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Discussion Did you think Tears of the Kingdom was too big?

Was Tears of the Kingdom too big?

  • Yes, it was too big to the point that it had a major impact on my experience

    Votes: 28 10.4%

  • Yes, it was too big to the point that it did have some impact on my experience

    Votes: 44 16.4%

  • Yes, it was too big but it doesn’t change how much I liked the game

    Votes: 38 14.2%

  • Yes, it was too big, but I didn’t particularly feel it until near or after the end

    Votes: 11 4.1%

  • No, it didn’t feel too big

    Votes: 135 50.4%

  • No, it didn’t feel too big and should have been bigger than what we got

    Votes: 12 4.5%
  • Total voters
    268
Hero of Hyrule

Hero of Hyrule

Frieren the Slayer
Pronouns
He/Him
Tears of the Kingdom is now three months old (or will be in a couple days, so close enough), which, given the premise of this thread, should be enough time to finish the damn thing for most people who started the game at or around launch.

To those people I ask - did you think TOTK was too big?

BOTW has a gigantic open world but it keeps the density of content in it fairly sparse, compared to how overstuffed other open world games get. TOTK eschews this philosophy by not only MORE THAN DOUBLING the size of BOTW’s map, but also absolutely overstuffing it was with content.

Ironically what contributed to my exhaustion with TOTK was the quality of this abundance of content. In almost every other game of this size, there is a very clear delineation between the quality of the “main” content, and the quality of the “side” content. So while AssCreed Odyssey and Yakuza 5 and Spider-Man are absurdly bloated, I can compartmentalize them better in my head because 90% of the over abundant content is low(er) quality and doesn’t need me to engage with it with as much focus as the main content does. This also actually means that that content can be used by me to pace myself - if I feel the story is getting too exhausting or too intense or too big, I can slow things down by doing the side content. If I think I’ve been spinning my wheels by doing inconsequential side content for too long, I switch back to the story.

Then there’s this fucking game.

In this game, ALL CONTENT IS GREAT. Side quests are excellent, shrines are excellent, all open world areas are excellent, all the caves are excellent, fucking everything is great. This causes two problems for me, a) now I feel more pressure to engage with everything (because now I’m not missing “bad” content, I’m missing great authored stuff), and b) all content needs me to engage with it with like I engage with the main content, which means this effectively becomes a game with a 90 hour critical path… which is fucking draining.

I need to stress, I love TOTK, so this criticism isn’t me saying it’s a bad game or anything, but I think Nintendo got a bit overzealous here lol; it almost feels like a hilarious overcompensation for charging $70 for the game or something.

But yeah, this is too big, so big I don’t know when I will ever go back to the game (if I ever will). I stil love TOTK, and it is either my favorite game of all time, or tied for it, but I sincerely hope the next game will be less maniacally insanely big than this because what the ever loving fuck
 
No, it was a nice piece of companion DLC which I played through in 5 hours in line with the expectations set by the first trailers.
 
No. It has more stuff in it than I want to do but that’s awesome, because it makes the game world more exciting and everyone’s play through is different this way
 
Yes but not in a bad way. It was overwhelming and I got a great 120 hours of it, with the exciting thought that I’ll be able to return to it for a long time with a bunch more still to do.

Though I wouldn’t have a problem at all if the next game is the same size or scaled a bit down, I can say that much😅
 
It was quite formidable, but then again I did complete a substantial number of the quests, and so I can't really knock it for that.
 
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it feels a bit overwhelming in comparison to botw for me at least I havent even beaten it yet cause I somehow get distracted by some random thing.
 
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Phendrift said:
Yes but not in a bad way. It was overwhelming and I got a great 120 hours of it, with the exciting thought that I’ll be able to return to it for a long time with a bunch more still to do.

Though I wouldn’t have a problem at all if the next game is the same size or scaled a bit down, I can say that much😅
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I think I, in theory, agree that it's nice that there is so much well designed never ending content in a game I love for me to go back to over the coming years.

Or I would if I had not been traumatized by the sheer magnitude of this game and was not reduced to a blubbering mass of quivering protoplasm each time I so much as considered one day maybe booting it up again.
 
75 hours in I say no, it's just right.

Just wish we had a little bit more going on in
Lorule,
but that's extremely small potatoes. 😉
 
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I think it was bigger than it needed to be, but that didn't impact my enjoyment of the game.

I pumped an obscene amount of hours into this game and I'd say 95% of it was me exploring the surface and the sky islands. I didn't engage much with the content in the underground besides the obvious main quests and side adventures down there. Looking at my Hero's Path, I basically made a beeline from lightroot to lightroot and didn't look back.

