@PogueSquadron

This is kind of where I'm at; I spent a similar amount of time in the game and got a similar amount of stuff before beating it, and I have similar criticisms about...similarity! TotK kind of oscillates between being this incredible work of construction-based gameplay on a foundation of genius programming with a massive playground of a world...to feeling nigh-indistinguishable from BotW, often in the same play session. Its story is stronger and has some solid emotional payoffs, but then I'll hit some expanse of nothingness with the same tinkling piano song I've already heard through my 400 hours of BotW.

And I think it lacks BotW's general vision and atmosphere; like, that really felt like a game all about nature and survival and exploration, with mechanics that fed into that. TotK has a lot of stuff just because BotW had it (like hunting, or that soundtrack I mentioned) which sort of clashes with its unified vision a lot.

Even so, I actually feel that it's a really great game despite those criticisms and I'd recommend it to any fans of BotW. There's enough good here to still make for a top Switch game. On the NW 100-point scale, a 9.4 sounds about right to me.

Guillaume said:

Remove all dialogue? But then we wouldn't have moments like that woman who's away from one of the stables, playing/working with the dogs, for self-care, because dudes in nothing but shorts have been showing up.

Haha, see, when I first read this, I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not. But it was a funny moment, and there have been some other funny moments like it.

@PogueSquadron
@TriforceBun

I'm at about 135 hours and think I've had my fill for now, and you guys hit the nail on the head. I watched this great BotW review recently where the guy points out that the freedom BotW provides is a trade-off, because it allows you to skip otherwise cool scenarios that could have arisen under more constrained circumstances. The run-up to Zora's Domain is an awesome part of the game, but you might miss it by paragliding right over. BotW's emphasis on freedom was a real life-changing revolution at the time, but with TotK I think I wanted more specific showcases of how nuts the mechanics can be.

One of my favorite parts of TotK was the Great Sky Island, largely because of how linear it was. It was able to give a really perfectly tuned experience within this engine that was unlike anything in BotW, and I was hoping for a lot more sequences like it. The rest of the sky islands feel like a big missed opportunity; you can tell that each bit of land is meant to be done in a particular order and hopped between in a specific way, but you can usually bypass all of it and skydive directly where you need to go, or just build a plane.

I defended BotW by telling people to "just play like dunkey," but with TotK there are a lot of parts where you need to go out of your way to figure out what the intended path is even supposed to be! I accidentally went to the Spirit Temple much earlier than I was supposed to because a sky-rock spawned right beneath the secret entrance that you'd otherwise have to go through a ton of work to get to. It was mindblowingly cool to find it early, but finding out later that I missed out on a whole interesting quest and level really deflated that section of the game.

The dungeons and pre-dungeons were incredible. They were linear enough to have obvious intended solutions while still giving you enough freedom to deviate in creative ways.

I can't in good conscience say that a game I put 135 hours into over two months isn't probably my favorite game ever, but I do wonder how much of that time was spent compulsively combing over the same land I explored in BotW for completionism's sake, and how much tighter of an experience the game would be if they had nuked most of the map and focused entirely on sky islands. Sort of like Bowser's Fury!

They could have just kept the Great Plateau around as the main physics playground; I didn't find that building vehicles helped much in the other sandboxey areas anyway. I never felt the need to build a car to travel 20 seconds to some mountain that would then require me to abandon the car. The coolest uses of Zonai devices were in areas that were designed for specific tasks.

@Secret_Tunnel

Absolutely not sarcastic. Humor in games is undervalued.

Hero_Of_Hyrule said:

But please, go off king. Genuinely. I really want to hear your thoughts about Tears of the Kingdom. I got the Master Sword, got most of the memories, and did 3/4 of the main town quests before falling off. There's a lot of dialogue, without a lot of story.

You do owe it to yourself to beat the final boss! It's an incredible sequence and one of my favorite boss battles ever, up there with Sans and Psycho Mantis in how it shakes you out of the safety of the game's mechanics.

But, to regurgitate what I and others have posted already (I wrote this as a note on my phone yesterday and was hoping for an excuse to post it):

Tears of the Kingdom ultimately does feel like an expansion to me. Not because it doesn't have enough new stuff—I played the game for 130 hours—but because it doesn't have the guts to get rid of the old stuff.

