Quick note. I've seen a lot of comments talking about me counting color variants of Bokoblins as separate enemies: to those people I would suggest to continue watching the video, because I literally make the point that it doesn't work like that and then re-do the math counting every variant of Bokoblin as one enemy like you want
To be fair, Skyward sword felt lacking in enemy variety because, despite the count, it seems like 2/3 of enemy encounters involve bokoblins or deku babas. The problem also comes down to how well the enemies are actually distributed in the world.
That's absolutely right. What you are getting at is the diversity of enemies, not the meir variety of enemies. A game with 10 enimes where you see 1 of them 90% of the time has the same variety as a game where there are 10 that you each see 10% of the time. But the second game has a higher diversity of enemies.
before watchng the vid i will say this, botw,totk enemy variety isnt awful because of the total number, but because of the enemy ratio with the size of the map and their distribution as well as the lenght of the game in a traditional zelda game like albw everytime you get o a new area or dungeon you will have new enemy, you are constantly being shown newthings for 30 hours, in the botw games, your spending 100+ hours in a game where every area have the same lineup of enemies, and every dungeon too, (except gerudo which have redead and molduga for some reason, every area should have this kinda mixup) so no matter how you play you are gonna see 90% of all the enemies at the 25 percent of your playthrough done, wherehas in every other games you are served new foes untilthe very end of the game duration
This A game with 30 enemies (and I mean core enemies, reskins don't count one way or another), where you spend a roughly equivalent amount of time fighting each one, with maybe one or two outliers is much, much more diverse feeling than a game that has 60 enemies, but of those 60, you spend 90% of the game fighting 4 of them, with many of the remaining 56 having numbers of appearance you can count on one hand. What also contributes is the diversity of combat approaches. If you have 30 enemies that all rush at you, and die if you jump on them, the nuances of whatever one might have over another start to feel trivial, compared to even if you have only 10 enemies, but each one has a totally unique approach, that ends up feeling much more different. Maybe only one can be jumped on, another needs to be flipped with explosives, another one only exposes a weak point you need to quickly strike after a combo, and so on.
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 100% agree. Simply counting truly different enemy types and judging by that alone is horribly oversimplifying enemy variety. Good enemy variety is just as much about evenly spreading combat time around the full roster, as the size of the roster itself. A big roster is of little value if it's extremely heavily weighted toward a small minority of the total options available. And on that note, Breath and Tears are therefore extra bad for variety because combat time is so heavily weighted toward the exactly three enemy types of bokoblins, moblins, and lizalfos. Which are then even worse still because they're all fought pretty similarly and do similar things anyway, and like you said, diversity of combat interactions is a major factor in experienced variety too; visually different enemies don't really count for much variety if you ultimately fight them the same way, with the same tactics, etc anyway. It'd be a huge pain to actually do, but to truly measure enemy variety meaningfully across Zelda games, you'd need to watch entire playthroughs of them, and clock how much combat time is spent per enemy type. AND THEN come up with a different enemy type accounting method that doesn't simply measure total enemy types and weigh all types equally, but factors in actual effective practical difference between enemies on top of that, so "differenter" enemies yield higher variety values per minute than less functionally different enemies. Only when you have specific time measurements showing how much each enemy type accounts for total combat play time, further modified by actual meaningful variety of enemy design, could you truly, meaningfully measure enemy variety: The amount of total variety that a player feels in actual gameplay practice.
@@Alloveckwith this logic, most enemies in Zelda games suck because they all do mostly similar things. OoT has slugs and bats you just whack when they’re close, and wolfos, lizalfos and knights where you just wait and attack for. Taking variety to the extreme you are would make most games crumble to pieces. BOTW and TOTK are better in regards to them having more enemies that are actually interesting to fight. Bokoblins, Moblins, Lizalfos, Gibdos, Guardians or Gloom Hands/Phantom Ganon, Zonai droids, overworld bosses, Yiga Soldiers and Brutes, Lynels, Wizrobes. Not to mention the bosses themselves become overworld bosses in the depths. All of these you fight often, even if the most common are the 3 you listed. All of these do far more and are far more complex and interesting to fight than almost any enemy in past Zelda games by leaps and bounds, even over some full on dungeon bosses. With different weapons to boot. That alone gives the game more variety than past Zelda games, as it means you do far less different in past games vs enemies in general, even if they technically have more or a “better spread”. Yeah, I’m having so much fun smacking the 50th basic enemy that barely attacks in OoT, like all the others that do the same exact thing 😂
@@Random1567 If by slugs you mean Leevers, I do agree they're similar to bats/keese, that's why it was so weird to me that BotW+TotK didn't have Leevers lol. And yeah, Wolfos, Lizalfos and Stalfos are all just movement and timing variants on the same type of enemy, I suspect that's why they they reused the "-fos" suffix in the first place. But those slight behavior variations ended up feeling like enough because they're so cosmetically distinct, and could each be used to reinforce totally different themes since they were so much rarer. In my opinion, the enemies fighting so similarly isn't actually a problem at all when they're spread out and not all blurring together. And although I usually don't blame the game's scale, that all plays a factor for this particular issue too. If you fought 100 OoT Lizalfos, it would get old _way_ faster than fighting 100 BotW Lizalfos would, especially if you're low-level, when their fights are still quite interesting... but you _won't_ fight 100 OoT Lizalfos, you won't even fight that many if you combine all the -foses in the game. BOTW's scale doesn't doom it by any means, it just makes their enemy design vulnerable to a new problem they didn't really have to worry about before. And that new problem makes cosmetic variety and area theming for enemies more useful than ever. The more distinct mobs can be from one another, and the more often the enemies you encounter look bespoke for the area, the less able it is to all blur together. I think TotK took *good* steps in the right direction to address that problem, especially with the bosses, but you still aren't encountering the same visual variety that you were in past titles, even if the variety we're missing is fairly shallow. The same handful of monster species still populate all of Hyrule the way only the occasional bat or skeleton did before, even though that's not the case for other animal species. A lot of people cite Elden Ring as a comparison, and I think the way it handled enemy variety and theming (though not scaling) would make perfect sense for wide-open-world Zelda.
switch titles had a very copy/paste formula. The biggest issue for me is that you see every kind of enemy everywhere, rather than distinguishing certain enemies by segregating them to different areas/progression points.
Pretty much yeah. Visiting new areas comes with the excitement of finding new things. But when you realize it's the same type of encounters everywhere that really takes the wind out of your sails. I don't think it's about reaching some number or quota, but just having enough enemies to make various areas more distinct. Heck- totk made gibdos almost exclusive to the gerudo region and even though it's just 1-2 enemies, I feel like that did wonders for setting the gerudo region apart.
Also, TotK is worse with this because it's easily like twice as big as BotW. Yes, they added Gleeoks and Frox, but now there are 96 Stone Talus and 96 Hinox! It's so disappointing to explore the depths and just find more of the same enemies
I mean so are the n64 games and yet all I hear are their praises, GameCube Zelda is also very similar although they did say that they just reused the formula. Skyward sword is the only unique 3D Zelda
it would be cool if the basic enemy types could have regional or biome-specific variants… like perhaps the Bokoblins in the snowy regions had fur, or just wore heavy coats, and the ones in the desert worse robes, etc 🤷🏻♂️
It's kind of like a variation of something one of the BotW developers (I assume Aonuma?) said in an interview, when asked why it isn't possible to pet the dogs. They wanted to reduce the number of actions that have a one-off use, in favour of making actions which are versatile and are used in many different situations Similarly, they reduced the number of enemies that are used in just one area in favour of making enemies which they can re-use in lots of different situations
My biggest issue is lack of UNIQUE enemies. Gerudo has two…no other region does I believe. Think freezards in Hebra, buzz blobs in Faron, dodongos in Eldin, etc.
I agree! It's not that the variety is small, it's that every variety can be found almost everywhere, sometimes in the same immediate area! And then you have the encampments in the Depths, they should have at least created unique themes such as "ice-only enemies", "all enemies have bombs" etc.
The biggest problem I had with not just enemy variety but the games in general is that once you’ve seen everything there is to see and there’s nothing else that’s new to experience, the game becomes a massive chore.
There are a couple more, such as the new flying enemies mostly around Hebra and high elevations, the ice lizalfos in snowy areas, horriblins and like likes in caves etc, but still, the lack of enemy variety and most importantly the lack of interesting or diverse movesets is still a problem
The lower enemy variety in BotW and TotK didn't bother me most of the time. There were, however, two points in TotK where I was a bit annoyed. One was that the mixed mobs of 'blins and Lizalfos started to get boring and I would have preferred to encounter more groups that were just one of those. The more specific instance was the whole pirate event. From early on you are told about those terrible pirates terrorizing Lurelin and driving people to leave the area. And then you go there and the pirates are ... the same monsters that you have already been fighting over and over. Disappointing.
I was expecting them to be Gerudo pirates as a callback to Majora's Mask and to give them an excuse to make Gerudo more common throughout the wider game world.
@@mythmaker6554 Idk, something about fighting Gerudo (Essentially just humans) in the BoTW engine feels extremely cursed. You can do so much goofy nonsense to enemies in these games that I just can't imagine Link doing to actual people.
The biggest disappointment was dungeons not having their own unique enemies that you can’t fight anywhere else. Nearly every Zelda game used to follow this, but now it’s “oh great, another soldier construct”
Zelda 2 I think was great with this, since not only are there enemy categories unique to palaces, but there are _also_ enemy categories that are unique to the final palace. I don't think any other Zelda game leaned into the idea of "Final dungeon enemies" as hard as Zelda 2 did
@@ironencepersonal9634 I have 0 attatchment to Zelda 2 but for some reason seeing the by far most clowned on game in the franchise acknowledged as not only doing something well but the best feels really wholesome to me.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Twilight Princess to me is the GOAT of dungeons and a large part of it is because they all have unique identities and theming, and the enemy roster for each dungeon is a HUGE reason for that. But in botw and totk that just simply isnt the case so the dungeons don’t stand out that well.
@@dpackerman4203 Twilight Princess's dungeons are completely brainless winding hallways with shallow "bring x to y" puzzles and "run up and slash away" enemies, and you just like them because they "look cool"?
I think another reason that the enemy variety is so low in BOTW/TOTK is that the enemies are, at least compared to skyward sword or echoes of wisdom, much more complex. They interact with the world, they pick up items, they eat sleep and hunt, sometimes they can even pick each other up and throw them. In general they do more than just walking around a set area waiting for a fight
Yeah but, People making these clickbaity titles and the dumb people that believe it aren’t the type to understand nuance. BotW is an infinitely more complex game by all accounts, including on enemy behavior, yet they will just compare the raw numbers and ignore all the context
@@Indigo_1001c9msider that those things for aesthetic aren't enough to compensate for how bland the enemies are, and for the size of the map and length of the game, having only 3 enemies no matter where you go makes each encounter predictable and uninteresting.
@@Indigo_1001but does the complexity even matter when there's only 3 of them? I personally don't think so. Many other games have had way more complex enemy moves while still having a ton more variety in monsters
Considering black bokoblins and red bokoblins to be different its like what mobile games do when they advertise themselves as having 1000+ enemies, which are the same but with different colors. Imo all of those should count as one enemy, they have the same attacks, same animations, same everything except they take more hits to kill (wow)
I agree with this take. More health and a new skin does not an enemy make. Maybe if the alt colors did more stuff different it would be justifiable, but they are effectively the same enemy. I'd honestly only count 62 truly unique enemies in BOTW, which only puts it barely above WW as per the video. The lack of enemies is a problem, and only accentuates the fact that Zelda team squandered the open world. The enemies just drive players to disengage from gameplay by being so repetitive that players often skip combats altogether, which says a lot.
Black bokoblins are actually better in combat slightly, with I think a couple new moves and they also move out of your line of sight when you draw your bow on them It's a small change but nice I agree they shouldn't really count as "separate enemies"
@@raze2012_There’s still more complexity than what the video presents. I would argue that things like Keese and Fire Keese are separate enemies, whereas red bokoblins and blue bokoblins are not. But that would take some pretty substantial rules to determine when similar enemies are counted as separate and when they’re not, so it’s fine the way he did it.
It's especially frustrating because it really seems like certain caves, areas of the depths and ruins would've been the perfect place to encounter Skulltula and perhaps entire nests of Skullwalltula enemies that cover the dark ceilings and walls, laying still in the darkness but then skittering about when we shine a light on them... Also having a giant Armagohma-style world boss would've been great in certain areas, but alas... : (
Yeah, one would think that because of Gohma in Totk there would be some spider like enemies in its dungeon to match the boss, but we didn't even get that...
it also doesn;t help in BOTW and TOTK that most of the enemies are "Humanoid with weapon" Bokoblin, Lizolfos, Stal, Yiga are all basically the same and are fought exactly the same. Sure the smaller Yiga have a different combat style that makes them stand out. but all the others just feel like reskins of the same basic weapon A.I
I wouldn't say they're all fought the same. Heck, even Bokoblins wielding a different weapon aren't all fought the same. There's a pretty big difference between a Silver Boko attacking you with a heavy two hander vs one that uses a fast spear or bow. Same goes for the combat styles of these enemies. Bokos are the average type, Moblins are super tanky and ignore your attacks and Lizalfos constantly weave in and out to hit you from your blind spots. Yiga keep teleporting. Yiga Soldiers constantly bait you to come towards them, so that they can slash you etc. Compared to something like OoT, where everything just dies to simple spin attack spamming, the combat variety in BotW and TotK is significantly better.
This is just another symptom of the weapon durability system. Because your weapons are always breaking, you need to constantly be getting more. As a result, they need the vast majority of enemies to be using weapons you can salvage after you break 2 swords fighting them.
@Il_Exile_lI yup! And to add to that, they also were using that as a way to give those enemies more variety in moveset/capabilities. There's many weapons already in the game for link, if they let an enemy use an amount of those, it makes them that much more interesting to fight!
Another reason they might’ve decided to include so many variations of the same enemy is BoTW/ToTK’s weapon system. In all other Zelda games, you get 2, maybe 3 swords. For the most part, you can account for which enemies are seen when you have each of these swords, and there’s not a ton of overlap. To account for your weapons gradually increasing in strength at a linear rate, enemies that increased at a more-linear way (going from moblin to blue moblin) makes the game have a continuous level of challenge. You see that sort of thing in JRPGs all the time for the same reason.
Yeah, a boko with a club fights differently from one with a bow or one with a spear. But visually, they all present the same. The coloured variants are also not just tankier and stronger, but often smarter too, so you have to play around them in slightly altered ways, but it’s easy to just chalk it up to yet another boko. Every monster has to be able to handle every weapon in the game so that their difficulty system works, and that’s likely one of the root causes of the lack of variety.
@@RePorpoised This is why I'd be happier with more "animalistic" enemies and only adding one, maybe two, humanoid enemies. Let the humanoids handle the "complexity", but have the "animalistic" enemies handle the variety.
@@quillion3rdoption not even animalistic necessarily. The gibdos were very interesting to encounter, and they're more or less humanoid. It's simply that they need more unarmed enemies. More gibdos, frok, and arrocudas. More of those, that are properly region-locked and you have yourself a really solid experience. And it's a shame that, while they ARE very similar to their shrine counterparts in botw, the zonai do actually have interesting item fusions that can really end up spicing up battles. I have to wonder if the pirates were initially intended to be a unique monster, but it was reconsidered due to dev time.
And 90% of the ones you encounter in the game are the same 3 (Bokoblin, Moblin, Lizalfos). So while the game technically has higher variety, in the reality of gameplay it does not.
@tyranitararmaldo no the game more than doubles the non boss leveld enemie count. Now we have Instead of just the 3 from BOTW we now also have Horroblins, boss Bocoblins, soldier constructs and captain constructs. Thus increasing the count 4 new leveled enemies to 7. The problem is TOTK has a lot more new non boss enemies than BOTW but they are all in some way tied to a gimmick like. Gibdos are weak to elemental damage. Likelikes just sit there till they show thiere weak spot. Arocudas just existed to carry enemies and drop with one hit (basically are just more mobile balloon Octorocks) Mini frox just exist to be a small annoyance. And they all also do not level up which is bad for the games difficulty curve. Great example is the battle talus. It has two level which means they go down before they can do anything. All they needed to do was give it a rare stone talus Cristal and black Bocoblins to make it stay bit more threatening once you start getting farther in to the game.
You mean how enemies were in older games? Seriously am I the only person to have ACTUALLY played the old 3d games because people keep making criticisms of botw/totk that apply to the old games too.
I feel validated. Another reason I think they may have fewer enemies is because in most Zelda games enemies are designed to be weak to Link's items. But the 3D Switch games have very few "traditional items"
Which also feels like a crutch. Lack of enemy variety because lack of weapons for games ALL ABOUT imagination feels quite limiting. I don't get the whole "do anything anywhere" approach when the games are just a slog because everything is copy/pasted. At least when you play WW in an unintended way you actually feel smart and not like you did what you were meant to do all along. Lack of road blocks and places you're meant to visit later also makes BotW and TotK feel very unrewarding, because they simply don't exist. Even then you are not rewarded for exploring because the stories feel pointless and almost everywhere looks/feels the same. People say that BotW and TotK have the biggest maps in any Zelda game, but given how sparse they are it feels the exact opposite.
@@wesshiflet2214 It feels small to me because there aren't any interesting NPCs or landmarks outside of story required areas. There should have been a whole set of sub-stories instead of samey caves over and over again, especially in TotK. Nintendo should have expanded on the world building and people in it instead of just the world.
@@YujiUedaFan there are a bunch of interesting landmarks off the Main Story path, there's even a whole town I was very happily surprised to find (made me hope for more, lol). but they all tie into sidequests, and you can't get anything "permanent" out of any of the really interesting optional places, save for the 120 shrine reward.
I'm super okay with having tons of variants, as long as there's also tons of base enemies. And that they aren't so evenly distributed what BotW did was recycle the red/blue dichotomy from the first game (and the second to some extent) so that you had a quick color-coded sense of difficulty, and then had the enemies slowly increase in difficulty over time... but that leads to even _less_ enemy variety later, when only blacks and silvers spawn. TotK fixed that a bit by not making it so even. But even so, they were VERY evenly distributed. Yes, elemental enemies only appeared in their designated areas, but the same few enemies were everywhere no matter where you were, making a huge world seem a lot smaller. and i get the reason for it, they wanted to make a game where... if you did the bare minimum, and went straight to the 4 dungeons (or even didn't finish all of them) then to Hyrule Castle, you could still have roughly seen everything. LOTS of things in BotW have this attitude, "We don't want people to miss much of the game if they choose not to explore." which I think is a mistake. Because if you aren't rewarding people for exploring, you're punishing them for it.
My main issue with enemy variety in these games is that they end up being so irrelevant that they don't feel like enemies, but... like prey (long text incoming I hope your read it) In older games, the enemies would be THERE, in the middle of your path. So you had to engage in combat in order to travel safely through Hyrule But in Breath and Tears most of them are located in specific places, which I can just ignore, as the game is HUGE. "But they are strategically placed next to the main paths" ok, I don't think I followed a single main path for the entire game (just climb and glide); and if I did, I would just run faster and leave then behind So do I have any reasons to fight them? I do in the early game, as I need to gather resources, but by mid game I already have all the weapons I need just by doing the "mandatory" fights. So whenever I fight them, it's because I've run towards them, "hunting them for sport" And there comes the second issue: there are many ways to kill them and some of them are OP. Stealth, Monster masks, traps, bombs (custom or flower), boomerangs, elemental stuff, parrys... I have done all of those things, not because each enemy incentivated me to try new things, but because I wanted to have more variety. If I wanted to be optimal and effective, I would just use a WindShield+Slowmo Arrows, or Smokebomb+Stealth OHKOs; the fact that I don't do this, but rather "play with my food", shows that the enemies aren't menacing by the slighest To sum up, I have reached a point were almost all enemies are just optional battles (that I have to willingly look for), where I have to nerf myself to have some fun. Self-imposed variety, not because the game forces me to have variety, but because I have to cook it myself At least the game gives me the tools to come up with more and more new ways to deal with this problem, which is in fact the best thing about Breath and Tears
"In older games, the enemies would be THERE, in the middle of your path. So you had to engage in combat in order to travel safely through Hyrule" I can think of an optional area in the first game where you had to kill a lynel, or occasional mandatory overworld scripted moments in ww and tp but it seems to me you are recalling mostly forced dungeon encounters.
@@daniel8181 It's also because sometimes in older games the only time you get to fight certain enemies is in one or two dungeons. Even if you don't get anything from the enemy, it's still fun to fight them and find out what their weaknesses are.
