thomasmahler
Moon Studios
Hey GAF,
I always think it's interesting to hear from other game developers what they thought about certain games... So I wanna start a discussion by looking at Breath of the Wild from a designers perspective and after all the well deserved praise the game got, I think it's good to point out the things that I thought it didn't do so well after all is said and done. Let me also state that I'm a huge Zelda fan (With ALTTP being my favorite game of all time and I also have a huge soft spot for the original Legend of Zelda on the NES) and it's clear as day that BotW is easily one of the best Zelda games ever made - So in many ways I'm nitpicking, but I think in order for Nintendo and other developers to improve upon what's been done here in the future, we should just be straight in calling out the obvious issues and things that could've been improved that would've made the game better.
I finally finished BotW last night (all memories, all 120 shrines, most quests completed, etc.) and tried to analyze the game while I was playing it - I'm playing games differently nowadays than I did back in the day, I'm trying to be very analytical in order to really understand how the game was built, how all the systems work, etc., simply because as a game designer it helps me make our stuff better if I know how other devs handled certain problems before us.
So without further ado, let's start with my criticism:
The Open World:
Generally speaking, I thought the world was too big. I'm generally not a HUGE fan of open world games (and yet I have to admit that BotW is definitely the best open world game I've ever played), simply because I'd never want to design a game that way. I think it's wrong to start with a huge landscape and then try to shoehorn a ton of content into it versus building really strong content in smaller chunks and then putting it together to ensure that every inch of the world truly feels well designed.
If you're not a game developer, here's a bit of info on how these open world games are built: You usually start with a large terrain and sculpt the landscape, then you fill in the landscape with content. This video gives you a basic idea of how these worlds are crafted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozXYKpUugd8
So, throughout my entire time playing the game, I couldn't shake the thought that Nintendo must have decided on the size of the world at the start of the project and couldn't back-paddle afterwards simply because the world is made out of one huge terrain. Most Terrain engines don't allow you to easily modify and change sizes once various parts have already been built, since scaling the terrain would affect everything you've already built (again, I'm not saying Nintendo didn't have more sophisticated terrain tools, but that's my simple guess since the world feels way too large for its own good).
So why do I think the world is too large? Because of a lack of varied content. That's always the problem with Open World Games - What good is a huge world if large parts of it are fairly empty with nothing for you to do? I'm honestly sick and tired of developers proclaiming that the world of the game they're building is x times larger than the world in their previous game - That's only a great thing if you also scaled up your team by a lot in order to be able to fill that world with super fun content, which is most often not the case. Me just having to traverse longer distances that a designer didn't even touch doesn't mean the game is more fun, in fact, the opposite is usually true, which games like No Man's Sky have proven very well I think. Just running around in boring areas with little to no interactivity is just not fun.
I do think Nintendo did a good job giving you movement tools like Shield Surfing, Paragliding, Climbing, etc., but a hell of a lot of time in the game is spent just traversing through the terrain by holding the analog stick forward, running, climbing while always keeping an eye on your Stamina bar - and that in itself isn't the most fun you could have. Often times you have to run 5-10 minutes from one place to another doing fairly menial tasks like running and climbing just to arrive at your goal.
And that's also when Fast Travel comes into play, since having to do that once is bad enough and developers know that you want to quickly get to the fun parts, so they allow you to skip large parts of the Open World. But the irony here is... if that's your design process, then maybe your world shouldn't be that large in the first place?
At Moon, we have this 'fun per inch' principle - If we have the player just running for too long without any varied interactivity and fun content, then the level design is probably not great and should be reworked. We always try to put as much interactivity and diverse challenges into every inch of the worlds we're building as possible. We usually build hundreds of levels and then only use the levels that we feel are really fun, the rest gets cut and out of the good stuff we build the actual world. That way we know that there are no 'empty-feeling levels' - Everything needs to be well designed, all the stuff that feels empty should be improved or cut. Obviously there are always 'transition zones' between certain levels, but even those should be fun to traverse through or interact with. And again, that is often times not the case with open world games, the 'transition zones' usually end up being huge and empty... Simply compare that to how Zelda 1 or ALTTP were designed: Almost every single screen in those games is packed with secrets, enemies, objects you can interact with, etc. - There's barely a screen in those games where all you do is holding the analog stick into a direction without any other possibility of interactivity. And interactivity is where the fun comes from, interactivity is what games are all about.
