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TOTK: Does it make BOTW obsolete?

is BOTW worth playing after the release of TOTK?


  • Total voters
    186

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
Playing this game a lot, it's a very expanded and indepth expansion to the original BOTW with the sky islands, underground and zonai tech. But despite all that there's still a ton of similarity in the overall gameplay loop, world, art style and music, to such an extreme extent where it feels like an update to botw, and kind of making it a pointless game to play.

However some people online actually dislike TOTK to such an extent where they prefer BOTW, for reasons such as thinking its too bloated and not as simple as the first, plus a slightly more linear progression (you can't just immediately go to the final boss after leaving the sky islands for example)

So I want opinions here. Does TOTK make BOTW obsolete to you or do you think there's enough unique aspects about BOTW to make it worth playing/replaying in 2024?
 

TNT Sheep

Member
Funny, I have returned to ToTK over the last few days and I was thinking the same thing. If I had to play one of them only once it would be ToTK.

For the people that like repeat playthroughs though there is some merit in playing BoTW instead of replaying ToTK. You have a hard mode in the DLC, your toolset is different and more limited forcing you to be creative in other ways, the main 'dungeons' while not as good are still different and at least worth playing, the master cycle zero is a fun optional item.

But yeah, besides the aforementioned and being less bloated/more replayable I struggle to come up with much else.
 
Not really, TOTK is basically BOTW 2.0, so many improvements over the original game.

I could imagine that they do some kind of ultimate edition of TOTK for switch 2, where they implement some quests of BOTW to TOTK.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
TOTK almost makes the ground map useless, so the exploration sense I felt in BOTW is almost all gone in TOTK. So much freedom vertically that it becomes almost like cheating. You can almost go anywhere without the original's pathing into the canyons/mountains/forest, etc.

IMO its a downgrade. Flying in the sky ruined it.
 

Robb

Gold Member
If you can only play one play tears. But both are great games.
This.

To me it pretty much comes down to the fact that there are different powers in each and therefore different puzzles to experience. And Zelda is all about the puzzles.
 
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ADiTAR

ידע זה כוח
If you already played BOTW, no. If you didn't, yes.

There's no real reason to play it if you've played TOTK, it's a much better game. BOTW is just magical for first time play.
 
No way, I prefer Botw way more. Story was way less interesting, most of the world is the same and the new underground zone was only interesting for about 5 minutes. Same goes for the added well dungeons...

The only positive was the construction stuff and even then it was more fun to experiment with than actually use for quest reasons
 

diffusionx

Gold Member
I feel like TOTK is the game they would have made if they had "unlimited" time to make it. I wouldn't go back to BOTW, as amazing as that game was in 2017.
 

IAmRei

Member
no, in the contrary, after this run, i will return to BoTW. they both have different charm, though QoL in ToTK sometimes makes anything annoying in BoTW seems better. but, i love them both. GoAT <3
 

IAmRei

Member
There's Zonai devices in TOTK that trivialize the exploration. It can become boring just flying to all the shrines and lightroots rather than figuring out how to get there on foot.
I rarely use Zonai, unless its mandatory. i mostly ... walk, or hover : ))
 

Deerock71

Member
Your title of the thread and the question asked on the poll could produce opposite answers that mean the same thing. So I'm voting a solid maybe.
 

sigmaZ

Member
Their masterworks. jk BotW served as a good reason to get a Switch. Totk served as a good reason to a Yuzu.
 
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Sakura

Member
BotW is the better game, in my opinion, so no.
The crafting in TotK is great, but the underground is quite boring, the sky world is boring, the story is much worse than BotW, and the cool crafting largely breaks the game. I think TotK is a better sandbox, but I am looking for more than that in a Zelda game.
 

Mozzarella

Member
Yes, aside from the puzzle shrines i believe TOTK was an improvement in everything else.
Also what a tricky poll, i voted without looking at the question lol, next time please try to keep them consistent.
 
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yamaci17

Member
totk feels like what they actually had in their mind while making botw but did not have resources/time to complete it

but that gives botw its own special charm... exploration is more rewarding and valuable and an "experience" in botw due to that. totk rewards you with tech that can make exploring easy. it has to, because its a game that you can literally go in skies and go underground, naturally it has insane scalability in terms of exploration. which makes the regular map exploration quite easy
 
BOTW is the better game. I beat it and all the DLC on Master Mode 100% and it was the most difficult/satisfying Nintendo game I've ever played.

I was initially blown away by TOTK, and the game is a software engineering marvel, but the amount of abilities available makes the game easy as dogshit.