I can get what you mean, but to be honest I think the same still applies for the old games. Twilight Princess has many moments where enemies are just scattered about during moments where you are going across a field, and you definitely don’t have to fight them, they also technically reward you less. Additionally a lot of them die super quickly with a few simple hits. So I think the “prey” title fits the old games too. It’s really that the old games have very visually strong variety with enemies, that truely fit and blended well with the environment / dungeon that you were exploring. At the same time though, for a game like twilight princess, a lot of them enemies are fairly simple and die quick. Meanwhile in BotW / TotK not only is the variety of enemies super weak, it’s also radioed poorly, as you will encounter bokoblins, Moblins and Lizalfos majority of the time. However, BotW and TotK had the best combat, far more fluid and less clunk than the other 3D titles. So which is better? I dunno. I definitely think in the future it is possible to have both, but as for now I would probably choose the older titles like TP. But that’s also easy for me to say, as I absolutely love TP since its my favourite game
@@zaciorfida-costanzo706 well, in the other Zelda games you never "lost" anything by fighting those enemies, or at the very least you don't lose anything that couldn't be made back with a 5 minute trip back to an inn and shop.
I think one of the issues with enemy variety is also the lack of proper mini bosses in the wild games. most Zeldas in hindsight have very similar regular enemy count. but older Zelda games had mini bosses that erase up the enemy count and made dungeons feel more unique. also the depths could've used just a few more new enemies. Just a few
I disagree with the view that Echoes of Wisdom has better variety than A Link Between Worlds. Varieties of the same category aren't bad. They are only bad if they exist because there aren't enough categories to begin with. There is nothing wrong with having 5 different Keese types or Bokoblin types, it is bad that there aren't enough categories of enemies. So I would say A Link Between Worlds has better variety than Echoes of Wisdom. The metric should be total amount of categories, not the ratio.
I think the different colored versions of enemies should count all as one instead of separating their entries because they all act the same. Plus you see all these enemies everywhere with very little to no separation based on region. Also I'd like it if you decided to cover the enemy variety of the N64 games compared to these titles.
@@mrister24 Well yeah, I realize that after watching, but I'd also just like to reinforce the notion that these recolors of enemies are not much more than just recolors in the Switch games. At least in Twilight Princess when you got a red Deku Baba's stem cut off, it would still crawl towards you afterwards, unlike the normal Deku Baba.
Great video and break down, I'd like to chime in with a game animator's perspective, the switch games definitely have less enemy variety in the traditional sense but they also have a lot more animations. In botw and totk enemies like bokoblins will have their walks, runs, falls, deaths, unique attacks per weapon category, on fire, electricuted, when they're suspecting you're around, when you are wearing a monster mask, etc. There's a lot more animation per enemy by far compared to the other games, and this still doesnt account for the unique animations per animals like foxes, wolves, eagles, small birds, bears, horses, deer, etc. Which means theres just tons of work that cant go towards making even more enemies. But they do add a lot of life to the overworld so I dont mind their compromise.
Part of it to me at least is the enemies feel less like they belong in a given location where as older games felt more like the enemies were made with a location in mind you have a dessert theres scorpions you have a forest theres killer plants and birds theres a whole ocean full of sharks fish and pirates where as the switch games give a recolor and call it a day because the enemies are needed to be in several locations they don't get specilized to fit thoes locations It also always feels like im fighting bokoblins in the switch games ive got many more recent hours on them so it could be a recent bias but it always fees like the same few enemies
It's important to acknowledgement that the BotW/TotK diversity is made a bit less interesting by having several incarnations of the same monster (generally 4 subtypes). There are 7 subtypes of lizalfos alone in BotW, and that accounts for almost 10% of the 75 enemy varieties. Edit: just getting to the category portion, apologies, should have waited until the video progressed
I was never bothered by the enemy variety in BOTW and TOTK, and I think it’s because the value of enemy variety to me lies not in how different the enemies actually are but in the number of ways I’m able to approach a combat and how fun those ways are, and that’s a front on which BOTW and TOTK excel. Most enemy encounters throughout both of these games can be taken on in any way you want, and for that reason it just never really felt like I was seeing the same thing every time. Would it have been nice to have some more variety just for the sake of flavor? Yeah, maybe. Zelda has a deep and wonderful selection of creatures it could have pulled from and seeing more of that would have been cool. Armos, Buzz Blobs, Tektites, Deku Scrubs, Re-Deads, Moldorms, Lanmolas, Ghinis, the list goes on. I would have loved to see them. But I prefer to judge a game based on what I got, rather than what I wanted, and what I got did not disappoint me in terms of actual gameplay.
Another factor besides physics is the actual freedom in BotW/TotK. Since you progressively get stronger in the open world, the games have an internal leveling system and stronger enemy variants appear more and more as you play the game. Having 4 levels of Bokoblins is necessary if you want players to go anywhere they want whenever they want without either destroying them or being discouraged.
Or you could, you know, impose some limitations on player freedom (scary I know) and have some regions with stronger enemies. That way, it naturally guides the player towards the "intended" path while still allowing experienced player to explore as they wish. As a bonus you would actually feel your progression when you come back to starter areas and demolish enemies you once struggled with
@HunsterMonter Yeah some games take this approach and I generally appreciate scaled areas more. However, this strategy makes the game more accessible, allowing people to go wherever whenever without throwing off the balance, which makes sense as a priority for Nintendo at least
On paper having 4 levels of Bokoblins is good but at the end of the day a red Bokoblin and a silver Bokoblin feel almost the same to kill. The only difference is sometimes the silver one may be slightly more time consuming but not more difficult. I feel like a better form of progression would have been all new more difficult and unique enemies. They kind of did this with the zonai robots which had harder ones with different ai
I think the difference mostly comes down to the fact, that linear Zelda games usually have unique enemies for every dungeon while BotW and TotK have mostly the same enemies across the entire map.
If anything it would look worse for botw/totk as it has so much more space for enemies so it’s possible to include a lot more enemies. Especially totk being about 2.5x larger than the already massive botw. However to your point it would be kinda niche going to a certain area for one enemy that isn’t very prevalent. Also as this video and other people have said the important thing is the physics and AI of things. These enemies are actual creatures not things waiting around. They do reside in the same place or area but they move. You can see Boss Boko armies marching around, Lynels roaming, bokos dancing, and Gleeoks flying around. They have a way more complicated AI from them doing stuff and they feel a lot more like things. Also from this interaction there’s a lot more physics to program and more things to focus on and the main point of these 2 games is freedom and movement. Especially in totk being able to fuse almost anything, able to ultrahand almost anything to make almost any structure, zonai devices for movement, Recall and Ascend for movement. Autobuild for its ease so you can easily spend more time exploring rather than building. The games while still having a complex combat system, decent amount of enemies, but subpar shrines and temples and repetitive koroks. The game focuses on exploration and the freedom you have in doing that and the creativity you can use to basically do anything.
I think the other thing is how they reuse enemies. In Skyward Sword, Bokoblins, Tecknoblins, and Cursed Bokoblins are all Bokoblins, but they are all more different than BotW's Red, Blue, and Black Bokoblins. The only times these enemies feel any different is with elemental varieties, something I will note that AGE OF CALAMITY of all things did better than both BotW and TotK
botw boko color variants are a difficulty indication, the real variation is in their equipment. depending on te weapon or mount they have, the way they fight and the threat they pose changes drastically.
Nice metrics but the lack of enemy variety (types) in the Switch games is made much worse and glaring by one huge factor- average completion time of a play-through. If you divide those numbers, you’ll get some shocking results. When you consider how long you have to play and how few “new” or “fresh” feeling encounters you have you’ll get why it feels so monotonous to so many.
after watching the vid, enemy reskin arent only better for botw and totk because of the physics making them easier to implement, but also because of the powerscalling system, they wanted to make you choose which area to tackle first meaning they couldnt just place weak and strong enemies on their corresponding areas, they needed each area to have a different roster of enemies based on how far you are into the game and thats much easier done by simply giving most enemies a stronger form
Echoes of Wisdom is also open world and doesn’t have this issue so that’s not a valid excuse. I’m not gonna say the dev team was lazy for botw or totk but it’s abundantly clear where they spent most of their time and which areas of the game were neglected
@@mkz6258echoes of wisdom doesn't have to balance an entire physics system. If you think that's not a limitation you need to try working with a simple physics sostem yourself.
@wesshiflet2214 a physics system makes it harder to add interactivity to enemies. Every new enemy needs to be tested against every other interaction you support. Water, ice, electric, fire. Then all the weird enemy interactions like when you throw a bomb and they just kick it around. Or when a moblin picks up a bokoblin and yeets it at you. There's a bunch of those weird little interactions. They need to be tested or isolated to almost never happen.
A bokoblin is a bokoblin, regardless of its color. Even if you count them as different enemies, botw and specially totk have giant maps with the same 3 types of enemies spread across the entire map, with only lizalfos changing to match its environment. It's copy and paste everywhere.
Great video!! Clear a lot of work went into getting these numbers. Absolutely hilarious how many people commented before watching past the 3 minute mark LOL
I think when discussing Enemy variety in BOTW & TOTK you left out the extremely important aspect that they can Wield lots of different weapons. A bokoblin with a sword is quite different from one with a spear or with a greatsword all of which are very different from one with bow. That's not to mention the rock armor in TOTK.
All the devs had to do was put, like, Red Bubbles in Eldin and Freezards in Hebra and stuff like that. I don't know what would possess them to put Moblins and Bokoblins literally everywhere, then put Fire Chus, Fire Keese, Fire Octoroks, and Fire Lizalfos in Eldin, then put Ice Chus, Ice Keese, Ice Octoroks and Ice Lizalfos in Hebra; then pretend they're not just copy-pasting everything! The only major region where they had unique enemies was Gerudo with the Molduga and Gibdos
The enemy AI is probably more complex in BotW and TotK compared to the other Zelda’s mentioned, and that would contribute to the effort required to make them function. In traditional Zelda’s, enemies mostly just stand around predetermined areas, with some other limited behaviors sprinkled in. Many BotW enemies can sleep, ride a horse, grab any weapon, detect stealth, traverse varied terrain, etc..
nah you can just have both smart enemies and dumb enemies. I was honestly surprised they didn’t throw in any Leevers when I first played, for example. They’re so simple
Another thing affecting the issue of enemy variety in BotW/TotK is the size. BotW and especially TotK are about 3-4 times the size of a traditional 3D Zelda game. So this means BotW and TotK needed to have 3-4 times the enemy variety as past games in order to feel equivalent to those games. But not only did they not have that much enemy variety, but they actually had LESS enemy variety than traditional Zelda games, really makes the enemy variety in these games feel really bad.
Some people argue in support of BotW’s weapon durability, because it forces you to change up your strategies. God no. *Enemy variety* is how you make players change their strategies. Only 13 base enemies really cements this issue with BotW. All the weapon durability did for me was annoy me into avoiding combat, and actively discourage me from exploration/engaging with side challenges, because I know I won’t be rewarded with treasure, only trash. Add in the bland shrines and dungeons, and you have the first Zelda game that bored me too much to finish. And that’s a trend that has continued with TotK and EoW. I get really excited about all the possibilities the new sandbox features provide, and then really bored because the rest of the game design is just bland and tedious. Which is a bummer because these engines are truly fantastic. I think Nintendo just ought to go all in on a Minecraft-esque sandbox game, and return Zelda back to its more handcrafted adventure formula.
The other factor that contributed to the perceived low enemy variety is that because of the progression system you effectively get to a point where certain enemy colors in BOTW and TOTK all but disappear. When every bokoblin was red, then changes to blue, I know it's technically a different enemy, but if they still kept a reasonable amount of red ones around then it would have felt like there was more variety. I agree that just having different colors for the same enemies was a decision driven by the physics engine, but it doesn't change how it makes the games feel.
There is a very reasonable amount of red bokoblins and moblins, and green lizalfos still in the overworld in both games. The blue and black versions of them too. I mean, even in master mode you can find base variants of the main three in obscure locations, the point is none of these variants ever disappear completely, and are still pretty commonly found, especially in tears of the kingdom where each variant has a unique monster drop that the devs didn't want players missing out on
Yeah, that’s what happens if you’re in the late game and you grinded a ton of good gear. In the early game, you might have to get pretty creative to take down harder foes. There’s a camp on the Great Plateau that has a boulder you can push which will roll down the hill and destroy a bomb barrel, killing the Bokoblins. That’s just one example. That’s just one example. The enemies can and will beat your ass if you don’t kill enemies in the right order or the right fashion. You could dupe a bunch of Lynel gear or just get good weapons, but it’s pretty intense early on.
@@vadoslink446 nah you just had to use hookshots and boomerangs and shit sometimes. seldom deep combat, but sometimes you got into more detailed swordplay in WW and TP
@@HungryWarden The issue is all that stuff that’s great in the early game becomes irrelevant late game. The damage sponges aren’t affected nearly as much by boulders or explosions, they’re basically guaranteed to require either archery or wailing on them with a stick till they break
@@wesshiflet2214 There's no real point in using items against enemies in older titles, unless they absolutely require you to use them. It just slows combat down and isn't even particularly efficient, compared to just spamming the spin attack. TP had the potential to do more, but then it made hidden skills optional and turned combat into samey "Spin attack and ending blow" battles against enemies that can barely fight back. And WW's combat was generally not good. All it did is add a "wait until the A button lights up" parry, that knocks enemies on the floor, which forces you to wait until they get up again.
The only crime is that skulltullas and their variants never came back when caves came up as well as a ton of other ideas. I do like Like Likes they piss me off in the right way, just want more creature variety like babas and other species that inhabit hyrule usually
i think what makes the open world zelda's feel more different is that you can basically approach every enemy in the game the same. in older 3D zeldas , combat is much more reactive and requires you to wait and observe each enemy's gimmick, whereas in open world zelda you can kind of just approach lol. Older 3D zeldas made enemies another puzzle to face and i think that's neat.
Regardless what anyone’s opinion is on enemy variety in Totk, the Depths absolutely failed in this department. The depths was an opportunity for Nintendo to bring back so many iconic creepy Zelda enemies like Poes and skulltulas and redeads. Instead they made Poes currency instead of enemies, and then they made the froxes, the new single most annoying generic enemy in the entire franchise.
I think to test the hypothesis that it's specifically due to the physics system you'd also need to test compared to other open world games that aren't Zelda games. Because I suspect there might be something else going on alongside the physics - The developers not knowing when you're going to encounter different parts of the world or if you're going to double back and encounter the same set of enemies multiple times, and it's easier to replace 1 blue and 3 red Bokoblins with 2 silver 1 black and 1 blue bokoblin if the player's been playing for a while from an encounter balance design than it would be to replace them with an _actually_ different encounter like you might do for a later part of a linear game. But also, as others have said, how long a game is also impacts how many enemies (in either absolute or kinds terms) is going to start to feel bland. And the open world Zeldas are long compared to past Zelda titles which mostly cap in for (According to HLTB) at between 20 and 30 hours for Main Story + Extras - Only Twilight Princess significantly exceeding that at 45 hours - while both of Era of the Wild games clock in at around 100 hours for that category.
Yeah it’s definitely due to the higher interactivity and complexity of the enemies and environments. They need to program not only physics and chemical interactions, but also environmental ones too. Enemies interacting with each other, navigating the terrain, eating food, finding weapons, attack behaviours.
The thing is, if different coloured variants had more complex or interesting movesets than their basic counterparts, then I would have less of an issue with it. The problem is that the main difference between a red bokoblin and a silver bokoblin is how hard they hit and how much damage they take. That doesnt make it harder in any sort of interesting way, it just makes them tedious to fight. The other big problem is a severe lack of regional enemies. In older games, you would find new enemies throughout the game as you progressed to new places. Tektites on water, dodongos at death mountain, freezards in ice areas and the lost goes on. In BotW this was essentially non-existent. In TotK they at least added like likes and horriblins for caves, the sky enemies in hebra and areas with high elevation, the gibdos in Gerudo etc. Thats great, but we need more, otherwise combat continues to be boring. Thankfully the focus in TotK is on weird contraptions rather than combat, but more variety would only improve the game and needs to be a goal for future games
there is great variation in bokoblin movesets. but it's not controlled by their color variant, it's controlled by the equipment they have access to. riders are a lot more mobile and hard to hit, especially mounted archers. unarmed bokoblins will throw whatever is available at you, this can be a threat if they have explosive barrels. polearm bokoblins will exploit their long range to keep you away with a mix of targeted stabbing and wide sweeping attacks. bokoblins with shields will block most of your attacks, so you need to find a way to break through their defences. sentry archers will blow their horn when they spot you, so you need to take them out with stealthy attacks if you're not ready to take on an entire camp at once. archers with different arrow types can be a huge problem, especially bomb and lightning arrows.
@Marvin_R Fair point, I hadn't considered that! In that case perhaps my theory is wrong then, but it doesn't change how I feel about the game so it must be another reason. Perhaps it's just that having all of the potential monster movesets available at any time makes them less engaging? Or perhaps it's that they animate and behave similarly despite their unique movesets in those scenarios where monsters in previous games were more unique. Perhaps it simply is that having those same archetypes across the whole map simply gets boring, and in previous games this is resolved by only having each enemy appear a handful of times in specific themed areas? You do see elements of this in the games with how the constructs appear around sky ruins and lizalfos appear near water, but they're all so common that it feels like they're everywhere despite being themed
@@Marvin_R That is true in theory, the problem is the Bokos are rarely tough enough for it to really make a difference. While their behaviours are the most varied they are still the weakest enemy type, which makes it extremely easy for the player to brute force through them without having to actually take any of them into account, usually by complete accident. Up until the silver tier who can actually tank it pretty well the bow alone already invalidates almost all boko types by default. And if you just one shot all of them in the exact same way, they may as well all be the same enemy. Doesn't help that one headshot or even just a good normal hit can completely disarm them of their unique equipment. The exception being when explosives are involved, since the player can't actually stay exposed or fire recklessly without risking getting 1-shot
Enemy variety is a problem that I never really noticed while playing the games, but once it was pointed out to me was pretty undeniably true. I think I was just mostly focused on other things like the environment or puzzles and only really took active note of enemies when it was a boss, miniboss, or a uniquely designed encounter space/context. While I very much do think the games could have been improved by increased enemy variety, the only time I remember feeling actively disappointed in it was when the pirates some npcs talked about ended up just being more bokoblins and moblins since the different language used built up an expectation of something fundamentally different.
So many people in the comments here outting themselves for not actually watching past the 3 minute mark lmao. He does a revised count where he does count variants as the same enemy
What to add: Peahats Freezard Miniblins Actual Gibdos that look like mummies. Dexi Hand Kargoroks Bladetraps Shabooms Deku Babas Iron Knuckles Lava Slugs Blue Bubbles Aeroflos Leevers Nejiron Zonai Armos Zonai Beemos Actual freaking Poes Real Bombchu Snappers Boes Bad Bats Stalflos(don't die instantly to head shots) - Mini Bosses Gomess Flare Dancer Darknut Bari King Arogorok Skull Kids
I feel like the grim reaper looking guy from MM would also be a good choice of miniboss cuz it has a unique light mechanic to make nighttime more dangerous and and unique weapon drop.
You forgot Wolfos. Also, now that you mention it, Peahats in hyrule field would have been a perfect replacement for gaurdians. Those things were scary in oot.
@@chiefcoiler Honestly I think the Phantom Hands do a good enough job replacing the guardians, that being said I would have liked to see Peahats in the fields, Gecko Turtle Riders in the swamps, and Iron Knuckles in ruins. At least in terms of minibosses
I think why BOTW enemy variety feels less is because player is given control how the fight goes. OOT there is little difference between a Stalfos and a Wolfos in how you interract with them- you attack when they unblock. However, these enemies are in control when you can do it, which makes all the difference. In BOTW you just hit the enemy whenever you like with variety of ways... Sometimes starting by your endless supply of bombs. BOTW enemies are generalized. Lizalfos, moblin or bokoblin: it's mostly the same rules to overpower them. You can lure them with bait, leave weapons so they pick them up. If they carry a shield or any other weapons, you can unarm them. In previous games, you give a bokoblin a shield and it becomes a "Shield Bokoblin", with no way to change how you approach them. BOTW you give moblin a shield and it's still a moblin.
Wolfos take extra damage from the back and are easily stunned with Deku Nuts from afar. Throw a nut before closing the distance then go for a jump attack at the back. Stalfos are more likely to block a ranged Deku Nut, but they have gaps in their block. Bombs can easily hit them during a block if thrown behind them and sometimes even from the front, due to the large explosion hitbox. When fought on terrain that changes elevation like the Shadow Temple Boat, the lingering hitbox of the spin attack can also slip through their guard. Deku Nuts are better used to turn their high damage jump attack into a free hit of your own. OoT and MM enemies' variety is much easier to notice when looking at how the wider toolset interacts with each, as opposed to the more basic sword and shield gameplay.
