20th January 2017, 6:08 PM
Oh sorry that's not what I mean by "flow". I'm talking about a concept lots of people are talking about these days when it comes to game design. Flow refers to two concepts. The first is the notion of idea-break-iteration-break-iteration-break-conclusion. That is, how a level or dungeon in games from Mario to Zelda to Doom are made, especially these days now that this concept has really become concrete. So, in a Zelda dungeon for example, a solid design involves first introducing the basic element of the dungeon. In the tower of hera, that basic idea is the multiple levels and switch blocks. This will be introduced in a way that the player will find seemingly by accident in a safe area, such as at the bottom of the tower where the switch blocks need to be switched to move on, but nothing more. The dungeon takes a break from that to introduce falling between floors, and takes a break from that to introduce an iteration on the switch blocks. The ultimate item from the dungeon (which has no impact on the dungeon itself, so technically players can miss it) can only be found by combining these two lessons by using floor switches to change where holes are located and considering the physical layout of the entire dungeon to recognize where you are likely to fall when the holes are in certain positions. I can go on about design that makes you consider the entire layout of a dungeon (Link's Awakening uses this to amazing effect in Eagle Tower), but in terms of "flow" that puzzle is the culmination of that idea. Add in a little finisher in the form of keeping track of the holes during the final boss fight and you've got the basic formula. LTTP was one of the first to really nail this idea of flow to an extent developers hadn't really wrapped their heads around in games from the last generation, and certainly the first in the Zelda series to really apply the idea in a consistent way (Super Mario Bros 3 really nails the idea of flow too).
In the sense of an overworld though, flow refers to something else. That is, what's also called the basic "core loop". Doom 4 has been getting analyzed to death regarding it's "core loop", and while it does take breaks from that loop to let you explore levels, that core loop is the essential thing people actually "do", the thing they'll tell other people the game is about. In Doom 4, every single combat mechanic feeds the core loop of "moving forward and killing more demons", with anything that might get in the way of that shaved right off the game, aside from the secrets as a nice little break from the loop. So, you take your gun and you shoot up a demon. When the demon gets weak, you can finish it off with a quick melee kill. The kills themselves are shortened to the point that they feel like a command you input instead of an "unskippable cinematic". Technically, most games have moves that involve committing you to an animation you can't break away from, but it's the duration and how it's slipped into the core loop that seems to determine if people see it as an unskippable cutscene or a cool move. Heck, most moves in fighting games are commitments to an animation you can't stop once it's started (cancelling mechanics being an exception). The mistake a mod like Brutal Doom might make is for that animation to take you right out of the character and take about 3-5 seconds, completely disrupting that core loop. Doom 4 recognizes that the length of the quick kills should be no longer than the longest shooting animation, and on average about the same as the medium length shooting animations, so it "feels" like a move and not a cut scene. Going down a pipe in Mario is the same way. That's an unskippable animation, but it takes about as long as grabbing a mushroom, so it feels like something you're doing and not a cutscene. So, a quick kill will put you right in the middle of the action, and likely leave you surrounded by enemies. The game motivates you to do this by making these quick kills restore your health. Using the chainsaw for the quick kill will instead restore ammo. In other words, the safest most reliable way to stay alive and keep yourself armed is to try to get into the fray to quick kill enemies and keep your health topped off (and occasionally switch things up to get ammo back). To top it off, your character is crazy fast, just like in the first games, so running up to the enemy to finish them off can be done more safely. Not only does this keep you in the middle of the action instead of picking off enemies from a distance, it tends to keep you moving from one end of a room to the other, generally making enemy spawns take a path that ultimately leads you to the next intended location when all is said and done. The game has doors where the "switch" that unlocks them comes in the form of demon nests you need to break. Doing so summons a bunch more demons to kill. In effect, your character is intentionally starting fights instead of doing things to avoid them (the only way to be sure is killing every last one, so get their attention and bring them to you), even though in a more basic sense all those gore nests are is a set of switches to open a door somewhere. The end result of making every last part of the game mechanics work this way is a game that feels very frantic and fast paced, with you ending up on killing sprees that take you from one end of a room to another, or even from one end of a level to the other, with the occasional lull to give you time to breathe and maybe explore.
