For this to be a good idea Nintendo would need to fix their analog sticks. Flashbacks to constantly selecting the wrong tool in Animal Crossing New Horizons.
It's been a long time since I've played TP but when I remembered that had a scroll wheel I almost couldn't believe it (after botw/totk and their menus). I definitely think that's a better solution in terms of menu-ing, but I also think it'd be great to reduce pausing in general.
@@LittleBeanGreenSS showed that you don't need to pause to use a selection wheel. If they had pointer controls on their next joycon and pro controllers as well as scroll wheels replacing shoulder buttons they could really nail it I think. I'd add that as well as meals/portions being consumed in real time that there should be done kind of limit to how much you can eat/drink in a certain amount of time, either a consumption cooldown or something more analogue like a fullness meter. Don't eat too many snacks Link, you won't have room for your octarok steak dinner!
It would be even worse than a straight line if it had all the options that TotK and EoW had (and BotW to a lesser extent). And TP itself had a problem with leaving irrelevant items on the scroll wheel, taking up unnecessary space.
Twilight Princess had it right with the weapon wheel. Skyward Sword perfected it with no pausing and a smaller wheel for consumables/shields. I don't know why Nintendo makes us pick through huge menus for everything with no favorites tab or anything for the 100s of items in Botw/Totk and Echoes.
I think its just design oversight to be honest. I would be willing to bet that the ui and menu navigate is thought up first and they don't think about it after that. Meaning that nobody makes adjustment after all the selectable items have been coded into the UI
The wild part to me is that they DO implement a favorites list for AutoBuilds but nothing more. And that’s probably only because unsaved builds (aside from the ones you get from the Yiga clan) disappear as the list grows.
My biggest criticism of Echoes of Wisdom was not being able to make custom presets for echoes. Having to search for a single echoes for 30 second was a massive pace breaker
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
That's not even to touch on the annoying menuing of BotW and TotK's cooking and equipment upgrades (and to a lesser extent, EoW's smoothie is about as bad). Having to go through half a dozen lines of dialogue, select an item to upgrade (or make), watch an animation, get a fanfare for the item you upgraded/made, confirm you want to do more with some dialogue... really makes what could be a simple and quick process a lot more tedious.
I'll never understand that about any game. Monster Hunter is another good example. Gotta eat before hunts and sure, the animation is neat the first time, but why in the world is there no auto skip option who on earth wants to watch it every. Single. Hunt. For. Eternity???
@@LittleBeanGreen ooooh the horse time trial minigame in Echoes of Wisdom having to wait for Falfa to nod for five seconds each time you want to play again... made getting the first course's top prize agonizing.
@@damiencouturee6240 Some of them are different for events, and it's part of the experience. It's also always skippable, so it takes little time to skip. It's not too bad. The more major issue was base MH World where you had to walk to the lever to get up there in the first place. Setting it to the hub and Iceborne helped with this. MH Frontier Z (Japanese/Chinese MMO MH game) actually had Bentos, which acted like a party wide meal and is probably what you are more after. But MH is very focused on the experience of being in the world, so I don't see them doing this in mainline sadly.
as much as i dislike the Wilds games UI, i have to say that using abilities felt good. once you knew where an ability was, it was quick to switch between them without slowing combat. i would have loved to see that implemented elsewhere, especially with weapons. take your idea of favoriting weapons or ammo types. having a quick menu like the abilities would make combat much more seamless
Skyward Sword's item wheels are a great feature that translates very well into analog stick gameplay. They are real time, easy to navigate, give you a limited number of options, and can easily have upgradable capacity. I personally think that it makes sense to have a "quick- inverntory" in the form of item wheels for selecting weapons, healing items, abilities etc, and a "storage inventory" where you can store more items, but cannot use them without first equipping them to your quick- inventory. I think both inventories should be in real time, so that if you open the storage inventory in the middle of a fight, you have to be really quick to be able to move items to your quick- inventory without getting killed, then you have to select the item from the item wheel to be able to use it. This would prevent you from being effectively invincible so long as you just keep pausing the game to heal, and would also encourage you to plan ahead what items you want to bring along before you get into battle.
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.
I think another issue with EoW specifically is imbalance. The game encourages you to be creative and use various echoes to solve various problems. That's great. The issue is that some echoes just kinda suck lol. Obviously not all of them can be great but there are some that are just so bad that I pretty much never use them and mainly stick to, like, the same 10 echoes, at most. So the game wants you to use a variety of solutions, but some solutions are simply not practical compared to others.
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.
Honestly, a big part of it is the limitations of gamepads. Terraria and Stardew are (primarily) PC games, where you have a keyboard (dozens of buttons that even non-gamers are familiar with) and mouse (point directly at the item you want) to eliminate the main annoyances of games with many potential actions. Button-combos and select wheels can help... but those were the main reason I couldn't finish TotK. You still need multiple inputs for every action, it's more elegant than a menu but also harder to remember. Echoes needed at least 3 active slots for summons, and a 2D grid to select them from instead of one giant line. TotK was kinda just too complicated for its own good.
The point about PC games is a good one and something I didn't even consider. There were times where I was playing totk and I had to stop and remember what buttons to push to do what I wanted.
What if they made a system using the down button on the d-pad for healing like other games, however in the actual pause screen you can map which food item you want to eat since each item gives different amounts of hearts
I would prefer to have many options like the cooking gives you, but you need to place them into quick access that is limited to like 4 slots and you heal without pausing. This also would allow to balance the difficulty much better. In TOTK the enemies often hit harder than in Dark Souls, so you kind of need this giant supply of food. But because they usually don't one shot you, it turns into: you get hit, you eat, repeat until win.
