In this post I take a look at how the discrepancy between the game’s fast-paced combat system and the resource management end up feeling disjointed, and I try to come up with a solution.
Introduction
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is a hack-and-slash game for the Nintendo Switch released on November 20, 2020. The game is set in the world of Hyrule from the Legend of Zelda series, and features gameplay elements from a series of games called Dynasty Warriors. This game takes place in the continuity of Breath of the Wild (BotW), acting as a quasi-sequel spinoff, featuring events and characters from 100 years prior to the events of BotW.
The game alternates between high-tempo battles on sprawling battlefields, which are familiar places to those who played the previous Zelda title, and a lot calmer resource management-like phase where the player interacts with various map markers on Hyrule’s map. These markers include shops, training facilities, quests, challenges and battle missions. These two “modes” almost perfectly complement each other, as the resource management can provide some much-needed respite after a challenging battle. The game retains the aesthetic and sounds of Breath of the Wild, which perfectly pave the way for players coming from BotW who might be unfamiliar with games from this genre.
Gameplay overview
It’s very easy to get into this game: the attack combinations are a sequential buildup of regular attacks finished with a strong attack, but feature other variations over the different characters. Since the attacks are split between 2 buttons: X and Y, performing combos becomes significantly more understandable and accessible to those featured in some other games with combat elements. Additional battle mechanics, like elemental rods and Sheikah Slate powers bring further variety to the combat all without creating an overcomplicated combat system.
This is all to the game’s benefit: the learning curve is very smooth thanks to these simple controls, and it makes it easy to switch between different characters. The added bonus is that despite the controls’ simplicity, each character feels to have a different playstyle. This all feeds into the game’s fast pace combat.
Something borrowed, something new
Age of Calamity takes some gameplay mechanics and features from BotW and integrates them in a fairly smart way, but not without issues. The game uses the same resources and materials found in BotW for cooking and completing non-combat missions, and players may discover Koroks on the battlefield who drop the ever-familiar Korok Seeds, once again used for increasing weapon stash size.
In BotW, players went through weapon after weapon as they broke after extended use, whereas Age of Calamity dropped weapon durability but tried to keep the abundance and variety of weapons and mix it with the crafting/fusion system found in games such as Warriors Orochi, Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors. Even though this is a complex and beneficial mechanic, I consider this to be the worst system in the game. It has a lot of thought put into it and has more depth than what may seem initially, but ultimately it ended up feeling like a chore, dragging the pace to a complete halt at times.
In Age of Calamity, weapons can be obtained from treasure chests, boss drops, or as rewards from missions. Each weapon has levels ranging from 1-20 initially, which can be expanded to 30 later in the game. Each weapon also has an attack value, which can differ for the same type of weapon depending on how and where they were obtained. Weapon drops work the same across characters: each character has certain weapons associated to them: Princess Zelda acquires Ancient Memory Parts for the Sheikah Slate, Mipha acquires various spears, and so on.
Each character has three different tiers of weapons. Taking Mipha as an example, she can get Traveler’s Spears, Zora Spears and Lightscale Tridents as drops. Each of these tiers have different minimum and maximum attack values. Link has three different types of weapons: one-handed, two-handed and spears, and every category has a wide range of different weapons.
This is the basics of equipment and inventory in the game. It might seem like a lot when put in writing, but the game does a good job and presents most of the aforementioned information to the user in a way where most of it comes across at a glance.
Making things more convoluted than they need to be
Managing the weapons happens mostly at the Hyrule Blacksmith Guild, a map marker the player unlocks early on. Initially, players can only sell or fuse the weapons, but can unlock additional features later in the game. Fusing weapons is what’s most important, as weapons only get experience points (XP), when being fused with other weapons. This part is fairly straightforward. Weapons get bonuses to their attack values as they level up, so in order to keep up with the enemies that are becoming more challenging, it is advisable that you keep improving your weapons.
But this is where it gets more complicated: weapons may come with seals on them. Seals come in four distinct categories, and there is a total of 24 seals in the game, with some having 3 tiers, offering increased benefits. Each weapon has a new seal slot open up every 5th level until level 20. After that, levels 25 and 30 add hidden seals to the weapon. These hidden seals the player has no control over.
