19th June 2016, 12:20 AM
(This post was last modified: 19th June 2016, 12:32 AM by A Black Falcon.)
There are two replies here, first a section-by-section response to your original post, and second a reply to your last post. I first wrote up the reply to your last post, but after doing that I thought that a longer reply to the first post might be really helpful, since you are saying that you're confused about how I possibly could think what I do. Well, I think that this should help, particularly in showing our different approaches to these games -- and ours are quite different, that's for sure! Most of the first reply is new, and not anything I've yet mentioned in this thread.
And once you do zoom in and look at individual screens, all areas in LttP are very open and allow for quick traversal, so you won't have the trickier, more varied experience of a LA, Oracles, or MM world. That's not interesting to me, make exploring the world challenging! As I say elsewhere in this post, this is why MM has a better overworld than OoT.
The other major issue with LttP's world design is that all subsequent Zelda games took its idea of having a world full of interesting and quirky characters, towns, houses, fields, and what have you, and expanded on it. So, LttP may have a lot more to offer than either NES game in terms of world and characters, but it also has far less than any Zelda game made after it. LA has much better-written and more interesting characters, and while the game does stand out in the series as the best story ever in the series, later Zelda games all outdo LttP as well. This is one of those places where nostalgia is really the only explanation for liking LttP over the other games; look at it compared to the other games and it's lacking. That goes for the story as well, of course. That Nintendo Power Zelda comic from '92 has a far better plot than the actual game does. Some later Zelda games are just as bad as LttP, story-wise, (the Oracles games and Phantom Hourglass have bad stories too, and the NES games of course), but it's nothing great.
Trying to think of Zelda games with a worse map than LttP, about all that comes to mind is maybe the original for NES, if we're unfair and compare it to the later ones instead of focusing on how innovative the game was for its time, and the DS games because of their limitations on movement (only being able to draw a line that your ship then auto-sails along in the first one, and just following set train tracks in the second). Minish Cap might be down there too due to how tiny its map is, but I'm not sure since i never did get around to getting too far into that one which I've never loved like I do the Oracles games. But the rest... LA and the Oracles games absolutely crush LttP, in zoomed-out-map design (how interesting does the world look when you look at the whole world map? This is important!), in all the little details that make the world fun to explore, in mixing things up by having a variety of areas to travel through, etc, and all of the 3d games are better as well.
Anyway, right now LttP has an A- in my game-collection spreadsheet. It's probably a fair score, though it could go down from there while it almost certainly won't go up, as it's a good game with some definite issues.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:I thought I'd make a proper thread dedicated to the hype train this particular game has started.To be fair, TP opened up after two dungeons and then let you explore the whole world, it's not very gated after that point. SS is more gated though, yes. I'm quite fine with that, though, for sure, it's other things that are issues with SS, though overall SS is a fantastic game, one of the best games on the Wii (second on my list after only Mario Galaxy) and in the upper tier of Zelda games. TP and OoT are even better, but SS is an A+ game in my book (if 9.8 or better is an A+, as it is for school grades; I don't give it a perfect 10).
I for one am very excited about this one. I've noted how many gamers have found Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword to be disappointing. Their reasons have been all over the place, but at this point I've got a good handle on what's changed (and for what matter, what Wind Waker did right). Namely, the freedom to roam was taken away from players in both Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. This has been a steady trend going back to when Zelda games got more cinematic. In order to direct those more movie-like moments, they had to funnel the player into a number of "plot gates", and Nintendo's been feeling the pushback as of late for such choices.
Quote:This also goes for their recent 2D games. The Capcom-made ones suffered from "gating" the player through and not really allowing a full sense of exploration, though to a lesser extent than TP and SS (huh, those are some problematic acronyms).Gating is awesome and makes the Capcom games better! It gives a better sense of exploration, not lesser -- there's more of a sense of reward when you get to a new area! The GB and GBC Zelda games are some of the most fun to explore in the series, for the overworlds in particular; dungeons I like best in the 3d games.
Quote:For my part, my favorite Zelda games are universally the oldest ones. Link to the Past, in recent years, has finally surpassed Link's Awakening in my standing. Link's Awakening is good, but Link to the Past allows more freedom.This is much more bad than good. That freedom is the freedom to pointlessly wander around, not any actual positive, and the "freedom" to miss vital items because the designers though that bad design (required hidden stuff you need) was a good idea.
Quote:The very first Zelda game, while it has the least to do and least variety in puzzle design, had a truly open world more open than any later game.I know, it's one of the reasons why most of its sequels, the DS games excepted, are better than the original.
Quote:Link to the Past is a close second though. Link to the Past, once you get past the opening, lets you go wherever you like. You can break sequence right from the start, although clearing Death Mountain before the other two palaces does require some creativity that the designers may not have intended. Once you reach the dark world, once again you're free to take on the dungeons in an almost completely free way.I don't really care about sequence-breaking, and almost never try to do such things myself. It's designed to be done in order and I believe I following the rules of a game! That's how it's supposed to be and it's going to be best as designed.
