is anyone else getting severely burned out on this game?

or if you have finished it and had some time to reflect on it, what do you think of it now?

To be upfront, I haven't finished the game but have conquered all the divine beasts and have uncovered all but 2 regions on the map, and I think my issue with this game is the map itself and the lack of things to really do in it. This is my first Zelda game ever.

all the activities comes down to

- Korok hunting, which I have no interest in

- seeing new regions and towns; exploration, which is very enjoyable initially, even though there is rarely any thing of interest to do when you reach your destinations.

- side quests, all of which are boring fetch quests

- the divine beasts, which are the best parts of the game

- finding treasure in bokoblin nests

- shrines, which are just ok.... I have maxed out stamina and have a sizeable portion of hearts to spare.

All that aside, the map is the real issue for me in this game.

I kept hearing from different games people that the map is revolutionary and its so wonderful not to have icons on the map that inundate or overwhelm you.

However, its a video game. I want to see what this video game has to offer.

As such, the only way I play this game is to uncover one region at a time and obsessive compulsively search everywhere in the region for something special - which doesn't happen too much (see above).

The fact that the map doesn't get drawn in is a real problem. Ive heard the argument that it frees you up to travel in any direction you want without the hinderance of guidance, however, wouldn't you be missing a lot if you did that?

Its had the opposite effect on me in that it has triggered me to want to search everywhere in case I miss something - something that I find pretty annoying. As of now, there is no real way to know where you've been and the shrines are not necessarily the best indicator because there can always be a chest or a Lionyl nearby.

This being my first Zelda game and the first real nintendo game that I've enjoyed, I don't want to seem too harsh on it. There's a lot to enjoy, however a lot of the enjoyment is somewhat passive. It turns out Breath of the Wild is an amazing podcast game (game that you play while listening to podcasts).

However, the way it was sold to me was being something revolutionary, and when it comes to the climbing and the freedom that allows, it kind of is. Its just sad that there is not really much to do in it. That said, I still want to finish it and its still going to be somewhere on my goty list but somewhere in the 5 - 10 range.

Anyone else feel this way?

It's my first Zelda since OoT, and I'm really enjoying it. I bought it near launch with my Switch, and I'm about 50 hours in (70 shrines, 3 divine beasts). I've enjoyed just wandering around. If I get bored, I look at one of the interactive maps online to find a shrine to go after. I can't put my finger on it, but I like exploring in this game, even if there often isn't much payoff.

It's one of the best games ever made

I loved it through and through. It's not a game meant to be obsessively played, like your typical open world adventure. It isn't filled with icons and bloat because you're not supposed to be mechanically incentivised to chase them in the same way as you are something like an Assassin's Creed or Watch Dogs. There are benefits to doing so, but it becomes a series of diminishing returns. I was happy after about 70 shrines and 150 korok seeds, all areas of the map uncovered and all Divine Beasts conquered. When I started to feel tired of the game, I simply walked to the castle and got it done. I never felt as if I was missing out on anything because there's always something cool just around the corner, or just up the mountain or in a cave. in fact, I thought the Divine Beasts were easily the worst part of the game just because of how they limited to exploratory abilities and didn't have anything more useful than mid-game weapons in them.

If you're playing this game to complete every last thing, or you feel a stone unturned is a lost opportunity, you're probably gonna have a bad time. It's meant to be taken at a leisurely pace; the game is happy to move as slowly or as quickly as you want it to, rather than giving you a set of objectives that tease you until they're complete.

I love Breath of the Wild but playing it as an obsessive completionist sounds like a bad time..I wandered theough the map exploring each area until I wanted to move on and did not worry about missing "content."

It is like a buffet. If you try to eat every diah you will feel sick and miserable. Just take what you like and leave the rest. The whole point is to have a self-directed freeform adventure, with just enough structure to keep it interesting.

The repetition is there to provide scope, not so you can find absolutely everything.

