Things that are unbalanced that need fixing for BOTW2

[Aeron]

For all the good things Breath of the Wild does, there is a lot of balancing issues that need to be fixed in the sequel.

Here's some things that could/should be tweaked for BOTW2;

• Weapon Durability

Let's get the most controversial one out of the way.
There's been many debates over it but this isn't about its existence it is about balancing.

The weapon durability in BOTW leans heavily towards the end of the spectrum of breaking sooner rather than later, people will argue this is by design, but being by design doesn't inherently mean done well or good.

It is too overzealous in the current state and evidently spoils people's fun to obtain a new weapon just for it to break not long after.
Tweaking the damage to durability a weapon takes per hit down even by about 15-20% would ease this problem without doing away with the concept.
You CAN have both, it's not just one or the other and there's no possible way to improve things.

If the durability is completely unchanged then the lack of a survival system in place to facilitate it would leave said design pretty shallow and lacking that extra 'oomph' of some solid mechanics to back up the concept.

• Damage Output & Health

Understandably having a Zelda game that has hard hitting enemies similar to Dark Souls was a hit with people, but just like the durability it has issues.
The damage output of some of the enemies (alternate enemies of the same type) is a bit much but more importantly, some of the 'deathblows' just aren't unique enough to really warrant the punch they pack.
This could probably just be fixed through more animations, but what absolutely could use balancing is the damage you do to enemies health.

The health of some enemies 'seems' too much and whilst you do have the special counter attack (which can completely trivialise things) you're still sometimes flailing about at a sponge. It is more understandable when you come across something like a Lynel the first time but when you find a weapon in an area and enemies in that very area take it like nothing it gets silly. (Not talking elemental types)

An increase in damage with a trade-off being enemies can block and dodge more would actually make the combat more visceral instead of the faux-visceral it currently has.



Don't have time for more and frankly didn't have time for this so it's rough.

If you have any complaints, it's Lobster Roll fault.

 

[antonio]

How about..make it a DONKEY KONG game :) DK would be great in such open world game. Moving around between different parts of the world would be done with animal buddies, each one with a special power. There would be less RPG and more monkey business.

 

[Butch]

I really liked how weapon durability worked in this game. I thought of them like cards for some reason.

I'd love if they don't change that but I know most people don't like it so I get it.

 

[Doggg]

Food/potions can be overpowered.

Some weapons/armor can be too expensive.

Sometimes it's like, where hell do I buy more arrows?

 

[Puffy]

Edit - oh balancing

 

[JoDa]

Counter argument for the durability issue without compromising the original design but rather expanding it.
Crafting system, but here is the catch in order to get materials you have to break weapons when you break one weapon specific materials related to it get added to your inventory and are used for unique craftable weapons that last significantly longer

 

[zoltek]

I didn't finish what may be one of the best games of all time because weapon durability, so fix that damnit.

 

[Billdrew]

Speaking of difficulty, I think the game ends up with having the opposite problem later on because cooking is so overpowered. You can survive anything by just nipping into your menu and eating with no risk or consequence, so the game is very hard early on and then too easy later

 

[fiendcode]

I just want a "permanent" bow option this time like they did for sword and shield. Also the arrow spawn/restock algorithm is crap.

 

[Deleted member 51789]

While I really don't mind (and actively like the current weapon degradation system) I'd be down for a small durability increase. As long as the basic idea of weapons as ammo stays then I'd be content.

Could also do with a little more variety in enemy action that makes normal combat a bit more involved. As long as I can still use stasis/magnesis in battles against enemies at will then all is good.

 

[Deleted member 3017]

Durability system is perfect.

Cooking/food is too overpowered though, Link should become "full" after eating a certain amount of food and be unable to eat for a period of time.

 

[Gusy]

Get rid of the rain. Make it a very rare occurrence. Its the only thing that almost breaks the game for me. It doesn't add anything interesting.. it only takes away from the almost perfect balance and gameplay

 

[Dr Richard Kimble]

I think having weapons and enemies that are region specific would make exploration more interesting.

 

[Doggg]

Get rid of the rain. Make it a very rare occurrence. Its the only thing that almost breaks the game for me. It doesn't add anything interesting.. it only takes away from the almost perfect balance and gameplay

Click to shrink...

Or maybe just make it so it doesn't make it practically impossible to climb but just a little more difficult.

 

[Adulfzen]

honestly I think durability should still be brutal early on when you're using shits swords, sticks and clubs but they could make it clearer when your weapons get better and more durable (which is already the case in BOTW if you bother engaging enemies in fights).

