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Nintendo is usually full of surprises - hopefully, when it comes to Zelda's open worlds, they have one more.

some would view that as 'going back' and Nintendo won't go for that I don't think. Although I think you're right in that they should experiment with bringing those mechanics/ideas into the open world and see how they jive.

@LittleBeanGreen Nintendo doesn't have a strict view on that though, they literally went back to Zelda on the NES when designing BOTW, if you search for the official making of the game videos, Nintendo literally made an entire NES style BOTW game as a way to "story board" the game. Also, adding dungeons is "going back" which BOTW didn't focus on, yet they Went Back to dungeons in TOTK. User Interface and Menus stream lining is timeless design style. So OOT inspired menu and UI. But with expanse real estate of Open World. Add like tons of amazing dungeons and secrets galore and bring back the fishing mini game lol

@@majicweather4890 But they try to capture the 'original essence' of the first game in EVERY installment they make. Nintendo used the OG Zelda because it was easy to make - it was to demonstrate that the logic behind the physics and chemistry engines made sense. There's a conversation to be had about whether the 'dungeons' in TotK are really dungeons or just Divine Beasts 2.0 in dungeon skins. It'd be great to streamline the menus by making a game that made you have to mandatorily use them as least as possible... Yes, let's get fishing.

@@majicweather4890 "they literally went back to Zelda on the NES when designing BOTW" From what I understand this is somewhat misinterpreted, in a later interview the developers discussed how the guiding vision for BotW was actually the piece of TLoZ artwork where link stands on a cliff and looks out at the horizon (the one the BotW's opening scene replicates). Personally I think the goal of replicating the feeling of TLoZ rather than TLoZ itself is sensible, but my problem is while BotW nails the feeling of starting TLoZ, it completely fails at capturing the feeling of finishing TLoZ. People love to fixate on that TLoZ-styled prototype, but really all that has is the moment-to-moment of wandering around the overworld. TLoZ was actually designed dungeons first with the overworld added later to stitch them together, which is why IMO saying BotW goes back to TLoZ is a snappy marketing line to reel in lapsed fans and little more.

I like the idea of still having food to eat that you can't do conveniently and healing that is quick.

Thanks for the comment - I think this video got a lot of flack because it was actually a response to an earlier video that listed somethings about what I thought Zelda was. I still largely believe those things but I think botw/totk still feel different. I'm in the process of designing a world/narrative for a conceptual Zelda game that hopes to blend the open world with the more traditional elements of Zelda's dungeon crawling. I'm hoping to see if the two philosophies could work together.

interesting - I've never played any of the monster hunter games but will have to check it out. I don't like the mixture of Zelda + crafting but I think it would be cool if Link could mix potions anywhere or anytime.

Appreciate that - thanks for watching!

Or you combine those sets into 1 thing and the player chooses when to wear it. Or you give Link a spell that resists cold and you don't have to buy armor.

botw in retrospect seems like the least worst offender after the last two installments

well some times it is!

I think separating the two is a good idea. Someone else in the comments suggested making food heal you over a longer period of time, regenerates hearts over 24 minutes or something. I definitely think potions are the way to go for immediate healing...plus we love bottles.

The specificity of the SS items are their downfall. I think there's definitely an opportunity to make the world more interactive to give less items more chances to do things out in the wild.

@@Trianull Less snappy switching at least works for slow-paced puzzle solving tbf.

@@quillion3rdoption True, and considering Skyward Sword's focus on, well, the sword, it meant most of the items were more like utilities than weapons. Even the bow had more of a focus on picking off enemies from quite a distance to save yourself the trouble.

That's interesting - the regenerative bit. I think the games don't lean into the buffs enough so that's something else I'm considering. Thanks for the comment!

Never played - I'll have to check that out.

Wait - 5 options are too many? And they certainly don't all do the same thing especially when they can be used strategically to beat certain enemies and the special powers are all different?