So what did Nintendo do in order to make traversing the open world more fun? Obviously, they added content, so let's take a look at that:
The Open World Content:
If you really analyze Breath of the Wild, the overall design used here is fairly simple. There's a big open world terrain that you traverse and within that world you find various things: Shrines, Korok Challenges, Enemy Camps, etc.
The problem here is that since the world is that big and a developer only has 24 hours in a day, repetition is the key to get the project to a finish line. And repetition is all over Breath of the Wild:
Let's start with the Shrines: All 120 shrines look exactly the same. The actual puzzles and challenges in there are usually really well designed (apart from the horrible Motion Controlled ones, these shrines are just horribly bungled in my opinion), but I do think the game would've been better if there would've been more variation within the shrines to make them more memorable. Wouldn't it have been cool if the shrines in the Death Mountain Area would've been themed around fire and exploited all the various ways you can interact with fire in the game? Wouldn't it have been cool if the Death Mountain Shrines actually looked more like they belong in that area? Instead, all the 120 shrines in the game are completely interchangeable, shrines that are in the Death Mountain area could just as well be placed within Gerudo's Desert, etc.
Also, the combat shrines... They're literally all the exact same. Seriously, nobody was able to come up with something more interesting here? You have 3 different enemy types in those shrine, but they're literally all the same: You walk in, a single enemy spawns and you need to defeat that enemy in order to complete the shrine. Not once did I fight multiple enemies in there, let alone more varied types - It's always the same walking guardian types. Couldn't Nintendo have mixed it up a bit more by putting a walking guardian AND a flying guardian in one of the combat shrines just to make things a LITTLE more interesting? That design decision was baffling to me.
The same is true for the Korok Challenges: Most of these are completely mindless and similar: Find a certain rock in the world that stands out, pick it up, a Korok appears. Put a rock in the right spot in the middle of a ring of rocks, boom, a Korok appears. Jump into a ring of flowers in the water, a Korok appears. Shoot some balloons, a Korok appears... Rinse and Repeat. You'll do these exact same challenges DOZENS of times. Again, I'm guessing Nintendo just saw that their world is too big and they had to put in a lot of these repetitive, not very fun little challenges in order to at least have SOMETHING in the world instead of just traversal followed by more traversal. Why have such a huge world if you then have to fill it with repetitive content?
Enemy Camps: Again, most of these are just the exact same setup. Yes, sometimes the enemies are a little tougher, but I'd really like to know how many of these 'Skull Structures with Bokoblins next to them' are in the game - My guess is dozens. Beat a few of the enemies, the chest unlocks, done. The same setups are then again scattered many, many, many times throughout the open world without any variation in challenge. In general, enemy variation was also a bit of a disappointment to me: For a world this large, it very much felt like there's barely a dozen different enemy designs in there. We have Guardians, Bokoblins, Keese, Octoroks, Lizalfos, Lynels... And I have a hard time naming more off the top of my head after just having finished the game. Again, that would've been fine in a smaller game, but for a game of this size, it becomes a bit of a drag that you always have to fight the same types of enemies that are only varied in color, but not behavior.
Combat / Controls: This is the most baffling to me, since I think the controls are quite a bit too convoluted. The Quick-Weapon switching with the 'Dpad' is all kinds of weird to me (the game pauses while doing that... really?) and breaks the games flow, the combat in general is just a notch over the traditional 3d Zelda combat, things like Shield Surfing require the player to press 3 buttons... all of that makes the game feel a bit less polished than what you usually expect from a Nintendo game. Regarding the UI in general, Brad Colbow made a great video about improving BOTW's UI that I 100% agree with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0td--XguPXA
Quests: Here again, the game suffers from the same exact issue all Open World games have, meaning, most quests are just variations of fetch quests. You have literal fetch quests in there that are as simple as "NPC tells you to bring item X to it, quest completes once you do that", others are a little more clever, but overall, a hell of a lot of the side quests feel pretty menial and boring. A really good Quest was Eventide Island (The Robinson Crusoe inspired one), but those are few and far between... I have a few quests left open and have little to no motivation to actually finish all of them.
