Survival vs Comfort : Zelda BOTW and Assassin's Creed Odyssey

[Crayon]

Botw is the "best game" according to me. I played ac odyssey because of all the huge praise and it was actually pretty bad in my estimation. Botw is so carefully made in comparison. Ac was like a haphazard mess.

One example. In botw, the climbing a gliding seem very simple. But compare that to ac's braindead answer: running up any wall and jumping off any height. :/ It really makes you appreciate botw's control and feel and attention to paths+line of sight in the environment. This same sort of thing extends to every major facet of the games when i compare them.

Botw made most open world games feel flat to me, tho. Spiderman for instance is single handedly saved by its incredible action. Horizon feels like a map simply scattered with "stuff to do". But ac was worse than either of those. And yes the overall convienence sort of points to all these loose ends they couldn't make fun or balanced. Example: Tagging enemies is a good mechanic because it brings surveying a targets into stealth gameplay without asking you to keep track of them all. But in ac they just skip it all and give you drone eagle so you can tag them all up from a birds eye view. The game trivializes almost everything with this kind of "get it over with" approach. Its bad. Bad combat, bad movement, bad balance, bad missions, more bad than good writing. Its a wreck.

 

[JeTmAn]

I always want a magic horse that can appear from anywhere for my riding whims in an open world game

 

[LuisGarcia]

I enjoyed Odyssey quite a bit more.

I don't dislike Zelda but I just don't really get the hype.

 

[LonestarZues]

I didn't hate BotW, but some of the mechanics really did diminish my enjoyment of the game. On the other hand Odyssey had a really good story along with a beautiful world and better characters and I actually finished it. So Odyssey was the better game for me as well.

 

[Art Vandelay]

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Transmogrification has existed long before XCX.

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My thought exactly.

 

[Zephy]

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Transmogrification has existed long before XCX.

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My thought exactly.

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Okay ? Obviously I didn't know that. A brief Google search tells me I might have involuntarily offended some WoW players.

I removed it from my post before anyone else decides to weigh in on this. You've made your point.

 

[TheYanger]

I just started Odyssey but I wouldn't really say it lets me focus on exploring due to the generic loot system. I know tons of games have that, and so does Zelda to a degree, but I will just impulsively be rummaging around in ugly corners of the game to pick up icons instead of finding genuinely meaningful discoveries.

So far I enjoy Zelda a bit more, which is due almost completely to Zelda having much better controls. The discoveries in Zelda also seem a bit more meaningful - even though the world is fairly plain and barren, when you find something it genuinely piques your curiosity, whereas with Odyssey it seems as though there is a stock template of event types that are completely evenly placed throughout the world, so I'm never really that excited by anything I find.

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You will quickly divest yourself of this habit. The vast majority of loot is crap so you won't go out of your way unless something is purple or gold colored.

 

[Peru]

BOTW is not and does not want to be a survival game. I've never been less stressed in an open world game. No in-your-face checklist to do, no order of procedures to follow, no task you have to no (no, you don't have to eat, level up, grind for anything, so it's not survival-y in the slightest).

 

[Zephy]

I've never been less stressed in an open world game.

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Interesting. This goes to show that different people are stressed out by different things. The whole equipment management is very stressful for me, while other open world games like GTA, Assassin's Creed, etc. are very relaxing.

 

[trugs26]

I'm literally throwing away powerful weapons frequently. You just need to trust the game and get rid of hoarding mentality (which I know isn't easy since video games taught us otherwise for the past few decades). But once you trust the game, it scales with you and gives you plenty of weapons to pick up (i.e as you progress, you find more powerful item drops).

 

[Phendrift]

I do think it's really dumb how you can't craft arrows in BotW. Like it has to be something they're thinking about for next one

 

[EVA UNIT 01]

Botw was a hard 7 for me.
AC odyssey is a goty contender imo

 

[treasureyez]

I'm hearing this argument very often, but I don't agree.

Players have a different psychology when approaching games and I don't like systems that cater to one specific mindset aka "you have to play this game a certain way to get it".

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You don't have to play Breath of the Wild one specific way, but you at least need to embrace rather than resist its design to get the most out of it — something I would argue is true for pretty much any game.

The weapon durability conversation will seemingly never end, and I think most of the stress people get from it comes from projecting their expectations from other games onto Breath of the Wild. This isn't a loot-based game where you are constantly searching for the next rare weapon that outclasses the rest of your lot; it's a game about adventure and improvisation. (That said you will basically be a demi-god by the time you finish the Divine Beasts.)

The durability system is tuned to give the player more of what they want; the more frequently you break a specific type of weapon, the more often you'll come across them. Players that resist the durability system and horde all their best weapons for "later" end up getting more and more of the lower-tier weapons they use instead, and end up disliking the mechanic even more.

