That's not what I'm talking about tho. I'm talking about how you just pop on the map with a single objective (well, in BoTW you have a better idea of what to do and where to go tho, but the point is still the same) and basically walk around and have fun with the world just like I did when I played Zelda Classic tho I couldn't understand anything of what I was supposed to do (but I was very very young, I would just walk and kill octoroks and tektites and stuff), and BoTW was the first game that was available to give me this feeling because even tho I had a yellow point I could follow, I had no GPS to follow, there was no obvious path since I was absolutely in the wild, I could hunt, chop wood and stuff, I would walk and follow the yellow point but a guardian was walking and patrolling and yeah, basically felt free, and that's a feeling that works besides the fact that weapons break, or that you can't sprint indefinitely because of stamina. I mean I don't have to have unbreakable weapons and infinite stamina to feel free, that's not really how a game succeed in giving freedom to a player.
I don't see stamina or fragillity as « artificial limitations » tbh but just features that are done poorly. The goal is for you to use different weapons but they break too quickly and since you can't repair them you have a tendency to think that using your best weapons would be a waste so you just keep them and never use them. That's counter intuitive. I think it would be fixed by having weapons being way more solid overall, having a way to repair them out of combat (I can see something like craft a millstone to have it regain 100% durability, just like you craft a fire) and having a way to enhance weapons so they won't break (and a way to store stuff, in Link's house for example, I bet some would like to farm and enhance every weapon possible), even if it means that you'll have to loose a few attack points, would be a fair trade imho. That way you could come prepared and rely on your weapons, and still keep the original game design view of « grabbing anything you can to fight monsters around »
Gerudo always had resent for men, I don't really get why there are suddenly so many people talking about sexism when they were there since Ocarina of Time and their resent for men was really obvious.
I obviously can see how some could think that's offensive tho. I don't really view myself as a men's rights advocate, but I'm very aware of these issues and I take this very seriously, and I don't really know why I never had any problem with the Gerudos. That's fictionnal so I don't really care and that puts them apart, that's a way to have a fictional kind of people who would put themselves far away, filled with mystery and stuff, and they still have to travel to find a man to get married so that's kinda « funny » to see how they really don't want men near their city but someday they have to get out and confront them. Sure that could appear as sexist, but I don't see it as an ill-intent to harm men so I don't have a huge issue with that, but I'm opened to other views of the thing. I think I don't take offense in that because I knew gerudos waaaaay before I even heard about men's rights and stuff.
But you point out something interesting, it's fine for a fictional society to be misandrist, but not for it to be misoginist, and that's something I agree with. I think fictional societies should be allowed to be misoginists tbh, it's fictional and as long as it is done well, with an intent of writing something, idk, then I don't have any issue with that tbh.
Personally, I found the utter lack of map markers or direction to be quite off-putting, since it means I'm lost in a big, empty world; I like to have some direction, and not just left to my own devices (which is part of why Minecraft holds no appeal for me, alongside that stupid 1.9 combat downgrade - when Bedrock Edition
still has the old combat system! So Mojang
knows they screwed up!).
I get incredibly bored just wandering around large open maps with no idea where to go or what to do, and since BotW has no map markers, I had to look up an online map -
which means the game has failed to entice me.
Zelda 1 can be somewhat excused for this, since games were much simpler back then and cartridges had limited storage space, but even that game could've had an actual map screen - especially in Virtual Console releases and the like.
Sure, the game doesn't need an overwhelming number of markers like Ubisoft's games do, but having some direction would be great, thanks, and wouldn't harm my sense of "freedom" since I could just choose where to head to first.
As for the Gerudo, I defer to
@RichardTheKing's point that no previous Gerudo depiction was anywhere near as bad as this. I mean, they only ever trust females, while never trusting males - even when one of them has directly saved their godawful civilisation and has gained the favour of the chieftess! Not even that is cause for an exception! Instead, Gerudo women are forced to leave their shitty village to get husbands, and if they return to the village, they're forced to leave their husbands behind; yeah, that's just real great there, splitting up families for such a repulsive reason.
In previous games, sure, they say they have an open disdain for men, but they never really show that since there's never any Hylian or Zora women in their fortresses, and OoT-Link is allowed to wander freely around that fortress after his initial stealth task.
MM-Link can't (not without the Stone Mask), and they do heavily injure that Zora before you arrive, but I don't think the word "Gerudo" is ever said in Majora's Mask...they're just a band of female pirates, so it's not quite the same. It's not a civilisation of people, just a pirate band.
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