Dungeons: One of the reasons why I LOVE Zelda is because Nintendo has some of the best level designers in the industry working for them. Even though games like Skyward Sword or Twilight Princess get a lot of shit today for following the same old Zelda formula, the dungeon designs usually are just genuinely well figured out. They're less sprawling and open than they were in the 2d Zeldas, sure, but they're still brilliantly designed. The 4 Breath of the Wild Dungeons felt pretty short to me and I breezed through them in almost no time. Variation within the dungeons is also not as well figured out as it used to be. You see, Zelda usually did a good job sectioning the dungeons into Puzzle Zones, Combat Zones, etc., so if you're stuck on a certain puzzle, you can go to some other area and fight some enemies... not so here, since the dungeons here feel like one big puzzle and if you don't know how to solve it, you're just shit out of luck.
And in the older Zelda games, everything got varied up once you got the dungeon item and had to re-traverse the dungeon using the item you just acquired to put another twist on the dungeon designs. That is obviously not the case here - Nintendo did try to put a little variation into the Divine Beasts design by allowing you to 'control' the Divine Beasts, but if you break down the dungeon design of Breath of the Wild, I'd argue that Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess had way better designed dungeons.
Before all the Nintendo and Zelda fans are going to kill me now for actually pointing out some flaws I THOUGHT the game had, please keep in mind that I think Breath of the Wild is a tremendous game, a huge achievement and easily one of the best games Nintendo ever made. But I'm always on the search for perfection and I don't think Nintendo quite reached that goal with Breath of the Wild.
So let's try to have an objective, level-headed discussion on what else could be improved to make new Zelda AND open-world games better! What are your thoughts?
Edit: Fuck me for not looking over the title before I posted. Can a mod delete the 'Completed' from the title? Thanks!
I always think it's interesting to hear from other game developers what they thought about certain games... So I wanna start a discussion by looking at Breath of the Wild from a designers perspective and after all the well deserved praise the game got, I think it's good to point out the things that I thought it didn't do so well after all is said and done. Let me also state that I'm a huge Zelda fan (With ALTTP being my favorite game of all time and I also have a huge soft spot for the original Legend of Zelda on the NES) and it's clear as day that BotW is easily one of the best Zelda games ever made - So in many ways I'm nitpicking, but I think in order for Nintendo and other developers to improve upon what's been done here in the future, we should just be straight in calling out the obvious issues and things that could've been improved that would've made the game better.
I finally finished BotW last night (all memories, all 120 shrines, most quests completed, etc.) and tried to analyze the game while I was playing it - I'm playing games differently nowadays than I did back in the day, I'm trying to be very analytical in order to really understand how the game was built, how all the systems work, etc., simply because as a game designer it helps me make our stuff better if I know how other devs handled certain problems before us.
So without further ado, let's start with my criticism:
The Open World:
Generally speaking, I thought the world was too big. I'm generally not a HUGE fan of open world games (and yet I have to admit that BotW is definitely the best open world game I've ever played), simply because I'd never want to design a game that way. I think it's wrong to start with a huge landscape and then try to shoehorn a ton of content into it versus building really strong content in smaller chunks and then putting it together to ensure that every inch of the world truly feels well designed.
If you're not a game developer, here's a bit of info on how these open world games are built: You usually start with a large terrain and sculpt the landscape, then you fill in the landscape with content. This video gives you a basic idea of how these worlds are crafted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozXYKpUugd8
So, throughout my entire time playing the game, I couldn't shake the thought that Nintendo must have decided on the size of the world at the start of the project and couldn't back-paddle afterwards simply because the world is made out of one huge terrain. Most Terrain engines don't allow you to easily modify and change sizes once various parts have already been built, since scaling the terrain would affect everything you've already built (again, I'm not saying Nintendo didn't have more sophisticated terrain tools, but that's my simple guess since the world feels way too large for its own good).
