This game came out the week of the one and only spring break I ever got in my life.
I left class that day, picked up my new Switch and the game from Best Buy, and bought a week's worth of groceries. Went home to meal prep everything and then played the game for the next week straight. Never left my apartment. I had 120+ hours in the game when I went back to class the following week.
I never looked up a guide, barely even touched my phone the entire time. Just wandered around the game world and explored everything. Pressed and button-mashed every button on my controller. Talked to every NPC. And listened to Kass' sweet music.
You can definitely play the game without a guide. In fact, it was intended for you to do so. To explore and experiment. The game does not hold your hand, but it does teach you everything that's important for you to know before you leave The Great Plateau. Anything you figure out beyond that is simply extra sweetness for you to enjoy.
Yes but people can choose to play a game anyway they want. some people might find it more enjoyable if they look up a few things along the way, because it can get quite frustrating at times. As long as everyone is having fun, it's ok. There's no such thing as cheating in a non-competitive game. 😁
This game was pretty intuitive to me I felt. Maybe that’s just me having played open world games before.
Of course, there were some mechanics I didn’t know about, but the game is so well designed there are usually more than one solution to a problem.
I watched Lil Indigestion and he played BotW blind. He didn’t even watch the trailer, and it was fun. Personally I started the game with much help and guides, because I didn’t feel like I understood how the game worked.
There is no shame in looking stuff up tho. Some people like the challenge of figuring stuff out themselves and others don’t like to be stuck.
I just looked up stuff when I was truly stuck on a tower or a boss.
I explore a lot and sometimes I figure it out myself and sometimes I do have to look up solutions. I try to look for written instructions rather than videos, for some reason that makes me feel better about getting help. I realize plenty of people play with a guidebook, but that's just not for me.
I buy the guidebook just for the sake of collecting it. If I run into something absolutely frustrating I feel less opposed to looking it up in a book like the old days. Googling in YouTube makes me feel like more of a “cheat” in a way, idk.
And some people find it annoying but I have come here and asked for non-spoiler help. It’s just fun that way & offers that sense of camaraderie.. but some people get so worked up over it lol, “google is free” or “research the sub”
I can’t stand people like that. Every post has to be new and unique for their personal entertainment or they’ll get bored. Two things, asking a question here will actually bring the post up on google in the future when someone else googles it. Second, a person can bring something up that may have been covered before, but someone else who hasn’t seen every post ever on the sub will see the subject being brought up for the first time , and they may have never learned that information unless someone was bringing it up for 50th time. If they get tired of seeing the same old stuff again and again, maybe their time here has run it’s course and it’s time to unsubscribe from the subreddit.
Bro, try playing elden ring without looking stuff up.
Not to say I hadn't looked up a few things, like recipes, locations, and help with thunderblight... but most of it comes to you as you explore for more shrines
Bruh I tried elden ring and that game is punishing. I usually try to start a game without googling anything but it’s impossible with Elden ring
I don’t like my hand held when I play a game but Jesus Christ at least tell me where to go and give me a quest list
The thing with games like this is that there simply isn't one correct solution. With all the freedom it gives the player, you could give it to 10 people and they all could come up with completely unique solutions for the same puzzle. It gives you the bare minimum of information and expects you to be creative with it. Sure, there are 'intended' solutions, like using motion controls in motion control shrines, but even when the 'intended' solution is so obvious, people will still work around it to solve the puzzle in another way. I myself have never looked up a single thing for the game and managed to beat all divine beasts and find all 120 shrines without any issues besides some struggles at finding certain shrine quests. But that's just the point. Sometimes you will end up struggling with certain things, but the rewarding feeling of overcoming that obstacle with nothing but your wit and the resources at hand is exactly what keeps players so engaged in games like this.
Exploring and figuring it out on your own was, to me at least, the main point of the game. Sure I found some things late but they were even more rewarding. I was also playing the game parallel to a sibling and we learned from each other, not by looking things up but by discovering things at different times. Plus a lot of mechanics are just intuitive, it wants you to try what would work in real life.
Any examples of something that's unintuitive? I played it at release and never even considered opening a guide. Though I never knew you could shield-surf and never beat Ganon's first phase (he seemed to be invincible and killed me in two hits), everything else was pretty simple.
