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Pre-Release The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Pre-Release Discussion Thread

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Doomedtacox said:
But a grand lift type hard barrier wouldn't really work in a world where you can climb anything...
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And this is precisely why I want them to dial back the climb anything/go anywhere a bit in TOTK. A bit! Not altogether! But I think that limitations and telling the player 'no, you actually CAN'T do that yet/with what you currently have' is a good thing now and then
 
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karmitt said:
I'm not in the camp that Zelda should be 'make your own fun' type of content, but I think you're underselling just how authored Breath of the Wild was. It had heaps of well crafted content with clear solutions, but the ethos was not to prescribe a specific single solution if they didn't have to.

I agree with you overall tho. We should not be insisting that Tears of the Kingdom is already going to be great because we can build our own car. That sounds rubbish to me on its own. I'll buy Lego 2K Drive if that's what I'm after.
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Why not both?
 
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I've only played BOTW once. It's my favorite Zelda game and i thought about playing it again, but it's such a huge game that going through all of it again feels like a chore. After finishing the DLC and the shrines, i thought "well, that's it, i think i got all i wanted from this game, it's time to put my attention on something else", and that's what i did.

SSHD, as flawed and inferior to BOTW as it is in a number of ways (as it is better in some ways), isn't so big, is a reasonably compact experience. It's like "comfort food" Zelda to me. I've played it four times.
 
sanstea said:
Truthfully I can't really agree with the no replayability aspect.

I think that is the one thing they really fixed compared to past Zelda games. In past Zelda games every event played out the same way and mostly could only play out the same way. Puzzles were solvable only one way, boss and enemy encounters were one-dimensional, there are enough towns and events with NPCs to break up the exploration/puzzle/combat pacing and the game was linear so you couldn't change up the order of your journey or even just straight up skip parts and so on.

In contrast to BotW, puzzles are solvable in a lot of different ways, combat encounters never play out the same way and especially bosses can be defeated completely differently each time, there are enough towns and NPCs to get off the open-world pacing and you can skip by and do only the things you really feel like doing while also choosing which way you want to go. The game not being a RPG with conventional leveling also means I'm not restricted in the order of anything I want to do. Nothing in the game feels out of reach from each beginning or at any point of time of your playthrough when playing the game.

Especially in a my replay playthrough it became clear to me how good the game is. You know what you can do, you know the physics to fight enemies more efficiently or how puzzles can be solved differently, you know even with low stamina or health the tricks to overcome parts you had trouble with while playing for the first time when climbing or fighting something. It becomes also very clear there is really no wrong way when pathfinding your way through the world - the game is really designed to go wherever you want from the start, even Hyrule Castle.

And the most awesome thing is you don't even have to be a godlike speedrunner or something to make that happen like in lots of other games when you go off the recommended path at the start. It's made extremely approachable in that respect which makes it possible for most players. A really underappreciated aspect.
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I think a lot of it comes down to progression of skill, it’s fun to replay so I can go straight from the plague now to hyrule castle and became obscenely overpowered in 10 minutes. Fire note the fun of replay in coems knowing what to do and where to go next to do it as effienctly as possible, I think that no other Zelda game (excep albw to an extent) has this amount of replayability .
 
BotW is one of my favorite Zelda games, and even then I still only beat it one time. But tbf, that's on me. I watched a lot of streamers play through most parts of the game, so a lot of things are still fresh in my mind.

Yet I'd rather replay BotW instead of Skyward Sword. SS might have some genuinely great sections, but my God, I'm not putting up with all the torturous shit inbetween those sections.
 
I would like someone with an education in actual marketing to chime in. It wouldn't surprise me if modern marketing strategies for enormously popular video games in a post-covid world are save everything until a month out then go ham.

BotW's mindshare is enormous. The Switch's mindshare is enormous. Work smarter not harder.
 
chocolate_supra said:
amandabynes-dearashley.gif
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Geez man, bad time for that gif
 
Magic-Man said:
Elden Ring has the best open world design in any game, period. Yeah, I said it. I hope the Zelda team takes inspiration from it.

