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Topic: How could the new Zelda Game better than Botw?

Posts 41 to 60 of 69

StuTwo

Personally I'd say a big 'no' to traditional dungeons. They force linearity on the game and (if I'm honest) are usually my least favourite part of Zelda games anyway.

  • More enemy variety. Let's have re-deads, Poe's, Iron Kunckles, Darknuts, Wolfos' and Like-Likes (why weren't they in a game where you literally find shields on the floor around every corner?). Plus more unique enemies. Let the enemies roam specific areas of the map rather than everywhere.
  • Expand the ideas of non-linear dungeons explored by BoTW. The Divine Beasts were clever but relatively small. Hyrule Castle was excellent. You had to pick your path of attack, your point of entry etc. They could build a whole game around that (if they want a Mursame revival...). The only thing lacking was a good map in there - I'd like to see more of those large brooding dungeons on the world map.
  • More impact of your actions on the game world. Think Majora's Mask.
  • Better travel across/through water
  • Limit costume changes. Like force them to take place in particular locations - Link shouldn't be carrying all of his wardrobe with him. This would actually make it easier for the developers to softly restrict access to some places (and simultaneously increase the importance of planning your exploration).

StuTwo

Switch Friend Code: SW-6338-4534-2507

LuckyLand

@Matt_Barber I actually like when in a game you become (or at least can become) much more powerful than even the strongest enemies. It feels good, rewarding and it is also a lot of fun. I didn't like BOTW and I didn't play it enough to become that powerful, but this is not something I would change. Maybe it could be something optional so the people who don't want to be so much advantaged can just avoid that.

Edited on by LuckyLand

I used to be a ripple user like you, then I took The Arrow in the knee

Matt_Barber

LuckyLand wrote:

@Matt_Barber I actually like when in a game you become (or at least can become) much more powerful than even the strongest enemies. It feels good, rewarding and it is also a lot of fun. I didn't like BOTW and I didn't play it enough to become that powerful, but this is not something I would change. Maybe it could be something optional so the people who don't want to be so much advantaged can just avoid that.

Well, it's certainly optional in that you can pick whichever armour and weapons you want and choose how far to upgrade them, or just run though to the finish in your undergarments and with only three hearts as is the usual method of demonstrating your prowess in Zelda games. However, I think it swings far too quickly from you being very much the underdog in combat, where you can only survive on stealth and precision attacks, to just being able to waltz into the middle of enemy camps and button mash your way to victory.

It's quite telling for me that the Master Trials start without any armour and only allow very limited options, while the Champion's Ballad equips you with the One-Hit Obliterator that even more forces you back into good habits. The designers at least seem to know that OP armour takes most of the sting out of the combat, and it needs some re-balancing.

Matt_Barber

Shellcore

More detail in the world. My favourite parts of OOT were small things like the graveyard in Kakariko village and the endless Kokiri forest. BOTW was large, but shallow.

EOTW

I think they should do two things.

1) More enemy variety. I counted up the enemies; including bosses but not including color variants there are less than thirty enemies. That is pretty bad in such a big world. I don't want to see the same things on death mountain as I do in the great plateau. Give us more area specific enemies and a lot more variety.

2) Not really a gameplay thing, but they should not hesitate to reuse assests for the next game. A big part of this game's flaws stem from the amount of time developing the engine, artstyle, and models that could have gone into more game design or story. That time could be spent in the next game making the world a much less copy/paste affair, now that there are assets ready to go.

3DS FC: 3222-5568-3578
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Dezzy

-More story.
-Smaller world but with more time spent on the towns and villages. BotW has too much wilderness.

It's dangerous to go alone! Stay at home.

Octane

@StuTwo Linearity isn't a bad thing. It means you can actually have some sort of progression in difficulty with your puzzles. Instead, everything had to be solvable on its own, so none were difficult. I'd say the most interesting shrines were the ones that built on a single idea and increased the difficulty with subsequent puzzles. Like you would see in a more traditional dungeon.

Octane

NEStalgia

More towns with more detail wouldn't hurt, but Zelda isn't an RPG, it's never really done much with towns...most of what was in towns was optional filler, not even quests, so I don't know towns would fit too well. The towns in BotW were very nicely done, there was just little to use them for beyond simple MMO quests. I think the big thing is keep the overworld mostly as is, but emphasize a return of more sophisticated puzzle dungeons. Zelda went from a game that in its first prototype had ONLY dungeons and no overworld, to a game with all overworld and only lipservice to dungeons. The core prototype of Zelda 1 was purely a dungeon based game!

