I’ve recently found that big (mostly open world) games tend to overwhelm or even intimidate me. I’m a big fan of the Rockstar games and absolutely adored Breath of the Wild, but my playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom has been a bit rocky from the get-go.
As soon as the game let me explore all of its content and released me from the tutorial island, I was able to roam the lands of Hyrule freely as I once did in Breath of the Wild, but I’ve come to a sort of paralysis. I feel like there’s such an enormous amount of content to see that I’m constantly anxious to unintentionally skip content or to not make the most of my experience. I did not feel like this back in Breath of the Wild, and I’m not really sure why. I did, however, have this same sense of FOMO when I first played Skyrim. That game also made me feel like I was constantly missing stuff which left me kind of unsatisfied.
This is not a big problem and all of the games I listed are great games. I’m posting this because I unconciously took a two week break from ToTK in order to alleviate that feeling but when I came back to the game today and still felt the same, I thought of posting here and maybe hearing your opinions on this thing.
Have you ever felt the same in big open world games? Do you feel like this in more linear games with multiple endings? (I do) Do you think I’m an overthinker and should just rock on? Looking forward to your comments!
TotK is a bit of a weird game. I’m still not sure what the “correct” way to play the game is. I did too much of the underground at first because I got a lot of maps. But when I had gotten all the treasures that I found the maps for, I had already explored a lot of the depths. Then I found up I could upgrade my battery more than 30 times, but I still had only five hearts, so I felt like I was playing the game wrong. So up to the surface I went. I thought I will mainly explore the underground after getting the map in that area. But after I learned how to make a aerial vehicle and the fast-building mechanic, I now feel like I skip everything, even places where I feel like I’m supposed to do something clever. But at the same time, I already explored this world by horse in the previous game, so perhaps skipping every obstacle by flying is what I’m supposed to do? Unfortunately, flying from shrine to shrine is pretty boring, and the shrines are ridiculously easy. Not sure where I’m going with this, but I think my point is simply that after probably a hundred hours I’m still confused about how to play this game in a meaningful way, even though I like this game a lot in many ways.
I think there’s no real “correct” way to play TotK. The game almost always gives you one obvious way to accomplish a task but puts very few guardrails to prevent you from bypassing things. It’s definitely a challenge for me to get out of that mindset of trying to guess the intended route so I don’t miss things and instead just enjoy encountering whatever content and situations arise from playing the game the way that I want.
