'Cause we got Elden Ring
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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People really hate weapon durability, huh? I thought it was kind of genius, and that TotK introducing a way to repair weapons was really bad for the gameplay loop.
The durability system is just extremely tedious in both BotW and ToTK. It takes a lot of fun out of the game imo. Especially since items have such little durability, they break far too quickly.
I also think the same about ACNH. I have a similar view (probably controversial) about Minecraft, except I think it'd be fine if the tools didn't permanently break and you could just repair them afterwards. Only if you fix anvils/repairing tho, it's been totally broken forever, although I guess mending exists as a bandaid. But really I prefer something like Terraria where there's just no durability period.
A long time ago, I played Fortnite Save the World (the PvE mode) and that was one of the worst offenders for weapon durability, at least for a beginner.
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People hate that they removed everything about the Zelda games that made them fun and charming, and left a mid grinding experience. The weapons breaking don't really bother me much.
Old Zelda: find a temple, new set of enemies, solve puzzles until you get to the new tool, solve puzzles with the tool, fight a large boss that the tool conveniently works really well on.
New Zelda: find a shrine, fight yet another of these little guys. Find a shrine, solve two or three of the same puzzles with the tools you got in the first hour of gameplay. Spend large amounts of time just walking through areas of the map fighting the same campsites and outposts, hoping for a radar beep so you can find a shrine.
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TotK didn't introduce a way to repair weapons, it reduced their durability to near nothing then gave you a way to buff them.
It did. In TotK only, put (almost) any weapon or shield on the ground in front of a Rock Octorok and let it inhale it and spit it out. You'll get back the same base weapon, with the same fused item, at full durability, but with a rerolled modifier. Each Rock Octorok can only do this once, so kill it afterwards so that you remember which ones you've used. They'll respawn at each Blood Moon so that you can repair again.
Some special weapons can't be repaired this way, so you have to use a workaround. If you want to keep whatever you have fused to them, go to Tarry Town and have the goron separate it. Then fuse the unrepairable weapon to anything that can be repaired. Feed that to a Rock Octorok, then take it back to Tarry Town and have it separated. The "unrepairable" weapon will good as new.
My Eldin map is covered in stamps showing where Rock Octoroks are, and I have a full inventory of strong weapons because I switch when their durability is low and then go on a somewhat tedious repairing spree when most of my weapons are flashing red.
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It's mostly just that it doesn't make any fucking sense, most especially after the beginning of the game. None of the weapons are mostly diverse enough that the frequent changing created by durability encourages you to really play the game any differently, usually you have a stockpile of extra weapons anyways so you don't really even need to pick up new stuff, and most of the hard enemies drop the weapons that deal higher damage, meaning you'll want to use the high damage weapons on those enemies, so there's not much decision-making going on there. After fighting enough hard enemies later in the game, you get enough high damage weapons that it's not even really worth it to interact with most of the random bokoblin camps. Not that doing so was super interesting to begin with, outside of like the first couple hours of gameplay.
TotK solves some of these problems with the fusion mechanic and having increased enemy variety, but it's still not great, and most of what it does serves to assuage the shittiness of the system rather than provide a reason for it to exist in the first place.
Yeah. Weapon degradation in a video game that isn't trying to go for a realism vibe is absolutely fucking garbage. You've got arrows that light on fire, turn to ice, or have lighting as soon as you pull them out of the quiver, but yeah. Totally makes sense that my Master Sword needs a lil sleepy time to become usable again. Just fucking garbage.
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The entire system was trash from the get go. I don’t care that weapons break IRL; I’m playing a fucking video game, get that shit out of there.
It isn't about realism, but creating a resource-management gameplay loop. Need better gear? You have to regularly work for it. It also encourages using weaker weapons in weaker areas, which makes the difficulty more consistent and fresh.
Yeah that’s all trash. I’m playing an action adventure game, not a logistics game. Get that crap out of there.
It's not that deep, lol. Again, it drives creative problem solving by adding a price to each action. Using your tools like the slate or other mechanics is free, and results in a more engaging gameplay experience than just "swing my strongest weapon forever."
Deep or not, it’s unnecessary trash.
You believe mechanics that support interesting problems and encourage creative solutions are "unnecessary?" What would you replace it with, to get the same results?
