Iād also be happy if they fixed button mashing as an implicit win; they have a stamina gauge ready to go and everything.
I think the real problem is not being able to decide to jump into difficult combat or leave it. Zelda hasnāt sold well enough next to development costs to give them a clear mandate so they hem and haw over who the game is built for; a slavish fan-wank but carefully tuned to be easy enough that no one can get blocked.
And Zeldaās mandate has always been to competently showcase many different genres: good puzzles, good exploration, good combat; this worked as long as Nintendo had budgets and polish far advanced over everyone else but post-PS2 the most they can claim is that they are ātastefully restrainedā (and they clearly arenāt (but parts of Skyward Sword are so gorgeous they make that turdpile gleam)).
I think people mistake experience for talent so much that to them there is no difference. I am not a very talented musician. Iāve just been playing for years, since I was kid. there are people who just start out who can play circles around me. most of them never get anywhere because they never bother to develop any discipline. Iād rather play with knowledgeable, practiced and experienced people than with ātalentā, and when people call me ātalentedā I get a little irked because it negates all the work I put in to get to where I am. I started with a little talent, that I cultivated for a long time. imo, this is the case with most great artists. it is also the case with most shitty hacks. every now and then you get someone like princeā¦ but heād still not be anybody if he hadnāt cultivated himself.
and yeah, I agree that focusing on talent discourages people from trying. all you need is the tiniest amount of talent. as long your desire to improve is great enough, that talent will develop. there are many things in my life that I ādecided I was just no good atā, only to later encounter them again andā¦ get good at them. it just takes repetition and time and frustration and effort. there are very few things that I doubt I could get good at, if I devoted the time and energy. I donāt think this makes me special! Iām pretty sure itās true of most people!
maybe itād be less of a hot button issue if we replaced ātalentā with āaptitudeā
iām not quite sure why it matters if some people get discouraged if they think too much about whether they have talent or not. just do your thing regardless. people get discouraged about a lot of things they canāt control, and a lot that they can. this isnāt meant to oversimplify, but i guess this just feels like a personal quirk rather than universal best practice
I used to be a hot-shot shitposter on internet forums about Pixelart for years. Even though Iām not that great of a pixelartist myelf, I loved giving people criticism to help them get over whatever pitfalls I did. Studying the format helped me a lot too, but it helped me with giving other people better criticism too.
I actually think the opposite of you, I think that an artist can be enjoying making art a fair amount and still hit a plateau rather easily without even noticing it.
Honestly, the most common way an artistic plateau usually happens is not being willing to either challenge yourself more - or dedicate more time to it. A lot of hobbyist pixelartists and artists stay that way forever because they never can really take the leap of it being a hobby to something they actively engage with it.
I think talent makes the difference though, as every artist Iāve seen (for instance: http://neoriceisgood.deviantart.com) that is naturally talented breaks through their plateau much, much easier and by dedicated less time to it
:shrug: Ok. I mean, the majority of SotCās landscape is goal-less. Doesnāt mean level design is absent. I donāt see the term as intrinsically connoting task-based design, so I guess weāre just not going to agree here. Which is fine.
Kind of amazing how we found things thatāre even less interesting to talk about
the majority of SotCās landscape is goal-less.
Well, what are we getting out of open-world levels?
- Context - the guardians have their own temples and the landscape suggests the nature of the guardian. Their placement illustrates a relationship to each other.
- Connection - though it appears open, the āzonesā have distinct designed connections to support the player learning routes rather than having to map the entire space. The designed connections can also move the player from one colossus fight to the next.
- Aesthetics - itās a major goal that the environment produce gorgeous views!
Mario 64ās castle grounds are a proto-version of this, in that you can still see the production sandbox utility of them while they pull double-duty as consequence-free player training.
Wait. Let me drag it back to, ācan movement be evaluated in a void?ā Iā'm arguing that it can, and an open-world level is much more void-like than a linear level and we can still meaningfully talk about fun movement and not in these spaces. We can complain about horse movement in every game that has quadrupeds and praise Crackdown and can imagine sticking these characters in other games with levels not designed for them and still proving them out as fun.
Sure. I was thinking of goals as things that involve a tactile relationship between your avatar and their environment.
The evaluation of character movement in a void is not going to be relative, which is what any sort of level design provides: context. So, sure, in an extremely broad sense, sensual evaluation of avatar can be done, but itās all going to change once that character is put into an intentional environment with conflicting situations and topographical variations. Soma Cruz (Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow) feels more interesting, nuanced, and fun to control than Simon Belmont (NES Castlevania) when putting either character onto a flat two-dimensional plane, but that ultimately doesnāt matter, because Simonās movement engages the game heās been placed into, whereas Somaās doesnāt.
Soma Cruz (Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow) feels more interesting, nuanced,
and fun to control than Simon Belmont (NES Castlevania) when putting
either character onto a flat two-dimensional plane, but that ultimately
doesnāt matter, because Simonās movement engages the game heās been
placed into, whereas Somaās doesnāt.
