Do you guys think that the recent Zelda overworlds were not really like past Zeldas? If so how would you fix it?
Prior to the Gamecube era I found that Zelda overworlds felt like they were of huge scope. In reality they weren't that big but they felt like they were pushing the hardware to the limits. It was like this was as big as they could go. With the Cube Zeldas it didn't feel like they were pushing the limits so much anymore. I've actually noticed this with Nintendo games in general. Nintendo used to push the hardware to the max, so you used to feel this sense of wonder of how far they could go if they didn't hit this wall. On the Cube they plateaued. It was like they found how far they wanted to go but we can see there is further they could go and they choose not to. How small everything is then becomes very apparent. Metroid Prime is the exception as I feel Retro pushed the limits so those games felt as big as they could be.
Wind Waker's big problem was that there was so little of anything. The ocean certainly had scope but each pocket of land felt very small and insignificant. Twilight Princess improved that except that it was the same damn place as Ocarina of Time. ARRRGH!!
What I figured would be the direction for Zelda, that they didn't do, was expand beyond Hyrule. Having an ocean is a good idea, if there are also large land areas to visit. I figured you would start somewhere about the size of the N64 Zelda worlds, and then you would set sail and visit other island and areas that are roughly the same size. The idea in the past seemed to be to provide the player with a world to explore, but that was limited by the hardware limitation and without those limits the world could become and feel bigger. Why couldn't they do what I'm suggesting here?
Zelda II actually had quite a scope because it had a RPG-esque overworld map where you covered a large distance and then entered specific areas. I think that wouldn't be a bad approach to create a bigger world with more races, more towns, more countries. With the last few Zeldas it's like here is THE town and THE lake and THE forest. Why can't there be more than one of these things? And these days you don't need an actual overworld map to create this scope. Wind Waker had the right idea in that an ocean can obscure the load times to create the illusion of one big world. This sort of scope, where it really feels like a big world, can be done now.
The problem is this sort of ambition seems like the sort of thing Nintendo now avoids. The casuals and non-gamers would not be on board for such an epic title and that would probably discourage Nintendo from doing it. They'll probably stick to something more TP size, and rely on Motion+ stuff to carry the game. I just hope they'll have a unique overworld where it doesn't feel like I've seen it before.
The best advice I would give them is to try to make a world - not just some window dressing to connect dungeon A to dungeon B. Think about what sort of place you would like to explore and go from there, instead of "well we need some water dungeon so we'll have some lake, and we'll need a castle for the last level..." Not being so rigid with the structure of dungeons would help a lot. I like the way Super Mario RPG did it where you had to find these seven stars but there wasn't any formal structure to it. You didn't know which areas had the stars, but in Zelda it's like "8 macguffins, 8 dungeons".
Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Read 619960 times)
