BotW best parts are, undoubtely and dogmatically so, the first 30 hours or so, where resources are scarce, encounters are always somewhat challenging, and venturing in unexplored lands always pose some dilemmas (frost/hot/burning areas). After a certain point, food become way too abundant, absolutely trivializing every kind of encounter or challenge, and armor/hp become also absurdly OP in a way where nothing can actually challenge you.
In fact, it's a testament to how absurdly good those first hours are if the game still feel amazing despite losing a lot of its luster in the latter half, where combat appearances become just boring A-fest spam with 0 risk or tactics in it with infinite food to recover to boot, and different enviroments just become a matter of changing your clothes or spamming any kind of overpowered food to make up for it.
I absolutely understand the need for the feeling of progression in any given game, but the way BotW do it is extremely ruinous to its core experience, that of wandering around and always feel challenged in a way or another by the exploration. Its overabundance of loots also become just a way to infinitely stack your inventory with OP healing items as well. This is a kind of progression that is suited for something like Disgaea or Diablo where you can increase the challenge constantly to make up for your number-crunching OP-ness, or even something like minecraft where you can use all the things you pick to effectively create things and give a sense to the grind.
The kind of progression BotW present also make so that monsters have to become HP sponges later on, because due to your near-infinite health pool (combined with the food), they have to at least consume a bit of your weapons AND rely on your eventual mistakes to force you to consume some of your foods.
Monsters upgrading being not only HP-upgrades but more of speed-upgrades of their patterns would make both more sense lore wise, and play better in the way of progression -> knowing patterns -> being more able to react to them faster , instead of progression -> farming items. Another consequence would be making contextual way to take them out more effective, like explosive barrels which do trivial damage to blue and above monsters, or boulders from above, as well as pushing them off cliffs. A lot of creative approachs to camps tend to be worthless later on because of the huge HP pools of said monsters, which make trying to separate them or stealth kill them impossible because they have too many hp to effectively kill them fast enough to avoid all the camp ganging up on you. The game even recognize this, making tower patrols blue at most, so you can always sniper them from afar with a decent bow.
I've found myself restarting the game multiple times only to re-experience those magic first 20-30 hours where every encounter or challenge has you taking in consideration your experience, your weapons/armor/foods, the weather (raining is a huge factor when sneaking in big camps and make for some of the best and most rewarding experiences), and the enviromental helps like barrels and boulders to take out monsters safely.
All this said, it would be a relatively easy fix for the game to actually retain a lot of its scarceness-feel and to keep you a bit more challenged even in the later parts of it.
First of all, armor need to be fixed in how it scale. Having armor that reduce any and all damage to 1/4 of an hearth except for silver lynel special attacks is a joke. A simple solution would be to make so that armor can never reduce damage below half or a quarter of the original value. This way, 24 damage (6 heart) weapons would still do 3 or 1 .5 hearts no matter the armor you get.
Optionally, armor shouldn't give you max resistance to cold/heath/burn by itself, forcing you to always keep potions/foods in consideration for harsher areas.
Food is absolutely, disgustingly broken, and in general, it's way too easy to amass. An easy fix is to limit consistently the amount of it you can carry. 3 pages is way, way too much. A row of 5 is more like it, possibly upgradable if you want to decrease the challenge. I am artificially playing limiting myself to 2 slots, and i find myself constantly using the raw foods i pick around, giving much more sense to my full pages of ingredients.
This is a change i would've really liked in the hard mode, or some other food limiting mechanic, instead of monster which are even more of HP sponges.
To keep enviromental approaches to combat viable (boulders, barrels, falling metal boxes, putting camps on fire etc...), HP for monsters shouldn't scale nowhere as much as it does now, with better monsters having betters stats other than just HP (Faster animations/movement/reaction, better aim, better AI, more damage, ability to parry etc...).
Monster parts and their drops in general shouldn't be as common as they are now. Make them rarer to avoid just cluttering your inventory and making the game all about picking up thing constantly. Improve the reward in chests camps if anything. This, combined with limited food slots, would give a meaning to your ingredient tab without needing a cooking pot, and would also make cooking pots in the wilderness much more of a reward than they actually are, since you can just stack yourself in a city right now.
I find it a bit frustrating that the absolutely amazing first parts of the game get so diluted and ruined by you becoming a walking wal-mart food store with armor that make you effectively invulnerable and hp bars in the 40+s of hearts. Past zeldas had basically little progression, but had 0 challenge from the start aside from puzzles. BotW has like the perfect amount of challenge, adjustable to your likes from where you want to go and what you want to do, but give you so much progression that the challenge after a while is even less than traditional "easy-mode" zeldas.
