Breath of the Wild super thread

[A Black Falcon]

In the collection thread you mentioned 'don't follow the main plotline', but that, of course, is like the opposite of how I usually do things. There are a lot of things to see on the map, though I imagine most are just the usual slight rehashes of the same stuff, and if you mean 'and you'll need to go off the main paths to find them' that is probably true. But even if a lot is the same stuff I won't say that there's nothing to that, because seeing interesting places in games can be pretty cool.

I just would not want to randomly wander in order to find those places, that is not how I do things. I of course don't just randomly wander! It's pointless, or worse, boring -- think of grinding in RPGs, which is similar in that your only objective is "level up" and not "get to a specific place". Either in games or in real life, if I'm going somewhere (in a game, for a walk, what have you) I want to know where I'm going before I start out. If you had to explore to reveal the map that'd be a pretty big thing pushing me to explore (and yes I wish this game did that, video above or no), but since it gives you each area's map all at once all, what I have done so far after getting off the plateau are going towards either a tower or the next quest marker, while following shrine-sensor pings along the way when it goes off since those can be fun. That works. Maybe at some point I'll try going to other map points though. As for on the plateau, there I just had to explore it, but it's small enough that that's quite reasonable.

I will say though, they really don't give you any help with how to figure out how to survive in the cold area... like, you need to figure out how to cook those cold-resistant herbs into something which gives you longer-term cold resistance pretty much, just eating them one at a time won't last long. And then if you happen to go to the right place (as I fortunately did) you get that cold-resistant outfit at the top of a mountain there, making that whole effort kind of pointless... hmm, it was nice, but from a design standpoint I'm not sure what I think of that.

"Some other game nearly identical to this one but not Zelda" is Horizon Zero Dawn, and I understand it's pretty good. What do you think of how this game handles finding new things to explore? I much prefer how it uses the landscape itself to guide you instead of a bunch of markers in a UI. As you already know I really loved this game and would love to see them improve on this formula next time.

While I've seen videos of them and such, I don't think I've played a lot of any of the many open-world games that have a map filled with icons, so I'm not sure which style I prefer... though this is probably better, since I like being able to put the markers on the map myself.

Oh, and may all helper characters be mute.

Do you mean the actual sounds? Navi's voice was annoying sometimes, sure, but the things they say are almost always very helpful.

As far as markers, the game gives you all sorts of icons to use. Just pick ones to represent certain things and be consistent. I use skulls to mark the various giant "world boss" enemies all over the map. I use a gem icon to indicate I need to come back later.

Beyond the color issue (which is a problem), the bigger issue is that apparently you only have 100 icons for this whole huge map, which isn't nearly enough! You need way more than that to cover it all... but yeah, the suggestion to use other icons is a good one, that would help -- marking weapon chests with the sword icon, etc. You need to do things like that in the Etrian Odyssey games as well, and yeah, the most important thing is to choose a system and stick with it.

... Maybe I should buy the DLC, having a line on the map showing where you've been for what is it, the last 200 hours, would be pretty nice...