After having finished it, my opinion landed at: I think the shrines (and the beasts) feel sterile and repetitive compared to dungeons of Zelda games in the past. The overworld enemies are interesting to fight at first, but I felt little incentive to continue to do so. The annoyances really started to build up: inventory management, durability, rain, weather, basically... all the "systems" they created were mostly un-fun to me.

As soon as I could manage it, I made a beeline to Ganon and had a reasonably good fight followed by a lame anticlimax. Overall, I think the game was very ambitious, but didn't come together into as enjoyable experience as I had hoped.

It is a good and interesting game with a lot of great ideas.

It is not one of the best games ever.

I'd write more but I'm on a cellphone, away from home.

I love it just as most people have. It's already been said but the way the map is designed is perfect for the open world genre.

When you are given an open world but things are laid out for you basically telling you what you can do, the interest is already taken away because you're fully aware of what you're getting into. The game is handing you an experience rather than you making the experience your own, which sounds contradictory to something made to be open doesn't it? It's partly why the GTA series is so much more successful than other open world series because next to the great story, the world is a lot of fun to just ride around and do crazy stuff in (it does run its course after a while though as does anything). Going into this game, it's refreshing to have the only things laid out for you be the destinations for quests. Since everything else pops up as you come upon it in the world it creates a shroud of mystery over the entire game. Even if you have done literally everything in the game (and assuming you haven't looked anything up online) you would still think there are things left that you haven't done because the game never tells you.

For a completionist, yes the game will run dry because they had to fill a incredibly large map with little things to discover which ends up being a lot of things. Since the game is designed more around adventure that is what the focus is on. There have been complaints about the map being too big, which i sort of agree, but it couldn't be too much smaller because if everything was too condensed it would take away from the satisfaction of exploring.

I still absolutely loved every second I played of Zelda. But I wish I did more side stuff before beating Ganon. I did all the main quests and for the master sword but once the story was over I didn't feel like going back.

I loved every minute of it, but I doubt I will ever play it again. I was so captivated by the sense of discovery that it brought with it, that I feel like trying to recapture that is impossible and would only diminish the original experience for me.

Horrible game, easily the worst of the series. I don't understand the love for this, there really isn't much to do, the main dungeons suck, the side dungeons are too short and there are too many of them, the combat is fine but repetitive, the story is dull, there are too many annoyances like stamina and rain, and the world is empty.

My opinion now is the same as it was when I played it at release. It has the best open world in any video game I've ever played and the dungeon content was supremely disappointing, a big step down from previous 3D Zelda games.

Overall a fantastic open world game, but as a massive Zelda fan I feel like the more Zelda-like aspects of the game were a let down. Of the three games I've played that I would consider for GOTY at this point, right now I'm feeling 1. Persona 2. Zelda 3. Horizon.

I really liked the exploration in it, so as soon as I had the map uncovered I lost most of my interest and went straight for Ganon. I hated the dungeons and the quests leading up to them, so every time I tried to tackle the story was a slog. When I finished the game I didn't need to think twice about going back and scouring the map for the shrines etc. I missed, since I knew it'd just make me hate the part of the game I enjoyed.

Really liked the game overall (since so much of it was just exploring, in my case), but it's definitely not my favourite Zelda, letalone one of my favourite games of all time. If I made top 10 of the year lists, it'd probably sit somewhere in the middle after Nier and Persona.

It's an incredible video game that has made me feel more excited and engaged than most video games ever have. I can acknowledge some of the downsides (I hate people complaining about the weapons breaking, though), but that feeling it gave me as I spent over 100 hours exploring Hyrule makes it one of my favorite games ever, period.

@the_nubster: I mostly agree with you, its just that the ethos of "just wander" became very tiresome if all you're doing is walking around largely barren environments. For me the potential joy of walking around in a game (or in real life) is the magic of stepping into the unknown and wandering into something you don't expect. That simply didn't happen in this game. I very much knew what to expect out of this game after playing it for 15 or so hours, and im over 100 hours in now. The aforementioned magic kind of happened in The Witcher 3 and to a certain extent in Skyrim and Red Dead. Its a hard thing to pull off though, and its something that people keep telling me this game has in spades and for me that simply isn't the case.