Hyrule isn't a very interesting world. I'd take most other game worlds over it. The mechanics in BOTW completely carry the game.
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I think the world is pretty interesting, but what carried BOTW for me were the Memories and piecing together what happened 100 years ago and how Link ended up in the Shrine. And pretty much everything involving Zelda as a character. So I'm really looking forward to whatever they replace that with in TOTK, since (I assume?) Memories won't be a thing again, at least not like they were
 
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catonkatonk said:
Number go up isn't exciting gameplay imo.
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They're not talking about "numbers go up".

Read their comment again, they're talking about leveling up (something you do in BotW, whether you like it or not, via hearts / stamina, it's just more detailed in ER).

They're also talking about finding new summons, new weapons, and new armor. And yes, sometimes new abilities.

Which is fun!

"Numbers go up isn't exciting gameplay"... Jesus lol
 
Magic-Man said:
Yeah, credit where it's due here. I hope there's more cities and castles in the sky and underground!
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Dude, a sky castle akin to like the giant's castle in the jack and the bean stalk fairy tale would be so damn cool. It's stuff like that that makes me want more structured fortresses, there's so much potential with the game's art style to make this type of stuff look so cool.
 
Magic-Man said:
Elden Ring has the best open world design in any game, period. Yeah, I said it. I hope the Zelda team takes inspiration from it.

Hyrule isn't a very interesting world. I'd take most other game worlds over it. The mechanics in BOTW completely carry the game.
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Spicy for sure, I definitely disagree. The amount of different biomes, NPC's, towns, puzzles, beauty, surprises, side quests, collectibles, etc in botw's world is just too immense.

Elden ring for me is missing two things that would've put it over Botw's world: puzzles and towns. And no I don't consider invisible turtles as puzzles. Can From just pleassse make a town (that isnt the main hub), doesn't even need to be stormvale/lyndell size, make it like castle sol size.
 
Dmax3901 said:
I would like someone with an education in actual marketing to chime in. It wouldn't surprise me if modern marketing strategies for enormously popular video games in a post-covid world are save everything until a month out then go ham.

BotW's mindshare is enormous. The Switch's mindshare is enormous. Work smarter not harder.
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Tears of the kingdoms marketing is it existing. Casual fans don’t need as much content to satiate, and with breath of the wild making Zelda go from a mid tier in popularity ip to one of the most popular games it’s teeming with new players who are just looking forward to another game, as we can see with preorders.

And in a month before release you can start going crazy with advertising and get all the people who haven’t played Zelda ever in.

New botw fans and future Zelda fans are defintly nintendos priority over old school Zelda fans. Which makes sense considering gold school Zelda was a stagnating series bordering on decline. If we got another traditional Zelda formula game after skyward sword that would have been something to see hehe.



Magic-Man said:
Elden Ring has the best open world design in any game, period. Yeah, I said it. I hope the Zelda team takes inspiration from it.

Hyrule isn't a very interesting world. I'd take most other game worlds over it. The mechanics in BOTW completely carry the game.
Click to expand...

After playing Genshin impact for a bit, the early areas do feel like hyrule 0.5 but the newer areas feel so enchanting and amazing to explore, with a wonder that breath of the wild never had. I really hope they take some inspiration from Genshin for the underground segments, ethereal colours, long destroyed cities with no explanation for their existence, the laws of physics breaking as you delve deeper.

Bassicaly I’m saying it needs more fantastical landscapes to spice it up, stuff not so grounded in realism. And so far the sky islands seem fine but what I’m really hoping for is open underground segments

Spoiler for a pretty late game location in Genshin
enkanomiya-genshin-impact
descending underneath a floating pond into a closed cave leading into a kind of marsh that lead into a giant hallway that opened up into this was so amazing, I doubt Nintendo will be able to do stuff at this scale with a refurbishing of botw’s map but I can only hope that the next game does stuff like this.
 
bellydrum said:
This is so annoying, they're not talking about "numbers go up".

Read their comment again, they're talking about leveling up (something you do in BotW, whether you like it or not, via hearts / stamina, it's just more detailed in ER).