Same for the difficulty, keep it brutal at the start of the game but I'd like them to scale difficulty better for the sequel, instead of enemies becoming bullet sponges, make them learn new moves, ideally the first half of the game would have different monsters learn your habits as a player and then use new moves depending on what you tend to do.

Overall BOTW 2 should try to bring more variety whether it's enemies, environments or dungeons. Give me also more "unique" events like the Horse God you can ride or the dragons roaming the world. Speaking of dungeons, I'd love more stuff like the Hyrule Castle with some puzzles peppered in.

Hopefully the fact that they have the engine and already a map means that the goal will be to fill Hyrule to the brim with content while also "remixing" existing areas. (also seems like the Sheika slate will be replaced by the glowing hand Link receives in the trailer).

 

[Alek]

I think the food system needs a complete rework. Only alllowing you to carry a limited number of food, or having them consume time (like estus flasks) would be a good move in my opinion.

As is, you're almost invincible if you want to be.

Oh, and I think they need to ditch durability altogether unless they intend to put many more weapons and weapon types into the game. At the moment it doesn't make you diversify because there's very little diversity to begin with. Most often, the player just ends up repeatedly shifting through a large pool of junk weapons.

I think they should look at games like Dead Rising, where you have a tonne of weapons, each with their own situational uses, and each weapon is hard to find it craft. So they all become unique resources for the player to actually think about when they want to use them. In BOTW, the durability system very rarely prompts any meaningful decisions, as is doesn't serve much mechanical purpose and burdens the gameplay with UI busywork.

 

[SpottieO]

Weapon durability system was perfectly fine.

 

[Deleted member 48813]

I hope they fix Link's weird physics since it bothers me how he ragdolls around for way too long when hit, it makes the game feel kinda "cheap". Make him a bit heavier so that doesn't happen.

 

[Enduin]

I had zero issues with weapon durability. If anything they need to reduce the number of weapons we can carry as the game and weapons became a non-issue in the second half as we could carry so many. Same with enemy damage output. Armors and food were super powerful and made increased dmg received not much of an issue. Removing the option to pause to eat but rather have the game still play, even in slo-mo, in the background might work.

Only thing here I had issues with was enemy health and our damage output against them. Bullet sponges, or rather sword sponges, aren't much fun.

A couple things BotW2 could use to really improve things in my mind are:

1. More enemy variety. We need more enemy types with different move sets. Not simply the same enemy with different skin color, better equipment and a fuck ton more health.
2. More weapon type variety. BotW had tons of weapons, but very little in actual variety with how those weapons operated. More unique movesets for weapons and maybe affects to make them more viable and useful against different enemy types would be great.

 

[Doggg]

Oh, another one -- it's fun pushing boulders and otherwise using physics and the environment to kill enemies and whatnot early in the game, but pretty quickly they're so strong that you need to use more powerful weapons to kill them. It should be balanced so that you're always rewarded for using creative ways to take out foes.

 

[Chumunga64]

I think the food system needs a complete rework. Only alllowing you to carry a limited number of food, or having them consume time (like estus flasks) would be a good move in my opinion.

As is, you're almost invincible if you want to be.

Click to shrink...

maybe make like a hunger meter and when it's full, you can't eat any food to get health back?

I think a Dynasty Warriors game did that

 

[ned_ballad]

I actually kind of think late game weapons last too long

There comes a point in the game where weapons just don't even matter anymore. You're always just using the Master Sword until it breaks and then swapping to a royal weapon while you wait for the MS to respawn. And by that point even random enemies are sometimes carrying royal weapons.

Like at the end I had a full inventory of royal greatswords and was never without a top tier weapon

 

[Kyuur]

The weapon durability is there to facilitate exploration, so any changes should want to make you explore more and not less. Crafting or repair in the wild might make sense as one above poster mentioned. I don't think just changing the durability is going to do anything because that's just a factor of enemy HP, player skill, etc.

 

[Cudpug]

Durians need to not heal 100% of your health. After I discovered that, it makes the rest of the cooking system largely pointless.

 

[modestb]

It should have the jury-rigging system for durability like New Vegas - you can break down similar items to repair your favorites. The higher quality/closer to the base item it is, the more it is fixed up.

 

[Decarb]

Shield deflect is pretty broken once you get the timing down. A wooden pot cover should not be able to deflect Guardian lasers.

 

[Alek]

maybe make like a hunger meter and when it's full, you can't eat any food to get health back?

I think a Dynasty Warriors game did that

Click to shrink...

Yeah something like that would work too. That's basically just the inverse of a limit on how much you can carry. It has pros and cons when comparing the two, the pro is that you don't need to bother with all the UI busywork sorting which food to take with you, but the con is that you lose that strategic choice of which food to take with you and prepare.