I did think the game map was too large, but I loved having the freedom from quest markers and such. I played with the HUD off.

It's probably also the easiest Zelda to play intermittently which worked out for me. Usually when I set a game down, I find it hard to pick back up. This one given how much freedom you have, was really easy to come back to. Typically when a Zelda game comes out I just plow through it in a week. But this one I just chipped away at for a couple months. I think that's the ideal way to play it avoid burnout.

I still haven't gone back to finish it, so I guess it's not all that.

I would be concerned if the entire population thourougly enjoyed Breath of the Wild. I've spoken with people who have major complaints with the games ability to keep them engaged. However I can say, without a doubt, that the visuals/sounds/movement all coincide to be immensely engaging. It almost certainly involves a level of nostalgia. But when I play Breathe of the Wild I feel strong emotions - like real world sense of exploration. This has all been said a bunch before but whatever, the game feels personal at times in a way I can honestly say I haven't felt before. The music swelling at the Rito village is a good example of the sense of content I feel while playing it.

I played it none stop when I got it. Did the main story, all the shrines and debating doing all the sidequests but I doubt I'll actually do that. Absolutely loved it and can't wait until I get far enough away from it to play it again.

@voshinova: BoTW does something so well that I haven't seen any other video game even come close to. It conveys natural beauty in a superbly effective way. I haven't seen a game handle nature the way this game does. The level of detail they put into making the world look and feel naturally beautiful in any moment or time is to me most of what makes it such a superb experience.

What? You mean you don't want every game to take place in a burned out city or the gray ruins of a fantasy world, or among the rotting corpses of a zombie apocalypse? Why not? Why would you want to see beautiful grassy fields and lush jungles and sharp white snowy peaks when you can be slogging through rust and decay?

It's astounding how much more beautiful the world of Zelda is than something like the Madagascar level of Uncharted 4, even though Uncharted 4 has a much higher graphical fidelity.

I think it has to do with height and draw distance. Zelda really used verticality in a way few open-world games have before.

@bigsocrates: My main point of comparison was Skyrim. Comparatively, Skyrim might as well be a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

At the point where I uncovered the entire map and got enough hearts to get the Master Sword , I pretty much gunned for the end and I don't have any intention of going back and "completing" it. As far as the combat goes, the shooting is fantastic but the melee combat falls short. The camera in this game has Dark Souls problems (large enemies or ones that jump around a lot fuck with the camera more than it feels like they should.) It feels like a lot of the solutions to difficult combat encounters is to spam food (Lionels are fun to deal with if you can survive at least one hit. The ones with large clubs take ten or so hearts per hit.) The shrines are fun little puzzles, but after doing about forty of them I didn't feel like I needed to see any more (ones that occur organically, like the labyrinth island, ruled.) The four dungeons that you can do are kind of cool, but not as distinct as I would have liked. The boss encounters are very similar and the dungeon aesthetics are as well. The unique mechanics of each one are cool but them all looking all the same was disappointing. It took me about fifty hours to finish the game and I know that there are large swathes of the map that I didn't explore. I feel like I've seen enough and I got my money's worth. I appreciate how you can't "break" this game and make it trivial to progress through like Skyrim, but I wouldn't call this a perfect formula.

It's better than the other 3D Zeldas, for sure. The older Zeldas tried to present an open world, but it was transparently pretty linear and usually in a way where it felt kind of frustrating or jarring finding the path you needed to go on. Diversions from that path usually lead to insignificant rewards (finding a secret treasure in OoT, opening the chest, getting rupees when you already have maximum or one fourth/fifth of a heart.) This is fully open and is overall a vast improvement, but it falls short of being a 100+ hour ridiculous commitment for me. It engaged me for a longer period of time than any Zelda game ever and that there isn't anything disappointing about that.

