Example; the Legend of Zelda: BotW and TotK weapon degradation system. At first I was annoyed at it, but once I stopped caring about my “favorite weapon” I really started to enjoy the system. I think it lends really well to the sandbox nature of the game and it itches that resourcefulness nature inside me.
The Zelda complaint is extra bullshit considering other open-world games like Just Cause do exactly the same thing by giving the guns limited ammo, so you constantly have to switch weapons based on what the enemies drop.
Considering in prior Zelda games you didn’t have to worry about your sword being unusable or your shield breaking (inb4 “what about…”, there’s like three circumstances in a dozen plus games, cmon.), I can understand why folks weren’t so keen on it in the new ones. Yeah you could run out of magic, arrows, or bombs, but that boomerang wasn’t going anywhere.
Tbh, if I had a boomerang as a weapon, I’d get precisely one throw out of it (whether I hit anything or not).
BotW is just not a Zelda game at all. It is a very mid outdoor walking simulator with fetch quests. I don’t care about the breakable weapons, even. I want the collection of tools, the long dungeons with puzzles using those tools, and the bosses vulnerable to those tools.
It has dungeons: The four divine beasts.
IMO It put a lot of the “Use a particular tool for this” puzzles into the shrines to scratch the puzzle solvers itch, (along with some of the Korok seeds.) but even those still gave leeway to not having to use those tools at all.
That is why I wrote specifically “long dungeons,” yeah. Those are simple and short, all the same little floating skulls, maybe one treasure that is a mild head-scratcher to get at. The boss fights in there are barely distinct from each other. It feels cheap compared to previous releases.
They did put all those tool puzzles into shrines. But they are one-offs and simplified. It takes longer to find a shrine than to solve it. And too many of them are just “fight this same little spidery guy again.”
The whole experience strikes me as Zelda for people who hated the majority of the content in previous games.
I mean if I run out of RPG ammo in GTA I can buy more for a universal currency I don’t have to keep beating crime lords down with a big stick until one of them drops a fresh one.
I think if you’re comparing open world games to open world games then yeah, BOTW doesn’t do anything too terribl differenty, but when you compare BOTW to other Zelda games then it’s very different and that’s where the criticism comes from.
Personally I feel BOTW is a very competent open world game, probably one of the better ones I’ve played but I still didn’t gel with it because I was already strongly feeling fatigued from too many games becoming open world and not making that leap particularly well (Mass Effect Andromeda and FFXV coming to mind for me personally), what I wanted was a more traditional Zelda game and that’s simply not what BOTW was.
I think there would have been less issue with the Zelda weapon system if they started you with a bigger inventory space or made the tree guy who expands it someone you talk to and learn where to meet them later at the beginning of the game.