Breath of the Wild wasn't perfect, but it was cohesive. Hunting, gathering, cooking, climbing; all the game's mechanics weaved together to create a beautiful experience of surviving in post-apocalyptic Hyrule and discovering the beauty that it still contains. The world was made for the story, the story was made for the gameplay, and the gameplay was made for the world. To whatever extent the moment-to-moment gameplay was slow, the revolutionary macro structure made it all feel so cool and meaningful.

Tears of the Kingdom, at its best, is a game that extends BotW's emergent powers into a level of interaction never before seen in a game. Its physics engine is absolutely nuts, and the puzzles it throws at you in its dungeons are the best Zelda has seen. But this tight experience is massively diluted by the inclusion of all the mechanics and environments from BotW that aren't relevant anymore. Why is the story still told via flashbacks? Why am I still spending time on terrain that isn't amenable to navigation via Zonai vehicles? My experience with TotK alternated between getting to play with some of the coolest mechanics I've ever seen in a game and retreading a world whose mystery has decayed. It has extremely cool ideas, but a mediocre ratio of novelty to compulsive filler.

And of course, the game is way, way too chatty. The developers have attempted to make up for the reused world by adding in more text content, but that's not what I'm interested in at all.

There are glimpses of the game that TotK could have been, on its Great Sky Island, in its dungeons, within some of its shrines. I don't fault the developers for not getting this completely right on their first try; the heights that TotK reaches are beyond anything the game industry has ever achieved. BotW was the starting point for the future of gaming, and TotK is the first unsteady step into the new world.

...but the story annoys me a lot. There's an entire sidequest where you decipher Zonai writings to learn more about the founding of Hyrule, and it tells you nothing beyond what you see in the memories while leaving major questions unanswered. When and why did the Zonai show up? What's the significance of Rauru and Sonia's inter-species relationship? Why does this backstory go out of its way to contradict previous games while also going out of its way to reference previous games? All of these mysteries were carrots on sticks that never paid off. And again, I don't mind leaving questions unanswered, but this game shoves so many plot points down your throat so hard that it forfeits any sense of intentional ambiguity. I felt like a genius for finding the Master Sword early by using clues from the first few memories I found, only to find out later in the story that I'd have been guided there by a heavy hand anyway.

As long as I'm busy complaining about this masterpiece, I want to make the additional claim that interrupting the atmospheric background music to play the Enemy Nuisance Theme three thousand times over the course of the playthrough is the type of design decision that single handedly makes me question if the dev team just lucked into creating two of the best games ever made and secretly has no clue what they're doing. Overall, the designs of both BotW and TotK are a little unprincipled and sloppy in a way that I never get from the Mario team, TotK moreso. As someone with a deep revulsion towards certain types of coercive game mechanics, this probably bothers me way more than other people, which is why my feelings about these games are so bipolar. These Zeldas are still my favorite two Switch games, but I don't ever have to look back over my 60 hours with Mario Odyssey picking apart which sections were a good use of time and which weren't!

Ah, I'm probably just being grumpy in hindsight. Obviously I had an incredible time with this game overall. But I think it could so easily be an absolutely untouchable GOAT if they'd had the same courage to question BotW's conventions that BotW had to question previous Zeldas' conventions. There's so much fat to trim here. Is collecting all the same armor and having to constantly swap it in the menu really any fun? Even in BotW, armor already nullified so much of what made the game's survival and cooking mechanics interesting.

If the writers had worked and innovated as hard as the programmers did to tell a mysterious archeology-focused story that required real thought to unravel, and if the level designers had condensed this world to a fraction of its size and strung novel challenges together in ways that felt more meaty... untouchable!

EDIT: I keep debating whether to temper this post or double down on it. These games drive me crazy! I had the same reaction to Breath of the Wild when I beat it.

Is this true love?

Secret_Tunnel said:

it doesn't have the guts to get rid of the old stuff.

I agree with this a lot. Especially since this game is so much BIGGER than BOTW, bigger than it really needs to be. They could have cut out like 20 or 30 hours of content and still had more content than BOTW. And if they did cut out that much content, the stuff that is too repetitive next to BOTW would be the obvious stuff to cut.

But I think a part of the problem is they reused the map. And then added more areas with the sky and depths and caves and everything. So they had a LOT of space to fill. Some of it felt really fresh. Some of it felt like more BOTW. And some of it was just like... areas that were specifically designed for a specific thing in BOTW, that have no real point anymore.

