PeffseMar 6

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I don’t find my weapon breaking every 10 minutes fun, nor do I find the endless wandering with no context clues very engaging. I swear 90% of the stuff you have to stumble onto by dumb luck. It took me months to accidentally bump into that stupid maraca tree thing and expand my inventory. That’s just dumb design.

Show threadCaptain AggravatedMar 7
In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you “Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village.” Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.
Show threadDe_NarmMar 7

It’s a game about free exploration, it’s silly to expect the player to directly follow these instruction. Just make him part of the mandatory tutorial area or have him come to you after collecting your first 10 seed or something.

I only found out about the guy after finishing the game.

Show threadPeffse

It’s not just the tree guy. The whole game’s like that.

Here, let me give you another example of the counter-intuitive gameplay I encountered:

The volcano. It’s hot. I need to travel up it.

First attempt: Check my available tools for something. Bombs, no. Timestop, no. Ice pillar, maybe? no. Swords, Shields, Bows… no.

Second attempt: Explore the area, see a hotspring. Try to map out a route using hotsprings as a cooling source. No dice.

Third attempt: Visit all the major cities for info, nothing found other than the volcano is hot. No vendors selling any items that can help.

Fourth attempt: Circle around and try to find a tunnel, putting on all my desert gear to reduce heat damage. Catch fire regardless, no cave found.

Fifth attempt: Load up all my food and make meals, brute force my way to the base camp. No assistance there, have to teleport out.

Sixth attempt: Doing a completely unrelated hunt for a shrine, bump into the NPC selling fire resist potions at a horse stable. A horse stable I mostly ignore because the game lets you teleport everywhere!

Do I feel accomplished, finally finding this only way up the volcano? No! I feel like Nintendo just wasted my time!

Even worse, when I finally make it to the Goron city and buy the fireproof armor, I bump into a Goron who gives me half the recipe to make the fire resist potion. Not even the whole recipe. And he was far far beyond the base camp I brute forced to. If he had been in all the other cities, and with the full recipe, maybe this wouldn’t have been such a challenge of dumb luck.

Mar 7 at 9:33pmWeb
Show threadwhoMar 7

Wow. Seems like your approach must have been really off the beaten path.

From memory, I think I was offered a fireproof elixir by an NPC at the nearest stable, and by a traveling vendor further up that road, and was given the flamebreaker armor for helping an NPC about halfway to Goron City. (That last one caught my interest because the help needed was in catching fireproof lizards, which seemed relevant to my immediate needs.) Any one of those would have been enough.

Your experience must have been frustrating. Were you avoiding roads and NPCs, by any chance?

Show threadPeffseMar 7
Nope, I talked to every NPC at all the towns, and on the roads. But, I didn’t stop at any of the horse stables since I never had need of a horse. It’s all cliffs and teleportation!
Show threadwhoMar 7

I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to be fireproof survive in Goron City. You would need a second piece (or one piece and an elixir) to get closer to the caldera, but by that time you can buy a second piece in the city. You never need the third piece.

I went to the stables just to check out what was there, and discovered that they have quest information, quest triggers, rumors about the world, vendors that don’t show up elsewhere, mini-game challenges with rewards, hints at the locations of Link’s lost memory photos, etc. It never occurred to me that someone might miss out on all that stuff if they weren’t given a reason to visit a stable. (Maybe the game gives a hint to go there? I don’t remember.)

Sorry you drew the short straw.

Show threadPeffseMar 7

I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to be fireproof in Goron City.

whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

Show threadPeffseMar 7

it’s true!

But the game has established multiple times that a set only gives a bonus on full equip!

Show threadwhoMar 8
That’s still true in BotW. (I think it requires the set to be upgraded as well.) The bonus from the Flamebreaker set is fire damage immunity, which can be handy when fighting certain enemies. You don’t need that bonus just to be in a scorched climate, though.
Show threadDe_NarmMar 7
I don’t think I ever found a potion before clearing the area. I remember stocking up on food, like you, and eventually stumbling into the merchant selling me fire resistant armour.
Show threadPeffseMar 7

The only reason I didn’t brute force the whole way was I ran out of food.