They're also talking about finding new summons, new weapons, and new armor. And yes, sometimes new abilities.

"Numbers go up isn't exciting gameplay"... Jesus lol
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The point they're making is that no enemy you kill is completely useless because you "level up".
So what's the difference between killing an enemy in Breath of the Wild and killing an enemy in Elden Ring? Both drop gear and materials (which, yes, I also find boring fwiw). So what, besides the number?
 
catonkatonk said:
The point they're making is that no enemy you kill is completely useless because you "level up".
So what's the difference between killing an enemy in Breath of the Wild and killing an enemy in Elden Ring? Both drop gear and materials (which, yes, I also find boring fwiw). So what, besides the number?
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Killing enemies in Elden Ring lets you customize your characters stats, which directly affects gameplay by letting you use different abilities at different power levels.

Sounds pretty damn fun if you ask me.
 
I'm not particularly fond of Elden Ring's open world design. I like it visually but the game's topography is a weak spot for me. On top of rarely ever feeling like I can create my own route to multiple points of interest, it does a less-than-optimal job highlighting points of interest that aren't legacy dungeons. Catacombs is something that feels like you only find by pure accident.

Zelda related: I'm watching a friend play BOTW blind for the first time right now and seeing them jerry-rig a faux-"motor" to a raft by using Magnesis and a treasure chest is pretty funny and novel to look at.
 
bellydrum said:
They're not talking about "numbers go up".

Read their comment again, they're talking about leveling up (something you do in BotW, whether you like it or not, via hearts / stamina, it's just more detailed in ER).

They're also talking about finding new summons, new weapons, and new armor. And yes, sometimes new abilities.

Which is fun!

"Numbers go up isn't exciting gameplay"... Jesus lol
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There's a lot more to it than just that, but there's also a pretty decent group of people for whom 'numbers go up' is actually pretty exciting! "Dungeon Encounters" is practically that, or most dungeon crawler RPGs in general, etc. I love me some incremental progression in a game.
catonkatonk said:
The point they're making is that no enemy you kill is completely useless because you "level up".
So what's the difference between killing an enemy in Breath of the Wild and killing an enemy in Elden Ring? Both drop gear and materials (which, yes, I also find boring fwiw). So what, besides the number?
Click to expand...
I mean, that alone is worth it to me. Simple knowing 'killing this thing will give me XP and is therefore useful' makes me infinitely more likely to actually kill things. This is true in pretty much every game. At the risk of bringing up yet another controversial game: Paper Mario: Origami King. I quickly realized I'd much rather just avoid combat as much as possible in that game because there was no XP and the rewards were basically useless. Similar in BOTW, honestly. Lack of XP combined with weapon durability meant I fought enemies very sparingly.
 
bellydrum said:
Killing enemies in Elden Ring lets you customize your characters stats, which directly affects gameplay by letting you use different abilities at different power levels.

Sounds pretty damn fun if you ask me.
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Yeah that just sounds like the number going up to me.
I'm not into it. You'll notice the "imo" right there in my post.

There's a world of difference between that and, like, getting dash or double jump in a Metroidvania. Which is something I prefer when it comes to progression, and which the hinted crafting system in Tears of the Kingdom could approximate.

But on a much broader level, I didn't do the shrines because I wanted heart containers or stamina. I did them because they were fun. I assume that's where the fun of Elden Ring is too. In the fights. Which isn't to negate the fun people might have with stats. I just don't share it. And I'd rather it wasn't in Zelda, a series which has generally avoided RPG mechanics for the most part.
 
catonkatonk said:
Yeah that just sounds like the number going up to me.
I'm not into it. You'll notice the "imo" right there in my post.

There's a world of difference between that and, like, getting dash or double jump in a Metroidvania. Which is something I prefer when it comes to progression, and which the hinted crafting system in Tears of the Kingdom could approximate.

