Take your broken weapons to a specialist in town, repair or ‘fairy upgrade’.
and or
In the wild fix, carry some ‘forge’ items (wood, flint, forge hammer, + weapon material)
An actual recipe book, once you do certain food combinations, you can recall them via a menu, and you can automatically cook and adjust the recipe via the menu (if you’re at a cooking station).
A better way to sail would be nice too. Maybe introduce more items that can deliver more wind. Or simply have an upgrade system for the Korok leaf.
Maybe some animal crossing mechanics. Make friends in different areas, time based events.
Some farmville mechanics. Get better meats and cooking items with your own personal farm/ gardens
Much in the same way I felt about Dragon’s Dogma, there should be a harder focus on travel and “expeditions”. Map should be 3x to 4x bigger, add more chokepoints on the map and keep relatively large distances between warp points. I want it to feel like Dark Souls, where when I want to head to a new area I feel like I actually have to prepare. BotW feels excellent in the starting plateau, the island challenge, and the master sword challenges because you feel the pressure of limited resources and you need to plan around what potions or items you can reasonably craft. Everywhere else it’s too easy to hoard resources and armor buffs are generally too utilitarian. I remember crafting like 20x fire potions to explore Death Mountain, used like 3 to make it to Goron Town and then bought armor that made them useless for the rest of the game.
I want to feel like I’m heading out into the wilderness and burning through a finite pack of resources. I want the feeling of dread when I’m down to my last environment potion and I need to decide if I press ahead or turn back. I want more area where I dip a toe in, get flattened by some factor like extreme heat or heavy rain, and have to think about what preparations I need to make to survive in that environment.
In regards to equipment I thought the constant weapon juggling was a good idea but I can see why it frustrated a lot of people. I think they could please almost everybody by making all weapons work like the master sword. Have stuff still break, but don’t remove it from your inventory and let you repair it. Keep weapon slots limited so that you need to make decisions whether to hold onto a broken powerful weapon until you make it back to camp or ditch it for a less powerful but immediately useful weapon in the field. Would also help reinforce the gameplay loop since after a certain point you never needed to return to town. Not that there should be a forced recovery like that but roughing it out in the woods should feel different gameplay-wise than making trips from town to town.
I think everyone agrees there should be a greater variety of enemies. Lizalfos and Bokoblins are almost identical gameplay wise. Moblins had such a limited attack variety that no encounters with them were notworthy. X-robes are too easy to gank once you have access to elemental weapons. Chuchus, plebbits, and keese are all nuisances that barely even count. Octoroks were almost universally unwanted nuisances that detracted from gameplay as they were just aggressive enough that you couldn’t ignore them and they camouflaged so that you couldn’t avoid them. Yiga clan were actually pretty interesting and I think the game did a good job of keeping encounters with them rare enough so that they didn’t get old. Hinox could have used some elemental tricks and varieties to spice them up. Talus where ok but despite their large variety you fight them all in the same way. Ditto for moldugas. Lynels felt too durable, there also didn’t seem to be enough way to exploit them so combat with them felt like attrition instead of a test of skill. I enjoyed all the skeleton enemies as they had lots of neat way to interact with. Same goes for all the guardians which had enough variety and were rare enough that they never got old.
I think the framework is there, which is why the game is so good. They need to stretch out the power level of the player. I really enjoyed the early game but the late game felt way too divorced from it.
I feel like the weapons breaking is too deeply baked into the system to allow for repair systems; although by the mid game it was pretty easy to find weapon farm locations, so who knows.
I also agree on the recipe book for the advanced recipies. Ahahaha, what if you aquired the recipes by instagramming the food?
I feel a deep need in my bones for stardew valley mechanics in this game, but I feel like that flies directly in the face of the “go out and explore” mission of breath of the wild.
I guess a better way to take notes would be my big ask? I always felt like I wanted to be able to open notepad in the game.
An infinite durability/zero defense shield for shield surfing maybe?
The problem I keep coming back to is that Zelda needs to be approachable on some level and all the suggestions I think of would be, on some level, hurting that approachability.
I feel like it’s too easy to teleport all the time, but if you introduce a cost to teleportation, you make it so you can’t enjoy the shrines in short play sessions. The cooking system, despite being delightful, doesn’t really feel fully baked into the system. However, if you make it so the armor doesn’t have those same effects, you now need to carefully ration your food, and breath of the wild quickly realized that portion of survival games is wiked tedious.
I love hard games but I don’t play Zelda to be stressed the fuck out. I play it for the fun of exploration, with some mild combat and puzzle challenges.
I like how people have these criticisms of a GOTY.
I know that the weapons thing was at first annoying, but there are tons of weapons everywhere, so it wasn’t a big deal.
I don’t claim to be a hardcore Zelda fan because I barely played any of the other games, but HOLY SHIT this game continues to blow me away and how wonderful it is and makes you want to keep going back and fucking around. I still want find all 900 Korok seeds. I want to have a really good collage of compendium photos with the best lighting and action shots of some of the things.
I just want more of BotW, which I’ll get out of playing Master Mode.
The weapon thing was only annoying for 5 minutes. What I find really hilarious is people complaining about the weapon wear system but also simultaneously complaining the game is too easy. You can easily make it harder by using lots of crappy weapons to fight.
Oh, we’re absolutely spoiled; BotW is a masterclass in just about everything it attempts. It delivers an impossibly polished experience of a genre that has been almost exclusively defined by broken
and/or bloated implementations. Most of my criticism boils down to “This part is only A material, not A++ material” and “I wish subsystem X was more integrated into the experience”.
I’d argue that more complex crafting would make the game worse, not better. Don’t turn every game that has crafting into a crafting game.
I wasn’t even cooking toward the end of BotW. It’s a fun little aspect of the game. Making it larger would make the game worse, obscuring the true holistic vision of the game itself.
I see a lot of gamers go down this road. They like one specific mechanic so much that they want it fully realized in every game. They want BotW to have:
Combat like Dark Souls
Farming like Stardew Valley
Crafting like Don’t Starve
etc…
If the crafting were even slightly more complex in BotW, it would impede the enjoyment of the rest of the game for most players. Same with the combat. Same with travel.
There are only two things I cook in BotW. I cook when a quest forces me to directly or indirectly. I also cook one durian at a time to create full-health restore items. That’s it.
Actually the reason I can’t get into BOTW is the small amount of crafting and the breakable weapons (which I would be fine with if they lasted like 100% longer). I love every other aspect.
They last a lot longer than 5 seconds. Also, you got infinite bombs. With that you can easily get a huge hoard of boko bows, clubs, travelers swords, etc.
People who have trouble I think are just playing inefficiently. Like hey, maybe don’t try to smack every bokoblin to death individually. Gotta shoot an arrow at the chandelier that blows them all up while they are sleeping.
real trick is to farm using the master sword. Problem being that to get the master sword you need too much health and that means giving up all that sweet stamina.
Answer: Make deals with the devil and trade all your stamina for hearts, grab the master sword, then switch back to stamina