Breath of the Wild Hard Mode Wishlist

I’m supposed to be working on other stuff right now but I still have Breath of the Wild on the brain so I thought it’d be fun to write up a hard mode wishlist. Before reading on be warned, if you haven’t played Breath of the Wild there’s no point reading this post. I’ve tried to keep spoilers to a minimum but the less you know about the game before playing it, the better. There are some details in here better discovered for yourself.

While I do wish that Breath of the Wild had a hard mode right from the start, I’m hopeful its creation as DLC will encourage Nintendo to make some bigger changes than usual to increase the difficulty. Enemies tend to hit hard enough and have enough health to make tweaking those basic values effectively pointless anyway. A small bump in late game enemy damage wouldn’t hurt but I don’t see how Nintendo could justify that as a hard mode so I’m expecting something different.

The goal here is to make some simple changes that increase the difficulty in Breath of the Wild without resorting to just making the game more tedious or turning every enemy into one hit kill. There are larger changes I’d make to some of these systems in an ideal scenario but since it will arrive as a patch I’ve kept it to relatively simple suggestions that I feel could be patched with a relatively small amount of effort. I’ve written them as imaginary patch notes since that’s the clearest way to present them.

Let’s get started.

• Consuming food or potions triggers an in-game animation of Link eating which lasts a second or two.

This is the change that most needs to happen for Hard mode to be worthwhile. At the moment as long as something isn’t a one hit kill you can rebound just by devouring as much stuff from your inventory as possible. After a few hours you quickly have enough food never to run out so making this an in-game animation forces players to at least wait until they’re out of combat or pick their timing carefully. An alternative might be to give Link some kind of “fullness” meter that limits his ability to eat so much at a time, that might be an easier change to make but I prefer the in-game animation idea.

• One hit kill protection removed.

At the moment the game seems to protect you from one hit kills, leaving you with a quarter heart instead sometimes. I wasn’t paying too much attention to this but I think it happens as long as you were on full health when you got hit. Whatever the case, the kind of people who want a hard mode are the same people most likely to exploit a mechanic like this so it should be removed.

• Mipha’s Grace no longer heals Link to full health. 5 hearts seems like a reasonable number instead.

This can’t be removed outright since it’s such an important item but it can be toned down. Five hearts is maybe enough to survive another hit from a weak enemy. Gives you time to recover your position in battle or run away.

• Daruk’s Protection reduced from 3 uses to 1.
• Urbosa’s Fury damage halved.

I hate to tweak a damage number but Urbosa’s Fury is too strong for hard mode. Daruk’s Protection basically gives you a free pass to win any single fight if you know what you’re doing so that needs a drastic change too. The goal is to keep the player on their toes for all combat encounters, with these nerfs the powers have less potential to be used as a crutch. Speaking of which…

• Stasis+ still freezes enemies but damage done while frozen doesn’t count.

Again this ability is unlikely to be removed but it should be rebalanced somehow. This is a difficult one because freezing enemies without being able to damage them seems kind of pointless but maybe it could last longer to compensate, at least that way you could use it on one enemy to take them out of the equation for a little while.

• Bombs no longer inflict knockdown, they cause a hitstun instead. Damage is unchanged.

Mixing bombs into combat is a nice option but it’s too easy to spam smaller enemies (Bokoblins) with them since they get knocked over.

• The effects of hearty food no longer stack. If the player consumes a hearty item which gives +3 yellow hearts and then one which gives +4 hearts they end up with only +4 hearts. (Consuming them in the opposite order also yields +4 hearts, smaller values don’t overwrite bigger ones.)

Even with this change hearty food is still very good because it can be stacked with another kind of buff anyway. Stacking several of these along with a defense buff is just too strong, especially early on.

• Link cannot carry more than one fairy at a time.

I’d be fine with them disabling fairies altogether since there’s already Mipha’s Grace but I figure they won’t want to scrap this mechanic entirely so instead it should be limited to just one. It’s too easy to stack fairies by visiting fountains and I’m not even sure there’s an upper limit on them which is kind of ridiculous.

• Manual saving is disabled outside of towns.
• Autosaves are no longer triggered before enemy camps or minibosses. Making progress on quests, visiting a town, arriving at a full boss, unlocking or solving a shrine are the only way to trigger autosaves. This autosave change is explained to the player in a prompt before they start hard mode.

