LogFAQs > #972500588

Kenri posted...

It lets you feel more powerful as the game goes on because your weapons break less and less. It changes how you fight certain enemies and bosses because you know you have to ration certain weapons like ammo in an FPS (tbh an identical situation that nobody complains about). It frees you to consider weapons expendable so you can try throwing them at far away enemies, using them as lightning rods, or other combat tricks with the knowledge that if you lose your weapon it doesn't matter. It creates constant risk vs reward in the early and mid game by hiding most of the best weapons behind endgame areas forcing you to constantly push yourself if you want a continual supply of them (vs doing one run into an endgame area immediately and then crushing the rest of the game with a bunch of permanent upgrades). It creates additional risk in certain areas because the area itself is a danger to your equipment.

You mentioned all these (very good) points with only tangentially bringing up the most underappreciated aspect of BotW's weapon breaking to me: it solves the classic "hoard all my best gear and then never use it" RPG problem. Weapon breaking just works so insanely well with the systems in BotW, I'm convinced people who complain about it never played more than 5 hours of the entire game.

Actually, I might singlehandedly credit BotW for changing my approach to other games.

That said, I do think there's some degree of fairness to the critique that the only reward for combat is another weapon.

First, the unfairness:

- Framing it "losing a good weapon for a weak weapon" is ludicrous. Why would you use your strong weapons on weak enemies when you know they're a finite resource? Did you ever actually play enough of the game to realize how much longer later weapons last than early ones? Unless it's rusted, which is specifically made to break after a few hits, you'll be able to kill plenty of powerful enemies with a single strong weapon, netting you a lot more strong weapons than you started with. (Side tangent: not sure if it's been pointed out here, but the real problem is the game's inventory space. The default should have either been much bigger or the upgrades to it come much quicker, in my opinion. Probably the latter so there's still some sense of stakes for discarding weapons.)

- Framing it as "the ONLY point of combat" is equally ludicrous. Combat is a requirement for chests all throughout the game, to access shrines, in shrines themselves, to complete quests, etc. Etc.

The fairness:

- The incentives for combat ABSOLUTELY need work. While the shrine rewards are obviously fantastic, the quest and treasure rewards are often laughable, so I was maybe going hard on the devil's advocate approach with that last point. There were definitely points in the game I'd finish a lengthy encounter and laugh as my reward was way worse than the weapon or weapons I broke during it. But this is mostly only a problem very late game when you're crawling with only ridiculously great weapons, if you play like me.

My one fear with TotK is it's going to be so full of brilliant potential and possibilities, but ultimately, it might be easier to do things without ever bothering to craft much later on. But I mean, that MAY be somewhat of an inevitability regardless how tuned the game is, and it may even feel good to get to that point too. I just want this fusion system to achieve its full potential and feel absolutely necessary.

I think dungeons can go along way in making this a reality though. Enemies in a dungeon constantly dropping a certain resource and you can't figure out how to solve a puzzle? Hmmm, maybe fuse that resource to your arrows! Boom, also an incentive for combat (well if you need that resource anyway).

whew thanks for reading if you made it through that post!