@@LittleBeanGreen you have much more as I recall it. first you can shoot. then there are two types of shooting, fast and aimed. the the shots can bounce. then you can melee attack. you can defend and deflect. then you can parry. then dash and attack, then use a special, then dash and use a second dash-special?? I swear there was more stuff. but all in all the simple melee attack is good enough usually, so its pointless to do all these. its like those adventure games with a billion combinations of attacking between ground and air and weak and strong and time and 2x and 3x and whatever... but its easier to just focus on the basic attack and its good enough because its a game. and most games are easy and the AI is predictable. I admire people like you who are able to not play the game optimally effort-wise. I cant bring myself to learn all this bs if punch punch punch is already a good enough solution. the only reason for complex movesets are for PVP on fighting games. you actually need them to beat a human opponent. either that or if the game required me to use all the moves somehow. but do not get me wrong, people LOVE these overlapping mechanics, i personally prefer inutilia truncat. and thats why I love zelda. you build your unventory slowly, not all weapons are good against all enemies, their use is limited. and thats why I hate botw and totk... 300 thousand weapons that do the same bs and are not special in any way cross code is so beautiful. I tried playing the game 3x times already but always feel overwhed. this is how it feels to me: here is a knife now here is a gun now here is a bazooka now here is a tank now here is an atomic bomb (all in the first hour of gameplay) your task: slice bread people: WOOWW IM SLICING BREAD WITH A BAZOOKA MOUNTED ON MY TANK WHILE I SHOOT KNIVES WITH MY GUN THAT HAS A MUSTACHE ON IT, THIS GAME IS AWESOME!!!11!! me: well the knife will do, why should I be troubled? oh this is so boring, I have way too many tools already. how can I feel even slightly challenged?

Hey man. Their catchphrase is 'play your way' or some nonsense. So let me.

Me either - for all the flack SS gets, it seems to have done a lot of things right.

never played

the oracles so lowwwww

I think if they make the world even more interactive, they can have a few select items that interact with the world (or combine to interact with it) in multiple ways.

@@LittleBeanGreen To its credit, BotW and TotK do just that with its "tools" (slate and arm runes in this case); I guess they shunted the "overspecialization" to the small items.

@@quillion3rdoption that's fair enough but there are also weapons and shields and bows. TotK doubles down with all the fusions too.

depends. some people REALLY like Wind Waker.

I think they could think about it from the opposite direction. You can still have lots of assets, but a select few items that can interact with them in a lot of ways. Make the world even MORE interactable.

the fact that I know what you're talking about is very helpful.

I'm growing mildly annoyed with pulling up menus - I feel like in combat, if it's in real time, and it's heated, the same thing applies with a quick menu: you'll be searching for an item and not paying attention to the game. Although I do respect the fact that it probably takes almost no time to do this in the 3DS games.

The DS games actually did pause, but it was so fast it didn't ever feel like it. You just press left or right D-Pad and tap one of the six items to use, only takes half a second at most.

@@Trianull Oh really? Yeah, it was so fluid I didn't remember that. Still a really good alternative to traditional menu pausing.

​@@Trianullit pauses in spirit tracks, but not phantom hourglass. Hour glass also split up items and menus.

@@777idkineedausername Oh huh, yeah seems I conflated the two. Goes to show how much more I like Spirit Tracks lol.

and there are 4 I can think of that only have 1 purpose - those statues from the Gerudo Sanctum.

@ exactly my point haha

I'd say there are a solid 50 useful echoes, the problem is that for most of those tie effort it'd take to find them on the menu I can probably just solve the problem with what I have equipped before I find the "optimal" one on the menu. Combat echoes for example, lots have their uses, but Wolfos or Darknut will have already killed them by the time I would have finished scrolling. If the game had voice commands where I could say Freezard and have that ready to go I would have used it a LOT more than I actually did. tl;dr the problem is the UI not the echoes.

I think it's mostly a problem when it interrupts the flow of combat or (in my conceptual example) exploration. In those moments of fluidity, when Zelda may echo something like the overall gameplay style of Mario or Sonic, that's when I don't like pausing - when it destroys that flow. And it also, to me, breaks immersion. I'm not opposed to pausing in general, just when either a. you're doing it all the time to sort through so many items or b. when it interrupts the flow of the game while normally playing it.

then I'll be turning the tables on em!