@fatalbanana: absolutely, there is a strange sense of sincerity in the way they convey nature. It all comes across as very "human." I have difficulty writing about BotW specifically because it's moment to moment gameplay feels so unique that I second guess myself. In regards to being "burnt out" on it, I'm currently distracted by Prey, which definitely doesn't mesh well with Zelda- as far as jumping between the two. I have a certain amount of trust that when I start Zelda back up, I'll instinctually smile and get sucked back into Hyrule.

If you want to know all the places of interest in the game you could always look for guides online. I'm sure there are dozens of interactive maps made by fans already. I can definitely see where you're coming from but the thing you don't like about the game is exactly the thing that's kept me playing. The lack of any real map icons placed by the game allows me to explore every nook and cranny whenever I so wish. This is a game that I can pick up and play for twenty minutes and just explore a tiny speck of the map and have my Zelda fix. I don't forsee myself finishing this game for at least a year, and that is exactly what I want from it.

I did a bunch of stuff, beat the game at around 40 hours and played for another 5 (explored more of the castle, all memories, etc.)

And while I'm done with the game, I absolutely loved my time with it. The combat was consistently enjoyable, the side stuff was a lot of fun, the main path was memorable, and I loved the artistic aspects. Just an incredibly well-made game that hooked me far more than I expected.

@bigsocrates: i love seeing foxes, deer, and things running around the world (+ eviscerating them for their sweet meat). it was one of the things that really impressed me my first time playing witcher 3 (going through the forest and having a herd of deer burst out and run alongside me)

I stopped playing about 3 divine beasts in because I got really ill IRL and kind of lost my momentum, but that was after having around 70 of my most enjoyable video game hours ever with the game. I'm going to go back to it of course.

Not that you are saying this OP because you have some specific problems with the game, but my situation with the game sort of reminds of Steam reviews for open world games where the person says 'I played this for 90 hours but then it got boring so I can't recommend it'.

It's a great game but in the end it's just a open world game and they all got the same problem do Y X times. ( got pretty bored after 7 hours in ) I still think the Witcher 3 is the best open world game to date. Still the Exploration of BoW is Really good , i had the most fun just running around in that game finding new city's. I wonder if this game would do well if it didn't got the Zelda name on it.

I think it's probably one of the best game ever made, at least it's up there with Witcher 3. I played it just after platinuming Horizon and that made me appreciate Zelda much more. This game really shows that graphics are not everything and what I also like about it is how natural and intuitive its systems are. It's not perfect but it comes close.

Bought it day one, beat it about 65 hours later with all divine beasts. Played through again, beat ganon without any divine beasts, with map turned off. As soon as hard mode comes out, I'll start a 3rd playthrough. I was worried as i played for the first time that the magic would wear off, but this is truly one of my favorite games I've ever played now. Miiiight have scheduled an appointment to get a giant Hestu tattoo on my calf... It's not for everybody, but the sound design, climbing and gliding mechanics, and just the handcrafted feel of the entire world make it the most memorable adventure I've had in many years.

I loved it, but I thought its shortcomings became more apparent as I put more time into it. If there's one thing above all that negatively sticks with me about the game it would be a lack of variety to the world. The shrines are visually the same and offer the same usual rewards. The dungeons are pretty small and they follow the same style and formula. They did a great job making the world feel massive, but once I reached its edges, I found most of the individual locations to be really only surface deep. I love Zelda puzzles, but this felt like doing Zelda puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles. In past games, that stuff felt like part of progression that would give you useful items while in BotW, it just feels like random parts of the world that will give you one of two upgrade currencies.

I guess what keeps me out of the "One of the best games ever" camp is the fact that I feel like I accomplished more in other Zelda games as I played them. BotW offers a ton of freedom to explore and it's really fun to do so, but it doesn't reward that exploration in a way that is ever all that interesting to me. So once I did the main stuff and filled the map out, I was ready to beat Ganon and call it a day. BotW is more of a "journey, not the destination" type of game compared to the rest of the series. Which is fine, but I would like to see the styles merge a bit more than they did. I think a little more emphasis put back into dungeon and item importance could do wonders for the open world model they're going for now.

