Email: A new Zelda needs randomly generated dungeons instead of puzzles
seanmalstrom
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Hello again. I missed out on the original Zelda growing up, but when I tried playing it for the first time awhile back I was kind of shocked at just how hard it was. I died a lot. A whole lot. I was so lost. And so I went onto Gamefaqs and looked up the overworld and dungeon maps. That didn’t necessarily make the game easier, but it did make it easier to find the secrets and items in the dungeons. The thing is that in the later Zeldas, we have a problem you referenced before, is that the dungeons are less maze-like and more about doing puzzles to get to the boss. You can go online and find out what to do if you get stuck and move on. It makes having the compass and the map pointless. Why not just not have ANY dungeons at all and just go into the place and fight the boss and save everybody the time?
What a new Zelda needs is dungeons that are randomly generated mazes. This would be hard to do. Or well hard to implement and actually put effort into so it didn’t come across as cheap (which is what most people view randomly-generated environments as being it would seem). But if it were done well, all of a sudden you not only got your maze-like dungeons back, but you also have even greater reason to find a map, and to find the compass, as you could actually perhaps run the risk of getting lost for once, and you wouldn’t just be able to go online and look up a solution. The treasure maps on DQ9 did this. You’d find a map, and it would lead to a randomly-generated dungeon with randomly generated enemies, loot, and a boss to fight, who would give you another map after you beat him so you could go to another randomly generated dungeon. Trading treasure maps was all the rage in Japan, so why doesn’t Nintendo actually copy a page from DQ for a change (seeing as it’s had healthy sales with each iteration) and actually implement some of these things in a new Zelda? Hell, if this is a “New” Legend of Zelda, and if it were to hypothetically go back to its roots, why not show us a new part of Hyrule and randomly generate it for each player? Either way it lends itself to greater replayability.
Of course to justify this the game can’t revolve around “story” and “puzzles”. The games would have to have a dangerous overworld and the dungeons would have to carry loot as a means to overcoming that danger in order to get further in. But at the same time this would further justify and perhaps strengthen any potential multiplayer because it would make a game that would be hard a bit easier with someone watching your back. And it’d also make it less repetitive since the dungeons wouldn’t be the same for each player. The game and the player would be generating “surprises” not the hardware or the developers’ “creativity”.
Though like you I’m worried about Aonuma’s involvement with this. In my mind I won’t be shocked if he churns out some horrible retro-title (those sprites on that message make me cringe in horror because I don’t doubt for a minute that Aonuma thinks people will take a Skyward Sword wrapped up in the original game’s bells and whistles).What you write is all good stuff. People have different ideas but the theme is ambitious. Randomly generated dungeons would be an ambitious direction (as would Internet multiplayer, different classes to play so you aren’t always a swordsman, level editor where people can make their own hyrule, etc).
Instead of wondering what NLOZ will be like, I think we need to ask, “Will there be anything ambitious in this game?”
I keep arriving at the answer of “No.” The game will do little more than be a remake and do nothing ‘ambitious’ except show off the ‘integrated hardware and software element of Nintendo consoles’. This is how NSMB (both games) were done. It is how Donkey Kong Country Returns was done.
Anything ambitious (read: expensive) will be reserved to Miyamoto’s shop of 3d horrors or Wrinkled-Developer-Who-Wants-To-Go-On-A-Creativity-Quest (e.g. Sakamoto).
Wii Sports was ambitious. Wii Fit was ambitious.
You know what was great about Ocarina of Time? It was an ambitious game. Ambitious has always been a hallmark of Zelda games (until after Ocarina where Zelda just plain falls apart). Just play any game from 1986, and you can tell just how crazy ambitious Zelda I was.
I fear LOZ is being made only at a minimal level in order to ‘add this type of gamer’ to the hardware install base. If Nintendo wishes to have a gaming revolution, Nintendo needs to be ambitious with its games instead of its momentum strategies.