Hyrule Warriors Irritated

[Emmanuel]

I rushed out to buy Hyrule Warriors when it first came out, and I really enjoyed the gameplay, despite the fact that it was often repetitive and monotonous. I love the Zelda universe and I feel like Hyrule Warriors provided an insight into the franchise that none of the main games have ever supplied. (i.e., great wars/battles taking place that we often hear about but never really see or participate in through the usual adventures.) I enjoyed upgrading my characters, watching them grow, honing my skills, building the perfect weapon, etc. Back when I had more time on my hands, I used to be a real completionist when it came to video games. (These days, it seems like I am lucky if I can just get through the main story.)

For a while, I'd boot up my Wii U every day after work and make my way through the Legend, and later the Adventure modes. I was stoked when I finally got Link up to level 99 and I started focusing on building up my other characters. Shortly after that, there was an update that, among other things, upped the level cap to 150. I was slightly annoyed because I realized that this would significantly increase the amount of time it would take me to level up all of my characters, but I did try to press on. Eventually, I took a break from playing the game. Just yesterday I finally put Hyrule Warriors back into my Wii U and found that yet another update (two!) needed to be installed. This time the level cap has been raised to 255!!

What is the point? Has the difficulty of the game itself actually increased? What possible reason do I need to level up my characters so high? Why are there 255 levels - it seems like such as arbitrary number? How do I know there aren't going to be more updates that will increase the level caps even further? 500? Why not 999, or 1000? Where does it stop? Honestly, I've lost any drive to try to "complete" this game because I don't think it's worth shooting for a goal if someone is going to keep moving the goalposts. (Remember those cartoons where the horse is chasing a carrot dangling from a stick? Yeah.) Where the relative monotony of Hyrule Warriors' gameplay used to be acceptable, even enjoyable, because it was part of a finite challenge to max out my characters, now the monotony is just irritating. I feel like Hyrule Warriors was a great game, and all of the updates and "DLC" have ruined it for me. Has anybody else had this experience? Does anyone else miss the days when a video games weren't all about DLC and constant updates or patches from the publisher?

 

[Spirit]

I know what you mean with this. Only Zelda for me in HW is level 100, the other characters are 50-70, I can't be bothered to grind so hard to get the numbers so high. For me the adventure modes are pretty difficult so the higher the level the easier the game but grinding takes so long...

To be honest, I was only bothered about seeing the story through, everything else is just filler for me since i'm a gamer who plays games for their story above all else. So none of the DLC or adventure maps have really drawn me in which gives me even less motivation to level up. The concept of DLC has never sat well with me and HWs was kind of disappointing overall for me, especially the added story missions...

So yeah, great game but the DLC drags it out and makes it a drag...

 

[basement24]

This is a frequent problem with DLC. Adding new patched elements that you don't particularly want to have added can be annoying. It frequently happens with PS3 games for me when it comes to their trophy system. I will be at 95% of trophies achieved, then they patch the game and add a bunch more for DLC and multiplayer. This then drops me down to something like 67% and I feel like I have been robbed of something. I know really that I haven't, but the spread to 100% just got larger. At least I know I had achieved 95% of the original content even if the screen doesn't reflect that. Often times, I just search out the remaining 5% of trophies I would have originally achieved and then move on to the next game.

I often wish that the non DLC patch elements could be optional like the DLC, but the fact is they're using the patch to fix stability as well. While games shouldn't ship broken, I'm glad we live in a time that games can be fixed after release as well. I would gladly keep that annoying drop in completion percentage to have a game that's got unplayable elements or poor balancing fixed.

For Hyrule Warriors specifically, this is probably the final level cap as the final DLC was released. Odds are patches will cease at this point so no more levels will be added. Also, the 255 is most likely a reference to the maximum amount of rupees you could obtain in the original NES LoZ. (Which in itself was a limitation of the system at the time.) Considering the love they show for the first game within Hyrule Warriors, this being a the maximum level is likely

 

[Emmanuel]

Ah, I hadn't caught the reference to the NES original with the 255 level cap - so perhaps this is the end. I certainly hope so.

