(Fair warning, despite the number of words below I basically don't actually discuss Tears of the Kingdom)
I played this voraciously for 90+ hours, but I've stalled... I don't feel the pull anymore. By my estimates (trying not to spoil myself), I'm only ~70% of the way to an end screen. I'm not abandoning the game because I've enjoyed my time with it too much to do that—I WILL come back and beat this, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.
But not now, and it's because the game is too big. It's just too big! I don't actually think you could improve the game in a way that keeps it engaging the whole time, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that there's fundamentally too much game here. At some point the opportunity cost of not playing something else, or watching something, being social, doing anything becomes too high to keep playing this stupidly large game.
I started logging games on this website only a few weeks before this game came out, because I found that logging movies on Letterboxd greatly improved my appreciation of movies and my relationship with movie-watching and I hoped to achieve something similar with video games. Part of the plan was: (a) only review games when you've "finished" them (or are abandoning them), and (b) not to pick up too many games at a time, to encourage playing more games through. Well, I still think those guidelines are worthwhile in general, but it's disheartening just how quickly I have to make an exception. Zelda is just too big.
Ending with an aside: I know this isn't a unique problem with Tears of the Kingdom. And there are certainly games I've put many more hours into than I have/project I will here. But I have not, personally, played a game for more than 100 hours without at least one significant hiatus in the middle somewhere. And for this kind of game (a game with a narrative, a game with an explorable world, etc) long breaks are damaging to the experience. It's probably worse with story-dense RPGs, but it's a factor here too.
Anyway. This post mostly functions as permission to myself to play something else, even though this is still here waiting for me to beat it. Absolution.
I played this voraciously for 90+ hours, but I've stalled... I don't feel the pull anymore. By my estimates (trying not to spoil myself), I'm only ~70% of the way to an end screen. I'm not abandoning the game because I've enjoyed my time with it too much to do that—I WILL come back and beat this, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.
But not now, and it's because the game is too big. It's just too big! I don't actually think you could improve the game in a way that keeps it engaging the whole time, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that there's fundamentally too much game here. At some point the opportunity cost of not playing something else, or watching something, being social, doing anything becomes too high to keep playing this stupidly large game.
I started logging games on this website only a few weeks before this game came out, because I found that logging movies on Letterboxd greatly improved my appreciation of movies and my relationship with movie-watching and I hoped to achieve something similar with video games. Part of the plan was: (a) only review games when you've "finished" them (or are abandoning them), and (b) not to pick up too many games at a time, to encourage playing more games through. Well, I still think those guidelines are worthwhile in general, but it's disheartening just how quickly I have to make an exception. Zelda is just too big.
Ending with an aside: I know this isn't a unique problem with Tears of the Kingdom. And there are certainly games I've put many more hours into than I have/project I will here. But I have not, personally, played a game for more than 100 hours without at least one significant hiatus in the middle somewhere. And for this kind of game (a game with a narrative, a game with an explorable world, etc) long breaks are damaging to the experience. It's probably worse with story-dense RPGs, but it's a factor here too.
Anyway. This post mostly functions as permission to myself to play something else, even though this is still here waiting for me to beat it. Absolution.