When I was talking about the overworld's "flow", what I was trying to say was that LTTP and many other Zelda games have a general idea of what the "core loop" of the overworld should be, what the core loop of the underworld should be, and what the overall gameplay loop should be. While a dungeon's loop involves methodically plodding along from one room to another, by the end (once you either open up enough shortcuts or obtain the dungeon's key item) the loop changes to a quicker pace so you don't get bored retreading old ground to get to the final showdown. Some dungeons change this up (like Hyrule Castle's second run), but that's the general idea. The overworld on the other hand has a different loop involving unlocking whole new areas, but within those areas you're given freer reign to go where you please and see what you like. Some games do this better than others. Link's Awakening doesn't have a bad overworld, but the general flow of it much more closely resembles one vast dungeon than the typical overworld of both previous and later Zelda games. The problem is, unlike most dungeons, you're going to be heading back to the overworld and exploring the same areas over and over again. It makes excellent and dense use of that layout, but repeated visits rarely have any "quick" workarounds, so I often have to go through rather tedious obstacles many times as I go back and forth. The worst has to be the river rafting mini-game, in which I have to go all the way around and back to the start about 4 or 5 times just to do a "complete" run of that section, getting every treasure and fully uncovering the map. I'm not asking to make it uneventful and just a mad dash from one side to another. I'm asking for there to be some sort of mechanic that gets me there in a way without interruption, or at least to FEEL like there's no interruption. Frankly, if I could dash, lift rocks, and jump without needing to manually equip all of those items, it wouldn't be an issue. It's all that constant pausing and reequipping that really makes it all stand out. The flow of tossing a rock out of the way, dash jumping over a few holes, and killing a few enemies in my path wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have a constant need to pause the game between every single one of those. Link to the Past not only gives some free breathing room to work around certain obstacles (again, they're still there, but you've got faster options for dealing with them), but thanks to the SNES controller most everything you need is always equipped, from picking things up to running to swinging the sword. In part, this is a solvable problem for LA. If they ever felt like it, a "Super Deluxe" edition would take advantage of the larger button layout to permanently assign those most commonly used items to buttons, leaving two or three extra buttons for manual assignment of the more rarely needed items. Along those lines, the way flying and warping works leads to a core mechanic of going to the light world, working around an unassailable obstacle from the dark world, and then popping back into the dark world. Every aspect of that world travelling system feeds that core loop in a very effective way. Change that around too much and you've got little reason to ever head back to the light world once you get to the dark world. They did an amazing job making duel use of the space in this game, and I've come to really appreciate that in recent years.
I really do love Link's Awakening, and the layout of it's overworld is unique among Zelda games for exactly the reason I layed out above. It's flow resembles one massive dungeon in a way no other Zelda game before or since has done. Frankly, I've played the game so much at this point that I've got ideal paths mapped out in my head to shorten travel times to a minimum for that second half of the game. Check out a few videos where people who played LTTP but are playing LA for the first time comment on that unique overworld layout. Heck, James Rolfe even commented about how tedious making it through the overworld could get at times, and just like us he did still love the game.
Aside from the controls, I wouldn't lose that uniqueness to get the flow back for this ONE game, but I also wouldn't want every game to resemble it. It was a clear tradeoff. The same sort of thing is true of Majora's Mask. I love that game, and I love the 3 day time limit and how that affects the gameplay, but as you've said time and time again it comes with a massive tradeoff in terms of repeating things you've done before if you happen to take too long. It's a catch 22 situation in either case, but I love that they're willing to run these experiments.
In the sense of an overworld though, flow refers to something else. That is, what's also called the basic "core loop". Doom 4 has been getting analyzed to death regarding it's "core loop", and while it does take breaks from that loop to let you explore levels, that core loop is the essential thing people actually "do", the thing they'll tell other people the game is about. In Doom 4, every single combat mechanic feeds the core loop of "moving forward and killing more demons", with anything that might get in the way of that shaved right off the game, aside from the secrets as a nice little break from the loop. So, you take your gun and you shoot up a demon. When the demon gets weak, you can finish it off with a quick melee kill. The kills themselves are shortened to the point that they feel like a command you input instead of an "unskippable cinematic". Technically, most games have moves that involve committing you to an animation you can't break away from, but it's the duration and how it's slipped into the core loop that seems to determine if people see it as an unskippable cutscene or a cool move. Heck, most moves in fighting games are commitments to an animation you can't stop once it's started (cancelling mechanics being an exception). The mistake a mod like Brutal Doom might make is for that animation to take you right out of the character and take about 3-5 seconds, completely disrupting that core loop. Doom 4 recognizes that the length of the quick kills should be no longer than the longest shooting animation, and on average about the same as the medium length shooting animations, so it "feels" like a move and not a cut scene. Going down a pipe in Mario is the same way. That's an unskippable animation, but it takes about as long as grabbing a mushroom, so it feels like something you're doing and not a cutscene. So, a quick kill will put you right in the middle of the action, and likely leave you surrounded by enemies. The game motivates you to do this by making these quick kills restore your health. Using the chainsaw for the quick kill will instead restore ammo. In other words, the safest most reliable way to stay alive and keep yourself armed is to try to get into the fray to quick kill enemies and keep your health topped off (and occasionally switch things up to get ammo back). To top it off, your character is crazy fast, just like in the first games, so running up to the enemy to finish them off can be done more safely. Not only does this keep you in the middle of the action instead of picking off enemies from a distance, it tends to keep you moving from one end of a room to the other, generally making enemy spawns take a path that ultimately leads you to the next intended location when all is said and done. The game has doors where the "switch" that unlocks them comes in the form of demon nests you need to break. Doing so summons a bunch more demons to kill. In effect, your character is intentionally starting fights instead of doing things to avoid them (the only way to be sure is killing every last one, so get their attention and bring them to you), even though in a more basic sense all those gore nests are is a set of switches to open a door somewhere. The end result of making every last part of the game mechanics work this way is a game that feels very frantic and fast paced, with you ending up on killing sprees that take you from one end of a room to another, or even from one end of a level to the other, with the occasional lull to give you time to breathe and maybe explore.