The main problem is weapon durability is in direct contention with how the dungeons are designed. The shrine puzzles try to encourage experimentation in finding solutions, but when using the time lock tool hitting objects depletes your durability, then once you run out of weapons, you need to leave the shrine to find new weapons\materials which ends up being a big interruption in the main gameplay loop. It's made even worse by the fact every weapon applies a different amount of force to a locked object per hit. I'm not sure what interesting and creative problem solving weapon durability adds. It really just encourages you to avoid combat and use easy to come by weapons wherever you can.
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I played the game as a rom with weapon durability turned off. It was a great game after that, previously it had been tedious, which is the exact opposite of what a game should be. I get enough tedium IRL & through talking to people like you.
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It's completely true. I like to call this the Halo effect. It's a pretty mid game that's entirely alone on it's platform, and therefore is massively popular and stands out.
That doesn't mean there aren't some fun features, like great physics, but that doesn't mean it's a truly great game.
No way you just said Halo was mid
As someone that has no nostalgia for the series, I have to agree with them. Halo was mid
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I have played halo 1, 2, 3, and 4 front to back on legendary. It is one of my only accomplishments as a gamer, I have completed almost no other games. No ODST or Reach for me though, because I am unlucky.
Halo is a shooter from a pre-call of duty, pre-titanfall, pre-brink, pre-mirror's edge era. It doesn't have really any interesting movement mechanics, and the . The grappling hook in infinite is maybe a response to this other, better variety of FPS, but I still think it kinda comes up flat. It has basically no interesting cover mechanics. Post-doom, quake, unreal tournament, and boomer shooter, though, and those had good movement, so who fuckin knows what their deal is.
No, halo's much slower. Halo, you have a slower walk speed, your enemy projectiles are supposed to move much slower since they're all plasma based and you're usually offered the opportunity to have hitscan weapons. So your movement still matters, it's just less interesting. Most of the appeal of halo comes about as a result of this slower movement speed affording more easily made levels, with more interesting level design, and more easily made enemy AI with more interesting behaviors. Basically, where other shooters make the core gameplay as fun as possible, on the player's side, making the player a more interesting character to control and use, Halo would rather make everything else as fun as possible, everything around that core.
Most FPS's just have like, open spaces, and then corridors, and then big rooms, and that's basically it, because they can't make the level geometry super complicated without screwing up the player's movement options, or over-complicating everything since the player can either look at enemies or look at the level design and usually not at both at the same time, which is also why they mostly always try to keep you moving towards the enemies, or why unreal tournament relies so much on you memorizing the arenas.
I think this means that when most people evaluate Halo, they're doing so by measuring it against other shooters, and against this other philosophy, and Halo obviously ends up as pretty mid when measured against that. It also doesn't help that Halo can be pretty hit and miss with this philosophy, since this relies more on very consistently interesting changes in level design and enemy variety to keep things spicy, and this novelty tends to wear off as the series inevitably chugs along. It also doesn't help, the number of mid shooters which followed in Halo's wake, or are reminiscent of halo specifically because of this lack of mechanical complexity, this minimalism, but without understanding what made Halo good, was that they made up for it with a lot more hard work poured into the rest of the game.
I don't think it would be a major mistake to call halo mid, especially on the average, and especially as the series chugs along, and there's really just less and less to do in order to make it interesting, both in the story and in the basic design. At the same time, the series does have some pretty high highs, and probably Halo is one of the most interestingly designed first person shooters I've seen, because it's so hard to see the depth at first glance.
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I did, and I stand by it.
I've been playing through the Halo series recently as I missed the craze growing up because I had a PlayStation and I'm not really getting it. I'm guessing it's just something you had to be there for? My first game was Super Mario World on the SNES and I loved COD4 when it dropped but trying to play Halo now is just not doing it for me I guess.
What board did OP post it on
/totkswitchnopcallowed
You can't tell me how to have fun.
If TotK is mid then what's a great game in the same genre?
If you say BG3 it will be obvious you didn't read the italicised part.
TotK and BotW both share the same problem IMO, though TotK fares far far better. Theyre not Zelda games, they're open world Ubisoft games with the Zelda name and way less bugs.
Both are locked to a console that can't even properly run them. Playing on PC with better framerates and weapon durability disabled definitely help them feel more fun, but ultimately they give about as much fun as a game like Far Cry 5 or 6.
Once I completed the main quest I just haven't ever gone back to them, and I probably never will. But I have replayed through Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, and Twilight Princess at least 5 times each.