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?
Not pausing in BotW/TotK would've been awesome. But that style game would benefit from a Monster Hunter Style pouch, make it so you have a huge store of items but away from camps or towns you'd only have a limited pouch keeping what you need to scroll through low and not letting you keep 100 Potions to heal for free
If the next zelda game continues with the BOTW-style itemization and menuing, I think it would be interesting if they used a Resident Evil type grid for inventory. To be more player friendly, let’s say link would have two grids: one for equipment, one for resource. Your equipment grid would hold weapons, armor, quivers, bomb bags and utility items (torches, pickaxes, Korok leaves, an instrument for horse calling etc…). While your resource grid holds materials (wood, stone, ore, etc), food, cooked dishes, potions, and raw ingredients/material for such. This would theoretically encourage freedom in a way BOTW’s menus could not, since it’s an empty grid you can use and fill however you wish, with limited space being the only really limit. This also makes itemization more meaningful since you have to decide what to keep and what to leave behind as you adventure. And what you do choose to keep determines how well you can adapt to any given encounter, making preparation meaningful as well. Also-also, the extremely limited space makes it so that the divisive mechanic that which is weapon durability is no longer needed, as extremely limited inventory space is already enough of a limitation. Therefore, the actual freedom to prepare however you want BEFORE encounters is now what is encouraged and emphasized, as opposed to the “freedom” to be creative and adaptive DURING encounters because your options are forcefully (ironically) taken away from you through durability… Also-also-also, limited carry space for food means that you can’t spam heal to brute force encounters. Regardless of whether or not menuing pauses game time. All in all, I think that an RE-style inventory grid seems to rectify most if not all issues that come with the menuing format of recent Zelda games, without really having any of its own issues. At least on paper. Though RE used its inventory system for survival horror reasons, I think it would be an interesting idea if a Zelda game used a similar system for survival adventure instead.
NONONONONO... Don't Multi-Bind Buttons. I have NEVER seen a good implementation of multi-binding. You mix Abilities on one Button, that have nothing to do with each other. Grapple hook and boost jump may go together, because they are both movement based, but don't you mix in an attack on the same button
You know how ultrahand can be used to stick stuff together but also in battle pull stuff apart? I'm thinking of it more like that...there isn't an actual 'attack' so much as one ability has more than one application. Maybe it's the same problem you're speaking of but I'm not sure it is. Someone will have to build a proof of concept.
@@LittleBeanGreen (needless to say, this is all my subjectiv opinion) "Ultrahand" did basically one thing. Grab something and move it. The "glue together" or "pull apart" is context sensitivity, which is fine. I have thought about the problem and actually I have played a game that had Multi binds (well kinda) done right, which is Mario 64. You could combine "Duck" (Z) and "Jump" (A) in various context sensitiv ways ways (Long Jump, High Backflip,....) Combining distinctiv actions to new actions is a good example for (kinda) Multibind a key Thing is, I don't know which button I'm actually pressing to jump. I press the "Jump"-Button. When the game tells me to jump, it's an easy task for me. If the game tells me to press the 'A' button... i have to look at the controller (I'm really bad in most quick time events) If I did understand you correctly, you said you wanted a Main-Button for the Item (with multiple distinct abilities), and a selector (on a secondary-Button) for which power of that item to use. I'd turn that around. Use main Buttons (A,B,X,Y) only for basic acions (jump,attack, interact) or customizable basic items (bow, boomerang, sword, shield...) and secondary buttons (L,ZL,R,ZR, arrow buttons) to infuse the basic action with a special ability or magic (which might be customisable on its own, if you want to have more than one type of magic)
@@blackshaddow5005 Hm interesting. and fair enough. I'm not tied to which button does the trick as long as the trick can be done, as it were (and save me some pausing and menuing).
no pause advantage, that also means locking out gear switching once combat starts until combat ends (like how kingdom hearts works where pausing in combat blocks access to any menus while in combat)
I like the idea of real-time item usage, but a bullet-time slowdown for inventory management… so perhaps if you go through all of your prepared healing items in the midst of a fight, you can still conceivably reload, but you don’t have unlimited time to do so. also, a type of “fullness” meter could be nice, so you have to choose and time your healing item usage carefully, rather than just cramming down apples by the dozen every time you take a hit 🤷🏻♂️
Skyward Sword was definitely on the right track for item selection, but it meant every item had to put you into a specific mode, making them a little less snappy to use. That kinda system would be cool to see in a 2D Zelda game where there's more item buttons, but it would prove annoying as you'd have to move your thumb back and forth between the right stick and face buttons.
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.
@@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.
@@LittleBeanGreen BotW and TotK are slow games. You are supposed to take your time with them, so I don't mind if I spend a few minutes every session scrolling through the menus.
@@LittleBeanGreen adventure games are generally slower games. You are allowed to choose the way you approach your quests and puzzles but the core of the game remains the same.
game developer and zelda fan here: modern zelda needs to give too many options because AAA titles diferentiate themselves by the ability of the studio of making lots and lots of assets. breath of the wild initate a new trend in zelda, huge world and lots of equipament and itens. in old zeldas every item matter, it was almost like one diferent mechanic each. in modern zelda is not that much. in the echoes of wisdom they made basicly almost all game assets into itens. this is WAY diferent from the old zelda. zelda needs now huge menus, cant be avoided, because they arent making anymore each item unique. But I truly liked your gamedesign concept of having more options easily accessible than usual
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 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
One solution for healing could be to embrace the "eating food for health" angle differently by converting the hearts gained to a seperate resource. These will be a kind of vitality that is called upon with a single button press during battle, limited in healing amount and frequency according to what you ate (and possibly an upgradeable stamina-like mechanic). Actually eating the meal swould take long enough to not be viable in combat at all - solving that "eat 100 apples in 0.5 seconds" bit of weirdness. Special effects of food could also be reserved for when they are needed instead of set on a timer. What's nice about this is you can use food this way but also have (a limited nber of) potions for immediate emergency healing - returning value and importance to that more classic feature.
