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Discussion Anyone else want botw 2 to be just a little more challenging after playing elden ring?

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For me, BotW's difficulty was perfect. Just enough amount of time to wrap your head around, and just enough effort to master. The feeling of flailing your tree stick against enemies who would one-shot you, only to 50 hours later coast around on the Master Cycle with 999 Ancient Arrows just making toast out of Guardians was awesome.

Sure, BotW2 will likely be much easier for me who has played BotW for heaven knows how many hours, but I don't really see myself as the core audience for that game anyway - the core audience for any game should imo be people coming into it for the first time.
 
If you want a a challenge in breath of the wild, take off the armor or use the gerudo veil, and don't heal. Every enemy will one shot you.
 
Not really. Not everything needs to be that hard. Plus BotW was already one of the harder Nintendo games.

I also feel like the puzzles add a type of challenge not seen in Elden Ring.
 
BlueManifest said:
It can have both
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Can it though?

It's common for people say that taking cool thing from one game and combining it with cool thing from another very different game will make the best game ever, but really, what you'd more likely get is an unfocused mess that tries to do everything and doesn't do any of it particularly well.
 
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I feel like a lot of the early streamer compilation videos was showing them repeatedly dying, often in quite amusing ways. Game was already hard, especially for a Zelda game where people used to the series tend to rarely die if at all.
 
BoTW's difficulty balance was great, and I say that as a pretty big fan of more difficult titles like Hollow Knight and the FromSoft catalogue.

If anything maybe add more creative combat challenges like Master Trials/One-Hit Exterminator/Eventide that really push you to approach combat in creative ways. Haven't finished all the DLC content yet but what I've played has been pretty impressive on that front and fits better with a Zelda game than straight Soulslike-style "get really good at dodging enemy patterns" system. Also yeah don't make Hard Mode DLC, that was wack.

jariw said:
His name isn't Lionel, it's Bruce. The reward is a Sheila.
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Welp, I've been playing too much Triangle Strategy, I officially can't hear Lionel in anything but that character's voice
 
Never felt that BOTW was too easy. Especially once the damn white guys started appearing on the overworld they're impossible to kill
 
I think I died more during the early parts of BOTW more than I did during the entirety of Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls 2 base game (yes I play INT builds don’t @ me)

However BOTW’s difficulty is basically trivialized once you clear a divine beast. Especially if your first is the Zora one like most people do

Can’t compare it with Elden Ring but I definitely think a lot of BOTW’s systems were easily broken and that was really apparent in terms of difficulty. Again you barely ever die once you clear your first divine beast, once you get a decent amount of ancient arrows the game is a cakewalk. The game could have had better balance in that aspect, Souls in general is probably the best example of game that does so without relying on level scaling since you’re forced to respect every encounter. Pausing to heal breaks the game, Skyward Sword had it right with the real time radial menu for potions. Food is very easy to hoard, it almost feels like you have unlimited fairies at some point. If they added food and removed hearts for the survival aspect I think it would have been more interesting if they just ripped off MGS3’s system of having to eat food to survive, if you don’t eat you’ll start to move sluggishly and lose health so have some kind of hunger meter for that.
 
No.

I love Elden Ring. But in words of dunkey: "Elden Ring enemy scaling is like they had one guy who was in charge of enemy scaling and he didn't show up to work during the entirety of this project".

Nintendo has already provided enough ways for people to make their playthroughs more challenging, sadly one locked behind the Ganondorf Amiibo in BoTW, the other is harder difficulties, or choosing to play with no armor, or restricting yourself to certain equipment. Just making the enemies harder and taking away accessibility problems is bad flawed game design and any game that chooses this design philosophy are only making worse games.