Quote:Ocarina of Time will always have a place in my list of favorite games, but it's luster has faded a bit. It is still a very well done game, but it was the start of a bad trend. Everything I can complain about with newer Zelda games got it's start with OOT. I never "hated" Navi like a lot of gamers, but her basic design of "hint giver" was not well done. She forced herself on you far too often and annoyed you into listening to her hints when you might have wanted to solve the puzzle yourself.Navi'a fine. Sure, she's a little annoying at times and occasionally the hints are unnecessary, like if you've played the game before or if she's repeating some hint yet again that the game has g iven you too many times already, but the helper character is MUCH more good than bad! You need some kind of quest log or something to help you stay on track in any big epic game, or people will just get hopelessly lost and confused. For example, at some point in Golden Sun: The Lost Age, I foolishly thought that it might be fun to explore, so I wandered around, stopped playing because I was in some hard dungeon, and then had no clue whatsoever where I was supposed to actually be or what I needed to do next... and the game has no help system, questlog, or what have you, so I eventually just gave up. Or in the Metroid Prime games, I never turn off any of the helper indicators, they're useful. I want to know where I should be going next, not randomly wandering around quickly getting frustrated at not knowing where I'm supposed to be going. (And yes, this is also why I hate grinding.)
Quote:While the overworld is far more open than later games like TP, it was also the start of forcing you along a gated path. There wasn't much of a way to do dungeons out of order, with only a few notable exceptions. It still did at least allow you to wander off to other locations and explore a bit though. I think we all loved finding that fishing pond for the first time.Why would you even want to do dungeons out of order, though? Just because you can? Whatever... I've never done that, and won't be trying. That's not how it was designed! (Yes, I've always been one who makes sure to follow the rules of a board game as written and not make stuff up.)
Quote:Majora's Mask continued that trend, but it did offer an amazingly well designed experience in it's own right, and I gotta appreciate it for what it is. It is still one of my favorites just for being such an odd one.The games' world and story are great, and I like the large, interesting town, but the time system drags the down so much that ultimately it's a disappointment. The games' highs are fantastic, but the lows are such a pain... weird game.
Quote:Link Between Worlds was Nintendo's first attempt at a return to form. It is great, and really challenges Link to the Past as my all-time favorite game.It's a fine, A or A--grade game, but that's going way too far. I'm glad that they finally made a good handheld Zelda game again, it'd been a long time considering the serious issues with both DS games and the GBA game (Minish Cap), but it's no match for the best Zelda games either.
Quote: It does have a more "open" design than LTTP, which is saying something, but that does come at a cost. In their effort to give the player choice, it skews a little too close to Megaman-like stage design. All the dungeons are "equal" difficulty, save the "final" one unlocked after beating them. For that matter, every dungeon only requires one specific item to solve it's puzzles. There's no sense of steadily using more and more tools to solve ever more elaborate puzzle design. The items themselves can all be obtained without needing to dive into the major dungeons, but that's because you just buy them all from the sales bunny camping in your house. There's no real sense of accomplishment in getting those items. You just grind up money and buy them.Here you identify my biggest problem with this kind of gamgame design when put in an RPG -- making the whole game equal in difficulty makes for boring gameplay! Yes, it can be done well, as Mega Man games show, but just as often it leads to a whole game of no-difficulty-progression tedium, as you see in Elder Scrolls games since they introduced level scaling for example. Or for a really bad example, Knuckles Chaotix... man, was making level select random and all five worlds even in difficulty a terrible idea! If I ever do actually play an Elder Scrolls game, I'd install one of those "we remove the whole-world level scaling" mods. So yeah, I very much agree with this criticism, it's a huge problem with open-world games that use it. I should have thought to mention it on my list of issues, in fact... it should be there, if Breath of the Wild's got it!
Quote:That's a shame, because the "side dungeons", those little caves dotting Zelda games with smaller scale challenges, would have been the perfect place to stick those items in as reward. You could still do things in any order, but you'd still need to find each item and solve puzzles to reach them. For all that I said, it is still a very well made game and I go back to it more often than I have a lot of recent Zelda games. I still highly recommend it.It's good, sure.
