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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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Throw more enemies in (along with different combinations) to vary up your approaches, but a big fat no to increasing the base difficulty of combat.
 
No.

Soulslike games are vastly overrated and more often than not, elden ring included, all you need to do is grind unless you want to do flashy twitch videos or speedruns.

BotW was masterpiece and leaps and bounds better in so many ways compared to Elden Ring. Not all games need to be similar in presentation, style, mechanics or difficulty.

So again. No.
 
I enjoyed Elden Ring, and the difficulty had nothing to do with my enjoyment, probably the opposite. Had it been a bit easier I probably would have enjoyed it a little bit more. - I though BotW was challenging enough and not over the the top like FS games often are. I dont think BotW2 would become better by becoming more difficult.

With that said I have nothing against the idea that there should be more difficulties though - both harder and easier - if they decided to add more difficulties that's great for everyone.
 
Timppis said:
overrated
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Instead of taking after Elden Ring, I'd like BotW2 to take after Demon's Souls. What I mean is that I want it to look like a PS2 game with bloom lighting and a magic system that makes all the bosses super easy. No, I'm not joking, these are things that I love about Demon's Souls. Give me Fire Storm in BotW2!
 
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"Challenge" in BotW is highly subjective after the plateau. From there on, the player decides the challenge. Going directly to Ganon with a couple of tree branches and no armor will be much more challenging than getting the divine beasts+full armor upgrades+finding all the best weapons before beating Ganon. It's up to the player to decide how to approach the game.

When I played BotW, one thing I did was to enter the Zora domain from over the hills in the north - and without gear/boosts that would give me climbing benefits in the rain. It took a loooong time, and it was extremely challenging - not because of enemy challenges but because of the weather challenge and finding a path where I could proceed.
 
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BOTW’s difficulty is such an interesting topic. On my first play through I’ve wished that the difficulty stayed as hard as the beginning of the game all the way through, but then I’ve seen people that had never played a videogame in their life beat the damn thing by themselves and realized that hey, maybe they did hit a difficulty sweetspot that allows the most amount of people to enjoy the game. Beyond my personal preferences, that’s such a wise move, design wise. As someone that hates difficulty options in games, I’ll be happy if BOTW2 hits the same sweet spot.
 
Kongo B said:
BOTW’s difficulty is such an interesting topic. On my first play through I’ve wished that the difficulty stayed as hard as the beginning of the game all the way through, but then I’ve seen people that had never played a videogame in their life beat the damn thing by themselves and realized that hey, maybe they did hit a difficulty sweetspot that allows the most amount of people to enjoy the game. Beyond my personal preferences, that’s such a wise move, design wise. As someone that hates difficulty options in games, I’ll be happy if BOTW2 hits the same sweet spot.
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Going by elden ring sales and some of the people I’ve seen buying it, it looks like casual players are even enjoying the challenge

I saw kids come into GameStop and ask employees where they should spend their stat pts

Challenge is becoming more mainstream imo
 
Yes, please. It doesn't need to be ER difficult but more difficult than BOTW would be a good start.

Also fix the broken inventory that let you heal whenever you want and you were completely out of danger while doing so. I don't think the difficulty in BOTW was balanced well, the game became weirdly easier the longer it went on.
 
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BlueManifest said:
Going by elden ring sales and some of the people I’ve seen buying it, it looks like casual players are even enjoying the challenge

I saw kids come into GameStop and ask employees where they should spend their stat pts

Challenge is becoming more mainstream imo
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BOTW is mechanically harder than previous Zelda games, but here's the thing: you can't get stuck in that game. It's the most accessible Zelda game, which is counter-intuitive since we usually tie accessibility to technical difficulty AKA button pressing + problem solving.
Dropping OOT at the water temple or dropping Dark Souls 1-3 at a mid-game boss is effectively the same thing: "I can't get over this hurdle, there's no way around it, i'm stuck". BOTW removed that entirely. Haven't played Elden Ring, but from what I'm hearing it pretty much did the same, so you don't have to kill that boss to go further in the game.
 
I was a little short with my initial post; I want to expand on it.

BOTW's difficulty is inherently puzzle-based. Even the challenges in combat are puzzle-ish in nature based on your surroundings and what you have available to you, either nearby or what's in your weapons stash. Even blue Bokoblins could be annoying if you're underprepared. And someone said above, BOTW is incredibly accessible in that you'll never get stuck.

Elden Ring's challenge is the same as Dark Souls' challenge at the end of the day; it's in a boss's obtuse attack patterns or level layouts, where you can easily get ganged up on by enemies you didn't see. The game is designed to have many of those moments, and having just finished Volcano Manor nothing is going to change, I don't think. There's nothing to Elden Ring's gameplay aside from combat.

