cn: There are no spoilers in this article, and the discussion is purely about game mechanics.
Zelda: Breath of the Wild has received near universal praise from critics, with Metacritic listing it as one of the best video games of all time. This is an exciting time, as we anticipate the numerous clones that will try (and fail) to capture what makes this game so great.
Like most adventure games, BotW is essentially a power fantasy. What makes the game exciting is the acquisition of power, and the illusion that your power matters. For example, you find better weapons and equipment, which grants you the power to access further game content. If BotW is better than similar games, then it is probably because it maintains a greater illusion of power for a longer period of time.
And indeed, the illusion of power is precisely what most critics praise. BotW is a game that lets you do anything! You can climb anywhere, and paraglide down. You can experience the story in any order, or just skip straight to the final boss immediately, if you so choose.
But as critics praise the extent of power that the game grants you, they are ignoring the other essential characteristic of a power fantasy: the illusion that the power matters.
I say “illusion” because at most you acquire power over the virtual world, and that world doesn’t matter. Yes, you might gain access further story content, but often the truth is you could have gotten better story content from TV and movies. Nonetheless, it is easy enough to maintain the illusion of meaning as long as the power matters within the virtual world.
What tends to make the illusion collapse is when it becomes clear that your power doesn’t matter even within the virtual world. At some point, you have so much power, but all you can really do with the power is acquire more power, and more power is useless to you. After becoming lord of all, you glimpse the pointlessness of (virtual) existence and realize that you are lord of nothing. It is not merely that your adventure has become meaningless, but that it had always been meaningless from the start.
Game designers could give you all the power from the start, including the ability to fly, to ignore wall collision, and to destroy enemies instantly. But if they did, then the power would feel pointless just that much faster. A good power fantasy instead rations out power, drip by drip, and tries to make each drip feel meaningful.
What makes BotW a satisfying game? Is it that the player gets so much power? No! The strength of the game is in how little power it gives, while still creating a strong impression of power. And the particular strategy for achieving this is to give you a taste of power, and then quickly take it away.
One of the most complained-about mechanics in BotW is weapon durability. Every weapon in the game breaks after a few dozen strikes. A single boss battle can have you cycling through several weapons. There is no way to repair them. You are never in want of weapons, because they are just lying around all over the place, but there is a danger of using up your strongest weapons or weapons that fill a particular niche.
People don’t like this mechanic, because it takes away power. With a little skill and perseverance, you can explore a high level area and find some powerful weapons, but that power is only on loan. In fact, you probably don’t even take advantage of the weapon, instead letting it languish in your inventory in anticipation of tough battle in the hypothetical future. Incidentally, inventory space is extremely limited, and one of the other rewards for exploration is a way to expand your inventory.
It’s understandable that players don’t like weapon durability, because it holds you back. But I believe it’s one of the most important mechanics in the game, because it holds you back from the abyss, the same abyss that lurks at the heart of every power fantasy game.
Consider the alternative, where weapons last forever. Instead of exploring to find weapons that grant you power for a finite amount of time, instead you explore to have a small chance of finding a weapon better than the one you’re currently using. This is basically skinner box game design, with a random reinforcement schedule. And to prevent you from charging straight into the abyss, the game probably needs areas with different level tiers, forcing the game to be more linear. The much-praised wide open world in BotW is basically made possible by weapon durability.
Of course, the weapon durability mechanic is not without its flaws. Some people intuitively see past the illusion, realizing the pointlessness of it all. I’ve observed that some people tend to hoard, systematically overestimating the value of saving a weapon for the future. Nonetheless, I think this is a case where people are very much impressed by one aspect of the game (a wide open world brimming with rewards) and unimpressed with another (brittle weapons), not realizing that the latter is what makes the former possible.
I love this!
