Tons of positive reviews for Tears of the Kingdom have come out, favorably comparing it to BotW. But, I haven't seen much said on improving over BotW, other than 'it has more stuff'.

I know the simple solution is 'just pirate it and try it out', which, yeah, I might do eventually when I have time, but I've emulated enough to know that it's not always super easy to get everything working right.

Regardless, I felt that BotW was too big and aimless, with an open world that felt empty. The people that like BotW seem to 'make their own fun', and use physics to solve open ended problems. Which, sounds fun, but my fun was kinda killed by the feeling that nothing had a point. I just felt like most of the 'rewards' were just weapons that would break (which, I don't even mind weapon durability, but it did make weapons as a reward suck), or collectables that had minimal impact on the game. Only a few set pieces did much for me, and they were very few and far between. Overall, played about a dozen hours, then went and killed Ganon, to little fanfare.

And, if Tears of the Kingdom is strictly BotW 2, I'd rather not 'waste' another 12 hours. But, I've heard some people say they added dungeons, and more direction to the game. Any opinions from you all?

  • Eris235 [undecided]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Cool. It looked like, for all the extra bells and whistles, that the 'core gameplay loop' may have been the same, and regardless of any other improvements or add-ons, the 'core gamepley' style of BotW just didn't appeal to me, at all.

    But also, the hype train is real, and a lot of people love it, so I feel like I'm second guessing my own tastes sometimes lol, and thinking 'maybe this time it'll be fun!'

    • riseuppikmin [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      If you didn't like BoTW you will not like this game. I'm probably 50 hours in and it's BoTW but more- the game. I jokingly refer to it as "Better of the Wild" when people ask me to assess it. Whether that appeals to someone or not is obviously personal preference, but you will not like this game if you didn't already enjoy BoTW.

      [Dungeons]

      • The dungeons are elemental-themed divine beasts in design despite being temples- they're not the linear dungeons of old.

      [Exploration]

      • Exploration is better because there are more things to do that feed into the "increase your hearts or stamina" gameplay loop alongside shrines instead of simply "here's another x weapon that may be worse than what you already have"

      [Durability]

      • The weapon fuse system also means monster drops are more useful rather than just rupee sinks to purchase things.

      Also glad to answer any spoiler-free question about the game that you or anyone else may have.

      • daisy
        ·
        1 year ago

        I have a question about TOTK: are there any mandatory one-hit-kill stealth dungeons like the desert thieves' base in BOTW? And if there are, can I just ancient-arrow (or the equivalent) everything in sight to brute force my way through as I did in BOTW?

        • riseuppikmin [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          I unfortunately don't have an answer to this question yet as I haven't run into anything like it if it's in the game.