Are ANY of the sidequests in this game worth doing...

The game doesn’t tell which shrines or quests give the best stuff and that’s the beauty of this game.

That’s literally the game in design.

Every thing is optional.

Some hard quest gives shit rewards and some easy one gives rare armor that you can’t get anywhere.

The level design is so good that that doesn’t even matter. Most of the time, I’m doing quest not because of the rewards but just to see the clever way and how they implement it into the world.

Shrine quests in particular is very fun to do.

Tarrey Town.
And the reward is not that great either, it's just to get one more town ingame and a secret seller.
Minigames are also useless.

I haven't found anything about exploring this world particularly interesting or fun, to be honest. And deliberately disproportionate quest rewards is objectively bad game design because when it's a good reward for an easy/effortless task it feels unearned and when you give them shit for something difficult or tedious it feels like a ripoff.

And I don't know what "good level design" you experienced, but... I haven't seen it. I've found several really short dungeons with easy puzzles that give bad rewards, and four main dungeons that are fairly short, have basically no enemies, and are largely underwhelming as a whole.

Even though I'm not a huge fan of shrines (loading screens, short, repetitive, tilt puzzles) I do like how a lot of the puzzles in them can be broken/bypassed/solved in unintended ways through the use of your ridiculously versatile toolset.

Not that user, but my idea of good design in the game is the shrines that have a clear solution, but you can substitute a more clever solution instead. Peak BotW for me was this shrine where there's a series of ramps and fans that you're meant to use to guide a ball into a socket to power an elevator that you're standing on. The challenge of the puzzle is meant to be the fact that you have to be standing on the elevator when the ball goes into the socket, otherwise it'll go up without you, so you have to guide the ball from that fixed position. However, you can bullshit your way through the whole thing by taking the ball over to the socket, placing it so that it is about to roll in, and then holding it in place with Stasis and retreating to the elevator. Then release Stasis and take the ride up.

Now, I'm sure the devs considered the Stasis trick, but left it in because they knew that someone who figured out the Stasis trick would probably enjoy the experience as much or more than the person who did the fan puzzle. The game open-handedly allowing you to abuse anything it's given you instead of very tightly trying to force you to solve puzzles the way the devs intended is one of the game's greatest strengths.

Sometimes the shrines are amusing, but my issue with them is the more of them you do, the less worth it they are. Once I hit about 8 hearts and three stamina wheels I stopped... needing anymore upgrades, and only deliberately got more so I could get the Master Sword. But after that I just kind of sit on the spirit orbs I do get and always forget to bother turning them in, if I even do the shrine in the first place instead of just activating it for fast travel.

And the rewards for the shrines outside the orbs have never felt worthwhile to me. I mean... like cleansing the blue dragon? For doing that I... get a shrine... and a weak ice spear? Just didn't feel rewarding at all.

If the shrine rewards felt more worth it, I'd have appreciated that kind of thing more. But as is... it just always leaves me with that bad "I wish this was in a different game" feeling.

This game is super flawed in many departments but it still gets a pass from me for actually making me care about it when I uncover more terrain. My favorite parts are visiting each village for the first time and climbing the fuck huge snow mountain. I'm not sure what the non-exploration minded people see in the game though, why is it so well received?

Yeah, like I said before, if you're focusing on the rewards more than the experience, it's going to let you down.

I think I'd get more out of the exploration if I hadn't experienced so many open world games so much like it for so many years. It doesn't ever really do anything I haven't seen in other games before... several times over, in most cases. Like I can't even tell you HOW many mountains I've climbed in games and I'm sure most people in this thread also have.

I do like finding the new villages, but the problem is there aren't they many and usually there's not much to do there. So I meet everyone, do a couple quests, buy a new clothing set, and... that's kinda it.

I have really liked some things (the monster shop guy and everything he sells is great), but nowhere near enough for me to understand why everyone told me this game was so spectacular. I was really expecting a lot more.

A few are but most aren't

The thing is, BotW has an exceptionally strong setup for an open world game. The tools it gives you, the method of approach to both exploring the world and progressing through challenges, even little stuff like the way the camera deemphasizes Link in favor of showing you the world while still making Link's position easy to track, are all fundamentally focused on the game's mission of making the world engaging to explore. Where it fails pretty much always revolves around the question of how to reward the player beyond trying to make the content itself intrinsically rewarding. They made the durability system so that they could take weapons away from you, otherwise giving you weapons wouldn't be a good reward. But that makes it so that even if weapons should seem like a good reward, they aren't, because they'll be taken away from you in due time as well. They made an exceptionally good system for exploring a sandbox and then couldn't figure out what to put in the sandbox.

