Before 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Lege🦩nd 🔯of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom came out, I wrote that I ♍hoped it would include the Hero’s Path from the very beginning. Nintendo has answered my prayers. It isn’t quite there from the very beginning, but if you know where to look, you can get it in a matter of hours. That’s one of roughly one million small improvements Tears of the Kingdom makes on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild, and it encapsulates🙈 why the game is 🌃so perpetually impressive.
When you bought Breath of the Wild’s The Master Trials DLC, you gained access to a cool ability for your Sheikah Slate called the Hero’s Path that charted your journey from the start of the game to the present with a little green line showing every zig and zag you took on your trek across Hyrule. It was a cool feature because, in any open-world game, it's easy to think that you've fully explored an area because you recognize the scenery. The Hero’s Path showed you the exact limits of your exploration, and served as a nudge to visit the places you had only seen on the horizon.
In Tears of the Kingdom, you can get the Hero’s Path added to your Purah Pad early on with a little help from Robbie, the diminutive scientist with angular gray hair at Lookout Landing. If you do a few early research missions in the Depths, you can unlock a conversation with Robbie that will send you to meet him at the abandoned lab in Hateno Village. Venture out, and you have the opportunity to unlock the Hero's Path then and there. I didn't get this until about 60 hours into the game, but if you mainline the quests on offer at Lookout Landing, you could probably get it inside of four or five.
Early or late, getting it while you're still in the thick of your first playthrough is so much more helpful than unlocking it as part of DLC you likely won't buy until you've rolled credits. As I explore Hyrule, I'm frequently bringing up the map, clicking Hero's Path on, and seeing if I've already visited the familiar-looking area ahead. Most of the time, I haven't! Or I've seen a small sliver of it, but ran off to the right and never explored to the left. It's a fantastic addition that is going to help me see more cool stuff hiding away in the game that I otherwise would have assumed I'd already seen.
This and upgrades like it are particularly impressive when you consider how close to perfection the first game was. I still contend that Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece, but Tears of the Kingdom is the kind of masterpiece that could only be built on the foundation of another masterpiece. It's a consummate work that fixes every grievance players had about Breath of the Wild, while also building something completely new. Annoyed that you couldn't climb when it was raining? TOTK gives you potions and armor that allow you to scale walls even when they're wet. Annoyed that rare ingredients sometimes went to waste as Dubious Food due to an unsuccessful culinary experiment? TOTK introduces a new character who will take your one-heart meals and turn them into something more nourishing.
Finding Koroks is more involved this time around. There are more side activities, like helping Addison hold up his sign. The wells that you find in just about every stable and village add explorable space to every area you thought you knew from Breath of the Wild. Memories are easier to find thanks to the Geoglyphs. The 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Divine Beasts have been replaced with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:better dungeons. Weapons are still breakable, but infinitely customizable thanks to Link's Fuse ability. And on, and on, and on.
Amid all those changes, the Hero's Path has a special place in my heart. After all, it helps me discover all the others.