22nd July 2005, 11:32 AM
I guess what we have to take into consideration is that in "traditional" tales of adventure and derring-do, travel plays an important part. Salam the honorable bandit, crossing the desert on camelback to save his girlfriend, seeing nothing but sand for forty days and forty nights, isn't going 'OH GOD THIS IS BORING' for the whole length of the trip. A player would. Furthermore I believe we can all agree that "warping" really blows as far as immersion and epicness go. Therefore how do we remedy to this problem?
A MMORPG I played recently proposes a solution. In Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, most of the game is spent on board a pirate ship, performing such menial activities as pumping bilge water, fixing cracks in the ship with lumbers, working the sails, etc. In most modern games this would be represented as: "PUMPING WATER: 56% WATER PUMPED" but Puzzle Pirates instead makes you play a little puzzle (as the name would suggest) vaguely representative of the task, repetitively for as long as the task needs to be performed. It's like playing Tetris only with a purpose. I don't know whether this could apply to an adventure game like Zelda, but maybe an answer lies in this direction?
A MMORPG I played recently proposes a solution. In Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, most of the game is spent on board a pirate ship, performing such menial activities as pumping bilge water, fixing cracks in the ship with lumbers, working the sails, etc. In most modern games this would be represented as: "PUMPING WATER: 56% WATER PUMPED" but Puzzle Pirates instead makes you play a little puzzle (as the name would suggest) vaguely representative of the task, repetitively for as long as the task needs to be performed. It's like playing Tetris only with a purpose. I don't know whether this could apply to an adventure game like Zelda, but maybe an answer lies in this direction?