Breath of the Wild: A masterpiece of mediocrity

Until last year when Tears of the Kingdom was released, I had put off buying a Nintendo switch. I’ve always wanted a Switch, and when they came out with a special Legend of Zelda edition OLED console, I saw it as the right time to get one, also knowing that we are in the later years of the console’s lifespan. If I wanted the Switch, I might as well have gotten it then, especially when I had FOMO with the hype and excitement around the new game.

But I didn't play Tears of the Kingdom (TOTK), no I got BOTW because the game was cheaper (with it being old) and looked similar enough to the sequel. As exciting as TOTK looked, I wanted to experience BOTW from the start. This first open world Zelda was one of the reasons why I always wanted the Nintendo Switch, it was a game I always wanted to play.

A brand new world to explore

When I started playing the game, I thought it was amazing; it was a game I wanted to play it all the time. The amount of things I could do felt like so much. There was just so much freedom, that this was what open world games should be. I would play the game any chance I got.

But that amazement didn’t last that long however. After the freshness of the game wore off, so did my desire to play. Over time, I was playing it on and off as my motivation to play the game dwindled and I found myself playing a few other Switch games more. I never really thought about why I didn't play the game as much, but when I started playing it regularly again, I noticed how much of what you do in the game is the same. The game is repetitive and tedious. I kept getting distracted off my objectives and going on tangents trying to find certain locations or discovering and completing shrines, and I don't even care for the shrines, I don't find them that exciting and would rather play the rest of the game because they take me out of the rest of the game too much. Honestly, why does this game have so many shrines? Of course it's because they're the only means for you to upgrade your hearts and stamina. But why design it like way? Why did they have to make it the ONLY way to aquire those things? They could have greatly reduced the number of shrines by offering other means of getting those upgrades in the form of rewards for completing side quests, or from opening a chest that you can only get from defeating a really tough enemy defense post, or solving a puzzle. The chance of obtaining heart vessels from chess would have at least made opening chests more exciting rather than being mostly rupees and weapons that will break. Being rewarded for things like exploration and completing challenges with pieces of heart in previous games felt much more rewarding than just doing lots of shrine puzzles and buying more hearts, so including those options with a smaller number of shrines would've added so much more variety and prevented the game from being so samey.

While this game feels large, they clearly favored quantity over quality here. The map, the items, the rewards and the shrines. The shrines rather being fun challenges, are more of a chore, something to check off and get over with. I find them to take you out of the rest of the game as they require a different state of mind to the rest of the game, you have to slow down, be patient and to be in the mood for solving puzzles that you might spend a while with. Same with the sidequests. They're the same, get this, do that, get it done just to check off a list. There's hardly anything interesting to find in the rest of the game, only shrines, rupees, Korok seeds, and disposable weapons, though sometimes you do find something nice like armor, accessories, and ancient materials however. While this game emphasizes “the exploration”, there is hardly any reason to do so when the payoffs are so lackluster. There is not much to find here in this game, and a lot of the things you “discover” are just more shrines and Korok puzzles. The side quests of related to uncovering mysteries and secrets, they’re probably shrines. The shrines could have been far more rewarding and interesting if there were MUCH less of them, more elusive, and rewarded you with good items. If the shrines were more like that, they might have been something you would be thrilled about discovering, but here they’re just another checkbox to tick off.

One thing that was done well in this game was how the story was told. You are in a broken Hyrule, everyone is dead and you have been awakened. You can find bits and pieces of the lore by literally recollecting memories by exploring, which fits the game perfectly. And just like the lore, the music also suited the openess of the game.

The limits of open world design

A common criticism of the open world genre (especially with Ubisoft games) is that most of that world is empty, a world that puts quantity over quality because they mistake scale for content, and this is the case here in Breath of the Wild. An exploration game with nothing to explore. The rewards are always predictable. Shrines, Korok seeds, weapons that will break. Nothing is interesting.

When they made Zelda open world, they sacrificed the variety in gameplay that the previous games had. What you will be doing most of the game will be mostly the same thing, which makes playing the game feel like a monotonous chore as a result. One thing in particular you’ll be doing a lot of in this game is climbing. Lots and LOTS of climbing, one of the most tedious aspects of the game. I’d have much rather preferred climbing to be limited to going up ladders and webs like in previous Zelda games, because at least something as boring as climbing would be far more limited to specific points. The ability to climb allows much more flexibility and openness in the game, but with the cost of tedious ways of traversal. It's like they forgot that they were designing a video game. Gaming shouldn't feel like work.

