The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

i turned off shrine ping until i had traversed the entire map on roads and hit up all the obvious ones like the ones in towns and next to stables, then turned it back on to find the out of the way ones

Because if you don't do quest X you can't get reward Y and you need reward Y to complete quest Z?

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, January 31, 2019 9:36 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's vanishingly little of this other than in the sequence of events leading you into each divine beast, and that's pretty linear and easier to keep track of.

You cannot move on to Y until you do X?

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, January 31, 2019 9:37 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Y = enjoying the game
X = stop worrying about playing it "correctly"

Yeah, it's easier to just fart around and do whatever makes you happy. The quest log keeps track of things pretty reliably.

There are three types of quest:

Side quest: Like, "fetch me the ingredients for a delicious devil stew from the castle and i will give you a disappointing 20 rupees" or "guide this message in a bottle down the river for a disappointing selection of rubies." These quests are all totally optional. Some are really fun, it's not just fetch quests.

Shrine quest: These are totally optional too. They're like side quests, but if you beat it, you'll uncover a new shrine.

Main quest: If you just want to complete the plot and finish the game as quickly as possible, you have to do (most of) these.

Then there's completing the shrines (these are optional but build up your health and stamina for battles) and finding your lost memories (which are totally optional, but if you get them all, you get a slightly better ending and a bunch of fun cut scenes during the game)

And theoretically you don't even have to get the divine beasts, but three of them are awesome fun dungeons, and the camel is a fucking wanker.

the divine beasts should not have been so dungeon-like. the shrines are better, optional dungeon puzzles. the initial catching/taming part was a good idea, but you should just fight the boss when you get inside.

josh I was only joking about having you banned

and every boss fight should have involved controlling the divine beast in order to deliver a final death blow

you should maybe prioritise the main quest and you’ll find yourself ambling into side quests along the way

I suggest you start by locating kakariko village (is that what it’s called? the first main village) and going from there

Yeah, I've been there, then to the annoying j-pop scientist, then ... back?

go to Zora Domain imo

And theoretically you don't even have to get the divine beasts, but three of them are awesome fun dungeons, and the camel is a fucking wanker.

― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, January 31, 2019 11:30 AM (thirty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I had no idea if there was a particular order to them when I first played (before losing the first switch), and this was the only one i made it to/beat. definitely looked up tips on how to beat it tho

Josh, generally, when I played the game, I did the following:

1. Did not cook at all, but explored every realm and used shrine-completion as an opportunity to heal.
2. Stuck to the main quest religiously until Zora's Realm was completed, as the ability you get from defeating the Divine Beast there is extremely useful.
3. Prioritized exploring the map, activating the towers.
4. Prioritized finding all four fairy fountains and upgrading my armour-- not cooking meant that I had naturally acquired most of the required ingredients to do so.

Because if you don't do quest X you can't get reward Y and you need reward Y to complete quest Z?

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, January 31, 2019 5:36 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is very little of this in the game (if any?) which is very unusual for a zelda game (a franchise which is big on this type of gating). if you’re skilled enough, you can walk off the plateau and straight to the final boss

I remember the early game being very difficult - requiring careful management of weapons, use of situational advantages in combat (bombs, barrels, stealth etc). there comes a point where you stop picking up clubs and sticks and start collecting swords and spears etc

this is a little way into the game and is the fun of progressing

for travel you can fast travel - a lot of the wonder comes from just traversing the world on foot and coming over small settlements, set pieces, large towns, merchants etc

fgti’s scheme is good

we are here for you josh. this is a safe space. I will not call for your removal from the board and have removed you from my badposters.xls

Cool. Coming from Dark Souls, there is no "right" way there, but there are wrong, practically irreversible things you can do, and big mistakes to make, that can seriously impair enjoyment.

I think dark souls was a really weird entry point for you. DS is awesome and there’s a reason there’s an entire genre called “soulslike” games. But it’s no sort of measuring stick other games. In general, although it sometimes makes sense to compare one game to another, especially games in the same series, I try to approach each game on its own terms.

the best way to play this game is to just noodle around in pursuit of some proximal goal and not worry about if you get distracted and wind up somewhere else. Just live in the game, man.


Otm

^yes so many play sessions were like shaggy dog stories

I like FGTI's approach, but I did a variation - lots of cooking and not a lot of fairy fountain stuff. The fairies start asking for a LOT of stuff in exchange for the later upgrades, and they aren't that necessary if you have some of the better dishes in your inventory.

I also managed to get through the game without almost any horse combat. I think there was some kind of horse combat training game upon which I never stumbled.

Long story short, I mostly wanted to make sure there wasn't something that if I missed or forgot to do early on I would seriously regret. Like, "oh shit, I should have told that dude in that field 'yes!'"