Enemies softlocking you into a corner underneath a tent in an enemy hideout is bullshit and I don't want BOTW to become bullshit. If anything, I want more enemies that take a more specific skillset to defeat. Rather than walking up to anything and hitting it with a sword, I want more aerial enemies you need to hit with arrows or some type of elemental thing you can create, like a lightning storm or a wind turbine by fire, enemies that rely on some type of element, like an expanded version of the Wizzrobes, more enemies that can be dismembered like the guardians, etc. Just go wild with it. Because the rest of BOTW is pretty much perfect.
 
Funny, I had the same thought as OP now that I've played Elden Ring. I feel like I got a lot better at reading enemy patterns and thinking more mechanically about it. So my first thought after that was whether BotW-2 might become too easy now in that department. Especially when there will be only so many kind of enemies compared to the sheer amount in Elden Ring.

Still, I trust the Zelda team to knock it out of the park on other fronts, if they've gained my trust on one thing it's superb game design.
 
Yavga said:
Funny, I had the same thought as OP now that I've played Elden Ring. I feel like I got a lot better at reading enemy patterns and thinking more mechanically about it. So my first thought after that was whether BotW-2 might become too easy now in that department. Especially when there will be only so many kind of enemies compared to the sheer amount in Elden Ring.

Still, I trust the Zelda team to knock it out of the park on other fronts, if they've gained my trust on one thing it's superb game design.
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Learning how to fight an enemy is just so much better than being able to easily kill them, difficulty is so important for engaging combat, it gives you more reason to improve your character too

Like if zelda had more challenging optional bosses maybe it would push me to find all the hearts instead of only half of them
 
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BotW did have a small amount of that kind of gameplay with Lynels and Hinoxes. I wouldn't be averse to seeing a wider variety of enemies like those in the sequel.
 
fourfourfun said:
I'd like a better Master Mode, would have to be said.
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I’m ok with difficulty settings as long as the player is rewarded for playing on harder settings, like being able to find gear and items you can’t find on easy, or maybe the boss will have a different final form on hard than it does on easy

If hard has exactly the same rewards as easy then I don’t feel like I’m gaining anything by playing on hard
 
BlueManifest said:
I’m ok with difficulty settings as long as the player is rewarded for playing on harder settings, like being able to find gear and items you can’t find on easy, or maybe the boss will have a different final form on hard than it does on easy

If hard has exactly the same rewards as easy then I don’t feel like I’m gaining anything by playing on hard
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Content being locked behind difficulty settings is one of the worst offenders when it comes to accessibility. Nobody should miss out on content just because they don't want to play on higher difficulty settings.
 
MissingNo. said:
Content being locked behind difficulty settings is one of the worst offenders when it comes to accessibility. Nobody should miss out on content just because they don't want to play on higher difficulty settings.
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This x100. Fuck that bullshit practice. I always hated it.
 
BlueManifest said:
Like if zelda had more challenging optional bosses maybe it would push me to find all the hearts instead of only half of them
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This, along with your question about the reward for beating that first Lynel make me think that we're on different pages completely here.

I got all the hearts because I wanted to get all the shrines, and I wanted to get all the shrines because the gameplay nugget found within most of them was fun. Like the best part of the game. That you never knew what you were going to get when you saw a Shrine on the background and went after it just made it better for me.

What I'm saying is that for me, the biggest reward the game gives you is gameplay.

On a broader level, I'd hate the design philosophy of, "enemy tough: go find better gear", or "enemy tough: grind." That is awful to me. And totally antithetical to Breath of the Wild's philosophy of, "You can do anything the game has to offer almost immediately, just choose what you want to do, when you want to do it"

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"If hard has exactly the same rewards as easy then I don’t feel like I’m gaining anything by playing on hard"
Like...
What you're gaining is... More fun, because it's more challenging.. and that's what you wanted? And if that's not any more fun to you, then, you shouldn't do it??
I don't get this at all!
 
Absolutely not. As someone who just decided they’ve had enough of Elden Ring’s difficulty, it’s the last thing I want.

BOTW2 could use two things - more enemy variety and a more steady difficulty curve. It was tough to start, and got easy once you hit enough shrines.
 
Everyone has already said that BOTW would benefit from Elden Ring's enemy variety, so...yeah!

I would also add that it would be nice if some of the later combat had real stakes to it. Early on in BOTW, the combat was engaging because you had all these piddly weapons and you couldn't afford to just run into any battle with them and risk running out of valuable gear. By the end of the game, your arsenal is packed to the gills with high level gear that is more durable and as such the combat begins to feel monotonous. Do something to keep the fights engaging throughout. I don't know that would be, but I'm sure the best developers in the world at Nintendo can figure it out.
 
