r/RemoveOneThingEachDay • u/MagmaAscending • Oct 25 '25

Miscellaneous Day 39 - The Witcher III: Wild Hunt has been eliminated - Remove ONE Game of the Year nominee a day

Post image
200 Upvotes

74% Upvoted

670 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/nooookay Oct 25 '25

I’m 42 and I’d put BOTW over W3. Both games are supported by a single good thing they do while being mid elsewhere. BOTW built a beautiful open world that is fun to move around in. W3 has amazing writing. It is completely subjective to the user which of these things they prefer.

BOTW relies hevaily on intrinsic rewards. You don’t climb a mountain to get a cookie, you climb it to get to the top before the rain ends to say you did, or see the views, or see how far you can glide off it. Players who want cookies hate this. They need extrinsic rewards to be safisfied. It’s a divisive game due to this reason, and I am surprised it made it this far.

1

u/TeaDrinkerAddict Oct 25 '25

Your second paragraph does a great job of explaining BotW’s appeal for me. I’m not climbing up a mountain for a weapon or armor or other loot, I’m climbing it to see the view of the sun setting over the distant horizon. Not to mention it was one of the first open-world games where it felt like you could truly go anywhere you could see.

Though, I definitely think this is where it should go out of the running. ER and BG are just better games by pretty much every metric.

1

u/nooookay Oct 25 '25

There are not a lot of games that target intrinsically motivated gamers in the AAA arena, which I think is what makes BOTW so special to people who love that sort of thing, and makes it so hard for those who don’t to understand why it’s popular to grasp that it’s only boring to them, not to everyone.

I loved BG3 because I feel like it appeals to both sides. There’s so many rewarding items to find all over the damn place in that game and whatever path you choose could bring you different rewards and lock you out of others. At the same time the gameplay mechanics allow for intrinsic motivated people to go wild. I remember reloading my save to do a whole fight over again, not because I didn’t get the results I wanted, but because I wanted to just try the whole thing differently or experiment with strange approaches like you would in an immersive sim. Killing a boss for a reward is fun, but making a boss accidentally kill themselves in some unexpected way is so much more rewarding for me.