But on a much broader level, I didn't do the shrines because I wanted heart containers or stamina. I did them because they were fun. I assume that's where the fun of Elden Ring is too. In the fights. Which isn't to negate the fun people might have with stats. I just don't share it. And I'd rather it wasn't in Zelda.
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That's one thing I hadn't really considered that could be a way I would really enjoy the crafting: If they use crafting vehicles or something as 'keys' to get to certain areas or locations. Kind of like how you need the double jump in a metroidvania to get into certain zones, if you needed to build a vehicle capable of flight or some other ability to get to some places, and the components necessary for that vehicle are in dungeons or caves or specific boss encounters or something. I'd be into that.
 
SammyJ9 said:
there's also a pretty decent group of people for whom 'numbers go up' is actually pretty exciting!
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Diablo IV is numbers go up: the game. I am at times an extremely 'numbers go up' kind of person.

If Nintendo decided to add more tangible numbers go up I erm...would not be mad. I very much enjoyed leveling up my armor sets, and not allowing us to level up the DLC armor sets was absolute nonsense.

Magic-Man said:
Elden Ring has the best open world design in any game, period. Yeah, I said it. I hope the Zelda team takes inspiration from it.

Hyrule isn't a very interesting world. I'd take most other game worlds over it. The mechanics in BOTW completely carry the game.
Click to expand...

Very spicy indeed, especially in this thread. To each their own.
 
karmitt said:
Diablo IV is numbers go up: the game. I am at times an extremely 'numbers go up' kind of person.

If Nintendo decided to add more tangible numbers go up I erm...would not be mad. I very much enjoyed leveling up my armor sets, and not allowing us to level up the DLC armor sets was absolute nonsense.
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I totally forgot about ARPGs/Looters like Diablo, Path of Exile, Titan Quest, etc., but dang you're right. Hell, I get excited in Path of Exile when I find a new ring that has +11 STR over my current ring and it frees up a point on the skill tree which then lets me reconfigure a ton of skill nodes to take a different path and the grand sum total of all this is... I do like 2% more damage :p. But it's fun!
 
catonkatonk said:
Yeah that just sounds like the number going up to me.
I'm not into it. You'll notice the "imo" right there in my post.

There's a world of difference between that and, like, getting dash or double jump in a Metroidvania. Which is something I prefer when it comes to progression, and which the hinted crafting system in Tears of the Kingdom could approximate.

But on a much broader level, I didn't do the shrines because I wanted heart containers or stamina. I did them because they were fun. I assume that's where the fun of Elden Ring is too. In the fights. Which isn't to negate the fun people might have with stats. I just don't share it. And I'd rather it wasn't in Zelda, a series which has generally avoided RPG mechanics for the most part.
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Right there with you, I'd be perfectly content if Elden Ring had no leveling up.
 
There's a few reasons why I'm not a huge fan of Hyrule, but I understand that it's all subjective.

1. All the biomes in the game are generic, other than one area (Rito Village). There's not a whole lot to them. I'd actually use Mario Odyssey for inspiration here. The Sand Kingdom has a beautiful village, pyramids, and an icy cave. Meanwhile, the Gerudo Desert is a barren wasteland. It's boring. The Wooded Kingdom has a garden industrial area and a dark section underneath. The woods in BOTW are just basic woods. There's nothing to the biomes in BOTW.

2. The animals and enemies stay nearly the same across every biome. The only area I can think of with unique encounters is the Gerudo Desert, with the Molduga and sand seals. The same enemies is copy pasted across every other biome, just with a different color scheme (and not even that half the time).

3. The shrines are completely separate from the game world, which is a HUGE missed opportunity for some great environmental puzzles and structures. For example, the dungeons in Elden Ring are connected to the game world. It feels more cohesive.

4. There's a lack of unique settings/encounters. Don't get me wrong, there's a few here and there (Thyphlo Ruins, Yiga Clan hideout, Eventide Island, the target range near Rito Village), but there's not nearly enough. Sometimes I don't want a shrine. I want an interesting location with unique enemies and mechanics. This actually ties into my previous point. Imagine if the shrines were their own unique locations.

5. The towns suck. Super basic, with no interesting structures or unique locations (sense a pattern here?).
 
Magic-Man said:
There's a few reasons why I'm not a huge fan of Hyrule, but I understand that it's all subjective.

