I've recently played through the entirety of Breath of the Wild again in my Master Mode 100% Completion Run and while it was overall a lot of fun to replay the game, I had a constant gripe with the inventory. It's just so inconvenient in many ways, managing it wastes a lot of play time and sometimes it's even downright limiting. This is, where Breath of the Wild is in most need of improvements and maybe even another update by Nintendo, so that my inevitable third playthrough would be a lot more comfortable and enjoyable.
There is also an excellent article, Thoughts on UX of Zelda: Breath of The Wild by Junyue Hua, dealing with the same issues. I've taken some ideas and modified screenshots from that article for this post.
More Armor Space
Broken record here, but it's still an issue that the game offers 107 individual armor pieces, while there is only room for 100 armor pieces in your inventory. So, if you're getting it all, you will have to get rid of at least seven pieces. At the same time the game even invites you to buy duplicates of armor pieces for dying, as proposed by a merchant in Gerudo Town. But this isn't really feasible, if you want as many unique armor pieces as possible.
The solution would be simple. Just let the armor inventory expand by at least one more page. Ideally you could have up to eight pages, which is the same number as the materials inventory and which would allow you to store many duplicates, if you really wanted to.
Armor Quick Equip
Changing armor in the game can be somewhat inconvenient. Not only do you have to navigate the lengthy inventory, but if you want to change to an entire set, because you want to utilize its set bonus, you have to select and equip each piece of the armor set individually. A better solution would have been to give you an "Equip set" option:
The "X"-button doesn't have any functionality within the inventory, except for holding materials. In case of the armor inventory it could have been used as a shortcut to equip pieces and entire sets at once.
With alternate headpieces like the Divine Helms, which you can get from the Champion amiibo, equipping a set on these items would automatically equip the corresponding rest of the set, like the Ancient Cuirass and the Ancient Greaves in this case. This would be really useful considering that the Divine Helms were placed at the end of the armor inventory, instead of next to the rest of the Ancient set, where it would belong. But of course the flawed sorting is another problem in itself here.
Even with a quick equip feature, changing armor within the inventory would still be quite slow, because you have to find the right pieces first. This is easy enough early in the game, but the more you play, the more the inventory grows. There can be five pages of armor (which isn't even enough), eight pages of materials, three pages of food and two pages of "key items". Together with weapons, bows and shields that's a total of 21 inventory pages that you need to navigate.
The armor inventory is right in the middle of the action, between shields and materials. While you can quickly navigate between pages using R-Stick, it still takes many flicks to get where you want. And holding the stick almost always guarantees you to miss your target.
While the full horizontal navigation of the inventory seems intuitive, it just isn't practical later in the game, where it would have been good to have an option to arrange the inventory tabs vertically. So, one flick to the right moves you from shields to armor and the next flick from armor to materials. Inside these tabs you could now move up and down between the pages.
With such a mechanic, it would only take you three flicks at the most to get to the armor inventory tab, where then you can quickly navigate vertically to find the right pieces of armor. Since the vertical boundaries are refined to the armor space, you could even hold the R-Stick here to quickly switch to the first or last armor page.
There could be additional sorting options to make things even easier and quicker. With the materials inventory, the two materials you will hold the most often are Apples and Wood. Apples are found right in the beginning of the first materials page, while Wood is located right at the end of the materials list as the last item, where you would need to scroll all the way down or right. But a reverse sorting option for the materials would make things a lot quicker.
Also, it would be useful, if you could sort materials by their effect, e.g. have all speed boosting ingredients right next to each other.
That's the one sentence that you will read the most often in Breath of the Wild, along with "You can't carry any more melee weapons." And it's always annoying. You open a chest or you find a good weapon, but you can't pick it up right away. Instead you have to open your inventory and drop something first.
A more convenient interface would at least give you the option to swap your currently selected item with whatever is lying on the ground:
In case of treasure chests, you would drop your current weapon, shield or bow on the ground and take the contents from the chest. Afterwards you could swap them again, in case you didn't really want the chest's contents.
There could even be an option to quickly "discard" the content of chests, where the item drops on the ground instead of your current gear. This would be useful for everyone, who simply want to have opened all the chests in the game, but aren't really interested in the contents. Of course chests, where you have chosen to discard the content, shouldn't re-appear.
You can change your weapon, bow or shield on the fly by holding left or right on the D-Pad without opening the inventory screen. While this is nice to have, it arranges all items in a line, where you can have up to 20, which results in a lot of scrolling and flicking with the right analogue stick to get to your desired item.
After you've "swapped" items, your currently selected tool will also be at the end of the line. So, if you want to change from a new weapon back to the Master Sword you would have to scroll all the way back to the beginning.
To make the "quick change" really quick, you should have the same sorting options as in the actual inventory by pressing the "Y"-button. So, when you currently have a sword at the right end, sorting would potentially move you quickly to the left half.
In addition they could let you navigate up and down with R-Stick during the quick change, which would behave the same way as in the inventory, where you have four lines of five items.
There is also an excellent article, Thoughts on UX of Zelda: Breath of The Wild by Junyue Hua, dealing with the same issues. I've taken some ideas and modified screenshots from that article for this post.
