A reader is so frustrated with how big Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom is he feels it’s impossible to play properly while being a working father.
Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom has been out for over a month now and I feel like I’ve got absolutely nowhere with it. I’ve done three dungeons and unlocked their sages and yet I’ve barely ever visited the Depths or the Sky Islands, which I thought were going to be the main focus of the game. I get the feeling I probably could’ve beaten the game already if I’d only done the story missions, but that goes against the style of the game so much that it would completely miss the point.
I enjoyed Zelda: Breath Of The Wild but did think it was a bit too big and probably would’ve been better if it had been a bit more condensed and streamlined. It wasn’t a major complaint though and I happily beat the game, but with Tears Of The Kingdom I’ve just given up. I seem to be getting nowhere and every time I decide to do something I get sidetracked by a hundred other things until I forget what I was even meant to be doing!
I’m sure some people see this as a positive and if I were a teenager, with all the free time in the world to devote to the game, I’m sure I’d feel the same way but I’m not. I’m a working dad and I get maybe a couple of hours a day to play the game, and not every day. I’m sure that’s not unusual and yet the game does almost nothing to help out people that don’t have much time, to the point where I have just given up.
This has been a general trend in games for a while, that I feel began when publishers started to realise that single-player games were still a draw, but they worried that people wouldn’t spend full price on them unless they offered plenty of value for money.
That’s all well and good in theory but so many of them don’t have any respect for your time and are filled with needless bloat.
It’s exactly the same problem as with many multiplayer games, where they all think that not only are you not going to play any other games, but you have literally nothing else to do with your time but devote it to them.
Tears Of The Kingdom is different because it takes the map of Breath Of The Wild and adds so much onto it. So you’ve got a game that was already probably too big and then it makes itself twice as big as that.
It does seem odd to complain about such things but for me, at least, it doesn’t matter how good or big a game is if I can never appreciate it properly. It’s not even a question purely of time but of comfort.
If I’m rushing to complete a quest in the one or two hours I’ve got, before I forget what I’m doing, then I haven’t got time to go on all the side quests and diversions and exploration along the way, that are meant to be the games’ main appeal.
I usually laugh and roll my eyes at people that say they took a week off work to play a game but suddenly I understand why. I genuinely think that would be the only way I could have enjoyed Tears Of The Kingdom, or played it in a way that I would’ve wanted to.
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For now, I’ve just given it up. I’m going to play Final Fantasy 16 instead and then when I’m finished that, which I’m sure will take a while, I’ll see if I’ll return, but I really don’t know.
My biggest fear now is that Final Fantasy will have the same problem and I’ll realise that video games have finally priced me out, not because I cannot afford the money but because I can’t afford the time.
By reader Goldman
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