To explain the process, when fusing two weapons with one seal each, the seal that will be retained is the one on the weapon you fuse the other weapons to – this will be referred to as base weapon. The other weapons are destroyed in the process, along with the seals on them. A player may choose up to 5 weapons at a time to fuse to the base weapon.
However, if the base weapon reaches level 5 with the fusion process, the first seal of the first selected weapon will be added onto the base weapon. You can tell which will that be by the number on the weapon in the selection screen.
And even though the game does not explain this, seals can interact with one another, empowering ones of the same type, so there’s a lot of consideration that can go into weapon fusion. Especially since the xp gain will drop off at higher levels, so you have to keep fusing different weapons, keeping in mind which one do you want to level up and which ones you’re just powering up to increase the xp they provide when used as fusion materials.
The problem with the system
1. Funds
Since the service costs money, you can hit a point where you can’t fuse anymore due to a lack of funds, and then you’ll be forced to sell weapons for money. But this money is more than likely will be spent at the blacksmith, as the game is generous with drops and I didn’t have to farm the same missions for resources until the end game, and that was with me completing everything available before moving on with the story chapters. And it’s easy to lose track of how much you’re spending at the Blacksmith, as your attention will be held by the weapon stats and seals.
2. The limited stash
Overall, you can customize your weapons a great deal, but it really comes at the price of slowing down the game’s process, taking you out of the flow completely. In case your severely limited stash is full once you gain new weapons at the end of the mission, you are then forced to sell enough until the number of weapons you own on a character doesn’t exceed the limits. Since you can only sell them in this case, you are basically discarding those weapons, losing out in their XP and seal potential. The problem with this is that once you beat a particularly challenging mission, instead of returning to the map screen to look at objectives and rest a bit, you are essentially halted and forced to make that decision, which can be lengthy, as you have to check each weapon to determine which will amount up to the smallest loss of value when selling.
In Dynasty Warriors 8, players can carry up to 1200 weapons. Granted, the game can drop upwards of 50 weapons per mission, that’s still a hefty limit. In Age of Calamity a player starts with a stash of 20, which can be expanded by two at a time through completing certain side quests which are few and far between. Considering some missions can drop 4 or more weapons, you can see how tight the inventory space is relative to potential drops compared to Dynasty Warriors. This means that if you’d rather not spend the time at the Blacksmith, or just trying to save some weapons up for fusing, you can quickly run out of inventory space and the game forces you into either selling or fusing them.
The limited weapon stash worked in Breath of the Wild, because you had to strategize which weapons are worth keeping and which ones should be discarded once a suitable upgrade was found. It strengthened the feeling of the player having to live off of the land so to speak, and taking the durability system into account, it meshed with the other gameplay elements exceptionally well. You could expand the stash size later on by purchasing the upgrades with Korok seeds, which allowed you to carry a larger arsenal, being prepared for any type of encounter. In the case of Age of Calamity however, weapons don’t break, and you keep getting them as you fight your way through Hyrule. I understand there must be a limit to how much weapons the inventory should store, but the 20 limit is terribly small compared how deep the fusion system can get and how frequently you obtain weapons. This particular element of the limited stash and miniscule upgrades to it was not worth bringing over from BotW at all.
3. Having to drudge around the menu forever
The Blacksmith’s Guild offers some other services later down the line, and can be unlocked by completing some side quests. You have the ability to Octo-polish rusty weapons. Rusty weapons take up your inventory space, but you can’t equip them for battle as they have no stats or attack value. You have to remove the rust from them to be able to put them to some monster-slashing use. Now this process leads into a further “menu hell”, because you need to select 5 minerals, then 30 monster parts, and finally 100 monster trophies. The game allows you to use one material to fill all 5, 30, or 100 slots, which I have always done, but imagine piecing it together from multiple materials. Granted, rusty weapons are few and far between, but it just adds on top of the already off-putting blacksmith system.