This is the suggestion I find hardest to defend because you could argue that this just makes the game more tedious. If you can warp to towns then you can save at any point just by doing that anyway. I still think it would be a worthwhile change however since it’s up to the player whether they want to push on to save time or be careful and waste time making a trip back to the village. To create that sense of adventure that hard mode players want there has to be risk. The amount of saving the game does at the moment really softens that risk element, it basically savescums itself for you.

• Night time is darker, visibility around Link is more limited.

Note that this is not the same kind of darkness present in the dark forest area, that’s more like a thick fog. This effect would be achieved by lowering the ambient light level at night time so even though it would be dark, light sources like the moon, shrines, shooting stars and death mountain could still be seen as normal. Since Link can’t run with a torch or use it on horseback this shouldn’t be so dark that a torch is required just to get around, that would introduce too much tedium. The aim is to create uncertainty about the road ahead which makes enemy encounters more threatening and increases the chances of the player wandering into a bad situation if they’re not careful. Bonus points if being near a light source makes Link more easily spotted by enemies.

• Lizalfos more closely match the colour of their surroundings when cloaked.
• Their pounce when breaking cloak is more accurate.

This is a really cool mechanic but it’s not as threatening as it should be. It seems as though there’s a sort of colour offset value that makes Lizalfos stick out a bit when they’re lying in wait. If there is such a value it should be reduced so that cloaked Lizalfos are harder to spot. Their pounce coming out of this state should also be more accurate, probably even on Normal mode. At the moment they never seem to land it which defeats the purpose.

• Wizzrobes are no longer instantly killed by elemental arrows, however they do take additional damage.
• Wizzrobes immediately go back to their immaterial form when hit by a headshot.

Wizzrobes fall off in challenge far too fast compared to other enemies. After the first few hours they often don’t even get a chance to fight back which is especially problematic since they tend to be fought 1v1. Personally I feel these Wizzrobe changes should also be applied to Normal, these enemies feel wasted at the moment which is a shame.

• Ancient arrows still do large bonus damage to guardians and high single target damage everything else but no longer instantly kill.
• Arrows have max limits. Suggested values: 30 normal, 20 fire/ice/elec, 10 bomb, 5 ancient.
• Lynel bows consume the number of arrows they fire. In other words a five shot bow uses five arrows from inventory.

The bow is a very powerful tool. Sometimes it’s so useful that it discourages players from using more creative methods to destroy enemy camps. Hard mode players should be expected to improvise more and limiting arrows is a good way to do that. Lynel bows are a lot of fun so I hate to suggest a nerf but they have by far the highest attack power of any weapon so there really should be a bigger downside.

• Rain is not more common than usual but rain is somewhat more likely to be a thunderstorm in areas where that’s possible.

The goal is to avoid making the game more tedious so more rain is a no-no. Lightning can present a progression problem for players but it also provides unique combat opportunities which hard mode players will probably get a kick out of utilising.

• Armor upgrade values are changed so that the level 4 upgrade value is now roughly equivalent to the level 2 upgrade value on Normal mode. Material requirements are unchanged and set bonuses are still granted at level 2.
  Example: If a piece of armour had the upgrade values 1 -> 5 -> 8 -> 11 on Normal it now has values like 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 6 instead.

Even though enemies hit hard on Normal their threat level falls off very harshly as armour gets upgraded. This would probably be an especially big problem on repeat playthroughs when the fairy fountain locations are already known by the player so I’d like to see armour values adjusted to improve the difficulty curve. This may seem like a harsh change but keep in mind players can still make defense food/potions to prepare for harder fights. Ancient armour might need an additional nerf too.

There’s probably more that will occur to me with more time but I think that’s a good start. Individually most of these changes are quite small but together I think they would represent a well fleshed out hard mode that would provide the kind of experience people are looking for. Some alterations to puzzles, enemy camp placements and bosses are also possible but would obviously require a lot of work. Focusing more on the general game systems gets more mileage for the amount of effort put in and it ensures the whole game becomes more challenging rather than just a few isolated areas but I wouldn’t complain if Nintendo wanted to make those other sorts of tweaks as well.

I expect more effort will go into the dungeon and story content they’re planning but I’m more interested in hard more right now so hopefully at least a couple of these changes manage to make their way in. However it turns out it’s going to be interesting to see what they have in store.