TL/DR: I think BotW is a really cool game, but it didn't hit all the marks for me like it did for others. Mostly it left me really curious/excited to see what they do next.

I played it over the span of 2 months. There were times I played it many days in a row, and times I played it every 2-3 days. Whenever I was feeling "burnout", I left it alone and then came back to it, and then was quickly reminded how awesome the game is.

It definitely is one of the best games I've ever played.

I haven't played in about a month, and still have to go murder Gannon and wander the castle, but I've done just about everything else and all I have are fond memories. Probably going to finally pick it back up this weekend and go end it. The thing about the game that got me is that it let me execute ideas. Good ideas, terrible ideas, anything in between. If I would see something and ask "I wonder if I can...", I could. I turned a raft into a speed boat, because the wind was too much for my leaf to handle, and I saw a chest and went "Hmm, I could pull it against the raft, but would that move it?". Yes. Yes it did.

The last thing I did was finish off the last few shrines and max out the Weapon and Bow inventories, but only about half through the Shield one. I don't think I'll go try and find more of those seeds though.

@catoasapun:

The thing about this game is that after about 10-15 hours into it I pretty much knew what to expect. The scenery would obviously change, but what you do in it remains largely the same and fairly bland for the reasons I stated in my original post. If the game worked for you then thats awesome, believe me, Im not coming on here and trying to say the game is bad. Its not. At all. Its just not what people were telling me it is.

In GTA, and more so in Red Dead, the map is more alive with personality which makes it more novel to drive or ride around in. But with BOTW, the game has largely barren environments... however thats not necessarily a bad thing. Its just that it looses alot of the mystery that makes other games like The Witcher 3 great. In The Witcher, you actually can wander anywhere and theres more than likely some kind of short, yet involved quest to participate in thats not just collect 10 of X. So as I stated in another post to someone else here, the ethos of "just wander about" looses all its potential when you essentially know what to expect. There is nothing surprising about this game after 10 to 15 hours. Apart from the climbing in this game and the freedom that that allows you (which is masterful IMO) there really is not much else going on, sadly.

I finished it at 75 hours and loved it, but there were times when I felt the game was lacking a little something. The character progression wasn't all that interesting (just health and stamina), I missed getting items like a hookshot that would open up the world progression in unique ways and the four dungeons were kind of weak. I still love that game to death though.

I enjoyed it but in the end it wasn't really what I was hoping for. Once you beat the 4 divine beasts and get the master sword, the game's pretty much over. I had extremely high expectations of the final dungeon based on what I'd heard people say about it but I literally accidentally glided straight into the boss room of the dungeon, beat the boss on the first try, then re-loaded the save right before the dungeon and played through it (and finished the memories thing) and it wasn't all that interesting.

I did enjoy the whole exploration focus and the shrines for the most part, but after I hit about 75 shrines or so it got to the point where you have to basically just go up and down the entire map as a grid to just scour for those few and far between well-developed hidden areas (the seven sages statues in the desert, the lightning plateau puzzle area, the labyrinths, etc). I think those areas are the best parts of the game, but they're so hard to find and the map is so big and so full of huge open areas that it's just a huge chore to get to them.

Once I hit 80-85 shrines I just said screw it and went to beat ganon. Super underwhelming boss fight and ending.

when I was playing it my interest in the game bordered on obsession. It was very good and I'll probably play it again after the hard mode comes out.

Nope. I haven't played it for weeks now and I think the game is still fantastic. I'm going to play through it again once all the DLC is out. New save.

I can provide an honest review, although it will have some spoilers in terms of gameplay and the actuality of how BotW is really like.

After finishing the game well over 120 hours of gameplay, finishing all 120 shrines, and maxing out the best armors (barbarian, ancient gear, and the green armor set of the wild), I believe I can give some well informed observations about the game. Overall, it's pretty good and I got plenty of hours of enjoyment out of it, but it's far from perfect and the geographical map is actually poorly designed.

