The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an exciting open-world game, and my first foray into a discovery-heavy genre. BoTW has a couple of cool dynamics that make it one of my favorites, but the best is fight- one of my favorites is the weapon degradation. Each weapon has a certain durability, and will eventually break(save for one, the most narratively significant sword in the game). This mechanic makes the challenges of battles so much more intense – when the resources are finite, the game has to become more about strategy than blindly swinging (my previous favorite method of approaching fights) and the stakes become much higher.
Another mechanic of the game is that weapons are found in chests or earned in fights, and rarer weapons are found in unique places, which encourages players to explore the furthest reaches of the game map to replace their lost weapons. This, in conjunction with the weapon degradation mechanic, adds to the dynamic of exploration by forcing players to go searching for new weapons when their old ones break. The game also has a mechanic that makes different regions better or worse suited to certain weapons – for example, ice enemies are easily defeated by fire weapons and vice versa. This further encourages exploration and engaging in battles to get rarer or more suitable weapons for specific game regions. Not only that, but I think it adds to the excitement of finding exactly the weapon you need, or earning a particularly useful weapon after a hard-fought battle.