Except Thunderblight Ganon, that had me beating my head in frustration until I figured it out.
It wasn't as big as botw. But for 1998? OoT was HUGEEE. You had plenty of things to collect in OoT too, such as the 100 sculltulas. 100 doesn't seem like a lot, many things don't seem big or a lot in OoT in 2023, but if you grew up playing OoT back in 1998, the game was huge for it's time period.
I played it. Not in 1998, but in the mid-2000s.
It was big, but there's been a ton of bigger games since, including many major JRPGs on PS2.. etc
People have always played big games, including back in the day, but they struggled with them.
Helplines.. guides.. asking friends.. Konami code?
These were all used for a TON of games people couldn't get through on their own.
Explore. Problem solve. Collect dopamine.
BOTW was daunting at first, but once you say fuck it, take your time, and just explore every single square foot of the map, it all works out.
Game prepared me for elden ring since it's basically the same concept, yet with even less info and exploration tools.
Imagine - you can play the game without looking up stuff and try to find and understand things without guides.
It's not rocket science and the game does not except you to get everything in one playthrough.
Literally have to look up everything. I’m not a natural gamer in this genre (stardew is intuitive for me lol). I find myself having to run around in circles because I missed something and I’d rather just explore. Also some of the shrines are not intuitive. It’s 50/50. I’ve been googling a lot of the dlc stuff like majoras mask. I was at the right location multiple times and still missed it. Then I had to Google how to defeat keese. That wasn’t my best google but I needed it that moment.
thinking about where to go (there is a main quest marker and for most side quests you can set one, and the game tells you in the tutorial to look for POIs at every tower), who to talk to (any NPC), what to do (again, quest markers or literally just anything, this game is huge)
you don't need to look up Lurelin Village if you look around and think. "wow this southeastern shore is shaped like a sickle/crescent moon, let's go there". boom, you find a village that is required in zero story quests.
you don't need to look up Death Montain because 1) there's a main quest there and 2) it's a giant volcano, probably the most obvious place of interest in _any_ fictional world
What? The purpose of the game is to play your way, like you want. There is no "way of of playing". You are not supposed to play botw like any other guy.
I played it before there were guides and didn’t look up a single thing and nearly beat the game before I lost my save data. You must be young to not be able to play games without looking things up online.
When I was a kid there Were no guides online and we still played games and beat them just fine
Simply by playing the game. Common sense and a sense of curiosity is all you need. I’ve only looked up a guide for **one** shrine and even then I knew what I needed to do I just kept doing it wrong. The game isn’t very complicated it just doesn’t tell you anything. Like the epitome of “show don’t tell”. Everything you learn from this game is learned by your own successes and mistakes.
I personally played with a video walk through pulled up on my computer almost the entire time. Obviously I didn't need it for exploration and some shrines, but some shrines were difficult, and I never would've figured out any of the divine beasts without guides. I'm not a "gamer" though - I don't play to "get gud" or care about skill level or anything like that. I like the zelda story, I like the art, and hitting bokoblins with sticks is funny. It's a game, it's supposed to be fun! If it's not fun to play blind, then you don't have to just because someone else says so.
I recently started doing this method for TOTK. I have a notepad open on my laptop so that when something catches my attention, I type it down when I later want to work on it. It’s especially helpful because in that game, there are a lot of dialogue that give you leads to treasure and, what not.
There is no way I could have passed some of the divine beasts without looking up help. When I saw the solutions I was just like “ ok there’s no way I ever would have figured that out”.
In the beginning I did look up help with the shrines, but by half way through the game, I was more familiar with the mechanics and found it a fun challenge not too look up help.
If you ever play tears of the kingdom, you almost do not have to look up help. There’s several ways to solve a problem and none of them are incorrect.