Lord Azrael said:
I think you are trying to make it into a game it is not. In Souls, combat is the focus. You WANT build customization, and you WANT to be rewarded with permanent upgrades that change the way you play. But BotW is all about scrapping it with what you have on hand. That's part of why weapons break, and probably why the only permanent upgrades you get are in aid of survivability/exploration. If you could customize and build up your character, you would have no incentive to mess around with the game's emergent systems.
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You could have both no problem. And the break system in BoTW was definitely busted in terms of item usage and re-obtaining certain weapons and armor. The system could had been much better and I would have had less of a hoarders mentality playing the game and feeling upset whenever my cool weapon I just got broke in 3 hits.

Needless to say, there is nothing and I mean absolutely NOTHING Zelda can learn from FromSoftware's game design. And I'm sick of people trying to drawing the comparisons, but I do know there is a lot FromSoftware can learn from Nintendo.

I love Elden Ring, I've beaten it twice already and have done almost everything you could do in my first playthrough. I'm not saying this as some overzealous Nintendo fan, but someone who isn't blind to the problems games have and what could be improved on.
 
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BlueManifest said:
It doesn’t have to be as hard but I would like atleast a few deaths from the boss fights

I would also like more things to find to in the world besides weapons, hearts and rupees

Are there any other changes your hoping Nintendo makes for zelda for future releases? I don’t think it would hurt the franchise to shake it up just a little more while still keeping the core of Zelda

I think elden ring needs a little bit of Zelda and Zelda needs a little bit of elden ring, something in between the 2
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No, I'm not all that skilled and had problems with Lynels and the Sword challenge final stages so that level of difficulty is alright for me lol. Some other options to make the enemies harder / more enemies on screen / less items to regain health / less heart containers (keyword: optional) are fine thought.
 
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BotW has "character builds" (i.e. set bonuses) which reward you for finding all pieces of an armor or weapon set and gathering enough materials to upgrade them. Like being a maxed-out Shiekah ninja who can unleash sneakstrikes and move quickly at night. Or an ancient warrior who's obtained enough guardian parts to craft armor and weapons and gain the ancient proficiency bonus.

These builds don't have the same depth as RPG classes, they're just more options for player expression and modifying difficulty. And since armor isn't breakable, they're valuable permanent rewards and there's a lot of flexibility in switching between let's say a heat-resistant build for the desert and a barbarian set for a test of strength shrine. I'd be excited to see if they take this further in the sequel (and finally give a set bonus for no rain slipping) / my 2 cents
 
Honestly OP, this isn't what you've asked, but I would be intrigued by a Strangers of Paradise style Zelda game that had more challenging combat. If they can make a Zelda musou game, I don't see why they can't make a Zelda Souls-like. I'm just not too keen on a mainline game going in that direction.
 
Nope. I actually found Breath of the Wild harder than Elden Ring (which is really easy by Souls standards).

I feel BotW had a decent balance to its challenge, which made exploration much more satisfying. Whereas outside of a couple bosses (most are really easy) in Elden Ring, most everything isn't a threat
 
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Aggrocrog said:
Honestly OP, this isn't what you've asked, but I would be intrigued by a Strangers of Paradise style Zelda game that had more challenging combat. If they can make a Zelda musou game, I don't see why they can't make a Zelda Souls-like. I'm just not too keen on a mainline game going in that direction.
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Yea I would be fine with a spin off too, I don’t feel like it would get as much dev attention as mainline though that I would want
 
It seems a lot of people forgot. Don't you guys remember when Botw got released? EVERYONE was dying left and right and especially against guardians and when encountering Lynels for the first time. Heck, people died a lot to normal enemies. It's just people got more experienced, adapted and it got "easy".

Besides, the Sword trials was definitely challenging, especially the Master trials.
 
I hope they add some enemies that are as difficult as lynels but with different mechanics such as iron knuckles, darknuts, ball and chain guards, new guardian(s), and aeralfos.
 
BotW rules because it's more focused on exploration than combat. I wouldn't want to play it if there was an expectation for me to be any good at the action parts.
 
The only thing Zelda needs to take from Elden Ring is the stuff the open world is filled with. Castles, dungeons, ruins, etc.
 
