@dionysos283 I've done about 2,5 playthrough. Once when I bought my switch late 2017, a half mid 2018 and once again when corona and working from home kicked in this year. It's already itching to start my next playthrough, but I'll hold it until the release date of BOTW2 is known and nearing.
@ToadBrigade yea I just started. Did my first shrine again. Still in the great plateau. Ive been playing dq11 which is fun, and no more heros which is eh...ok. I havent had THAT much fun with a game since I put down 3d Allstars honestly and I wanted to reinvigorate my gaming love. Back on botw launch day, it did exactly that after taking a a couple year hiatus from gaming. Just this last hour thru the great plateau immediately brought back all those great feelings and how much I love this game. This will be my 3rd playthrough, but its been just over 3 years. So it'll all be fresh. This and dq will hold me over til I have some funds for AoC
Has anyone tried to play the game with self imposed challenges (e.g. no armor)? The healing and armor systems are so unbalanced that you practically have to make restrictions to get a bit of challenge. What is your favorite challenge run?
@chipia yes credit to @Panopticon for starting a thread on it last year. It's the only way I play BOTW. This is a copy and paste from his thread. Made the game much more enjoyable.
Sorry if this topic has already been posted but I searched and didn't find one. I thought it would be cool to post ideas here on how you could give yourself a custom set of rules to give new life to Breath of the Wild, i.e. the 3 Heart Challenge. Here are some good examples I've found on the Internet:
No Fast Travel: Walk, glide or ride everywhere.
Horse and Hound: Have your horse and Wolf Link with you as often as you can. If either die, you "game over" and start again from last save.
Curse of the Moon: Every Blood Moon, you lose all gear (weapons, bows, shields). Wear the Ocarina of Time armor set to give it more of a Majora's Mask vibe!
Atheist: No Praying (no heart or stam upgrades).
Survivalist: No trading with any NPCs (rupees become obsolete, heavier reliance on cooking and hunting/gathering).
I decided that I really liked the idea of No Fast Travel, Curse of the Moon, and Survivalist all combined into one run. After several hours of gameplay, I've discovered a few issues/concerns that I had, and I've made a few tweaks. As a result, I've come up with a brand new challenge:
The Hunger Games: Pretend you are a tribute participating in The Hunger Games arena!
1. Master Mode.
2. No fast travel.
3. Stay away from towns. Pretend they don't exist. And stay away from NPCs.
4. There are three concessions to Rule #3: You may unlock memories from Impa (talk to Impa, talk to Purah, talk to Impa again), you may register 1 horse, and you may purchase the Hylian gear. After these three concessions, no more towns or stables.
5. You can't use the climbing gear or Barbarian set. Only the Hylian set, or an amiibo set.
6. Fight every Yiga you see (the ones who look like NPCs on the side of the roads). They are fellow tributes who you must defeat.
7. You may interact with Koroks (Hestu inventory upgrades, obtaining the Master Sword) and with Fairy Fountains (armor upgrades).
8. Curse of the Moon: To keep the Hunger Games interesting, the game makers remove your gear (melee, bows, and shields) with each Blood Moon, forcing you into deadly situations to collect new gear. The Hylian Shield is exempt from this rule.
9. Optional Once every 5 in game days, you can scan one amiibo, which represents a sponsor sending a gift to you in the arena.
Some more in-depth explanation.
-This means no trading, and this will be a No Beast run.
-This is going to be a long game with no fast travel, so I'm allowing you to unlock memories. You might as well get to see those cutscenes every once in awhile to keep things more interesting.
-In this run, armor doesn't provide any buffs. Since you can't trade or go into towns, you won't be obtaining any of the armor sets from the 4 beast regions. This is going to put the "Death" in Death Mountain.
-I'm allowing armor upgrades because since you can't trade, you need to be able to use all your monster parts/collectibles towards something. Otherwise it just wouldn't be any fun. The caveat to this is that collecting rupees is much harder, and you probably won't unlock the 3rd fountain, and definitely not the 4th. If you choose the Hylian set, upgrading will be easier but you will have spent precious rupees that can no longer be used to unlock Fairy Fountains. If you choose an amiibo armor set, you save those rupees but upgrading armor is way harder (you'll need Star Fragments).