I'd like Botwo to be a little more balanced. BotW is brutal in the first few hours but the enemies scale very poorly.
 
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catonkatonk said:
If hard has exactly the same rewards as easy then I don’t feel like I’m gaining anything by playing on hard"
Like...
What you're gaining is... More fun, because it's more challenging.. and that's what you wanted? And if that's not any more fun to you, then, you shouldn't do it??
I don't get this at all!
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Think of arcades, where you would get tickets based on the score you got, what if a score of 1 got the same amount of tickets as a score of 1,000,000. Why would strive to get a higher score if the amount of tickets you got was the same

This is why I don’t like all games with difficulty settings, I’m not getting anymore for completing it than I would if I played on easy
 
BlueManifest said:
I’m ok with difficulty settings as long as the player is rewarded for playing on harder settings, like being able to find gear and items you can’t find on easy, or maybe the boss will have a different final form on hard than it does on easy

If hard has exactly the same rewards as easy then I don’t feel like I’m gaining anything by playing on hard
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It did have the weird floating platforms and the gold variety enemies, but I wasn't a fan of how much it impacted on the Master Sword Trials.
 
I haven't played Elden Ring, but:

I too would like it if BotW2 included some harder challenges, kind of, but I do not want the game to ape the way FromSoft does things. Most of From's games since Demon's Souls are variations on the same core foundation: that of punishing, defense-oriented combat. It's not a type of game that favors on-the-fly experimentation; if anything, the threat of losing progress breeds caution.

Comparatively, BotW is a game entirely about discovery and weird systemic interactions. It's a much more fluid game that favors improvisation and scrappy fights with the tools you happen to have in hand, rather than the long-term planning games with builds have. In that sense, I have trouble thinking what Souls games can teach BotW (and vice-versa), since they're aiming for completely opposite experiences. To me, Souls games work best in David vs. Goliath, 1v1 boss encounters, while BotW's combat shines when Link is juggling a number of enemies at the same time.

There is wiggle room still for making the combat more intrinsically rewarding without refocusing the game entirely around combat, however: what I would see as a net improvement is the addition of more tools that increase the skill ceiling of the game. The swordfighting as it is right now is the most boring part of combat to me, so I wouldn't mind it if there were more techniques to find, or weapon mastery levels that open up the moveset progressively as you advance through the game, for example. In terms of powers, take notes from other games in which you can mess with fodder enemies in interesting ways (Dishonored, Doom, or even NMHIII, for example). Let me manually throw enemies against each other, slow them down outside of Flurry Rush, or create a decoy that attracts their attention. I don't know how well Elden Ring executes on these ideas, if at all, but crow-control tools seem like a good fit for open-world combat.

All of that said, combat is a distant priority as far as what I'd like to see improved or expanded in BotW2. It'd take a broader chemistry system with more systemic interactions, more unique physics-based puzzles, and more varied gameplay scenarios like the minigames, stealth sections and such, over a revamped combat system.
 
MissingNo. said:
Not with exclusive content, no.

Conversely, why should anyone be missing out on content for playing on a lower difficulty? That just screams archaic design philosophy to me.
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What I said in my other post
BlueManifest said:
Think of arcades, where you would get tickets based on the score you got, what if a score of 1 got the same amount of tickets as a score of 1,000,000. Why would strive to get a higher score if the amount of tickets you got was the same

This is why I don’t like all games with difficulty settings, I’m not getting anymore for completing it than I would if I played on easy
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BlueManifest said:
Think of arcades, where you would get tickets based on the score you got, what if a score of 1 got the same amount of tickets as a score of 1,000,000. Why would strive to get a higher score if the amount of tickets you got was the same

This is why I don’t like all games with difficulty settings, I’m not getting anymore for completing it than I would if I played on easy
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Because you can? Like, why play video games when fundamentally you will gain nothing from playing it? We do it because we can, because we want to. This is what i think you don't get about BOTW. BOTW is all about giving you the freedom to put exactly the amount of time you want and still have a complete experience. Someone who runs straight to Ganon and someone who explores every nook and cranny can still have a satisfying conclusion playing the game. There's no "I feel like I missed something" when playing BOTW that many open world games suffer from. The fact that there's no huge gain exploring means that exploring and missions are done not because of "gameplay rewards" but "because I can". Why do I want to go the top of that mountain? Because I want to. And if there's no prize...well then at least I got a nice view. This is BOTW's greatest strength and weakness and the fundamental reason why it got success. Trying to copy a game with a different fundamental principle wouldn't work. I'm not saying that Elden Ring is bad, it's an amazing game, but you are comparing two game with very different fundamental design philosophies
 