Yeah, I agree completely. I just think we can hold two truths, that in general Soma movement is more fun, and that in certain contexts Simon movement makes a better game.
Itās the sort of problem thatās tripped up a bunch of Japanese studios, certainly: survival horror trying to transition past control limitations without becoming action games, Monster Hunter steadfastly standing by long attack lock-ins, Kingās Fieldās ridiculous turning speed. All choices make their games better as designed but become focal points for frustration because in isolation they feel poor.
nothing is interesting
Maybe the talent is 90% in the ability to simply notice your plateau/weakness and start to think about what efforts you might undertake to break through?
It goes back to the earlier discussion about the similarity of skillset between critic and artist.
well la-di-fuckin-da
The whole positioning / slow actions countering dynamics in MH extends to the slow active use of healing and other consumables as well, which really made me really cringe in the little bit of Breath of the Wild I watched where Link just downed meat from the inventory menu to safely heal in a pause screen- I canāt really care about the combat balance (compared to however gorgeous the locales are) if they miss that sort of mark.
Did you guys know that Dolphin can run Super Mario Sunshine at 60fps instead of its native 30? I did not, and it is making me smile.
So do the Zelda games really have playground/learning areas that are equivalent to Peachās Castle? The Kokiri Village in Zelda 64 captures some of that, but I have no idea if later games develop on that concept, or if they switch over fully to incremental/on-the-spot lessons that fit with the tool acquisition, with new opportunities being Metroid-esque revisits rather than expanded hub understanding. I have no idea what Iām actually typing.
All Zelda enemies are still area/room cluster-locked, right?
And helper characters donāt ever really act as familiars/Options.
Hmm, this is perhaps overly reductive. There is no reason why slow active healing has to be the way healing works in a game.
Hit points are designed to be a timer on combat, and healing items, whether instant or slow-drain are just game-isms to increase the quantity of time you have to stay in battle. A slow-acting heal is just as much an artifice as an instant pause-menu heal. The only practical difference is the very slight skill bump needed to use your healing item before you die in a game with active healing.
In return Iād argue saying āvery slight skill bumpā for the shift between instant (and stack-able) and delayed (and separated) healing is itself somewhat reductive- that such reducing attrition and risk/reward usage towards an abstracted āalways can escape and healā is denying flow can be part of difficulty in the experience.
Iām not sure what this means.
the skill bump is just learning to choose to heal instead of attacking all the time, it is not necessarily significant in itself and often times becomes just as rote as pausing the game and choosing to heal. However it may lead to interesting decisions if the combat is specifically balanced around the choice of healing vs attacking or defending. Whether or not items are stackable seems completely irrelevant.
The real issue is whether the healing economy will be balanced with the combat economy. If a player can ever reach the scenario during normal play (meaning not a ludicrous amount of grinding) where they have practically limitless healing resources, that WOULD destabilize the combat economy because the entire point of having these ātimersā is to guarantee an end-state to every combat encounter.
So, the point is that pause-menu instant healing is just another way of saying that your pool of virtual hit points is much larger than your pool of apparent hit points, and any combat design must be done in observation of this fact. Hit points pace a fight so the only requirement is that the decisions you do make in a battle are interesting.
My own preference is if they did away with in-combat-healing altogether and you had to find other ways to heal in between fights. Itās a mostly unexplored design space (at least in video games, it has been somewhat explored in RPGs and Board Games)
So Iād ask what is the point of even having healing items as opposed to simply increasing the size of the health bar.
- Decide whether the risk of getting one-shot at a certain health level calls for it
- Decide whether itās worth wasting part of the item against your max HP
- Decide whether to try to get the next bonfire/inn type heal instead
These are all decisions that are interesting to make in the moment, as well as decisions you get better at making as you gain knowledge about map layout and attack damage levels, feeding into the mastery metagame.
If additionally the item has a delay to use, thereās yet another decision to make: do I have time right now, and will I have time later. Thatās based on yet another kind of knowledge, about enemy movement and animation timings. It also means very aggressive and in-your-face enemies pose more of an interesting challenge, you cannot simply tank through them. So it adds another dimension of mastery and straight-up improves the game pretty much. It seems almost indisputable to me.
DkS thought enough about this question that the heal spells are slower to execute than Estus, and you have to pick which to use in a given context. As for the new Zelda, as per usual itās mindlessly copying what previous Zeldas did.
Because it lets players feel like they are dictating the pace of a combat, even if ideally the combat pace was already designed around the assumption that player characters will have hit point pools several times larger than is apparent. Thereās also a resource management angle to this, though this is just as dependent on designers balancing the resource economy to work with the combat.
I feel like youāre arguing against something Iām not saying with the next two paragraphs
Dark Souls is the go-to example of a game that actually makes combat healing feel right. @r-i was talking about the combat feel in monster hunter, however, and those games make healing into a boring non-decision (Am I nearly dead? ok Iāll run 20 feet away and chug a potion). And frankly, I donāt think thatās an improvement on pause-menu heals. Itās just as rote.