-Unlocking the Master Sword and Hylian Shield may end up being a high priority, since they are exempt from Curse of the Moon.
Sorry if the Hunger Games reference is a little hokey and outdated, but I've been doing this run for about 20 hours now and I'm honestly having a blast. Every decision you make becomes extremely calculated. You rely heavily on cooking and hunting/gathering. Every arrow you have becomes ridiculously precious. Also, I used to hate Master Mode for a few reasons, but honestly it helps for this run because of the floating rafts that usually end up having higher-tiered gear inside that don't require killing all nearby monsters to unlock. I've been hit by a few Blood Moons so far and each time it's genuinely painful to lose all my gear, but you end up collecting new gear in some very interesting ways. In the past, I barely used the map icons other than to maybe mark the location of a shrine; now I am marking where cooking pots are, and which shrines have good gear in them in case I'm desperate and need to go back to them.
I hope he doesn't mind me quoting
I cannot recommend the hunger games challenge enough. It made me love the game even more. Hope the same goes for you.
Revisited my first BOTW game, probably 100+ hours, defeated gannon long ago. Wish there was an easier way to find side quests. I'm sure there are others. I guess I just have to keep finding and talking to people?
I keep trying to finish my Hero mode run, but I'll play for a couple hours and then just start feeling overwhelmed again. So many shrines, so many seeds, weapons degrading, Master Sword trial, cooking buffs, armor and upgrades...bleh. I don't know. Some of the burdensome systems and insane number of collections in this game just destroy it for me beyond the initial newness of the game the first time around.
I really hope they decide to take out some of the mmo/open world elements in BotW2 and steer the ship a bit more towards the old-school 3D Zelda feel. I'm sure they can find a good balance.
@rallydefault There are ways around the degrading weapons.
Make sure your bombs rune is maxed for max power and quicker recharging. You can actually fight most everything with only bombs by switching back and forth between the round and cube bombs. The scientist girl at the lab on top of the hill at Hateno Village, she upgrades your slate/bombs.
Farm arrows. Here's where I farm arrows. I teleport to the shrine at the stable, in the western map region, by the gorge. https://youtu.be/HfNGFPQIkwo?t=14
Good bows with 38 hp and good swords in castle.
You can also max your armor up to four times, if you find all four fairy fountains. After you find all four, you can upgrade multiple times at any fairy fountain.
@WoomyNNYes
I knew a few of them, but thank you nonetheless. I'm sure I will do another full playthrough especially once BotW2 is given an official date and bigger tease and everyone is caught back up in the hype. I may just end up doing another normal run, though - hero mode is very frustrating for me for quite a few hours before you start to gain enough power to make things feel challenging instead of just ridiculous lol
I probably said it before but I don't like the rumor about botw 2 being more lineair. The idea I often hear is: "because the overworld is the same it doesn't matter that it starts out lineair". Excuse me, but then it actually matters! In my opinion its better to have new areas in a lineair fashion then visiting old areas in this matter. It would only frustrate me: "I know this area already, why are there everywhere invisible walls?". It almost sounds like what they did with the tears in Skyward sword. People complained that these hunts all took place in areas they already knew! But of course its all to soon. Another rumor states that the areas are much more expansive with much more going on. Maybe they feel fresh enough?
No matter what, I prefer the freedom of the first Botw. I understand they want to do some sort of story, but please don't take away the freedom.
@Henmii
I really doubt they're going to just make it a linear romp through the exact, down-to-the-bushes original world. I wouldn't worry about that.
But please, Nintendo, please: Bring back utility items to help solve puzzles. Bring some thematic life back to the dungeons. Make some different bosses that aren't just a reskin with a different twist on the moveset. Take away weapon degradation for the most part; perhaps reserve for particular items as previous games have.
