Elden Ring completely changed how I played Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

polygon.com:

I didn’t expect to get sucked into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom so quickly. I’ve spent the majority of my 50 hours plowing through the Depths and taking out the Yiga Clan, tearing through Bokoblin camps as I explore the game’s overworld, and refusing to shy away from any Frox or Flux Construct I find. It’s a completely different approach from the way I played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a play style so different it initially surprised me.

My newfound confidence is at least partially thanks to Link’s new skills, particularly Fuse, which lets me combine items and weapons, like adding bomb flowers to arrows or sticking elemental crystals onto swords. But the truer culprit might be the hours I spent with Elden Ring last year, and how that game completely changed my outlook on open-world games with fearsome enemies.

I initially delayed playing Breath of the Wild until 2018, saving it for a 14-hour flight to see family in Taiwan — at which point it had been declared 2017’s game of the year at numerous outlets, including Polygon. The game was also, evidently, accessible to newcomers — a statement that foolishly made me think it would be easy. I was actually intimidated, unable to use the same strategies I’d historically relied on when playing open-world games, because I’d historically mostly played RPGs: I typically avoid head-on combat, preferring to rely on stealth traits instead. I choose thief or ranger classes — ones that let me backstab and steal, or shoot from a safe vantage point. In Skyrim, I max out sneak, pickpocket, archery, and conjuration. I loot, pilfer, let Atronachs do my dirty work, and then I sell the stolen goods for profit. In Divinity: Original Sin 2, I play as two characters,