Yes. But not too much. I cant play elden ring because i have about 2 hours per week were i can play. And i dont want to use those 2 hours to fight 2 to 3 bosses and thats it. You can hop into botw play 20 mins and can accomplish alot. I guess it will be the same with botw2. Not to hard but harder than botws enemies for sure.
 
BotenAnna said:
My memories of BotW combat are clouded with horrible menuing and being really unsatisfied with the world scaling. I know difficulty discourse is all the rage, but that combat system suffered from just plain old poor design. You could change how consumables work which would make it more difficult I guess, but not by much and it's more a consequence of making the combat not slow to a crawl or have damage with consequences. Fixing world scaling to be less, well just kinda stupid, would also probably end up makin the game easier but overall give a better experience. The overall difficulty has little to do with it outside of consumables imo, and the consumable issues aren't really entirely tied to difficulty.
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You start as a nobody and turn into a god. Which is how it should be. If the enemies stay the same as you then why the heck scaling at all? Why new weapons if the enemies will lvl with you? Why new skills? If the result is that the enemies will stay equaly strong as you on any time then why do we need any progression? How is it a progression if you are always on par with the enemy?
 
Irene said:
For me, BotW's difficulty was perfect. Just enough amount of time to wrap your head around, and just enough effort to master. The feeling of flailing your tree stick against enemies who would one-shot you, only to 50 hours later coast around on the Master Cycle with 999 Ancient Arrows just making toast out of Guardians was awesome.

Sure, BotW2 will likely be much easier for me who has played BotW for heaven knows how many hours, but I don't really see myself as the core audience for that game anyway - the core audience for any game should imo be people coming into it for the first time.
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I really like how you phrased this because this is exactly how the game made me feel and Tunic is giving me that exact same feeling right now, down to stick, robot and more powerful weapon. I'll refrain from spoilers but I see a good amount of BOTW DNA in this game. 😄
 
Irene said:
For me, BotW's difficulty was perfect. Just enough amount of time to wrap your head around, and just enough effort to master. The feeling of flailing your tree stick against enemies who would one-shot you, only to 50 hours later coast around on the Master Cycle with 999 Ancient Arrows just making toast out of Guardians was awesome.

Sure, BotW2 will likely be much easier for me who has played BotW for heaven knows how many hours, but I don't really see myself as the core audience for that game anyway - the core audience for any game should imo be people coming into it for the first time.
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Spot on. The base game was just perfectly balanced. At most I'd enjoy a few optional hard world bosses that feel insurmountable for most players until 50+ hours in. Silver Lynels might fit that requirement, but I'd have preferred a brand new face.

I will say that I do want a better "master mode" for my second round through the game. They just need to re-think the entire hard-mode experience altogether, because the way they implemented it really missed the mark. It didn't feel like the same game. I always wanted to skip encounters because almost every time you'd end up with less or worse gear than when you started, plus a few pieces of crafting material. Then you hunt out the floating platforms for easy-win items - a band-aid solution by the designers. Leaning heavily into attack+ foods helped, but just generally it wasn't as fun.

I really think it a simple fix would be making enemies hit harder, very careful use of regenerating health, [edit] but most importantly keep enemy health the same. That'd make combat feel more urgent, and allow less mistakes, but wouldn't force you to exhaust every weapon in your arsenal to take out sponges.
 
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karmitt said:
I will say that I do want a better "master mode" for my second round through the game. They just need to re-think the entire hard-mode experience altogether, because the way they implemented it really missed the mark. It didn't feel like the same game. I always wanted to skip encounters because almost every time you'd end up with less or worse gear than when you started, plus a few pieces of crafting material. Then you hunt out the floating platforms for easy-win items - a band-aid solution by the designers. Leaning heavily into attack+ foods helped, but just generally it wasn't as fun.

