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Breath of the Wild What is missing in BOTW?

Joined
Feb 25, 2019
In BOTW one of the defects of the game is the lack of variety of enemies and the lack of the possibility to dive into the sea or the lakes you hear! What do you think about it?

I'm sorry for the repost!
 
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Just a minor list...

  • Poes
  • ReDead
  • Princess Zelda. You could never directly interact with her.
  • The Golden Goddesses. Did anyone else notice how irrelevant they were this time around?
  • Enough Paya. They drop hints she'll be some kind of major character, and she ends up... seriously not.
  • Pets. By this point, Link really could use a companion of some sort to keep him from going insane. Unless he already has...
  • Princess Zelda. Not certain if I mentioned her, but she should have been in the game more.
  • A "before" for the Calamity. Something to make the player care before Link sleeps for 100 years.
  • Magic. Link was kinda... quite anti-magic this time around. It felt odd.
  • Princess Zelda. Really could have used more interaction with her.
 
Joined
Feb 25, 2019
  1. The minimal interactions with the princess I liked because it gives you that feeling of loneliness and really being the last hope for hyrule;
  2. the goddesses as you say are very marginal in this chapter;
  3. the lack of what happened before the 100 years of sleep left me a bitter taste and the memories are not enough to satisfy my thirst knowledge of the facts.

I hear this a lot, that BotW is "missing something". However, my experience of the game was never lacking. People bring up the lack of story, which in previous years people were saying they could do without in a Zelda game. As mentioned in the OP, there's also the point about a lack of variety of enemies. However, I never even thought about that during my platthrough and would argue that it doesn't impact your enjoyment of the game at all, only your opinion afterwards.

It's become increasingly clear to me since reading opinions around the internet that BotW was as close to a perfect Zelda game FOR ME, so I recognise that I may be bias. It suited my preferences well, and I understand the points that people make about it's shortcomings but any supposed lack was never in an area of the game that bothered me. I wanted to be able to explore an expansive land, play the main game at my own pace and enjoy a more in-depth combat system, and I got all of them.

So for me there's nothing big missing in BotW but I'd never claim it was objectively perfect.


You know in such a vast world and with vast portions of the empty world these shortcomings are felt.
 
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Dio

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It's the thoughtful narrative and good character development which is missing from this 2017 game. You would have thought that storytelling would have progressed since 2006 not gone backwards.
 

Azure Sage

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The only thing I would say was missing was being able to team up with NPCs like you can with the Wolf Link amiibo. I really wanted for that to be a thing outside of that particular amiibo. That's the only thing I would say is missing, though. I was very satisfied with everything else. I don't mind the enemy variety, I enjoyed the story and characters very much, the gameplay was the best its ever been... I didn't feel like it was truly lacking in any aspect at all.
 
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The only thing I would say was missing was being able to team up with NPCs like you can with the Wolf Link amiibo. I really wanted for that to be a thing outside of that particular amiibo. That's the only thing I would say is missing, though. I was very satisfied with everything else. I don't mind the enemy variety, I enjoyed the story and characters very much, the gameplay was the best its ever been... I didn't feel like it was truly lacking in any aspect at all.


but I have always found this botw very empty! because of enemies and as a variety, the only thing I must not say is the gameplay which is spectacular!
 

Azure Sage

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but I have always found this botw very empty! because of enemies and as a variety, the only thing I must not say is the gameplay which is spectacular!
I didn’t find it empty at all. There’s neat stuff around every corner. Cool locations, treasure, wildlife, monsters, resources.... very few places in the game have none of this. I could maybe count these spots on one hand. The game is full to the brim with life and interesting things.
 

CynicalSquid

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The only issue I have with BOTW is the lack of any traditional Zelda styled dungeons. The shrines were ok but they felt like one or two dungeons just split up into 120 mini trials that were scattered across Hyrule. The Divine Beast were a huge let down to me. The puzzles inside them weren’t that great and the Blight Ganons weren’t very good boss fights. I just have always loved the dungeons in every zelda game and I wish that either the divine beasts were better or that they put actual dungeons in the game.

BOTW is still a superb open world adventure game though and it’s still one of my favorite zelda games. This is just more of a personal nitpick I have with the game.
 

Azure Sage

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I guess you could pin this down to a difference in playstyles. I played loving the journey, and enjoying the act of exploring and finding things. A lot of other people however played with exploring simply being a means to an end.
I think this hits the nail on the head. I see people say things like "I climbed the Gerudo Highlands ALL THE WAY to the top and found NO REWARD!" but like... climbing it is fun. There's neat stuff along the way. There's a gigantic sword statue at the top. Farosh flies by often. There's treasure and enemies and intrigue everywhere. But I see a lot of people ignore all of that because they want to get some material thing out of it instead of just enjoying the experience. I can't enjoy games while thinking that way, personally.
 
Overworld-wise, caves. Networking caves. You don't know how many times I blasted a rock wall, hoping it would be an entrance to something more, when it just ended up being a small depression concealing either a treasure chest, ore, or a rock with a korok under it. The open world aspect could have shown promise for some really neat underground segments, but we really didn't get that apart from all of the hidden shrines and the skeleton in Hebra.
 
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I didn’t find it empty at all. There’s neat stuff around every corner. Cool locations, treasure, wildlife, monsters, resources.... very few places in the game have none of this. I could maybe count these spots on one hand. The game is full to the brim with life and interesting things.

instead I found it empty, unbalanced and a landscape that does not change with the passage of links! I found a dish at the level of changes!
 
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Well, again, I may just be bias. But I have never thought the world could ever be described as empty. There's 120 shrines to find with 42 of those being hidden until you've completed a quest, along with a butt-tonne of korok seeds, sides quests, enemy camps, areas to find that tell stories (such as the battleground) Lynels, the list goes on.

There's stretches of may withMay with little in it, for sure, but I think it's better that way. Sometimes J just wanted to explore and yet more times I wanted the challenge of traversing the environment. I wasn't interested in distractions. However, they were there when I needed them. I cant say I ever traversed more than 5 minutes without encountering something of interest other than perhaps in the snowy mountains or Gerudo Desert.

I love WW, it was my favorite game until BotW came along. There were critisizers of the Great Sea, for sure, but not nearly as many people complaining of an empty Great Sea as those that complain about BotW being empty. Yet the latter filled the world with little points of interest everywhere, whilst the former was very often completely barren until you reached your destination.

I guess you could pin this down to a difference in playstyles. I played loving the journey, and enjoying the act of exploring and finding things. A lot of other people however played with exploring simply being a means to an end. If you look at the map and say "What's interesting between here and here" you probably couldn't think of much. However when you actually make the trip, there's hundreds of tiny little distractions to be had.

I like your point of view, in fact the possibility of traveling without a fixed destination is what I liked best in this game, but as I said before it seems to me as bare as a world and with a few varieties of enemies!
 

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