Even worse than just the lack of enemy variety is lack of boss variety, when you fight the same boss a dozen times it doesn't feel like a boss it feels like a more tedious generic There's also an issue with enemy distribution, gerudo desert is the only area with any unique enemies, everywhere else is all the same bokos and lizals Also worth comparing to their development predecessor XCX which they adopted their open world formula from, where there was around 100 enemy categories, each category having 5-10 variants of different strength levels, every location had a different set of enemies, every enemy type had multiple boss variants that were distinct from the generics, and the map was 3x as large to fill out with them
To me, the enemy variety problem can simply be summed up by how the VAST majority of the enemies in Breath/Tears are humanoids with the same essential capabilities. In that regard, I wouldn't just say that different color variants don't count as unique enemies, but even that bokoblins, moblins, and lizalfos aren't really all that meaningfully different, since they generally have the same mobility, same focus on melee attacks, etc. Even the standard constructs in Tears fall into that same overall category, meaning that the vast majority of your actual, practical combat time is spent dealing with enemies who are ALL fought more or less the same way. Conversely, in other Zelda games, enemies come in far more shapes and sizes, with far more varied gameplay functions, and far more varied ways to deal with them. As such, you aren't constantly running into the more or less same overall humanoid foes who fall into the same combat rhythm. What BotW and TotK needed wasn't simply more enemies, they needed more of the very much non-humanoid enemies of past games specifically, like immobile deku babas, peahats who focus entirely on just bumping into you for contact damage, and so on: Enemies with significantly different behavior and capabilities. Now, with that said, I think that a HUGE part of why it's a world of mostly humanoid enemies is the indirect design requirement of the whole fragile weapon thing: If Link's constantly breaking his weapons, he needs a fresh supply of new ones. And humanoid enemies are the type that most readily make sense to be carrying replacement weapons that Link can use, so humanoid enemies MUST be the most common enemies who are basically found everywhere. Constant weapon fragility mandated the constant presence of enemies who can provide replacements, and thus the monotonous enemy design. But as someone who DOES NOT LIKE the super brittle weapons anyway, (and that's putting it mildly,) design sense or not, that's just one design problem causing another, as I see it. Also, I think that effective enemy variety needs to weighted by what you spend the most time actually fighting, not simply total enemy types. So even if, counting bosses and all, Tears has 20 truly different enemies, if 85% of the total spawns are the functionally similar humanoids only, then that makes the enemy variety worse in terms of actual, practical player experience than it is when simply measured by total categories available, and practical player experience is what matters most in the end. A game that evenly split 5 enemy types throughout the whole thing would ultimately feel like more variety than a game that had 10 enemy types total, but 9 of the types only showed up once at one point ever, and the rest of the game was purely the 1 remaining enemy type spawning a thousand times. Breath and Tears don't just have a low total types, but they heavily limit their truly, meaningfully different enemy types to rare boss encounters only, which makes the variety feel even worse in practice than it theoretically otherwise would based on purely on total categories alone. So once again, I say that game designers with limited time and resources should focus less on bosses you only see once, (or otherwise very rarely,) and more on filling out the common enemies you fight hundreds of times. It's the repetitive common enemies where variety is always needed the most, where variety helps a game the most, and where time spent on enemy content gets the most mileage.
Imagine creating a massive open world game where you expect players to spend 50 hours, and then thinking than creating 13 enemies and saying "Yeah, that's fine, just reskin them a bunch of times." No wonder these games bore me so much lol
You can't just act like you know the exact thought process behind these decisions, especially if you're going out of your way to pick the one that makes the people involved look the most incompetent. Who knows, maybe if they could have added more they would, but ran into time issues because as it turns out coding brand new enemies into an open world game is rather time consuming, especially if its your very first time and in a game meant to fit on the wii-u There is no flattering explanation for ToTK though
What's especially frustrating about BOTW and TOTK for me in comparison to the other Zelda games is the lack of spider type enemies in the "creepy" places of the game's world. Because if they wanted to go for that "Adventurer stumbles upon dark, forgotten place" vibe, then it really seems like certain caves, areas of the depths and ruins would've been the perfect place to encounter Skulltula and perhaps entire nests of Skullwalltula enemies that cover the dark ceilings and walls, laying still in the darkness but then skittering about when we shine a light on them... These enemies could've had some interesting interactions with elements such as fire and ice as well with the whole chemistry / physics system at play. Also having a giant Armagohma-style world boss would've been great in certain areas, but alas... : (
Another thing about the enemies in BOTW and TOTK is that many of them are able to equip any type of sword, bow, and shield, so that also can help give variety
I have always felt that the freedom to tackle chanlenges in whatever way you want to be very hallow for breath of the wild, and while Tears of the kindom certainly improved that by a fair amount it still feels hallow to me because ultimately build a machine to take you across a distance is always going to feel samey to me. the shrines often felt like there was one way to do them and then another way to effectively skip them, which didn't really help things there. It really doesn't help that the story and worlds of zelda were what always drew me in and loosing so many dungeons and bosses really broke that for me. it's why I still feel like Twilight Princess and Windwaker were the best games in the serries.
The problem with these two games are they're massive but shockingly shallow. Shrines, caves, repetitive quests, koroks, and repeated enemy designs, that's all you'll find across Hyrule. It would be so much more interesting if snow areas for example had snow related enemies exclusive to it, and snow puzzles and quests, but no it's just regular old shit but now the enemies are icy, same with every other location.
Yeah they feel like the building blocks of a great game, they just don't do much with it. Enemies should be locked to certain biomes like past games instead of spread all over. Maybe have certain enemies in caves, but don't make 6 different Keese and call it a day.
I mean, they do have all that. But they reskin existing stuff with an icy theme, like pretty much every other game would do. But the unique quests were always nice enough to keep it mixed up. The shield surfer quest, the snow bowling, even the non-quest of going to the very peak and finding a Fire Greatsword. I'm not sure what level of variety people expect from what it ultimately "snow mountain" but I was satisfied.
You literally get snow puzzles in the snow area? You go to Hebra Mountain and a lot of the stuff there has to do with snowboarding, melting ice, keeping ice from thawing, opening doors with snowballs etc. It's also not like old games didn't just reskin enemies either. Go into a snowy area in MM and those Keese and Wolfos are suddenly Ice Keese and White Wolfos. I don't know why people are so insanely petty in regards to the new games.
But using facts & logic gets in the way of his complaining. 😁 Someone called the game shallow, but in comparison to the other zelda games it has the biggest combat variety so what are these guys talking about?
Twilight Princess still having the best enemy variety and diversity among the 3D Zelda games is really sad. It has enemies that are exclusive to certain areas/dungeons, and the ones that get reused don't overstay their welcome. Wind Waker feels much the same, I was surprised to learn that there are much fewer unique enemies. The same cannot be said BotW and TotK, however.
Makes sense. Twilight princess was the last "normal" 3d game. Skyward sword messed with orientation, and BOTW expanded all the way up. Nintendo's never just been satisfied with "the same thing but bigger.". They always try to innovate with their IP's
If we're being technical, the last mainline Zelda before Breath of The Wild was Tri Force Heroes, not A Link Between Worlds. It doesn't really matter, but I just wanted to mention it.
imagine if we did end up having the same breath of the wild enemies and typing. but they just supercharged the keese for example so that fire keese can cast fireballs on top of charging into you. ice keese can in a area of effect, make the floor around you slippery and harder to maneuver. and electricity keese can create tiny aoe's (with lightning flashing) where if you stand there you get a minishock, aside from again, charging into you. too little is done to make these enemies stand out no matter what typing. they only are a different typing for the sake of you to engage with the chemistry engine thats put in, this includes weapons such as wood working better for electric keese. ocarina of time for example already put in so much effort to make every enemy like act different altogether. there simply is no excuse to not have deku babas in the breath of the wild overworld, they can drop sticks. we could use sticks by golly we need them in tears of the kingdom for example. darknuts are a no brainer with the weapons. you could easily invent useful drops that play into the chemistry engine of botw/totk. but they didnt. its a lazy sequel on all counts. and they took six years just to add nuts n bolts to the shtick. would it save the game with the enemy variety though? no, but it would defintiely make the open world a more complete package. and even if they didnt give us restricted linear dungeons with lots of intricate level design, they couldnt even give us the supposed easier solution on making the overworld more fun to play around in. so you get this very light experience, a dabbling if you will, of systems which is very modern nintendo design philosophy. its about as risky as a cheese sandwich. just think of the desperation that everyone has that this has become a topic in general, we'd welcome OLD enemies with open arms, becuase even then they couldnt come up with completley new ones themselves. its sad. echo chamber suggested youtube videos arent making my mood any better so i leave with my mantra : "with every month that passes, i dislike totk even more" botw gets off scot free because of it being new, totk was the chosen one, it failed.
Here's the thing you missed. The reason the NuZeldas have fewer enemy types isn't because of the physics system, it's because of the enemy AI system. More specifically, the part where Bokos, Lizals, Moblins, and a few others can dynamically pick up different types of weapons on the fly. Development wise each of these variations counts as roughly 1 new enemy because they have different behaviors and different movesets despite being the same unit. For example, this means that instead of Boko being 1 unit that comes in 5 colored variants, Bokos have a unarmed moveset, a bow moveset, a 1hand moveset, 2hand moveset, and a spear moveset. They're effectively 5 different enemies in one body. The same applies to Lizals, Moblins, and the zonai drones in ToTK (and to a lesser extent the Boss Bokos and (Phantom) Ganon in ToTK and Lynels and Guardians). But no one thinks of it that way, because 4+ different enemies in one body feels like 1 enemy even when they do make you play differently to accommodate them (which doesn't exactly happen in NuZelda a lot of the time, but I'm not gonna get into that). On top of that, their AI and movesets are so simplistic that even though they have a bunch of variations each one feels flat to fight against. I guarantee if the NuZeldas had used the colored variations to assign different weapon types to (for example, red always getting 1hand, black always getting 2hand, silver always getting spears, etc) instead of to distinguish power level people would have a lot less complaints about the enemy variety. I still personally think that even with this mindset the NuZeldas don't have enough enemy variety. - Anyway TL:DR, the problem is that the NuZeldas repeatedly took what would be ~3-4 enemies in previous games and squished them into 1 generic enemy, then spammed those generic enemies around the map and that combined with how simple the AI is and how shallow their movesets are fools our monkey brains into thinking there are a lot less enemy types than there are. I would gladly trade generic enemies having dynamic movesets based on the weapon on their hand that get recolored over and over for more distinct enemies and enemy variations with more expansive movesets (Basically, more Lynel style variations, less Boko style variations).
One thing that I think is worth mentioning is that BotW and TotK enemies could still differentiate themselves in combat, even within a single variant. A Red Bokoblin with a club has different timings to a Red Bokoblin with a bat, which is itself very different in how you would fight one with a bow or spear. Similarly, for me, Electric Keese and Ice Keese are best dispatched with a bow due to how annoying they can be, while other types of Keese are fine to deal with using a sword. I didn't mind the enemy variety that much in these games, as, unlike most other Zelda games I've played, "just smack it with a sword" wasn't always the best option against every enemy.
i've recently thought of something that i think in part contributes to the low enemy variety in botw and totk, and that's the breakable weapons. i'm actually not super opposed to the weapon durability system, i'm not particularly a fan of it and i think it takes the wind out of what could otherwise feel like special weapons, but it's never killed the whole experience for me like it has for others. rather, i think it by nature ends up limiting what kinds of enemies they add. thinking like a game designer, if you have a system where weapons break, then of course you need to make sure that in the course of common gameplay, the typical player will see a steady stream of weapons to replace the broken ones. so, it becomes important to ensure that most enemy encounters involve enemies that can carry any sort of weapon. if it can't hold a sword and it can't hold a bow, then it simply might not work well with the durability system. youll also notice that a lot of enemies that don't fit this requirement of being able to use the same weapons you do (keese, octoroks, guardians, etc.) often either chase you down so you *have* to engage with them (such is the case with guardians), or they feel like set dressing to an extent (such as keese). its actually for this reason primarily that i hope the weapon durability system doesnt return. now, totk did alleviate this issue somewhat with the fuse mechanic, allowing the parts dropped by enemies to be part of a weapon themselves, but i think the problem persists regardless. it's alleviated, but not gone. i still felt like constructs were mostly just reskinned bokoblins, for example, because functionally they still do the same things with the same tools, even if their animations are different.
One idea in how to fix this is to only have certain enemies in certain parts of the world. For example you might see more tact titles near death mountain while in the forest you see decu babas. If you can make an area partially defined by what enemies are there like how the real world has environments we associate with animals (like penguin ls in Antarctica ot camels in the desert) then the world will feel a bit more alive and natural.
to a degree, botw and totk had that. but mostly with regional variants, or to specific area types rather than regions. death mountain octoroks are mostly on paths, and suck stuff up before spitting larger projectiles. highlands octoroks are mimics, carrying chests on their heads to lure you in. grassland and water octoroks are similar, but need different weapons because of terrain. keese usually stay in pairs, but around central hyrule you see more keese swarms. wizzrobes stick primarily to abandoned camps and structures.
Even this is being a little bit generous to them, enemies can be categorized into minor enemies, major enemies, and boss monsters. All of these are of course important, but the most important for enemy variety are major enemies. BoTW has 7 major enemies: bokoblins, moblins, lizalfos, wizzrobes, Yiga footsoldiers and swordmasters, and guardians scouts. Of these, 3 are everywhere, wizzrobes are very underutilized, Yiga enemies are even more underutilized, and guardian scouts are incompatible with all other enemy types, so there are functionally only 3 enemies. Of course, to be completely fair, these 3 enemies behave differently depending on which weapon they use, so there are perhaps more accurately 10 enemies: sword bokoblins, sword and shield bokoblins, claymore bokoblins, spear bokoblins, claymore moblins, spear moblins, sword lizalfos, sword and shield lizalfos, spear lizalfos, and archers. But even more accurately, it would be said that there only 4 or perhaps 5 enemies: bokoblins, moblins, lizalfos, archers, and perhaps shield users; since most of these will seem like the same enemy to most people.
I personally never noticed the lack of variety cause to be honest combat was never really a huge part of how I played the game and that felt intentional. What I believe they were trying to do (and it worked for me) is that they made more variety within the single enemy types if you get what I'm saying. Like there's visually one red bokoblin but they could have literally any weapon from the game (all 3 holds, bows, and all elements), as well as things like barrels and rocks to throw. Whereas in past games they generally had like 1 or 2 weapons and attack styles. I think BOTW and TOTK lack visual variety but the ones they have are way more in depth than ever before. When I come across a bokoblin camp in BOTW it feels like a real ambush because of how they all run off and grab their own weapons and although it's the same 3 red guys, one of them's shooting ice arrows, another is spinning in circles with a flaming wooden bat, and the third is blocking my attacks with their shield, in past games it felt so videogamey. I'm not tryna argue that they shouldn't do more in the future that would be stupid, I'm just noting that the enemies in BOTW and TOTK probably took them like way way more time and effort to make and have more non-visual variety than past games. One of my favourite things is just watching them in their natural habitats. I also think enemy dispersal is a big thing. While other games had their enemies sectioned off to whatever element they belonged to, in BOTW they're pretty much everywhere. In past games you generally fought big groups of one type of enemy, then you would move on to the next big group. But in BOTW you're introduced to all 13 of the enemy varieties basically immediately on the great plateau, and they're all mixed together, and they're also absolutely everywhere. Seeing the 700th lizalfos in BOTW doesn't compare at all to how cool they were in skyward sword where you saw them like once in a blue moon.
I think botw innovated and broke new grounds for open worlds, but totk shows that they couldn't keep up with other developers doing the same (like fromsoft)
The reason botw/totk has fewer enemy types is that botw and totks enemies are astronomically more complex than prior games. Bokos can eat,sleep, hunt for food, pick up bomb barrels, will attempt to find new weapons when they lose theirs, higher level bokos are smarter than red bokos and will react to you throwing bombs or aiming tour bow at them. And a bunch of other stuff too. Enemies in previous zelda games were more numerous because you were only supposed to see most of them in one dungeon. which means they could be less inteligent and more gimmicky compare to botw's enemys who have to show up everywhere because the world is too big to have unique enemies in each area. Theres alot of valid things to critique these games about but this one is completely overblown.
Also let's not pretend like old zelda enemies were fun to fight since 90% of them were almost completely incapable of harming you. This is because ocarina of time dumbed down the combat for 3d and every game after refused to change it untill botw. Like I'm not saying this makes them unplayable garbage (i love this series for a reason) but im capable of taking my nostalgia goggles off just enough to remember that zelda made big changes for a reason.
This. It's insane to me how much people ignore this fact or even prefer shallow variety over proper nuance. Like, it's cool when a game like OoT can boast a diverse amount of unique enemies, but when you have something like Biris or Anubis existing in just one place and essentially having little to no screen time, it makes me question if that isn't just wasted development time...especially when these enemies are all kinda fodder. A single Bokoblin probably had more development effort behind it than like half of OoT's entire catalogue of enemies combined.
@@thegreatgoobert5847 nah, cutting through Leevers is fun. there are simple enemies in BotW too, no reason there couldn’t be more of those. you can have complex enemies in your game and still have some simple Leevers pop up in the desert. I guess they put those resources into adding more huntable animals instead, but as much as I liked the wildlife and sustenance theme, hunting wasn’t that interesting lol
@@vadoslink446 Honestly, that just sounds like an illustration of diminishing returns lol. Do you think they got more out of that Bokoblin than they did out of the dozens of aesthetically distinct enemy styles in OoT?
@@wesshiflet2214 Generally speaking, yeah. Like I said, it's a quality over quantity thing. Having visual variety is nice...but a game like AlttP, which has the highest amount of visual variety, still has infinitely worse combat than BotW, because how incredibly simplistic the enemies are.
Lynels are by far the best enemies we have ever got in the entire series 🦁🔥 It would be really cool if you could ride them around or maybe even transform into one. Instead of calling it Wolf Link we would call it Lynel Link 😎
So many points listed that I agree with. I would have liked to see more "super natural" type enemies. The depths would have been a great place for zombie Hylians, OoT Wall hands, Spiders, Death Swords, ReDeads, Dead Hands, etc...Hell,, invisible enemies you could only see after eating magic mushrooms 😅
I think the main reason why some people might feel that the open world games enemy roster is lackluster is not necessarily because of the quantity but rather the diversity in each enemy and the locations off them. Many enemies in Botw(just example) are generally very similar to others, and is located in high quantity around the map. Not only is the basic enemies just humanoid pics with different colors and weapons but most other enemies follow a very similar pattern. Humanoid pig creatures in different sizes and colors, welding different weapons and armor. The only enemies that somewhat breaks that trend is lizalfos, guardians and lynels, but even then they still follow many of the trends. It also doesn’t help that because of the open world nature of the games most enemies feels like they are being spread across the entire world, and no real diversity is being created .
I dont mind the different variance on the enemy. But what I think is boring and lame is the fact that Red Bokoblins and Black or White Bokoblins are the same enemy but one is a hit sponge. There is not a difference in movement pattern or something. I don't waste time fighting against white enemies variance simply because it take too much time to defeat them.
Thank you for making this video. I once did a count just like this for BotW, separating total enemy count and the total number of families of enemies and pretty much came to the same conclusion. Sadly the data is trapped on an old disused PC. It doesn't even stand up well against Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask in this regard. I will give credit to BotW and TotK for featuring what must easily be the most intelligent enemies in a Zelda game to date possessing much greater reactivity to both you and the world, however the freedom of the open world trivialises what all of this contributes to combat. You will never run out of space to retreat and you will never not have some outcropping or hideyhole to help you out-snipe a sniper. It goes to show that a smart enemy isn't necessarily conducive to an entertaining experience. Older games may have enemies with more simple behaviour however you don't often see them manning cookie cutter outposts. Instead every environment is curated to guarantee that you will experience the same enemies in what feels like very different scenarios, often delivered in an order that feels like a logical evolution from previous encounters with them. Knowing that an enemy is smart enough to look for the nearest weapon is not guaranteed to draw the same excitement as getting trapped in a tiny room with a swarm of enemies who only know how to bounce and nothing else. I think the biggest casualty of BotWs enemy count is that most regions lacked their own identity. You see most of the same threats but the consequence for getting hit by their element is a bit different. If I may make a suggestion for another video, talk about korok seeds. How many are there versus how many types of them exist. How often do they actually amount to something more than a non-puzzle.
I don't expect such huge games to have a million different enemies with unique attacks, animations and weaknesses to exploit, but given the size of the maps the developers should have done SOMETHING about this issue.
I would like to add that the enemies are all very same-y from a game design standpoint as well. Sure, they all LOOK different, but they're all fought the exact same way: whichever way you find combat to be most effective/comfortable/fun. There are no skulltulas requiring the use of the bow, or stalfos with shields, or wolfos circling in on the kill. All enemies can be beaten the exact same way, which makes them way less interesting as a cast
Your theory about the physics system being the key reason for the low enemy variety is very interesting - and based on your reasoning, I’m convinced that you’re right. It’s very interesting, as I’m realizing it’s likely the same situation for another of my favorite games: Dragons Dogma 2. While I’ve really enjoyed it since launch, a consistent complaint of mine (as well as the wider fan base) has been the apparent lack of enemy variety… but now that I think on it, I’m realizing how much of an effort it probably is to design new enemies that behave properly with the worlds physics…
I had a nice big writeup that I posted which UA-cam immediately lost for no reason, so I'll be shorter in this rewrite. The physics system is definitely not the reason why there's such a small roster of enemies in the open world games- it's not harder to 'set up' new varieties of enemies in more complex systems. If I had to guess, it's most likely because the designers thought that the player's arsenal of capabilities was enough to stand on its own, as it were. Kind of like how Devil May Cry games typically have small rosters because those games focus on the player creating their own combos as opposed to fighting basic enemies.