1. All the biomes in the game are generic, other than one area (Rito Village). There's not a whole lot to them. I'd actually use Mario Odyssey for inspiration here. The Sand Kingdom has a beautiful village, pyramids, and an icy cave. Meanwhile, the Gerudo Desert is a barren wasteland. It's boring. The Wooded Kingdom has a garden industrial area and a dark section underneath. The woods in BOTW are just basic woods. There's nothing to the biomes in BOTW.

2. The animals and enemies stay nearly the same across every biome. The only area I can think of with unique encounters is the Gerudo Desert, with the Molduga and sand seals. The same enemies is copy pasted across every other biome, just with a different color scheme (and not even that half the time).

3. The shrines are completely separate from the game world, which is a HUGE missed opportunity for some great environmental puzzles and structures. For example, the dungeons in Elden Ring are connected to the game world. It feels more cohesive.

4. There's a lack of unique settings/encounters. Don't get me wrong, there's a few here and there (Thyphlo Ruins, Yiga Clan hideout, Eventide Island, the target range near Rito Village), but there's not nearly enough. Sometimes I don't want a shrine. I want an interesting location with unique enemies and mechanics. This actually ties into my previous point. Imagine if the shrines were their own unique locations.

5. The towns suck. Super basic, with no interesting structures or unique locations (sense a pattern here?).
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I agree very much with 2, 3, and 4.
 
chocolate_supra said:
I agree very much with 2, 3, and 4.
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Yeah, just simple enemy/animal variety between biomes would do a lot for general game feel. Make me afraid to enter an area because of the animals there. Have high level enemies with high level loot as a risk/reward scenario. Not simple sword/shield/bow enemies either. Have some attack me from the sky. Some breathe fire or ice. Others lay traps or hide themselves (not using camouflage either). The Hinox, Guardians, and Lynels are great examples of this, but they're everywhere in the game so they lose their impact.

Have me stumble across a structure, think it's a puzzle, then lock me inside with a unique enemy. Statues can come to life. That's not a tree you idiot now run. Oh shit that's a dragon IT'S HEADING RIGHT TOWARDS ME FU-
 
Magic-Man said:
Elden Ring has the best open world design in any game, period. Yeah, I said it. I hope the Zelda team takes inspiration from it.

Hyrule isn't a very interesting world. I'd take most other game worlds over it. The mechanics in BOTW completely carry the game.
Click to expand...
See I think it depends on what you're looking for

For me topography is a weirdly large part of how I like worlds. Besides the legacy dungeons, ER's topography is imo fairly boring, while Zelda's is near top of the class

Honestly unique locations and enemies don't typically do nearly as much for me, it gets filled under the "content" flag regardless
 
Magic-Man said:
There's a few reasons why I'm not a huge fan of Hyrule, but I understand that it's all subjective.

1. All the biomes in the game are generic, other than one area (Rito Village). There's not a whole lot to them. I'd actually use Mario Odyssey for inspiration here. The Sand Kingdom has a beautiful village, pyramids, and an icy cave. Meanwhile, the Gerudo Desert is a barren wasteland. It's boring. The Wooded Kingdom has a garden industrial area and a dark section underneath. The woods in BOTW are just basic woods. There's nothing to the biomes in BOTW.

2. The animals and enemies stay nearly the same across every biome. The only area I can think of with unique encounters is the Gerudo Desert, with the Molduga and sand seals. The same enemies is copy pasted across every other biome, just with a different color scheme (and not even that half the time).

3. The shrines are completely separate from the game world, which is a HUGE missed opportunity for some great environmental puzzles and structures. For example, the dungeons in Elden Ring are connected to the game world. It feels more cohesive.

4. There's a lack of unique settings/encounters. Don't get me wrong, there's a few here and there (Thyphlo Ruins, Yiga Clan hideout, Eventide Island, the target range near Rito Village), but there's not nearly enough. Sometimes I don't want a shrine. I want an interesting location with unique enemies and mechanics. This actually ties into my previous point. Imagine if the shrines were their own unique locations.