BOTW had a neverending sense of wonder that TOTK could never capture because it shared the same map. And the sense of exploration was absent in TOTK because you couldn't walk 5 feet in any direction without getting hit over the head with another cookie cutter quest. I also think the "Dungeons" in TOTK were far less imaginative and far easier than the Divine Beasts in BOTW, mainly because you can teleport through ceilings and build bridges and build flying machines to cheese your way through pretty much every challenge in the game.

tldr; BOTW is the 🐐
 

IAmRei

Member
contrary to viral thingy, i mostly walk. and its literally walk, climbing, glide, exploring a lot, building my own imagination with ruins, villages, people, even people dress giving me some sense to think, why they dress like that. BoTW and ToTK is my immersive game. and i'm kind of role playing as Archeologist or Historian, stumbled upon new world. and Sky islands invites me more to explore. truly masterpiece...
 
I enjoyed both. Can't go wrong with either. If you enjoy the tears of the kingdom formula why wouldn't you go back and play breath of the wild? Like seriously, it's another zelda game just sitting there waiting for your time. Do it. Your other choice is to wait another 4-6 years for the next zelda to release.
 
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No. BotW will always have its place as one of the greats because it is a unique experience and just because it shares the same geography with TotK, those lands obviously provide a very contrasting journey.

TotK should have been called "Tiers of the Kingdom" just to give the unaware an idea of the almost three times amount of sandbox.

The first game was about survival and adventure and freedom, the second a lego-like playground with better tools and a potent story conclusion. They're both two of my favorite games of all-time and would never consider BotW unnecessary.
 

Kataploom

Gold Member
They both are games that are meant to play differently, none is a substitute for the other, UNLESS you wanted from BOTW something it wasn't to begin with
 
If you can only play one play tears. But both are great games.
I see them as sort of a Part I and Part II of the same era from the same World using the same combat system, mechanics and characters.

The fact they’ve said what’s next is totally new only reinforces that to me.

Because the next 3D Zelda is so far off they’d be absolutely mental not to do a double pack for the Switch 2 launch running at 4k/60fps with better textures, foliage and draw distance. An easy $100 double pack lol.
 

Neff

Member
It's better in many ways, but I think BotW distributed its content more evenly and logically. With three layers of game world versus BotW's one (four if you count the overworld's cave network), TotK is almost too big, so much so that I still haven't finished it, and I'm the guy who beat BotW four times. In BotW it's hard not to discover something by simply walking, or discover something while you're discovering something. But in TotK it's not uncommon to be walking. driving or flying for relatively long periods of time through environments without surprises.

Amazing game but I felt and still feel that using the original map and simply building from it was a mistake.
 
TotK shows how much farther Nintendo can develop a game with better technology than the Wii u architecture it was built on. And whatever they have coming up next will be even better.
 

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
No. The dungeons and the story behind them are still interesting. The tutorial in BOTW is less confusing for newcomers, and the shrine puzzles are overall more interesting.
TOTK is the better game, but it doesn’t make BOTW completely redundant.
 

Kenpachii

Member
When i started playing totk it felt like it makes botw completely obselete but when i finished the game i actually prefered the first one after a while. The reason for that is, its basically a more chill version with being more straight forwards where the overworld actually feels like a world instead of feeling useless as u constantly jump out of the sky anyway or launch yourself and fly through the air.
 
I am sure I am in the minority, but I actually prefer BOTW. I didn’t like the creative mechanic in TOTK. I think TOTK, is a great game that enhances everything that BOTW does. But, I feel it leads to a bloated game. I bounced off TOTK pretty fast. Maybe if it was saved for a Switch 2 launch game, I may have felt differently, idk. As it stands now, I prefer BOTW by a wide margin. (Warts and all).
 

Hudo

Member
I thought so as well too at first. But BotW is far more chill in both how its open-world presents and paces itself for the player and how the complexity-curve goes than TotK. TotK goes all-in fairly quickly but deliberately so. Because the emphasis is on the player crafting his/her own solution instead of discovering one.
 

Thaedolus

Gold Member
I’ve played through BotW like 3 or 4 times now, I can’t really see myself going back after TotK. I’ve seen it all and the mechanics of TotK add so much more IMO. I’m just waiting on Switch 2 details to decide on how I’m going to play it again: officially upscaled/higher FPS or emulated. I’d prefer to just slot my cart into my Switch 2 and have BC work with upscaling, but Nintendo does stupid things sometimes
 
Kind of. I could play BotW and enjoy it again, but it would be hard to go back. TotK does everything better in just about every regard and in the future when I'm feeling that itch for adventure I'll pick TotK.

It's kind of like Doom and Doom Eternal, There are aspects of Doom 2016 that I like more than Eternal, mainly the way the story is told and the more straightforward approach to levels, but the way Eternal plays and the way weapons have been better balanced and movement capabilities increased makes going back harder.

Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint, I love the world of Wildlands more, but the animations and gameplay of Breakpoint is so much better that it's harder to go back.
 
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