This of course, can get worse. You can unlock the ability to remove one seal from a weapon, and later to remove all the seals from a weapon. This is a pretty neat feature when trying to pass down the desired seals to the next weapon, but instead of it costing money, like fusion does, it costs 20 of each of the following: fruits, mushrooms and meats; along with 30 monster parts and 100 trophies. I wanted to remove a seal once to date to check it out, but once I saw this list I just backed out of the menu. You see, all those other materials compete to be used in side quests that empower my characters, or to be used for cooking, which offers extra benefits in the battles. Sometimes these materials can be hard to come by – certainly harder than monster parts and trophies, so unlike in the case of de-rusting, where you can freely and conveniently select the mineral, monster part or trophy to fill out all of the slots, here you’d have to be more strategic about your choice, filling out those 20 slots piece by piece from different materials, which just drags the process down even more.
In short:
The problem with this system is instead of hacking and slashing monsters, or allocating resources to power up your characters as some rest between high-action missions, you have to spend time dicking around in a menu going back-and-forth deciding what you can afford to part with for something that offers some amount of upgrade. The amount of time and energy this requires compared to the benefits it provides, it is not always worth doing. And this system of weapon management not optional, as one way or another, you’re railroaded back into it.
Solution
I think the system would have worked better if instead of weapons, you’d get seals as a drop. A solution that could work well within the narrative as well is if you had access to some basic weapons from the start as part of the Hylian army’s arsenal, and as you progress more in the story, the selection of weapons increases, with the new acquisitions reflecting the zone where the story mission that unlocked them took place in. Boss-specific weapons, like Lynel or Ancient weapons can be first acquired when you first beat a boss that’s wielding the weapon. This change would solve the problem of the limited inventory space, and severely cut down on the menu hell the current system presents. In this sense, Korok seeds wouldn’t be an absolute necessity and could be used for other things as well.
Since this is a single-player game where you’re not competing against anyone else, the weapons serve more of a cosmetic accessory, and as such the different default attack values based on the weapon could be done away with without affecting the rest of the gameplay. The characters themselves have hidden attack stats, so that could be used to calculate damage output, and the weapons could serve solely as vessels for seals.
If you got seals as drops instead of weapons, specific missions could provide seals from a specific pool, which would give more agency to the player in terms of farming for the desired seals, and still retain a slight element of chance. Seals could be fused on to the weapons at the blacksmith for a price, and they would be used up upon fusing. This would streamline the process of customizing the weapons.
With all this said, the last remaining thing unaccounted for by the changes is the weapon level system. With these changes, it would remain mostly unchanged, as seals slots would continue to unlock based on the weapons’ level as they currently do. The only question that remains is how would the levels increase? In the current implementation, weapon leveling is removed from “normal gameplay” and you have to go out of your way to increase their levels. The most obvious choice is having the weapon gain experience from downing enemies, just like characters do. Characters also earn xp for completing missions, which I believe to be more substantial than what downing enemies gives, and this can be modified by cooking specific dishes. Weapons of course would not benefit from these xp sources and bonuses for balancing reasons. This would incentivize clearing the battlefield more, which would benefit the treasure and Korok seed collection process as well. Furthermore, weapon levels could be gated by story progression, where the maximum weapon level would be 5 until chapter 2, and each additional chapter would increase the maximum weapon level by 5.
I believe that these changes would not impact the other elements of the game negatively while improving the flow of the game resulting in better user experience.
Closing thoughts
It is still a commendable effort that this system was implemented: it tried to bring something familiar over from BotW, and make it its own. But whereas in Breath of the Wild the aim of the weapon system and its design was informed by the genre and surrounding gameplay that supported it, the different pace and genre is not forgiving in the case of Age of Calamity, resulting in a feeling of disjointed gameplay.
Take leveling up the characters for example: there is a Military Training Camp, where you can increase the level of any of your characters, up to the highest level character’s current level. I haven’t used it for the longest time, partially because I didn’t need to, and partially because I thought it is done via betting your characters against strong enemies, which I thought would be time-consuming and useless as I was already fighting strong enemies in the missions I was undertaking. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the leveling process is basically you paying an amount of rupees for each level, and it is really the depth of your rupee-pouch that sets limit on how much you can level your characters. This is a very simple, straightforward method that makes it easy to jump back into the game in case you got stuck, and it really helps when there’s 10+ characters whose levels you need to manage. This should have been the design philosophy behind the Blacksmith’s guild as well: relatively fast decisions that are easier to make and the benefits outweigh the time sunk into them.
Thanks for taking the time and reading this post It’s quite long but I wanted to provide enough contextual information to get my point across successfully. See you in the next post!