Uhh, yes it is. You add a new enemy in a physics system you run into a potential combanitorial amount of new issues. Never underestimate how fickle physics can be to wrangle. It's always harder than you think. DMC is a weird comparison as a non-open world action game focused on flat topography and set custom encounters. If that's your mood for games that's fine, but I can't think of a much different philosophy without changing genre.
@@raze2012_ Not as far as I know. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only actions that the enemies in these games do that interact with the physics are ragdolling, and picking up/throwing things, which are both rather simple to set up on an individual basis- once your physics engine is finished being set up, most of the work is already done. It's not that odd of a comparison- if my idea of what their thoughts were is correct, then it can be boiled down to a game designed to let the player use the character's arsenal on punching bags as opposed to a game designed to have the player be challenged by them.
@AtelierMcMuttonArt they also need to interact with the environment. Most enemies drown but a few can swim. Enemies get shocked by your weapons or the environment. Bokoblins can ride horses, boss Bokoblins have a load of interactions with their crew. They are capable of some minor arrow fusing in order to launch elemental attacks which are based on a physical supply aroind them (steal all their fruit and they cannot keep firing at you). They can not only pickup but kick around bombs in a relatively accurate way wrt the environment. They can also hunt and consume game just like Link can. And all that are just for the base 3 enemies (Bokoblins, moblins, and lizolfos). There's so many behaviors going on, adding another unique enemy type of that complexity isn't just some drag and drop if you want to match maybe half that quality. And yes, BOTW/TOTK is focused on exploration, not arena combat. They are entirely different feels to it. Zelda was never about amassing combo chains and achieving a flow of combat. Thars how series like Final Fantasy end up with 16, which no one asked for. You don't just shove that kind of game design into an existing game without changing its identity. Adventure things like ledges and accurate physics only disrupts your flow instead of enhancing it. Non-simple AI behavior is disruptive for mobs that you are using to predictably extend your combo. Slower, deliberate actions (most of these games' combat traversal) are discouraged since everything needs to be accessed instead of available on a menu. It's very different. If you just want a boss rush on a flat environment there's plenty of recommendations I have for that. Not too many games capture the exploration and adventure of the Wild series.
@@raze2012_ Most of what you listed has nothing to do with the physics system's complexity- they'd mostly be done with scripting and generic function calls. I love talking about this stuff, so I'm gonna dive right into the nitty-gritty. "They also need to interact with the environment." -This is a very broad truth. If you're talking about physically interacting, that's done with a simple physics collider, which is as simple as adding the appropriately-sized capsule collider to the enemy. "Most enemies drown but a few can swim." -This can be done via coding. A game engine can be made to detect when an entity 'enters' a body of water and get the Y coordinate that represents the water's 'surface'. Then it's just a matter of activating a Drowning state, which plays an animation and then kills the enemy, or activating a secondary movement state. They most likely used generic function calls, but with custom animations depending on the enemy. "Enemies get shocked by your weapons or the environment. " -This is also via coding. Lightning strikes and lightning-infused equipment will emit a spherical area that inflicts anything inside of it with a 'Shock' trigger, which would activate the appropriate 'Shocked' animation and any secondary effects, like dropping equipped weapons. Both of these would also be done with generic function calls. "Bokoblins can ride horses" -They most likely have a generic script function that lets enemies 'know' what kinds of entities are nearby them. If one of the entities is a horse, they might trigger an AI routine where they move towards it and trigger the same 'Mount and Ride' function that Link uses to ride horses. "boss Bokoblins have a load of interactions with their crew" -Tangential, but this is probably the best unique behavior in the game. It'd most likely use the entity list again. Not sure if it'd be called from the Boss or if the Bokoblins would 'inform' the Boss that there are enough of them around to execute a tactical maneuver, as it were. But I'm pretty sure all Bokoblins have the functions that tell them to get into formation, using the entity list and a basic pathfinding function. "They are capable of some minor arrow fusing in order to launch elemental attacks which are based on a physical supply aroind them " -This would use the entity list again. If they want to use nearby stuff on their arrows, they'd just move towards that object, perform a 'grab' animation, and then the script would change their arrow to have the appropriate effect "They can not only pickup but kick around bombs in a relatively accurate way wrt the environment." -This would also use the entity list. They'd have an AI routine that might call if a bomb is in the list, and then use a generic "leading shot" physics impulse function to send it in the right direction to get it back to you. So far, this is the only thing that actually uses the physics engine, but it's also just a basic physics thing that any given physics engine can do. "They can also hunt and consume game just like Link can" -I think friendly NPCs do this to, but I can't recall for certain. It's the same NPC activity AI programming that you might see in Skyrim. "There's so many behaviors going on, adding another unique enemy type of that complexity isn't just some drag and drop if you want to match maybe half that quality." -The truth is that a lot of these things are just generic behaviors that are made to look unique due to each enemy's unique animations. There are very few actually unique behaviors among the chaff enemies- stuff like the Horriblins hanging and moving on the ceiling and the Lizalfos' swimming that you'd brought up before. It's not actually all that much overhead, because the behaviors already exist- they'd just need to make the animations for any new enemies. You aren't understanding the point of my DMC comparison. It has nothing to do with DMC, itself. The enemies don't have any variety in the open-world Zelda games because fighting enemies isn't the point, and they think that the player's capabilities stand on their own without being supported by good enemy design. This is strictly about the two games having a similar design philosophy concerning the role that basic enemies play- nothing more.
@@AtelierMcMuttonArt I and assumedly you did not program the game so nitpicking over implementation details is pretty useless. If you don't see how any of your behaviors won't somehow screw over the physics system, you may need to find a larger project to work on. Plenty of open source stuff to take a look at for that. Just because it's not literally physics doesn't mean the physics system isn't involved. That's why no one else even tries this stuff past static events. And I guess we'll just disagree on DMC. Zelda isn't a character action game, it never tried to be. The design is different, there's no less useful criticism than saying that a game isn't A when it's clearly trying to be B. Feel free to try and make your own open world DMC hybrid if you want. There's a reason no one does this either (and it's more audience demands, DMC players don't wanna spend hours just traveling around. They wanna get straight to the action).
For as little variety in enemy types the games have, I do think that the humble Bokoblin is the best enemy in the game. There is so much variety in what they can do and how they interact with the environment around them. And the fact that they are weapon wielders mean that they can be differentiated with all the weapon variety the game has to offer too. Tears of the Kingdom upgraded them even further by giving them backpacks of throwable items at times. Truly amazing and versatile little guys that should go appreciated.
I think this is still ignoring that several BotW/TotK enemies can wield 4 different weapon types (that's even ignoring the effects of wands, deku leaf, elemental weapons, multi-shot bows and then on top of that TotK added fuse, and then Bokoblins can also ride animals). Point is that the amount of interactions you can get from just Bokoblins is pretty crazy and would cover a wider variety then you'd get from several enemy types in other games. …that doesn't mean I don't think there's NO problem here, but it's mostly just skin deep. You're gonna get a lot more variety from BotW/TotK's Bokoblins than both TP's Bokoblins and Bulblins but starting to see Bulblins feels like a progression that doesn't really exist in BotW and TotK. I feel something like area specific skins/outfits for Bokoblins could do a lot here.
Another contributing factor, to me, is that enemy variants in Breath of the Wild aren't nearly as distinguishable as they are in other games. Green knights and blue knights might be identical aside from color and attack/defense values, but unlike a lot of enemies in BotW they don't visually blend together.
IMO a big reason why there's less enemy variety has to do with Link having less built in tools to deal with enemies. A lot of times you'd need a specific type of item to exploit a specific enemy's weakness, and the game designers would know exactly when you'd get these items and would be able to design around that. In BotW, you get most of your core toolkit in the first part of the game, and everything else you can do is based upon weapons that have limited durability or special powerups that only happen when you complete a Divine Beast. The devs might not have felt confident designing encounters or enemies around weapons or items that the player may or may not have.
If you compare enemy variety from HWDE to BotW, there are these categories in HWDE: (Only counting enemies with unique portraits/models) Common enemies: Aerial Lizardmen - Aeralfos, Dark Aeralfos, Fiery Aeralfos, Dark Fiery Aeralfos Ground Lizardmen - Dinolfos, Dark Dinolfos, Lizalfos, Dark Lizalfos Bokoblins - Bokoblin, Bokoblin Captain, Bokoblin Summoner Moblins - Moblin, Dark Moblin, Shield Moblin, Dark Shield Moblin Bulblins - Bulblin, Bulblin Captain, Bulblin Summoner WW Moblins - Big Blin, Dark Big Blin, Stone Blin, Dark Stone Blin Miniblins - Miniblin, Miniblin Captain, Miniblin Summoner Poes - Big Poe, Dark Big Poe, Icy Big Poe, Dark Icy Big Poe Darknuts - Darknut, Dark Darknut Undead - Gibdo, Dark Gibdo, ReDead Knight, Dark ReDead Knight Stalchild - Stalchild, Stalchild Captain, Stalchild Summoner, Captain Keeta Stalmasters - Stalmaster, Dark Stalmaster Stationary/set path enemies: Beamos Bombchu Deku Baba Manhandla Stalk Chuchus - Green Chuchu, Red Chuchu, Yellow Chuchu Gold Skulltula Bosses: King Dodongo - King Dodongo (LoZ design), Dark King Dodongo (LoZ), King Dodongo (OoT design), Dark King Dodongo (OoT) Gohma - Gohman, Dark Gohma Manhandla - Manhandla, Dark Manhandla Argorok - Argarok, Dark Argarok The Imprisoned - The Imprisoned, The Dark Imprisoned, The Mini-Imprisoned Ganon - Ganon, Dark Ganon Helmaroc King Phantom Ganon Great Fairy (Only appears as a boss in Ganons Fury Mode; otherwise treated as one of Link's weapons) Allies/Other (excluding playable characters other than Cuccos): Hylian Soliders - Soldier, Hylian Captain (armoured), Hylian Captain (unarmoured), Dark Hylian Captain, Hylian Summoner, Ghost Soldier, Ghost Captain, Ghost Summoner, Turncoat Soldier (Also as a Hylian Captain alt) Gorons - Goron, Goron Captain, Dark Goron Captain, Goron Summoner, Bombchu Operator (Also as a Goron Captain alt) Cuccos - Cucco, Dark Cucco, Brown Cucco, Silver Cucco, Gold Cucco There are 85 enemies in the game (excluding playable characters outside of Ganon, Great Fairy and Cucoo; including Hylian Soldiers, Gorons and Cuccos), which is the same amount in TotK. In total there are 30 categories of enemies, which is also the same amount as SS and WW. Overall HWDE has around 2.8 enemies per category, though most have 2 or 3 and some have a lot more.
What makes enemy variety suck so bad in BotW and TotK is that there are almost no area exclusive enemies. The Gerudo have Gibdos and the Depths have Froxes(Frox?) and that's basically it. The key is to have a constant stream of new enemies throughout the game. Elemental variants suck and do not count for this point. After beating BotW in 2017, playing TotK presented no challenge, I already knew how to fight 90% of the enemies, and the new ones for the most part were variations or simple enough that after fighting them 3 or 4 times there was nothing else to do (ignoring bosses)
1. Finish the video, you can play 100 hour games but can't watch the other 8 minutes where he talks about enemy variety? 2. Okay, TOTK aren't easy games but they aren't souls games. You can outgear any enemy. It is not trying to punish you every encounter.
@raze2012_ 1. I watched the whole video, my comment is not against the video, I just wanted to add my opinion on why I think enemy variety feels so bad in the new 3d games. 2. I do not want zelda games to be difficult combatwise. My point is that in these games you will be fighting for the most part the same 5 enemy types during the whole playthrough. Making a bokoblin black, or silver and have better gear makes them tougher, but in the most uninteresting way possible. Combat scenarios get very stale very quickly and for a game this big that's a major flaw, I think.
@@MigueUgartechea 1. You probably need to re-watch the video because he agrees with you, that's the whole point of the 2nd chart that he in fact spends most of the video on. 2. IMO just adding more mooks doesn't matter if, as others argue, they are taken out the same way. Variety isn't depth.
These people in the comment section are clueless. For the longest time, enemy AI in Zelda games were so bad it severely limited the types of terrain and unique situations you could encounter them in making most encounters feel exactly the same. Look at how different the behaviors and combat moves can be now based on what weapon they are carrying, etc.
0:50 no it isn't. if it's a threat then it's an enemy. wolves are enemies and enemies are enemies. bosses are not enemies unless they are copy pasted everywhere, which makes taluses, hinoxes, and hydras enemies. enemies with platforms with additional enemies on them are still the same enemies as before but in a cluster, which is usually the case anyway. enemies with a different colour are still the same enemies. they function identically, they look identical, only their stats are different. they are the same, so no, botw and totk do not have 85 enemies. you are completely wrong
I mean yes it is hard to define. For example according to your definition: Boulders are enemies because they are threats to Link. You need to refine your definition of enemies more
this feels to me like saying that, in yo-kai watch, for example, yo-kai with the same design and just a palette swap should be counted as the same enemy when it is just not the case. there, they not only ALSO have unique entries, they have different traits and stats. red bokoblins not only are weaker in power and health, but also lack certain attacks or patterns that stronger bokoblins do, they act differently. they are also counted differently. another example is like saying that, idk, plusle and minun are the same pokémon, latios and latias, nidoking and nidoqueen. pokémon with very similar direct counterparts are still different pokémon by species. even then, both urshifu are not the same, male and female meowstic, indeedee, and oinkologne are different from the other gender, etc. also, if it's a threat it's an enemy is a weird definition, because that makes that swampy poison slop water an enemy, that makes lava an enemy, that makes voiding out an enemy, there has to be more to it besides simply being a threat because then world hazards are enemies. technically, horses, bears, boars, deer, they can all hurt you, i forget if bears get aggressive towards you on their own like wolves do, but every player has the experience of getting kicked by a horse or trying to kill an animal for food only to get smacked around by them a bit before they run away. are blupees not enemies? they can't hurt you but you have the option to violently engage with them for your own gain. bubbulfrogs try to defend themselves with bubbles, forget if they actually harm you or not but given the goal is kinda to kill them all, they seem pretty enemy-like to me. one last thing is like i don't think monster hunter players count every variation of a monster as just the same guy, either. an azure rathalos is not the same as the basic one. ultimately it is up to you what you think, but it doesn't make your opinion right, let people publishing their videos make informed assumptions on how they should go about categorizing stuff.
I support your theory on it being resources focused on the physics system. They have made it -very- clear in interviews how proud and how much work they have put into that. Budget, time constraints and as you pointed out, the added complexity of creating a new unique enemy in full high quality 3d AND that interacts with the world on the same level as everything else... In the span you could create one enemy for TotK, you could probably make 4 or more in the other games. As a full time developer myself, I am very impressed with what they have done with BotW and TotK. Would I like more variety and not bokoblin but blue? Or lizalfos but fire? Of course. But I can recognize and apreciate the product as a whole. Though I admit, BETEEN BotW and TotK, I would have liked to see more more so than with BotW since much of the game was sorta there already. I wasnt from the ground up in the same way BotW was.
This issue is always so hard to quantify because of how complex BOTW and TOTK enemies are. Their AI and diversity of situations add a lot to them. While I love the VISUAL diversity of TP and WW, there are few enemies that actually rival the bokoblins complexity. I think if there was more visual diversity in the BOTW and TOTK enemies, people wouldn’t complain as much.
IMO the "complexity" of the bokoblins mean nothing when you can fight them all the same way. Not once when through either of these games have I noticed the complexity of the enemies.
@@hist150project5 It just ends up being a great example of why smartly-designed enemies with basic AI and interesting capabilities are better for games than complex AI that seem super smart and can do everything.
@@hist150project5emphasis on "can". I guess your enjoyment of the AI depends on how much you like screwing around or how much you just want a Souls game. BOTW/TOTK's difficulty drops off after you hit mid game, but it's fun experimenting with all the ways to mess aroind even with bokoblins. Baiting them with meat, having them play around with a bomb, all the phsycial interactions (fire, thunder, ice), insta drowning them, dropping a huge steel box on them, sneaking into their camp while asleep and looting them, blending in with a mask, creating some unholy abomination to mow them down. I could go on for paragraphs. But if you're just approaching them the same way, then sure. Of course it'd get boring.
@@AtelierMcMuttonArt Disagreed. Couldn't care less if the game throws new fodder type enemies at me around every corner. If every fight just has me spin attack them without a thought, that's not good combat. Meanwhile a game like Sekiro or Sifu, which doesn't have a whole lot of visual variety, can lead to MUCH more satisfying combat, simply because enemies can do more. The interaction is simply more engaging with an enemy that's smart, instead of simply looking different.
I wouldn't blame the lack of enemy variety on physics. There's another feature that BotW & TotK have, but other games lack, which you've overlooked: weapon breaking. No other game in the series has to look at its enemy encounters and ask itself if the player will still be able to actually fight after they beat it. BotW & TotK do have to ask this question though, and sure enough, most of the enemies you encounter are something that could provide you with a weapon. It's further shown by how many of TotK's enemies have horns, even if they were in BotW and previously lacked them, just so you could have fuse materials to make your weapons worthwhile.
Very good video and rounding was the right call for numbers because extremely exact numbers would be confusing and too much. Amd i like the point you made about why the there's less variety.
Quick note. I've seen a lot of comments talking about me counting color variants of Bokoblins as separate enemies: to those people I would suggest to continue watching the video, because I literally make the point that it doesn't work like that and then re-do the math counting every variant of Bokoblin as one enemy like you want
Why do you start out with it then?
@@i-am-the-slime To make the video longer and waste people's time
Deleting people's comments is pathetic.
No one cared about pallet swaps.
Most people comment during the video
To be fair, Skyward sword felt lacking in enemy variety because, despite the count, it seems like 2/3 of enemy encounters involve bokoblins or deku babas. The problem also comes down to how well the enemies are actually distributed in the world.
That's absolutely right. What you are getting at is the diversity of enemies, not the meir variety of enemies.
A game with 10 enimes where you see 1 of them 90% of the time has the same variety as a game where there are 10 that you each see 10% of the time. But the second game has a higher diversity of enemies.
The Demon Tribe needed a lot more "soldier monsters" beyond Bokoblins. Most of the enemies were more like "wildlife monsters".
@@quillion3rdoptionthe lack of darknuts in the depths in criminal.
@@amandaslough125 TBF, I don't really see Darknuts functioning much more different from Boss Bokos without their minions.
What helps is restricting enemies to areas. So when you change the area you meet new enemies.
before watchng the vid i will say this, botw,totk enemy variety isnt awful because of the total number, but because of the enemy ratio with the size of the map and their distribution as well as the lenght of the game
in a traditional zelda game like albw everytime you get o a new area or dungeon you will have new enemy, you are constantly being shown newthings for 30 hours, in the botw games, your spending 100+ hours in a game where every area have the same lineup of enemies, and every dungeon too, (except gerudo which have redead and molduga for some reason, every area should have this kinda mixup) so no matter how you play you are gonna see 90% of all the enemies at the 25 percent of your playthrough done, wherehas in every other games you are served new foes untilthe very end of the game duration
This
A game with 30 enemies (and I mean core enemies, reskins don't count one way or another), where you spend a roughly equivalent amount of time fighting each one, with maybe one or two outliers is much, much more diverse feeling than a game that has 60 enemies, but of those 60, you spend 90% of the game fighting 4 of them, with many of the remaining 56 having numbers of appearance you can count on one hand.
What also contributes is the diversity of combat approaches. If you have 30 enemies that all rush at you, and die if you jump on them, the nuances of whatever one might have over another start to feel trivial, compared to even if you have only 10 enemies, but each one has a totally unique approach, that ends up feeling much more different. Maybe only one can be jumped on, another needs to be flipped with explosives, another one only exposes a weak point you need to quickly strike after a combo, and so on.
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 100% agree. Simply counting truly different enemy types and judging by that alone is horribly oversimplifying enemy variety. Good enemy variety is just as much about evenly spreading combat time around the full roster, as the size of the roster itself. A big roster is of little value if it's extremely heavily weighted toward a small minority of the total options available. And on that note, Breath and Tears are therefore extra bad for variety because combat time is so heavily weighted toward the exactly three enemy types of bokoblins, moblins, and lizalfos. Which are then even worse still because they're all fought pretty similarly and do similar things anyway, and like you said, diversity of combat interactions is a major factor in experienced variety too; visually different enemies don't really count for much variety if you ultimately fight them the same way, with the same tactics, etc anyway.