5. The towns suck. Super basic, with no interesting structures or unique locations (sense a pattern here?).
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What’s a shame is that monolith has so many unique areas in their game, I guess Nintendo wanted to play it safe but I hope with totk they can be more out there.

If totk ends up the mm to botw’s oot then I have hope. That’s the biggest problem in the game imo, it doesn’t branch out enough in its theming it goes out there in gameplay going so far out of what Zelda normally does, but it’s world races and characters are So common and safe wishing the Zelda universe. but it looks like totk will fix that with the underground (and sky islands but gotta be hoesnlty it’s the same aesthetic but with yellow instead of green, so not as exciting)
 
NabiscoFelt said:
See I think it depends on what you're looking for

For me topography is a weirdly large part of how I like worlds. Besides the legacy dungeons, ER's topography is imo fairly boring, while Zelda's is near top of the class

Honestly unique locations and enemies don't typically do nearly as much for me, it gets filled under the "content" flag regardless
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What do you mean by topography? I know a basic definition but my brain is short circuiting trying to connect it to video games for some reason lol
 
Magic-Man said:
What do you mean by topography? I know a basic definition but my brain is short circuiting trying to connect it to video games for some reason lol
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Just like, terrain variation

BoTW has more of it, imo, or perhaps I just felt that way because the only way you can really deal with terrain in ER is find a magic horse jump point or go around. But in general I found ER's landscape fairly flat and boring
 
NabiscoFelt said:
Just like, terrain variation

BoTW has more of it, imo, or perhaps I just felt that way because the only way you can really deal with terrain in ER is find a magic horse jump point or go around. But in general I found ER's landscape fairly flat and boring
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Weird. I kinda feel the opposite about that. The terrain in Elden Ring is a lot more varied. You just can't climb it like in BOTW.

My perfect game would probably be Immortals Fenyx Rising (and BOTW because they're very similar mechanically) mixed with Elden Ring. A cartoony, yet stylistically pleasing artstyle, mythology influences, BOTW puzzles and dungeons built into the world, climbing and grappling hooks, and diverse biomes with unique enemies and locations. And a motorcycle.
 
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Magic-Man said:
What do you mean by topography? I know a basic definition but my brain is short circuiting trying to connect it to video games for some reason lol
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Can't speak for the poster but personally when I talk about topography it's usually the general layout of the landmass (cliffs/plains/mountains) and the relation that the player has to it.

ER's critical path generally has a theme of trying to create a continuous prolonged ascent. The world is laid out with massive amounts of visual detail that looks pretty but I never get the sense that I'm closer to understanding the world given the lack of interesting movement and how concealed non-critical locations are. It'll reward me often with a nice view of a new central location/legacy dungeon but usually I have to trust the game that moving across the only obvious path will be what leads me to it, and the map is extremely unhelpful at times in discerning verticality. I've gotten stonewalled more times than I like to count because the map is awful, and it disincentivizes me from looking for optional content like Catacombs and other side stuff.

I felt BOTW with its open world generally values empty space and isn't afraid of being loose about density, as that plays a huge benefit in location-tracking and understanding your position in the world/what's around you. You can easily reach vertical vantage points to get a strong overview of the land/a preferred route. It segues and moves through peaks and valleys constantly, with the peaks always enabling options, and even at the times you find yourself obscured by a significang ascent you can usually makeshift a unique solution to getting around or away from it (like paraglider, upward drafts, etc). Obviously the movement mechanics make the map so much easier to understand and read since verticality isn't as big of a roadblock. The Shrines/Towers may be interchangeable to some extents but the genious thing about them is that they're usually placed in smart areas that offer you a general proximity overview of what you can do; most of every area surrounding them has some additional viewpoints and landmarks that inspire curiosity. The Towers especially offer this, but even the Shrines do to an extent.

I don't like making these comparisons too much though because ER's strength is generally in legacy dungeons and combat design. I like the open world when I treat it as a buffer for major encounters, though I like it less when I have to engage with it as an exploratory element because it lacks what's interesting about playing it.
 