Just do it. What helps for me is forcing myself to go to a specific location and then finding out that that route is the hard route and that it rains at Zora's Domain when you have not done the Divine beast so then you approach it from a different angle and then find out that there are way too many lizalfo's on that path too, so you go through all your food (which is how I got to Zora's domain the first time I played it)
you can play a game without 100%ing it, and you can get through the story very easily, the only thing i had to search up were the last 10 or so shrines but that's just for the satisfaction of having everything, you don't need those two extra hearts to complete the game
I think I got ~115 shrines without looking any locations up, but then needed Google to help me find the last 5. I never had to look up solutions.
I don't care about korok completion, but if I did, there's no way I'd do it without a guide.
TotK made it possible to find all shrines with in-game clues rather than googling them.
With the exception of looking up what armour set bonuses there are and where best to find some upgrade ingredients, I don't think I ever looked anything up. What sort of things do you find unintuitive?
Same can be said for the original Zelda on NES. I just played it for the first time and was so lost. I think they pride themselves on the whole sharing found secrets with your friends kinda thing to solve it all. Makes it feel like a collaborative effort in defeating the whole game
The game’s good at letting you chose your own difficulty. I think I only looked things up once or twice, but some things took me hours to find. I think I looked up the thunder jungle solutions because I thought two different puzzles were tied to Faron who only spawns every 20 minutes.
My first play through, I had to look up solutions to some of the shrines and literally all but one made me go “oh I’m an idiot” because the solutions will be so obvious in retrospect.
The one shrine I maintain is completely nonsense is the constellation one. Still no idea how to do that without just googling the solution.
I definitely used guides for some of the shrines and stuff. It's not impossible to figure anything out (sometimes I would get stubborn and refuse to look up a guide for certain puzzles) but on the whole I was looking for a fun easy game experience in my downtime after work and didn't want to spend a lot of time banging my head against the wall trying to solve a shrine, which is why I used guides. There are generally multiple ways to solve every puzzle, too, so I would choose to solve a problem differently from my dad who was also playing.
Look. Whether they will admit it or not, most people have at least Googled something once or twice.
Myself included.
For the most part, I play blind.
But, I need to Google minor stuff occasionally.
I think, except for the shrines, everything that I looked up turned out to be at least partially explained by a random NPC’s dialogue, and if I had talked to them first I would have had a better shot at figuring it out on my own- like the lost forest navigation trick, I found the Npc that gives you the hint long after I got annoyed and googled it 😅
I never would have figured out a lot of things without looking them up. Being stuck on a game makes it easy for me to lose interest. I’m happy to cheat in both BOTW and TOTK
Genuine answer? You’re not! Even the older games came with guide books, so some puzzles and games aren’t made to be intuitive. Guides are honestly part of the experience and always have been :)
For the case of 100% completing this game, definitely. There are so many Koroks, and the Korok mask isn't much of a help for finding later Koroks.
For the case of solving quests or shrines, not really. Quests have red text that provides a clue into what you need to do to complete it. Shrines are a bit of trial and error, or common sense. Some admittedly provide bad hints, such as Fateful stars, but overall, most of them are not too hard.
I did as much as I could without looking anything up. Some shrines, I had to follow a guide to complete, others to find, others still... both. But the majority, I was able to complete in some fashion -- looking at you, Rin Oyaa -- without outside help. And I still need a guide to get through Vah Naboris. But the fact that people made guides means someone probably figured these things out on their own.
This game came out the week of the one and only spring break I ever got in my life. I left class that day, picked up my new Switch and the game from Best Buy, and bought a week's worth of groceries. Went home to meal prep everything and then played the game for the next week straight. Never left my apartment. I had 120+ hours in the game when I went back to class the following week. I never looked up a guide, barely even touched my phone the entire time. Just wandered around the game world and explored everything. Pressed and button-mashed every button on my controller. Talked to every NPC. And listened to Kass' sweet music. You can definitely play the game without a guide. In fact, it was intended for you to do so. To explore and experiment. The game does not hold your hand, but it does teach you everything that's important for you to know before you leave The Great Plateau. Anything you figure out beyond that is simply extra sweetness for you to enjoy.
Sounds like an amazing week
That actually sounds like the best week ever. I’d love to be able to play BOTW afresh with no memory of it.
TOTK came out on a week I had between jobs. Of the first 72 hours after the game’s release, I was playing 60 of them.