NEStalgia

Ralizah

@Octane That hasn't been my experience with the vast majority of the Zelda games I've played, though. Most Zelda dungeons are a series of pretty basic puzzles connected by a lot of design bloat (moving blocks around, shooting eyeballs on the wall, defeating hordes of enemies, etc.) in order to make them seem like more substantive ordeals than they really are. This is probably because, in typical Zelda games, the dungeons and boss fights are the only good parts of the game.

The difficulty level of enemies in a dungeon could easily be scaled based on the number of dungeons that have been previously completed in a non-linear Zelda game, and, let's be real, in most Zelda games, outside of a few core tools, you're not going to use most of the tools you find much outside of the dungeons you found them in.

Currently Playing: Advance Wars 1 + 2: Re- Boot Camp (NS)

Timsworld

By including a Dutch dub that should've been in Breath of the Wild.

Timsworld

Kimyonaakuma

There are lots of things that could improve the series after Breath of the Wild! Bigger and better dungeons and towns would be good, more detail, more enemies and so on.

I think they got away with a lot because of the whole "100 years since Ganon attacked" thing, but that gimmick wears off quickly and just makes the world a little empty and boring after so many hours. The next game needs more content in the world, even if that means making the world a little smaller. Scale can be impressive but that's pointless when there isn't a ton of variety. A mountain, canyon or lake is nice but what's the point when it's just for another bokoblin camp or korok seed?

Kimyonaakuma

Namco

@Timsworld I can help you with that, best I can do is dutch sub though:

''Link je hebt nu wel lang genoeg geslapen! Je hebt honderd jaar in dat bad gezeten ga nou eens Ganon verslaan!''

I would definitely volunteer to voice Link

Edited on by Namco

A piece of the Triforce appeared before you! (>'.')> Touch it now!

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RenderSpotlight

@NEStalgia I partially agree with you on this. I believe the core of the NES Legend of Zelda has always been Link's discovery and exploration of an unknown world. The game relied on an overworld and underworld to achieve this. The game drops the player into a mostly empty screen with only 4 ways to go. Three lead to enemies, the 4th to a cave with someone giving you a sword. That is basically all you start with.
And to be super specific, there are no dungeons at all in the first Legend of Zelda game. The underground was referred to as Labyrinths. And Labyrinths are best described as a maze. Even the original manual that came with the game describes it as "a maze of dangerous labyrinths".
So I disagree that it is a pure dungeon base game. It is not a pure RPG, it is not a dungeon game, it is not a shooting game..... it really is a mix and match of many genres, but not really specifically any one. I believe this is why the original game was such a wild success.
I remember when I was young, I really felt like I was going on an adventure with Link and I was discovering things as Link discovered things. I rarely had that feeling of discovery with any other game. I believe it was like that because the player was giving so little info to start.
I feel that BotW captured that sense of discovery and exploration of an unknown world better than any other recent Zelda game.
Back then, I would consider a game like Phantasy Star to be closer to a dungeon type game. Maybe not a pure dungeon crawling game, but closer than Zelda.

Let me know what think? Am I talking out of my rear end?

RenderSpotlight

Agriculture

The only way they go top what they already did is if Link had a motorcycle in the next Zelda. Oh wait a minute...

Agriculture

StuTwo

@Octane I agree linearity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However non-linearity is more impressive to experience and harder to get right. It’s a more ambitious design choice that’s more rewarding to the player - in my opinion.

Traditional Zelda dungeons became rote to me after a while because - “guess what the solution to this awkward puzzle is - it’s the tool hidden in this dungeon!” (Twilight Princess was the worst for this)

There were certainly some great shrines that were equivalent to compact dungeons. I don’t personally think they suffered from having the whole set of tools available early - a few of the more ambitious shrines even followed the traditional Zelda dungeon design structure (restricting acces to say an electrical ball until half way through in place of getting a new tool).

A more meaningful sense of progression in difficulty could be achieved in different ways than the traditional formula. One simple way would be to define an ordered progression of shrines - instead of the shrine in the lower left corner of the map being a minor test of strength maybe it’s a minor test of strength of its the first shrine you find and a major test of strength if you’ve already found 3 minor tests of strength.