When I was talking about the overworld's "flow", what I was trying to say was that LTTP and many other Zelda games have a general idea of what the "core loop" of the overworld should be, what the core loop of the underworld should be, and what the overall gameplay loop should be. While a dungeon's loop involves methodically plodding along from one room to another, by the end (once you either open up enough shortcuts or obtain the dungeon's key item) the loop changes to a quicker pace so you don't get bored retreading old ground to get to the final showdown. Some dungeons change this up (like Hyrule Castle's second run), but that's the general idea. The overworld on the other hand has a different loop involving unlocking whole new areas, but within those areas you're given freer reign to go where you please and see what you like. Some games do this better than others. Link's Awakening doesn't have a bad overworld, but the general flow of it much more closely resembles one vast dungeon than the typical overworld of both previous and later Zelda games. The problem is, unlike most dungeons, you're going to be heading back to the overworld and exploring the same areas over and over again. It makes excellent and dense use of that layout, but repeated visits rarely have any "quick" workarounds, so I often have to go through rather tedious obstacles many times as I go back and forth. The worst has to be the river rafting mini-game, in which I have to go all the way around and back to the start about 4 or 5 times just to do a "complete" run of that section, getting every treasure and fully uncovering the map. I'm not asking to make it uneventful and just a mad dash from one side to another. I'm asking for there to be some sort of mechanic that gets me there in a way without interruption, or at least to FEEL like there's no interruption. Frankly, if I could dash, lift rocks, and jump without needing to manually equip all of those items, it wouldn't be an issue. It's all that constant pausing and reequipping that really makes it all stand out. The flow of tossing a rock out of the way, dash jumping over a few holes, and killing a few enemies in my path wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have a constant need to pause the game between every single one of those. Link to the Past not only gives some free breathing room to work around certain obstacles (again, they're still there, but you've got faster options for dealing with them), but thanks to the SNES controller most everything you need is always equipped, from picking things up to running to swinging the sword. In part, this is a solvable problem for LA. If they ever felt like it, a "Super Deluxe" edition would take advantage of the larger button layout to permanently assign those most commonly used items to buttons, leaving two or three extra buttons for manual assignment of the more rarely needed items. Along those lines, the way flying and warping works leads to a core mechanic of going to the light world, working around an unassailable obstacle from the dark world, and then popping back into the dark world. Every aspect of that world travelling system feeds that core loop in a very effective way. Change that around too much and you've got little reason to ever head back to the light world once you get to the dark world. They did an amazing job making duel use of the space in this game, and I've come to really appreciate that in recent years.
I really do love Link's Awakening, and the layout of it's overworld is unique among Zelda games for exactly the reason I layed out above. It's flow resembles one massive dungeon in a way no other Zelda game before or since has done. Frankly, I've played the game so much at this point that I've got ideal paths mapped out in my head to shorten travel times to a minimum for that second half of the game. Check out a few videos where people who played LTTP but are playing LA for the first time comment on that unique overworld layout. Heck, James Rolfe even commented about how tedious making it through the overworld could get at times, and just like us he did still love the game.
Aside from the controls, I wouldn't lose that uniqueness to get the flow back for this ONE game, but I also wouldn't want every game to resemble it. It was a clear tradeoff. The same sort of thing is true of Majora's Mask. I love that game, and I love the 3 day time limit and how that affects the gameplay, but as you've said time and time again it comes with a massive tradeoff in terms of repeating things you've done before if you happen to take too long. It's a catch 22 situation in either case, but I love that they're willing to run these experiments.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)