Weapon degradation seems to be a serious and genuine complaint that a lot of people have with BotW and TotK but for some reason it never seemed to bother me as it has others. I totally understand the criticism but frankly I always had a full stock of good quality weapons - particularly with the Fuse function in TotK - and never ran low or out of decent weapons on hand.
I think they were implemented to try to force gamers to think about other options to take down enemies rather than brute-forcing every battle which appeals to me, but it seems to have angered a significant proportion of people. From my perspective, it helps to engender the puzzler aspect of Zelda games in a novel way - viewing battles as a puzzle to be solved for maximum efficiency rather than how well you can strike and dodge.
The problem is that I don’t want to use different weapons. Some people play Monster Hunter with a bunch of different weapons depending on the hunt, but I don’t, and the game respects that. In a game like BotW I don’t want to use my cool thing because then it will go away and I’ll be sad.
I think some previous Zelda entries did a much better job at making bosses feel like puzzles, particularly Link Between Worlds. In BotW you can just eat a feast and mash buttons.
I honestly felt that the weapon degradation was freeing in a way - that every item in the same was a consumable to be used and not an item to be collected and stashed away forever while you just use the Zweihander from the graveyard for 90% of the game. Even the unique quest items broke, but you could do another quest to unlock the ability to buy infinite versions! I thought that was great game design.
Weapon degradation seems to be a serious and genuine complaint that a lot of people have with BotW and TotK but for some reason it never seemed to bother me as it has others. I totally understand the criticism but frankly I always had a full stock of good quality weapons - particularly with the Fuse function in TotK - and never ran low or out of decent weapons on hand.
I think they were implemented to try to force gamers to think about other options to take down enemies rather than brute-forcing every battle which appeals to me, but it seems to have angered a significant proportion of people. From my perspective, it helps to engender the puzzler aspect of Zelda games in a novel way - viewing battles as a puzzle to be solved for maximum efficiency rather than how well you can strike and dodge.
The problem is that I don’t want to use different weapons. Some people play Monster Hunter with a bunch of different weapons depending on the hunt, but I don’t, and the game respects that. In a game like BotW I don’t want to use my cool thing because then it will go away and I’ll be sad.
I think some previous Zelda entries did a much better job at making bosses feel like puzzles, particularly Link Between Worlds. In BotW you can just eat a feast and mash buttons.
I honestly felt that the weapon degradation was freeing in a way - that every item in the same was a consumable to be used and not an item to be collected and stashed away forever while you just use the Zweihander from the graveyard for 90% of the game. Even the unique quest items broke, but you could do another quest to unlock the ability to buy infinite versions! I thought that was great game design.