@@LittleBeanGreen you better

absolutely agree.

Both TotK and EoW seriously needed a "favorites menu" for Fuse items and Echoes respectively. I'd gladly sacrifice "last used" and "most used" options if adding another sort option would suck as well.

@@marche800 That's part of the reason I just barely beat Breath of the Wild and haven't done much but get Tulin and do shrines in Totk. It just gets kind of obnoxious to play tbh, and Totk just didn't hold my interest, I'll pick it back up and do some more shrines one day but I'm not into any combat because I just don't like it lol

well said.

And how do you think that solution works? Do you find yourself doing a lot of pausing?

@LittleBeanGreen I don't understand your query? Can you rephrase?

@@mybumstudios1989 Does having 8 items and a button that pulls up a scroll wheel to switch between them reduce pausing? Or do you still find that you're doing a lot of pausing?

@LittleBeanGreen Yes. The X button then completely removes the necessity of a menu where one would assign many items to a few item slots. It's also not a scroll wheel. Think of it as an octagon, and you 'point' at the item you want equipped upon X's release.

I thought the dungeons were perfect.

Yes and they really capture the combat-puzzle alternance of traditional Zelda games.

I think the balance of puzzle to combat was so good. Plus how they let you test a power before giving it to you so they could ramp up the puzzles - genius.

How would you feel about having fewer things but being able to do more with them?

@@LittleBeanGreen That does sound like a good idea,

THANK YOU.

anytime!

Maybe I did a poor job explaining it but it's not really that complicated...it's pushing two buttons at any time without stopping anything. It would be like pushing two buttons to jump and glide but instead it's selecting a power and using it.

I think I'd tend to agree with you - especially the 3D remakes

Once I figure out all the moving pieces and the artist I'm working with draws it 😅 ...I'm hoping come the new year there'll be a lot to show.

@ heck yeah, I love the idea of videos like that. I started my own channel a while back for that purpose and am still in much the same stage haha 😓

@@tyedupinsmokestacey2935 It's tough! Especially when you have a certain vision and want to work out every little detail and don't quite have the skills to do it haha

@ I totally agree, finding the motivation is tough because I don’t want to force myself through it otherwise it’ll make a product I’m not happy with

@@tyedupinsmokestacey2935 Yeah I feel that - it needs to meet my standard ha

In most cases, my gripe is exactly this. I don't care that you have bottomless pockets, I care that you can pause whenever you want to access them, and I care that that pausing interrupts the game.

@@LittleBeanGreen The more items there are, the more item management there will be, even games that handle it "well" still have a lot of downtime. In BotW it wasn't so bad as item management was mostly done in downtime, but TotK's new mechanics meant that item management was now a core part of the combat and puzzles. Same continues into EoW and it really hampers game flow. I remember seeing a clip of TotK combat with all the menu time edited out and feeling like it was an entirely different game to the one I was playing. In TotK for a while I decided to never let the UI prevent me from doing something, and counted how much time I was spending in menus vs outside them. Then I compared it to games like FF7 Rebirth and found TotK has more menu time than many modern action JRPGs, presumably because those have UIs focused on trying to keep you in the action and casting spells/etc as fluidly as possible. Given Nintendo's supposed gameplay focus, I really don't understand how this has passed the bar for them. Like what is their playtesting process and do the not see players shoving 20 apples into their face to avoid cooking as a problem?

This is really the problem - it completely interrupts the flow of the game. I maintain that with a bit more refinement with the echoes and the swordfighter form and automatons are unnecessary.

In those old games, you had to find ways to heal, you didn't have an endless menu of options available to you. Echoes of Wisdom definitely feels like those older, lower difficulty games and it still has the same pausing to heal issue. I would consider meeting you half way with rebalancing just how much damage some enemies do, but I'd also say not every enemy you encounter is meant to be bested the first time you encounter it. Understanding that and combining it with armor upgrades makes pausing to heal becomes less critical. I think any over-pausing in general is a detriment to the immersion.

