#if we're talking about games like artpieces

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Hello!! I'm back for: more whining about TotK Quest Design Philosophy

I can't reblog a really great post I just saw for some reason (tumblrrrr *shakes my fist*), but hmmmm yeah not only do I completely agree, but I think I might expand on why I feel so much annoyance towards TotK's quest design philosophy at some point, because it does extend past the fundamentally broken setup of trying to punch a pseudo-mystery game on top of BotW's bones, where the core objective was always explicit and centered and stapled the entire world together; or the convoluted and inefficient way it tells its story through the Tears, the somehow single linear exploration-driven quest in the entire game.

Basically: I'm talking about the pointless back-and-forths. There were a lot of them, a lot that acted against the open world philosophy, and almost none of them ever recontextualized the environment through neither gameplay abilities nor worldbuilding nor character work.

I'll take two examples: the initial run to Hyrule Castle (before you get your paraglider), and then the billion back-and-forths in the Zora questline.

I think?? the goal of that initial quest to Hyrule Castle is to familiarize you with the landmark, introduce the notion that weapons rot, tell you about the gloom pits, and also tell you that Zelda sightings are a thing? But to force any of these ideas on you before giving you a paraglider is, in my opinion, pretty unnecessary. I think the reason it happens in that order is to prevent Link from simply pummeling down to the gloom pit under Hyrule Castle and fight Ganondorf immediately while still introducing ideas surrounding the location; but genuinely, the Zelda sighting makes the next events even more confusing? Why wouldn't you focus all your priorities in reaching the castle if you just saw her there? Why lose time investigating anything else? Genuinely: what is stopping you from getting your paraglider and immediately getting yourself back there, plunging into the depths to try and get to the literal bottom of this? (beyond player literacy assuming this is where the final boss would be, and so not to immediately spoil yourself --which, in an open world game, you should never be able to spoil yourself by engaging with the mechanics normally, and if you can that's a genuine failure of design)

I think, personally, that you should not have been pointed to go there at all. That anything it brings to the table, you could have learned more organically by investigating yourself, or by exploring in that direction on your own accord --or, maybe you think Zelda is up there in the castle, and then the region objectives become explicitely about helping you reaching that castle (maybe by building up troops to help you in a big assault, or through the Sages granting you abilities to move past level-design oriented hurdles in your way, etc). Either way: no need to actually make you walk the distance and back, because the tediousness doesn't teach you anything you haven't already learned about traversal in the (extremely long, btw, needlessly so I would say) tutorial area.

But to take another example, I'll nitpick at a very specific moment in the Zora Questline, that is honestly full of these back-and-forth paddings that recontextualize absolutely nothing and teach you nothing you didn't already know. The most egregious example, in my opinion, is the moment where you are trying to find the king, and you have to learn by listening in to the zora children who do not let you listening in.

So okay. I think Zelda is great when it does whimsy, and children doing children things guiding you is a staple of the series, and a great one at that. But here? It does not work for me on any level. Any tension that could arise from the situation flattens because nobody seems to care enough about their king disappearing in the middle of a major ecological crisis, except for children who are conveniently dumb enough not to graps the severity of the situation, but not stressed out enough that it could be construed as a way for them to cope about it and make anything feel more serious or pressing. It feels like a completely arbitrary blocker that isn't informed by the state of the world, doesn't do anything interesting gameplay-wise with this idea, doesn't build up the mood, and genuinely feels like busywork for its own sake.

This is especially tragic when the inherent concept of "the zora king has been wounded by what most zoras would believe to be Zelda and is hiding from his own people so the two factions do not go to war over it" has such tension and interest and spark that the game absolutely refuse to explore --instead having you collect carved stones who do not tell you anything new, splatter water in a floating island, thrud through mud who feel more like an inconvenience than a threat or, hey, listen to children playing about their missing king less than a couple of years after being freed from Calamity Ganon's menace. It feels like level designers/system designers having vague technical systems that are hard-coded in the game now, and we need to put them to use even if it's not that interesting, not that fun or not that compelling. It's the sort of attitude that a lot of western RPGs get eviscerated for; but here, for some reason, it's just a case of "gameplay before story", instead of, quite simply, a case of poorly thought-out gameplay.

Not every quest in the game is like this! I think the tone worked much better in the sidequests overall, that are self-contained and disconnected from the extremely messy main storyline, and so can tell a compelling little tale from start to finish without the budget to make you waddle in a puddle of nothing for hours at a time. It's the only place where you actually get character arcs that are allowed to feel anything that isn't a variation on "very determined" or "curious about the zonai/ruins", and where you get to feel life as it tries to blossom back into a new tomorrow for Hyrule.