Being in the same genre, how specific do you want? Open world fantasy? Elden Ring IMO. Zelda games? Pick any of the ones made after Zelda II and before BotW, CDi games not included, and you're probably going to have a more "Zelda" experience. RPGs just in general? Probably Chrono Trigger or Divinity Original Sin 2.
Haha, what.
Zelda 1 was open world.
Breath and Tears are more true to the franchise than any game since, but you'll not see me tossing any of them into the bin out of some arbitrary genre loyalty.
Zelda 1 was the only game in the franchise that was open world until BotW came out. No, it was not the most true to the franchise.
Uh
The one that defined the franchise? Isn't true to the franchise? It literally was the franchise in its time.
It's the originator. It's the roots in "get back to our roots". Talking nonsense about "departures" is pretty dumb when the direction in which it departs is towards the first game in the series. That's not a departure, that's a return.
So the latest Prince of Persia isn't a departure from the usual formula because the Apple II PoP was a sidescroller?
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Zelda 1 started the franchise, but it doesn't define it. Ask anyone the most definitive Zelda game, and most people will tell you Zelda 3: A Link to the Past, or Ocarina of Time (which I think is Zelda 4 but I am not sure 100%).
Notably, every mainline Zelda game after 3 followed a definitive formula that 3 started, which BotW and TotK ditched. TotK kinda tried to bring back some of the formula, and thats why I say TotK is far better than BotW, but it still wasn't what most would expect from Zelda.
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Downvote me if you must but I finished AND enjoyed both Far Cry 5 and 6.
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Pretty much any open world game, including Ubisoft ones.
In botw I realized once I disabled weapon durability that there is very little reason to explore the world once I got a decent weapon; that part of the game is contrived exclusively to justify weapon durability. So the open world sucks.
Then the "dungeons", the core and lifeblood of a Zelda game, are just one puzzle room that that takes 10 minutes. So it's a bad Zelda game.
And I know it's subjective but I just found the game boring. Like the game was made for young children so they couldn't make it too interesting to play. There was nothing interesting, or novel about it other than the glider, which other games have copies since then, so it's no longer unique. Compared to other open world games it was extremely bare bones. Even open world games before it had more stuff to do, and certainly more engaging combat.
It felt like a tech demo more than a game, and it's only impressive in the condescending way a console game can be called impressive. "Oh you made this game to work on a potato battery? Wow! Good for you!"
On top of that, I never appreciated Nintendo's business model of forcing me to buy a $300 console on top of $60 just to play the Mario, or the Zelda.
What was even original about the glider? Gliding / parachuting mechanics have been around forever. Just Cause had them ages ago. Even Spyro games in the 90's had them.
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What, the open world genre? Maybe Elden Ring, but tbh it would have been better had it not been open world.
I just don't really get BotW and TotK, and fwiw, I am that, 'played emulated with settings pumped for free' person. They both just seem so repetitive, worth like, 5 hours of fun.
Edit: to be clear, I did not turn off item durability or change any game mechanics, just resolution and fps. Item durability is a crutch the game relies of for balance, andnits annoying, but isn't related to the central complaint I have: game is repetative. So much is just, same kind of luzzle again, same kind of fight again, and no cool rewards that don't break. I don't get what the appeal is.
I haven't played TOTK, but I tried BOTW and the entire time I was playing it I wished I was playing Just Cause.
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Huh, lots of opinions on BOTW and "if I disable a mechanic on PC, the game is not fun".
I've enjoyed both botw and totk, but not to completion.
I do feel like they are both tech demo iterations.
Botw introducing actual physics and creativity as puzzle solving possibilities. Totk introducing "everything is physics" and relying on creativity for puzzle solving.
Botw story was mid. Totk story was better.
Botw dungeons were terrible. Totk dungeons were better, and some had a bit more girth/depth to them.
I feel like now that they've cracked the "everything is physics", and iterated dungeon designs... The next one will hopefully feel a lot more Zelda.
At least, I hope so.
But, same genre...
What do you class totks genre as?
“if I disable a mechanic on PC, the game is not fun”
To be clear, disabling weapon durability made the game more fun.
The mechanic itself was ass. I wouldn't have played further without disabling it.
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Tunic?
Eh, it is mid and i say this as a fan. Zeltik was bang on with his 'disappointing masterpiece' . None of the obsessive replayability of BOTW
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The main difference is Switch owners have never played a real game, only nintenshit.
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