I just wish they would patch a "Swap" button in to the "Inventory is full" message when you try to pick up something ... definitely the inventory management systems were designed for the Wii U and are a bit awkward to use. But I actually like the ability to be able to swap weapons with the d-pad, as you can do some cool stuff with switching weapons mid-combat.

 

[ReyVGM]

I'm literally throwing away powerful weapons frequently. You just need to trust the game and get rid of hoarding mentality (which I know isn't easy since video games taught us otherwise for the past few decades). But once you trust the game, it scales with you and gives you plenty of weapons to pick up (i.e as you progress, you find more powerful item drops).

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The Elixir Syndrome.

 

[ReyVGM]

I do think it's really dumb how you can't craft arrows in BotW. Like it has to be something they're thinking about for next one

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No thanks. Having an infinite supply of arrows at all times would destroy the balance it has. If you are going to waste players' time crafting arrows, you might as well just give them in pots and grass like old Zelda games.

Anyone running out of arrows in BotW is either trigger happy, or doesn't know where to buy/farm them.

 

[Prine]

Yep. OP your right. That useless breaking mechanic in BotW was what ended the game for me. Too big of a flaw to get around. And most weapons feature the same animation but with greater damage, you dont feel as if your progressing, nor do you gain satisfaction of upgrading a weapon given they fall apart. Combat was already bad, throw in the awful shattering (with a insulting justification like "experiment!") then it can damage a game immensely.

 

[Tibarn]

Haven't played Odyssey (I'm kind of fed up with both AC and "checklist" open world games), but I love how BotW uses all its mechanics to be a game that rewards exploration and curiosity, but at the same time makes the player decide about almost everything.

You want to pick this powerful sword that looks like it's going to break in a few hits? Maybe you can sacrifice the not-so-powerful but extra durable Zora trident. You really want to climb this mountaint and use your mushrooms to make some stamina potions? You think that defeating the Guardian and using your only Ancient arrow is worthy?

There's lots of decision making in this game, the extremely non-linear structure is another example, this together with the way the game hints the players to hidden secrets (never marking them in the map) and the impact of temperature, weather... makes BotW my favorite game of all time... it justs work for me perectly.

I see some comparisons here with RDR2, but I kind of disagree. In RDR2 you'll never have ammo shortage, if you want to travel to somewhere hot or cold the outfits are easily purchased at your town's shop, the weapon durability is only an annoying mechanic that never presetens any real decision, as gun oil is everywhere. I'd say that the realism in RDR2 can detract from the experience a lot, mostly because it makes everything slower but not more interesting, and is devoid of any real decision.

 

[Tibarn]

I do think it's really dumb how you can't craft arrows in BotW. Like it has to be something they're thinking about for next one

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This I agree, I remember spending most of my money in arrows during the first hours, because stunlocking powerful enemies via headshots is one of the most powerful early games tools.

 

[Crayon]

No no! The arrow evonomy is well balanced. Remember how in the origional 1 arrow= 1 rupee

 

[alpha]

I also didn't like the weapon breaking of BOTW, even though it was fantastic in basically all other categories.

Instead of making me excited to "think on my feet" it just made me want to avoid combat scenarios unless I had to fight.

Plus, from an aesthetic standpoint I'd like the look of certain weapons but nope, it's broken and here's your ugly skeleton arm or Boko Club but it's okay because we gave you a replacement weapon right? That was a buzzkill in the extreme for me.

Like I said, pretty much everything else about BOTW was incredible though.

 

[Tibarn]

Plus, from an aesthetic standpoint I'd like the look of certain weapons but nope, it's broken and here's your ugly skeleton arm or Boko Club but it's okay because we gave you a replacement weapon right?

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This only happens during the first 5 or so hours in the game, soon you'll learn where to find incredible weapons all the time. I remember "farming" the 16 damage soldier swords pretty early in the game in order to kill the first Lynel (the Zora quest one, it was my first).

 

[trugs26]

The Elixir Syndrome.

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Precisely.

 

[ozfunghi]

Haven't played AC:O but the breaking mechanic in Zelda really isn't that big a deal. You get to cary more than one weapon (about 5 i think?), so as soon as your current one breaks, by that time you will have found another one that might be a bit different, but with as many advantages and roughly as powerful as the one that just broke. Don't dwell on it, play on. Drop the weakest one as soon as you find a new more powerful weapon. Use the next in line as soon as you need it. I also quite liked cooking, because it basically is a way to craft your custom powerups.

The only thing that did bum me out, was that the weapons you can buy later on in the game, which really needed some investing (time and in-game currency) and also broke just as easily, if not more so. It really made it not worth it to go for those special weapons, other than a couple of those arrows which you really do need to move on in the game. Luckily, roughly by that time i had found the you-know-what at the you-know-where.

 

[bytesized]

In BOTW most of the times after I would break a cool weapon I had 3 other just as cool waiting in my inventory to be used and, sooner than later, I would encounter that weapon again anyway. I really don't get the hate for the breakable weapons, to me it made the game more interesting and dynamic.