I guess I feel similar to Spirit. The Adventure mode is not nearly as satisfying to me as the Legend mode was. It took me forever to figure out exactly what I was supposed to do in Adventure mode, and I finally got to the point where I can see or access pretty much the entire map, but I still am not even remotely close to getting all of the upgrades there and everything. I feel like the map is extremely tedious because I need to play specific levels to get items that will expose secrets or open up new levels so that I can get more items... on and on and on. The character restrictions are annoying for some of the levels because I am pretty awful with some of the characters, I'm not interested in grinding them all up to whatever level and I don't have enough rupees to upgrade them that way. *sigh* What's a nerd to do?

 

[the8thark]

Why are there 255 levels - it seems like such as arbitrary number?

The 255 is there because in Zelda 1 NES, the max number of rupees you could hold was 255. Just another little nod to Zelda 1 there. 255 is FF in Hexdecimal. So it's the largest 2 digit number you can have in a base 16 numbering system. 256 different digits. 0 being the first digit.
(I think someone else said it above but I'll say it again )

I think what partially ruined the game is that farming armour badges or levels or extra hearts really don't help all that much in levels because of the damage taken requirements for A Rank and the fact that most of the hard stages have no favoured element.

 

[Akuhime-sama]

Well, the DLC packs most likely have already came to a grinding halt after the Boss Pack. So- your carrot-on-a-stick analogy isn't going to work anymore. It's something you can look forward to. (I mean the finite value staying in one spot)

But anyway, as for my input, I actually LOVED the DLC packs. It allowed for new characters, new-ish gameplay, and more goals. Yes, it will take some time to get to them, but isn't that part of the fun? I mean, when I think about what will happen when I max my characters and unlock everything- it just depresses me. It means there's no real point of the game anymore. Sadly- since the game is goal-oriented, once you reach the goal, it ceases to be meaningful to continue. That's why Updates & DLC packs help. It gives new goals, and drives players to continue.

Honestly, as much as I love the game, Its replay value immediately spirals down after achieving everything. (Or at least I speculate that it will.-since I don't actually know what it's like yet to get everything)
The one way they could avoid this, would be perhaps adding an extra mode that doesn't rely on levels, or power, etc- but just a little something that isn't goal-oriented, or the goal is different each time and you compete with friends, or something. I have no idea how exactly they would do that, but perhaps something a little extra could be thrown in to keep interest.

Also- just to add that I like the packs because it adds playable characters, and boy I can't tell you enough how a good character selection variety is an important part of a game. Well- I mean for games that focus on choosing a player. Like- Mario Party, Mario Kart, Smash Bros., Hyrule Warriors, Soul Calibur, pretty much ANY fighting/battle game, etc, etc...
Games that are more story-driven, single-player, adventure games obviously don't adhere to these conditions, nor do most puzzle games. (ie- Tetris, or DR. Mario)
But for games that incorporate you choosing your character, they should have a wide variety. It's because of this reason I don't play the first 2 Mario Party games as much. Very little character selection.

Spoiler

And, MP1's boards were just terrible. Too tiny, and it felt like it was over too quickly. MP2's boards were decent size, and had interesting rules. Also, MP2 had a lot of the same MP1 mini-games, and the really fun ones, so I play MP2 more than 1, but still- I'd rather play 3-8 because of character selection. Why I don't play the others are for obvious reasons. Mainly because they took the most crucial Board-Game element out in MP9. The individual movement of each player character. Though- mind you- I have yet to play 10.

Sorry for going off-tangent. I was just explaining what I meant a little.

 

[the8thark]

Ah, I hadn't caught the reference to the NES original with the 255 level cap - so perhaps this is the end. I certainly hope so.

In the first post here: http://zeldadungeon.net/forum/threads/will-there-be-any-more-hyrule-warriors-patches-or-dlc.51880/ I gave all the evidence showing that most likely there will be no more DLC.

I quite liked adventure mode. It's certainly broken (but damn fun) - Pointless heart pieces and badges (no favoured element stages) when going for A Rank. And the difficulty of the stages is very random. Some super tough and others easy as. And the level number of the stages means nothing difficulty wise. I don't even know what the level of a stage means. If a stage is Lv 12 what does it have that a Lv 8 stage for example does not? I never worked that out.

Hyrule Warriors is a great game. I loved it. Flawed game though.