I think, to a certain extent, the sense of comfort you describe was what they were going for. In Tears of the Kingdom, you have a list of clear goals, and many of them are easy to achieve. This person wants you to bring them ten mushrooms. That person wants to bring them ten eggs. And these NPCs are usually standing right outside the place where you can get whatever they need.
I feel like Breath of the Wild was more subtle about its fetch quests. To give an example, there was that one guy in Hateno Village who wanted you to get ten grasshoppers for him, but he had a whole story about why he wanted them and why he couldn't leave his post to get them himself and why he was delusional for thinking this was a good idea in the first place. Like, there was an entire drama with multiple characters surrounding a fetch quest intended to teach you how to find a semi-rare item.
Meanwhile, Tears of the Kingdom will just have someone standing outside a cave being like, "There are mushrooms inside this cave. But I don't want to go inside the cave. I'll give you $20 if you go get me mushrooms." And more often than not, you already have the mushrooms, so you don't even need to go inside the cave.
"Lazy" isn't quite the word I'd use for what's going on with the sidequests in Tears of the Kingdom, but there's a lot of hand holding. After the brilliant subtlety of Breath of the Wild, the grocery list fetch quests feel regressive and video game-y, if that makes sense.
Then again, apparently the producer and director (Aonuma and Fujibayashi) designed Tears of the Kingdom while thinking about how overwhelmed and stressed out their sons seem to be in real life, so maybe it made sense for them to create a working model of how to set and achieve simple goals.
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Date: 2023-05-30 01:23 pm (UTC)I feel like Breath of the Wild was more subtle about its fetch quests. To give an example, there was that one guy in Hateno Village who wanted you to get ten grasshoppers for him, but he had a whole story about why he wanted them and why he couldn't leave his post to get them himself and why he was delusional for thinking this was a good idea in the first place. Like, there was an entire drama with multiple characters surrounding a fetch quest intended to teach you how to find a semi-rare item.
Meanwhile, Tears of the Kingdom will just have someone standing outside a cave being like, "There are mushrooms inside this cave. But I don't want to go inside the cave. I'll give you $20 if you go get me mushrooms." And more often than not, you already have the mushrooms, so you don't even need to go inside the cave.
"Lazy" isn't quite the word I'd use for what's going on with the sidequests in Tears of the Kingdom, but there's a lot of hand holding. After the brilliant subtlety of Breath of the Wild, the grocery list fetch quests feel regressive and video game-y, if that makes sense.
Then again, apparently the producer and director (Aonuma and Fujibayashi) designed Tears of the Kingdom while thinking about how overwhelmed and stressed out their sons seem to be in real life, so maybe it made sense for them to create a working model of how to set and achieve simple goals.