The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

definitely gonna go die a bunch trying to do that to the ones around the central Hyrule tower I haven't gotten yet

I didn't even deal with those guys. Just intermittently hid from their tracking beams and eventually made it past them and up the tower. I may have had the fast climbing bandana on, though. I've been dumping shrine orbs into extra stamina vessels, and I'm now very happy that I did so. New strategy is to use faster climbing and greater stamina to visit fairy ponds before big battles. fuck a heart container.

i did the first divine beast last night (the zora one), that was very cool. the boss was pretty easy though compared to a lot of normal enemies. does the difficulty ramp up on the other beasts or are they all about the same since there's no official order to them?

The first beast I did (and only one so far) was Vah Medoh and I was surprised at how easy it was so I guess they'll all be about the same. A few hits with bomb arrows and it was all over in about 2 minutes.

How critical is the stealth armor? I've been saving up for it, but it's pretty expensive! Also, any good strategies for getting rupees? I've just been hunting, cooking, and selling skewers. Is that about right?

Still having a tough time with fighting. Generally I start panicking as the camera swings around, end up in a crouch, and get my butt kicked. The only time I feel confident is when I eat a big defense crab stew. Just waiting for the controls to click and start feeling natural, I guess.

i need to get back into this; feeling like i lost patience way too early for no reason.

yeah i'm definitely not good at the combat still, having mostly opted out of the dark-souls-ification of gaming over the past decade. luckily the game is structured such that you don't ever really have to fight the hard stuff.

I keep getting sidetracked! Was going to one of the test of strength battles, decided to go harvest some crabs, ended up back in the village, didn't have enough for the stealth armor, went hunting, ended up in new area, found a few shrines, and now I'm off in some new place, and who knows when I'll get back to that test of strength. I don't even remember where it was at this point! And I keep finding seeds, and getting ridiculous little side quests. It's feeling more fun now, but it's still completely overwhelming.

Oh and I managed to climb and light the central tower without getting zapped, which felt pretty rad!

yeah i've got all the towers now except for the southwest and northeast areas. the ridgeland one that's in the middle of a pond full of electric enemies was harder than the central one. northeast one looks especially intimidating to get to.

I got the one with the electric enemies by just hiding in a spot and dropping bombs on them over and over...

The last tower for me was hard because I couldnt fucking FIND it. It was tucked under a cliff.

there's a good number of those lol

I did my final tower last night, Akkala in the north-east. I thought it looked really difficult so I'd been putting it off but it wasn't that bad. One or two average difficulty bokoblins but the flying guardians are easy to avoid if you don't want to fight them.

I was probably delighted the first time it rained, and I slipped while climbing. I am now entirely fed up with 8 hour rains that interrupt the middle of a journey up a giant mountainside. Or I was fed up. Then I did the whole zora's domain hero/lynel/weapon/dungeon thing, and the game is beautiful again.

I find the dungeons way more unsettling than past Zelda games despite not being as gloomy or encompassing

weirdly this game feels like it pulls more beats from twilight princess than any of the other 3d zeldas stylistically. I think city in the sky is the closest past dungeon in look and feel to the divine beasts, and same with palace of twilight for the shrines and sheikah tech

fighting with a giant club feels like battletoads

octoballoons are fun, i guess? i might have had some fun? or pain? it was definitely fun or pain.

aside from that one quest i had no idea what to do with those things

apparently you were 'supposed' to use them to get up the faron tower but i just climbed the mountain next to it and jumped over instead

Ive had no luck with those things. ON a raft it just tilts all over the place and then they pop after a few seconds anyway!

they are good but also bad

you can put one on a bomb and then use a leaf to blow it across a gap but i have no idea whether that ever becomes necessary in the game

neat thread about the game world design/dev

Got around to reading some of the BotW CEDEC articles. Interesting fact -
https://t.co/494TwAuYxi

— Matt Walker (@gypsyOtoko) October 3, 2017

thank u i enjoyed that thread, also the second one on the ui design

Thanks to @Nibellion and tonyh24613 from Gaf I've been alerted to articles based on the other BotW CEDEC talks - so how bout a new thread?

— Matt Walker (@gypsyOtoko) October 4, 2017

going to paint my kitchen "zelda white" so it's less startling to look up from my switch

very cool!

also need botw.css for ilx

from the world design thread: "after a marathon of herzog documentaries, designers decided that it should rain every time a player hoped to climb a tall mountain, fight a stone talus, capture sunset fireflies, etc. this would really drive home the uncaring chaos and brutality of nature."

there should be dlc narration

The WiiU lets you see how much time youve spent on a game. I have now clocked up over 300 hours on this thing :/ Prob at least 100 of those is me just aimlessly wandering around, because I find this thing so meditative.

i could wander around and collect virtual mushrooms or i could see what's happening on the internet... yeah i think virtual mushrooms win this one. am so, so glad that nintendo is still making great offline games.

ugh, trying to read that Matt Walker twitter thread is a total mess now with all the replies.
and his medium summaries have no images. bummer.

oh geez he deliberately deleted the original tweets "out of respect" to the original talkers. someone get him on twitter and tell him the images don't embed on medium

lol

man, this game, even the glitches are cool. spouse just ran across a dlc bug where a treasure chest falls out of the sky over and over again.

The other day I used one of my amiibos to do a treasure drop, and it dropped a chest and 2 wooden crates. Then there was a flash of lightning and one crate just blinked out of existence.

I also found and rode the King of the Mountain the other day! He was spooky.

Lord of the Mountain rather.

Oh man this game. I've pretty much ignored a whole bunch of mechanics - quests, mini bosses, riding horses, shrines, korok seeds - and I'm still clambering over new mountains and creeping along new valleys, just trying to find out what's around the next corner. This is after about 40 hours. I got the house, though - Bolson is a dude.

And now my kids are playing it and noticing things that I breezed right past, setting bomb traps for octoroks, catching horse after horse - they're approaching it. in such a different way to me, it's an education.

So I’ve got like 80 shrines, and all of the beasts. I’m kinda petering out. I guess I should go to the castle and finish this, but I don’t want to end the game. Once I go to the castle can I keep playing the game after, or is that it (spoilers, I guess)?

that's it, pretty much. you'll get a save with a * so you can keep trying to 100% after if you want

there's the DLC, some of which isn't out yet, no?

I've only done two beasts. I became obsessed with obtaining and upgrading armor for awhile when life got very busy. I've also been playing mario kart because I switched game cards to play with friends awhile back, and it's hard to justify not playing mario kart whenever I pick the thing up. Now the new mario is coming out, and I don't think I can juggle 3 masterpieces.

xp oh yeah that DLC- will definitely buy when it's complete

the nice thing about single player masterpieces, they'll always be waiting for you =D but zelda is so good, finish it

finishing games is overrated imo

I wandered around for like an hour last night trying to find more shrines and ended up with like 2 stupid korok seeds. Guess it's time to wrap it up. Or I could just talk to every goddamn NPC in Hyrule and do all the side quests (many of which reveal shrines, I guess).

the ones that open shrines go into a separate section in your quest log iirc so you know which they are

Good to know, thanks!