I agree completely with your view. It seems to me that games take advantage of sunk cost fallacy, and the illusion of control (I am not sure which fallacy that is) to make our interactions more satisfying. We’d be annoyed if product marketing did the same thing, too obviously. But it’s a lot more compelling to me to play a game where I think I am in control of my “choices” (I’m not!) compared to a movie or a book. The appeal is very different.
I sometimes game with a friend who is a “grinder” – his agenda going into a game is very very different from mine. Not surprisingly, the games we like are mostly different, too.
“You can do anything” is the sort of thing that sounds good but usually makes the game far worse.
Most of my favorite games are mostly-linear. Those that aren’t have clear arcs and rules where you can never do just anything.
Except that the whole point of acquiring power in a video game is that you can use it to overcome greater challenges. I don’t appreciate acquiring a rocket launcher because I think it “matters” but because it lets me take down the juggernauts I’d been running from all this time.
I’ve honestly never felt the illusion of power or control to be a major aspect of video game fun; it’s all about overcoming challenges. Video game power matters because it provides a tool to overcome video game challenges, not because it creates the illusion of real power.
Weapon durability is hardly a unique mechanic. Especially when you consider that in shooters (one of my preferred genres!), limited ammo is functionally the same thing.
“But I might need it later” is virtually omnipresent in games where weapon use is limited. You can easily end up sitting on a nuclear stockpile to shame North Korea and find yourself flicking peas at a giant robot crab on the off chance that there might be a bigger giant robot crab around the corner.
Can’t waste my missiles on a blue Hunter, there might be a juggernaut in the next room!
Can’t waste my comboings on these zombies, there might be a strider just outside!
Can’t waste my grenades on these skitters, there might be a… no wait, I have a cedar box so ammo is unlimited. Good to know! It’s more fun this way!
Can’t put my valuable thunderbirds at risk in this tricky battle… no, wait, I get more of them every turn so I can easily recoup any losses. It’s certainly more fun this way!
Or alternatively, you find new and better weapons with relative ease, each of which lasts forever, thus allowing you to fight against the new assortment of baddies who were always there but which you just weren’t powerful to take on yet.
Finding a new weapon is nice, but the real fun comes from using that weapon to take down a monster you’d spent ages running from.
I know that creates functional linearity— you can technically go anywhere, but you’ll be mercilessly slaughtered instantly unless you go everywhere in ascending order of difficulty. It eliminates the free open world aspect. I don’t really care. Open worlds are overrated. Sandboxes can go pound sand.
@Jessie Harban,
I think it’s a bit strange to speak of using items “to overcome greater challenges”. If it helps you overcome challenges, it does so by making the challenges easier, no? Some games help you overcome greater challenges by teaching you new skills, but acquiring stronger equipment or leveling up definitely does not teach you new skills, it just lets you get away with less skill.
Yeah, I don’t really get people’s complaints about the weapon durability. To me it feels a lot better than farming and farming to maybe one day find a drop that’s slightly better than what you have, and destroying all the rest to create enchanting mats. Once I’m geared out in that sort of game, I stop playing (unless friends still want me to help them, but that creates its own problems, because with random drops there’s a hugely unequal experience when one player gets a big lucky streak that kinda ruins it). But with this system there’s a lot more variability to the way that I play. My preference is to use spears as much as possible, but I can’t do that all the time because if I did I’d just run out of them, so I have to learn other combat styles/tactics too. I also think it works really well in this game because it makes the one weapon that doesn’t break feel that much more impressive, even though you still can’t overuse it.
This is true up to a certain point, but there are cases (without spoiling anything) where the challenge is so punishing without decent gear/food buffs/enough hearts that you don’t even really get the chance to learn anything about the encounter, because you’re just getting one-shot immediately. Instead of learning to fight, you learn to run and hide. I guess that’s still an important skill, especially for early game, but it’s not the same skill as actually taking the enemy down. It’s not the same kind of gear-level gating as you see with WoW, where you explicitly need a certain gear level to even enter certain dungeons, and you can come up with more creative solutions in this game, but it’s still there.