StuTwo

Switch Friend Code: SW-6338-4534-2507

Octane

@StuTwo To be fair, I think shrines are a BOTW thing. I don't think the new Zelda game will have them, even if they're going with a similar structure to that of BOTW. In theory, you can still retain the ability to do the dungeons in any order, you can have similar puzzles to those found in BOTW, but have them structured in a way that's more reminiscent of real dungeons. Several floors, multiple rooms, introducing puzzle concepts and building on them in subsequent rooms. Preferably each with a unique theme and unique boss.

Octane

TuVictus

It's weird that people like the shrines while also saying they're glad traditional dungeons were gone. Shrines were just those dungeon rooms that required a specific item ripped apart into individual rooms rather than being interconnected, and instead of having a normal difficulty curve, they had to all be pretty easy in case it was one of your first ones.

TuVictus

NEStalgia

@Hikingguy You're right about the original Zelda, and I forgot they were called "labyrinths" and were really mazes without too much puzzling other than the rogue moving block or explodable wall, though that was likely more a limit on the NES than anything else. Zelda II turned it more into platformer dungeons but it was more dungeony, and ALTTP really set the future puzzle dungeon idea in motion by expanding on those original labyrinths with more to do and making use of multiple floors once the hardware could handle it.

But I was actually talking about Miyamoto's original prototype that was only a progressive dungeon game without an overworld. It probably had more in common with Diablo 1 than what we now call Zelda. His original foundational idea for the Zelda game was to be a dungeon (or labyrinth) game. The overworld was suggested by someone else and resulted from play testing feedback where people thought dungeons alone were too boring. What we know as TLoZ 1 was really heavily modified from his original game design of a dungeon crawler. But as a result of the origins it's probably fairest to assume the dungeons are the MAIN game, and the overworld is a bonus. Personally I always liked the overworld best

But BotW's "dungeons", mostly single room puzzles, and the beasts that were like 5 room puzzles don't quite fill that gap either. BotW is the true Zelda II that us Zelda 1 fans have waited for since the 80's, but to be a "complete" vision, they need to add the labyrinths/dungeons back in in a more complete form.

NEStalgia

RenderSpotlight

@NEStalgia that makes a lot of sense. I noticed that you used the word Prototype and I should have ask you for more specifics on that.
I just really enjoyed BotW a lot. Way more than any recent console Zelda game. No hand holding, no long drawn out tutorial, not that many silly characters, just a blind exploration game that give the player little nudges and suggestions to keep the player going forward all the while not letting the player loose interest.

There is just so much to do. I cannot tell you how many times I was going in one direction than I was distracted and went to do 5 other things before I remembered what my original goal was for this play through! And the strategy of the weapon system was awesome. I love the subtle resource management systems. Along with what to keep and what to use.
I think it was really well done. Anyway, any video game that can keep my wife interesting and playing for longer than a few minutes must be very special. She is not a gamer at all.

RenderSpotlight

NEStalgia

Octane wrote:

@StuTwo To be fair, I think shrines are a BOTW thing. I don't think the new Zelda game will have them, even if they're going with a similar structure to that of BOTW. In theory, you can still retain the ability to do the dungeons in any order, you can have similar puzzles to those found in BOTW, but have them structured in a way that's more reminiscent of real dungeons. Several floors, multiple rooms, introducing puzzle concepts and building on them in subsequent rooms. Preferably each with a unique theme and unique boss.

yeah, the shrines feel more like a diversion than an exploration of a ruin. You go in knowing "this is one test consisting of one room. 2 or 3 of them felt like big proper multi-room areas to explore, but the shrines feel much more like lab tests from Portal than giving a sense of unearthing a foreboding doorway into some subterranean unknown to explore. Those open-mouth face doorways in LoZ 1 gave that sense of "I'm heading into something large that I probably shouldn't be entering into." Finding a shrine in BotW just prepares me that I have to pass a test. And there will be cake.

@Hikingguy Definitely. The sense of exploration in BotW has been missing from every Zelda game since, I was going to say LoZ1 but technically ALTTP and ALBW had a different sense of that exploration as well. ALBW is merely a "modernized remake" of ALTTP so I consider it since ALTTP we've had real exploration. Add proper underground (or even above ground "forbidden towers" or such....it doesn't really need to be puzzle driven, but a sense of exploring ruins or forbidden areas that you know you ought not to be in) and it's a perfect formula of everything Zelda!

@aesc Haha, thanks! That would indeed be fun, and I, in fact, was a critic on the PC side of the industry once upon a yesteryear. Sadly, I'm a long way from London, and I don't have a red mane and a beard.....I scarcely qualify for NL

NEStalgia

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