New Zelda Scans: 2 to 3 times bigger than OOT

[A Black Falcon]

Majora's Mask, they said it had a bigger central field, but I can't see that being accurate. If that's the case, then I suppose most of the field must be occupied by the main town of the game. I can see directly to the edge of the main area the second I step outside, and from the start it never felt really vast. Still, I did enjoy that game alot anyway.

I absolutely agree, and that was my point... MM doesn't feel vast. It feels very, very well put together, with a brilliantly designed world, but it feels pretty small... I think they could have made a larger and just as interesting world for sure if they had tried. They just didn't want to... or perhaps the N64 has hardware limitations? But either way, the result was a feeling of a small world that I wished was larger (when I wasn't hating the timing system).

OoT? OoT I thought was better there... the Hyrule Field isn't substantial gameplay-wise, but it feels big and that really helps the game. MM has that giant city right in the middle ruining that field. Still, though, OoT doesn't exactly have a massive overworld... oh well. Didn't really hurt the game much at all, given its brilliance.

Ah yes, Zelda. Now, the lands really weren't that large, not realistically so anyway, in the older 2D Zelda games, but for good reason. Imagine actually traversing a whole country, or actually managing to work out all the parts on a personal and well thought out level for something like that. However, they did, at least to me, seem to have a larger sense of scale than the 3D ones.

I agree to a degree that the 2d ones feel larger... but I'm not so sure that they actually are. Yes, there definitely was more to do in the overworld in the 2d games than in MM or OoT, especially for enemies and puzzles and stuff, but part of the culprit is 3d vs. 2d... I bet that in terms of footage (or squares or whatever) OoT and MM are larger than the 2d games. The problem is that because of how 3d games have to be designed, they don't make use of the space in the same way so despite their larger size they don't have the same feel to them... but if you really look at the 2d games, they definitely benefit a lot from the limitations of 2d (the limited viewpoint for instance, primarially...).