It'd be a huge pain to actually do, but to truly measure enemy variety meaningfully across Zelda games, you'd need to watch entire playthroughs of them, and clock how much combat time is spent per enemy type. AND THEN come up with a different enemy type accounting method that doesn't simply measure total enemy types and weigh all types equally, but factors in actual effective practical difference between enemies on top of that, so "differenter" enemies yield higher variety values per minute than less functionally different enemies. Only when you have specific time measurements showing how much each enemy type accounts for total combat play time, further modified by actual meaningful variety of enemy design, could you truly, meaningfully measure enemy variety: The amount of total variety that a player feels in actual gameplay practice.
the total number’s pretty sad compared to other Zelda games too, though
@@Alloveckwith this logic, most enemies in Zelda games suck because they all do mostly similar things. OoT has slugs and bats you just whack when they’re close, and wolfos, lizalfos and knights where you just wait and attack for. Taking variety to the extreme you are would make most games crumble to pieces. BOTW and TOTK are better in regards to them having more enemies that are actually interesting to fight. Bokoblins, Moblins, Lizalfos, Gibdos, Guardians or Gloom Hands/Phantom Ganon, Zonai droids, overworld bosses, Yiga Soldiers and Brutes, Lynels, Wizrobes. Not to mention the bosses themselves become overworld bosses in the depths. All of these you fight often, even if the most common are the 3 you listed. All of these do far more and are far more complex and interesting to fight than almost any enemy in past Zelda games by leaps and bounds, even over some full on dungeon bosses. With different weapons to boot. That alone gives the game more variety than past Zelda games, as it means you do far less different in past games vs enemies in general, even if they technically have more or a “better spread”. Yeah, I’m having so much fun smacking the 50th basic enemy that barely attacks in OoT, like all the others that do the same exact thing 😂
@@Random1567 If by slugs you mean Leevers, I do agree they're similar to bats/keese, that's why it was so weird to me that BotW+TotK didn't have Leevers lol.
And yeah, Wolfos, Lizalfos and Stalfos are all just movement and timing variants on the same type of enemy, I suspect that's why they they reused the "-fos" suffix in the first place. But those slight behavior variations ended up feeling like enough because they're so cosmetically distinct, and could each be used to reinforce totally different themes since they were so much rarer. In my opinion, the enemies fighting so similarly isn't actually a problem at all when they're spread out and not all blurring together.
And although I usually don't blame the game's scale, that all plays a factor for this particular issue too. If you fought 100 OoT Lizalfos, it would get old _way_ faster than fighting 100 BotW Lizalfos would, especially if you're low-level, when their fights are still quite interesting... but you _won't_ fight 100 OoT Lizalfos, you won't even fight that many if you combine all the -foses in the game. BOTW's scale doesn't doom it by any means, it just makes their enemy design vulnerable to a new problem they didn't really have to worry about before. And that new problem makes cosmetic variety and area theming for enemies more useful than ever. The more distinct mobs can be from one another, and the more often the enemies you encounter look bespoke for the area, the less able it is to all blur together.
I think TotK took *good* steps in the right direction to address that problem, especially with the bosses, but you still aren't encountering the same visual variety that you were in past titles, even if the variety we're missing is fairly shallow. The same handful of monster species still populate all of Hyrule the way only the occasional bat or skeleton did before, even though that's not the case for other animal species. A lot of people cite Elden Ring as a comparison, and I think the way it handled enemy variety and theming (though not scaling) would make perfect sense for wide-open-world Zelda.
switch titles had a very copy/paste formula. The biggest issue for me is that you see every kind of enemy everywhere, rather than distinguishing certain enemies by segregating them to different areas/progression points.
Pretty much yeah. Visiting new areas comes with the excitement of finding new things. But when you realize it's the same type of encounters everywhere that really takes the wind out of your sails. I don't think it's about reaching some number or quota, but just having enough enemies to make various areas more distinct.
Heck- totk made gibdos almost exclusive to the gerudo region and even though it's just 1-2 enemies, I feel like that did wonders for setting the gerudo region apart.
Also, TotK is worse with this because it's easily like twice as big as BotW. Yes, they added Gleeoks and Frox, but now there are 96 Stone Talus and 96 Hinox! It's so disappointing to explore the depths and just find more of the same enemies
I mean so are the n64 games and yet all I hear are their praises, GameCube Zelda is also very similar although they did say that they just reused the formula. Skyward sword is the only unique 3D Zelda
it would be cool if the basic enemy types could have regional or biome-specific variants… like perhaps the Bokoblins in the snowy regions had fur, or just wore heavy coats, and the ones in the desert worse robes, etc 🤷🏻♂️
It's kind of like a variation of something one of the BotW developers (I assume Aonuma?) said in an interview, when asked why it isn't possible to pet the dogs.
They wanted to reduce the number of actions that have a one-off use, in favour of making actions which are versatile and are used in many different situations
Similarly, they reduced the number of enemies that are used in just one area in favour of making enemies which they can re-use in lots of different situations
My biggest issue is lack of UNIQUE enemies. Gerudo has two…no other region does I believe.
Think freezards in Hebra, buzz blobs in Faron, dodongos in Eldin, etc.
Truly
I agree! It's not that the variety is small, it's that every variety can be found almost everywhere, sometimes in the same immediate area! And then you have the encampments in the Depths, they should have at least created unique themes such as "ice-only enemies", "all enemies have bombs" etc.
The biggest problem I had with not just enemy variety but the games in general is that once you’ve seen everything there is to see and there’s nothing else that’s new to experience, the game becomes a massive chore.
There are a couple more, such as the new flying enemies mostly around Hebra and high elevations, the ice lizalfos in snowy areas, horriblins and like likes in caves etc, but still, the lack of enemy variety and most importantly the lack of interesting or diverse movesets is still a problem
We don't call them freezards anymore, we call them thermodynamically challenged.
The lower enemy variety in BotW and TotK didn't bother me most of the time. There were, however, two points in TotK where I was a bit annoyed. One was that the mixed mobs of 'blins and Lizalfos started to get boring and I would have preferred to encounter more groups that were just one of those. The more specific instance was the whole pirate event. From early on you are told about those terrible pirates terrorizing Lurelin and driving people to leave the area. And then you go there and the pirates are ... the same monsters that you have already been fighting over and over. Disappointing.
I was expecting them to be Gerudo pirates as a callback to Majora's Mask and to give them an excuse to make Gerudo more common throughout the wider game world.
@@mythmaker6554 That would have been great.
They could've at least given the Bokos pirate hats, Smh
@@mythmaker6554
Idk, something about fighting Gerudo (Essentially just humans) in the BoTW engine feels extremely cursed.
You can do so much goofy nonsense to enemies in these games that I just can't imagine Link doing to actual people.
@@An_Entire_Lime What about the Yiga Clan?
The biggest disappointment was dungeons not having their own unique enemies that you can’t fight anywhere else. Nearly every Zelda game used to follow this, but now it’s “oh great, another soldier construct”
Zelda 2 I think was great with this, since not only are there enemy categories unique to palaces, but there are _also_ enemy categories that are unique to the final palace. I don't think any other Zelda game leaned into the idea of "Final dungeon enemies" as hard as Zelda 2 did
@@ironencepersonal9634
I have 0 attatchment to Zelda 2 but for some reason seeing the by far most clowned on game in the franchise acknowledged as not only doing something well but the best feels really wholesome to me.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Twilight Princess to me is the GOAT of dungeons and a large part of it is because they all have unique identities and theming, and the enemy roster for each dungeon is a HUGE reason for that. But in botw and totk that just simply isnt the case so the dungeons don’t stand out that well.
@@dpackerman4203 Twilight Princess's dungeons are completely brainless winding hallways with shallow "bring x to y" puzzles and "run up and slash away" enemies, and you just like them because they "look cool"?
@@quillion3rdoption nope
I think another reason that the enemy variety is so low in BOTW/TOTK is that the enemies are, at least compared to skyward sword or echoes of wisdom, much more complex. They interact with the world, they pick up items, they eat sleep and hunt, sometimes they can even pick each other up and throw them. In general they do more than just walking around a set area waiting for a fight
Yeah but,
People making these clickbaity titles and the dumb people that believe it aren’t the type to understand nuance.
BotW is an infinitely more complex game by all accounts, including on enemy behavior, yet they will just compare the raw numbers and ignore all the context
@@Indigo_1001c9msider that those things for aesthetic aren't enough to compensate for how bland the enemies are, and for the size of the map and length of the game, having only 3 enemies no matter where you go makes each encounter predictable and uninteresting.
And these games all rode the top end of peak system performance.
@@Indigo_1001but does the complexity even matter when there's only 3 of them? I personally don't think so. Many other games have had way more complex enemy moves while still having a ton more variety in monsters
Then don't make every enemy complex. Sometimes simple monsters can be just as interesting as the more complex ones in the right environment.
Considering black bokoblins and red bokoblins to be different its like what mobile games do when they advertise themselves as having 1000+ enemies, which are the same but with different colors.
Imo all of those should count as one enemy, they have the same attacks, same animations, same everything except they take more hits to kill (wow)
I agree with this take. More health and a new skin does not an enemy make. Maybe if the alt colors did more stuff different it would be justifiable, but they are effectively the same enemy. I'd honestly only count 62 truly unique enemies in BOTW, which only puts it barely above WW as per the video.
The lack of enemies is a problem, and only accentuates the fact that Zelda team squandered the open world. The enemies just drive players to disengage from gameplay by being so repetitive that players often skip combats altogether, which says a lot.
Black bokoblins are actually better in combat slightly, with I think a couple new moves and they also move out of your line of sight when you draw your bow on them
It's a small change but nice
I agree they shouldn't really count as "separate enemies"
Maybe you should watch past the 5 minute mark to see this happen.
exactly, reminds of those old-school "99 games!" cartridges with 80 "skins" of tetris
@@raze2012_There’s still more complexity than what the video presents. I would argue that things like Keese and Fire Keese are separate enemies, whereas red bokoblins and blue bokoblins are not. But that would take some pretty substantial rules to determine when similar enemies are counted as separate and when they’re not, so it’s fine the way he did it.
It still baffles me that theres not a single spider enemy in both BOTW and TOTK, closest thing are the guardians but it's not the same.
It's especially frustrating because it really seems like certain caves, areas of the depths and ruins would've been the perfect place to encounter Skulltula and perhaps entire nests of Skullwalltula enemies that cover the dark ceilings and walls, laying still in the darkness but then skittering about when we shine a light on them... Also having a giant Armagohma-style world boss would've been great in certain areas, but alas... : (
Yeah, one would think that because of Gohma in Totk there would be some spider like enemies in its dungeon to match the boss, but we didn't even get that...
@@dinoman6481 We don't even get Gohma's back-up option of Scrubs.
Had a genuine "huh... Now that you mention it" moment there. That IS weird
From a game design perspective I fully agree that it’s weird but also as someone with rather severe arachnophobia I’m rather grateful.
it also doesn;t help in BOTW and TOTK that most of the enemies are "Humanoid with weapon" Bokoblin, Lizolfos, Stal, Yiga are all basically the same and are fought exactly the same. Sure the smaller Yiga have a different combat style that makes them stand out. but all the others just feel like reskins of the same basic weapon A.I
I wouldn't say they're all fought the same. Heck, even Bokoblins wielding a different weapon aren't all fought the same. There's a pretty big difference between a Silver Boko attacking you with a heavy two hander vs one that uses a fast spear or bow. Same goes for the combat styles of these enemies. Bokos are the average type, Moblins are super tanky and ignore your attacks and Lizalfos constantly weave in and out to hit you from your blind spots. Yiga keep teleporting. Yiga Soldiers constantly bait you to come towards them, so that they can slash you etc.
Compared to something like OoT, where everything just dies to simple spin attack spamming, the combat variety in BotW and TotK is significantly better.
i wonder why anyone has tried to rebut your argument? The moment logic & facts are brought into the discussion the complainers wash away.
This is just another symptom of the weapon durability system. Because your weapons are always breaking, you need to constantly be getting more. As a result, they need the vast majority of enemies to be using weapons you can salvage after you break 2 swords fighting them.
@@Refreshment01 dude i agree with the comment but only like 20 people had seen it
@Il_Exile_lI yup! And to add to that, they also were using that as a way to give those enemies more variety in moveset/capabilities. There's many weapons already in the game for link, if they let an enemy use an amount of those, it makes them that much more interesting to fight!
Another reason they might’ve decided to include so many variations of the same enemy is BoTW/ToTK’s weapon system. In all other Zelda games, you get 2, maybe 3 swords. For the most part, you can account for which enemies are seen when you have each of these swords, and there’s not a ton of overlap.
To account for your weapons gradually increasing in strength at a linear rate, enemies that increased at a more-linear way (going from moblin to blue moblin) makes the game have a continuous level of challenge. You see that sort of thing in JRPGs all the time for the same reason.
Yeah, a boko with a club fights differently from one with a bow or one with a spear. But visually, they all present the same.
The coloured variants are also not just tankier and stronger, but often smarter too, so you have to play around them in slightly altered ways, but it’s easy to just chalk it up to yet another boko.
Every monster has to be able to handle every weapon in the game so that their difficulty system works, and that’s likely one of the root causes of the lack of variety.
@@RePorpoised This is why I'd be happier with more "animalistic" enemies and only adding one, maybe two, humanoid enemies. Let the humanoids handle the "complexity", but have the "animalistic" enemies handle the variety.
@@quillion3rdoption not even animalistic necessarily. The gibdos were very interesting to encounter, and they're more or less humanoid. It's simply that they need more unarmed enemies. More gibdos, frok, and arrocudas. More of those, that are properly region-locked and you have yourself a really solid experience.
And it's a shame that, while they ARE very similar to their shrine counterparts in botw, the zonai do actually have interesting item fusions that can really end up spicing up battles.
I have to wonder if the pirates were initially intended to be a unique monster, but it was reconsidered due to dev time.
TOTK has a decent amount of enemies but a lot of them are very weak gimmick based enemies so they are easily forgotten about.
And 90% of the ones you encounter in the game are the same 3 (Bokoblin, Moblin, Lizalfos). So while the game technically has higher variety, in the reality of gameplay it does not.
@tyranitararmaldo no the game more than doubles the non boss leveld enemie count.
Now we have Instead of just the 3 from BOTW we now also have Horroblins, boss Bocoblins, soldier constructs and captain constructs.
Thus increasing the count 4 new leveled enemies to 7.
The problem is TOTK has a lot more new non boss enemies than BOTW but they are all in some way tied to a gimmick like.
Gibdos are weak to elemental damage.
Likelikes just sit there till they show thiere weak spot.
Arocudas just existed to carry enemies and drop with one hit (basically are just more mobile balloon Octorocks)
Mini frox just exist to be a small annoyance.
And they all also do not level up which is bad for the games difficulty curve.
Great example is the battle talus.
It has two level which means they go down before they can do anything.
All they needed to do was give it a rare stone talus Cristal and black Bocoblins to make it stay bit more threatening once you start getting farther in to the game.
You mean how enemies were in older games? Seriously am I the only person to have ACTUALLY played the old 3d games because people keep making criticisms of botw/totk that apply to the old games too.
@@thegreatgoobert5847 this is the only complaint i’ve seen that also applied to the older enemies tbh
Well that confirms it, the enemy variety is laughably low in those games lol
I feel validated.
Another reason I think they may have fewer enemies is because in most Zelda games enemies are designed to be weak to Link's items. But the 3D Switch games have very few "traditional items"
Good point
Which also feels like a crutch. Lack of enemy variety because lack of weapons for games ALL ABOUT imagination feels quite limiting. I don't get the whole "do anything anywhere" approach when the games are just a slog because everything is copy/pasted. At least when you play WW in an unintended way you actually feel smart and not like you did what you were meant to do all along.
Lack of road blocks and places you're meant to visit later also makes BotW and TotK feel very unrewarding, because they simply don't exist. Even then you are not rewarded for exploring because the stories feel pointless and almost everywhere looks/feels the same. People say that BotW and TotK have the biggest maps in any Zelda game, but given how sparse they are it feels the exact opposite.
@@YujiUedaFan the world of BotW feels huge because of its set pieces and immersive physics systems, but IN SPITE of its enemy systems.
@@wesshiflet2214 It feels small to me because there aren't any interesting NPCs or landmarks outside of story required areas. There should have been a whole set of sub-stories instead of samey caves over and over again, especially in TotK. Nintendo should have expanded on the world building and people in it instead of just the world.
@@YujiUedaFan there are a bunch of interesting landmarks off the Main Story path, there's even a whole town I was very happily surprised to find (made me hope for more, lol). but they all tie into sidequests, and you can't get anything "permanent" out of any of the really interesting optional places, save for the 120 shrine reward.
I'm super okay with having tons of variants, as long as there's also tons of base enemies. And that they aren't so evenly distributed
what BotW did was recycle the red/blue dichotomy from the first game (and the second to some extent) so that you had a quick color-coded sense of difficulty, and then had the enemies slowly increase in difficulty over time... but that leads to even _less_ enemy variety later, when only blacks and silvers spawn. TotK fixed that a bit by not making it so even. But even so, they were VERY evenly distributed. Yes, elemental enemies only appeared in their designated areas, but the same few enemies were everywhere no matter where you were, making a huge world seem a lot smaller. and i get the reason for it, they wanted to make a game where... if you did the bare minimum, and went straight to the 4 dungeons (or even didn't finish all of them) then to Hyrule Castle, you could still have roughly seen everything. LOTS of things in BotW have this attitude, "We don't want people to miss much of the game if they choose not to explore." which I think is a mistake. Because if you aren't rewarding people for exploring, you're punishing them for it.
My main issue with enemy variety in these games is that they end up being so irrelevant that they don't feel like enemies, but... like prey
(long text incoming I hope your read it)
In older games, the enemies would be THERE, in the middle of your path. So you had to engage in combat in order to travel safely through Hyrule
But in Breath and Tears most of them are located in specific places, which I can just ignore, as the game is HUGE. "But they are strategically placed next to the main paths" ok, I don't think I followed a single main path for the entire game (just climb and glide); and if I did, I would just run faster and leave then behind
So do I have any reasons to fight them? I do in the early game, as I need to gather resources, but by mid game I already have all the weapons I need just by doing the "mandatory" fights. So whenever I fight them, it's because I've run towards them, "hunting them for sport"
And there comes the second issue: there are many ways to kill them and some of them are OP. Stealth, Monster masks, traps, bombs (custom or flower), boomerangs, elemental stuff, parrys... I have done all of those things, not because each enemy incentivated me to try new things, but because I wanted to have more variety. If I wanted to be optimal and effective, I would just use a WindShield+Slowmo Arrows, or Smokebomb+Stealth OHKOs; the fact that I don't do this, but rather "play with my food", shows that the enemies aren't menacing by the slighest
To sum up, I have reached a point were almost all enemies are just optional battles (that I have to willingly look for), where I have to nerf myself to have some fun. Self-imposed variety, not because the game forces me to have variety, but because I have to cook it myself
At least the game gives me the tools to come up with more and more new ways to deal with this problem, which is in fact the best thing about Breath and Tears
"In older games, the enemies would be THERE, in the middle of your path. So you had to engage in combat in order to travel safely through Hyrule"
I can think of an optional area in the first game where you had to kill a lynel, or occasional mandatory overworld scripted moments in ww and tp but it seems to me you are recalling mostly forced dungeon encounters.
@@daniel8181 It's also because sometimes in older games the only time you get to fight certain enemies is in one or two dungeons. Even if you don't get anything from the enemy, it's still fun to fight them and find out what their weaknesses are.
I can get what you mean, but to be honest I think the same still applies for the old games.
Twilight Princess has many moments where enemies are just scattered about during moments where you are going across a field, and you definitely don’t have to fight them, they also technically reward you less. Additionally a lot of them die super quickly with a few simple hits. So I think the “prey” title fits the old games too.
It’s really that the old games have very visually strong variety with enemies, that truely fit and blended well with the environment / dungeon that you were exploring. At the same time though, for a game like twilight princess, a lot of them enemies are fairly simple and die quick.
Meanwhile in BotW / TotK not only is the variety of enemies super weak, it’s also radioed poorly, as you will encounter bokoblins, Moblins and Lizalfos majority of the time. However, BotW and TotK had the best combat, far more fluid and less clunk than the other 3D titles.
So which is better? I dunno. I definitely think in the future it is possible to have both, but as for now I would probably choose the older titles like TP. But that’s also easy for me to say, as I absolutely love TP since its my favourite game
@@YujiUedaFan I wouldnt go too far with the accusation that they have "weaknesses" to "find out". Honestly pretty rare in Zelda.
@@zaciorfida-costanzo706 well, in the other Zelda games you never "lost" anything by fighting those enemies, or at the very least you don't lose anything that couldn't be made back with a 5 minute trip back to an inn and shop.