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Magic-Man said:
There's a few reasons why I'm not a huge fan of Hyrule, but I understand that it's all subjective.

1. All the biomes in the game are generic, other than one area (Rito Village). There's not a whole lot to them. I'd actually use Mario Odyssey for inspiration here. The Sand Kingdom has a beautiful village, pyramids, and an icy cave. Meanwhile, the Gerudo Desert is a barren wasteland. It's boring. The Wooded Kingdom has a garden industrial area and a dark section underneath. The woods in BOTW are just basic woods. There's nothing to the biomes in BOTW.

2. The animals and enemies stay nearly the same across every biome. The only area I can think of with unique encounters is the Gerudo Desert, with the Molduga and sand seals. The same enemies is copy pasted across every other biome, just with a different color scheme (and not even that half the time).

3. The shrines are completely separate from the game world, which is a HUGE missed opportunity for some great environmental puzzles and structures. For example, the dungeons in Elden Ring are connected to the game world. It feels more cohesive.

4. There's a lack of unique settings/encounters. Don't get me wrong, there's a few here and there (Thyphlo Ruins, Yiga Clan hideout, Eventide Island, the target range near Rito Village), but there's not nearly enough. Sometimes I don't want a shrine. I want an interesting location with unique enemies and mechanics. This actually ties into my previous point. Imagine if the shrines were their own unique locations.

5. The towns suck. Super basic, with no interesting structures or unique locations (sense a pattern here?).
Click to expand...

Completely my thoughts on the game. I still enjoyed the game but this is very accurate for me as well.
 
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SammyJ9 said:
I totally forgot about ARPGs/Looters like Diablo, Path of Exile, Titan Quest, etc., but dang you're right. Hell, I get excited in Path of Exile when I find a new ring that has +11 STR over my current ring and it frees up a point on the skill tree which then lets me reconfigure a ton of skill nodes to take a different path and the grand sum total of all this is... I do like 2% more damage :p. But it's fun!
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Oh yeah...... that's the stuff
 
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SammyJ9 said:
There's a lot more to it than just that, but there's also a pretty decent group of people for whom 'numbers go up' is actually pretty exciting! "Dungeon Encounters" is practically that, or most dungeon crawler RPGs in general, etc. I love me some incremental progression in a game.

I mean, that alone is worth it to me. Simple knowing 'killing this thing will give me XP and is therefore useful' makes me infinitely more likely to actually kill things. This is true in pretty much every game. At the risk of bringing up yet another controversial game: Paper Mario: Origami King. I quickly realized I'd much rather just avoid combat as much as possible in that game because there was no XP and the rewards were basically useless. Similar in BOTW, honestly. Lack of XP combined with weapon durability meant I fought enemies very sparingly.
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I'm definitely a fan of "numbers go up" as a reward system, but I prefer leveling specifically when it's passive. I never really go out of my way to level, and don't really have the mindset that leveling is a good reward on its own (it's honestly kinda boring imo if that's all you're getting) but it's something I like having in the background.

I did end up avoiding combat in what I've played of ER in the open world, mostly because I don't find Souls "mook" combat all that interesting outside of dungeons, and on top of that the XP rewards weren't really worth the risk to me. Whereas I tended to fight more in BoTW since I found the mook combat more engaging and there was also minimal risk
 
Magic-Man said:
Yeah, just simple enemy/animal variety between biomes would do a lot for general game feel. Make me afraid to enter an area because of the animals there. Have high level enemies with high level loot as a risk/reward scenario. Not simple sword/shield/bow enemies either. Have some attack me from the sky. Some breathe fire or ice. Others lay traps or hide themselves (not using camouflage either). The Hinox, Guardians, and Lynels are great examples of this, but they're everywhere in the game so they lose their impact.

Have me stumble across a structure, think it's a puzzle, then lock me inside with a unique enemy. Statues can come to life. That's not a tree you idiot now run. Oh shit that's a dragon IT'S HEADING RIGHT TOWARDS ME FU-
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Exactly.

Dark Cloud said:
All this spice got me sweating
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Fuck yeah curry
 
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