with high strength this time" as it will also have high speed to match it. It's nice to get around but you spend a lot of time calming it down and can be thrown off. This can lead to some exiting moments where you have to fight the enemies you hoped to run past, and I do love the mounted combat in this game.

Enemies and bosses

When you first start out the enemies can feel really daunting and you will die. As you get some clothing and a few hearts this is much less of a problem. Each encounter is still set up in an interesting way, using explosive barrels or look outs that you need to take care of first. But it can feel a bit repetitive when most enemies are just slightly different versions of the same thing. They might have more health, come back from the grave or have different weapons but largely its the same 4-6 enemies all through out the over world. The first time you see a moblin can be very intimidating, and I still don't feel confident around guardians so it's not all the same thing each time.

Bosses help vary this, though they are rare and can take a bit of work something like a rock giant can be really fun to fight. Others however are simply about kiting, avoiding the tree they pick up, and hit their weak spot to knock them over. They drop cool loot as if you aren't over/under geared it can be a really fun fight. 

One thing that the game does is have an event called a blood moon, every so often the blood moon will rise and respawn all defeated enemies (including bosses) this can even resurrect anything you have recently slain and are still standing on. I don't imagine this works in temples, but I haven't been around to check yet. It does allow the world to stay populated, but also like your efforts aren't nullified as soon as you leave the area. It can also let you farm loot from bosses or just experience a fun fight as often as you would like.

tldr;

The game is great, but not perfect it does exactly what it set out to do and I hope we don't need to wait another 7 years for Zelda to come back. Now I'm going to go play Zelda before my girl friend gets home and claims it's her turn to play.

Don't forget to be awesome!