>>717137301
Good way to articulate what I wasn't able to put my finger on. I like TOTK a lot more than BOTW because where BOTW lacked in story, TOTK made up for in spades.
I think one of the big things with Zelda is the sense of not just exploration, but the discovery within exploration. I could scrub my nutsack across every square inch of a Ubisoft game and as big as they are, there's no sense of finding anything, because there genuinely isn't anything to find. BOTW made up for this gameplay philosophy by putting in Deku scrubs everywhere to find, or small encounters with a nice little weapon or item to find. The only problem is that, as fun as having a map that big is, there's not enough in there to justify a map that big. Majora's Mask and Ocarina of Time were as big as they needed to be for the amount of unique content was in each game.
BOTW and TOTK could easily get by with having maybe HALF as many shrines as they did, and having the Piece of Heart stand-ins not just be obtainable from shrines, but quests and exploration. Maybe even capitalize on the world bosses by having them drop pieces of heart if they're a particularly tough fight, like the Gleeok fights. Or maybe some scripted Dark Ganondorf boss fights in notable locations.
You're right in "Multiplicative Design" in that they got EXTREMELY formulaic with enemies and weapons. I wasn't a fan. I'd rather have a huge variety of enemies that at least look and move differently, even if what they do is essentially the same. And I think it's not just a design flaw that affects BOTW/TOTK, but most open-world games. Developers try to make the world first, then fill it in afterwards, rather than planning cool stuff and then making the world to fit that stuff in. Dragon's Dogma is a game that definitely gets it right. Super unique enemies and boss fights, and a big semi-open world that's only big enough to justify the amount of content that's in it.
Sorry for the essay. Pic related.