 

[deathsaber]

Weapons should be more durable- at least steel/swords.

Make this system more realistic. Yes, wooden poles, clubs, should be breakable. But a good steel forged sword should last a pretty long time, especially when dispatched against fleshy foes- make it less about breaking and more about sharpening (to keep damage levels high) however they could blunt/break faster against hard foes in armor, or skeletons, etc (where maybe one could encourage more use of heavy blunt weaponry.

Also, rain basically hosing all climbing with no workaround needs to be refigured out- give some slip-resistant gloves or something one could equip to counteract. When so much the game was centered around climbing/traversal, it was dopey for that part of the game to basic be shut down every time there is a downpour (which was very frequent).

 

[Devil]

I think if the weapon durability was higher people would get attached to a cool looking weapon and be even more disappointed when it eventually breaks.

People should view a sword in BOTW not just as a weapon but more like ammo. It's disposable and meant to be used until you're out of ammo. Maybe the game could make this aspect more clear next time but I actually liked the mechanic a lot. Especially in the first half of the game when you were not absolutely stacked with weapons and had to actually think about what to use and collect. The balancing of this went downhill later on.

 

[jotun?]

Weapon durability is balanced just fine. It's the players' perception of it that's messed up.

My first time through, I took the approach of trying to optimize and micromanage my weapon usage, using my weaker weapons most often to make room for finding better ones.. It was fine, and I didn't ever feel like I had to avoid enemies to maintain my weapon supply, but I spent a lot of extra time in the inventory screen.

Second time through, I made a conscious effort to just always use my best weapons and not worry about things breaking, and it was way better! It seemed perfectly balanced so that when I just played the game without worrying about weapons breaking, I would still never be short on weapons and I would always have some inventory space free for new ones without needing to drop anything.

 

[Aurongel]

Radial menu for weapon and power selection. This is a no brainer and it's crazy the original lacked it.

also a way to "ping" the HUD or have a way to hide the heart count that is constantly trying to ruin my pretty OLED.

 

[Astro Cat]

Get rid of the weapon durability entirely. And the rain, or at least tone it down so it's possible to climb in some way.

 

[Kemono]

I think having weapons and enemies that are region specific would make exploration more interesting.

Click to shrink...

Having a bigger enemy variety and not just the same creatures in a different color would be a great improvement.

 

[Deleted member 35631]

I hate four things in this game:
1) Weapon durability
We will never get to an agreement, and every single change they make regardless of how small or big it is, it will cause controversy.

2) Stamina while running
It's a huge world! Why won't they let me run?! I don't care stamina for things like climbing, archery or whatnot, but if you are going to make a huge world, let me run infinitely!

3) Impossibility to climb in the rain
This is just annoying! Why did they decide to keep it that way? I think this will definitely be changed in the sequel. Otherwise, facepalm.

4) Master sword needs to recharge
Why? it's absurd! And serve no purpose other than to make it completely useless and people not wanting to use it.

 

[Video Games Are Dumb]

The Weapon Durability problem is solved by getting rid of it. It's cute but doesn't add much. Like, sure, sticks should break. But maybe just make the clubs and whatever else have randomized damage outputs, encouraging people to pick up new items? And maybe an enhanced modding system? I dunno, people need a reason to pick stuff up, but Weapon Durability is lame.

 

[Kemono]

Weapon durability is balanced just fine. It's the players' perception of it that's messed up.

My first time through, I took the approach of trying to optimize and micromanage my weapon usage, using my weaker weapons most often to make room for finding better ones.. It was fine, and I didn't ever feel like I had to avoid enemies to maintain my weapon supply, but I spent a lot of extra time in the inventory screen.

Second time through, I made a conscious effort to just always use my best weapons and not worry about things breaking, and it was way better! It seemed perfectly balanced so that when I just played the game without worrying about weapons breaking, I would still never be short on weapons and I would always have some inventory space free for new ones without needing to drop anything.

Click to shrink...

That's bad design imo. Where's the need for breaking weapons if you find good weapons every few steps?

It feels tacked on if you could play the game with a handfull of different weapons that won't break.

The only upside is that the player uses different weapons but that would be much better if the enemies would make a different strategy necessary.

 

[MegaSackman]

Personally I'd like that when I'm exploring (which is the main draw of the game I believe) the answer to my curiosity is not always a shrine or a Korok seed.