I think one of the issues with enemy variety is also the lack of proper mini bosses in the wild games.
most Zeldas in hindsight have very similar regular enemy count. but older Zelda games had mini bosses that erase up the enemy count and made dungeons feel more unique.
also the depths could've used just a few more new enemies. Just a few
I disagree with the view that Echoes of Wisdom has better variety than A Link Between Worlds. Varieties of the same category aren't bad. They are only bad if they exist because there aren't enough categories to begin with. There is nothing wrong with having 5 different Keese types or Bokoblin types, it is bad that there aren't enough categories of enemies. So I would say A Link Between Worlds has better variety than Echoes of Wisdom. The metric should be total amount of categories, not the ratio.
the two game have the same number of enemy categories... lol
Disagreeing with the raw math I see. Could be a distribution issue in the world but uhhh objectively incorrect comment
I think the different colored versions of enemies should count all as one instead of separating their entries because they all act the same. Plus you see all these enemies everywhere with very little to no separation based on region.
Also I'd like it if you decided to cover the enemy variety of the N64 games compared to these titles.
Yeah, dude was being extremely generous to the enemy variety of the open world games.
Bokoblin is a bokoblin 🗿
You simply need to watch past the 5 minute mark because he does this
@@mrister24 Well yeah, I realize that after watching, but I'd also just like to reinforce the notion that these recolors of enemies are not much more than just recolors in the Switch games.
At least in Twilight Princess when you got a red Deku Baba's stem cut off, it would still crawl towards you afterwards, unlike the normal Deku Baba.
@@Boomblox5896 I agree the enemy variety was bad which is why I was glad he condensed variants of the same enemies later in the video
Great video and break down, I'd like to chime in with a game animator's perspective, the switch games definitely have less enemy variety in the traditional sense but they also have a lot more animations. In botw and totk enemies like bokoblins will have their walks, runs, falls, deaths, unique attacks per weapon category, on fire, electricuted, when they're suspecting you're around, when you are wearing a monster mask, etc. There's a lot more animation per enemy by far compared to the other games, and this still doesnt account for the unique animations per animals like foxes, wolves, eagles, small birds, bears, horses, deer, etc. Which means theres just tons of work that cant go towards making even more enemies. But they do add a lot of life to the overworld so I dont mind their compromise.
Part of it to me at least is the enemies feel less like they belong in a given location where as older games felt more like the enemies were made with a location in mind you have a dessert theres scorpions you have a forest theres killer plants and birds theres a whole ocean full of sharks fish and pirates where as the switch games give a recolor and call it a day because the enemies are needed to be in several locations they don't get specilized to fit thoes locations
It also always feels like im fighting bokoblins in the switch games ive got many more recent hours on them so it could be a recent bias but it always fees like the same few enemies
It's important to acknowledgement that the BotW/TotK diversity is made a bit less interesting by having several incarnations of the same monster (generally 4 subtypes). There are 7 subtypes of lizalfos alone in BotW, and that accounts for almost 10% of the 75 enemy varieties.
Edit: just getting to the category portion, apologies, should have waited until the video progressed
The gameplay makes a difference as well. Older 3d Zelda games lasted 40 hours or less, you can play the open world games for hundreds of hours.
That's all the more reason the lack of enemy variety is a problem.
Yes, you can collect hundreds of korok seeds! How exciting!
I was never bothered by the enemy variety in BOTW and TOTK, and I think it’s because the value of enemy variety to me lies not in how different the enemies actually are but in the number of ways I’m able to approach a combat and how fun those ways are, and that’s a front on which BOTW and TOTK excel. Most enemy encounters throughout both of these games can be taken on in any way you want, and for that reason it just never really felt like I was seeing the same thing every time.
Would it have been nice to have some more variety just for the sake of flavor? Yeah, maybe. Zelda has a deep and wonderful selection of creatures it could have pulled from and seeing more of that would have been cool. Armos, Buzz Blobs, Tektites, Deku Scrubs, Re-Deads, Moldorms, Lanmolas, Ghinis, the list goes on. I would have loved to see them. But I prefer to judge a game based on what I got, rather than what I wanted, and what I got did not disappoint me in terms of actual gameplay.
Another factor besides physics is the actual freedom in BotW/TotK. Since you progressively get stronger in the open world, the games have an internal leveling system and stronger enemy variants appear more and more as you play the game. Having 4 levels of Bokoblins is necessary if you want players to go anywhere they want whenever they want without either destroying them or being discouraged.
Or you could, you know, impose some limitations on player freedom (scary I know) and have some regions with stronger enemies. That way, it naturally guides the player towards the "intended" path while still allowing experienced player to explore as they wish. As a bonus you would actually feel your progression when you come back to starter areas and demolish enemies you once struggled with
@HunsterMonter Yeah some games take this approach and I generally appreciate scaled areas more. However, this strategy makes the game more accessible, allowing people to go wherever whenever without throwing off the balance, which makes sense as a priority for Nintendo at least
On paper having 4 levels of Bokoblins is good but at the end of the day a red Bokoblin and a silver Bokoblin feel almost the same to kill. The only difference is sometimes the silver one may be slightly more time consuming but not more difficult. I feel like a better form of progression would have been all new more difficult and unique enemies. They kind of did this with the zonai robots which had harder ones with different ai
I think the difference mostly comes down to the fact, that linear Zelda games usually have unique enemies for every dungeon while BotW and TotK have mostly the same enemies across the entire map.
I’m happy gibdos and like likes made a return in Totk but Skultulas should’ve came back also.
I refuse to call those things Gibdos.
Yes skultulas are cool
Skulltulas are so obnoxious. They made the first dungeon of Skyward Sword hell to play through.
@@HungryWarden I can understand that, especially since you're probably not used to the motion controls so early on into the game
The gibdos in TotK are a joke though
I think it's not proportional considering the size of that world.
If anything it would look worse for botw/totk as it has so much more space for enemies so it’s possible to include a lot more enemies. Especially totk being about 2.5x larger than the already massive botw. However to your point it would be kinda niche going to a certain area for one enemy that isn’t very prevalent. Also as this video and other people have said the important thing is the physics and AI of things. These enemies are actual creatures not things waiting around. They do reside in the same place or area but they move. You can see Boss Boko armies marching around, Lynels roaming, bokos dancing, and Gleeoks flying around. They have a way more complicated AI from them doing stuff and they feel a lot more like things. Also from this interaction there’s a lot more physics to program and more things to focus on and the main point of these 2 games is freedom and movement. Especially in totk being able to fuse almost anything, able to ultrahand almost anything to make almost any structure, zonai devices for movement, Recall and Ascend for movement. Autobuild for its ease so you can easily spend more time exploring rather than building.
The games while still having a complex combat system, decent amount of enemies, but subpar shrines and temples and repetitive koroks. The game focuses on exploration and the freedom you have in doing that and the creativity you can use to basically do anything.
I think the other thing is how they reuse enemies. In Skyward Sword, Bokoblins, Tecknoblins, and Cursed Bokoblins are all Bokoblins, but they are all more different than BotW's Red, Blue, and Black Bokoblins. The only times these enemies feel any different is with elemental varieties, something I will note that AGE OF CALAMITY of all things did better than both BotW and TotK
botw boko color variants are a difficulty indication, the real variation is in their equipment.
depending on te weapon or mount they have, the way they fight and the threat they pose changes drastically.
@@Marvin_R i thought it was just equipment and health differences
Nice metrics but the lack of enemy variety (types) in the Switch games is made much worse and glaring by one huge factor- average completion time of a play-through. If you divide those numbers, you’ll get some shocking results. When you consider how long you have to play and how few “new” or “fresh” feeling encounters you have you’ll get why it feels so monotonous to so many.
after watching the vid, enemy reskin arent only better for botw and totk because of the physics making them easier to implement, but also because of the powerscalling system, they wanted to make you choose which area to tackle first meaning they couldnt just place weak and strong enemies on their corresponding areas, they needed each area to have a different roster of enemies based on how far you are into the game and thats much easier done by simply giving most enemies a stronger form
Echoes of Wisdom is also open world and doesn’t have this issue so that’s not a valid excuse. I’m not gonna say the dev team was lazy for botw or totk but it’s abundantly clear where they spent most of their time and which areas of the game were neglected
@@mkz6258echoes of wisdom doesn't have to balance an entire physics system. If you think that's not a limitation you need to try working with a simple physics sostem yourself.
@@raze2012_how’s a physics system make it harder to powerscale enemies?
@wesshiflet2214 a physics system makes it harder to add interactivity to enemies. Every new enemy needs to be tested against every other interaction you support. Water, ice, electric, fire. Then all the weird enemy interactions like when you throw a bomb and they just kick it around. Or when a moblin picks up a bokoblin and yeets it at you.
There's a bunch of those weird little interactions. They need to be tested or isolated to almost never happen.
A bokoblin is a bokoblin, regardless of its color. Even if you count them as different enemies, botw and specially totk have giant maps with the same 3 types of enemies spread across the entire map, with only lizalfos changing to match its environment. It's copy and paste everywhere.
you and 35 people didnt watch the video
@potatoweaver4116 you did not understand my comment
Great video!! Clear a lot of work went into getting these numbers. Absolutely hilarious how many people commented before watching past the 3 minute mark LOL
Thanks!
I think when discussing Enemy variety in BOTW & TOTK you left out the extremely important aspect that they can Wield lots of different weapons.
A bokoblin with a sword is quite different from one with a spear or with a greatsword all of which are very different from one with bow. That's not to mention the rock armor in TOTK.
but conversely, a bokoblin with a bow isn’t particularly different from a lizalfos or moblin with a bow
@wesshiflet2214 Fair point
All the devs had to do was put, like, Red Bubbles in Eldin and Freezards in Hebra and stuff like that. I don't know what would possess them to put Moblins and Bokoblins literally everywhere, then put Fire Chus, Fire Keese, Fire Octoroks, and Fire Lizalfos in Eldin, then put Ice Chus, Ice Keese, Ice Octoroks and Ice Lizalfos in Hebra; then pretend they're not just copy-pasting everything! The only major region where they had unique enemies was Gerudo with the Molduga and Gibdos
The enemy AI is probably more complex in BotW and TotK compared to the other Zelda’s mentioned, and that would contribute to the effort required to make them function. In traditional Zelda’s, enemies mostly just stand around predetermined areas, with some other limited behaviors sprinkled in. Many BotW enemies can sleep, ride a horse, grab any weapon, detect stealth, traverse varied terrain, etc..
nah you can just have both smart enemies and dumb enemies. I was honestly surprised they didn’t throw in any Leevers when I first played, for example. They’re so simple
I don't mind it- except for Lizalfos. There are too many of them for how annoying they are.
Another thing affecting the issue of enemy variety in BotW/TotK is the size. BotW and especially TotK are about 3-4 times the size of a traditional 3D Zelda game. So this means BotW and TotK needed to have 3-4 times the enemy variety as past games in order to feel equivalent to those games. But not only did they not have that much enemy variety, but they actually had LESS enemy variety than traditional Zelda games, really makes the enemy variety in these games feel really bad.
Some people argue in support of BotW’s weapon durability, because it forces you to change up your strategies. God no. *Enemy variety* is how you make players change their strategies. Only 13 base enemies really cements this issue with BotW.
All the weapon durability did for me was annoy me into avoiding combat, and actively discourage me from exploration/engaging with side challenges, because I know I won’t be rewarded with treasure, only trash. Add in the bland shrines and dungeons, and you have the first Zelda game that bored me too much to finish.
And that’s a trend that has continued with TotK and EoW. I get really excited about all the possibilities the new sandbox features provide, and then really bored because the rest of the game design is just bland and tedious. Which is a bummer because these engines are truly fantastic. I think Nintendo just ought to go all in on a Minecraft-esque sandbox game, and return Zelda back to its more handcrafted adventure formula.
The other factor that contributed to the perceived low enemy variety is that because of the progression system you effectively get to a point where certain enemy colors in BOTW and TOTK all but disappear. When every bokoblin was red, then changes to blue, I know it's technically a different enemy, but if they still kept a reasonable amount of red ones around then it would have felt like there was more variety. I agree that just having different colors for the same enemies was a decision driven by the physics engine, but it doesn't change how it makes the games feel.
There is a very reasonable amount of red bokoblins and moblins, and green lizalfos still in the overworld in both games. The blue and black versions of them too. I mean, even in master mode you can find base variants of the main three in obscure locations, the point is none of these variants ever disappear completely, and are still pretty commonly found, especially in tears of the kingdom where each variant has a unique monster drop that the devs didn't want players missing out on
in BotW the lower enemy levels disappear as you level up, so the enemy variety actually REDUCES with progress. They fixed that in TotK at least
Every enemy also feels like you fight it the same way. There's no variety in strategy.
Yeah, that’s what happens if you’re in the late game and you grinded a ton of good gear.
In the early game, you might have to get pretty creative to take down harder foes. There’s a camp on the Great Plateau that has a boulder you can push which will roll down the hill and destroy a bomb barrel, killing the Bokoblins. That’s just one example.
That’s just one example. The enemies can and will beat your ass if you don’t kill enemies in the right order or the right fashion. You could dupe a bunch of Lynel gear or just get good weapons, but it’s pretty intense early on.
As opposed to the old games, where you just spin attack spam every enemy into oblivion?
@@vadoslink446 nah you just had to use hookshots and boomerangs and shit sometimes. seldom deep combat, but sometimes you got into more detailed swordplay in WW and TP
@@HungryWarden The issue is all that stuff that’s great in the early game becomes irrelevant late game. The damage sponges aren’t affected nearly as much by boulders or explosions, they’re basically guaranteed to require either archery or wailing on them with a stick till they break
@@wesshiflet2214 There's no real point in using items against enemies in older titles, unless they absolutely require you to use them. It just slows combat down and isn't even particularly efficient, compared to just spamming the spin attack.
TP had the potential to do more, but then it made hidden skills optional and turned combat into samey "Spin attack and ending blow" battles against enemies that can barely fight back. And WW's combat was generally not good. All it did is add a "wait until the A button lights up" parry, that knocks enemies on the floor, which forces you to wait until they get up again.
The only crime is that skulltullas and their variants never came back when caves came up as well as a ton of other ideas. I do like Like Likes they piss me off in the right way, just want more creature variety like babas and other species that inhabit hyrule usually
i think what makes the open world zelda's feel more different is that you can basically approach every enemy in the game the same. in older 3D zeldas , combat is much more reactive and requires you to wait and observe each enemy's gimmick, whereas in open world zelda you can kind of just approach lol. Older 3D zeldas made enemies another puzzle to face and i think that's neat.
0:22 makes me giggle every time
Regardless what anyone’s opinion is on enemy variety in Totk, the Depths absolutely failed in this department. The depths was an opportunity for Nintendo to bring back so many iconic creepy Zelda enemies like Poes and skulltulas and redeads. Instead they made Poes currency instead of enemies, and then they made the froxes, the new single most annoying generic enemy in the entire franchise.
They just made curse as gimmick lol
If winder waker was an open world game... why was it's story so much more engaging than...what we got now.
The vast majority of modern AAA "open world" games aren't even really open world. They're linear cinematic games placed onto a big map.
Because opinions, I guess.
I think to test the hypothesis that it's specifically due to the physics system you'd also need to test compared to other open world games that aren't Zelda games. Because I suspect there might be something else going on alongside the physics - The developers not knowing when you're going to encounter different parts of the world or if you're going to double back and encounter the same set of enemies multiple times, and it's easier to replace 1 blue and 3 red Bokoblins with 2 silver 1 black and 1 blue bokoblin if the player's been playing for a while from an encounter balance design than it would be to replace them with an _actually_ different encounter like you might do for a later part of a linear game.
But also, as others have said, how long a game is also impacts how many enemies (in either absolute or kinds terms) is going to start to feel bland. And the open world Zeldas are long compared to past Zelda titles which mostly cap in for (According to HLTB) at between 20 and 30 hours for Main Story + Extras - Only Twilight Princess significantly exceeding that at 45 hours - while both of Era of the Wild games clock in at around 100 hours for that category.
Yeah it’s definitely due to the higher interactivity and complexity of the enemies and environments. They need to program not only physics and chemical interactions, but also environmental ones too. Enemies interacting with each other, navigating the terrain, eating food, finding weapons, attack behaviours.
The thing is, if different coloured variants had more complex or interesting movesets than their basic counterparts, then I would have less of an issue with it. The problem is that the main difference between a red bokoblin and a silver bokoblin is how hard they hit and how much damage they take. That doesnt make it harder in any sort of interesting way, it just makes them tedious to fight.
The other big problem is a severe lack of regional enemies. In older games, you would find new enemies throughout the game as you progressed to new places. Tektites on water, dodongos at death mountain, freezards in ice areas and the lost goes on. In BotW this was essentially non-existent. In TotK they at least added like likes and horriblins for caves, the sky enemies in hebra and areas with high elevation, the gibdos in Gerudo etc. Thats great, but we need more, otherwise combat continues to be boring. Thankfully the focus in TotK is on weird contraptions rather than combat, but more variety would only improve the game and needs to be a goal for future games
there is great variation in bokoblin movesets.
but it's not controlled by their color variant, it's controlled by the equipment they have access to.
riders are a lot more mobile and hard to hit, especially mounted archers.
unarmed bokoblins will throw whatever is available at you, this can be a threat if they have explosive barrels.
polearm bokoblins will exploit their long range to keep you away with a mix of targeted stabbing and wide sweeping attacks.
bokoblins with shields will block most of your attacks, so you need to find a way to break through their defences.
sentry archers will blow their horn when they spot you, so you need to take them out with stealthy attacks if you're not ready to take on an entire camp at once.
archers with different arrow types can be a huge problem, especially bomb and lightning arrows.
@Marvin_R Fair point, I hadn't considered that! In that case perhaps my theory is wrong then, but it doesn't change how I feel about the game so it must be another reason.
Perhaps it's just that having all of the potential monster movesets available at any time makes them less engaging?
Or perhaps it's that they animate and behave similarly despite their unique movesets in those scenarios where monsters in previous games were more unique.
Perhaps it simply is that having those same archetypes across the whole map simply gets boring, and in previous games this is resolved by only having each enemy appear a handful of times in specific themed areas? You do see elements of this in the games with how the constructs appear around sky ruins and lizalfos appear near water, but they're all so common that it feels like they're everywhere despite being themed
@@Marvin_R
That is true in theory, the problem is the Bokos are rarely tough enough for it to really make a difference.
While their behaviours are the most varied they are still the weakest enemy type, which makes it extremely easy for the player to brute force through them without having to actually take any of them into account, usually by complete accident.
Up until the silver tier who can actually tank it pretty well the bow alone already invalidates almost all boko types by default.
And if you just one shot all of them in the exact same way, they may as well all be the same enemy.
Doesn't help that one headshot or even just a good normal hit can completely disarm them of their unique equipment.
The exception being when explosives are involved, since the player can't actually stay exposed or fire recklessly without risking getting 1-shot
Enemy variety is a problem that I never really noticed while playing the games, but once it was pointed out to me was pretty undeniably true. I think I was just mostly focused on other things like the environment or puzzles and only really took active note of enemies when it was a boss, miniboss, or a uniquely designed encounter space/context. While I very much do think the games could have been improved by increased enemy variety, the only time I remember feeling actively disappointed in it was when the pirates some npcs talked about ended up just being more bokoblins and moblins since the different language used built up an expectation of something fundamentally different.
Bro saw 6 bokoblins and said "yeah, they're different"
So many people in the comments here outting themselves for not actually watching past the 3 minute mark lmao.
He does a revised count where he does count variants as the same enemy
What to add:
Peahats
Freezard
Miniblins
Actual Gibdos that look like mummies.
Dexi Hand
Kargoroks
Bladetraps
Shabooms
Deku Babas
Iron Knuckles
Lava Slugs
Blue Bubbles
Aeroflos
Leevers
Nejiron
Zonai Armos
Zonai Beemos
Actual freaking Poes
Real Bombchu
Snappers
Boes
Bad Bats
Stalflos(don't die instantly to head shots)
-
Mini Bosses
Gomess
Flare Dancer
Darknut
Bari
King Arogorok
Skull Kids
I feel like the grim reaper looking guy from MM would also be a good choice of miniboss cuz it has a unique light mechanic to make nighttime more dangerous and and unique weapon drop.
You forgot Wolfos. Also, now that you mention it, Peahats in hyrule field would have been a perfect replacement for gaurdians. Those things were scary in oot.
@@chiefcoiler Honestly I think the Phantom Hands do a good enough job replacing the guardians, that being said I would have liked to see Peahats in the fields, Gecko Turtle Riders in the swamps, and Iron Knuckles in ruins. At least in terms of minibosses
@nekomaru856 It won't show up above the surface unless you defeat it in the depths first.
@@nekomaru856 Gloom Spawns aren't everywhere compared to Guardians.
I think why BOTW enemy variety feels less is because player is given control how the fight goes. OOT there is little difference between a Stalfos and a Wolfos in how you interract with them- you attack when they unblock. However, these enemies are in control when you can do it, which makes all the difference. In BOTW you just hit the enemy whenever you like with variety of ways... Sometimes starting by your endless supply of bombs.