Still love the game but it's tough to know where I'm going to end up on it scorewise. It has a lot of amazing stuff in it, a lot of pure joy in creation that I haven't felt in many games well... ever. But also a lot of stuff that feels like more of the same next to BOTW. And you don't really know what will be what until you get there, so even though most of it is optional, there wouldn't be any easy way to just do the new / fresh stuff.

I'm still not quite finished and I didn't expect this but at this point I just kind of want to get it done and move on. At a certain point there isn't much really new happening, and unfortunately that point can come when you still have a lot of content left.

@Secret_Tunnel

I wish I had something to add after prompting such a long exploration, but I feel like you sum up my problems very well. I think those problems are a bigger issue for me because I'm not a big fan of open worlds, physics sandboxes, or games where your own creative drive is a big source of fun. So for me, it's just one of the better games in a genre I don't particularly care for, rather than a new dawn for video games or something.

Zero said:

And you don't really know what will be what until you get there, so even though most of it is optional, there wouldn't be any easy way to just do the new / fresh stuff.

Right, this is an important point. A good level/puzzle/scenario in a game is like a joke, or a magic trick. It's not immediately obvious that there will be any value, but you trust the developers to give you a good punchline. The industry has burned a lot of that trust for me lately, which is why I don't even bother with most otherwise cool-looking games. TOTK burned a similar amount of that trust by having half great content and half repeated content (returning to the Great Plateau, incredible! returning to Eventide Island, disappointing), to the point where the idea of another sequel doesn't even excite me much right now.

Maybe I had a different experience since I haven't revisited BotW since it came out, never played Age of Calamity, etc.

The Hyrule map in TOTK could have been mostly new for all I know. I don't really remember any details from BOTW.

Not being excited for the idea of another sequel 3 months after a game has released is… normal?

Let's check back in 6 years, maybe?

I wonder how people who NEVER played BotW would feel about TotK? I bet it would be "game of the forever" for them, honestly. Our issues all seem to stem from the very fact that we all put in 100+ hours into BotW. It certainly is the case with me, too. If I had never played BotW this would be the most epic adventure I've ever been on in a game. With playing BotW twice (three times?) I keep feeling "Oh, it is this place again, but now the mountain is a little different. Cool."

Interestingly, as many have pointed out, one of the most compelling parts to me was the opening sequence when you were stuck on the sky islands. That felt enticing. I understand they couldn't have put out the game as quickly if they had just made it all sky islands, but I almost wish I could run back up to the sky and forget regular Hyrule exists, lol.

@Secret_Tunnel

This was a fun read. I think there are about a hundred little issues I could poke into this game, but it's conflicting because I still found it extremely compelling (at least for the first 100 hours or so). It definitely started falling off after a while for me and I decided to wrap things up before feeling burnout. So to keep it brief, I agree that many of its issues stick from adhering to BotW's systems without a real "reason" for it, and I'd go so far as to say that's the game's biggest problem. This includes the soundtrack, which reuses way too many themes for my liking; probably 80% of my experience playing the game was while hearing pre-existing BotW music, and by far the most common new themes I heard were the Depths music and the new combat theme.

Still, it's a mind-blowing game in enough other ways for me to award it something like a 9.4/10. I think I still preferred Octopath 2 as a 2023 experience as a whole, but I don't see any other game this year coming close to these two. ...Maybe RE4 once I get around to it.

@J.K. Riki
I've wondered about that too. At the time of first trying out TotK, I'd already spent a good 400 hours (200 per play through, Normal and Master) in this version of Hyrule, so I'd have been plenty happy never seeing another Bokoblin camp in my life. I'd be curious to hear how people adapted to the game who never played BotW. It might even be TOO overwhelming. This is definitely Nintendo's most complicated game, control-wise.

@J.K. Riki I would definitely say that objectively I can't think of many things BOTW did better than TOTK. TOTK feels like a big step up on most levels. And certainly early on, even as someone who has played BOTW, TOTK had a lot of super fun, creative parts, a lot of unexpected stuff (like the depths), etc. If someone came to me and was like "I'm only going to play ONE of those games, which should I play?" I'd say TOTK easy. But yeah, for a lot of us who played both it's a tougher call. For the reasons I mentioned above TOTK feels like half super new and creative, half retread to me. I actually think it would have been a better game if they cut out a lot of the retread and just made it shorter and tighter.