@@LittleBeanGreen I consider design that deliberately uses fail states as a "teaching tool" to be a failure of game design (unless the game very specifically revolves around the mechanic, like souls games do, but zelda is far from that), so I can't agree with that point of yours. I actually think echoes was a step in the right direction as you only have the single excessive men to navigate instead of the three-four-odd the wild games do. I do agree that the healing there is unnecessary, especially combined with the beds, though i've been told the smoothies actually make a difference on hero mode. I can see a case made for real time healing there, especially since you have the time to pop a nap in between even boss attacks. But I don't see it working well for the wild games without significant changs to other mechanics.

I was thinking of something similar. While I would love to see an end to excessive menuing, the idea of removing healing while paused would be a fundamental change that could have repercussions beyond simple game mechanics and difficulty. When playing Legend of Zelda or Adventure of Link, you do need to select a healing item or spell and have it preped to use it in a moment, or to be able to pause and select and hopefully get the effect off as soon as you return to action, giving a slight sense of urgency, but also giving the player essentially a 'time out'. This continued with potions in Link to the Past, and some of the 3D Zelda games. The divergence was felt with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom where you did all of your healing in menu. Personally I would like to see a return to the original two games where you select an item or ability and then have to use it. Or you can select them prior to the engagement and have them at the ready when you need them. I personally think this fits the theme of the franchise better (having been in the majority of the games) and serves as a decent compromise to what you see in BotW/TotK and what is being suggested by the video author. Just because Dark Souls does something, doesn't mean it will work well or play well in a Zelda game. I'm not saying I'm 100% against it. But it will fundamentally change how combat works in Zelda and to be honest... when we play Zelda, we expect combat to be Zelda combat, and not something else. I do agree with some limits though. In Legend of Zelda you got one heal from a Blue Potion, and 2 uses from a Red. You had your heart containers x2 or x3 depending one what your potion you had if any. In Adventure of Link it was more complex as you had Life which cost MP and MP was determined by how many Magic Containers you had (16mp per), and Life cost so much magic based on your Magic Level. Life would restore 3 hearts on each cast. Giving you a set limit on how many times you could cast it before finding blue or red magic decanters to refill it. BotW and TotK however allowed pretty much unlimited healing. You were limited by how many meals you could cook, but the limit was incredible and you could in theory with enough prep (and you didn't have to face major dangers to do this) fill in each slot with full + max heart food. Making some challenges trivial. The result was that some challenges expected the average player (you know.. the players that don't make those crazy Lynel killing videos) to simply 'tank' hits and constantly heal themselves. This made the game difficult as you mentioned in some areas with some players barely skating by. Which challenges tend to be more fun in general? Early ones where your mistakes can be learned from on the fly and you use healing to cover that a bit but are limited in how much you can heal. Or the later ones where mistakes are devastating and you simply have to have an inventory full of healing to just attack, get hit, heal, and repeat? I personally did have fun with BotW and TotK's combat. But I do consider myself an advanced player. But even then I did find some parts in those two games a tad frustrating at times when trying to learn new encounters. And having to go around farming specific materials to craft meals in order to have a chance at learning new patterns and movesets from foes. Where in earlier installments I just went to see a vendor or nab a faerie with a net to ensure I get enough slack to learn a new boss or environment. BotW and TotK really only start getting really fun when you reach a point where you no longer feel the need to farm healing items. Unfortunately not every player gets there. And many of us players don't understand what that is like.

Twilight Princess used to have this and there is something like this in TotK, but because there are so many options, you spend so much time in the menu.

@@LittleBeanGreen There are far more items in monster hunter and you can craft items using the radial menu as well. A radial menu would have sped of the menuing in BotK and TotK drastically if implemented correctly. The radial menu in Twilight Princess is very limited compared to the ones in Monster Hunter World for instance

Oh god I never even thought of multiplayer.... My thinking is that it won't really be 'sifting' - by a certain point you should know what button has each power. So you could be sprinting, then just hit R + X and have switched a power. In my head at least that doesn't seem too taxing but. Sounds like your scenario may be a bit different.