But if I'm this harsh about the main storyline, it really is because I find it hard to accept that we do not criticize a structure that is at times so half-assed that you can almost taste employees' burnout seeping through the cracks --the lack of thematic ambition and self-reflection and ingeniosity outside of system design and, arguably at times, level design-- simply because it's Hyrule and we're happy to be there.

There's something in the industry that is called the "wow effect", which is their way to say "cool" without saying "cool". It's basically the money shots, but for games: it's what makes you go "ohhhh" when you play. And it's great! The ascension to the top of the Ark was one of them --breathtaking, just an absolute high point of systems working together to weave an epic tale. You plummeting from the skies to the absolute depths of hell is another one; most of the dungeons rely on that factor to keep your attention; the entire Zelda is a dragon storyline is nothing but "wow effect" (and yeah, the moment where you do remove the Master Sword did give me shivers, I'll admit to this willingly) and so is Ganondorf's presence and presentation in the game --he's here to be cool, non-specifically mean, hateable in a non-threatening way and to give us a good sexy time, do not think about it too hard. What bothers me is that TotK's world has basically nothing to offer but "wow effect"; that if you bother to dig at anything it presents you for more than a second, everything crumbles into incoherence --not only in story, but in mood, in themes, in identity. This is a wonderfully fun game with absolutely nothing to say, relying on the cultural osmosis and aura of excellency surrounding Zelda to pass itself off as meatier than it really is. This is what I say when I criticize it as self-referential to a fault; half of the story makes no sense if this is your first Zelda game, and what little of that world there is tends to be deeply unconcerned and uncurious about itself.

And no, Breath of the Wild wasn't like this. Breath of the Wild was deeply curious about itself; the entire game was built off curiosity and discovery, experimentation and challenge (and I say this while fully admitting I had more fun with the loop of TotK, which I found more forgiving overall). The traversal in Tears of the Kingdom is centered around: how do I skip those large expanses of land in the most efficient and fun way possible. How do I automate these fights. How do I find resources to automate both traversal and fights better. It's a game that asks questions (who are the zonais, who is Rauru and what is his deal, what is the Imprisoning War about, where is Zelda), and then kind of doesn't really care about the answers (yeah the zonais are like... guys, they did a cool kingdom, Rauru used to run it, the Imprisoning War is literally whatever all you have to care about is who to feel sad for and who to kill about it and you don't get a choice and certainly cannot feel any ambiguous feelings about any of that, and Zelda is a dragon but we will never expand on how it felt for her to make such a drastic and violent choice and also nobody cares that's a plot point you could *remove* from the game without changing the golden path at all).

I'm so aggravated by the argument "in Zelda, it's gameplay before story" because gameplay is story. That's the literal point of my work as a narrative designer: trying to breach the impossibly large gap between what the game designers want to do, and what the writers are thinking the game will be about (it's never the same game). And in TotK, the game systems are all about automation and fusion. It's about practicality and efficiency. It's also about disconnecting stuff from their original purpose as you optimize yourself out of danger, fear, or curiosity --except for the way you can become even more efficient. And sure, BotW was about this too; but you were rewarded because you had explored the world in the first place, experimented enough, put yourself in danger, went to find out the story of who you used to be and why you should care about Hyrule. I'm not here to argue BotW was a well-written game; I think it was pretty tropey at large to be honest, safe for a couple of moments of brilliance, but it had a coherent design vision that rewarded your curiosity while never getting in the way of the clarity of your objective. There is a convolutedness to TotK that, to me, reveals some extremely deep-seated issues with the direction the series is heading towards; one that, at its core, cares more about looking the part of a Zelda game than having any deeper conversation about what a Zelda game should be.

[jaythelay]

Dark Souls' control feel being clunky makes ya feel like you're experiencing a new game for the first time in years. Subsequent games kept refining the clunk and I feel like DS2 fans would describe it's clunkiness most of the time as softer than DS1.

Elden Ring kinda feels like much of the clunk is far, far too soft and the clunk that is there feels too designed and balanced.

Apart of the magic of Dark Souls 1 is that everything you know from other games is not going to make you a pro. I think that's why old survival horror still holds up, the clunkiness is not flaws, they are elements to be designed around. When you remove them, all you have is a long slide with no turns.

ER feels remarkably the same from beginning to end every subsequent playthrough, the magic of the first playthrough not being replicable, is a problem DS1 doesn't have as much, it feels like a series of quizes on your knowledge and how much you were prepared for it. Every encounter has the same philosophy as a boss fight: Test what you know and surpass this obstacle with it. Because of this, you can memorize so much since it actually mattered to you.