@Zero
I know what you mean and have similar thoughts. But for fun, I do think BotW did the following things better (although I'd hesitate to use "objectively" since that's often pretty hard to justify when it comes to evaluating games etc):

-Fully new and original overworld/surface
-Fully new and original soundtrack
-Fully new and original combat system & set of enemies
-Fully new and original UI, item system, armor/upgrade system, etc

Okay, enough of that type of stuff, we all get the picture. Let me try thinking of other things.

-A more cohesive experience around survival rather than the "kitchen sink" approach of TotK (this is pretty subjective though)
-Ummm...maybe some people prefer Cryonis and Stasis?

Ultimately it really boils down just to BotW introducing wayyyyy more new concepts than TotK. Even things like the four dungeons are in the same areas with the same races. But yeah, that wouldn't really matter for someone who's just playing one of them for the first time. So it's mainly the cohesion/creative vision for the game that I think would be the only real thing BotW has over TotK besides innovation/freshness.

It's a little bit like Pokemon Red/Blue being more or less included in Pokemon Gold/Silver as postgame content. Kinda hard to recommend them over the sequel in that way.

@TriforceBun What I mean by better is like, if we ignore which came first. Or for instance if there is that theoretical person who has played neither, how would they stack up against each other? So the "fully new" wouldn't apply because both would be new to this theoretical person.

With that said I can think of a few things BOTW did better. It was better at guiding players down specific, more focused paths in the overworld, for instance. A lot of times in TOTK I land somewhere and start exploring and it becomes clear I'm kind of doing it backwards. Especially in the sky. I would want to make sure I explored every island in the sky, but often I realize I landed at the "end" point and most everything else in the area existed just to lead you to the place I already landed at. So I got the payoff right away and then explored the surrounded islands to find... nothing. Kind of weird.

I really adored BOTW's environmental storytelling. It did a lot to make it feel like Zelda had come full circle back to the first game.



The starkness of "Defeat Ganon" being the main quest and the absolute freedom that it gave you to tackle it; the classic tracks buried in the OST; the redemption from Skyward Sword; BOTW's place within the Zelda canon as a big reset point for the series, as well as its place within the industry as the first game to question certain design tropes, gave the game a lot of oomph for me.

Just by being a sequel, TOTK can't recreate that feeling of "a new start," so it's not really a flaw, but I do wonder if even people who aren't so invested in the series might be better off playing BOTW instead just because it's the first one.

I have a buddy whose first single-player game since Skyrim in 2011 is TOTK, and he's loving it. I suppose the type of person who hasn't already played BOTW would be better off jumping straight into TOTK, since they probably don't care as much about Zelda canon and revolutionary moments in game design.

Part of what makes TOTK's design feel contradictory to me was that BOTW really was the kind of game that was designed for you to put 200+ hours into over the course of years and years. I don't think we should fault ourselves for overdosing on Zelda; that was kind of the point of the game! If TOTK had been a smaller experience with less overlap of mechanics, then the two games could stand side by side and each serve a clear role.

Zero said:

I would want to make sure I explored every island in the sky, but often I realize I landed at the "end" point and most everything else in the area existed just to lead you to the place I already landed at. So I got the payoff right away and then explored the surrounded islands to find... nothing. Kind of weird.

This was really weird to me too.

Alright, credits rolled. Got all of the shrines and lightroots and finished up the sidequests that I felt like finishing (left a few undone though.) Not a ton more to say about this game but I'll say a few things.

First, I won't spoil anything, but the ending sequence was actually pretty intense, even with totally souped up gear and a ton of hearts. Which is awesome! Wish they could have found more ways late game to have more focused, intense stuff like this.

Anyway, about the game as a whole. It's pretty amazing. But with the caveats I already mentioned above. When it feels fresh and new, it's about the best there is in gaming. 10/10 easy. Getting an idea for a creation and building it and testing it out and having it actually work feels so good. But then there is a lot that just feels like more Breath of the Wild, which is... still good actually, but I played a LOT of Breath of the Wild already, so it felt a bit same old at times. And being on the same map did hurt it a bit, and I do feel like the map is actually too big (I felt this way about BOTW as well but even moreso here.)

