17th June 2016, 6:02 PM
I thought I'd make a proper thread dedicated to the hype train this particular game has started.
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.
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).
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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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 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. 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.
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.
Lastly, the things I've seen hint at a focus on sequence breaking and emergent gameplay. The game I enjoyed the MOST last year was Phantom Pain, and it wasn't even finished :D. The reason? The designers focused on giving the player a bunch of tools, yes, but more than that, focused on making the tools interact with other tools in interesting ways, and the environment besides. Phantom Pain is a game that is designed with the ethos "if you can do it, cool!". The sheer variety players have come up with to solve problems in the game is amazing. There's many a time you may find yourself surrounded, about to be discovered, and you end up just pulling up your list of items and saying "okay, what combination will open this lock?". For example, helicopter parked somewhere and you want to take it out? You could shoot a rocket at it. That's boring though. Air drop a tank on it!
As an aside, a quick fix to the gender issue would be simply letting a player pick their own pronoun at the start of the game, with the game script accordingly switching that pronoun around as you play. Link is androgynous enough for that to work with minimal effort.
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.
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).
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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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 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. 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.
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.
Lastly, the things I've seen hint at a focus on sequence breaking and emergent gameplay. The game I enjoyed the MOST last year was Phantom Pain, and it wasn't even finished :D. The reason? The designers focused on giving the player a bunch of tools, yes, but more than that, focused on making the tools interact with other tools in interesting ways, and the environment besides. Phantom Pain is a game that is designed with the ethos "if you can do it, cool!". The sheer variety players have come up with to solve problems in the game is amazing. There's many a time you may find yourself surrounded, about to be discovered, and you end up just pulling up your list of items and saying "okay, what combination will open this lock?". For example, helicopter parked somewhere and you want to take it out? You could shoot a rocket at it. That's boring though. Air drop a tank on it!
As an aside, a quick fix to the gender issue would be simply letting a player pick their own pronoun at the start of the game, with the game script accordingly switching that pronoun around as you play. Link is androgynous enough for that to work with minimal effort.
"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)