Quote:So that leads us here. Not only do they seem to be learning from the design issues of recent Zelda games, they're adding in all sorts of fun things to do. I'm not a big fan of item durability in my Zelda games, but if they do it right, maybe those items will just feel like those "temp" weapons you could pick up off enemies in Wind Waker (Double Dragon style weapons, basically). The open world design should have that sense of a vastness that Wind Waker had, but on actual land. Even the art design really calls back to Zelda 1. (I've always loved how Zelda, as a series, isn't afraid to completely reinvent it's art style every few games, so if you aren't a fan of one art style, don't worry, they'll be trying something else in a few years.) The sense of loneliness in this vast world means they will be skewing away from cinematic narrative in favor of letting you put together the story by just exploring the world. Think something like Myst or the Souls series. I don't need everything spelled out for me, so this is great.I don't need cinematic narrative, but I do need some kind of system to keep you on track -- a quest log, indicators to show where you need to go, a good mapping system which rewards exploration by revealing the map as you go instead of just giving you all of it from the start since revealing the map as you explore is MUCH more rewarding, etc. Without that games are aimless and I'll lose interest quickly, as always happens with me in open-world action, RPG, or action-adventure games. Endless choices doesn't make me want to explore all those choices, it makes me often freeze up and probably just move on to some other game before seeing most of them. It's not really an open-world game, but for an early example of this, as much as I loved Baldur's Gate 1 when we got it back in '99, I never even got into the city of Baldur's Gate, as I kept wandering around in the forests of the first half of the game until I lost interest in playing any more. I have always said that there are things I quite like about a more linear experience. Like, I have beaten Baldur's Gate II, which is more focused than its predecessor, much less full of large, mostly empty forest zones.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Well, of course your opinion is well known. You're the one who gives it every single time LTTP is brought up, ya know.Oh, I couldn't figure out what you meant by that; using quotes or quote tags would have been helpful. But yes, the mediocre world design hurts the game a lot.
Oh, and that line that so confused you is something YOU SAID. I was disagreeing with it, that's all.
Quote:Look, you've made your point many many times. I disagree. Most of us disagree. I don't think it's nostalgia at all. Read all the articles from people with a lot of experience dissecting classic games explaining why they all think LTTP is a very well made game. I'll never be able to convince you that LTTP's map isn't boring (I don't think it is, as time goes on I become more and more impressed by just how well they designed it and how well they used the space, and I have a number of memories of discovering new places and being wow'd by them).I think you are misunderstanding some things here. First, when I say that the map is incredibly boring and one of the worst in the series, I'm talking first about the WHOLE map, not just a single screen of it -- the zoomed-out map, as you see on the map screen. Look at that, and what do you see? You see a large central rectangle, surrounded with a ring of other rectangles, each a small themed area. No other Zelda game has such a boring map concept, all of the others at least TRY to make it look interesting.
And once you do zoom in and look at individual screens, all areas in LttP are very open and allow for quick traversal, so you won't have the trickier, more varied experience of a LA, Oracles, or MM world. That's not interesting to me, make exploring the world challenging! As I say elsewhere in this post, this is why MM has a better overworld than OoT.
The other major issue with LttP's world design is that all subsequent Zelda games took its idea of having a world full of interesting and quirky characters, towns, houses, fields, and what have you, and expanded on it. So, LttP may have a lot more to offer than either NES game in terms of world and characters, but it also has far less than any Zelda game made after it. LA has much better-written and more interesting characters, and while the game does stand out in the series as the best story ever in the series, later Zelda games all outdo LttP as well. This is one of those places where nostalgia is really the only explanation for liking LttP over the other games; look at it compared to the other games and it's lacking. That goes for the story as well, of course. That Nintendo Power Zelda comic from '92 has a far better plot than the actual game does. Some later Zelda games are just as bad as LttP, story-wise, (the Oracles games and Phantom Hourglass have bad stories too, and the NES games of course), but it's nothing great.
Trying to think of Zelda games with a worse map than LttP, about all that comes to mind is maybe the original for NES, if we're unfair and compare it to the later ones instead of focusing on how innovative the game was for its time, and the DS games because of their limitations on movement (only being able to draw a line that your ship then auto-sails along in the first one, and just following set train tracks in the second). Minish Cap might be down there too due to how tiny its map is, but I'm not sure since i never did get around to getting too far into that one which I've never loved like I do the Oracles games. But the rest... LA and the Oracles games absolutely crush LttP, in zoomed-out-map design (how interesting does the world look when you look at the whole world map? This is important!), in all the little details that make the world fun to explore, in mixing things up by having a variety of areas to travel through, etc, and all of the 3d games are better as well.
Quote:I too am not obsessed with "loot", as you put it, but those things you say aren't there, me and most others say ARE there. I don't understand how you came to that view, no matter how many times you explain it, I end up thinking the exact opposite of practically everything you type about the game, so it's hard to really connect. That's fine. Sometimes, it's impossible for people to understand each other, and that's okay. I just really am sick of debating the merits of LTTP EVERY SINGLE TIME it gets brought up.I brought up LttP because you did, I probably wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise; this game is trying to be a modern open-world game with some inspirations from the original NES Legend of Zelda, not something so directly connected to LttP. But you went on at length about how great LttP is, so of course it's fair to respond to that! When you're saying all these things I strongly disagree with about LttP, that makes me want to respond to it, naturally. I enjoy reasoned discussion.
Anyway, right now LttP has an A- in my game-collection spreadsheet. It's probably a fair score, though it could go down from there while it almost certainly won't go up, as it's a good game with some definite issues.
Quote:I'm just trying to get across my thoughts on the new game, and how I feel it's a good return to form.That's true, at least the game isn't randomly generated, it does have that in its favor. Nintendo seems to be trying to make it interesting and full of stuff to experience, in a designed manner and not random. Definitely a good sign there, at least.
Along those lines though, I haven't heard any indication they're randomly generating maps. This world seems to have that hand-crafted design to it, which looks good to me.