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.
I'm a be real, having to hold down a button to access a menu is the problem. Every time I hold down the Dpad to bring up the "quick menu" I am reminded of how horrible the idea is in practice. Having multiple mappable buttons is the solution. There are at least 10 different buttons that could be mapped to a single power/item: Dpad, L/LZ/R/RZ, and if we are being totally honest, X/Y Leaving +/- to access the deep menu is just fine. And 10 quick access points is beyond reasonable. It would also help if they trimmed down the unnecessary gimmicks. Like why are Clockworks even a thing in EoW?
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.
Another reason why I believe Majora's Mask deserves some more props is that I think the transformation masks help mitigate this issue. Example: The Zora is both the boomerang and iron boots tied in one item slot. Although admittedly, the game isn't perfect (cough cough switching between Fire and Ice Arrows) I sure do hope this is an issue the Zelda dev team pays attention to in the future.
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 have to disagree on the context sensitivity thing. The lack of context sensitive abilities was a deliberate choice by developers and an integral part of BotW dynamic gameplay and game feel. The lack of context sensitivity is modern Zelda's special sauce and what sets it apart from other open world games.
so do you think in a game where the ocean is a huge part of the world, and unlike botw where you can't explore underwater, that if you had abilities that worked differently when completely submerged that that would make a game feel less dynamic?
3 - Non-advantageous pausing-is that really what we want from games? Restricting the ability to change equipment or use items mid-game feels unnecessarily limiting. It blocks players from enjoying the game in the way they want. When I started playing Zelda, I used advantageous pausing to help defeat bosses. Over time, as I improved, I chose not to rely on it anymore. This feature helped me learn without resorting to the tedious "run back to the boss" mechanic seen in Souls games-a process that adds little value once you've already cleared the area. If a player wants to "cheese" a boss, they'll find a way regardless. In Souls games, for example, you can upgrade weapons to make bosses trivial, often defeating them in under five hits. Should we remove weapon upgrades because of that? Of course not; it’s an option for the player to explore. Yeah, some shortcuts for making changes in real-time would be cool, but I don’t want inventory management optimization to become something I have to master in every game I play. 5 - Limit our options - Zelda Botw and TOTK are games that aim to have limitless options, this is bonkers to say. The other points are valid.
I am not advocating for NO mid-game pausing, just some limits on what or when. I think there needs to be some balance, because being able to pause to get out of a tough spot, paradoxically, blocks me from enjoying the game the way I'd like. Zelda games are also incredibly generous with when and where the player can save and the 'run back to the boss' mechanic (that I also don't like in other games) can be completely avoided by having the game autosave directly before a boss. I've never played any of the Souls games but I imagine that the upgrade system is demanding in that being weaker and taking longer to kill a boss might take as long as being so strong you kill it in give hits but it takes a long time to upgrade. I don't even think bosses need to be 'cheesed' but could be designed to be beaten in a multitude of ways. I'm also not advocating for making pausing and menuing optimized to oblivion, but in a game like Echoes of Wisdom where you have to open your menu every time you have to make a decision (and because you can 'play your own way,' every move could be a choice), that's too much menuing. That may very well be their design philosophy, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with it, especially in a game like totk where there are hundreds of items and, because puzzles have so many solutions, many can be solved in the same way. To me, that isn't interesting. I'm also not advocating for a game that is botw or totk, but a conceptual next Zelda game, one where I don't have to pause every 2 seconds.
This can easily be fixed in both TOTK and Echoes. Change the first level inventory slider to only be items you’ve selected to be there with a secondary press brining up the full menu. That would give players freedom to speed up menu flow as a payoff for better understanding what they need in battle. Worse players would still have the full menu at the cost of more inefficient menu scrolling, so there would be a real world incentive to get good.
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.
It's baffling to me that Nintendo already solved this issue with Skyward Sword's item wheel but then reverted back to a tedious system. And they're clearly willing to learn, since they changed Link's abilities to a wheel in TOTK, compared to the linear menu from BOTW. To me, Monster Hunter's 5th generation already adressed this issue very well. The series has always struggled with item management until World. But they always made them a limited ressource that you can carry on yourself and being taken in real time while the monster can attack you. This not only prevents trivializing the game's healing, but it also makes it rewarding by comparison, because knowing when to heal is a skill in and of itself that you need to learn. Other games that also have lots of menuing and/or item management streamlined it in a rewarding way like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 with its fusion arts system instead of the single line from Xenoblade 1 and X. As you suggested, it can be done in various ways, either changing specific keys when you maintain a trigger pressed, or by using the right stick like Monster Hunter does nowadays. This way you could have preselected types of meals / clothing / potions preset on your radial menu shortcuts to use in the middle of a fight, but not have access to your entire inventory. You don't necessarly need to make it a lot more difficult by having a limited inventory like Monster Hunter or Skyward Sword. Simply prevent opening your full inventory to setup your radial menus when you're in a combat encounter. This way you could still spend the time you need setting up your shortcuts when you're just chilling in a safe place.
