#ThisThoughtIsTooLongForAnythingElse

[natcracken]

Finding the Master Sword in TotK is the closest I've ever seen a big budget game get to the Outer Wilds formula. I won't be mentioning any specific discoveries, just the structure.

Once you complete the first task for Purah, there is nothing stopping you from going directly to the sword other than knowledge of where it is and a stamina requirement. Put a pin in stamina, thats the biggest deviation and its for last.

Most players will of course not have this knowledge so the game has several different paths of different intrusiveness to push you towards this discovery.

The least obtrusive is to just intuit it. If you are just curious about what you see and get lucky, you may arrive at the destination with no prompting from the game.

Or you may have prior knowledge of the games inhabitants and recognize that something is out of place and investigate.

If you arrive either of these ways you will have no context for how this came to be. You may be able to come to the acursed realization from the areas color scheme, but you might not and can't be sure. This is the most subtle Outer Wilds-like element that other game puzzles lack: the process of discovery informs other aspects of the story. The characters, the world, the lore. All get fleshed out during the pursuit of the answer. Luckily TotK has this in spades. (Perhaps even too much with the memory sequences)

If you rush ahead of the "intended path" and pursue Gannon, you have the option to reveal murals that give you a massive clue. These are explicitly brought to your attention in the intro sequence (although you can miss them if you ignore Zelda fangirling over them.) However the realization that the murals should be taken literally and are actionable in the gameworld are left as an excersize for the player. I can forsee a path where a player tries to rush the ending, sees the answer, gets gatekept by the difficult enemies, returns to the intended path, and doesn't realize the mural they saw during this escapade was important. They're in for a massive "augh you IDIOT" moment down the line. Especially if they don't recall the mural when they make the discovery, and see it again at the end of their playthrough; reminding them of it.

And then there are the geoglyphs. Theres lots of nuance within this route. If you follow the recommended path to the Rito Village you are highly likely to come across a character that tutorializes the glyphs and introduces them as a main quest. They are present in many other places on the map in case you miss them. But you are more than capable of finding them early. If you head southeast from your first landing in Hyrule you may be in for a particularly late-timeline sequence. BotW players are at another advantage in this quest. Just recognizing the geoglyphs as something new is an advantage. A first time player aware of the franchises reputation may just assume that "ancient chalk art" is part of the lore. Some of them around the center of the map are especially adeptly placed to feel like they "belong there".

Next is the godess statue. A player doing the intended route, with prior knowledge, who missed the NPC, may simply choose the visit the godess statue as its on the way. They are in for an upsetting surprise on that front, but will also access the geoglyph map. Having most players visit this area early on their quest is an especially adept trick to make some later gut puches land hand.

Aa you gather the geoglyphs you have a slim possibility of intuiting the truth from the name of the game itself. The droplet animation is very deliberate and its not to much to figure out that these are the Tears of the Kingdom (could also refer to the special stones but their shape is just off enough that I think its just a mythic coincidence). How are these Tears, not just droplets, "of" said kingdom? Oh

And last (as far as I'm aware) is the great deku tree. Clearing the lost woods in this game is a whole other discussion and I dont think its handled as elegantly. I imagine returning players might feel especially cheated here. But once you find your way in and complete a fight, the deku tree will straight up tell you where the sword is, even giving you a moving map marker. This is the only path I think was handled poorly. The "reward" of being told exactly where to go may actively rob you of this discovery, one of the strongest moments in the entire game. I can see a mechanically inclined player being satisfied, or path version where you figure out the mystery and just need assistance with the location. But as a standard route it lacks the finesse of the others. It almost feels like a "last resort" option to catch any players who can't figure it out by other means; but a better last resort already exsists in finishing the geoplyphs. When analyzed from a discovery and exploration perspective, this route is a trap. It appears like a grand path in the same way as the geoglyphs, but with none of the narrative or character development that comes with it. So its simmilar to luck or intuition but without the discovery of them. Its all of the downsides of the other routes without the shining moments that offset them.

Eventually you will get enough information to pursue the answer yourself. If you don't figure it out and complete all of the geoglyphs first, you are treated to a more comprehensive sequence that explicitly tells you what happened and where to go. Either way you will come up against the stamina check. This is the greatest difference from the Outer Wilds formula as it gates your progress based on a mechanical stat. You must have completed enough shrines to have started investing in stamina (most players invest in a buffer of health first so this may be quite late in the game.) Or have made enough main quest progress to reveal the trading shrine. Either way you must have completed at least 20 shrines or traded equivalent heart containers. This is completely in line with series tradition, its in fact a subversion as a player may have been collecting health to prepare for this only to get dunked on with stam. But I can't help but feel like this was too much of a hedge. What does this gate actually stop you from doing that the mystery already doesn't. The overwhelming majority of players won't rush the geoplyphs; they will do them as they travel along the main quest or in their own rambling; so it doesn't block them. It only blocks players who either get lucky or intuit the answer themselves. And those groups deserve better. Congratulations on your discovery! Now fuck off untill you grind more levels.

I can only assume this was an act for caution. They looked at metrics for how many people rushed gannon in BotW and decided to hedge against stuff like it, in this case to preserve balance. Except TotK already had a system for that. The mob drop + combining + world scaling system keeps your dps tightly locked to the difficulty of the areas you're in. You can get slight advantages if you push into late game areas and then scamper off with the loot. Having the master sword from the very start of the game would not change this. There was no reason to be as cautious as they were when players can already snag royal guard weapons from the castle, only gated by the same unlock that gates getting to the sword.

With one exception: players who used guides. This player will be rightly gatekept from a reward they did not earn. I hope that this is just a coincidence are game are not being actively developed around gamefaqs and ign. Its a players own responsibility to curate how they engage with 3rd party media and if they want to cheat themselves out of their own video game then let them. And mock them. But don't develop around them.

I don’t really have a way to end this. Lots of naysaying in the back half and thats pretty much just me being a pedant. The overwhelming majority of players (me included) will follow an intended path with slight deviations here and there, and be completely fooled into thinking its a matter of either our own genius or tenacity and not extremely tight design. This is of course the mark of masterful design. This sequence is an acomplishment, a gamble on their own mastry of player psychology that paid off. I just can't help but wish they were just that more confident to let the game handle its own outliers. It can.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

tldr: totk goty. Re4makestans can cope. Get autobuilded on idiot