Every main town in the game is surrounded by mountains as if they're in a giant pit. Rivers, lakes, and waterfalls are not designed correctly according to the geographical lay of the land. There are only a handful of enemies in the whole game with 3-4 skins of each. The shrines are extremely similar to eachother and generic. About a third of the shrines (40 shrines) don't even have puzzles. You recieve a reward just by simply walking inside, or you have to fight a really easy guardian enemy. Cooking is overpowered and breaks the game in terms of rupee farming. Just harvest everything as you play the game and cook it all. Selling it will earn you thousands and thousands of rupees. Five Endura carrots cooked will net you over 400 rupees alone...and they're easily farmed around all of the great fairy fountains.

And now the divine beasts... they are great idea and it's very cool how you have to enter them considering they are the real main "dungeons" of the game...that is until you realize they are all the same. You have to disable all 4 of "something" around their body, and once inside you have to find a map and then play with the gimmick of contorting the beast from within until you access all 5 of the terminals inside. Then you fight a generic Ganon-like boss at the end. After all this talk throughout development that Eiji Aonuma gave about creating different kinds of puzzles...it's very disappointing that we end up with the same kind of puzzle for all 4 divine beasts just served up slightly different ways.

And the entire ending sequence of having to go through a decimated Hyrule Castle in order to face Ganon...is not all that great. The game was PRACTICALLY BEGGING for some kind of time travel element where once you reach Ganon and beat him up, he sends you back in time 100 years ago. This would have been the perfect opportunity for one final dungeon and a proper final battle. It never happened...

My criticisms may seem heavy, but they are valid. However, as I previously said, the game is still very much enjoyable and I had a great time...but, is it a perfect masterpiece? No, not at all.

I finished the main story two months ago and did half of the shrine quests (saving the second half for the second DLC pack that's supposed to include more story content). With the exceptions of Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV (I have eclectic tastes), it's the best game I've played since 2010 and my seventh favorite game of all time. I think it has a fantastic open world and emphasizes sandbox play, emergent systems and physicality in a way very few modern open world games do. However, it's not flawless by any means.

Despite all the proclamations of this being the hardest Zelda in years, I never really felt challenged beyond the first three hours. In the ordinary course of play the game throws so much gear and powers and healing items and recipes at you that you'd have to go out of your way to find the later story quests and boss fights any less than piss-easy. I never felt like the game's combat challenges matched the potential offered by the huge number of tools you're given. I wish there was some sort of repeatable endgame or New Game+ mode...hopefully the Hard Mode in the DLC will address this a bit, but I doubt it'll go far enough.

Additionally, by the end of the game I felt like the progression was somewhat hollow...apart from increasing health and stamina and acquiring Divine Beast powers, every advancement was predicated purely on external equipment that could very easily break. This is very much an issue of personal taste, but I do wish it had leaned a little more into being an RPG and offering more permanent statistical progression or skill acquisitions.

I also have a laundry list of nitpicks:

• Compared to the other abilities, the ice power never felt like it lived up to its full potential in puzzles and shrines.
• Though the writing disguised this in places, most of the non-Shrine side quests were really bog standard and rarely offered much beyond fetch quests or kill quests.
• Rainstorms bring the game to a grinding halt. It really kills momentum and motivation when you're trying to get somewhere and suddenly can't for five minutes.
• Regenerating items makes sense since all the items break so easily but it also makes it feel like you can never make any permanent changes to the world.
• Story feels imbalanced (e.g. the Gerudo arc has way more variety and tasks to complete than any of the other Divine Beast questlines), weirdly half-baked and not long enough for all the mechanics you're given to play with.
• Bossfights needed much more variety.
• Forced stealth sections are always terrible.

Other than that, it's a damn fine game. I'm looking forward to the DLC to hit so I have an excuse to go back in.