So why do I think the world is too large? Because of a lack of varied content. That's always the problem with Open World Games - What good is a huge world if large parts of it are fairly empty with nothing for you to do? I'm honestly sick and tired of developers proclaiming that the world of the game they're building is x times larger than the world in their previous game - That's only a great thing if you also scaled up your team by a lot in order to be able to fill that world with super fun content, which is most often not the case. Me just having to traverse longer distances that a designer didn't even touch doesn't mean the game is more fun, in fact, the opposite is usually true, which games like No Man's Sky have proven very well I think. Just running around in boring areas with little to no interactivity is just not fun.
I do think Nintendo did a good job giving you movement tools like Shield Surfing, Paragliding, Climbing, etc., but a hell of a lot of time in the game is spent just traversing through the terrain by holding the analog stick forward, running, climbing while always keeping an eye on your Stamina bar - and that in itself isn't the most fun you could have. Often times you have to run 5-10 minutes from one place to another doing fairly menial tasks like running and climbing just to arrive at your goal.
And that's also when Fast Travel comes into play, since having to do that once is bad enough and developers know that you want to quickly get to the fun parts, so they allow you to skip large parts of the Open World. But the irony here is... if that's your design process, then maybe your world shouldn't be that large in the first place?
At Moon, we have this 'fun per inch' principle - If we have the player just running for too long without any varied interactivity and fun content, then the level design is probably not great and should be reworked. We always try to put as much interactivity and diverse challenges into every inch of the worlds we're building as possible. We usually build hundreds of levels and then only use the levels that we feel are really fun, the rest gets cut and out of the good stuff we build the actual world. That way we know that there are no 'empty-feeling levels' - Everything needs to be well designed, all the stuff that feels empty should be improved or cut. Obviously there are always 'transition zones' between certain levels, but even those should be fun to traverse through or interact with. And again, that is often times not the case with open world games, the 'transition zones' usually end up being huge and empty... Simply compare that to how Zelda 1 or ALTTP were designed: Almost every single screen in those games is packed with secrets, enemies, objects you can interact with, etc. - There's barely a screen in those games where all you do is holding the analog stick into a direction without any other possibility of interactivity. And interactivity is where the fun comes from, interactivity is what games are all about.
So what did Nintendo do in order to make traversing the open world more fun? Obviously, they added content, so let's take a look at that:
The Open World Content:
If you really analyze Breath of the Wild, the overall design used here is fairly simple. There's a big open world terrain that you traverse and within that world you find various things: Shrines, Korok Challenges, Enemy Camps, etc.
The problem here is that since the world is that big and a developer only has 24 hours in a day, repetition is the key to get the project to a finish line. And repetition is all over Breath of the Wild:
Let's start with the Shrines: All 120 shrines look exactly the same. The actual puzzles and challenges in there are usually really well designed (apart from the horrible Motion Controlled ones, these shrines are just horribly bungled in my opinion), but I do think the game would've been better if there would've been more variation within the shrines to make them more memorable. Wouldn't it have been cool if the shrines in the Death Mountain Area would've been themed around fire and exploited all the various ways you can interact with fire in the game? Wouldn't it have been cool if the Death Mountain Shrines actually looked more like they belong in that area? Instead, all the 120 shrines in the game are completely interchangeable, shrines that are in the Death Mountain area could just as well be placed within Gerudo's Desert, etc.
Also, the combat shrines... They're literally all the exact same. Seriously, nobody was able to come up with something more interesting here? You have 3 different enemy types in those shrine, but they're literally all the same: You walk in, a single enemy spawns and you need to defeat that enemy in order to complete the shrine. Not once did I fight multiple enemies in there, let alone more varied types - It's always the same walking guardian types. Couldn't Nintendo have mixed it up a bit more by putting a walking guardian AND a flying guardian in one of the combat shrines just to make things a LITTLE more interesting? That design decision was baffling to me.
