For all intents and purposes, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an open-world RPG. Link grows from a shirtless scrub to a many-hearted, heavily armored battlebot and mech master over the course of the game. You pursue an overarching main quest while completing side quests along the way, and there are many characters to meet, mysteries to uncover, and villages to visit along the way. It’s a better version of the same framework we’ve seen in countless games like Horizon Forbidden West, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and — dare I say it — The Witcher 3.
I don’t like any of those games as much as Tears of the Kingdom, but they have one leg up on Link’s latest adventure. Their developers were consciously making games that were definitely RPGs, which means that they doled out all-important XP after every minor success. TOTK is an experience point desert.
That doesn't prevent it from being a great game, and in fact, it would probably be a worse game if it just did the thing most games do. If the reward for helping Addison stand President Hudson up was simply a hundred experience points, I might be less inclined to be a good Samaritan. If the game trained me to see building my little scaffolds as something I do primarily because it levels me up, I might stop finding the fun in the act of play. As it is now, I never know exactly what goodies Addison is going to give me and, as a result, the reward is rarely the motivation. I tend to stop and help him because figuring out how to keep the president upright is a fun little puzzle that rarely takes much time, not because it will get me slightly closer to doing a little more damage.
By refusing to give you something as straightforward as XP, Tears of the Kingdom may be a more interesting game. But! I always wish I was getting XP, anyway. Every time I finish a quest, I sit there and stare waiting for the rush of a four-digit number appearing on the screen. It never comes, just text reading "Complete" by the quest name. The game repeatedly subverts my expectations, not because Zelda games have conditioned me to expect something different, but because the rest of the genre has. It just feels weird to finish a bunch of quests in Lookout Landing and not have anything to show for it except a couple items of varying degrees of utility and the fun I had along the way.
It's especially noticeable after you complete a main quest. I finished the Death Mountain questline last night and my reward was… a heart, the thing I get everytime I finish four shrines. In this new Zelda, where you have more opportunities to increase your health and greater control over the speed at which your hearts grow, it feels strange when the reward for finishing something major is the same reward you get for accomplishing something minor. You also get a new companion to summon for help, but because they work with you throughout the dungeon, it feels less like a new reward, and more like a continuation of one you already received.
Is a big helping of XP really all that much better, though? After years playing RPGs, I go all Pavlov's Dog whenever the numbers go up, but is that actually better game design? It's certainly easier game design. There's a reason that every multiplayer shooter adopted an XP system after Call of Duty 4 popularized the practice. Knowing that they will have numerical progress (and maybe a cool skin for their gun) to show after a play session keeps players hooked. What Tears of the Kingdom does, awarding unique items after each quest, takes more thought. It may not be as immediately satisfying, but it makes for a better experience in the long-term. At least, that's what I'm going to tell myself.