How Tears Of The Kingdom Keeps You Playing Forever

The blood moon of capitalism rises once again, brave hero - and with it so do my ever-growing bills for maize-based bacon flavored snack food. Please! You must help me!: www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames Yahahaha! You found me! My special Korok task? Why, it's to follow me on twitter! of course!: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot

This game is like a real life fast-forward button. To me playing in what seems like an hour, is actually 5 hours.

I was SHOCKED to see my play time at 95 hours today. That’s half the amount of Elden Ring playtime I put in over the course of a year and I LOVE Elden Ring. This game is addictive.

As someone who’s put roughly 400 hours into BOTW, TOTK is like a revelation, nearly every mechanic is an improvement over BOTW. I’m having a blast and haven’t beaten the game yet. Edit: The Lightning Temple rules.

The damning magic charm of this game is that there is always something to do, and most of these things don’t take long to do. Thus you have an endless series of gratifying short-term goals that don’t put a drain on you, thereby you keep on doing them one after another, and before you know it, three hours have flown by. And you haven’t even made a dent in the sheer amount of game here.

In a similar vein, I have a principle that I call “Final Boss Syndrome”. I’m sure plenty of folks have experienced it. You’ve reached the end of the game, probably done some grinds, played mini games, and worked through time and skill and for whatever reason you just go “eh”, stopping right before the big showdown. Maybe you feel like you’ve gotten everything you want out of it, or maybe you decide that you’re gonna save it for another day and just don’t get back around to it. Final Boss Syndrome has been the bane of a number of my gaming experiences.

Hot take but I actually think that the Koroks are one of the few downgrades from BotW. The BotW koroks took like 5 seconds to complete so they didn’t really distract your exploration too much. The TotK ones (specifically the get me to my friend ones) take too long to do so after like the second one, I just marked them on my map and kept it pushing because I had other things I wanted to do

I personally found BOTW very engaging, and beat it to 100% (it took 300 hours). Although, I agree that TOTK improves on it in every way. It also shores up most of the areas where BOTW fell a little short. BOTW's story was "everything already happened, all you're doing is killing the bad guy, all story elements are flashbacks", and that wasn't as engaging. It also suffered from monotonous shrines/korok seeds, and a severe lack of dungeons. And while the ambience that plays is amazing for exploring the world, it barely had any moments with the orchestral scores Zelda was always known for. TOTK fixes all of this...shrines are much shorter and much more fun, korok seeds have a lot more variety, and there is a mix of both ambience and epic scores, and there are real dungeons. Also, the story happens in the moment.

Every single sentence, sometimes multiple beats within a sentence, you have the perfectly chosen scene to reflect what you're saying, from game footage that is actually relevant to the point you're making. The amount of work that has gone into this video beyond just the script is incredible. Not only was I engaged, but I was invested.

“ok Nintendo lawyers let’s agree to not think too hard about why the Botw footage is running at 60 Fps ok” Hey adam before the Nintendo assassins get to you I would like to thank you for your great videos, Rest in peace brother

4:34 I love that you covered up that footage just a pair of frames before falling off the glider XD

Fantastic video. I especially relate to the point about feeling guilty about not getting everything in a game. As a personal example: I love Fire Emblem but often run the risk of burring myself out because I keep trying to get the most out of every unit I get-keeping them leveled and especially seeing all of their supports- despite the fact that there's no need to do all of that in a single playthrough. Setting goals for yourself when playing a game, and thus boundaries, is definitely something I need to practice more.

Instead of multiple endings I like having just one but also having different points where you can consider the game finished. For example in Xenoblade games the end of the main story is a great ending but the superbosses allow for a mechanical culmination.

I did exactly the same thing on BotW. I liked it so much I burned out doing shrines and koroks and still feel guilty about not finishing it

This was my exact experience with BoTW and ToTK. Exploration in BoTW rather quickly felt empty and stale. 40+ hours into ToTK and exploration still feels good. And I finally completed one region of the main quest and that was so fun!

The way I handled things was by prioritizing sections. For example a cool thing about the new game is how the roots in the underground are directly bellow the shrines in the over world. When I noticed this I made completing the roots my goal cause then I was able to just mark all shrine locations in the over world. I then prioritized the sky tower in an area followed by all the shrines I have access to. By doing this I got another benefit which was that traveling was now a solved problem. In a way games are sometimes too complex throw too much at us to make us feel like there is a lot of game. The only way I have found to actually finish games like this is making way smaller games with smaller scopes out of em

I always wonder what makes a game interesting enough for me to finish it. Sometimes it’s not the games fault at all. I will bounce off a game only to come back to it at a later date and fall in love with it. So part of it is my mood and what I feel like playing that particular day.

I feel like TOTK did an especially good job at knowing where BOTW players were most likely to go (shrine of resurrection, where you get the paraglider, the place where you fight Ganon in the castle, etc.) and ensured that there'd be interesting things there while also having a lot of new things to explore along the way so it didn't feel like you were just doing the same things again. And actually, this was a problem I had with Xenoblade Chronicles 3 where it didn't feel quite as connected to the previous 2 games despite its entire plot depending on those games; it's still an amazing third game, but there were a lot of things working against it, like all the side content that takes you farther away from the actual next objective, how long it takes to get from plot point to plot point, and the lack of familiarity (apart from that there are gormotti, high entia, etc.) until the second half of chapter 6. But I will say that it implements the "darkest hour" bit the best out of any XC game

The Witcher 3 had this incredible hook for me. The story actually starts kind of slow but then you start encountering these amazing sub plots and side stories, from extremely dark to funny to intriguing... And you kept this amazing urge to come back to it because during the 50-100 hours I just kept wondering what story was going to be told next. This must have been very difficult to write. Most games with a good story always have a point where it becomes clear how things will play out and the rest of it is... Well just that, it plays out. The Witcher never reached that point. Maybe because the game is designed like a great novel and it's much more a collection of short stories only loosely tied together.

For me, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is a game that I routinley come back to and that once you play it you get stuck for hours.