I played my first playthrough on Master Mode and I really enjoyed it. In Master Mode, you will frequently encounter enemies that you're not strong enough to beat, so you'll have to either try to run past them or flee and come back later. For the first 8 hours or so, I ran from nearly every enemy I encountered. Slowly, as I gathered better gear, upgraded my hearts, and learned how to cook foods that grant strong buffs, I became able to fight more and more enemies. Eventually, I could take on pretty much anything. It was a very satisfying progression.
Also, Master Mode mainly just affects how difficult enemies are to defeat. Puzzles, environmental traversal/interactions, and other side activities are essentially the same as on normal. So even if you're too weak to defeat certain enemies, you can still solve shrines, complete quests, and do other non-combat activities. You're never blocked from all progress due to being too weak to fight; you can always go do something else, and return when you're stronger.
The game is unforgiving, especially early on, and tells you next to nothing as far as tutorials go, but there are tons and tons of autosaves. This is on the normal difficulty.
If you really, really like a challenge, I'd say go for it, but it could be smart to play a bit on normal just to understand how the game works.
Wow such good responses from all of you! Still a little torn between what to go with but much more informed now since I dont like googling for long story based games because of spoilers and such :(
Breath of the Wild becomes super easy once you learn how to exploit the food system. At the point where you have stocked up on a lot of good food items, the game is basically broken. At that point, there's basically no level of enemy difficulty that you can't just brute force your way through with food. Since hard mode doesn't alter the way food works, your ability to exploit the game in that way is unchanged. The time before you get well stocked with food will be more difficult, but just like the normal mode you'll eventually hit a point where you'll stop dying altogether.
@ll_exile_ll: Cooking is definitely overtuned later on when you can cook food that refills the entirety of your hearts and gives you an overcharge of like 20 hearts. That's not really what breaks the difficulty of the game in regards to food, what really does it is the ability to pause the game and eat food regardless of what state you are in. There are no conditions, barring death, where you can't just pause the game and heal to full after getting hit. Simple fix for this is if they made it so Master Mode prevented you from eating while in combat. You could technically make it a personal challenge to not use the cooking mechanic or eat while in combat, but I hate it when games force you to make up little arbitrary rules in your head to actually make the game somewhat challenging. It's the old Skyrim joke of eating 500 cheese wheels in the middle of a fight.
Also, Master Mode mainly just affects how difficult enemies are to defeat. Puzzles, environmental traversal/interactions, and other side activities are essentially the same as on normal. So even if you're too weak to defeat certain enemies, you can still solve shrines, complete quests, and do other non-combat activities. You're never blocked from all progress due to being too weak to fight; you can always go do something else, and return when you're stronger.
I'm gonna sort of piggyback off of this comment to say that all of the stuff master mode doesn't affect is the actual fun of BotW. The "challenge," with combat isn't really all that exciting to me, and it actually gets in the way more often than being something I actively enjoy to engage with. I've heard a lot of people echo this sentiment, so take it for what you will. The combat was just challenging enough to be a necessary nuisance (kind of in a good way) but if it were any more stacked against me, it certainly would get in the way of my adventure enough to make me dislike the game more often than not.
Also, Master Mode mainly just affects how difficult enemies are to defeat. Puzzles, environmental traversal/interactions, and other side activities are essentially the same as on normal. So even if you're too weak to defeat certain enemies, you can still solve shrines, complete quests, and do other non-combat activities. You're never blocked from all progress due to being too weak to fight; you can always go do something else, and return when you're stronger.
I'm gonna sort of piggyback off of this comment to say that all of the stuff master mode doesn't affect is the actual fun of BotW. The "challenge," with combat isn't really all that exciting to me, and it actually gets in the way more often than being something I actively enjoy to engage with. I've heard a lot of people echo this sentiment, so take it for what you will. The combat was just challenging enough to be a necessary nuisance (kind of in a good way) but if it were any more stacked against me, it certainly would get in the way of my adventure enough to make me dislike the game more often than not.
Having only played on Normal mode, I'll say that my enjoyment of the game would certainly have been affected if Master Mode only made the early parts of the game harder. The later hours of my game were more about exploring instead of dealing with enemies, and if Master Mode only made those rare encounters more of a nuisance that could easily be countered with food, I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it more. A more even challenge throughout would have been appreciated, so a difficulty mode which doesn't smooth that curve out would strike me as more frustrating than anything.
I picked my battles a little more in general, because you die quicker in master mode and the rewards for wiping out a camp head-on often weren't worth the cost in weapon durability and whatnot. (Though in the long run you're gimping yourself if you're not killing and getting battle loot.)
I favoured going out at night because I could sneak into a camp and steal weapons/get high-damage sneak hits.
I valued high-durability low-damage two-handers like woodcutting axes more than I otherwise might've, because you can use them to push enemies around and off ledges and into water (where they tend to drown instantly) and such.
You have to focus on a specific enemy in combat more, because they are pretty spongy and they start recovering life if they avoid taking hits for long enough. You can't just take out a camp over several light skirmishes like you can in normal mode, unless you make sure that you kill someone each time.
Combat remained risky for far longer than it did in normal mode. BotW is noted and even praised for being a Zelda game where the world is actually trying seriously to kill you, but that drops off in normal mode within maybe 20 hours of play. If this is something you want a lot of, then master mode is probably the way to go.
Overall I think master mode made me reconsider my approaches enough to be interesting for much of a second playthrough: I challenged myself to pull together enough of the major items/powerups and conquer enough of the world to "master" (no pun intended) master mode, and had fun doing it. (Still haven't bothered re-doing the dungeons, though. I'm just too disappointed by them to bother.) That said, I understood how cooking and whatnot worked, and beelined for all the good stuff to bootstrap myself, so there's the possibility that master mode will be too much of a struggle for a new player who doesn't have my knowledge or experience of the game world.
Another thing to consider with Master Mode is the Trial of the Sword. It can be a very frustrating experience on Master Mode, because of the way health regen works. It's more than doable, but it is definitely a whole different ball game than normal mode.
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