Most of the underground could've been contained into a handful of very specific areas and the game would've obtained the same stellar reviews it got in my opinion.
 
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Was pretty overwhelming when I first started out, but I’ve been taking my time through the game and not trying to do everything at once which made it feel more manageable
 
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In the beginning I felt overwhelmed. I wasn’t sure how I should go about exploring the land, sky and depths.

Not only that but there was the building with the zonai devices and collecting of zonaite, charges and crystallised charges which took me quite a while to get my head round. I don’t think this stuff was particularly well explained tbh and I just gradually grew to understand over a period of time.

After a good while of playing, everything slowly started to click with me and I created my own system for exploring and collecting parts etc. It was then that I realised just how great this game truly was and if there was any doubt, that it had surpassed BotW in almost every way. It’s probably the best game ever made.
 
I don't think it was too big, but I do think that I would have preferred stronger more handmade content in certain areas rather than there being a world about twice the size of BOTW's. I also don't really want Rauru shrines to return if there's shrines in the next game.
 
It felt too big but for the wrong reasons. We didn't need a whole underground for the depths when there's nothing down there, and we didn't need a whole sky to explore if most of the islands are copy-pasted, and we didn't need 152 shrines if like 40 of them are blessing shrines.

The depths should've been a couple of large chunks of underground sections that may or may not have connected and the sky should have been six or seven large Great Sky Island sized islands. Then they could have filled each with more meaningful content.
 
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I only worry about how big then can make the next one. It feels like TotK is almost limitless(the sky is the limit so to speak).
 
Considering I'm still suffering withdrawal from not having more to explore, I needed it to be bigger tbh.
 
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Lord Azrael said:
The only part I think I could be convinced was too big was the underground
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Agreed. I get what the purpose of the Depths is, but it's antithetical to what drew me to BotW in the first place.

Otherwise, though, I love how big the world is. Didn't get bored exploring. Hope they do more with the sky islands in future iterations.
 
My first 20 hours, I would have said "no, this is perfect".
40 hours in, 3 temples behind me and I feel exhausted and overwhelmed every time I boot up the game now- and I love open world games. I just sort of get this paralysis state of not knowing what to do, then as soon as I "click" back in, suddenly there's a living stack of missions continuously interrupting the one that I'm currently searching for. I feel like I need a To Do List every time I load my file.

So now I completely get why some people have been saying "it's too much game".

But maybe that's oversimplifying it?
Maybe it's not the size of the physical space, but how the challenges and missions occupy it?
 
It's massive but I'm shocked at how little I remember from it. BotW/TotK just feel like one combined blur
 
Honestly...yeah, kinda? And this comes from someone who absolutely disagrees with the "Too Many Moons" argument for Mario Odyssey.

Tears of the Kingdom is a very dense game, building on top of the already large Breath of the Wild. More shrines than the original. More Koroks. Caves dotting the overworld with the Bubbul Gems and sometimes equipment. The Sky Islands with their own challenges. The Depths being the same size as the already massive Hyrule. This on top of the the story.

None of this makes Tears of the Kingdom bad, it's still a great game, but it is a lot. It can almost feel like too much - 90 hours in and I'm nowhere near done with the game and it's boatloads of meaningful content. Playing a shorter game like Pikmin 4 feels like a relief.
 
Sorta. I never really felt overwhelmed by the size of the world, but a lot of my issues with the game stem from it's size necessitating a lot of repeated content, both in the Sky and the Depths.
 
VolcanicDynamo said:
Playing a shorter game like Pikmin 4 feels like a relief.
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That's funny, because I'm finding Pikmin 4 way too big after just coming off Tears of the Kingdom and Final Fantasy XVI the months prior :ROFLMAO:

It's like the developers are contractually obligated to make the games at least 30 hours.
 
For me it was too big, yes.
And too many things catching your attention and distracting you while playing (sky islands, chasms, Addison, escort mission Korok, shrines, camps, etc.) made the world feel less organic and "wild" and more artificial - BotW was better paced in that regard.




I would also disagree that all content was great.
I think the depths should have been reduced to about 30% of its size.
The content doesn't carry the size of this layer, imo.
 
