Breath of the Wild Hard Mode

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Breath of the Wild. Only mild story spoilers, but a bunch on mechanics.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a phenomenal game, but it features a fair few new features for the series. One such feature is paid DLC, set to deliver extra content at a later date. Among the bullet point promises shot out of a pre-release press image is hard mode, set to release this August. A number of previous Zelda games have had this, down to the very first, but with varying levels of alteration. Most just raise a bunch of damage numbers, but others feature more drastic changes and sometimes even brand-new content.

We have no idea know what hard mode for BotW involves yet. It probably won’t be anything special. But given that the game occupies the majority of my free time and waking thoughts, I thought I’d engage in some baseless speculation/suggestion. Here are some things that could make Breath of the Wild more difficult in a way that’s engaging and worthwhile. But! There’s a catch: I’m going to try and get as much possible out of the least amount of effort. I’m sure there’s not an avalanche of resources going into hard mode. Obviously it would be preferable if they added new content, and redid all the enemies, and changed all the puzzles, and altered all the mechanics, and basically just built an entirely new game. But no one does that*, and it’s also more interesting to write under constraints rather than just say “Make Everything Better”.

*That I know of. If you’ve got a game in mind, I’d be interested to hear about it.

Let’s start with the obvious:

Undertale and Completionism

I’m sure plenty of people are sick of Undertale, and even sicker of people saying that they can’t talk about Undertale. For what it’s worth, everyone is entitled to their opinion and the game won’t appeal to everyone. It does a lot of clever things that are better experienced yourself, so it reaches this weird middle area where many love it but can’t express why. It’s entirely possible that even without hype or spoilers you could play the game, not care, and wonder why everyone wouldn’t shut up about it. That being said, I’ve finally decided to say something related to this game I enjoyed so much, and am giving the proper warning:

THIS POST CONTAINS MAJOR UNDERTALE SPOILERS, AND EXPECTS YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THE GAMES ENDINGS. IF YOU INTEND TO PLAY AT ALL, PLEASE DO NOT READ FURTHER.

SERIOUSLY THOUGH.

F’REALS.

...

...okay, are they gone?

Yes?

I don’t believe you.

On Oblivion Leveling

NOTE: This post is a game design interlude not directly connected to my written Let’s Play of Oblivion. If you don’t care about this sort of thing, you can skip it. But if you like painfully detailed discussions of in-game mechanics, gosh golly gee are you in for a treat.

So before we continue the adventures of Shush’Ogar, there’s something I need to address. In the first episode of this series, as well as future episodes, I’m trying to mix in discussions of game design along with humorous play-by-plays. This is all well and good for most things, as Oblivion has a lot of weird and amusing quirks to it. However, there is one subject in Oblivion that is too massive an issue. There’s one giant, messy problem with the game that I want to dedicate an entire post to properly discuss. This one thing, this near fatal flaw is my biggest issue with Oblivion. It bolsters many of the lesser problems in the game and is the number one reason I can't consider Oblivion the best Elder Scrolls game. So what could this flaw possibly be?

Today, we’re going to talk about leveling up in Oblivion.

On Old-School Difficulty in Games

Hero Man has had a difficult journey. His home village was burned down leaving no one but his plucky childhood love interest and himself left alive. He uncovered the ancient Sword of Stabbin’ Shit in a tomb filled with unruly undead. He recovered the Seven Seals of Seriously Significant Sorcery from all across the world. He’s performed hundreds of inane tasks in between, from rescuing kittens to killing rats to dealing with more fetch quests than any mortal man should ever have to see. He’s fought snakes and skeletons and sirens, demons and dragons and doppelgangers, Cyclops and cultists and centaurs, mummies and minotaurs and manticores and much much more. He’s been through hell and back, possibly literally, and is finally about to finish his epic quest. Atop of Mount Merciless, in the upper spire of the Castle of Catastrophe, our hero is finally about to put a stop to the evil sorcerer and save the entire world from his wrath, once and ffffffffffffffff-

-FFFUCK! I missed the jump again!