I'm pretty sure that the only thing you ever lose access to, in the whole game, is the interior of the divine beasts, after beating bosses. You need not regret anything.

so basically play it as just a bunch of adventures and puzzles and challenges, or, if I want, story mode.

play it however it makes sense to you! if you're craving a challenge, head straight for the castle in the middle. you'll probably get your ass kicked and realize you need better equipment. the way to get better equipment and weapons is just to explore and do quests. there's no correct or incorrect order to do the quests, you just kind of figure it out.

personally the way i played it was something like

*takes out binoculars*
whoa, there's a shrine way up there on that mountain, i'm gonna try to get to it
*many adventures take place on the way to the mountain*
fuck, wait, it's cold on the mountain. i need some sort of cold-repelling food before i try it again.
*adventures take place. the sun goes up and down several times. i totally forget what i was doing, while also completing 17 other shrines and finding a fairy who wants to have sex with me in the woods*
oh yeah, i was going to try to find that shrine on the mountain!
*many adventures take place on the way to the mountain*
etc

if you want structure or to be told how to play the game, here's a way:

defeat the four divine beasts, then go to hyrule castle in the middle

otm

those fairies are extremely horny

but just keep in mind that another way to play is try to find a tree at the top of a large slope and then blow it to pieces and have fun pushing the logs down the hill

do we think you might not fully appreciate how novel and brilliant botw is with all its freedom and fluidity - if you're not invested in the zelda franchise having never played all the key mainline games ?

lol for some reason 90% of the times my partner would sit down to watch me play for a bit, I'd be at the fairy getting ready to upgrade like 7 items. "uh no it's not allllways like this I swear"
leisure suit link

love those fairies

xp that was my experience as well!

every time i visit the fairies i think about george constanza's desire to date an extremely tall woman

I wonder if BOTW being someone’s first open world game dulls its impact a little. I feel like if you haven’t slogged through dozens of similar but terrible games over the years you might not see it as particularly mind blowing. But stuff like how you never need to do X in order to do Y, you get every ability from the outset, you can go literally anywhere as soon as you leave the plateau, the geography being meticulously designed to constantly reward you for exploration but doesn’t FEEL meticulously designed, you can experiment without breaking the game, fire and ice and magnetism and gravity and momentum all work as expected which encourages you to dick around with them, etc—it’s like aw yiss they finally got it all right.

otm - a lot of the systems are perfectly tuned and feel "right", which might not be so exciting unless you have experienced lots of other games where similar systems are a toil.

it's kind of like the jump in super mario bros 3, which is still one of the greatest jumps of all time. unless you have played a bunch of 2D platformers with subpar jumping mechanisms, you might not appreciate how perfect it feels in SMB3 and how hard that is to accomplish

for me, part of the wonder of BOTW was how pleasant the exploration and wandering was. in a lot of open world games, you can technically go anywhere from the beginning but for all practical purposes, there are gates set up where you need to approach things in a certain way, or spend some time leveling up before heading out toward the center. like in red dead redemption 2, i guess if you wanted you could take your horse and head to the edge of the map as soon as it starts (maybe not?), but other than small side quests, you won't find much to do there until you've progressed far enough to unlock the main story missions and some essential gear and abilities. there are elements of that in BOTW, but the sense of freedom is much more palpable.

Yeah. People have speedrun the whole thing in a half hour at this point (though they used some glitches), and the game doesn't stop it.

I like the idea of it, but the weather and night and day dynamics can be a drag on just having fun exploring.

2. Stuck to the main quest religiously until Zora's Realm was completed, as the ability you get from defeating the Divine Beast there is extremely useful.

This is certainly something I recommend also. And when doing so, dont bother fighting the Lynel you'll see when you're told to go get electric arrows. Just get em and nope out of there then go buy some elsewhere instead. Lynels can wait, believe me.

(that said I wish I'd tried to defeat one sooner than I did, once I discovered they drop such powerful weapons)

xp slipping in the rain while climbing and tiresome skeleton enemies are two other middling bits of the game. it's still very good, though.

let's just wait till josh gets a metal sword and it rains

This is certainly something I recommend also. And when doing so, dont bother fighting the Lynel you'll see when you're told to go get electric arrows. Just get em and nope out of there then go buy some elsewhere instead. Lynels can wait, believe me.

If you want a similarity to Dead Souls, there's nothing quite as satisfying as defeating your first Lynel after being remorselessly powdered by them for weeks

Some of my favourite things happen at night in the game - gilding over akkala in a thunderstorm, with the lightning revealing the field of dead guardians for brief seconds at a time, was major goosebumps

this is pertinent to my interests because i burnt out on this game on the way to the sora quest so maybe i should try again. it'd be my fourth time. i kinda hate both the boss battles and the fucking shrines.

My bf told me he beat that Lynel, and I spent hours desperately trying to accomplish what he had claimed to accomplish, beating a Lynel so early game

I failed and I am now convinced he was lying

If you can get the parry move down, you can beat them without getting too banged up, but that's not an easy move to pull off, over and over.

fgti, I think your anti-cooking stance will need rethinking with that lynel

tbh I just spam them with bomb arrows, I never got a real technique down. I cant trigger flurry rush for the life of me.

I'm not convinced you can parry those fuckers, and I fought a few in a row once in a misjudged quest for shields. I did once, purely by accident, glide up into the air on a fire draft and landed on his back, an amazingly badass move I could never reproduce

my recent thing with lynels has been grinding to get my ancient armor set upgraded, the bonus on that gives me an 80% damage boost with ancient weapons (which are ubiquitous at this point in the game) that STACKS with mighty food, it is very satisfying to just go in and pound on lynels that way

takes goddamn forever to get that armor and upgrade it though