xaszatm said:
Because you can? Like, why play video games when fundamentally you will gain nothing from playing it? We do it because we can, because we want to. This is what i think you don't get about BOTW. BOTW is all about giving you the freedom to put exactly the amount of time you want and still have a complete experience. Someone who runs straight to Ganon and someone who explores every nook and cranny can still have a satisfying conclusion playing the game. There's no "I feel like I missed something" when playing BOTW that many open world games suffer from. The fact that there's no huge gain exploring means that exploring and missions are done not because of "gameplay rewards" but "because I can". Why do I want to go the top of that mountain? Because I want to. And if there's no prize...well then at least I got a nice view. This is BOTW's greatest strength and weakness and the fundamental reason why it got success. Trying to copy a game with a different fundamental principle wouldn't work. I'm not saying that Elden Ring is bad, it's an amazing game, but you are comparing two game with very different fundamental design philosophies
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I can but why would I want to
 
BlueManifest said:
And the player should not be rewarded for overcoming a harder challenge?
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Yes. The inner satisfaction that they conquered something tough and won.

Zelda is a series that is chanllenging yet accessible for all. If it was like Souls, my wife would drop it no questions asked. Also, I do not want to be stressed in a Zelda game. I like the challenge to be "I hit a strong enemy" or "difficult puzzle", how do I get out of this. I do not want exploring the world in between challenges to be stressful. I like that in BoTW I could approach it in any way.

Solving a tricky or tough shrine was rewarding. And puzzles are a key point in Zelda games.

Why do people in general like puzzles? They are fun to solve. The reward is solving it on your own. Am I taking crazy pills? Do people not feel satisfaction in solving a puzzle?

And enemies got more and more dangerous the longer you played the game, and their behavior is pretty smart and also the way with dealing with them.

Now could BoTW have used more enemy variety like in older games? Sure could and that is all I hope for. But the combat was already challenging until you got better equipment and upgrades. And even then, fighting a silver Lynel, no matter the color, let alone high level ones, is still a road block for many.

Souls combat is slower, more methodical. That is fine for that type of game. Zelda is faster, and with BoTW, improvisational. My weapon of choice was the spear so I could poke and run.
 
Clix said:
Not sure what the obsession with getting a cookie is. Either way, BoTW has lots of different gear and upgrade paths and rare materials as rewards.
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Everyone wont be able to see the final level in Mario because not everyone is able to get to all the stars, is that a problem that not everyone will be able to see the last level?
 
BlueManifest said:
I can but why would I want to
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And that's the thing. You don't have to. BOTW essentially tells people "Here's a world, do what you want." It doesn't punish you for not exploring the mountain.

Also...people do hard stuff all the time. Why do people have no damage speed runs? Why is there a one hit death mode in Dread when there is literally no reason to do so? Why do a boss rush mode? There's a million thing that don't actually provide rewards to do but many people do it anyway.

BlueManifest said:
Everyone wont be able to see the final level in Mario because not everyone is able to get to all the stars, is that a problem that not everyone will be able to see the last level?
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I mean...yeah. There's a reason why Odyssey and even Bowser's Fury doesn't hide too much past 100% completion because they want you to not feel obligated to do everything.
 
xaszatm said:
I mean...yeah. There's a reason why Odyssey and even Bowser's Fury doesn't hide too much past 100% completion because they want you to not feel obligated to do everything.
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It would be like collecting all the stars and getting nothing for it

But thankfully they don’t just give you nothing they give you a whole extra world
 
BlueManifest said:
Everyone wont be able to see the final level in Mario because not everyone is able to get to all the stars, is that a problem that not everyone will be able to see the last level?
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The amount of stars needed to see the final level is incredibly generous in all the Mario games starting with 64. They are accessible as heck.

So Odyssey, I finished the game. Why did I go back and do these extra challenges and stages just to get stars I do not need? Cause it was fun....
 
BlueManifest said:
It would be like collecting all the stars and getting nothing for it

But thankfully they don’t just give you nothing they give you a whole extra world
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You don't need them to get the extra world at all. I don't have every moon. Even the extra world only needs a certain amount.
 
Clix said:
You don't need them to get the extra world at all. I don't have every moon. Even the extra world only needs a certain amount.
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I was thinking more of 3D land and 3D world, galaxy 2, odyssey you don’t need every single one but you still do need a lot

The point is you get a reward for going beyond what’s needed
 
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