Personally i can't wait for the next zelda where they learn to do progression right (lot of ideas in the right place, like the ability to sell your heart containers which was made with people who like challenge in mind for sure), with the challenging exploration of BotW to go with it. I may as well stop playing right after that.
In fact, it's a testament to how absurdly good those first hours are if the game still feel amazing despite losing a lot of its luster in the latter half, where combat appearances become just boring A-fest spam with 0 risk or tactics in it with infinite food to recover to boot, and different enviroments just become a matter of changing your clothes or spamming any kind of overpowered food to make up for it.
I absolutely understand the need for the feeling of progression in any given game, but the way BotW do it is extremely ruinous to its core experience, that of wandering around and always feel challenged in a way or another by the exploration. Its overabundance of loots also become just a way to infinitely stack your inventory with OP healing items as well. This is a kind of progression that is suited for something like Disgaea or Diablo where you can increase the challenge constantly to make up for your number-crunching OP-ness, or even something like minecraft where you can use all the things you pick to effectively create things and give a sense to the grind.
The kind of progression BotW present also make so that monsters have to become HP sponges later on, because due to your near-infinite health pool (combined with the food), they have to at least consume a bit of your weapons AND rely on your eventual mistakes to force you to consume some of your foods.
Monsters upgrading being not only HP-upgrades but more of speed-upgrades of their patterns would make both more sense lore wise, and play better in the way of progression -> knowing patterns -> being more able to react to them faster , instead of progression -> farming items. Another consequence would be making contextual way to take them out more effective, like explosive barrels which do trivial damage to blue and above monsters, or boulders from above, as well as pushing them off cliffs. A lot of creative approachs to camps tend to be worthless later on because of the huge HP pools of said monsters, which make trying to separate them or stealth kill them impossible because they have too many hp to effectively kill them fast enough to avoid all the camp ganging up on you. The game even recognize this, making tower patrols blue at most, so you can always sniper them from afar with a decent bow.
I've found myself restarting the game multiple times only to re-experience those magic first 20-30 hours where every encounter or challenge has you taking in consideration your experience, your weapons/armor/foods, the weather (raining is a huge factor when sneaking in big camps and make for some of the best and most rewarding experiences), and the enviromental helps like barrels and boulders to take out monsters safely.
All this said, it would be a relatively easy fix for the game to actually retain a lot of its scarceness-feel and to keep you a bit more challenged even in the later parts of it.
First of all, armor need to be fixed in how it scale. Having armor that reduce any and all damage to 1/4 of an hearth except for silver lynel special attacks is a joke. A simple solution would be to make so that armor can never reduce damage below half or a quarter of the original value. This way, 24 damage (6 heart) weapons would still do 3 or 1 .5 hearts no matter the armor you get.
Optionally, armor shouldn't give you max resistance to cold/heath/burn by itself, forcing you to always keep potions/foods in consideration for harsher areas.
Food is absolutely, disgustingly broken, and in general, it's way too easy to amass. An easy fix is to limit consistently the amount of it you can carry. 3 pages is way, way too much. A row of 5 is more like it, possibly upgradable if you want to decrease the challenge. I am artificially playing limiting myself to 2 slots, and i find myself constantly using the raw foods i pick around, giving much more sense to my full pages of ingredients.
This is a change i would've really liked in the hard mode, or some other food limiting mechanic, instead of monster which are even more of HP sponges.
To keep enviromental approaches to combat viable (boulders, barrels, falling metal boxes, putting camps on fire etc...), HP for monsters shouldn't scale nowhere as much as it does now, with better monsters having betters stats other than just HP (Faster animations/movement/reaction, better aim, better AI, more damage, ability to parry etc...).
Monster parts and their drops in general shouldn't be as common as they are now. Make them rarer to avoid just cluttering your inventory and making the game all about picking up thing constantly. Improve the reward in chests camps if anything. This, combined with limited food slots, would give a meaning to your ingredient tab without needing a cooking pot, and would also make cooking pots in the wilderness much more of a reward than they actually are, since you can just stack yourself in a city right now.
I find it a bit frustrating that the absolutely amazing first parts of the game get so diluted and ruined by you becoming a walking wal-mart food store with armor that make you effectively invulnerable and hp bars in the 40+s of hearts. Past zeldas had basically little progression, but had 0 challenge from the start aside from puzzles. BotW has like the perfect amount of challenge, adjustable to your likes from where you want to go and what you want to do, but give you so much progression that the challenge after a while is even less than traditional "easy-mode" zeldas.
Personally i can't wait for the next zelda where they learn to do progression right (lot of ideas in the right place, like the ability to sell your heart containers which was made with people who like challenge in mind for sure), with the challenging exploration of BotW to go with it. I may as well stop playing right after that.
