That feeling when you are searching for hours for the last few shrines, and suddenly the Sheikah Sensor begins to beep.

Only one more to find, and I feel like this is going to be a doozy considering I've been pretty much everywhere, and it's not 100% clear if it's part of a shrine quest or not. Still finding tons of Korok seeds, though!

@TheBigG753
I'm nearly where you are, with only two shrines to go.
I feel like I scoured Hyrule three times over so it's time for a break!

How many hours y'all at?

@carlosrox

Over 130+.

Seeking the last Eight Shrines I'm searching for.

Finished my first uh... dungeon I guess. Elephant. And the boss fight. The dungeon was pretty cool, I'd actually say pretty awesome, though it definitely left me hankering for more substantial sized dungeons. Boss fight was ok, not particularly stand out but not bad.

Does that mean I'm finally moving on to a new area? Maybe! Or maybe I'll putz around this one longer! Can probably climb the big mountains now that it's no longer raining.

Speaking of climbing, I wish there were more of a visual cue for what you could and couldn't climb that made more coherent sense. I mean I guess it just comes down to "most everything in shrines / dungeons is not climbable"? But it feels so arbitrary. Link can pretty much climb ANYTHING in this game, why not that stuff?!

@Zero

Shrines test Link in ways unique to them. So slippery surfaces which are unclimbable I guess goes with that logic…? Or they just want to design puzzles you can't climb your way through. Smart move IMO.

@Zero

A wizard did it.

Seriously, who cares why? Other than Zero?

carlosrox said:

How many hours y'all at?

107 hours. My completion is at like 30% according to the map screen (I think this only shows up after you roll credits). Game's pretty big.

@nate38

Where is that at? I beat the game but I don't see it. Did it save after the game was beat for you? For me it didn't seem to. Maybe I messed up somehow?

@DrFinkelstein If you have a star on your profile, it saved after beating the game. It's on the map screen in the lower left corner, above temperature and stuff.

@nate38

Damn. Why wouldn't it have saved after I beat it? Maybe I didn't hit some button and close it out but I can't remember what the hell happened after the credits…

oh well, I guess I'll go beat the game again. I've got this. I was wondering where my percentage was now.

Shrines Got!

I was very fortunate tonight...the first area I decided to check out ended up being where the last shrine was, which I'm a little surprised about because I had explored all around that area but never quite in the center -- which is where the shrine was!

As far as other stats, I'm up to 400 Korok Seeds and 57% overall completion. Nearly all of my armor is up to Level 3. I've got ~5~ side missions left to find, and then that elusive last Great Fairy (which I can't believe I haven't found yet!) Now that I've done the shrines, I think I'll hit all of the major population centers and stables again (during the day AND at night) to make sure I didn't miss anything big.

Where are you guys seeing your hour count at? I've gotta think I'm over 150 hours, maybe even 200, just spitballing...

@Zero

That was the first dungeon I did as well, and while I kinda wished it was a bit more substantial as well, I'm far more in the "it was pretty awesome" spectrum. My biggest takeaway was when climbing the outside of the elephant, changing the height of its trunk to get way up on top of it and seeing the whole rest of the world around me -- Zora's Domain, the mountains, the reservoir, etc. -- and how the dungeon is basically just another part of this huge world like everything else. It made this big statement to me of "this is what a Zelda dungeon is in 2017." Everything about it just felt fresh.

As far as the climbing goes, I'm guessing it's because it would break a lot of the dungeon/shrine puzzles and traversal, but it is a bit odd considering (@Zero this is a spoiler for you based on your progress, so don't highlight this next part!) Revali's Gale can be used in dungeons and can be used to "cheat" in spots. Bird was my third dungeon so I only had this ability for the Camel dungeon, but I felt a bit guilty using it there.

@kriswright It's not so much that I care WHY as that I like an uninterrupted gameplay experience. My natural inclination to climb things being stopped short and me futzing around a bit before I realized that no, this thing just plain isn't climbable... not ideal game design to me. If you're going to design a game where you're basically begging the player to climb anything around them, and then some stuff isn't climbable, make it super, duper clear!

@DrFinkelstein @TheBigG753 I understand WHY those things aren't climbable, I just think they could have used more of a visible cue.

@Zero

I'm fairly certain I saw a specific tip that notes Shrine walls are not climbable.

I don't know how much more clear you want it to be honestly. Dungeons and Shrines- No climbing. Everything else? Climb.

I see what Zero's saying about it being arbitrary but I also don't see why it's a big deal at all.

Funny though, I thought I remember the exterior of the Shrines being climbable so I tried to climb one the other day with no success.

@Shadowlink
I think there's a few other things you can't climb but it's far and few between.

@Zero
The Shrine stuff actually is supposed to be its own visual clue since you should discover on your own that it doesn't work, outside and inside. For the most part it shouldn't come as a surprise that the same applies to the DB.

carlosrox said:

The Shrine stuff actually is supposed to be its own visual clue since you should discover on your own that it doesn't work, outside and inside. For the most part it shouldn't come as a surprise that the same applies to the DB.

Yep, pretty much this. Before reaching your first shrine, you've pretty much discovered by that point that you can climb just about everything and it's just natural that you'd try doing the same inside of a shrine, since climbing is such a core part of the gameplay. And when it didn't let me, I was just like "Oh...okay, I guess it makes sense that it'd be like this." It's just another way in which the game teaches you its rule set without resorting to deliberately spelling it all out.

The only issue I had with that was that the divine beast surfaces look rough and textured, like they would be easy to climb. Maybe they should have made them really shiny and slippery-looking.

I finally found another mini-game, the glider one you get after the island shrine quest. Pretty neat! Although it's a bit odd because it is a mini-game that you can do better with the more powered up your stamina is, which kind of makes me feel like why bother putting too much time into it right now? But maybe that's better, can come back here and then when I'm a bit more powered up and get a lot higher score than I got before.

Actually that probably applies to the first mini-game I found, the deer hunting one as well, only in that case it'd be more about getting better stealth gear / using better steal items than actually powering up.

It's not the fault of the game at all but because it is SO HUGE sometimes the pacing is tough to get used to. Like I was thinking "this game doesn't really have many mini-games" but then I was like well, yeah I have only found two so far, but A. there might be more that I missed in the areas I have explored and B. I've really only explored about 1/4 of the map at the moment.

@carlosrox Discovering by doing something that you would think would work that doesn't is sort of the opposite of a visual cue though? By visual cue I mean you look and go "oh, I probably can't do that."

The most clear example I can think of is spinys in the original Super Mario Bros. Up to that point you could pretty much jump on any enemy right? And then they introduce one you can't jump on. But you don't have to jump on it to find out. You look at it and go "oh, definitely should not try to jump on that!" It's a really basic, obvious game design technique!

Actually BOTW does use spikes in some places to restrict your climbing, like on some of the towers. I doubt anyone ran up to one of those towers with spikes on them and thought "hey I bet I can climb those spikes!" It's just visually clear that you can't. Of course I get why they didn't coat all of the walls of shrines / dungeons with spikes, that'd be kind of ugly. But I think they could have probably made it more visually obvious than it is.

@Zero

I thought it was visually obvious. Like the stone/walls have a different finish to them compared to the natural stone of, say, the mountains. Like they've been coated with a slippery agent. The kind I put on my floors to make my kids fall down.

@TheOldManFromZelda Sort of, but it's not super obvious. And the outside of the beasts aren't very slick, combined with the fact that it sent me outside of the beast, I totally thought I was going to be doing some climbing on the body like SOTC or something, but nah. And some of the stuff inside isn't very slick either, for that matter.