let's take out everything that made the zelda games so loved (amazing music, unique dungeons, fun enemies and bosses, cool equipment) and replace it with a barren wasteland of an open world thats filled with the exact same mini-dungeons that get boring after like the fourth time you do them, and populated with the same 3 types of enemies. the exploring gets so boring so fast, because it's just the shrines, korok seeds and towers, that are all the same. even the rare unique puzzles just open up another shrine when you complete them
there's no incentive to exploring either, cause your only rewards are health/stamina and ocassionally a rare weapon/armor - but those dont matter, because weapons break after like 4 hits and theres no way to fix them, so your best bet is to just avoid combat altogether.
also, lets make it rain every 10 minutes to to make the best part of the game (the climbing) stop working
honest to god dont understand how people gave it 10/10s
The entire premise of the game is solving problems through creativity and new thought. Everything the game does to you is about creating emergent situations that you must use your bag of tools to solve in potentially new and crazy ways.
Only through uncomfortable situations and strife do you force players to try and figure out some crazy new thing they can do or cheese the situation in some elaborate way.
Weapon breaking is part of that. It achieves a lot of things, it forces players to constantly learn new ways to play because each weapon has different damage and swing speed and range and other factors that you don't know until you learn it, so they force you to learn it. It creates scenarios where players don't necessarily have the tool they thought they had in their disposal so they have to figure out something new. As a tool in gameplay it generates variety, and one of the biggest problems with open world games is a lack of variety. Players get into a comfort zone where they have a thing they like to do that works and they do it over and over and over and over again.
Players reacted negatively to the weapon breaking but ultimately it created much more variety in their game than if it didn't exist. Variety and exploration are the main parts of the game, exploration of the tools, weapons and other things is as much a part of "exploration" as physically walking around the land is.
I agree completely, it makes sense in the game for weapons to break and the game is balanced around that.
I was just saying that I dislike weapons breaking as a mechanic in general (it is often badly done and only adds pointless grinding). I put up with it in breath of the wild and it bothered me in the beginning, I kept hoarding them until I realised it made me miserable on top of being unnecessary since as you say, the point is to keep from staying in your comfort zone. You are thrown in a now unfamiliar world (which works great on a meta level because most fans know the basic geography of hyrule but it is slightly different in BotW) and have to tackle each situation with whatever you have on hand, even if it means throwing a bunch of bombs or dropping boulders on monsters.
Exactly. The entire point is creativity.
Limitations are the thing that gives way to human creativity. Only when we are severely limited do we start coming up with creative ways around the limitations given to us.
That is what BotW's mechanics seek to do at every turn, including the much maligned sliding while climbing during rain. Weather is an unescapable phenomenon and it places limitations on the player, these limitations are intended to make the player take a path they did not intend to take instead of the path they wanted to take. It forces the player to go an out of the way route that they otherwise may not have explored whatsoever.