Item wheels are the way to go! (as long as the joysticks work correctly 😅) A game that uses a mixture of this and the paused inventory menu is Phoenotopia: Awakening (a 2D Zelda-like. It's good, play it). You have a limited inventory for food (healing) and loot, and a separate one for tools/weapons. You can equip items from the menu, or you can set them on a wheel of eight items to fast-equip them without pausing. So you have a selection of eight items/weapons to keep the action fluid but you still need preparation for the right healing items since your inventory is limited and eating takes time. Technically this last point is a difficulty option. You can set it so that you are allowed to eat in the menu, but the points about quick weapon changing and limited inventory still stands. To get back to the topic of the video, honestly I don't have a problem with pausing when item scrolling, as long as it's well implemented. I would prefer a limited number of different items, but when the inventories are as big as they are in the last Zelda games, not being able to pause to select an item would ruin the experience and discourage me even more from engaging in combat.
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.
This is not really a "big zelda problem." More a reality of adventure games. Don't really see the need to have an overcomplicated pausing system in Zelda. ❤
While the 3ds was solid for item management, I didn’t like that it paused the game. Now the Wii U, that solved all my issues. Having everything on the gamepad in WWHD and TPHD was amazing. Never having to pause the game to look at the map (especially in the boat) or quickly drag items into the slots was so seamless. I fully believe that BotW had these features scrapped so the Switch version would be better, and they did show the map working like this in 2015. I also feel that WWHD and TPHD would be slightly worse on Switch, but will still be nice for more people to play them.
The newer monster hunter games have fully customizable radial menus for drinking potions all the way to crafting items on the go, alongside a quick select item bar. If totk and botw had customizable radial menus they would be so much more enjoyable
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.
I played RPGs so many times, I kind don't have the problem with going to through menus. I pretty much know what I'm going to do before I need to do it, and it's rare I can't find what I'm looking for (and I usually don't need half the crap the game gives me even though I'm a big item user).
Here is the thing: the more open the games, the more vapid, useless item baggage we will get to give the illusion of choice and openness. The more trash we can get in the modern empty worlds, the worse this problem will be. Better UI like an item wheel or favorite list will only go so far, but the more stupid trash we can get in game, the worse this problem will be. Thank you for making me hate open air even more now, just goes to show zelda lost its magic, and details like this are why.
The thing is, open-world is the logical continuation for Zelda. Exploration is in its foundations, and honestly, BOTW/TOTK were the first Zelda games since the 2D Zeldas to nail that aspect (it's especially clear when you see BOTW/TOTK map is made like 2D Zelda, with the whole world fitting into a square/rectangle and not something with a central place and corridors for each "region" to try to emulate a feeling of exploration that is actually artificial) You can do open-world in various ways too and Nintendo will definitely demonstrate that with the next 3D Zelda game
The only thing I can think to solve this is the game has an learning system to assist the player. Exemple: when you arrive in a cold ambience and open the menu, it opens instantly in the rito set to be switched. But if instead you’re fighting a Lynel in cold, it opens instantly in a cold resistance recipe so you can keep the defense of the atual gear.
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.
Me and my sister are developing a 2D zelda-esque and have attepted to address these problems... We consolidated 22 key items into 8 items that have multiple actions (i.e. the bow can also fire sleep darts or a grappling hook) through upgrades. Holding Y will bring up an item wheel with 8 slots. One can select by pointing the Dpad and then releasing X. Then the different actions are performed with Y, A, and B. Other inventory like healing items, maps, etc. has been grouped into 8 categories that are handled similiarly with the Dpad in a menu accessed with -
@@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 disagree with the no pause healing. The wild games were already heartbreaking to play for some people I know who grew up playing and loving lower difficulty games like wind waker, twilight princess and skyward sword and could already barely get through the wild games as is. This would have just made it a game entirely not for what used to be zelda fans.
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.
@@gydgeza8646 I feel like the vast majority of deaths in the Wild games come from getting 1-shot, which usually just makes it feel like you're doing an encounter way under-equipped (unless it's a death due to random explosives lol). If you're not getting 1-shot, food is pretty much so abundant after a few hours that you might as well just instantly pause and fully heal. I reckon the older Zelda games' more limited healing item slots made the encounter balance much better, along with there being only a few places in the game you can actually create/buy potions. You only had maybe a few potions which heal like 5+ hearts at a time which you don't want to waste straight away, so you often go between encounters at half health. Your playstyle changes at low health as you try to risk fighting more enemies hoping they'll drop hearts, or you play more defensively by weaving around enemies, hoping to make it to the next safe area. That tension from the risk/reward is extremely compelling. To BotW's credit, the insane 1-shot damage of the Guardians actually worked in their favor, making them really intense and fun encounters. It's a shame TotK doesn't really have an equivalent (maybe the hand enemies? ehh)
In BOTW style games meals shouldn't heal you but regenerate hearts over time for the 24 minute day and grant long lasting weak buffs. Potions should be instant healing in battle or short lasting strong buffs but limited to the number of bottles you've collected
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!
Real-time swapping is what multiplayer Zelda-likes need. Pausing in the middle of a game usually frustrates the other players around you. The Mana series is doubly guilty of its stop-and-go gameplay because you have to dig items and spells out of a menu in most cases. That being said, in my own personal experience, using the shoulder buttons one-push-at-a-time to sift through item menus in real-time is a bad idea when you've got a boss chasing you. I've made a game that does that, and it made me want to push the Pause button to get what I need. Then again, my goal with that game was making a multiplayer Zelda-like that, if necessary, can control both characters with one XBox controller when playing solo.
