Zelda Breath of the Wild 3: What 900 Korok Seeds and 152 Shrines Taught Nintendo About Collectibles

The Gold Pile of Nothing

Let me start with the most honest piece of game design feedback Nintendo has ever accidentally given its players. In Breath of the Wild, there are 900 Korok seeds scattered across Hyrule. You need 441 to fully upgrade your inventory. The remaining 459 seeds, when collected, are exchanged for a literal golden pile of poop. Hestu gives it to you. The text description reads "a gift of friendship." The community calls it Hestu's Gift, and it is the most passive-aggressive reward in video game history.

Nintendo knew nobody would reasonably collect all 900. They put the golden poop in the game to tell you, explicitly, that chasing completion in this particular way is a waste of your time. It is weirdly refreshing. Most games reward obsessive completion with overpowered gear or special endings. Zelda gave you a golden turd and a pat on the head.

But it also revealed a design tension that both BotW and TotK never fully resolved. The games want you to explore naturally, not systematically. The map design rewards wandering. The actual collectible systems reward exactly the opposite. Korok seeds are discrete objects that spawn in specific locations. Shrines have exact map coordinates. The completion percentage on the map screen literally displays a number. Every system in the game pushes you toward checklist behavior that the golden poop explicitly mocks.

I think this tension is something Nintendo has been thinking about for the next game. And if the rumors about a completely new world and a new core mechanic are true, this is their chance to rethink how hidden content works from the ground up.

What Worked: Environmental Storytelling Through Secrets

Not all collectibles in BotW and TotK are padding. Some of the best moments in both games come from discovering things that were never marked on any map.

The Lord of the Mountain on Satori Mountain is probably the best example. There is no quest for it. No NPC tells you about it. The mountain just glows green on certain nights and if you climb up there, you find a mystical horse surrounded by Blupees. That moment belongs entirely to the player who noticed something strange and went to investigate. No reward. No inventory item. Just the experience of finding something the game never told you to look for.

Then there is the eighth heroine statue in the Gerudo Highlands. The main quest sends you to find seven statues. The eighth one, completely optional and unmarked, is in a remote corner of the highlands. Finding it feels like you outsmarted the game. And TotK rewarded players who remembered it by putting a Misko treasure quest there, creating a callback that only makes sense if you played the first game.

Eventide Island might be the most universally praised piece of content in either game. You arrive on an island and the game strips away all your gear. You have to scavenge, survive, and solve shrine puzzles with nothing but whatever you find on the beach. It is a complete microcosm of the game's survival loop compressed into a single island, with no map markers, no quest log entries beyond the initial trigger, and no indication that the island even exists unless you spot it from the coast or glide to it on a whim.

These moments work because they are not collectibles in the traditional sense. They are discoveries. The difference matters. A collectible is something you are told to find. A discovery is something you find on your own. BotW and TotK have both kinds, and the discoveries are universally better than the collectibles.

What Was Padding: The Shrine Count Problem

152 shrines in Tears of the Kingdom. 120 in Breath of the Wild. Each one is designed around a specific puzzle or combat challenge. Some are genuinely brilliant. The apparatus shrines in BotW that used the Switch gyroscope were creative even if they made you twist your controller into uncomfortable positions. The Proving Grounds shrines in TotK, where you start with no equipment and have to defeat enemies using only what the shrine provides, are excellent tests of combat creativity.

But there are also a lot of Blessing shrines. Walk in, get your orb, leave. Nintendo clearly ran out of puzzle ideas and padded the shrine count with freebies tied to overworld challenges. The problem is not that Blessing shrines exist. The overworld challenges that unlock them are often excellent. The problem is that the shrine system as a whole forces every piece of content into the same format: solve a thing, enter a loading screen, get an orb, exit a loading screen. After shrine number ninety or so, the loading screens start to feel like punishment.

I hope the next game moves away from shrines as the universal content delivery mechanism. Keep the puzzle chambers. Keep the combat trials. But do not put a loading screen between every piece of content and the rest of the game. Some puzzles can just exist in the world. Some combat trials can just be caves. The orb-for-upgrades system is fine. The shrine wrapper around every single orb is not.

What Should Change: Secrets That Change the World

A pattern I noticed replaying both games is that almost no secret permanently changes how the world behaves. Finding all the great fairies upgrades your armor. Finding all the Korok seeds expands your inventory. But these are numerical upgrades. They do not change how Hyrule looks or feels.

Imagine hidden content that leaves a visible mark on the world. Rebuilding a destroyed bridge opens a new trade route and suddenly you see NPCs using it. Clearing a monster stronghold permanently turns that area into a friendly settlement with shops and quests. Finding a hidden spring restores plant life to a blighted region and the visual change persists for the rest of the game.

TotK took small steps in this direction. The Lurelin Village restoration quest actually rebuilds the pirate-attacked village and NPCs move back in. The Monster Control Crew sends squads to areas you have cleared. But these are one-off quests, not a systematic approach to world-changing secrets.

This is where Better Than BotW comparisons inevitably come up, which is unfair because Nintendo cannot possibly live up to the expectations created by Breath of the Wild launching alongside a new console. But the next game does have the opportunity to make secrets feel more consequential. And I think that is the right direction. Fewer collectibles. More discoveries. And discoveries that actually leave a mark on the world you are exploring.

The One Collectible I Will Fight For

I know I just spent a thousand words complaining about collectibles. But there is one type I genuinely want to see return: the memories. BotW had Link's lost memories triggered by specific locations matching Zelda's photos. TotK had the Dragon's Tears geoglyphs that told Zelda's story from the distant past.

These work because they are not really collectibles. They are story delivery mechanisms gated behind exploration. Each memory or tear advances your understanding of the narrative. Finding them feels like uncovering secrets rather than checking boxes. The geoglyph system in TotK was particularly smart because the glyphs are visible from the sky, so gliding around and spotting them from above becomes its own gameplay loop.

For the next game, I would love to see this approach applied to worldbuilding rather than just main story. Hidden journals from previous inhabitants. Murals that show what the region looked like in an earlier era. Echoes of past events that you can witness by finding specific locations and activating the rumored rift mechanic to peer into a different time. If the cross-dimensional rift rumor is real, this practically designs itself. Each rift you open could reveal a snapshot of the location's history. A buried memory system that tells the story of the world rather than just the story of the main characters.

Anyway. This is all speculation. Nintendo will do whatever Nintendo does. But if I had to bet on one thing, it is that the next Zelda will have fewer meaningless collectibles and more meaningful discoveries. The golden poop was funny once. I do not think they can get away with it twice.