But the biggest thing I think they can do to help the game: BotW did a great job of making you feel isolated and desperate, but in reality the respite of towns and other hubs were just a fast travel button press away. Take away fast travel from the map. Go back to something more traditional like specific warp points that must be traveled to, or perhaps an items that can take you to just a few locations across the map. By the end of my first playthrough, my gameplay was mostly just a rotation of shrine/fast travel, dungeon/fast travel, town/fast travel, korok seed upgrades/fast travel. At that point I was basically playing Assassin's Creed or Fallout; it didn't feel incredibly different from an Ubisoft open-world adventure.
@rallydefault I've used fast travel once, just to test it out. It is optional you know. No need to make EVERYONE (who wants to fast travel) travel to fast travel hubs when those of us who don't want to diminish the 'journey' aspect of the game can simply not use FT.
@gcunit
lol yes of course I know it's optional. I think it's a dumb design decision to have it. Period. Not everything needs to turn into this self-righteous "but don't punish everyone!" debate. That's such a flawed way to approach game design. "Don't take this dumb element away because you'll punish some people who like using the dumb element." Seriously?
@rallydefault fast travel is probably never going away. It’s just too useful - especially if you’ve not got a huge amount of time (personally I rarely used it).
I’d love to see them restrict costume changes to particular locations though (& not allow changes in the field). If you want to climb a mountain you’d need to balance the utility of the climbing gear with the fragility it gives you whilst you were travelling to get to the mountain.
I’ve just finished the game! My first Zelda game. What a ride! It was very overwhelming in the beginning and I’ve spent hours just walking around exploring. The game made me a digital hoarder. But in the end it’s so satisfying to take down those strong monsters your couldn’t face in the beginning. Without fast travel it would we impossible to play for me. It already took me 100 hrs to beat it. More then enough for one game.
I just wish they would get rid of the Bethesda/Ubisoft-style fast travel. Most Zelda games have had some form of "fast travel," but they've handled it much better: rooster statues, the ocarina, warp tiles, etc. Now, those maps were exponentially smaller than BotW's, so there's that hurdle, but I wish they'd put some brainpower toward figuring something out that takes away from its omnipresence it has in BotW.
I don't have that big of an issue with the fast-travel. You need to put in the work to find and (in many cases) conquer the travel points, after all. They're not drawn in your map automatically. Also, the map is huge and cohesive. This isn't a Witcher 3 situation, where the world and mission design are entirely dependent on fast-travel and quest arrows. Breath of the Wild is built so you can ignore fast travel if you wish. You're also punished for relying too much on it: many of the secrets and shrines expect you to roam off the beaten track. However, the distances are so vast you need some kind of system in place to get around. I suppose there are two ways to circumvent this: you can do what Dark Souls did, where fast travel is only implemented about two-thirds of the way through, so that by then you've earned the right to warp around; or you can limit the number of warp points. With more than a hundred shrines and a dozen towers, the entire map ends up cluttered with warp points by the time you're done. It takes many, many hours to get to that point — but it's certainly something that happens. So I understand your concern. I'm just not sure it's that problematic in the context of a game that's already pushing into experimental territory, at least within the realm of AAA titles.
@Beaucine
I think Bethesda/Ubisoft-style fast travel is lazy game design and belongs in the past. Yes, at the beginning of the game it's not an issue, but then again that's kind of how the beginnings of games always go: you don't have much. As you say, the "map ends up cluttered with warp points by the time you're done." That's the issue I have. And it doesn't even have to be the tail-end of the game. Even if you only have a third of the shrines and towers, you have about 50 fast-travel points on the map. Even for a big map, that's a lot.
I think game devs need to think of something better. Yes, you can ignore it, but like I said before, I think that's a dumb excuse. I think including stuff that players can "just ignore" results in a bloated game with systems that don't make sense. I play games the way they are presented to me with the systems the developers included. If I need to artificially limit myself from some of the systems in order to have a better or more immersive experience, then the game design is bad. Just my opinion, but the greatest games are the one where every design and implementation makes sense and contribute toward player immersion and the ebb and flow of challenge.
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