BOTW enemies are generalized. Lizalfos, moblin or bokoblin: it's mostly the same rules to overpower them. You can lure them with bait, leave weapons so they pick them up. If they carry a shield or any other weapons, you can unarm them. In previous games, you give a bokoblin a shield and it becomes a "Shield Bokoblin", with no way to change how you approach them. BOTW you give moblin a shield and it's still a moblin.
Wolfos take extra damage from the back and are easily stunned with Deku Nuts from afar. Throw a nut before closing the distance then go for a jump attack at the back.
Stalfos are more likely to block a ranged Deku Nut, but they have gaps in their block. Bombs can easily hit them during a block if thrown behind them and sometimes even from the front, due to the large explosion hitbox. When fought on terrain that changes elevation like the Shadow Temple Boat, the lingering hitbox of the spin attack can also slip through their guard. Deku Nuts are better used to turn their high damage jump attack into a free hit of your own.
OoT and MM enemies' variety is much easier to notice when looking at how the wider toolset interacts with each, as opposed to the more basic sword and shield gameplay.
Even worse than just the lack of enemy variety is lack of boss variety, when you fight the same boss a dozen times it doesn't feel like a boss it feels like a more tedious generic
There's also an issue with enemy distribution, gerudo desert is the only area with any unique enemies, everywhere else is all the same bokos and lizals
Also worth comparing to their development predecessor XCX which they adopted their open world formula from, where there was around 100 enemy categories, each category having 5-10 variants of different strength levels, every location had a different set of enemies, every enemy type had multiple boss variants that were distinct from the generics, and the map was 3x as large to fill out with them
To me, the enemy variety problem can simply be summed up by how the VAST majority of the enemies in Breath/Tears are humanoids with the same essential capabilities. In that regard, I wouldn't just say that different color variants don't count as unique enemies, but even that bokoblins, moblins, and lizalfos aren't really all that meaningfully different, since they generally have the same mobility, same focus on melee attacks, etc. Even the standard constructs in Tears fall into that same overall category, meaning that the vast majority of your actual, practical combat time is spent dealing with enemies who are ALL fought more or less the same way. Conversely, in other Zelda games, enemies come in far more shapes and sizes, with far more varied gameplay functions, and far more varied ways to deal with them. As such, you aren't constantly running into the more or less same overall humanoid foes who fall into the same combat rhythm. What BotW and TotK needed wasn't simply more enemies, they needed more of the very much non-humanoid enemies of past games specifically, like immobile deku babas, peahats who focus entirely on just bumping into you for contact damage, and so on: Enemies with significantly different behavior and capabilities.
Now, with that said, I think that a HUGE part of why it's a world of mostly humanoid enemies is the indirect design requirement of the whole fragile weapon thing: If Link's constantly breaking his weapons, he needs a fresh supply of new ones. And humanoid enemies are the type that most readily make sense to be carrying replacement weapons that Link can use, so humanoid enemies MUST be the most common enemies who are basically found everywhere. Constant weapon fragility mandated the constant presence of enemies who can provide replacements, and thus the monotonous enemy design. But as someone who DOES NOT LIKE the super brittle weapons anyway, (and that's putting it mildly,) design sense or not, that's just one design problem causing another, as I see it.
Also, I think that effective enemy variety needs to weighted by what you spend the most time actually fighting, not simply total enemy types. So even if, counting bosses and all, Tears has 20 truly different enemies, if 85% of the total spawns are the functionally similar humanoids only, then that makes the enemy variety worse in terms of actual, practical player experience than it is when simply measured by total categories available, and practical player experience is what matters most in the end. A game that evenly split 5 enemy types throughout the whole thing would ultimately feel like more variety than a game that had 10 enemy types total, but 9 of the types only showed up once at one point ever, and the rest of the game was purely the 1 remaining enemy type spawning a thousand times. Breath and Tears don't just have a low total types, but they heavily limit their truly, meaningfully different enemy types to rare boss encounters only, which makes the variety feel even worse in practice than it theoretically otherwise would based on purely on total categories alone.
So once again, I say that game designers with limited time and resources should focus less on bosses you only see once, (or otherwise very rarely,) and more on filling out the common enemies you fight hundreds of times. It's the repetitive common enemies where variety is always needed the most, where variety helps a game the most, and where time spent on enemy content gets the most mileage.
Imagine creating a massive open world game where you expect players to spend 50 hours, and then thinking than creating 13 enemies and saying "Yeah, that's fine, just reskin them a bunch of times." No wonder these games bore me so much lol
You can't just act like you know the exact thought process behind these decisions, especially if you're going out of your way to pick the one that makes the people involved look the most incompetent.
Who knows, maybe if they could have added more they would, but ran into time issues because as it turns out coding brand new enemies into an open world game is rather time consuming, especially if its your very first time and in a game meant to fit on the wii-u
There is no flattering explanation for ToTK though
What's especially frustrating about BOTW and TOTK for me in comparison to the other Zelda games is the lack of spider type enemies in the "creepy" places of the game's world. Because if they wanted to go for that "Adventurer stumbles upon dark, forgotten place" vibe, then it really seems like certain caves, areas of the depths and ruins would've been the perfect place to encounter Skulltula and perhaps entire nests of Skullwalltula enemies that cover the dark ceilings and walls, laying still in the darkness but then skittering about when we shine a light on them... These enemies could've had some interesting interactions with elements such as fire and ice as well with the whole chemistry / physics system at play. Also having a giant Armagohma-style world boss would've been great in certain areas, but alas... : (
Another thing about the enemies in BOTW and TOTK is that many of them are able to equip any type of sword, bow, and shield, so that also can help give variety
I have always felt that the freedom to tackle chanlenges in whatever way you want to be very hallow for breath of the wild, and while Tears of the kindom certainly improved that by a fair amount it still feels hallow to me because ultimately build a machine to take you across a distance is always going to feel samey to me. the shrines often felt like there was one way to do them and then another way to effectively skip them, which didn't really help things there. It really doesn't help that the story and worlds of zelda were what always drew me in and loosing so many dungeons and bosses really broke that for me. it's why I still feel like Twilight Princess and Windwaker were the best games in the serries.
It’s way more hollow in Tears of the Kingdom since a flying machine solves like a third of the problems in the game.
The problem with these two games are they're massive but shockingly shallow. Shrines, caves, repetitive quests, koroks, and repeated enemy designs, that's all you'll find across Hyrule. It would be so much more interesting if snow areas for example had snow related enemies exclusive to it, and snow puzzles and quests, but no it's just regular old shit but now the enemies are icy, same with every other location.
Yeah they feel like the building blocks of a great game, they just don't do much with it. Enemies should be locked to certain biomes like past games instead of spread all over. Maybe have certain enemies in caves, but don't make 6 different Keese and call it a day.
I mean, they do have all that. But they reskin existing stuff with an icy theme, like pretty much every other game would do. But the unique quests were always nice enough to keep it mixed up. The shield surfer quest, the snow bowling, even the non-quest of going to the very peak and finding a Fire Greatsword.
I'm not sure what level of variety people expect from what it ultimately "snow mountain" but I was satisfied.
You literally get snow puzzles in the snow area? You go to Hebra Mountain and a lot of the stuff there has to do with snowboarding, melting ice, keeping ice from thawing, opening doors with snowballs etc.
It's also not like old games didn't just reskin enemies either. Go into a snowy area in MM and those Keese and Wolfos are suddenly Ice Keese and White Wolfos. I don't know why people are so insanely petty in regards to the new games.
But using facts & logic gets in the way of his complaining. 😁 Someone called the game shallow, but in comparison to the other zelda games it has the biggest combat variety so what are these guys talking about?
@@Refreshment01 Because most are reskins!
Twilight Princess still having the best enemy variety and diversity among the 3D Zelda games is really sad. It has enemies that are exclusive to certain areas/dungeons, and the ones that get reused don't overstay their welcome. Wind Waker feels much the same, I was surprised to learn that there are much fewer unique enemies. The same cannot be said BotW and TotK, however.
Makes sense. Twilight princess was the last "normal" 3d game. Skyward sword messed with orientation, and BOTW expanded all the way up. Nintendo's never just been satisfied with "the same thing but bigger.". They always try to innovate with their IP's
Did it have more enemy variety than the N64 games? Those weren’t counted
They will never make another Zelda game with dungeons as good as Twilight Princess, I’ve been convinced. And that is just so, so depressing.
If we're being technical, the last mainline Zelda before Breath of The Wild was Tri Force Heroes, not A Link Between Worlds.
It doesn't really matter, but I just wanted to mention it.
Lbw better
imagine if we did end up having the same breath of the wild enemies and typing. but they just supercharged the keese for example so that fire keese can cast fireballs on top of charging into you. ice keese can in a area of effect, make the floor around you slippery and harder to maneuver. and electricity keese can create tiny aoe's (with lightning flashing) where if you stand there you get a minishock, aside from again, charging into you.
too little is done to make these enemies stand out no matter what typing. they only are a different typing for the sake of you to engage with the chemistry engine thats put in, this includes weapons such as wood working better for electric keese.
ocarina of time for example already put in so much effort to make every enemy like act different altogether.
there simply is no excuse to not have deku babas in the breath of the wild overworld, they can drop sticks. we could use sticks by golly we need them in tears of the kingdom for example.
darknuts are a no brainer with the weapons. you could easily invent useful drops that play into the chemistry engine of botw/totk. but they didnt. its a lazy sequel on all counts. and they took six years just to add nuts n bolts to the shtick.
would it save the game with the enemy variety though? no, but it would defintiely make the open world a more complete package. and even if they didnt give us restricted linear dungeons with lots of intricate level design, they couldnt even give us the supposed easier solution on making the overworld more fun to play around in. so you get this very light experience, a dabbling if you will, of systems which is very modern nintendo design philosophy. its about as risky as a cheese sandwich.
just think of the desperation that everyone has that this has become a topic in general, we'd welcome OLD enemies with open arms, becuase even then they couldnt come up with completley new ones themselves. its sad.
echo chamber suggested youtube videos arent making my mood any better so i leave with my mantra : "with every month that passes, i dislike totk even more" botw gets off scot free because of it being new, totk was the chosen one, it failed.
Here's the thing you missed. The reason the NuZeldas have fewer enemy types isn't because of the physics system, it's because of the enemy AI system. More specifically, the part where Bokos, Lizals, Moblins, and a few others can dynamically pick up different types of weapons on the fly. Development wise each of these variations counts as roughly 1 new enemy because they have different behaviors and different movesets despite being the same unit.
For example, this means that instead of Boko being 1 unit that comes in 5 colored variants, Bokos have a unarmed moveset, a bow moveset, a 1hand moveset, 2hand moveset, and a spear moveset. They're effectively 5 different enemies in one body. The same applies to Lizals, Moblins, and the zonai drones in ToTK (and to a lesser extent the Boss Bokos and (Phantom) Ganon in ToTK and Lynels and Guardians).
But no one thinks of it that way, because 4+ different enemies in one body feels like 1 enemy even when they do make you play differently to accommodate them (which doesn't exactly happen in NuZelda a lot of the time, but I'm not gonna get into that). On top of that, their AI and movesets are so simplistic that even though they have a bunch of variations each one feels flat to fight against.
I guarantee if the NuZeldas had used the colored variations to assign different weapon types to (for example, red always getting 1hand, black always getting 2hand, silver always getting spears, etc) instead of to distinguish power level people would have a lot less complaints about the enemy variety. I still personally think that even with this mindset the NuZeldas don't have enough enemy variety.
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Anyway TL:DR, the problem is that the NuZeldas repeatedly took what would be ~3-4 enemies in previous games and squished them into 1 generic enemy, then spammed those generic enemies around the map and that combined with how simple the AI is and how shallow their movesets are fools our monkey brains into thinking there are a lot less enemy types than there are. I would gladly trade generic enemies having dynamic movesets based on the weapon on their hand that get recolored over and over for more distinct enemies and enemy variations with more expansive movesets (Basically, more Lynel style variations, less Boko style variations).
One thing that I think is worth mentioning is that BotW and TotK enemies could still differentiate themselves in combat, even within a single variant. A Red Bokoblin with a club has different timings to a Red Bokoblin with a bat, which is itself very different in how you would fight one with a bow or spear. Similarly, for me, Electric Keese and Ice Keese are best dispatched with a bow due to how annoying they can be, while other types of Keese are fine to deal with using a sword. I didn't mind the enemy variety that much in these games, as, unlike most other Zelda games I've played, "just smack it with a sword" wasn't always the best option against every enemy.
i've recently thought of something that i think in part contributes to the low enemy variety in botw and totk, and that's the breakable weapons. i'm actually not super opposed to the weapon durability system, i'm not particularly a fan of it and i think it takes the wind out of what could otherwise feel like special weapons, but it's never killed the whole experience for me like it has for others. rather, i think it by nature ends up limiting what kinds of enemies they add. thinking like a game designer, if you have a system where weapons break, then of course you need to make sure that in the course of common gameplay, the typical player will see a steady stream of weapons to replace the broken ones. so, it becomes important to ensure that most enemy encounters involve enemies that can carry any sort of weapon. if it can't hold a sword and it can't hold a bow, then it simply might not work well with the durability system. youll also notice that a lot of enemies that don't fit this requirement of being able to use the same weapons you do (keese, octoroks, guardians, etc.) often either chase you down so you *have* to engage with them (such is the case with guardians), or they feel like set dressing to an extent (such as keese). its actually for this reason primarily that i hope the weapon durability system doesnt return. now, totk did alleviate this issue somewhat with the fuse mechanic, allowing the parts dropped by enemies to be part of a weapon themselves, but i think the problem persists regardless. it's alleviated, but not gone. i still felt like constructs were mostly just reskinned bokoblins, for example, because functionally they still do the same things with the same tools, even if their animations are different.
One idea in how to fix this is to only have certain enemies in certain parts of the world. For example you might see more tact titles near death mountain while in the forest you see decu babas. If you can make an area partially defined by what enemies are there like how the real world has environments we associate with animals (like penguin ls in Antarctica ot camels in the desert) then the world will feel a bit more alive and natural.
to a degree, botw and totk had that.
but mostly with regional variants, or to specific area types rather than regions.
death mountain octoroks are mostly on paths, and suck stuff up before spitting larger projectiles.
highlands octoroks are mimics, carrying chests on their heads to lure you in.
grassland and water octoroks are similar, but need different weapons because of terrain.
keese usually stay in pairs, but around central hyrule you see more keese swarms.
wizzrobes stick primarily to abandoned camps and structures.
Even this is being a little bit generous to them, enemies can be categorized into minor enemies, major enemies, and boss monsters. All of these are of course important, but the most important for enemy variety are major enemies. BoTW has 7 major enemies: bokoblins, moblins, lizalfos, wizzrobes, Yiga footsoldiers and swordmasters, and guardians scouts. Of these, 3 are everywhere, wizzrobes are very underutilized, Yiga enemies are even more underutilized, and guardian scouts are incompatible with all other enemy types, so there are functionally only 3 enemies. Of course, to be completely fair, these 3 enemies behave differently depending on which weapon they use, so there are perhaps more accurately 10 enemies: sword bokoblins, sword and shield bokoblins, claymore bokoblins, spear bokoblins, claymore moblins, spear moblins, sword lizalfos, sword and shield lizalfos, spear lizalfos, and archers. But even more accurately, it would be said that there only 4 or perhaps 5 enemies: bokoblins, moblins, lizalfos, archers, and perhaps shield users; since most of these will seem like the same enemy to most people.
Great video!! I love how honest you were about the numbers. It made me trust the results.
Oh wow, thanks man! I love your vids!
I very recently found your channel and i love your videos, keep up the good work 😎
Thanks!
I personally never noticed the lack of variety cause to be honest combat was never really a huge part of how I played the game and that felt intentional.
What I believe they were trying to do (and it worked for me) is that they made more variety within the single enemy types if you get what I'm saying.
Like there's visually one red bokoblin but they could have literally any weapon from the game (all 3 holds, bows, and all elements), as well as things like barrels and rocks to throw.
Whereas in past games they generally had like 1 or 2 weapons and attack styles. I think BOTW and TOTK lack visual variety but the ones they have are way more in depth than ever before.
When I come across a bokoblin camp in BOTW it feels like a real ambush because of how they all run off and grab their own weapons and although it's the same 3 red guys, one of them's shooting ice arrows, another is spinning in circles with a flaming wooden bat, and the third is blocking my attacks with their shield, in past games it felt so videogamey.
I'm not tryna argue that they shouldn't do more in the future that would be stupid, I'm just noting that the enemies in BOTW and TOTK probably took them like way way more time and effort to make and have more non-visual variety than past games. One of my favourite things is just watching them in their natural habitats.
I also think enemy dispersal is a big thing. While other games had their enemies sectioned off to whatever element they belonged to, in BOTW they're pretty much everywhere. In past games you generally fought big groups of one type of enemy, then you would move on to the next big group. But in BOTW you're introduced to all 13 of the enemy varieties basically immediately on the great plateau, and they're all mixed together, and they're also absolutely everywhere. Seeing the 700th lizalfos in BOTW doesn't compare at all to how cool they were in skyward sword where you saw them like once in a blue moon.
The numbers for the new games are pathetic if I'm being honest.
What do you mean? Echoes of wisdom has more enemies than ever, and about the same variety.
I think botw innovated and broke new grounds for open worlds, but totk shows that they couldn't keep up with other developers doing the same (like fromsoft)
The reason botw/totk has fewer enemy types is that botw and totks enemies are astronomically more complex than prior games. Bokos can eat,sleep, hunt for food, pick up bomb barrels, will attempt to find new weapons when they lose theirs, higher level bokos are smarter than red bokos and will react to you throwing bombs or aiming tour bow at them. And a bunch of other stuff too.
Enemies in previous zelda games were more numerous because you were only supposed to see most of them in one dungeon. which means they could be less inteligent and more gimmicky compare to botw's enemys who have to show up everywhere because the world is too big to have unique enemies in each area.
Theres alot of valid things to critique these games about but this one is completely overblown.
Also let's not pretend like old zelda enemies were fun to fight since 90% of them were almost completely incapable of harming you. This is because ocarina of time dumbed down the combat for 3d and every game after refused to change it untill botw.
Like I'm not saying this makes them unplayable garbage (i love this series for a reason) but im capable of taking my nostalgia goggles off just enough to remember that zelda made big changes for a reason.
This. It's insane to me how much people ignore this fact or even prefer shallow variety over proper nuance. Like, it's cool when a game like OoT can boast a diverse amount of unique enemies, but when you have something like Biris or Anubis existing in just one place and essentially having little to no screen time, it makes me question if that isn't just wasted development time...especially when these enemies are all kinda fodder. A single Bokoblin probably had more development effort behind it than like half of OoT's entire catalogue of enemies combined.
@@thegreatgoobert5847 nah, cutting through Leevers is fun.
there are simple enemies in BotW too, no reason there couldn’t be more of those. you can have complex enemies in your game and still have some simple Leevers pop up in the desert.
I guess they put those resources into adding more huntable animals instead, but as much as I liked the wildlife and sustenance theme, hunting wasn’t that interesting lol
@@vadoslink446 Honestly, that just sounds like an illustration of diminishing returns lol. Do you think they got more out of that Bokoblin than they did out of the dozens of aesthetically distinct enemy styles in OoT?
@@wesshiflet2214 Generally speaking, yeah. Like I said, it's a quality over quantity thing. Having visual variety is nice...but a game like AlttP, which has the highest amount of visual variety, still has infinitely worse combat than BotW, because how incredibly simplistic the enemies are.
Lynels are by far the best enemies we have ever got in the entire series 🦁🔥 It would be really cool if you could ride them around or maybe even transform into one. Instead of calling it Wolf Link we would call it Lynel Link 😎
So many points listed that I agree with. I would have liked to see more "super natural" type enemies. The depths would have been a great place for zombie Hylians, OoT Wall hands, Spiders, Death Swords, ReDeads, Dead Hands, etc...Hell,, invisible enemies you could only see after eating magic mushrooms 😅
I think the main reason why some people might feel that the open world games enemy roster is lackluster is not necessarily because of the quantity but rather the diversity in each enemy and the locations off them. Many enemies in Botw(just example) are generally very similar to others, and is located in high quantity around the map. Not only is the basic enemies just humanoid pics with different colors and weapons but most other enemies follow a very similar pattern. Humanoid pig creatures in different sizes and colors, welding different weapons and armor. The only enemies that somewhat breaks that trend is lizalfos, guardians and lynels, but even then they still follow many of the trends.
It also doesn’t help that because of the open world nature of the games most enemies feels like they are being spread across the entire world, and no real diversity is being created .
I dont mind the different variance on the enemy. But what I think is boring and lame is the fact that Red Bokoblins and Black or White Bokoblins are the same enemy but one is a hit sponge.
There is not a difference in movement pattern or something. I don't waste time fighting against white enemies variance simply because it take too much time to defeat them.
Thank you for making this video. I once did a count just like this for BotW, separating total enemy count and the total number of families of enemies and pretty much came to the same conclusion. Sadly the data is trapped on an old disused PC. It doesn't even stand up well against Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask in this regard.
