Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

...SS's dungeon enemies were mostly generic. Appearances can be swapped as you progress. TP had dungeon exclusive enemies more, but if you ask me, that hurt the game more than helped it. There wasn't a learning curve with things like Chilfos or Stalfos. They showed up in their exclusive dungeons and once in the final dungeon.

Damage =/= Difficulty. This is why I'm not a fan of hero mode. Difficult means the enemies are hard to avoid and hard to land a hit on. There is actually a shift in the necessary skill. Upping the damage just punishes mistakes more. This just forces you to avoid risk

I see no reason why they can't just let people tackle dungeons out of order, 'balance' be damned. It's why Zelda 1 was so enjoyable to mess around in, because you could go anywhere regardless of whether you were really 'meant' to yet. It's another reason games like Dark Souls are so popular too.

Let those who want adventure explore wherever they want and potentially get slaughtered. Let those who want linearity and 'fairness' just follow the 'story'. Those two things can co exist perfectly fine.

I think the whole idea is that the story accommodates multiple orders of play. If the story tells you to do one thing, but unbeknownst to you you can do another thing, that's pointless.

Anyway, let's say you do go to the hardest dungeons initially, and after much toil, you beat them. Now what? You just breeze through the rest? That's why dynamic difficulty is nice, not to avoid early game hard parts, but to avoid late game easy parts

Hmm, yeah. I definitely don't want nonlinear or randomly selected puzzles (I'd rather just have more normal puzzles), but enemy difficulty is something that could definitely be addressed. I really don't want every dungeon to be populated with a different color of X, but if they could do some sort of global buff, where every enemy in the game does some more damage and gains some health after you complete each dungeon, then that could work. Obviously it'd have to be tailored in certain instances, but I'd rather enemy stats increase than sacrifice Zelda's famous diverse enemy pool. We still need lizalfos & those armored dinosaurs in the lakebed temple, deku babas in the forest temple, and stafos & redeads in the crypt (etc and so on).

Zelda 1 also didn't have puzzles for pants. The biggest problem with the gameplay I see the nonlinear dungeon order having, is a flat level of progression for the puzzles. You can't really require players have the longshot, the eye of truth, and the bow in the Spirit Temple if you don't know players have completed those other dungeons previously. The challenge then becomes how replace that layering of mechanics; how do you get that complexity in the puzzles with only one item, some unique environmental mechanics, and, say, the bow?

The dungeons, except for presumably the final one, will have to be like a collection of vignettes, it seems. Each tailored around a specific set of mechanics that a select few items correspond to. Few games I know have done that sufficiently, none on the scale of a Zelda game.

Gameplay involving scenarios such as "You need the longshot to enter here" "I'll give you the long shot if you bring me a chicken" "I'll tell you where the chickens are if you bring me the key of nonsense" is as old as the Dizzy games on a ZX Spectrum. Zelda does remarkably well to disguise this progress mechanism but I don't think replacing it with dynamic difficulty is a suitable switch. For me, I like exploring, but finding somewhere I cannot access makes me want to figure out how to access it and this is the mechanism that sends a player on small quests / journeys to retrieve an item - like Jezsan and the Arganauts (cannot help the Star Fox reference there.)

Here's the thing though, health+damage=/= difficulty. If an enemy has more health but still is incredibly passive and easy to hit, it's just more tedious, not more difficult. If an enemy does more damage, it just makes the small mistakes you could ordinarily make more punishing. It doesn't push you to try to think of new strategies or improve your skill, it just kicks you when you are down. This is why Hero mode sucks too.

What needs to be adjusted is the actual difficulty of the enemies. So if you go to the water temple at the beginning of the game, you'll see Lizalfos. If you go in the middle, you'll see a mix of Lizalfos and Dynalfos, and if you go at the end, you'll see almost entirely Dynalfos. You can also increase the difficulty in numbers. Instead of having a single Stalfos in a room, replace it with 3 Stalfos. Or they could simply have a graded AI that increases depending on how far you are in the game.

It's less about the enemies, more about the puzzles. Ice Temple in A Link Between Worlds took me almost as long as all the other temples combined. Maybe it was just me though. Can't remember if there was an "Aha!" moment where I figured out the obvious solution to a puzzle that wasn't supposed to be that hard.

A Link Between Worlds is best Zelda.

It's also one of the only games I've ever arbitrarily lost. Thankfully after I beat it, but still...

I haven't played Link Between Worlds yet, but Ice puzzles are pretty much the hardest puzzles in the book.

Anyway, I never really found Zelda puzzle difficulty to scale that much. I guess the later dungeons were longer and tougher than the early ones, but it was a lot more punctuated, and the early dungeons were still very enjoyable (and the probably would be in the late game too). Enemy difficulty tends to be far more gradual, dynamic difficulty is easier to implement, and the effects of poor scaling are more pronounced.

Ice Temple be all like

To be fair most of the puzzles in LoZ games aren't really brain teasers. They're more like, try to find the hidden block to push to open the door. There are a few exceptions, such as the ice block-pushing puzzles in OoT and TP. But even long puzzles like the Mirror Room puzzle in Wind Waker, where you have to line up the giant mirrors to get the light to shine in the right place for you and Medli to reflect the light into the statues eyes... they're not brain teasers. More like obvious solutions that take a while to achieve.

Does this mean that you never get stuck? I'm sure you've gotten stuck before, unless you always look things up online. While no puzzle exactly exercises your brain, it didn't mean they're not difficult. Puzzles in Zelda are usually either finding things, figuring out how to use your item properly, or solving basic riddles, and while it doesn't take a genius to figure them out, there's not always a guarantee of success (unless you look things up online). Sometimes they're hidden pretty deep. This is why a companion guide who hand-holds and points everything out sucks all of the fun out of the game.

I completely disagree. The Mirror puzzle was plenty tough, as it required a sense of special reasoning where the light needed to go. There was also the challenge of figuring out how to access all the mirrors.

Not at all, I got stuck plenty. The Water Temple in OoT will always be my downfall. It doesn't matter how many times I beat that game, I always get stuck in it. For some reason, I always lose track of the keys, and I'm always one short near the end. Plus, going back to collecting the Gold Skulltulas once you have the Longshot can be confusing as well.

What I'm saying is that the puzzles aren't hard because they're hard to do. Sometimes they're just hard because they're hidden or because you overlooked something. I'm not saying that's a bad thing! I'm just saying it is a thing.

OoT Water Temple is a long dungeon, but I don't recall ever being stuck in it. It's pretty straight forward. If you can't find what you're looking for, raise or lower the water level, check the rooms, rinse and repeat.

That ''puzzle'' is pretty straightforward, just drag the statues into the slots. As @crimsoncavalier said, it just takes a while to achieve.

I agree.

Puzzles in Zelda are all about environmental awareness (not in the political sense). Exploring and understanding your surroundings, then taking the path of action that sees you progressing.

I loved the water temple because the water level was a meta-puzzle that lasted the entire dungeon's length. Not to mention one of the best minibosses in the series in an amazing trippy sequence.

I'm just going to quote this because I thought I was alone in the world. I'm glad I'm not.

The challenging part was figuring out where to drag the statues to, and how to destroy the blocks that held some statues in place or blocked certain slots.