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 didn’t have an issue with totk menu scrolling since you don’t need that many different arrow head but echoes of wisdom echoes scrolling is pretty bad and that’s the only big flaw with the game. I do wish for a Zelda game with less interruptions. They need gameplay ideas that don’t require a giant inventory lol
Thoughts: * Thank you for pointing out that pausing's always been a problem, even in the pre-Wild games. * Cross Code looks like it learned from the Style Switch from Devil May Cry in 4-onward (later backported to 3's re-releases). * THE BIG ONE: That's really a bold statement asking that Zelda outright LIMITS options. But honestly, I actually agree to some extent. It feels like the Wild Era games swapped out those "filler" Rupee chests with "weak" materials, which is better for worldbuilding but sucks for inventory clutter. I think they should focus on making a few extremely versatile items (even "small/expendable" items) instead of overspecialized items, problems that TP and SS suffer in their "tools" and BotW, TotK, and EoW suffer in their "small items."
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.
They can double the number of Item slots by allowing you to assign two Items per button where you hold another button to switch between them. For example let's say you have a bow and bomb assigned to the LT C button. Pressing the button alone let's you use the bow. But holding L and pressing LT C button gives you bombs. This makes you go to the menu far less often and makes gameplay smoother.
I have no problem with how the old games use items but i dont like how breath of the wild games brake items and gives you too mutch healing and the game feels less like zelda and closer too something like elder scrolls. Good games in there own right but if i want too play somethimg thatvis not zelda i wouldnt play a zelda game and i would feel the same if elder scrolls made a game similer too the old zelda games they need too stop
Fair enough. I think the 2D games, especially Link's Awakening and the Oracle games have a lot of pausing for item swapping but it certainly isn't worse than the latest installments.
I think the best i've seen in the OOT romhacks is one that keeps the standard 3 Cs for main item usage, then adds alot of other options to the D-pad, things that are like toggles, masks, eye of truth, or switching equipment, and they made it so the L buttom switched the D-pad between two sets of 4 items, and pressing an equipment button could cycle through the equipment on the fly, e.g. normal boots, iron boots, hover boots, normal boots again, repeat. And that 2-level D-pad is 8 options accessible easily! Skyward sword definitely made the game feel the least likely to have interrupted flow. Two circle menus complete with a little tied motion control goes MILES forwards in progress. That non-interruptive menu navigating was SMOOTH.
@@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 don’t understand why they don’t have a radial menu kinda like TP/SS except they could nest items into categories. You could quickly select a category in the radial menu & then keep ‘blooming’ it deeper & deeper until you get to what you want. It would be like 3 quick flicks of the wrist (using the gyroscope).
Xenoblade 2 and 3 handle ability swapping really well Each attack is set to a face button input, you can set which attack goes to which input In 2 you have a group of options on the d pad to swap to different sets of attacks to take over the face buttons which you can also set the positioning of While in 3 you have a preset order of swapping between characters and different movesets, 3 more attacks set to the dpad, and holding the trigger buttons brings up a whole other set of attack and ability options on every button
@LittleBeanGreen it's the series that heavily inspired BotW/TotK and made by the same development studio, some of the best and biggest games Nintendo has ever put out
Yeah I don't mean that they aren't boots, but they are on a separate screen where they can't be equipped in real time (like the hookshot or bow etc.). Instead you have to go into the menu and 'take' them on and off.
I love Zelda 64, I think they need to go back to basics with a similar direction as that game but just expand on what was so loved about OOT. The mechanics and ideas of OOT, with the size of botw.
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.
The developers just came out and said they made that long string of echoes so that you would have to run through them and maybe find new ones you'd want to experiment with...while I understand that rationale, I still think it's dumb.
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 i would fix fuse is adding autofuse and add a favorite items category thag you can make to quick select an item without needing to scroll for ages. Autofuse works when you hold your bow and go in to fuse menu and press Y while on lets say a fire fruit. You would now have that itam be locked in as your auto fuse material which would be shown in a small icon on the creen so you dont forget that you still have it on. This goes away as soon as you put your bow away, auto fuse should be something you do deliberately and not in a pinch, for that spamming regular arowss exists. But you you got the distance you go activate autofuse and you can rain down a hailstorm of fused arows.
@LittleBeanGreen they should bring it back in some shape or form. I don't want to go back having my inventory be filled with 999 monster parts because they practically do nothing. I can live without ultrahand in the next game but I just hope fuse returns even if it's only limited to arrows.