BOTW was already too big, TOTK’s sky and depths were basically a band aid solution to break the monotony

So in BOTW you had this pretty clear dichotomy between the overworld and the puzzles (Shrines). In TOTK the world feels more alive, as you have more major events outside of the four main dungeons. Besides the main quests there are other things to do, so that’s where the sky and depths come in, it’s kind of like the gameplay loop is around three tiers of grinding. You have the BOTW map that has new events + caves. In the caves you get the seeds that light things up so you can see in the depths. In the depths you get Zonaite to upgrade your battery so you can use more of the Zonai parts which you get in the sky. The Zonai parts help you nagivate the depths, you also get the flowers to make food that heals you from the gloom. See it’s like a loop, there’s also the fact that exploring the surface helps you to explore the depths and vice-versa.

That’s all fine during the first few hours but once you’re far enough, well it’s pretty apparent how most sky islands have the same layout, the depths are samey, most caves are too. So while at least it’s not just the Shrines that are samey, it’s still the same overall problem. I know the classic answer to this is that “you don’t need to do everything” but here’s the thing, it’s okay for Korok seeds and the signpost guy to be so abundant that the game doesn’t expect you to find them all, since here the point is just to provide resources to the player. However, in the case of Shrines, it’s a problem because they are handcrafted content. The game constantly distracts you and sidetracks you with shiny spots and other points of interests. When you look for a new Shrine, cave or quest, you expect them to be “one of the great ones”, one of the surprises, like Eventide was in BOTW. That’s why it’s perfectly valid to complain about huge open world games being repetitive, it’s not a “stop being a completionist” problem, it’s a pacing problem if the act of “exploring to your heart’s content” leads you to repetition
 
Not at all. I played at my own pace and had one of the best experiences I've ever had in gaming. I want more content if anything.

That said there is no way in hell I was ever paying $70 for this unless I had no other choice.
 
At first I didn’t feel that way, but im in the middle of a link between worlds replay, and im realizing how much I aprreciate the compactness of the map. Same with minish cap and links awakening.
 
I thought it was too big in a pretty literal sense, which it inherited from BotW. The scale feels wrong, which I noticed when flying around on the hoverbike. The world looks more "normal" from that perspective, but on the ground it's like Link is too small to properly take in his surroundings now, which is probably from BotW's whole "climb up to a high vantage point to spot your next destination" thing. And having that much space meant a lot of it felt wasted or unnecessary and was just there to achieve a sense of scale I didn't particularly like in the first place.

But also yeah, regardless of quality of content the game could definitely have stood to be smaller. I'm pretty much always going to be in favor of something smaller and more bespoke/developed/polished over size. It's why in a weird way I think Phantom Hourglass did Wind Waker's concept better, it was more of an odyssey with larger and more interesting islands. It actually has more dungeons than Wind Waker!

...Of course, the music and art fell off a cliff and the dungeons are just autopiloting from map marker to map marker, so it's not actually a better game in any real sense even if the touch screen revamps of certain items are actually really clever, but I wish Wind Waker had a map more like Phantom Hourglass's 16 unique locations instead of 49 tiny nothings.
 
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Nope it felt just right. The initial feeling of "oh snap they fleshed this world out even more up and down" was strong as soon as I got to Lookout Landing but once I explored enough everything felt pretty well designed.

The sky was probably the most important layer to balance, because that could've easily been too cluttered.
 
I felt like it was too big in the sense that the world was too dense and at times that made my exploration more stressful than exciting at times. After awhile I stopped seeking out Koroks all together because I needed one less thing to care about on the map.
 
Bobo said:
I felt like it was too big in the sense that the world was too dense and at times that made my exploration more stressful than exciting at times. After awhile I stopped seeking out Koroks all together because I needed one less thing to care about on the map.
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This is basically the sentiment I’m getting at. BOTW was really chil, I could kind of check out and just relax with that game and the only time I had to tune back in was when I chose to by engaging with the specifically delineated content that required a higher degree of engagement.

TOTK completely lacks that sort of player driven down time because the world is FULL of high quality content that is all clamoring for you to pay attention, keep track, properly engage with and play it.
 
I'm 185h in and still not done, having seen credits yet. So yeah, maybe a bit too big, but I'm still having a blast. No rush to finish it.
 
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Mango said:
It felt too big but for the wrong reasons. We didn't need a whole underground for the depths when there's nothing down there, and we didn't need a whole sky to explore of most of the islands are copy-pasted, and we didn't need 152 shrines if like 40 of them are blessing shrines.

The depths should've been a couple of large chunks of underground sections that may or may not have connected and the sky should have been six or seven large Great Sky Island sized islands. Then they could have filled each with more meaningful content.
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Agreed completely. Underground feels like a ton of wasted potential, and is just a big open area for the sake of adding more landmass.