But still, it's such a creative game. Like it contains things that make me remember why I love gaming. At times I'd just be playing around, not even thinking about specific goals or anything.

Still not sure what score to give it exactly. Definitely a high 9 but how high? Hmmmmmmmmmm.

I feel like they could get super creative on DLC for this game if they want to. But will they?

@Zero

A good question. I'm kind of surprised we've gotten zero word on DLC so far. Like, seems it would fit for a Christmastime release, no? But to be totally silent about it? Hmm.

TriforceBun said:

Even things like the four dungeons are in the same areas with the same races.

If I could change one thing about the game, it would be this. Even just rotate the locations 45 degrees on the main map, keep the races the same for all I care, but don't have them start in the EXACT same spots as last time. That was such a let down, and killed the experience for me way more than I would have expected.

I popped onto reddit to see what people were saying about this game, found a particularly insightful post, read through the poster's post history a bit (apparently they're a senior game designer), and wanted to copy/paste some of them for posterity:

sylinmino said:

Mostly, I think Totk is often going for something very different than BotW, and intentionally. Tears of the Kingdom is a much more side quest and town and arc centric game, while Breath of the Wild is much more focused on discovery and exploration. Tears of the Kingdom is jam packed with content to the point where your head actually hurts sometimes playing it from decision paralysis, while Breath of the Wild more carefully curates its content to be less dense but more manageable and meditative.

Which one prefers is up to personal preference, because they're very different experiences with so fundamentally different gameplay loops.

-----

BotW uses open space and deliberately limited views of what is possible next to make adventuring far more manageable, more serene, and devoid of decision paralysis. It's got these ups and downs of excitement and relaxation and it makes the whole thing feel very...real.

Tears of the Kingdom's density is not an improvement--it's a tradeoff. It's more jam- packed with quality content, but it also is flat out overwhelming and it would be far worse if this was a brand new map because it would cause many players' brains to shut off and run away.

So in BotW, in any one part of the world, you can spot 2 or 3 new things to do somewhere else. In Totk, that's like 12-15 things sometimes. And it is exhausting especially in the midpoint of a playthrough. My brain actively hurt so much from all the rapid stopping and starting and putting down more markers for things I'll get to later.

That's not a low. That's a subjective point of enjoyment.

-----

I literally jumped from one directly to the other. It may be a bit familiar, but it's dramatically different.

What makes Totk special is just how far it takes the idea of being a direct sequel.

The base world is the same, but the core gameplay loop is completely different. Far less focused on discovery and more on side quests and longer story arcs. World density is completely changed to turn a meditative and serene experience into one that's hyperactive with content everywhere. Means of traversal are completely different (and when BotW is all about traversal...completely overhauling the means of traversal leads to a very different experience). The time skip is executed the best in any direct sequel I've played (Witcher and Mass Effect included)--it's actually quite astounding how much care was put into having almost every single NPC (even the most minor ones most players would miss) and having them naturally progress their own individual stories over the 5 year gap. Verticality and layers are introduced into an open world setting in a completely analogue and seamless way. Groundbreaking for its format.

The evolution of the music tells a story in itself. The evolution of the world's towns and cities tell their own stories. The sky islands and the depths introduce new lore onto a predecessor that already had some really great worldbuilding to discover.

-----

- Totk has way more focus on extrinsic rewards, and how those extrinsic rewards feed into each other

-----

Breath of the Wild is absolutely a discovery-centric game. Tears of the Kingdom is not--it's a rediscovery game. It's about the side quests, how the towns develop, how the world feels less lonely now, how seemingly every single freaking minor NPC from BotW had a story that evolved and progressed over the ~5 years since the original events took place. And that's so cool to me.

But it's definitely a different game. And that's part of the reason why I love Totk even though I prefer BotW--it doesn't try to be Breath of the Wild again.

-----

Learning the sheer broken power of Zora weapons is one of my favorite parts of this game because it feels really satisfying to learn it when you get the epiphany

---

Counterpoint: The Depths are a great example that players are too compelled to 100% stuff for their own good.

I didn't try 100%ing and mostly did fully unique content in my playthrough.

And I found about 150 hours of unique content and encounters.

That's not a little, and that's not repetitive.

The Depths become unfun when you literally ignore all of the game's clear language to not try for scouring the whole thing and instead identify the patterns. But then players are like, "Nah I'm going to 100% the whole thing in one sitting" and then complain about their efforts trying to 100% it.