Healing "Do you think they could have implemented a 'limited healing items during combat' rule with a cooldown timer? For example, maybe you could use up to five healing items per minute or two. This would allow you to pause to heal, but you wouldn’t be able to fully restore health at will, avoiding the spamming of healing items while paused. Another approach might be a slight slowdown mechanic while healing in real time, giving the player a bit of buffer without fully pausing the game. I wonder what other workarounds could be available if a developer thought real-time healing was too punishing, but spamming items while paused was too easy. Of course, there could be drawbacks. With the slowdown mechanic, players might exploit it to slow down combat and gain extra reaction time. And with the timed item limit, it might feel restrictive or messy if players feel limited by a timer rather than skill-based actions like running to a safe spot to heal. But maybe with the right balance, one of these approaches could work. Another idea for real-time healing could be to adjust the speed at which healing occurs. Healing could be made very fast, even if players could still technically take damage while healing. The time it takes to heal could be adjusted to be as slow or as fast as developers find appropriate. (And, of course, this is assuming blocking healing while the game is paused, in combat). Quick Menus These are great points. I didn’t notice many issues with the quick menus in Breath of the Wild since they were mainly for switching weapons, shields, and bows. With a set maximum number of each, it rarely felt overwhelming-maybe a bit near the end of the game. But in Tears of the Kingdom, I’ve definitely noticed the 'lag' of scrolling through the quick menu for the Fuse ability, with so many items available. This menu, designed for quick, intuitive access, can feel tedious as the list grows, making it harder to find specific items. With an optimally sized list, though, I think these menus are fantastic! I really liked them in Breath of the Wild because they kept the immersion intact. Instead of fully pausing in the inventory, you could quickly switch weapons or items on the fly. Radial Menus vs. Linear Menus Some people might feel that radial menus would improve these quick-access options, but I think the linear format works best as long as there aren’t too many items. Radial menus tend to be more limiting because they only hold a few options comfortably and require precise control, like moving diagonally. This can make them challenging to use in fast-paced gameplay, especially if joystick drift is a factor. In contrast, the linear format in Breath of the Wild works well because it allows you to scroll left and right quickly, giving access to a few more options without feeling cluttered. It’s easy to understand and feels intuitive, even for new players. Radial menus also require remembering where items are positioned in 2D space, which can feel more complex than a straightforward left-to-right list. With the linear format-especially when the list is a manageable length-it’s easy to navigate and keeps players immersed in the game. I think Nintendo made the right choice in Breath of the Wild by using a list for quick swaps. It maintains accessibility, and as long as the list doesn’t get too long, it really does feel like the quickest option! Multi-Binding Inputs As pointed out by blackshaddow5005 in the comments, while your controller scheme idea might sound okay at first, I’d agree that it could become very messy and hard to remember which buttons handle what. It requires a lot of abstract thinking (constantly remapping everything) and isn’t as intuitive as having modifiers that adjust the specific function of a button. The modifier buttons can affect each button/action in different ways. This approach is more intuitive because the player can remember each button and its associated action, along with its modified variants. This avoids the need to set buttons repeatedly and risk forgetting the current layout, which can make it hard to keep track of what each button does. It sounds like you might be thinking of the way many Zelda games let players set certain items to specific buttons and use them directly. But that approach is simple-set a button once, and it’s ready when needed. What you suggested, though, involves a list of options tied to each button. So, rather than simply setting a button with an action, you would need to remember how to access the list, then set the action, and then use it. It’s more abstract, which makes it less intuitive than simply having a button with a main action and modifiers for variations. The shoulder buttons (L, R, ZL, ZR) work great as modifier buttons. You might think you can access more options the way you planned it (clicking A, B, or X to set Y while holding a shoulder button like R), but you could use each shoulder button to get four additional actions on top of the default action (e.g., L + Y, R + Y, ZL + Y, ZR + Y, and Y alone). That’s five options instead of just three. If some of these shoulder buttons are already assigned specific functions (like ZL for targeting), you might have fewer options available, but it would likely still be more intuitive-and probably still offer more options-than the alternative approach. If you’re worried about each of these shoulder buttons having context-specific functions (like R for a special variant of an action and ZL, ZR, or L for something else entirely) and only want a single button like Y for a certain set of actions, then you might be more limited in your options. But it seems you’d still benefit from this approach in terms of how much more intuitive it is. It feels like you tried to take the 'set item' concept from inventory management and apply it in an abstract way to 'set button' in a list of abstract buttons, which isn’t as clear to the player as it could be. Another idea is to use the D-Pad to change out a set of the A, B, X, Y buttons. Pressing the Right D-Pad button, for instance, could map these primary buttons to all of the Y-related actions you wanted. However, changing out sets like this comes with its own drawbacks. If you have primary actions that you’d like the player to always be able to perform, like jumping, this approach might not be ideal since it could interfere with those core actions.
I agree that the one giant horizontal bar only method of item selection in Tears of the Kingdom is awful, and there are definitely ways it could be done better. And I agree that there is too much item selection in Zeldas overall and I am super happy whenever an item gets a dedicated button rather than being manually equipped/selected like the Pegasus shoes. Or is just a totally passive upgrade. Less manually swapping which items are currently mapped to a button = more good. But, and this is a huge all caps level but, I ABSOLUTELY HATE REALTIME ITEM SELECTION. IN EVERY GAME THAT USES IT EVER. Seriously, no matter how good the game otherwise is, if it makes me select items (or equipment or spells etc) in real time, it's like walking around with a shard of glass in my shoe that can't be removed. (Lookin' at you, every From Soft game.) So while improvements are needed, realtime item selection is the most opposite of an improvement there can be under current control standards, and should never be done short of the game being able to read my mind and thereby skip selection menus entirely. A dedicated button combination for each item slot is acceptable as well, but that also would be basically skipping selection menus for that matter. So really, the point is that in-game time passing and moving a cursor around and/or scrolling through menus should never mix. EVER. Letting you pause to select stuff, even if the selection menus themselves could be sooooo much more efficient and direct, is really the only thing Zeldas always do right in that regard. For example, I'm playing Hyrule Warriors Definite Edition right now, and I like a lot about it, but I hate having to select the items in realtime, even like a hundred hours in, with their order fully memorized. Pretty much means I almost never use them except against giant bosses where they're totally necessary. I get selecting in realtime when you're playing co-op, but there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't be able to pause to switch items when you're playing single player. And that goes for all games. Optional paused item selection would be legally required for all games when playing singleplayer if it were up to me. I feel that strongly. With all that being said though, I do agree that INSTANTLY using items from within paused menus, for example healing items, can cause a balance issue. Though even then, paused item usage is still a much, much lesser evil than realtime item selection regardless, it's like choosing between being shot with a nerf gun and a real gun. But the good news is that you don't need horrible realtime item selection to solve the lesser problem of instant apple eating- Just have the game pause while you're in the item menu, but then play the flask drinking or eating animation in real, unpaused time once you've selected and chosen the healing item from the pause menu. That's the way to go if you ask me: Pause to navigate menus and select what you want to use, unpause and play the usage animation once you've made your selection. There's no reason that pausing for menus and usage animations can't coexist, which gets you the best of both worlds.