I can't remember how the 3DS remake handled things but it would be nice to have purely a quick bar for masks, but you're right. This is what I meant by not giving us too many options. We technically have 4: Link, Deku, Goron, Zora, but they can do a bunch of different things.

One problem of equiping an entire item set rather than individual items is that there is less customizability of which items to have available at once, it is not necesarily always a problem, though, and can be more convenient than equipping items individually.

@@elio7610 What I was trying to get at was something more akin to the 64 games - where you had 3 item slots for weapons. In the original releases, masks took up one of those item slots, but I'm suggesting having a mask only selection. So you would have 3 items available and 3 masks available at any time.

@@LittleBeanGreen The Restoration Project. Its a mod for the 3DS Majoras Mask that solves that exact problem. Among bringing some n64 qualities they removed, they add all of the main masks to the D-Pad. Playing it rn and it works perfectly

I don't follow what you're arguing.

Having the option to pause so that you can deal with real life stuff is good but the issue here is that the games require you to pause and go through menus to do ingame actions.

@@elio7610 thanks for clarifying 😅

You can have a pause menu that is different from your inventory menu. (For example mapped to the + and - buttons respectively.) Or even maybe you can pause to access your inventory but only to equip items that you then have to use in real time.

This end up making playing less experimental. It’s easier to access the favourites than browsing the full menu. I suggest also have a recommended option that have not only favourited item suitable for that situation, but others as well. Besides, add a secondary menu for items of the same type would be nice instead of putting them in the same menu

It stills feels like, based on the design of these games, that pausing is built in to the gameplay, which to my mind, is not good. I think less menu-ing is one way to fix that but the other is not designing games with soooooooooooo many tools.

Sounds like a pretty good system. I like the idea of the two inventories, where one is more purposeful and one is bulk. It makes you have to be strategic instead of just pausing and pausing...and pausing.

Oh no then it becomes too much like ARK: Survival and I don't know if I could handle that 🤣

Certainly seems like they're trying!

That was the Wii U 🤣 In all seriousness, the Switch 2 seems ripe to make the 3DS/Wii U/dual screen thing the best it can be.

*hears siren noises in the distance*

The Wii U was sweet, my buddy had one and I watched him play BOTW on it when it debuted for hours on end. Watching someone play a great game can be just as fun as playing it and having the second screen was an awesome feature. It’s sad that you cant do that with the switch while playing on a TV

The Nintendo HDS

@@terdfergeson23 botw doesn't have a second screen mode for botw though, it only switches the tv output to the gamepad and vice versa

Then what is the point of combat at all? They didn't add enemies for the sake of relaxation. I think you would have a point if you were talking about Animal Crossing but Zelda games have always had plenty of action combat where reaction time matters even if they are not meant to be super hard. Regardless of whether the game is supposed to be easy or hard, pause menu healing during live action is just bad design. Doing lots of stuff in menus can work for a turn based game where the flow of combat is supposed to be constantly pausing anyway but Zelda games are not turn based. It is not fun to need to go into a pause menu during live combat, pausing should only be necessary when you need to leave the game for a moment or want some time to think.

I agree that the combat doesn't have to be fast paced but I would also argue that the constant pausing doesn't work as well in the newer Zelda games. The classic games had all of your items on one screen, making it super easy to see them all right there and quickly map it to a button. These new games have such a bloated menu that you are guaranteed to scroll through a list to find what you need almost every time. It just wastes more of my time every time I pause the game, which still ends up being a lot

I disagree that these are games you are meant to 'lay back and relax with.' Zelda is about adventure. That could mean finding a cave with a frog in it or fighting a camp of enemies. But if I want to feel like I'm immersed in the game, regardless of whether it's hectic or easy-going, I don't want to be shuffling through menus. It's less about difficulty and more about immersion.

@@LittleBeanGreen To me, Zelda is about exploring with moments of action

@@elio7610 I see more moments of walking, running, swimming and climbing than fighting. I guess it depends how a person plays it. Combat is there, but a player isn't forced into it. What I mean laid back is that you choose when to do most things. No time limit or urgency in defeating enemies.