The same is true for the Korok Challenges: Most of these are completely mindless and similar: Find a certain rock in the world that stands out, pick it up, a Korok appears. Put a rock in the right spot in the middle of a ring of rocks, boom, a Korok appears. Jump into a ring of flowers in the water, a Korok appears. Shoot some balloons, a Korok appears... Rinse and Repeat. You'll do these exact same challenges DOZENS of times. Again, I'm guessing Nintendo just saw that their world is too big and they had to put in a lot of these repetitive, not very fun little challenges in order to at least have SOMETHING in the world instead of just traversal followed by more traversal. Why have such a huge world if you then have to fill it with repetitive content?
Enemy Camps: Again, most of these are just the exact same setup. Yes, sometimes the enemies are a little tougher, but I'd really like to know how many of these 'Skull Structures with Bokoblins next to them' are in the game - My guess is dozens. Beat a few of the enemies, the chest unlocks, done. The same setups are then again scattered many, many, many times throughout the open world without any variation in challenge. In general, enemy variation was also a bit of a disappointment to me: For a world this large, it very much felt like there's barely a dozen different enemy designs in there. We have Guardians, Bokoblins, Keese, Octoroks, Lizalfos, Lynels... And I have a hard time naming more off the top of my head after just having finished the game. Again, that would've been fine in a smaller game, but for a game of this size, it becomes a bit of a drag that you always have to fight the same types of enemies that are only varied in color, but not behavior.
Combat / Controls: This is the most baffling to me, since I think the controls are quite a bit too convoluted. The Quick-Weapon switching with the 'Dpad' is all kinds of weird to me (the game pauses while doing that... really?) and breaks the games flow, the combat in general is just a notch over the traditional 3d Zelda combat, things like Shield Surfing require the player to press 3 buttons... all of that makes the game feel a bit less polished than what you usually expect from a Nintendo game. Regarding the UI in general, Brad Colbow made a great video about improving BOTW's UI that I 100% agree with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0td--XguPXA
Quests: Here again, the game suffers from the same exact issue all Open World games have, meaning, most quests are just variations of fetch quests. You have literal fetch quests in there that are as simple as "NPC tells you to bring item X to it, quest completes once you do that", others are a little more clever, but overall, a hell of a lot of the side quests feel pretty menial and boring. A really good Quest was Eventide Island (The Robinson Crusoe inspired one), but those are few and far between... I have a few quests left open and have little to no motivation to actually finish all of them.
Dungeons: One of the reasons why I LOVE Zelda is because Nintendo has some of the best level designers in the industry working for them. Even though games like Skyward Sword or Twilight Princess get a lot of shit today for following the same old Zelda formula, the dungeon designs usually are just genuinely well figured out. They're less sprawling and open than they were in the 2d Zeldas, sure, but they're still brilliantly designed. The 4 Breath of the Wild Dungeons felt pretty short to me and I breezed through them in almost no time. Variation within the dungeons is also not as well figured out as it used to be. You see, Zelda usually did a good job sectioning the dungeons into Puzzle Zones, Combat Zones, etc., so if you're stuck on a certain puzzle, you can go to some other area and fight some enemies... not so here, since the dungeons here feel like one big puzzle and if you don't know how to solve it, you're just shit out of luck.
And in the older Zelda games, everything got varied up once you got the dungeon item and had to re-traverse the dungeon using the item you just acquired to put another twist on the dungeon designs. That is obviously not the case here - Nintendo did try to put a little variation into the Divine Beasts design by allowing you to 'control' the Divine Beasts, but if you break down the dungeon design of Breath of the Wild, I'd argue that Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess had way better designed dungeons.
Before all the Nintendo and Zelda fans are going to kill me now for actually pointing out some flaws I THOUGHT the game had, please keep in mind that I think Breath of the Wild is a tremendous game, a huge achievement and easily one of the best games Nintendo ever made. But I'm always on the search for perfection and I don't think Nintendo quite reached that goal with Breath of the Wild.
So let's try to have an objective, level-headed discussion on what else could be improved to make new Zelda AND open-world games better! What are your thoughts?
Edit: Fuck me for not looking over the title before I posted. Can a mod delete the 'Completed' from the title? Thanks!
