Over the past month, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Breath of the Wild. Here’s a summary of my posts related to it.
Game Design
- BotW does an incredible job of keeping a broad range of players engaged and in flow by having multiple objectives and multiple ways to play the game.
- However, high-skilled players don’t have enough challenging content to stay occupied.
- Durability is a necessary evil for the game to engage players the way it does.
- Cooking and eating is a mechanic that adds to player engagement but needs refinement.
- What types of players will enjoy Skyward Sword more than Breath of the Wild?
Survey Results
I created a survey with various questions related to the perceived difficulty and enjoyment of BotW. Here are the results:
- I found that 84% of players play Zora domain first and the Gerudo boss is the hardest. Here is the more detailed post on boss order and difficulty.
- Not surprisingly, the earlier players get the master sword, the easier the dungeons are. This is not only due to the Master Sword’s power but also because it’s a heuristic of how skilled the player is. We know this because players with the master sword also find dungeons easier. Here’s more detail on how the master sword impacts difficulty. I also mention the difficulty of the final dungeon and boss.
- Most people prefer the Zora main quest, but I found that players who played Gerudo first tend to like it better. Additionally, more skilled players tend to enjoy the divine beast quests less possibly because they are more bored of the game. Here’s more detail on players favorite main quests along with how player skill and dungeon order impacts their enjoyment.
Here’s a link to the raw results and here is the Excel spreadsheet I used to analyze the data. I learned things from making this survey:
- Plan out questions that you are curious about and use those to drive the questions you ask in the survey. Think about how you will use the responses to answer your questions. Don’t rush it.
- Let someone else read your questions first to see if they make sense.
- Proofread (I spelled fourth and third wrong). I blame the painkillers I was on when I made the survey…
- Learn something besides Excel. Facetgrid and factorplot are better for showing more combinations of variables. The Python library Seaborn is something to look into as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn about these things until I had already done most of my analysis.
- Small sample size is a limitation of my analysis.
