After that lenghty replies during the playthrough of Andromeda I thought about doing the same here. Today cut the tie and bought a switch + Zelda breath of the wild. Lots of friends told me it solves a lot of open world design issues. People in general say it is a great game.
I personally have 0 affinity with Zelda. Never really got into them and have no expectations whatsoever. Lets see what this game has to offer though 
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So far only completed the tutorial landmass which took a bout 5-6 hours. I explored a lot, wasted 2,5 hours hunting a boar for their meat. It looks atmospheric, but not as crisp as I had hoped for a modern console. At times it even looks washed out on my IPS 1080p monitor. Lightning is reasonable and lack of voice overs with typical weird noises when npc’s talk require me to get back to the olden days of console gaming.
I started feeling somewhat impressed with the freedom you get. Can climb, dive, swim, float whatever and whereever. Haven’t felt anxious with a quest log or map being filled by random stuff. It is quite a peaceful experience in which I’m actually exploring instead of working off a checklist of chores.
Combat is fairly simplistic at the moment. Find a weapon and just swing it. Combo’s are created by pressing the attack button several times in a row. You can lock onto an opponent and strafe around them, wait for certain animations and reply accordingly. I also loved stealthing about and sneaking up on opponents for critical hits or taking out tower guards before they could warn others.
Breaking weapons is annoying in the sense that you have to switch to a new weapon mid combat when you might be standing in a compromising position. This is dreadfully done. Wonder how this will change over time. For now I tried avoiding combat since it doesn’t give much loot rewards compared to breaking a weapon again. On one hand I like how a game doesn’t just expect you to go on a blind massacre, other hand its also annoying. I try to gather weapons as much as possible, but then you get “inventory is full” quite regularly.
I do like that several encounters are setup in a way that you can explore and find a different way to deal with the encounter. You can find boulders further ahead which you can push down and watch it crush the enemies. Depending on the skills obtained through the shrines done you might aquire the bomb early and letting you throw it to explode barrels. which in turn kill opponents. It is nice that you can try different methods other then head on encounters. I expect this to play a larger role later on.
At one point I placed my massive club in a nearby campfire with the idea to throw it on top of exploding barrels to take otu a tower guard. When running towards the toward I traversed a field with high grass…which caught fire and kill myself hehe. Or killing skeletons at night and obtaining their hands as weapons…which then lets me bitchslap and spank opponents to death. I like that sort of details.
When going through the tutorial shrines the game does explain well how the skill works. So you can get it working and it’ll be interesting to see how they will incorporate this later on in the game.
Certain things are not explained well at all. Once you need to go to the snowy mountain for the fourth shrine the game expects you to have found a way to remain warm. Finding a torch and light it is not as easy as you think. The quest for a warm piece of clothing is found in a note/side quest which I expect a fair amount of people to skip. Let alone figure out how to make the recipe with the missing ingredient without using googlemancy. This is a make or break point of the game. Getting fish is easy, getting peppers is easy…hunting boars for 3 hours straight and them running away and de-spawning on the other hand is not okay and frustrating. I hunted boars for the past 2 hours and still haven’t gotten any. Alternate way to progress up the mountain is also very frustrating. IF you made it in that region you can either take the boat or run across the shore and try to cross a broken bridge further ahead. Problem is that you have to jump over very narrow poles in the freezing water… Not an easy task at all. Resulting you to fall in the water sooner or later. If you didn’t get the vest due to bad luck on hunting the boar…then you’re pretty much instantly dead. This is not done well meaning plenty of people can, understandably, put the game down before evening finishing the first area.
The controls, especially in regards to the menu’s, are awkward and at times annoyingly setup.
For now I’ve been enjoying most of what the game had to offer. Would be a shame to run into another frustrating situation, because then I’ll just put the game down forever. At this point it is getting a mere adequate as result…7/10 score.