I really think it could have been as simple as making enemies hit harder, and careful use of regenerating health. That'd make combat feel more urgent, and allow less mistakes, but wouldn't force you to exhaust every weapon in your arsenal to take out sponges.
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See, I disagree here, and would have liked Master Mode to be even more different. Specifically, they could have made it so you could only eat at a cookpot, you could only change your clothes in a town or at a campfire, that kind of thing. I think making enemies damage sponges (with regenerating health wtf) is just a very.. cheap? way of making a "hard mode". A mode that leaned more into the survival aspect of the game that required you to plan ahead for the terrain/environment would be more interesting. Especially as it can be assumed that the player has already gone through the world once.
 
catonkatonk said:
See, I disagree here, and would have liked Master Mode to be even more different. Specifically, they could have made it so you could only eat at a cookpot, you could only change your clothes in a town or at a campfire, that kind of thing. I think making enemies damage sponges (with regenerating health wtf) is just a very.. cheap? way of making a "hard mode". A mode that leaned more into the survival aspect of the game that required you to plan ahead for the terrain/environment would be more interesting. Especially as it can be assumed that the player has already gone through the world once.
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My point was that them being damage sponges was the main problem. I Should have been more clear. Having the same health, dealing more damage, and careful use of regen would raise the stakes but still keep the base gameplay loop intact.

I’m not saying that my idea is the most exciting. Just a small change that wouldn’t break the game as much.

I agree with you 100% tho. A more fundamental change in design would be better - locking out eating during combat would definitely be a fun one.
 
Personally I just want to see more of it before even wondering about difficulty compared to From Software games.
 
Dardan Sandiego said:
Taking notes for my "Anyone else want botw 2 to be just a little less challenging after playing kirby?" thread
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Kirby-level challenge is reserved for BOTW3, following Link's apotheosis in the climax of BOTW2, the zenith of which sees him ascend to being some sort of Fierce Deity.

As for the topic of difficulty in general, it can be a rather nebulous subject, as the idea of difficulty could relate to sundry elements; the question is one of what is altered to create changes in difficulty as such and why.

And then there's the question of how different the systems could turn out. One might expect BOTW2 to iterate upon the systems of its predecessor, rather than completely overhaul them.

Even something such as the suggested consumption of food in game time rather than as a free action, thus necessitating a level of strategy to regenerate health, seems like a simple change but has profound impacts in different areas, even as it leaves most of the game systems largely intact.

Something like that would impact the game at a base level, but you could also implement different artifacts one could acquire, which effect Link himself. For instance, one could structure his stats to follow a glass cannon archetype.

Though I'm partial to the idea of implementing side quests, dungeons, mini-dungeons, bosses, and the like, which can, themselves, be rewards for the player and offer tests in different areas of gameplay and ability.

Enemy variety can also play a role, necessitating different strategies, especially as environment comes into play.

But that's not so much an idea of difficulty as an overarching idea, more of the different elements that might come into play.
 
In other words, do I want to be excluded from playing Zelda because of my physical capability?
Fuck no.
 
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Thinking about it further, I feel like the question of difficulty in Breath of the Wild is fundamentally...
It's just not the right question.
There will be tough enemies in the world, and easy ones, and you can fight all of them, or you can avoid most of them. You can make yourself immensely powerful, or you can choose not to do that.
 
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God no, gaming doesn't need more 'From software' clones atm. It needs neither the attitude of the devs nor the "communities" that sprout up around those games. (I despise From Software on principal, mostly from a little too much close contact from rabid fans of theirs, people go SUPER NASTY when they think your ideas threaten their fun)
 
jkm23 said:
God no, gaming doesn't need more 'From software' clones atm. It needs neither the attitude of the devs nor the "communities" that sprout up around those games. (I despise From Software on principal, mostly from a little too much close contact from rabid fans of theirs, people go SUPER NASTY when they think your ideas threaten their fun)
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That was me. Played Demons Souls on release and it was great and the Atlus boards were super cool. Then after Dark Souls came out, there was a shift as it really hit mainstream. By the time Bloodborne came out, I just wanted nothing to do with the community. It is actively leaving a bad taste in my mouth. And this Delma one one drawn to Demons cause of the old school Castlevania/Zelda 2 vibes and difficulty.