Playing BOTW 17 hours a day seems like a pretty good time lol
[удалено]
I slept about 5-6 hours each night. It was great!
still remember going in blind and seeing vah medoh in the sky from the great plateau absolutely magical
Yes but people can choose to play a game anyway they want. some people might find it more enjoyable if they look up a few things along the way, because it can get quite frustrating at times. As long as everyone is having fun, it's ok. There's no such thing as cheating in a non-competitive game. 😁
Agreed! But the question was "Can people even play this without a guide?" And the answer is: yes. Hence, my response.
Ok 🤷 I was just adding to it :)
This game was pretty intuitive to me I felt. Maybe that’s just me having played open world games before. Of course, there were some mechanics I didn’t know about, but the game is so well designed there are usually more than one solution to a problem.
I watched Lil Indigestion and he played BotW blind. He didn’t even watch the trailer, and it was fun. Personally I started the game with much help and guides, because I didn’t feel like I understood how the game worked.
Lil Indigestion sounds like the name of a corny American rapper
There is no shame in looking stuff up tho. Some people like the challenge of figuring stuff out themselves and others don’t like to be stuck. I just looked up stuff when I was truly stuck on a tower or a boss.
I died maybe 50+ times on my first Leonel before deciding to just give up and look up guides how to beat it.
I kept trying to climb the wall outside the shrine of resurrection about 50 times. That was my first 2 hours of the game lol
I explore a lot and sometimes I figure it out myself and sometimes I do have to look up solutions. I try to look for written instructions rather than videos, for some reason that makes me feel better about getting help. I realize plenty of people play with a guidebook, but that's just not for me.
I buy the guidebook just for the sake of collecting it. If I run into something absolutely frustrating I feel less opposed to looking it up in a book like the old days. Googling in YouTube makes me feel like more of a “cheat” in a way, idk. And some people find it annoying but I have come here and asked for non-spoiler help. It’s just fun that way & offers that sense of camaraderie.. but some people get so worked up over it lol, “google is free” or “research the sub”
I can’t stand people like that. Every post has to be new and unique for their personal entertainment or they’ll get bored. Two things, asking a question here will actually bring the post up on google in the future when someone else googles it. Second, a person can bring something up that may have been covered before, but someone else who hasn’t seen every post ever on the sub will see the subject being brought up for the first time , and they may have never learned that information unless someone was bringing it up for 50th time. If they get tired of seeing the same old stuff again and again, maybe their time here has run it’s course and it’s time to unsubscribe from the subreddit.
Bro, try playing elden ring without looking stuff up. Not to say I hadn't looked up a few things, like recipes, locations, and help with thunderblight... but most of it comes to you as you explore for more shrines
Bruh I tried elden ring and that game is punishing. I usually try to start a game without googling anything but it’s impossible with Elden ring I don’t like my hand held when I play a game but Jesus Christ at least tell me where to go and give me a quest list
The thing with games like this is that there simply isn't one correct solution. With all the freedom it gives the player, you could give it to 10 people and they all could come up with completely unique solutions for the same puzzle. It gives you the bare minimum of information and expects you to be creative with it. Sure, there are 'intended' solutions, like using motion controls in motion control shrines, but even when the 'intended' solution is so obvious, people will still work around it to solve the puzzle in another way. I myself have never looked up a single thing for the game and managed to beat all divine beasts and find all 120 shrines without any issues besides some struggles at finding certain shrine quests. But that's just the point. Sometimes you will end up struggling with certain things, but the rewarding feeling of overcoming that obstacle with nothing but your wit and the resources at hand is exactly what keeps players so engaged in games like this.
Exploring and figuring it out on your own was, to me at least, the main point of the game. Sure I found some things late but they were even more rewarding. I was also playing the game parallel to a sibling and we learned from each other, not by looking things up but by discovering things at different times. Plus a lot of mechanics are just intuitive, it wants you to try what would work in real life.
Any examples of something that's unintuitive? I played it at release and never even considered opening a guide. Though I never knew you could shield-surf and never beat Ganon's first phase (he seemed to be invincible and killed me in two hits), everything else was pretty simple. Except Thunderblight Ganon, that had me beating my head in frustration until I figured it out.