Depending on what type of game this is there are multiple possible outcomes as to what happens next. But if it’s an old-school game, I can sure as hell tell which outcome is most likely. And that’s that you won’t be getting to the conclusion of your quest without throwing at least half an hour of your life out the window. And if it’s me in this situation, then that half an hour won’t come until I muddle through a few minutes of muffled profanity, or alternatively just up and quit. Maybe I’ll come back, but maybe I won’t.

I don’t want to point any fingers, but the first half of this sentence is a bold-faced lie.

On Random Chance

            Greetings to hypothetical readers, self-deprecation as a result of slow update rate, etc. You know the drill. So I have been rather busy lately, which is partly responsible for the lack of updates. The other reason is the fact that since I haven’t had much free time, the only video game I’ve played in like 3 solid weeks is the pet battling system from World of Warcraft.

Above: What obsession looks like

Exploration in Video Games

            This is a topic that has been on my mind a fair bit lately, and I had previously mentioned I might go into while discussing 3D platformers. Video games have a lot of potential as a completely unique medium to do things that books, television and movies never could. Of course I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with games doing the same things that other mediums do, like using text or cinematics. But as an interactive form of media games have access to some unique things that only they can do, and among those is the ability to explore.

Even if Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a movie, you still could see this cool shot of the city of Hengsha. But you couldn’t then explore the city at your own pace.

            Movies and books may be able to show all sorts of side details and interesting aspects to the world that help flesh it out or reveal new information, but they always have to be directed by the creator. There’s no way to go off the rails of a story if it’s a linear experience, but when interactivity comes in you can simply present the audience with a world and let them go nuts. Games are in a unique position to more accurately exhibit the feeling of free will and exploration more than any other, and it’s one of the reasons I love them. It’s also one of the reasons some of gaming’s more recent AAA titles haven’t enthralled me as much.

Platforming and the Third Dimension

            An idea for an article that’s been kicking around in my head for a while has been to talk about one of my favorite sub-genres of games, 3D platformers, and why they seem to be so horribly dead at the moment. I then considered splitting it into two articles, wherein the first one explains the platforming genre (games where you jump, essentially) in general and how it came to be. However, as soon as I started researching for the article I noticed that the internet already had covered that issue in more ways than I could ever reconcile, and with more authority. I know that original ideas are hard to come by and that it’s perfectly fine to retell old information with a new spin. But if I were to write just about the rise of 2D platformers I would be copying far too much of the article from Wikipedia verbatim for my liking.

Bottom line, we’re fusing the two ideas, with me first doing a brief overview of platformers in general before moving on to the variety with an extra dimension. Some readers more savvy to the history of video games may find some familiar information to begin with, but at the very least I can hope to put an entertaining spin on things to keep you interested. For example, Wikipedia can’t make terrible puns or toilet humor jokes. It’s one of mankind’s last bastions of defense against robot superiority.

More like WEEkipedia! …Y’know, like wee. As in pee. Like piss. The fluid. That is dispelled from your body as waste. …*cough*

Super Sonic Sadism

            I’m quite a fan of the Sonic the Hedgehog series, some missteps in his games notwithstanding. So the other day when my friend and I were looking for things to do we decided to pop in a collection of old sonic games and play through Sonic 3. Eventually we were unable to continue and tried Sonic 2 in an attempt to end on a higher note. The game fared a bit better but we still had some problems near the end. But playing these brought to mind a lot of the reasons where I think the Sonic games had some problems, even back in their supposed golden age.

No one’s arguing that all the new games were fantastic, but they weren’t devoid of problems even before then…

The Supposed-To-Lose Fight

            There are many reoccurring themes and tropes of video game stories that tend to crop up again and again, and among these is the popular convention of the supposed-to-lose fight. This is the tradition of a game giving you a fight or challenge, usually early on in the game, which is literally impossible to succeed in, and incorporates failure in to the actual plot of the game. This can take the form of losing in a cutscene or literally making an impossible segment of play. They’re most common in RPGs, due to their emphasis on story, setting up villains, and growing stronger over the course of the game.

            Now how useful these encounters can be is up for debate, but there’s no denying that how effective they are varies. I’d like to go over several examples of this subject and examine which are better or worse and why; because depending on how they’re used they can be either a good narrative device or absolutely infuriating.