Yeah I don't actually like picking items in real time. I think the Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask way of doing things for the most part was pretty good - you had items you could pick in real time without having to resort to a menu.
☝😺 Yes! Menu scrolling is why I havn't picked up Echoes, I became burnt out from TOTK's menus. Imagine playing one of the Wild games with just your basic skills and no menu items..
I find the menu of EOW tedious as well, but it forced me to think through problems, and it's pretty minor compared to how enjoyable the rest of the game is! I hope you'll pick it up eventually.
My experience with EoW was: early on there weren't that many echoes, so you could open up the full menu and see them all in a boxed grid; mid-game there were too many and most of the time you were just scrolling through menus and throwing things at the wall to see what stuck; late game you had a handful of really powerful things and that's all you used... But I still enjoyed it.
it's been awhile since I've played that came so I can't speak too decisively about my feelings on it....but there were definitely waaaaaaaaaay to many things to collect and organize - something totk doubled down on
I agree with the problem, but am strongly against the solutions. It's a whole bunch of complexity that reduced the flow of the games just as much as the problems they're trying to avoid.
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.
Being able to pause the game and heal at any time is pretty much the only reason I was able to beat breath of the wild and tears of the Kingdom. It's balanced because you have to farm for all of those materials.
Honestly question, do you actually enjoy face-tanking damage with healing items? I don't see why it wouldn't it just be better for enemies hit less hard.
@@LittleBeanGreen if the game is also rebalanced so that a stray shot won't immediately cripple your health yes, but in a game where most basic creatures will two shot you, that sounds like it would be sadistic. We don't need zelda to turn into dark souls.
@@gydgeza8646 that may be true for the early game but as soon as you get any semblance of an armor upgrade, this trivializes most enemies. I still don't think strong enemies is more of an issue than pausing to heal and I think it can still work out where the difficulty isn't dark souls, but also not brainless.
@elio7610 I’m aware of that. But ever heard of the saying back in 03: “Unless you got three hands, you can only carry two weapons. [Beside your sidearm and grenades.]” And most just took all of that away! Now who says I can’t hold a 2nd screen gamepad with two hands in real life? Frankly, even FPS titles can benefit for weapon selection with the gamepad in mind.
My All Time Zelda Ranking 🛡️🙏 #1 Majora’s Mask #2 Twilight Princess #3 A Link Between Worlds #4 Ocarina of Time #5 Breath of the Wild #6 A Link To The Past #7 Minish Cap #8 Zelda 2: Adventure of Link #9 Link’s Awakening #10 Original Legend of Zelda #11 Skyward Sword #12 Tears of the Kingdom #13 Oracle of Seasons #14 Oracle of Ages #15 Phantom Hourglass #16 Wind Waker #17 Echoes of Wisdom #18 Four Swords Adventure #19 Spirit Tracks #20 Four Swords #21 Triforce Heroes
It’s so funny because this is an extreme version of one of the biggest issues in og ocarina of time. That they then fixed in the remakes. (Most of the Zelda remakes of the Wii U 3ds era fixed menuing) Now look at where we ended up 😂
Don't worry the next Zelda will take one of your suggestions and make you scroll through a menu of 504 items in real time. The strategy is to never select a new item in combat. 😂
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
I'm sorry but this video is kinda like a mess Why is it bad to give too many options? If a game wants to give more options than it needs to, so some players can be extra creative, then why is it a bad thing? Also, what is the vision and intent behind BoTW and ToTK? Do they want every single player to have to worry when to heal? I've beaten Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne and Elden Ring, and I would have dies multiple times in BoTW if I was vulnerable while healing. Is BoTW supposed to be a demanding game to play in that sense? Sure I would like that change, but I don't think it would be a good change for BoTW. I think it is part of the game to make food, get materials to upgrade stuff... So opening the menu, and being able to choose which speed buff to chose is fine by me. If it is freezing, I also think its fine to be able to select which of the 5 meals I have for cold resistance without the time passing as I die of cold. At the end of the day, it comes down to the vision the developers had behind the game. If they don't want to lean that much to action with so much precise and highly demanding combat skills, then they won't do that, and they are not wrong. I played Final Fantasy XV and took me more than 1000 hours to really understand what the devs meant by "the game was balanced". You can easily spend more than 100 hours in the base game version of that game doing all end game challenges. You can spam potions with no penalty in that game... Many people, including myself, would spend 30 elixirs and many other healing potions in a single fight. Now imagine the game was harder, imagine you could not carry 99 potions but 20 or 30, or you had to use healing at the correct time... that game would be just too dificult, and god knows how many hours it would take to complete the end game content. The game is actually hard, not easy. If you have to use 40 potions in a fight, it was not easy, but you still succeded with struggle. That was the balance they wanted to achieve: a hard game with no game over. You never receive a game over, but you constantly use most of your resources, you fail to fight properly, enemies overwhelm you...
Given the length of TOTK development and the loud complaints leading into EOW, there is no flipping way they devs didn't playtest or experiment with alternatives. Remember the "cheating" philosophy of the game is to give the player more power than normal so they feel empowered. There is no way they didn't try a favorite / customization version. But my guess is that as soon as they opened that window, playtesters wanted more and more organization and customization options and powers... and spent more and more time optimizing their Echoes... and less and less time playing. I guarantee the menu that we all complain about is an intentional beauty mark following playtesting with what we all claim we want but, in testing, hurt the game for the same reasons you raise with limits.
