@Mop it up
You can also warp or ride a horse. I haven't really been doing that, since I want to explore freely, but I feel that, by the end of the game, we'll be able to instantly jump very close to a destination in any previously visited area.

@Anand Sure, fast-travel is always nice in an open-world game, but you warp to previous areas, not unexplored ones.

With horses, I feel like ultimately they don't actually help travel, they're more of a fun diversion and another way to take on some enemies. I didn't bother much with them however, because training one to fully obey takes a while, and there are a lot of places they can't go like climb mountains or swim across rivers. I'm also not sure how calling one works, and maybe that's based on friendship level as well. It never worked when I tried though. Do you first have to register the horse at the stable for the section you're in?

@Mop it up
I dunno. I'm still pretty early in the game. I've only had one horse, and I had to ditch him to get to Kakariko Village. He was pretty obedient, though. You have to keep soothing him! (Although if you do that in real life, the horse will think he owns you.)

Speaking of horse riding, whenever I've ridden a horse in a Zelda game, I was always wishing for way more space to ride around freely in. So I was pretty freaking psyched when I mounted my first one in BotW. It made me sad when I had to ditch him on that icy mountaintop...

@Mop it upI guess maybe that's what the Rushrooms and the like are for? I haven't experimented enough with that stuff yet. But maybe if you have a stock of speed meals, you can spend the game on 'turbo mode' so to speak.

So can I use that other thread I made for "light" spoilers/swapping info and tips? Cuz I feel like this game could use it without worrying about anyone (including myself) freaking out over spoilers. But there still needs to be *some kind* of system.

For the most part I understand a good amount and I've put in quite a bit of hours.

I'd be happy to answer what I know, and I have some questions of my own.


*HORSE "SPOILERS" AKA TIPS*
@Mop it up
I'm pretty sure you can only call them once you've registered that horse. Taming them takes seconds to minutes, what makes you say it takes long?
You can feed horses too. They like apples.
Register your horse and they will always be able to be retrieved from any stable. Calling them will work from a certain distance too. If you do lock on while on your horse you have direct control over it, which makes traversing tough terrain much easier.

I like some of the details in this game. I was sneaking up on a Moblin, and I had to stop when I watched it pick up something from the ground and eat it.

@carlosrox I did register it, but the calling didn't work the few times I tried it. There may be areas you can't call them in, don't really know how it works.

Taming probably doesn't take that long, but I wanted to go places and didn't feel like waiting the 5-10 minutes it takes to reach max tameness. Sometimes I'm impatient, so sue me! Well, you'd better not sue me, I don't have the money to afford that, hee hee.

@Mop it up

You have to be close enough to call it. It's not like the old days where Epona would come wherever you ask her to.

@DrFinkelstein Ah, bummer. So you have to get one of your horses from a stable before you can use the call button?

@Shadowlink I haven't noticed much of a difference with those, though they can be helpful when fighting.

@Mop it up
Yeah. You've got to take the horse out first and you gotta be a realistic distance away to call it. There's also a horse icon on your map letting you know where it is.

And by the way, I think I'm suffering from ZELDA MANIA.

Oh man, I just had an amazing session. I mean, I know we're all having amazing sessions but to know for a fact that yours was pretty unique is so special. This game is insane. I'm going to bed but tossing over the memories as if they happened irl. Just incredible.

I do think that the game could use a couple, minor quality of life improvements.

1) It would be handy to be able to Assassin's Creed your horse and have it show up near you no matter how far away you end up from it. Sometimes you end up on the other side of a mountain from your horse and there are no stables or warps nearby
2) It would be nice to be able to have a list of recipes you made and to be able to make more than one recipe at a time. If I've got enough ingredients to make 4 helpings of the same 5 ingredient meal, I should be able to rip that off in one go
3) More detail about item durability would be nice. Unless I'm missing something, all you can see is new / used / about to break

Or if I can do these things and I'm missing how... someone please fix my ignorance! :)

@Super_Conzo

I saw something damn-right magical and mystical happen and it had me running all over the area. Using a raft, running along side cliffs, trying to catch a glimpse or interact with what I was seeing. It was craziness and amazing. In the end I managed to actually interact with it but it was far from obvious and while I have no idea where to go from here about this event, I felt accomplished.