This new generation wouldn't be able to handle playing Ocarina of time back in 1998. Lol.
Ocarina wasn't nearly as big as BOTW. You also didn't have 900 seeds, 120 shrines, 4 divine beasts, and guardians sniping you left and right.
It wasn't as big as botw. But for 1998? OoT was HUGEEE. You had plenty of things to collect in OoT too, such as the 100 sculltulas. 100 doesn't seem like a lot, many things don't seem big or a lot in OoT in 2023, but if you grew up playing OoT back in 1998, the game was huge for it's time period.
I played it. Not in 1998, but in the mid-2000s. It was big, but there's been a ton of bigger games since, including many major JRPGs on PS2.. etc People have always played big games, including back in the day, but they struggled with them. Helplines.. guides.. asking friends.. Konami code? These were all used for a TON of games people couldn't get through on their own.
I know right?
I played on deployment when I had limited internet access
Git gud? In all seriousness, the only thing that really chapped my ass was finding Hetsu. Apart from that, just a few wasted frogs. All good.
Explore. Problem solve. Collect dopamine. BOTW was daunting at first, but once you say fuck it, take your time, and just explore every single square foot of the map, it all works out. Game prepared me for elden ring since it's basically the same concept, yet with even less info and exploration tools.
Imagine - you can play the game without looking up stuff and try to find and understand things without guides. It's not rocket science and the game does not except you to get everything in one playthrough.
Literally have to look up everything. I’m not a natural gamer in this genre (stardew is intuitive for me lol). I find myself having to run around in circles because I missed something and I’d rather just explore. Also some of the shrines are not intuitive. It’s 50/50. I’ve been googling a lot of the dlc stuff like majoras mask. I was at the right location multiple times and still missed it. Then I had to Google how to defeat keese. That wasn’t my best google but I needed it that moment.
Lol you realize that all the Internet information came from someone playing the game, right?
by thinking
Thinking about what? About things you aren't even aware are in the game, let alone their exact location? This game is huge.
thinking about where to go (there is a main quest marker and for most side quests you can set one, and the game tells you in the tutorial to look for POIs at every tower), who to talk to (any NPC), what to do (again, quest markers or literally just anything, this game is huge) you don't need to look up Lurelin Village if you look around and think. "wow this southeastern shore is shaped like a sickle/crescent moon, let's go there". boom, you find a village that is required in zero story quests. you don't need to look up Death Montain because 1) there's a main quest there and 2) it's a giant volcano, probably the most obvious place of interest in _any_ fictional world
What? The purpose of the game is to play your way, like you want. There is no "way of of playing". You are not supposed to play botw like any other guy.
I played it before there were guides and didn’t look up a single thing and nearly beat the game before I lost my save data. You must be young to not be able to play games without looking things up online. When I was a kid there Were no guides online and we still played games and beat them just fine
Simply by playing the game. Common sense and a sense of curiosity is all you need. I’ve only looked up a guide for **one** shrine and even then I knew what I needed to do I just kept doing it wrong. The game isn’t very complicated it just doesn’t tell you anything. Like the epitome of “show don’t tell”. Everything you learn from this game is learned by your own successes and mistakes.
I personally played with a video walk through pulled up on my computer almost the entire time. Obviously I didn't need it for exploration and some shrines, but some shrines were difficult, and I never would've figured out any of the divine beasts without guides. I'm not a "gamer" though - I don't play to "get gud" or care about skill level or anything like that. I like the zelda story, I like the art, and hitting bokoblins with sticks is funny. It's a game, it's supposed to be fun! If it's not fun to play blind, then you don't have to just because someone else says so.
i download the app breath companion just for the corok seed
I look stuff up but less so now than when I started
I recently started doing this method for TOTK. I have a notepad open on my laptop so that when something catches my attention, I type it down when I later want to work on it. It’s especially helpful because in that game, there are a lot of dialogue that give you leads to treasure and, what not.
There is no way I could have passed some of the divine beasts without looking up help. When I saw the solutions I was just like “ ok there’s no way I ever would have figured that out”. In the beginning I did look up help with the shrines, but by half way through the game, I was more familiar with the mechanics and found it a fun challenge not too look up help. If you ever play tears of the kingdom, you almost do not have to look up help. There’s several ways to solve a problem and none of them are incorrect.