People who gush about the game are focused on how well crafted it is from the mechanical viewpoint of how you interact with the world. People who criticize it are going to be more focused on how ultimately lacking it is in terms of the content you're actually interacting with.

You need 13 hearts for the Master Sword (not really necessary anyway) and a decent stamina gauge if you want to climb properly, that's it.

Almost nothing in the game actually feels individually rewarding, especially because weapons are worthless and there are no unique items to gain, but it starts stacking up after a while.
The best upgrade and maybe the only thing that you're truly incentivized to do, is upgrading armors.
I didn't really explore all of the game either and you don't need to. The open world fags will tell you how amazing it is that you get to uncover one measly shrine for elaborate quests, but we all know that's just delusion.

>Weapons are worthless

By the end of the game I had a route to get all the good weapons which was self sustaining and throughout the game was marking on the map where the fixed good weapon spawns were, I think people who complain about durability are the same people that won’t use bows because arrows are consumable.

Having reliable access to the good weapons just serves to highlight the fact that every other instance of the game rewarding you with a weapon is worthless.

The game suffers from weapon overload and durability at the same time, they are two issue that exist simultaneously without fixing each other. Although I could well imagine that the weapon overload was their band-aid fix to durability.

When you start the game you don't ever feel like using your good weapons against anything but bosses because they break after 5 hits, you don't have enogh inventory space to stock up properly and it honestly feels like a waste to even attack enemy camps because their reward is a fucking Amber.

Eventually the game throws so many weapons at you you can't carry them all, and after you finally upgraded your weapon stash sufficiently you start to realize that there is nothing good out there because all you have to do is farm Lynels to get the best weapons. Nothing you can find in caves or shrines will ever be fucking relevant to you. The best example are the Champion weapons which are a complete joke because Royal weapons which EVERY FUCKING ENEMY drops are just flat out better. What the fuck these devs were thinking I can't even imagine. But even assuming the Champion weapons didn't suck and actually were special and sick, would you ever dare use them? Of course not, and that proves durability is still a n issue. As soon as you try to elevate a weapon reward from the heaps of trashloot, you are instantly reminded that it will break in a few hits. Who gives a fuck if you can reforge it? Who the fuck would constantly pay for that when he can just stick to monster clubs and do a tiny bit less damage?

Someone in another thread argued the case that the Champion weapons should have been unbreakable. It would justify their middling stats while also making you feel a sense of progression from the start of the game and make them feel like a much more tangible reward. You're pretty much never truly emptyhanded, so having a few pieces of equipment that give you the sense of security of knowing they'll always be there to fall back on would be nice, while also giving you something to slap around basic fodder enemies without having to worry about "wasting" anything.

Majority of them are.
The main quests are the lowest points of the game in most cases.

All I remember grinding was wood. All you need is a place with trees and a 2 handed sword for like 15 minutes for that

Just do what you find fun, not what might give you something good. After all, there's nothing better than Beast rewards

They’ve done they’re research
Most Zelda fans enjoy dicking around in the world instead of doing quests or the main story

Pleb filtered
Everything in the game is equally worthless
You should be playing for fun not min maxing
You don’t even have to complete all the korok seeds nor shrines
Just play how you want to play

Yeah, and it's fucking annoying as shit. You'll also go through several weapons as you do it.

It has nothing to do with min-maxing. It has to do with "not fun/interesting quest" giving bad reward. So far none of the sidequests have been interesting or particularly fun to do, so I'm only left with the core game... which feels really, really short when you cut all the fluff out.

I loved doing the Tarrey Town quest

I finished it before I had was done with even two Divine Beasts.

Bombs.

I would say only Tarrey Town, and even then it has wood grinding and a shitty final reward. You do it because it's neat and the only quest that feels all-encompassing rather than throwaway.

But you don’t know where or what the good weapons are at the start, you’re complaining about “end game” in a single player game.

see And it's not like getting 2 handed swords is hard either. I thought people were over degradation already

next to the rito village are big stacks of already cut up wood
you just need to bomb them

No, the durability issue is a problem at every stage of the game, in different degrees.

They really should not have put weapons in chests, just added an extra layer of tedium to inventory management. But I guess, like with everything else, they acted as filler.

The biggest joke is the Forgotten Temple, a hidden place filled with guardians which rewards... A fucking Flameblade.

>900 Korok seeds
How? I already maxed my weapons stash which is the only important one, is there anything more out of getting them?

Isn't there a Shrine there? Also it's a good place to farm Guardian materials.

Go to the top of the mountain near the village where you get the house
otherwise no not really

No. They were designed so that players would just find plenty on their normal playthrough. This game does not incorporate 100% in its design. You're not supposed to do it for any reason other than to satisfy your own autism if you're so compelled.