I agree in part. While I thought that BotW’s overworld was fairly unexciting I enjoyed the traversal mechanics themselves. Rewards were too systemic in my opinion. What’s the point of exploring a new and unique environment if you know all you’ll find is another korok seed and a treasure chest with randomized loot? It would be better if you sometimes found nothing but the sights and experience of that exploration and sometimes found unique hand-placed treasures. The fact that the game’s explicit rewards for engaging with its mechanics are so quotidian and blandly repetitive sabotages any feeling of venturing into the unknown.
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Two further examples from the series, one that’s the same and another is a counter-example:
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In Wind Waker, there’s something in every ocean square, ranging from story dungeon to immersion-shattering. Just…always something. I honestly don’t understand how you can make a game around a world dominated by ocean and then can’t let the concept even breathe a little (AC: Black Flag had a very similar problem in that going to sea was more like getting on the interstate in a decently populated suburb as opposed to actually being in a ship).
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In the original Zelda, there isn’t something on every screen. There often is! However, they allow the screens to be part of the scenery of the world that you’re traversing.
FWIW, I think BotW handles this a lot better than WW in that the “poking around to find something” felt a lot more organic.
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In an ideal world they’ll even figure out that nobody is precisely asking for controllable Zelda either. The people demand Linkle
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It’s one of the hardest problems to solve; I think Zelda was reasonably elegant by minimizing its rewards; currency is boring enough that the player isn’t getting a hit of disappointment every time the dungeon doesn’t reward them with replacement gear.
I’m pretty confident you can’t mix ‘the journey is its own reward’ with systemic rewards, you have to pick one or the other at the outset and be very clear in setting expectations.
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I am at the end of my time with Baba is You and will write it up at some point in the puzzle topic, but that is gonna be rather positive (the game is pretty great) and I gotta vent at the one thing it does that I dislike, and that a bunch of other games do and that I’ve bitched about before.
You can “beat” Baba is You at about the point you clear… maybe 20% of the puzzles in the game by gaining access to the “final” one that triggers what passes for an ending and a credit roll. A lot of games do this “hey you beat the game and got the end credits early on, now you don’t have to keep playing but we really want you to and will send mixed messages from this point forward” but at worst these generally pop up around the midway point, not with maybe 80% of the game still out there. This problem is magnified by the game likely having too many puzzles with no real clearly marked end point (I’ve finished 162 puzzles and have no idea how much are left in there) and a difficulty level that seems to climb higher and higher.
Some will save that final puzzle until they are just tired of it and cash out then, and some will see their way all the way to the end (I have a few achievements that only 4% have, so I assume very few do the latter) but for everyone else the game basically puts you into an seemingly endless march where the likely ways out are to either just lose interest in continuing or getting annoyed and quitting over it. That feels like bad design and yet it seems to be moving more and more in vogue and I don’t get it. I’ve gotten a ton of wonder and enjoyment out of the game and yet my final moments with it are undoubtedly my worst, and I feel the need to stand atop this particular games you played today mountaintop and yell out “this is dumb and bad, stop doing this!” Keep a post-game if you want, but stop putting much of the actual proper game parts there.
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idk i found botw’s world worth exploring just because of how fucking gorgeous it was (i have the photo album to prove it) and finishing shrines was ancillary to that? i left tons of map markers whenever i saw something interesting in the distance & when i wanted a break from the plot stuff i’d pick a few and just wander
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Most games that do this at least frontload the artwork/music so that you see most of it in the main game. For Baba the “content” isn’t so much artwork as mechanics, though, and unfortunately it does save some of the best for the final secret world (which it may irritate you to learn that maybe you haven’t reached at 162 puzzles?)
I also felt that feeling of endless, Sisyphean slog from Baba is you but I identified it more with lack of breaks in the pacing – I really would’ve liked to see some easy filler romps in there instead of the reward for brain exercise being more brain exercise. Probably you’re right that more “endings” (cutscenes from a certain POV) would’ve helped too.
The game that popularized this concept, Super Mario 3D Land/World, was way better at varying the pacing since you’d return to easier levels to seek star coins, and in World there were also minigame houses and Captain Toad stages.
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As someone who isn’t particularly interested in finishing games, I got exactly what I wanted out of Baba is You, and I kind of like that sort of structure because it provides exactly as much content as I want, and it gives me a reason to revisit it later.
Like, I ran out of content in Celeste, which bummed me out, but I still can’t beat the last couple levels of Dustforce. I still fire up Dustforce every few months when the mood strikes.
There was a trend in indie games for a while where the games were too short and the ideas under-explored, so I’m happy for the opposite trend.
I do agree with Broco that it could vary the difficulty/pacing more. Hundreds of puzzles that are roughly sequential in difficulty means that eventually you hit the point where every puzzle is absolutely exhausting.
And as far as games that could commit the sin of “too much content”, at least Baba’s concept is deserving of it.
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truly a life -styled game
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Speaking of Celeste, have you tried the Chapter 9 DLC and tried to get the strawberries in there? That final strawberry is certainly one of those things that might call for returning to like those Dustforce levels, and it’s not tedious perfectionism like most of the golden strawberries.
Personally I just got back to Celeste and replayed most of the game including all B-sides to derust, and finally made progress in Chapter 9. I reached the last screen as of this weekend (no strawberries though – I only know what they involve from Twitch streams).
I found some secret stuff: I solved a couple overworld levels as Baba and Flag, and hence beat the overworld map and gained access to another. This was right before I started the tenth marked area so I took and new vein of content as “oh no” rather than “oh neat”. That plays a lot into my “I literally have no idea anymore how deep this goes” and for my own sanity I had to say “no, when I’m done with the main set I’m done, this is just exhausting now”.