I will give credit to BotW and TotK for featuring what must easily be the most intelligent enemies in a Zelda game to date possessing much greater reactivity to both you and the world, however the freedom of the open world trivialises what all of this contributes to combat. You will never run out of space to retreat and you will never not have some outcropping or hideyhole to help you out-snipe a sniper. It goes to show that a smart enemy isn't necessarily conducive to an entertaining experience.
Older games may have enemies with more simple behaviour however you don't often see them manning cookie cutter outposts. Instead every environment is curated to guarantee that you will experience the same enemies in what feels like very different scenarios, often delivered in an order that feels like a logical evolution from previous encounters with them. Knowing that an enemy is smart enough to look for the nearest weapon is not guaranteed to draw the same excitement as getting trapped in a tiny room with a swarm of enemies who only know how to bounce and nothing else.
I think the biggest casualty of BotWs enemy count is that most regions lacked their own identity. You see most of the same threats but the consequence for getting hit by their element is a bit different.
If I may make a suggestion for another video, talk about korok seeds. How many are there versus how many types of them exist. How often do they actually amount to something more than a non-puzzle.
I don't expect such huge games to have a million different enemies with unique attacks, animations and weaknesses to exploit, but given the size of the maps the developers should have done SOMETHING about this issue.
I would like to add that the enemies are all very same-y from a game design standpoint as well. Sure, they all LOOK different, but they're all fought the exact same way: whichever way you find combat to be most effective/comfortable/fun. There are no skulltulas requiring the use of the bow, or stalfos with shields, or wolfos circling in on the kill. All enemies can be beaten the exact same way, which makes them way less interesting as a cast
I guess the variant bumping it up makes sense due to the progression XP mechanics
Everywhere I go, only see bokoblins, moblins, lizalfoss, and keesees.
Your theory about the physics system being the key reason for the low enemy variety is very interesting - and based on your reasoning, I’m convinced that you’re right.
It’s very interesting, as I’m realizing it’s likely the same situation for another of my favorite games: Dragons Dogma 2. While I’ve really enjoyed it since launch, a consistent complaint of mine (as well as the wider fan base) has been the apparent lack of enemy variety… but now that I think on it, I’m realizing how much of an effort it probably is to design new enemies that behave properly with the worlds physics…
I had a nice big writeup that I posted which UA-cam immediately lost for no reason, so I'll be shorter in this rewrite.
The physics system is definitely not the reason why there's such a small roster of enemies in the open world games- it's not harder to 'set up' new varieties of enemies in more complex systems.
If I had to guess, it's most likely because the designers thought that the player's arsenal of capabilities was enough to stand on its own, as it were. Kind of like how Devil May Cry games typically have small rosters because those games focus on the player creating their own combos as opposed to fighting basic enemies.
Uhh, yes it is. You add a new enemy in a physics system you run into a potential combanitorial amount of new issues. Never underestimate how fickle physics can be to wrangle. It's always harder than you think.
DMC is a weird comparison as a non-open world action game focused on flat topography and set custom encounters. If that's your mood for games that's fine, but I can't think of a much different philosophy without changing genre.
@@raze2012_ Not as far as I know. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only actions that the enemies in these games do that interact with the physics are ragdolling, and picking up/throwing things, which are both rather simple to set up on an individual basis- once your physics engine is finished being set up, most of the work is already done.
It's not that odd of a comparison- if my idea of what their thoughts were is correct, then it can be boiled down to a game designed to let the player use the character's arsenal on punching bags as opposed to a game designed to have the player be challenged by them.
@AtelierMcMuttonArt they also need to interact with the environment. Most enemies drown but a few can swim. Enemies get shocked by your weapons or the environment. Bokoblins can ride horses, boss Bokoblins have a load of interactions with their crew. They are capable of some minor arrow fusing in order to launch elemental attacks which are based on a physical supply aroind them (steal all their fruit and they cannot keep firing at you). They can not only pickup but kick around bombs in a relatively accurate way wrt the environment. They can also hunt and consume game just like Link can. And all that are just for the base 3 enemies (Bokoblins, moblins, and lizolfos).
There's so many behaviors going on, adding another unique enemy type of that complexity isn't just some drag and drop if you want to match maybe half that quality.
And yes, BOTW/TOTK is focused on exploration, not arena combat. They are entirely different feels to it. Zelda was never about amassing combo chains and achieving a flow of combat. Thars how series like Final Fantasy end up with 16, which no one asked for. You don't just shove that kind of game design into an existing game without changing its identity. Adventure things like ledges and accurate physics only disrupts your flow instead of enhancing it. Non-simple AI behavior is disruptive for mobs that you are using to predictably extend your combo. Slower, deliberate actions (most of these games' combat traversal) are discouraged since everything needs to be accessed instead of available on a menu. It's very different.
If you just want a boss rush on a flat environment there's plenty of recommendations I have for that. Not too many games capture the exploration and adventure of the Wild series.
@@raze2012_ Most of what you listed has nothing to do with the physics system's complexity- they'd mostly be done with scripting and generic function calls. I love talking about this stuff, so I'm gonna dive right into the nitty-gritty.
"They also need to interact with the environment."
-This is a very broad truth. If you're talking about physically interacting, that's done with a simple physics collider, which is as simple as adding the appropriately-sized capsule collider to the enemy.
"Most enemies drown but a few can swim."
-This can be done via coding. A game engine can be made to detect when an entity 'enters' a body of water and get the Y coordinate that represents the water's 'surface'. Then it's just a matter of activating a Drowning state, which plays an animation and then kills the enemy, or activating a secondary movement state. They most likely used generic function calls, but with custom animations depending on the enemy.
"Enemies get shocked by your weapons or the environment. "
-This is also via coding. Lightning strikes and lightning-infused equipment will emit a spherical area that inflicts anything inside of it with a 'Shock' trigger, which would activate the appropriate 'Shocked' animation and any secondary effects, like dropping equipped weapons. Both of these would also be done with generic function calls.
"Bokoblins can ride horses"
-They most likely have a generic script function that lets enemies 'know' what kinds of entities are nearby them. If one of the entities is a horse, they might trigger an AI routine where they move towards it and trigger the same 'Mount and Ride' function that Link uses to ride horses.
"boss Bokoblins have a load of interactions with their crew"
-Tangential, but this is probably the best unique behavior in the game. It'd most likely use the entity list again. Not sure if it'd be called from the Boss or if the Bokoblins would 'inform' the Boss that there are enough of them around to execute a tactical maneuver, as it were. But I'm pretty sure all Bokoblins have the functions that tell them to get into formation, using the entity list and a basic pathfinding function.
"They are capable of some minor arrow fusing in order to launch elemental attacks which are based on a physical supply aroind them "
-This would use the entity list again. If they want to use nearby stuff on their arrows, they'd just move towards that object, perform a 'grab' animation, and then the script would change their arrow to have the appropriate effect
"They can not only pickup but kick around bombs in a relatively accurate way wrt the environment."
-This would also use the entity list. They'd have an AI routine that might call if a bomb is in the list, and then use a generic "leading shot" physics impulse function to send it in the right direction to get it back to you. So far, this is the only thing that actually uses the physics engine, but it's also just a basic physics thing that any given physics engine can do.
"They can also hunt and consume game just like Link can"
-I think friendly NPCs do this to, but I can't recall for certain. It's the same NPC activity AI programming that you might see in Skyrim.
"There's so many behaviors going on, adding another unique enemy type of that complexity isn't just some drag and drop if you want to match maybe half that quality."
-The truth is that a lot of these things are just generic behaviors that are made to look unique due to each enemy's unique animations. There are very few actually unique behaviors among the chaff enemies- stuff like the Horriblins hanging and moving on the ceiling and the Lizalfos' swimming that you'd brought up before. It's not actually all that much overhead, because the behaviors already exist- they'd just need to make the animations for any new enemies.
You aren't understanding the point of my DMC comparison. It has nothing to do with DMC, itself. The enemies don't have any variety in the open-world Zelda games because fighting enemies isn't the point, and they think that the player's capabilities stand on their own without being supported by good enemy design. This is strictly about the two games having a similar design philosophy concerning the role that basic enemies play- nothing more.
@@AtelierMcMuttonArt I and assumedly you did not program the game so nitpicking over implementation details is pretty useless. If you don't see how any of your behaviors won't somehow screw over the physics system, you may need to find a larger project to work on. Plenty of open source stuff to take a look at for that. Just because it's not literally physics doesn't mean the physics system isn't involved. That's why no one else even tries this stuff past static events.
And I guess we'll just disagree on DMC. Zelda isn't a character action game, it never tried to be. The design is different, there's no less useful criticism than saying that a game isn't A when it's clearly trying to be B. Feel free to try and make your own open world DMC hybrid if you want. There's a reason no one does this either (and it's more audience demands, DMC players don't wanna spend hours just traveling around. They wanna get straight to the action).
I loved this! Thank you for making this!
For as little variety in enemy types the games have, I do think that the humble Bokoblin is the best enemy in the game. There is so much variety in what they can do and how they interact with the environment around them. And the fact that they are weapon wielders mean that they can be differentiated with all the weapon variety the game has to offer too. Tears of the Kingdom upgraded them even further by giving them backpacks of throwable items at times. Truly amazing and versatile little guys that should go appreciated.
absence makes the heart grow fonder. they go unappreciated after awhile bc they’re freakin everywhere lol
I think this is still ignoring that several BotW/TotK enemies can wield 4 different weapon types (that's even ignoring the effects of wands, deku leaf, elemental weapons, multi-shot bows and then on top of that TotK added fuse, and then Bokoblins can also ride animals).
Point is that the amount of interactions you can get from just Bokoblins is pretty crazy and would cover a wider variety then you'd get from several enemy types in other games.
…that doesn't mean I don't think there's NO problem here, but it's mostly just skin deep.
You're gonna get a lot more variety from BotW/TotK's Bokoblins than both TP's Bokoblins and Bulblins but starting to see Bulblins feels like a progression that doesn't really exist in BotW and TotK.
I feel something like area specific skins/outfits for Bokoblins could do a lot here.
Another contributing factor, to me, is that enemy variants in Breath of the Wild aren't nearly as distinguishable as they are in other games.
Green knights and blue knights might be identical aside from color and attack/defense values, but unlike a lot of enemies in BotW they don't visually blend together.
IMO a big reason why there's less enemy variety has to do with Link having less built in tools to deal with enemies. A lot of times you'd need a specific type of item to exploit a specific enemy's weakness, and the game designers would know exactly when you'd get these items and would be able to design around that. In BotW, you get most of your core toolkit in the first part of the game, and everything else you can do is based upon weapons that have limited durability or special powerups that only happen when you complete a Divine Beast. The devs might not have felt confident designing encounters or enemies around weapons or items that the player may or may not have.
If you compare enemy variety from HWDE to BotW, there are these categories in HWDE: (Only counting enemies with unique portraits/models)
Common enemies:
Aerial Lizardmen - Aeralfos, Dark Aeralfos, Fiery Aeralfos, Dark Fiery Aeralfos
Ground Lizardmen - Dinolfos, Dark Dinolfos, Lizalfos, Dark Lizalfos
Bokoblins - Bokoblin, Bokoblin Captain, Bokoblin Summoner
Moblins - Moblin, Dark Moblin, Shield Moblin, Dark Shield Moblin
Bulblins - Bulblin, Bulblin Captain, Bulblin Summoner
WW Moblins - Big Blin, Dark Big Blin, Stone Blin, Dark Stone Blin
Miniblins - Miniblin, Miniblin Captain, Miniblin Summoner
Poes - Big Poe, Dark Big Poe, Icy Big Poe, Dark Icy Big Poe
Darknuts - Darknut, Dark Darknut
Undead - Gibdo, Dark Gibdo, ReDead Knight, Dark ReDead Knight
Stalchild - Stalchild, Stalchild Captain, Stalchild Summoner, Captain Keeta
Stalmasters - Stalmaster, Dark Stalmaster
Stationary/set path enemies:
Beamos
Bombchu
Deku Baba
Manhandla Stalk
Chuchus - Green Chuchu, Red Chuchu, Yellow Chuchu
Gold Skulltula
Bosses:
King Dodongo - King Dodongo (LoZ design), Dark King Dodongo (LoZ), King Dodongo (OoT design), Dark King Dodongo (OoT)
Gohma - Gohman, Dark Gohma
Manhandla - Manhandla, Dark Manhandla
Argorok - Argarok, Dark Argarok
The Imprisoned - The Imprisoned, The Dark Imprisoned, The Mini-Imprisoned
Ganon - Ganon, Dark Ganon
Helmaroc King
Phantom Ganon
Great Fairy (Only appears as a boss in Ganons Fury Mode; otherwise treated as one of Link's weapons)
Allies/Other (excluding playable characters other than Cuccos):
Hylian Soliders - Soldier, Hylian Captain (armoured), Hylian Captain (unarmoured), Dark Hylian Captain, Hylian Summoner, Ghost Soldier, Ghost Captain, Ghost Summoner, Turncoat Soldier (Also as a Hylian Captain alt)
Gorons - Goron, Goron Captain, Dark Goron Captain, Goron Summoner, Bombchu Operator (Also as a Goron Captain alt)
Cuccos - Cucco, Dark Cucco, Brown Cucco, Silver Cucco, Gold Cucco
There are 85 enemies in the game (excluding playable characters outside of Ganon, Great Fairy and Cucoo; including Hylian Soldiers, Gorons and Cuccos), which is the same amount in TotK. In total there are 30 categories of enemies, which is also the same amount as SS and WW. Overall HWDE has around 2.8 enemies per category, though most have 2 or 3 and some have a lot more.
What makes enemy variety suck so bad in BotW and TotK is that there are almost no area exclusive enemies. The Gerudo have Gibdos and the Depths have Froxes(Frox?) and that's basically it. The key is to have a constant stream of new enemies throughout the game. Elemental variants suck and do not count for this point.
After beating BotW in 2017, playing TotK presented no challenge, I already knew how to fight 90% of the enemies, and the new ones for the most part were variations or simple enough that after fighting them 3 or 4 times there was nothing else to do (ignoring bosses)
1. Finish the video, you can play 100 hour games but can't watch the other 8 minutes where he talks about enemy variety?
2. Okay, TOTK aren't easy games but they aren't souls games. You can outgear any enemy. It is not trying to punish you every encounter.
@raze2012_
1. I watched the whole video, my comment is not against the video, I just wanted to add my opinion on why I think enemy variety feels so bad in the new 3d games.
2. I do not want zelda games to be difficult combatwise. My point is that in these games you will be fighting for the most part the same 5 enemy types during the whole playthrough. Making a bokoblin black, or silver and have better gear makes them tougher, but in the most uninteresting way possible. Combat scenarios get very stale very quickly and for a game this big that's a major flaw, I think.
@@MigueUgartechea 1. You probably need to re-watch the video because he agrees with you, that's the whole point of the 2nd chart that he in fact spends most of the video on.
2. IMO just adding more mooks doesn't matter if, as others argue, they are taken out the same way. Variety isn't depth.
@@raze2012_ I never said anything about they agreeing or disagreeing with me
@@raze2012_ he’s not arguing lol, he’s just adding his own opinion
come on, if bokoblin colors count as different, a level 2 caterpie and a level 3 caterpie are two different pokemon.
wouldn’t it be a normal caterpie and a shiny?
These people in the comment section are clueless. For the longest time, enemy AI in Zelda games were so bad it severely limited the types of terrain and unique situations you could encounter them in making most encounters feel exactly the same. Look at how different the behaviors and combat moves can be now based on what weapon they are carrying, etc.
0:50 no it isn't. if it's a threat then it's an enemy. wolves are enemies and enemies are enemies. bosses are not enemies unless they are copy pasted everywhere, which makes taluses, hinoxes, and hydras enemies. enemies with platforms with additional enemies on them are still the same enemies as before but in a cluster, which is usually the case anyway. enemies with a different colour are still the same enemies. they function identically, they look identical, only their stats are different. they are the same, so no, botw and totk do not have 85 enemies. you are completely wrong
I mean yes it is hard to define. For example according to your definition: Boulders are enemies because they are threats to Link. You need to refine your definition of enemies more
this feels to me like saying that, in yo-kai watch, for example, yo-kai with the same design and just a palette swap should be counted as the same enemy when it is just not the case. there, they not only ALSO have unique entries, they have different traits and stats. red bokoblins not only are weaker in power and health, but also lack certain attacks or patterns that stronger bokoblins do, they act differently. they are also counted differently.
another example is like saying that, idk, plusle and minun are the same pokémon, latios and latias, nidoking and nidoqueen. pokémon with very similar direct counterparts are still different pokémon by species. even then, both urshifu are not the same, male and female meowstic, indeedee, and oinkologne are different from the other gender, etc.
also, if it's a threat it's an enemy is a weird definition, because that makes that swampy poison slop water an enemy, that makes lava an enemy, that makes voiding out an enemy, there has to be more to it besides simply being a threat because then world hazards are enemies. technically, horses, bears, boars, deer, they can all hurt you, i forget if bears get aggressive towards you on their own like wolves do, but every player has the experience of getting kicked by a horse or trying to kill an animal for food only to get smacked around by them a bit before they run away.
are blupees not enemies? they can't hurt you but you have the option to violently engage with them for your own gain. bubbulfrogs try to defend themselves with bubbles, forget if they actually harm you or not but given the goal is kinda to kill them all, they seem pretty enemy-like to me.
one last thing is like i don't think monster hunter players count every variation of a monster as just the same guy, either. an azure rathalos is not the same as the basic one. ultimately it is up to you what you think, but it doesn't make your opinion right, let people publishing their videos make informed assumptions on how they should go about categorizing stuff.
why aren’t all bosses enemies?
I figured if it’s hostile, and you’re not meant to make peace with it, it’s an enemy.
@@w1ll0ww1sp_ they have different attack patterns? i played for hundreds of hours and never noticed lol
UA-cam watchers try not to make it obvious you didn't watch past the half-way point of the video before commenting, impossible challenge 1000% fail
I support your theory on it being resources focused on the physics system. They have made it -very- clear in interviews how proud and how much work they have put into that. Budget, time constraints and as you pointed out, the added complexity of creating a new unique enemy in full high quality 3d AND that interacts with the world on the same level as everything else... In the span you could create one enemy for TotK, you could probably make 4 or more in the other games.
As a full time developer myself, I am very impressed with what they have done with BotW and TotK. Would I like more variety and not bokoblin but blue? Or lizalfos but fire? Of course. But I can recognize and apreciate the product as a whole. Though I admit, BETEEN BotW and TotK, I would have liked to see more more so than with BotW since much of the game was sorta there already. I wasnt from the ground up in the same way BotW was.
This issue is always so hard to quantify because of how complex BOTW and TOTK enemies are. Their AI and diversity of situations add a lot to them.
While I love the VISUAL diversity of TP and WW, there are few enemies that actually rival the bokoblins complexity. I think if there was more visual diversity in the BOTW and TOTK enemies, people wouldn’t complain as much.
Finally another person who appreciates this
IMO the "complexity" of the bokoblins mean nothing when you can fight them all the same way. Not once when through either of these games have I noticed the complexity of the enemies.
@@hist150project5 It just ends up being a great example of why smartly-designed enemies with basic AI and interesting capabilities are better for games than complex AI that seem super smart and can do everything.
@@hist150project5emphasis on "can". I guess your enjoyment of the AI depends on how much you like screwing around or how much you just want a Souls game.
BOTW/TOTK's difficulty drops off after you hit mid game, but it's fun experimenting with all the ways to mess aroind even with bokoblins. Baiting them with meat, having them play around with a bomb, all the phsycial interactions (fire, thunder, ice), insta drowning them, dropping a huge steel box on them, sneaking into their camp while asleep and looting them, blending in with a mask, creating some unholy abomination to mow them down. I could go on for paragraphs.
But if you're just approaching them the same way, then sure. Of course it'd get boring.
@@AtelierMcMuttonArt Disagreed. Couldn't care less if the game throws new fodder type enemies at me around every corner. If every fight just has me spin attack them without a thought, that's not good combat. Meanwhile a game like Sekiro or Sifu, which doesn't have a whole lot of visual variety, can lead to MUCH more satisfying combat, simply because enemies can do more. The interaction is simply more engaging with an enemy that's smart, instead of simply looking different.
I wouldn't blame the lack of enemy variety on physics. There's another feature that BotW & TotK have, but other games lack, which you've overlooked: weapon breaking. No other game in the series has to look at its enemy encounters and ask itself if the player will still be able to actually fight after they beat it. BotW & TotK do have to ask this question though, and sure enough, most of the enemies you encounter are something that could provide you with a weapon. It's further shown by how many of TotK's enemies have horns, even if they were in BotW and previously lacked them, just so you could have fuse materials to make your weapons worthwhile.
Very good video and rounding was the right call for numbers because extremely exact numbers would be confusing and too much. Amd i like the point you made about why the there's less variety.