And now the elephant in the room, the common critique that everyone talks about in this game. A common complaint BOTW is the weapon durability system, which I cannot agree more with; it was just not done well at all. While having breakable weapons isn’t a bad idea in of itself, you only have a small number of weapon slots available to you to carry (until you you upgrade your inventory), and when your weapons just break after fighting a few enemies, they just don’t feel reliable, and we should want our tools to be reliable when they're so critical to staying alive. Of course you can just pick up new ones after defeating enemies, but it’s just extra fiction that takes you out of the things you should be focusing on the most. I don’t want to have to waste time dropping, comparing, and picking up weapons. And why even care about obtaining interesting weapons from chests when you can just pick up new ones that are just as effective after they break? Of course breakable weapons were nothing new in games, but this kind of thing is done so much better in other games such as Fallout and the Souls series. Items can break, but you can get MUCH more use out of them before they break than you can in this game, they didn't break after fighting a couple of enemies and you can even have them repaired. While having durability in this game wouldn’t have been a bad idea in itself, it was poorly executed and doesn’t feel like it was thought through. If the game already has something like cooking, why on Earth wouldn’t there be a crafting and repairing feature? The sequel TOTK improves on this somewhat by allowing you to carry far more items with the addition of the Fuse ability to easily craft items by making use of more items, but also becomes a disadvantage by burdening the player with too much choice. If you’re in combat, the last thing you’d want to do is to be fumbling about navigating menus, unless you’re playing a turn-based RPG. Like with shrines, they favored quantity over quality when it comes to weapons. What good is having so much choice in weapons when they're so disposable?

A foolish counter to this fustrating design choice is the idea that you're supposed to find other ways of fighting enemes. And I say, like what? Dropping boulders? Using magnesis to move metal blocks (which feels clunky in combat), bow and arrows where bows can break too? Not only are most of these "solutions" situational, but they do not do anything to add to the game, they're just an annoyance. Another foolish retort might be that it's not a combat focused hack and slash game. That would have to be the dumbest argument I've heard. So because it doesn't have a complex fighting system, we should make combat even worse? It's not a combat game, so we should have crappy poorly implemented mechanics hamfisted in? You could also make the same argument about complaints about previous games being too linear. Zelda was never an open world game either yet we have open world Zelda games now.

The sequel

As my interest in this game waded, I started to look at how TOTK would be, and it turns out, everything I dislike about BOTW is far worse in the sequel where you have even more empty worlds and pointless filler content that adds nothing and fails to innovate on anything its previous entry did and instead relies on gimicky surface level gadgets to play around with. The special abilities do look cool, but that is all they are, cool things to play with. If you’re going to have a sequel to a Zelda game and have new items, the core game should focus around use of those items. Like OOT and MM with the Ocarina, or with Twighlight Princess and the Wolf transformation, the new abilities should have major significance to the gameplay, its story and its progression, rather than being just a fun way to move around.

There is a much greater emphasis on story despite it being one of the worst written in the series history, with motives that don’t make sense and characters we have no reason to care about, and what makes it worse is that the story disrupts the design of the game by turning what’s meant to be a non-linear open world game of exploration, into something that is bound by narrative. What it looks like is that this game tries to have its cake and eat it. It is a game that everyone said was so much better than BOTW, yet it has even more pointless busy work, time wasting bullshit, and a worse story that poorly imitated everything that worked well for its prequel. A game like this should have just been a seperate sandbox game (since the physics and crafting are the only things people care about) rather than trying to force a Zelda game into something it's not. Those game reviewers singing its praises for the game were full of shit, just look at another similarly priced open world game that released in the same year, it makes TOTK look like child's play in comparison. In fact, it's not even better than Red Dead 2 which was released 6 years ago. The game is pretty and that's it, all style no substance.

A good starting point for the next phase

The Zelda series going open world was possibly a step in the right direction as it was something that fans of the series have been asking for, and Breath of the Wild was a good starting point for this style of Zelda, which is why the follow up should have been learned from, rather than expanded on. It’s been nothing but criticism here, but what would I suggest? How could a Zelda game in an open world be designed? There would be a lot to work with, not even the sky is the limit.

There is a balance to be struck between exploration, and intentional and purposeful design. One way to strike that balance would be to be able to complete the game in any way that you want, but to have linear smaller parts in the game such as objectives and quests that play in a linear fashion. In fact, this was done in BOTW when collecting the divine beasts. From the order you decide to collect them to the decision to even do them at all is non linear and you can approach them in any way you like, but when you do start those quests, they play in a linear way. You approach the town and their inhabitats are facing problems with their divine beasts that used to protect them. The elders of these towns tell you a story about their beast and then tell you what is happening at the present. You would then have a new objective to help them with their beast turning evil, along with someone in the town helping you on your new mission on freeing the divine beast. These objectives progress linearly and yet I find them to be the most exciting parts of the game. You have the freedom to go at your own pace and to choose any objective in any order, yet there is an intentional progression of that objective. You get filled in on the situation, you get help entering the beast, you do the puzzles, defeat the boss and free the divine beast. Having more objectives like this would have been a good way to strike a balance between the free open air of this game, and linear traditional game design. Something like this would fix the issues of uninteresting side quests and actually make you invested in doing them. The adventure of completing side quests should matter as much as the end reward.

The game is also bigger than it needs to be with most of the content being mindless busywork and lots of travelling, which is a major problem in open world games; content should matter more than map size. If all that fat was cut out, the initial amazement that many feel when first experiencing the game should last until completion. Replace the shrines with mini quests that reward you with something rare after completing it. These mini objectives could work as vignettes but could also tie in to the story in some way, substantive content that isn’t just more shrines, but content that gets you invested into this world they want you to explore.

Conclusion

The gameplay is hardly any different to the standard Ubisoft title where you have a massive map with several points you can go to. Is Breath of the wild bad? No, but it certainly is no masterpiece. It is barely even a game, it would be more accurate to call it a tech demo with Zelda style assets and sounds. It's a physics engine with a Zelda skin with TOTK being a 2023 update.