 

[Arithmetician]

• Damage Output & Health

Understandably having a Zelda game that has hard hitting enemies similar to Dark Souls was a hit with people, but just like the durability it has issues.
The damage output of some of the enemies (alternate enemies of the same type) is a bit much but more importantly, some of the 'deathblows' just aren't unique enough to really warrant the punch they pack.
This could probably just be fixed through more animations, but what absolutely could use balancing is the damage you do to enemies health.

The health of some enemies 'seems' too much and whilst you do have the special counter attack (which can completely trivialise things) you're still sometimes flailing about at a sponge. It is more understandable when you come across something like a Lynel the first time but when you find a weapon in an area and enemies in that very area take it like nothing it gets silly. (Not talking elemental types)

An increase in damage with a trade-off being enemies can block and dodge more would actually make the combat more visceral instead of the faux-visceral it currently has.



Don't have time for more and frankly didn't have time for this so it's rough.

If you have any complaints, it's Lobster Roll fault.

Click to shrink...

Breath of the Wild is my favorite game, but the enemy scaling was completely broken.

It's really disappointing to see a red bokoblin and a silver bokoblin next to each other - they look identical but the silver one has like 50x the health of the red one, and deals an extra six hearts of damage per strike or something. It just doesn't make any sense - they look the same! They need to have more enemy variety to have different difficulties of enemies, and then make some areas "endgame" areas full of difficult enemies, and others "easy areas" with softballs.

 

[Arithmetician]

Radial menu for weapon and power selection. This is a no brainer and it's crazy the original lacked it.

also a way to "ping" the HUD or have a way to hide the heart count that is constantly trying to ruin my pretty OLED.

Click to shrink...

Aaaah, those are both great ideas as well. I hated the divine beast powers occupying tons of real space on the HUD, and changing weapons was good in the beginning terrible after maxing out the number of weapon slots.

 

[Deleted member 37928]

I felt like there was too many food items in the world when concidering how insignificant some of the recipees were, or similar to eachother. I would very much like more creativity when mixing and finding out new properties. Maybe even food that has interesting negative effects? Example: you get double the attack damage but also half the defense for a minute, or maybe your bow gets extremely potent but you are also locked out from using anything else until the potion wears off. I feel like there's so much you could explore here when taking into account the massive amount of items you collect during your adventure.

 

[ShapeDePapa]

Make the weapons/equipement more durable or have a way to upgrade their durability.

 

[Deleted member 32822]

More interesting swordplay would be nice too. Combos, special techniques from TP and SS.

 

[Vidiot]

I definitely want more meaningful items in chests instead of a bunch of weapons that will eventually break.

 

[Monster Zero]

BOTW 2 should have the kind of combat techniques I was able to do in Twilight Princess.

 

[Deleted member 29691]

I forget, was there a way to repair weapons? That would make finding rare/cool ones a lot less stressful I feel. And yes, give them higher durability to begin with. Being able to take them to a repair shop/having the tools to repair them yourself would be a very cool addition.

 

[beansontoast]

I have no idea how much the survival/exploration aspect will be focused on in the sequel, but assuming it is emphasised to a reasonably similar degree, then they definitely need to fix the clothing and food system. Being able to pause the game in the middle of exploration and esp combat and heal/change clothes definitely impacts on the survival stuff. Food should not be able to be instantly consumed (i.e. make it take a while to consume or make looking through inventory not pause the game) and clothing should only be able to be changed before you need its effects (i.e. you should be forced to plan ahead), for example at campfires or inns or something.

 

[AbsoluteZ3R0]

They need to improve the combat, boss fights, take out weapon durability and add more enemy variety, Also, add few complex dungeon like hyrule castle throughout the open world.

 

[Kromeo]

Stop putting gems in most of the chest, that's not interesting to find. I wouldn't have had a problem with durability if hammers didn't break from mining

 

[LegendofLex]

A good fix for weapon durability: weapons don't fully break until thrown, but lose most of their potency when durability hits minimum. Weapons can be fixed using ore-type materials and monster parts.

I do think the cycle of burning through weapons and having a shifting inventory is part of the appeal of the game and keeps the combat from devolving to "one powerful weapon carries you through most of the game" or "99% of the weapons you find are useless duplicates."

 

[Undeniablybiased]

Pretty much everything that has to do with numbers is unbalanced. Enemy health/defense, player health/defense, weapon strength, the number of hearts you can get, how much stamina you can get, all the effects food can have. And then there's the extra stuff like being able to carry infinite amounts of food and potions, being able to pause to use them. And of course the busted, busted champion abilities. Combine this with the games open nature and it's one of the most unbalanced games I've ever played.

I hope the sequel fixes all this stuff. The fun of the game being open comes from the large number of things you can do and ways you can accomplish tasks. The overinflated numbers aren't necessary to achieve that.