I just can’t anymore… it’s like when people don’t shut up about the MCU that My body just has a natural aversion.
 
I definitely wouldn’t mind there being some super secret bosses hidden somewhere in the world that are really challenging with an awesome reward to go with it. I wouldn’t want every boss to be ‘Elden Ring’ difficult, but I’d 100% be okay with a select few optional bosses being like that.

But the one thing that BoTW needs that Elden Ring has in aces? VARIETY. There are so many different types of enemies and bosses that the game constantly surprises you with and keeps everything fresh. It really excels at this and that’s the one area where BoTW failed imo. If I could have anything in the sequel above all else (aside from timeline placement, please!) then it would have a good variety of enemies and bosses.
 
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No, I don’t want to play a game as hard as Elden Ring ever again and I found BOTW to actually be in a sweet spot of challenging but still fun
 
Rareware said:
I definitely wouldn’t mind there being some super secret bosses hidden somewhere in the world that are really challenging with an awesome reward to go with it. I wouldn’t want every boss to be ‘Elden Ring’ difficult, but I’d 100% be okay with a select few optional bosses being like that.
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I would love this too
 
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Rareware said:
But the one thing that BoTW needs that Elden Ring has in aces? VARIETY. There are so many different types of enemies and bosses that the game constantly surprises you with and keeps everything fresh. It really excels at this and that’s the one are where BoTW failed imo. If I could have anything in the sequel above all else (aside from timeline placement, please!) then it would have a good variety of enemies and bosses.
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This too
 
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HockeyBird said:
No, I don't need every game to be exactly like the game I just recently played.
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It's funny you say this, since there's a portion of the Breath of the Wild fanbase that likes to Boss Baby everything that even vaguely resembles it, and asks for other games to take stuff from BotW 😅
jkm23 said:
God no, gaming doesn't need more 'From software' clones atm. It needs neither the attitude of the devs nor the "communities" that sprout up around those games. (I despise From Software on principal, mostly from a little too much close contact from rabid fans of theirs, people go SUPER NASTY when they think your ideas threaten their fun)
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Those folks are a small, vocal minority. Most of the fans would rather help you out, and get you finding some enjoyment in the thing they enjoy.
 
No, I don't play action games. And Breath of the Wild's joy is in its exploration. It's greatest strength and greatest weakness was the fact that so many places was only as important as you wanted to be. Climbing and exploration and reaching a peak only to have a boss one shot me and bring me all the way back to the beginning doesn't feel me with joy. It makes me want to turn off the game and never open it again.
 
not a little, a lot. Zelda has been far too easy for far too long, even with master modes. I don't mean just the combat, puzzles/progression as well. If BotW2 doubled its difficulty it would still be an easy game. At the very least, make the master modes actually a meaningful bump in challenge
 
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I find Elden Ring to be amateurish compared to BOTW in nearly every respect. From a game design standpoint it falls short in so many ways that I'm puzzled that the gaming world is trying so hard to anoint it as its superior. The whole thing feels quite forced.
 
Botw was no cake walk to start with. It even has it's share of bullshit one hit KOs.

A great example of what not to do is Master Mode. That was the most unpleasant gaming experiences I've ever had. Just increasing enemy health and damage does not equal more fun.

So not that kind of 'challenge', but they should look at refining some things.

-Being able to eat your entire pouch of food while you're paused should go away. Have an animation play in real time for healing, and or limit the amount of food you can eat at a time. Have a smaller limit on the amount of meals you can carry.

-Champion abilities are busted, on top of not being very fun. Well, Ravali's gale was fun, but extremely busted. So instead, give smaller utility abilities that you can use more often.

-Rework armor. There's no downside in wearing your tankiest armor all the time. Maybe it should increase stamina consumption, or decrease movement speed.
 
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