The caves are by far more interesting and fun to explore than the depths. The caves create cool structured challenges into the open world itself, whereas the depths are just a much less content rich version of the overworld.

And it's funny how they marketed the game solely on exploring the sky, but it's such a tiny portion of the game. And the surprise of the underground wears off very quickly when you realize you've seen just about everything in the first few hours.

I still very much enjoyed the game, but I think they should have put the effort into creating a new map instead. I would have vastly preferred if the game somehow took place exclusively in the sky and underground, if that meant seeing those areas fleshed out. Revisiting the overworld had some cool moments, but it was absolutely not worth having so much of the new areas feel underbaked.
 
The overworld was perfect, but the sky felt a bit undercooked considering how little is there and how much of it repeats despite it being on the box art and a key, promoted theme of the game. I found the underworld got less and less interesting as time went on. Really impactful at the start but, as your resources grow, it became less exciting for me and more formulaic. Still, my complaints are really minor though, I got 90 hours out of it and loved most of them.
 
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Being too big isn't the problem itself. Problem is the proportion of content I liked divided by the amount of content.

Game has tons of sidequests but I think that 5 ~ 10 were worth of my time.
Game has tons of outfits that I used once at most.
Most of sky puzzles are a variation of one I did before.
At BOTW start I was fine with shrines but by the end of the game I got bored by them. So Totk repeats the same puzzle structure of something I didn't have patience anymore. But needed to to them to get hearts or stamina.
Also zero patience for korok seeds but they were required to have more inventory space.
Underground has the same overworld philosophy of having a small set of different activities(groves, yiga, mines, coliseum...) repeated all over the map. First time I saw each of those things they were interesting but after that I felt nothing.
Sign guy and lost korok were also interesting once or twice but I didn't want to interact with them after sometime.

Well and caves were my favorite thing. Even though I'd reduce their number to make things more unique they were able subvert my expectations. I love not knowing what to expect next.

In the end it has a lot of content but it was difficult to find things I really liked. That said option 1 seems to be the nearest to how I felt.
 
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It was too big and not big enough at the same time.

The depths were too big, with not nearly enough to do in them. And the sky islands don’t have enough big islands with huge landmasses.
 
i played the games for nearly 400h and didnt felt it was bloated, actually i felt disapoited in Breath of the Wild the game was too short in content(glad Nintendo fixed this and gave me a game with a tremendous amount of content)
 
Too big for me? Yes, had to put that shit down and move on to other things after finishing the main story. I was SO overwhelmed.
Too big in general? Nah, I feel like most people are satisfied with the scale of it for the most part!
 
I like big games, but Zelda Tears of the Kingdom was too big with a lot of content not worthwhile. The Depths in particular were super draining (stumble in darkness, walk to glowing orb 120 times, reveal drab environment with little in it) and too many of the Sky Islands repeated themselves in a very mechanical way. The repeated surface world was also a bummer, but less of an issue in the too big sense. I much preferred Breath of the Wild.
 
I think TotK is appropriately big; however, it's what they did with the size that leaves a lot to be desired. Still a phenomenal game but the Sky Islands were pretty disappointing in the end.
 
Not at all. It was the perfect size for me.

Scale is important to me in this kind of open air exploration game, and I think they nailed it.
 
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Not at all. If you do not find all of the content fun then don’t do it all. I 100% understand the complaints about the sky and the depths but there’s nowhere in the game that says you must do all of it to finish. Only do what you find fun, that’s the appeal of this game. I read posts from people who after a month and 100 hours haven’t done a single temple and that’s valid.

For example I find at least 75% of Super Mario Odyssey’s content super boring so I don’t do it and just do what I need to finish the game. I don’t think the game is “too big,” since, like BotW, the appeal is that you can approach completing the game pretty much however you see fit.
 
For me, it’s too big. There’s too much. I dropped the game fifteen hours in because I was getting stressed out by the amount of stuff to do. Instead of being excited by all the cool things the game throws at you, I found myself frustrated that it was basically impossible to get from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time without getting sidetracked.

I intend to go back at some point and play through the main story at least. But the thought of all the shrines, the sky islands, the depths, finding and upgrading armors… all of it really, gives me what I can only call anxiety and makes me not want to play the game.
 
It is a ginormous title, with an exceptional amount of content to get and discover. However, the freedom of traversal, the lightroots-shrines connection, and the much-easier-to-find shrines all make things a lot more easier. Did a lot more in this game than I did in Breath of the Wild...way more shrines, more korok seeds, more additional items and quests. I think this game is a lot friendlier/accessible, and I really liked it.
 
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