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?
The disposable weapon system is annoying in the moment but it's absolutely vital to the game. It would be such a goddamn piece of shit game without it.
The reason they did this is to allow you to go literally anywhere and kill anything, as long as you're good enough. You can hunt down kill a white Lynel with like 4 hearts if you just don't get hit. That gives you one of his insane weapons. It's got like 60 or 70 damage vs. 4 damage for like a rusty iron sword.
In any other game, if you did that, you've just completed 5% of the game and made the next 90% of the game absolutely fucking boring until you hit the final 5% of the game. This is why many RPGs have even worse systems like level gating items, or they just let you have it and then none of the items you ever get are any good until the game is almost over. Or the high level enemies take literally millions of hits to defeat when you're low level, so you have to just walk away.
So you wouldn't have to learn anything about enemies or bosses because you just walk up and one-tap them for most of the rest of the game. Every quest reward would be garbage, etc .
It is funny how 'weapons breaking' feels so bad, when, from a mechanics perspective, its the same type of formula that DOOM uses.
Yeah, a broken weapon is 'deleted' from your inventory, but kill more of that foe, and you'll get a fresh one. Same thing with the stronger DOOM weapons; killing certain foes always drops ammo for your strong but limited ammo weapons. A Rocket Launcher with no Rockets is just as useless as a broken BotW weapon.
While I don't really like the weapon system in BotW, I also know its necessary to the game structure it chose, and its very much not part of the list of design choices that I think makes the game feel empty and boring to me.