More Armor Space
Broken record here, but it's still an issue that the game offers 107 individual armor pieces, while there is only room for 100 armor pieces in your inventory. So, if you're getting it all, you will have to get rid of at least seven pieces. At the same time the game even invites you to buy duplicates of armor pieces for dying, as proposed by a merchant in Gerudo Town. But this isn't really feasible, if you want as many unique armor pieces as possible.
The solution would be simple. Just let the armor inventory expand by at least one more page. Ideally you could have up to eight pages, which is the same number as the materials inventory and which would allow you to store many duplicates, if you really wanted to.
Armor Quick Equip
Changing armor in the game can be somewhat inconvenient. Not only do you have to navigate the lengthy inventory, but if you want to change to an entire set, because you want to utilize its set bonus, you have to select and equip each piece of the armor set individually. A better solution would have been to give you an "Equip set" option:
The "X"-button doesn't have any functionality within the inventory, except for holding materials. In case of the armor inventory it could have been used as a shortcut to equip pieces and entire sets at once.
With alternate headpieces like the Divine Helms, which you can get from the Champion amiibo, equipping a set on these items would automatically equip the corresponding rest of the set, like the Ancient Cuirass and the Ancient Greaves in this case. This would be really useful considering that the Divine Helms were placed at the end of the armor inventory, instead of next to the rest of the Ancient set, where it would belong. But of course the flawed sorting is another problem in itself here.
Vertical Inventory Tab Navigation
Even with a quick equip feature, changing armor within the inventory would still be quite slow, because you have to find the right pieces first. This is easy enough early in the game, but the more you play, the more the inventory grows. There can be five pages of armor (which isn't even enough), eight pages of materials, three pages of food and two pages of "key items". Together with weapons, bows and shields that's a total of 21 inventory pages that you need to navigate.
The armor inventory is right in the middle of the action, between shields and materials. While you can quickly navigate between pages using R-Stick, it still takes many flicks to get where you want. And holding the stick almost always guarantees you to miss your target.
While the full horizontal navigation of the inventory seems intuitive, it just isn't practical later in the game, where it would have been good to have an option to arrange the inventory tabs vertically. So, one flick to the right moves you from shields to armor and the next flick from armor to materials. Inside these tabs you could now move up and down between the pages.
With such a mechanic, it would only take you three flicks at the most to get to the armor inventory tab, where then you can quickly navigate vertically to find the right pieces of armor. Since the vertical boundaries are refined to the armor space, you could even hold the R-Stick here to quickly switch to the first or last armor page.
Additional Sorting Options
There could be additional sorting options to make things even easier and quicker. With the materials inventory, the two materials you will hold the most often are Apples and Wood. Apples are found right in the beginning of the first materials page, while Wood is located right at the end of the materials list as the last item, where you would need to scroll all the way down or right. But a reverse sorting option for the materials would make things a lot quicker.
Also, it would be useful, if you could sort materials by their effect, e.g. have all speed boosting ingredients right next to each other.
Quick Swap Weapons, Bows and Shields
"Your inventory is full."
That's the one sentence that you will read the most often in Breath of the Wild, along with "You can't carry any more melee weapons." And it's always annoying. You open a chest or you find a good weapon, but you can't pick it up right away. Instead you have to open your inventory and drop something first.
A more convenient interface would at least give you the option to swap your currently selected item with whatever is lying on the ground:
In case of treasure chests, you would drop your current weapon, shield or bow on the ground and take the contents from the chest. Afterwards you could swap them again, in case you didn't really want the chest's contents.
There could even be an option to quickly "discard" the content of chests, where the item drops on the ground instead of your current gear. This would be useful for everyone, who simply want to have opened all the chests in the game, but aren't really interested in the contents. Of course chests, where you have chosen to discard the content, shouldn't re-appear.
Sorting during Quick Change
You can change your weapon, bow or shield on the fly by holding left or right on the D-Pad without opening the inventory screen. While this is nice to have, it arranges all items in a line, where you can have up to 20, which results in a lot of scrolling and flicking with the right analogue stick to get to your desired item.
After you've "swapped" items, your currently selected tool will also be at the end of the line. So, if you want to change from a new weapon back to the Master Sword you would have to scroll all the way back to the beginning.
To make the "quick change" really quick, you should have the same sorting options as in the actual inventory by pressing the "Y"-button. So, when you currently have a sword at the right end, sorting would potentially move you quickly to the left half.
In addition they could let you navigate up and down with R-Stick during the quick change, which would behave the same way as in the inventory, where you have four lines of five items.
Some good ideas here - especially like the armour management - though I feel some things are missing here. What I was honestly most frustrated with was the poor sorting options, especially when it comes to materials. Unlike armour, where you get two different orders, you can only sort materials one way. What I would really have liked is a second sorting options that puts items with similar effects next to each other. So pressing Y again will put rushrooms, swift carrots, fleet lotus seeds, swifts violets, hightail lizards and hot-footed frogs all next to each other - so everything that gives a speed boost. The same would go for all other kinds of ingredients, like hearty food, stamina restorers, things that give an attack boost, etc.
ReplyDeleteI also personally would have liked the option to ditch the whistling in favour of a quick menu that lets me eat food in battle, which would work similarly to the weapon select menus. The way it is now, I can only eat if I pause the game and go into the menu, which for me, takes all the tension out of a fight.
Hey, thanks for the comment!
ReplyDeleteI've added the material sorting option by effect to the post. Seems quite useful to me.