Completing botw became more of a chore than anything else. I couldn’t get all the way through tears of the kingdom. The chores in that one just compounded. I managed to somehow light up the entire underworld and yet my gear was too fucking terrible to face the end bosses.
Botw was very cool at times, but it had a few things that made it utterly frustrating to play. The weapons breaking and having to watch Link go “uhh eeefff eeeff ooof” on the side of a cliff for hours was just painful and purposeless.
To your point, it seems like no game can manage to have an expansive, explorable world that’s actually rewarding to explore. Maybe there is an exception out there but I haven’t encountered it.
Elden Ring has done it best so far, particularly the dlc, but it also obliterated the replay value compared to other souls games with how much empty traversal it adds and now that you can go anywhere you know what’s available and wind up googling where things are instead of making do with your limited options as you go.
Completing botw became more of a chore than anything else. I couldn’t get all the way through tears of the kingdom. The chores in that one just compounded. I managed to somehow light up the entire underworld and yet my gear was too fucking terrible to face the end bosses.
Botw was very cool at times, but it had a few things that made it utterly frustrating to play. The weapons breaking and having to watch Link go “uhh eeefff eeeff ooof” on the side of a cliff for hours was just painful and purposeless.
To your point, it seems like no game can manage to have an expansive, explorable world that’s actually rewarding to explore. Maybe there is an exception out there but I haven’t encountered it.
Elden Ring has done it best so far, particularly the dlc, but it also obliterated the replay value compared to other souls games with how much empty traversal it adds and now that you can go anywhere you know what’s available and wind up googling where things are instead of making do with your limited options as you go.