What games do that to you!? #rhetorical (but seriously I don't get this reaction much)

Now it's clicking for me again. Within literally like a minute after turning it back on I found a pretty fun mini-game (albeit you need your own arrows so it is tough to keep playing over and over.) And then went exploring and found a shrine guarded by a pretty tough group of enemies, not to mention the fight inside was pretty intense and I felt smart about how I dealt with its last move. And now I'm in the middle of a trio!!! of mini-bosses that I found which supposedly opens up another shrine once defeated.

Where was all of this stuff last night?!!!?!?

Did my second dungeon tonight (the one nearest to the first one I did). The dungeon (and lead up to it) wasn't quite as strong as the first one I did, but it was still really good. It had a variation on a mechanic from a previous Zelda game's dungeon without feeling like a rehash.

Probably going to shift back into full-blown adventuring again on the other side of the map, now that I've seen a good chunk of the main quest.

Not sure if this has already been shared in the myriad preview posts I was avoiding like the plague, but here's an interesting interview with Aonuma regarding development and issues they had with developing the physics engine.

http://www.perfectly-nintendo.com/zelda-breath-of-the-wild-aonuma-on-how-elements-were-placed-on-the-map-physic-engine-shenanigans/

@TheBigG753 @TheBigG753 Yeah, the solution was what I thought, it's just that the first couple circles I found, what I needed wasn't nearby, so I I started thinking something else was the answer.

@DrFinkelstein Are you talking about a shooting star, perhaps? Or something else? I heard about that from somewhere, but not sure what it does.

@Shadowlink This is pretty smart:

Since a lot of people were playtesting the game, Eiji Aonuma asked for a tool to be created, in order to have a map displayed on a PC. That map was to show the movements of 100 players in real-time, and simultaneously, with a marking point every hour.

It was all pretty amusing for Eiji Aonuma, because it showed the many different ways players were playing the game. Sometimes, lines would converge to a single point, which showed lots of players were going to the same place at a given time. When asked why they went there, players would give answers such as “Because there’s something there”, or “Because I found that thing”.

Very often, it was something he had not thought about, or simply didn’t notice from his point of view (as developer/dirctor). This also allowed the development team to see which places players were not visiting, so that they could make modifications: adding a path, modifying the topography, making a place more attracting, etc..

Well, I had a very good session tonight. My original goal for the night was to stick to the main quest and head back to Kakariko right away, and I almost just warped there, but I decided to run back instead, and I kept finding so much other stuff to do so it took me like 4 or 5 hours to get back. No idea why I wasn't finding much last night but tonight was packed. And I'm leaving with a bunch of stuff left undone so next session will have plenty to do as well.

I just love how open ended some things are in this game. For instance I ran into this section where I needed to get three of those ball things to put in 3 holes to open up a shrine, and there were 3 mini-bosses in the surrounding area that had them. If this were a normal game you'd just go, fight them, and bring the balls back, right? And of course you can do that (which I did), but you can also climb to the top of the respective arenas they are in, glide down to the sleeping bosses, and steal the balls and run off before they catch you. Which you might want to do as well, at least at this point, because they can pretty much 1 hit kill you.

So yeah, I decided to fight them instead. First two were easy, but the third was pretty tough, didn't follow quite the same predictable patterns as the first yet could still one hit kill. UNTIL... I accidentally found out that he had a metal collar on one of his legs, and hitting it with an electrically-charged sword shocked him + temporarily disabled him. Piece of cake after that.

GOTF again. Seriously, at this point I'm back to thinking this is one of the best games I've played. Watch me tomorrow get all emo again.

@Zero

I actually wish that would be something we could get in-game when we finish- A map showing all our wanderings. It'd be fun to see just which ways we all went.