Monday, September 1, 2014

How Zelda Dungeons and Puzzles Should Work

 the most fun I've ever had in a video game is when I play as Luigi in Super Mario 64 DS and discover ways to break the game with his added jump height and amazing spin jump.The feeling I get when I've gotten the star in a way the designers didn't intend is one of the best feeling I've ever had. That feeling , more than anything else is what I think Zelda games need to capture.

Have an obviously solution for the noobs, but make the items more powerful, so if a person knows what each item's capabilities and limites, then they can break the puzzle and finish it a different way. Like the cheat trick in the water temple in ocarina of time where you use the hookshot to attach to a treasure chest; getting you to a floor you otherwise would be able to get to, or the trick that allows you to use a deku stick against Ganon at the end, or the trick in the Wii version of twilight princess where you take the iron boots off in the middle of being sucked up into a magnetic force field, and then you walk normally on the magnetic surfaces. This is why sometimes older games are better, there's more fun glitches and more loop holes the designer missed. Oh yeah, there's a way to get a fifth bottle in ocarina of time too. Super fun and rewarding to do stuff like that.

There should pretty much always be more than one solution for every puzzle and task. Here's how it could work. There's tons of environment activity. Like many more things are explodable and changeable. If I shoot a bomb arrow at a tower it falls over. If I stake crates I may be able to  hook shot to the top and get up somewhere higher. Rather than them spending a lot of time testing to make sure the player can't get trapped, they should instead impliment a room reset  and undo system. Even give the option to reset the whole dungeon  which would vital when a person has so many options. Then when you get more items you at times will be able to complete the dungeon in a different way or a lot faster.

They should keep shortness of the dungeons in LBWs or even shorter. This would be so fricking awesome!  When you get a new item that's what really makes you excited. "Oh man what are all the things I can do with this." 

I'd be okay with starting with all of the main items, like in a LBW, but instead of still having dungeons where you're mostly using one item make in each dungeon it's possible to use a lot of items in a way of way. I'd want this to be open enough where the ideal that even the designers don't know of all the ways the puzzles in a dungeon could be solved.

If they could manage to make a such a complex system work, they make even be able to go a step further and implement a random dungeon generater, that could theoretically dish out nearly endless dungeons. I get the idea from the platformer game like that. The randomization process is designed to only put together levels that are solvable. Brilliant concept for Zelda dungeons.

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