A disclaimer: I’m honestly not sure if you’ve covered this particular angle, so if you have I apologize in advance.
I think we got a clue to the type of “density” the Zelda team is shooting for in Skyward Sword back during the Iwata Asks interviews for Twilight Princess.
Miyamoto: It’s fine if someone really likes Zelda’s story: in fact it’s great. But if a person like that starts to work on developing a Zelda game, they won’t necessarily be an ideal match for the project. Something else that is vital to Zelda is that everything fits together seamlessly. This isn’t easy to explain, but what I mean is that with all of the ideas in the game tightly woven together, the various elements of the game will perfectly complement the terrain and scenery. The balance of “sparsity” and “density” in the game works really well. This is something that’s important in Zelda. A real challenge with Twilight Princess was that as development moved from the earlier stages into the latter half, that balance was lost. The 3D Modeling Team was steadily expanding the size of the game, but the actual content of the game was not keeping pace. The longer the 3D modeling and the content remain out of step, the more sparse the game becomes. Or, game content starts interfering with other content and spoiling it. Trying to get that under control is a real challenge. Putting it another way, perhaps it’s controlling the balance of “sparsity” and “density” that actually makes a Zelda game.
I think a couple things are important here-
1) Miyamoto makes it clear that developing Zelda through a story-driven lens is a bad idea. That he goes on from this to say that this need to “fit together seamlessly” and that there needs to be a balance of “sparsity and density” makes it sound like he’s explaining how Zelda should be (i.e. story should be in sync with gameplay).
2) Miyamoto is aware that this balance was lost in Twilight Princess, and he specifically cites the contrast between the amount of “3D modeling” and “content.” There were too many 3D models and not enough content. I don’t know about you, but that sounds an awful lot like “too many cutscenes” and “not enough play,” which perfectly describes Twilight Princess’s overly cinematic “style-over-substance” feel, superfluous NPCs, and a too-large, too-empty overworld.
Compare that to what was said of Skyward Sword:
Aonuma: There was a sense that we had made The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess too big. We felt like we weren’t able to fully leverage its scale and not quite package it into one solid piece. So we wanted to make sure we first built a strong foundation for the game and then create a compact, yet solid playing experience.
Iwata: I see. You’re not saying there was too much to enjoy, but rather you might have been able to increase the density of game elements while packaging so many stages and other ideas in its vast world.
Miyamoto: Yeah, it’s really more…it’s not about game density, but about the density of play.
Assuming (perhaps too generously) that Aonuma’s comment corresponds to Miyamoto’s concern back in the TP interview, it sounds like the approach this time around was to refrain from building the “3D models” (and therefore the cutscenes) until the game fundamentals were complete. (I believe Aonuma’s even said that usually they create cutscenes first and then iron out the gameplay and fundamentals, but this time they reversed the process.) Miyamoto explains that this approach isn’t about “game density” (a lot of 3D models – “stuff” – that make up the game) but about “density of play” (which sounds an awful lot like “content” to me). This explains why when SS was first revealed we only saw a few seconds of real cutscene footage and almost nothing that wasn’t a showcase of the fundamentals in action – not only is that aspect of the game the one that needs the most field testing, but there’s no reason to show off cinematics if it’s not going to be a very cinematic game.
Based on the demo footage I’ve seen, it doesn’t really look like “content” necessarily means an overabundance of “puzzles,” either – the biggest “puzzle” in the demo was the eye-door thing. Everything else was “see how much of the world you can discover” and “try out the Motion Plus against these enemies,” which reminds me of the original Legend of Zelda where you’d run into all kinds of dead-ends looking for a new dungeon or pathway and the best part about getting a new item was discovering the advantage it gave you against certain enemies. (In previous modern Zelda games there is only one way to go in the first place and no one cares about using items against enemies because you can run up to them and hack them to pieces with your sword before they even try to fight back.)
Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few of the lazy tropes like “there’s a spider crawling on the vines, I should shoot it and climb up” or “this wall is cracked, I should blow it up and see what’s behind it” but static obstacles like these have always been around and won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. (Besides, I prefer visual cues to guessing where I should place my bombs to find secrets.)
This is just a small taste of “field” gameplay, though; who knows what the dungeons, NPCs, and story will be like outside of basic field exploration.
What he means by ‘density’ in a game is like concentration of sugar in a cup of coffee. It is more ‘stuff’ crammed in without large empty spaces.
It means more puzzles per square meter.
Looking back, when Richard Garriot talked about Ultima 7, he regretted the ’empty spaces’. When they made an Ultima world, they had to make the huge world as a foundation first and then throw in everything else in it. This often led to large areas that had nothing in it.
So in that upcoming Ultima game, Richard Garriot swore it would be more dense as developers could create the towns, dungeons, and all and then fit them all together seamlessly as opposed to creating a large foundation of a world and then plopping stuff down in it. This new Ultima, Richard Garriot assured us, would be richly packed and fit together well.
This ‘Ultima’ was ‘Ultima IX’. Ask your local resident Ultima fan how that turned out.
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