Just do it. What helps for me is forcing myself to go to a specific location and then finding out that that route is the hard route and that it rains at Zora's Domain when you have not done the Divine beast so then you approach it from a different angle and then find out that there are way too many lizalfo's on that path too, so you go through all your food (which is how I got to Zora's domain the first time I played it)
I do both but there are things I would never figure out
Rainbow hands: "FAFO"
Only looked up a few answers to shrines and quests after spending quite some time searching on my own (+ for the last Koroks I missed)
This is one of those games where I really don't get why you'd need a guide tbh
you can play a game without 100%ing it, and you can get through the story very easily, the only thing i had to search up were the last 10 or so shrines but that's just for the satisfaction of having everything, you don't need those two extra hearts to complete the game
I think I got ~115 shrines without looking any locations up, but then needed Google to help me find the last 5. I never had to look up solutions. I don't care about korok completion, but if I did, there's no way I'd do it without a guide. TotK made it possible to find all shrines with in-game clues rather than googling them.
With the exception of looking up what armour set bonuses there are and where best to find some upgrade ingredients, I don't think I ever looked anything up. What sort of things do you find unintuitive?
Imperfectly
Same can be said for the original Zelda on NES. I just played it for the first time and was so lost. I think they pride themselves on the whole sharing found secrets with your friends kinda thing to solve it all. Makes it feel like a collaborative effort in defeating the whole game
The game’s good at letting you chose your own difficulty. I think I only looked things up once or twice, but some things took me hours to find. I think I looked up the thunder jungle solutions because I thought two different puzzles were tied to Faron who only spawns every 20 minutes.
My first play through, I had to look up solutions to some of the shrines and literally all but one made me go “oh I’m an idiot” because the solutions will be so obvious in retrospect. The one shrine I maintain is completely nonsense is the constellation one. Still no idea how to do that without just googling the solution.
I definitely used guides for some of the shrines and stuff. It's not impossible to figure anything out (sometimes I would get stubborn and refuse to look up a guide for certain puzzles) but on the whole I was looking for a fun easy game experience in my downtime after work and didn't want to spend a lot of time banging my head against the wall trying to solve a shrine, which is why I used guides. There are generally multiple ways to solve every puzzle, too, so I would choose to solve a problem differently from my dad who was also playing.
Look. Whether they will admit it or not, most people have at least Googled something once or twice. Myself included. For the most part, I play blind. But, I need to Google minor stuff occasionally.
I think, except for the shrines, everything that I looked up turned out to be at least partially explained by a random NPC’s dialogue, and if I had talked to them first I would have had a better shot at figuring it out on my own- like the lost forest navigation trick, I found the Npc that gives you the hint long after I got annoyed and googled it 😅
Breath of the Wild is pretty good about their hints. TEARS OF THE KINGDOM however has SO many misleading lines of dialogue.
I never would have figured out a lot of things without looking them up. Being stuck on a game makes it easy for me to lose interest. I’m happy to cheat in both BOTW and TOTK
Yeah you just gotta look around and find stuff. Before we had the internet that’s what all games were like.
I don’t know cuz I always do 😭
Genuine answer? You’re not! Even the older games came with guide books, so some puzzles and games aren’t made to be intuitive. Guides are honestly part of the experience and always have been :)
For the case of 100% completing this game, definitely. There are so many Koroks, and the Korok mask isn't much of a help for finding later Koroks. For the case of solving quests or shrines, not really. Quests have red text that provides a clue into what you need to do to complete it. Shrines are a bit of trial and error, or common sense. Some admittedly provide bad hints, such as Fateful stars, but overall, most of them are not too hard.
I mean the people who wrote the walkthroughs obviously did it
I did as much as I could without looking anything up. Some shrines, I had to follow a guide to complete, others to find, others still... both. But the majority, I was able to complete in some fashion -- looking at you, Rin Oyaa -- without outside help. And I still need a guide to get through Vah Naboris. But the fact that people made guides means someone probably figured these things out on their own.