And we're not talking "you learned to aim!" it's a series of timings at it's baseline that gives a pool of opportunities in openings provided BY your own actions. The speed of which being basically perfect, it's considerate and purposeful, the game trusts your intention with the buttons pressed, it's why it has that damn annoying button queueing, it's clunk, they designed around.

By speeding the game up so much every subsequent game, the clunk becomes only obstacles to emerging new game design philosophies. What was a game Anyone can beat with enough time, becomes a frustrating half-hearted attempt because so much of the core design is from a 2009 PS3 exclusive.

All this said: This series going faster, being more and more flashy, has fundamentally soiled the core aspects of this series. The fix is to return to basics, reset the ever growing difficulty floor, and put these old concepts back into the limelight, or cut them out entirely.

DS3 and ER feel like they desperately want a game that isn't designed around input queues and strict timings, but a difficult beat em up designed around quick movements and deliberation, less than intention. And honestly? I'd really like to see a fromsoft game inspired by their souls-like content, more than anymore souls-like content. It's had it's run I feel, some essential stuff needs sweeping changes for the genre to really keep evolving in anyway.

Rambling, just thinking about the design of the game. There's really no other game to spark my imagination and critical thinking of it's gameplay like it. The fact I can get my non-gamer friend as far as BoC so far, is genuinely a testament to the fantastic design of this artpiece.

So often when I think about doing something I have no clue on, it feels like an unknown and I'll never learn the secret handshakes of every aspect, at best just superficial face value knowledge, but Dark Souls, and Just Dark Souls 1, made me realize, the titanic impossibility is all in my head, that there isn't anything in the world "I simply cannot understand" because the fact is, there is a design to everything, the people making stuff have intention behind their choices, it's up to you AND them, to garner trust between and show what is possible.

I assure you, every obstacle a designer throws, they meant for you to surpass, they're worried whether players can succeed as much as you're worried you can. The trick is to give the player confidence in what situation the designer put them in. Nobody wants a game where it feels like you're the sim in the pool.

Yes there are examples otherwise and I'm ignoring scummy microtransaction mobile types, but what DS did for me, was show me that's not everything in life, not everything is designed around hair-trigger quick wit responses, but learning, adapting, preparing, and then acting. Being knowledgeable and simply reactive enough to survive, what DS says is "Unless you're Actively Dying, you can overcome anything, even Dark Souls"

To me, this is why DS3 and ER haven't had such impactful content spawn from them, they really are impossible tasks in the worst ways, unfun or too dang long. DS a decade later, thanks to ER revitalizing interest, feels more relevant than even it's inception. I don't doubt the authenticity of work, design, or intent for those titles, but I don't feel that energetic trust nearly as much. Being completely able to trust the designer for most of an experience is incredibly difficult for any creator to achieve.

Some frustration comes in when, it feels like they're trapped in this box of "what Souls-Likes are" and not "What can we make from a Souls-Like", the lack of knowing and being glued to the formula means no matter how much paint they put upon it, underneath is the bone of something that doesn't work well with the paint on top of it.

Get a new bone is not the message entirely however, it's "Does the bone even need paint?" and answer is no. What the bone needs is not stuff applied on top of it, the bone is not the important part, it is an aspect of it. Without other aspects, the core is simply an idea, concept at most, but it's propage has detached it from every system that attempts to be ontop of it, instead of apart of it.

The core, or bone, of Dark Souls is not it's stamina systems, or bonfires and exploration, it's not timings or even difficulty, It's Trust. Between player and developer. Intentional Design, where the obstacle is intentionally intimidating but possible to beat without being The Most Skilled Evarz.

ER has this veneer of trust and intentional design that's covered in the paint of uncertainty and grossfully extensive longevity. The reason many who moved from ER to DS had an easier shift than other souls-likes, is because of that veneer being fully realized in DS where in ER it's not near as present, but it is still present, it's just far more hollow than DS accomplished.

None of this is to shit on anything mind you, but comparing DS1 to the rest of it's contempararies shows it really has something almost magical to it. It's unexplainable and yet all I want to do is find that explaination. Really put it into words anyone can grasp and use for their own work.

If ya want to make another Dark Souls, you've already failed. What you should focus on, is Earning Trust through Intentional Design that creates Obstacles people want to surpass via learning more of your work. In some ways, an ARG is like DS1, in order to play, you need the knowledge to even begin.

That sounds remarkably stupid and obvious, but too many games focus on reaction times and pin point precision, basically speedrunner/MMO fodder. That's easier to do than making a game where the more you know, the 'stronger' you are.