I also feel sad as I don’t think it is a game that’ll be easy to just go back to in a few years and pick up. So much is done with the concept and you are forced to learn and break so many notions that I can’t see being able to just step into the late game and having the faintest idea what to do if current me who has put… 27 or so hours into it over the past couple months isn’t exactly smashing through it.
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I think I was very close to the end and accidentally reset my progress in the chapter? I didn’t try for strawberries, though. I was preoccupied with something at the time, and slightly burnt out on precision platforming from all the Mario Maker I had been playing.
That does sound intriguing, though; might revisit it at some point to see what all the fuss is.
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Makes sense. It shouldn’t be a big problem to blast through the levels you already beat in 3-5 hours or so on a replay a few years from now to derust before trying to get to the true ending. I agree you do want to make sure you don’t forget any of the mechanics you learned, but it’s more a matter of bringing them out of long-term storage. It might even give you that “easy romp” experience that’s missing.
I did exactly the same! I was on tilt failing at wavedashes for half an hour on one screen and managed to mash the restart shortcut. Specifically on this bastard of a screen:
which I thought was near the end, but turns out to be only halfway through!
I turned on assist mode and dashed back to it, then ahead to further screens to see just how close I was to the end before going back and doing things properly. It just kept going and going, presumably with even harder screens than the one I already felt was impossible. I decided to give up forever, then stubbornly came back a week later anyway.
Celeste is quite relevant to this discussion in that it does the postgame pacing dance very well in the main game, but finally falls over in the DLC. Chapter 9 probably should’ve been divided into “sides” like the rest instead of mashed into an interminable megachallenge.
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Yeah, I definitely beat that screen. Just looked at a speedrun, and I think I was somewhere around 2/3rds through. Not all of the colored block toggling screens looked familiar. It definitely needs a different save system to support that long of a chapter.
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I do have to say that I do think Baba is You does a better job varying the difficulty than initially given credit for. Whenever you first enter a new area the first few puzzles are definitely easier than whatever the final ones you got to in the prior area where like (granted the beginning of the 8th area is still harder than the beginning of say the 3rd). Now if unlike me you jump around from area to area you may eat up all those easier puzzles early on and leave yourself with nothing but tough sledding, but I don’t know that there is a cure for that.
Also I won’t lie to myself or anyone else here: when I put the game down I’m never coming back to it. The amount of games I’ve replayed in the past decade I might be able to count on a single hand.
Chapter 9 in Celeste really did need to be broken up somehow, but as noted with assist mode one should be able to skip around the chapter with relative ease. That said I respond… particularly poorly to losing progress in games so if I happened to do that in the middle of chapter 9 I’d have probably flipped out majorly. I nearly swore off Stephen’s Sausage Roll because a poor late game design decision forced me to revert to an earlier save, and I was angered to the degree I was 50-50 on just telling the game to go to hell and abandoning it two or so puzzles from the end.
This has become “personality quirks that bled into gaming today” for me these past few posts >_>
P.S. God bless anyone who tried their hand at Chapter 9 of Celeste after having put the game down for a bit, I played the game all in a row and that chapter still resulted in physical damage befalling my hand.
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i think one of the reasons i really love warriors orochi 3 and 4 is that dynasty warriors and samurai warriors do play differently and turning the differences in their mechanics into strategic choices that i need to consider while forming a team is a nice layer to add onto a musou game. the difference between “you can end any attack string with a powerful charge attack” and “your charge attack is replaced by a separate string that’s much more mobile and good at clearing crowds” matters a lot in these games. anyway in warriors orochi 4 (4 plays more like sw4 than dw9 in case this means anything to you btw!!) you have MAGIC as well which means you have another fun bar of murder to unleash on people in addition to using it to make your musou more powerful and it changes fucking everything. im regularly dropping 3000 hit combos on random officers and completely laying waste to entire screens full of nobunaga’s henchmen. you get ranked on how fast you complete battles and how many people you kill while doing so and i haven’t played a game in ages that is so dedicated to giving me the tools to empower the shit gamer part of my brain thats obsessed with GOIN FAST AND KILLIN TONS OF GUYS for that sweet S rank
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okay nerds how is no one here talking about this it’s very good
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Browsing Launchbox and remembered how I tried really hard to unlock the naked suit for PN03 which I’m trying to rationalize because I wasn’t really horny for games and even if PN03 is a cool game it was extremely tedious work and I guess I was just undersexed and couldn’t find anything better to do with my time thanks for reading.
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i’m trying to learn a little more about musou games, and i’m not sure where to start. the only game like this i ever played much of was sengoku basara 3 on the wii - i did enjoy that one a lot
but yeah i have like 15 PS2 games with titles like Dynasty Warriors 5 - Empires and Samurai Warriors 2 - Xtreme Legends!! and i’m just like… what
is there any point to starting with earlier titles or is it just a big stale buffet and you just grab a plate
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i’m pretty recent into these games myself so i mostly play whatever, i just make sure it’s the latest release of the game and go to town. i think the older ones have historical value if you rly like musou games, and there’s scenario and mechanical stuff that’s cool too. sometimes games have cool modes that others don’t. i def have preferences for how characters work in some of the games than others. warriors orochi 3 will always have a weird place in my heart no matter how many I play. i havent played any of the empires games but its my understanding they have a strategy layer to them too. I will die after playing as many of these games as humanly possible
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