But do just the stuff it compels you to, and you get consistently amazing content down there.

-----

There's no point in halving the size.

The game explicitly points you to the stuff you need in the depths, provides handy entry points to the most convenient spots, and traveling between them is not tedious.

In fact, keeping it the same size as main Hyrule means there is a perfectly consistent understanding of the inversion once you deduce it.

Then, it's a super clean process for identifying where you need to go in the depths and what you need to do.

Thinking about TOTK with all of this context in mind helps me articulate exactly how I feel about it:

TOTK is very focused on characters, quests, extrinsic rewards, scripted sequences, and plot beats. I much preferred BOTW's emphasis on discovery, mindful exploration, non-linear storytelling, and a more grounded feel. You'll have a much better experience with TOTK when you swallow the pill of reading heavy dialogue and jumping directly to map markers, like the game encourages you to do; I fought this impulse because of how antithetical it felt to BOTW and my preferences, and that's where some bits of tension came in during my playthrough. To the extent it felt repetitive, it was because I was attempting to play it like BOTW, by scouring the world on foot instead of quickly navigating to important spots. And even though I became aware of this 20 hours in...

Secret_Tunnel said:

So yeah, going forward I'm going to be focusing a lot more on quests and obvious landmarks than I did in BOTW. The game seems like that's what it wants me to be doing, so that it can direct me to the specific big new things.

...I still felt such an aversion to the game's quests that I ended up exploring the old way instead again and again.

Part of this is probably subjective preference, part of this is probably me not meeting the game on its own terms. The good news is that now that I've noticed this, I can always go back with this new mindset and get enjoyment out of TOTK for what it is.

And with that perspective in mind, I'm already seeing how many things TOTK does to make its late game interesting once you stop playing it like BOTW. Battles against silver enemies aren't as mechanically interesting in the moment, but they unlock an interesting (if grindy) meta-game around finding loot, fusing it, and coming up with different builds. Meanwhile, there are still plenty of red enemies for you to treat as an Ultra Hand playground.

Retreading Hyrule for every last shrine would be a slog, but the game gives you tools to knock them all out very quickly once you adopt a more methodical mindset. The same goes for caves and lightroots.

I also noticed the other day that in the Switch news feed, Nintendo is now posting coordinates that contain interesting secrets and hidden areas. Yet another suggestion to go straight from Point A to Point B.

I do still prefer BOTW's loneliness, and it makes me nervous that TOTK is more towards the Skyward Sword side of that spectrum. Many of my issues with BOTW already stemmed from its non-lonely parts! But explicitly disentangling BOTW's and TOTK's design goals has been very clarifying, and TOTK is still the GOAT when it comes to interactivity.

@Secret_Tunnel

Interesting stuff. When I start TotK back up after my break, maybe I'll try approaching it totally differently then, yeah.

I guess my main problem is what I really want is more BotW. Not a side-quest, NPC character RPG. So I guess I'll let that dream die and go play the game Nintendo designed, flying everywhere I feel like any time I feel like! Definitely interesting concept...

I'm still playing this! I knocked out all the shrines a couple weeks ago. It gets a bit repetitive towards the end, but in general it's an awesome game-spanning puzzle. I'm surprised they had the guts to not explicitly draw attention to a particular aspect of it.

I was getting a little bored after that and figured I was done. Then I unequipped all my armor, turned on the Sheikah Sensor to pick up wells, put on the Korok mask, and have been hunting down caves. And once again, it's like a whole new game! Without the ability to absorb attacks with no consequences, every enemy encounter requires real thought and strategy. I used to just run past Like-Likes, but now they I can appreciate how they're positioning makes caves way more interesting.

Environmental effects take inventiveness to overcome. I fell into a well that had burning air, which I would normally just bypass by tediously opening the menu and equipping flamebreaker armor. But in restricting myself from doing that, the well became an actual memorable challenge where I had to keep a hydrant running that I could run back and soak myself in every few seconds.

Want to make the game fun again? Unequip your armor!

Secret_Tunnel said:

Without the ability to absorb attacks with no consequences, every enemy encounter requires real thought and strategy.

The shrines that force you into no armor and only the weapons you find inside are pretty interesting to me. They help get around the whole "now I'm way too op" feeling that happens in most every open world game.