If you’ve taken down the final boss of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you’ve probably noticed a completion percentage that seemed way too low. A lot of people are reporting completion percentages in the 20s. This has led many to believe the game world of Breath of the Wild is just larger and more detail-rich than they’d thought, even after completing it.
While I’m not going to try to pretend this game isn’t massive, or that it’s not filled with hundreds of hours of incredible (and oftentimes difficult) content, it turns out the completion percentage metrics are a little bogus.
Now, if you’re wondering how to find your completion percentage, it appears on your map screen after you’ve finished the game for the first time.
According to Page 326 of the official guide for Breath of the Wild, there are several things that completion percentage takes into account. Those are:
- Shrines completed
- Bosses defeated
- Korok seeds discovered
- Map locations discovered
Upon completion of any of these activities, players are rewarded with approximately 0.08% completion.
Now, if I’m reading this right, it implies that there’s no completion percentage reward for the game’s four major dungeons, or for discovering memories, or for filling out the Hyrule Compendium, or for earning and upgrading your gear, or for finding fairy fountains, or for completing side quests for villagers. So, that Lynel you took down while you were wandering the world counts more than finding the Master Sword. And finding a single Korok seed (of which there are 900) will count exactly as much as completing a Shrine (of which there are 120).
So, if you do the basic math, the completion percentage is incredibly skewed toward Korok seeds. As much as I love the Koroks (along with anything Wind Waker-related), this just doesn’t seem like a valid measurement of a player’s completion in the game.
A more logical way to measure completion rate would be to assign values that weigh specific events against each other. A Divine Beast, say, would be worth 10%. Finding all 18 memories, another 10%. Defeating Calamity Ganon, perhaps another 10%. That leaves 40% to divide between the side activities listed above, plus side quests.
Of course, that’s just off the top of my head. An even more accurate measurement system would take into account how long each of these activities would take and assign them each an appropriate weight. This way, your completion percentage would actually mean something. In the current game, it may as well be meaningless, except as a constant Korok seed and roaming boss reminder.
I don’t know about you, but I would definitely like to see this addressed at some point in the future.
