Alex79uk wrote: ↑May 12th, 2019, 9:31 am EDIT: Alex, you utter twat.

So you know when you enter the shrine there's the thing that gives you a new ability.

Yeah, missed that. I'd been breaking the rocks with my hammer. A bomb rune would be useful, wouldn't it. Oh hang on...

Ha, you wally.

I decided to uncover some of the map so spent a while last night looking for those towers. I was in the south in a sort of deserty bit when I saw this huge thing flying through the air. I got a bit closer and realised it was a dragon!! It was amazing! Real Shadow Of The Colossus stuff! I was too scared to do anything so hid behind a pillar and waited for it to go, but it was so cool!

I’m not enjoying master mode one bit. Feels designed to be incredibly frustrating.

I didn’t particularly enjoy any of the DLC to be honest.

It feels like it was designed for people who just never stopped playing the game. I find Master Mode and the Champions Ballard too tricky to just jump back into after two years out.

Although I did enjoy that trails mode for a few hours.

This may be the only game I've ever played where I can put in a two hour session of doing nothing at all of note, and go to bed satisfied. Last night all I did was cook loads of meals, catch myself a new horse, climb a mountain and discovered its possible to sail the little rafts about if you have a big leaf in your possession - and that was it. I didn't climb any towers, didn't do any missions, didn't find any shrines, not even a kurok seed. Two hours of nothing and it was brilliant!

Alex - Do the words ‘Eventide Island’ mean anything to you yet ??

Suits wrote: ↑July 2nd, 2019, 8:40 am Alex - Do the words ‘Eventide Island’ mean anything to you yet ??

I'm not Alex but they do to me

hazeredmist wrote: ↑July 2nd, 2019, 11:26 am

Suits wrote: ↑July 2nd, 2019, 8:40 am Alex - Do the words ‘Eventide Island’ mean anything to you yet ??

I'm not Alex but they do to me

Suits wrote: ↑July 2nd, 2019, 11:58 am

hazeredmist wrote: ↑July 2nd, 2019, 11:26 am

Suits wrote: ↑July 2nd, 2019, 8:40 am Alex - Do the words ‘Eventide Island’ mean anything to you yet ??

I'm not Alex but they do to me

Not a sausage!

Alex79uk wrote: ↑July 2nd, 2019, 8:24 am This may be the only game I've ever played where I can put in a two hour session of doing nothing at all of note, and go to bed satisfied. Last night all I did was cook loads of meals, catch myself a new horse, climb a mountain and discovered its possible to sail the little rafts about if you have a big leaf in your possession - and that was it. I didn't climb any towers, didn't do any missions, didn't find any shrines, not even a kurok seed. Two hours of nothing and it was brilliant!

It's a shame that the horses are largely pointless, given how much more efficient traveling via the glider is. I don't think I bothered with them much at all. Maybe something the sequel will improve on?

Yeah -although it breaks immersion somewhat, the Red Dead/Elder Scrolls/Assassins Creed way the horses magically appear when you whistle is much more useful. The other thing if I'm travelling by horse though is that I worry I'm missing interesting things along the way so generally walk everywhere anyway!

In the 130 hours I played of this, I very rarely used a horse - mainly as you say Alex, because you’d miss stuff.

It's also kind of inconvenient to use a horse, since you need to go to a stable each time you want one, and make sure you never stray too far from your horse so you can call them back to you. And then the DLC made the whole thing somewhat redundant by letting you summon a magical motorbike no matter where you are.

Same - I didn't use my horses. If you don't take them to a stable they just stay where they are or get lost, and I found that stressful and would keep going back. Stables are rarely where you actually want to go, so they were pretty useless.

I think playing it in the regular way, horses are more of a pain than they’re worth. But if you make a conscious decision to not fast travel, some of the systems in the game really start to come out more.

Cooking for example becomes a bit trivial once you find a really good fruit, and then a shrine near the fruit. Just warp there, cook it up and you’re good to go for a while (and if not you can quickly warp back.) Weapon degradation too stops being much of an issue if you can remember where some of the good stuff is that’s near a shrine. For example there’s a huge fire sword that’s in a risky place, but as long as you can dash to it and pick it up you can just quickly warp out before it gets hairy.

Even health isn’t so bad after you’ve got a regular free place to sleep.

But if you stop or self impose a limit on fast travelling you find yourself having to use the systems a lot more, including riding horse back. It takes a bit of restraint (and stops being tenable if you want to do all the shrines) but i think it ends up helping the sandbox fun and extends the initial creative joy of invention of the Great Plateau.

I never, ever fast travel in games. Unless there is a really legitimate story reason why you should be able to. Even then, I rarely do it. Played 100s of hours of Witcher, Elder Scrolls, all sorts of games, no fast travel! I feel like it breaks the game in some ways. I can totally get why people do it, but it's not for me. I really enjoyed the pace of, for example, Witcher 3 - when you're sailing between islands and stuff it just feels like more of a journey.

Couldn't agree more. Same with Dark Souls to be honest. As amazing as the LV is to receive and discover its implications, it also instantly destroys the imposing nature of the journey and much of the psychological weight of the world. That's why whenever people rant about getting stuck in the Depths cursed or in BT with whatever ailment, they're lucky to experience something so rare which respects its own world and its values more than your desire for convenience and gratification.

I try to limit my use of fast travel to where I feel like it makes narrative sense (to me). For example, if I’m just heading back to a city to sell things in Skyrim I’ll fast travel there and back, a novelisation of the story wouldn’t contain the dull trek through places you’ve already been to sell some stuff before you came back. I see that as game mechanic over narrative.

Almost as if ‘it didn’t happen’ from the point of view of the game’s narrative,

One time I remember fast travel actively breaking the intent of the narrative is also in Skyrim. There’s an optional quest in a town to have a drinking contest with someone, at the end of which you pass out. You wake up in a city on the other corner of the map with none of the intervening space mapped out (you don’t remember how you got there after all). The weight of the quest should now be “you’re miles away from anywhere you know and have to make the best of the situation”, but the game mechanics just let you fast travel straight back. Those sorts of things I don’t do, if I can help it.

I quite like the adventurous feeling of riding a horse in Breath of the Wild, especially into uncharted regions. So I did a lot of it, until my map was fully charted and then yes... I proceeded with a lot more teleporting and more intense exploring off the paths. But even still, sometimes I just like to hit the roads of Hyrule for a ride.

I'm about '40 or more hours' in to this game now, done a small handful of side missions but left the main story at the point you're told about the four divine beasts. I've not tried to make any more progress with it than that. I've been happily wandering the world looking for shrines and the memory photo spots which seem to do a nice job of filling in some back story.

Last night though, because I was in the general area, I decided to try to do the Shrine Quest in which you have to line the three cedar trees up on the mountain top and head towards the sea. I couldn't find the treasure or shrine it was supposed to point me towards, so I then decided to scale the mountain to look for the spring at the top.

As I approached, the music began to change and I caught a glimpse of something. Then as I reached the peak, I saw it.

Spoiler: show

It was absolutely breathtaking, I stood looking at it, wondering if it would aggro and attack but it didn't. It was just so mind-blowing finding that huge dragon at the spring! I then followed the quest guides and activated it, and then followed some of the best of the game so far. It was so amazing catching the thermals with my paraglider and shooting the corrupted eyes with my arrows, it was just so awesome!

Just such a brilliant game. Totally unexpected and blew me away!

Still annoyed about that three trees puzzle, though. Hmm.