Another Zelda(ish) inspired game like A Hat In Time (albeit more inspired by Mario 64) suffered with this problem probably more than the TOTK horizontal menu… You see, while getting around each world, you’re at the mercy of saving up pons (in-game currency) to buy badges from the freaky-looking though friendly Badge Seller. Your character, Hat Kid (Toon Link’s girlfriend in another universe…), has a wide variety of hats that can easily swap with a hat wheel… Each one having room to equip badges with… Even her default hat is so big, she could have just decorate it with every badge she found! Unfortunately… she can only fit a max total of 3 at a time… From the very start, Hat Kid is only limited to one badge pin. She can buy two more from the Badge Seller to equip a total of 3 selected badges… And as soon as you equip a certain badge, you replace one of the badges you’ve equipped. So you have to go back into the menu to equip it again! And at the tip of the iceberg, you better make sure you have a certain badge equipped right of the bat because things are going to not end well for Toon Link’s girlfriend! And even more insulting is that modders have more convient ways to improve the gameplay, and they’re solely for PC users! Have the game on console? Too bad! You gotta have a PC and mods downloaded for the better experience! What the devs, Gears for Breakfast, could’ve done is improve the game with updates. Give us badges that permanently stay equipped, let us select what we want to equip, give Cooking Cat a purpose like cook meals in case we go to face a boss, turn every useless ball of yarn into Rift Tokens, do away with the slot machine for selecting different cosmetics, let us buy what we want, fix the camera, give us a difficulty setting, they could have done all of that for everyone! BUT NO!!! Every benefit is locked behind mods that you can only download for the PC version! And that is a cruel joke! As much as I love A Hat In Time (more specifically, the base game by itself, didn’t like the DLCs…), it’s left with flaws that could’ve been updated or even have a deluxe version throughout the time it’s been released, but to Gears for Breakfast, it’s all a one and done deal! No “Yooka-Replayee” treatment, no sequel, no love for those who can’t afford top-of-the-line PC specs! X( You thought BOTW, TOTK, EOW, had such bad item selection, Toon Link’s girlfriend had just as much of a bad time for herself with such limited customization options! (And there’s a bug with the damn slot machine that takes away your Rift Tokens and the cosmetic you just bought… AND THEY NEVER FIXED IT!!!)
that is why I HATE crosscode. too many options and they all do the same thing. it all becomes pointless. not a good example. totk and botw are aberrations and not even zelda, so thats also not a food example. but i agree 20 slots for smoothies is too much. 8 would be enough.
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?
Maybe it was a flaw in my description but I'm thinking about pushing two buttons quickly as compared to scrolling through menus and I'm neither confused nor annoyed 😅
I think pausing to swap weapons and instant healing are fine for these games. They are meant to be games you lay back and relax with, not meant to stress you out in fast paced combat and thinking.
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.
@@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.
Sorry but the implementation of your idea sounds worse than the "problem" trying to solve. Not everyone live alone. You can't just say "no" to someone saying "Come here and do that for me." or "Take a look at this." in your home. If this happens, with your implementation, your run is over. You will have to let your character die.
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.
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.
I miss the scroll wheel from Twilight Princess. Much more convenient than your menu being a straight line.
For this to be a good idea Nintendo would need to fix their analog sticks.
Flashbacks to constantly selecting the wrong tool in Animal Crossing New Horizons.
It's been a long time since I've played TP but when I remembered that had a scroll wheel I almost couldn't believe it (after botw/totk and their menus). I definitely think that's a better solution in terms of menu-ing, but I also think it'd be great to reduce pausing in general.
@@LittleBeanGreenSS showed that you don't need to pause to use a selection wheel.
If they had pointer controls on their next joycon and pro controllers as well as scroll wheels replacing shoulder buttons they could really nail it I think.
I'd add that as well as meals/portions being consumed in real time that there should be done kind of limit to how much you can eat/drink in a certain amount of time, either a consumption cooldown or something more analogue like a fullness meter.
Don't eat too many snacks Link, you won't have room for your octarok steak dinner!
It would be even worse than a straight line if it had all the options that TotK and EoW had (and BotW to a lesser extent). And TP itself had a problem with leaving irrelevant items on the scroll wheel, taking up unnecessary space.
@@quillion3rdoptiontbh if it had a few wheels for each category it could take a bit but I could see navigation being really fast
Twilight Princess had it right with the weapon wheel.
Skyward Sword perfected it with no pausing and a smaller wheel for consumables/shields.
I don't know why Nintendo makes us pick through huge menus for everything with no favorites tab or anything for the 100s of items in Botw/Totk and Echoes.
Me either - for all the flack SS gets, it seems to have done a lot of things right.
I think its just design oversight to be honest. I would be willing to bet that the ui and menu navigate is thought up first and they don't think about it after that. Meaning that nobody makes adjustment after all the selectable items have been coded into the UI
The wild part to me is that they DO implement a favorites list for AutoBuilds but nothing more. And that’s probably only because unsaved builds (aside from the ones you get from the Yiga clan) disappear as the list grows.
Because ppl hated twillight princess *and* skyward sword.
@@elcalabozodelandroide2That's an odd take as Twilight Princess in particular was very well received
My biggest criticism of Echoes of Wisdom was not being able to make custom presets for echoes. Having to search for a single echoes for 30 second was a massive pace breaker
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
That's not even to touch on the annoying menuing of BotW and TotK's cooking and equipment upgrades (and to a lesser extent, EoW's smoothie is about as bad). Having to go through half a dozen lines of dialogue, select an item to upgrade (or make), watch an animation, get a fanfare for the item you upgraded/made, confirm you want to do more with some dialogue... really makes what could be a simple and quick process a lot more tedious.
I'll never understand that about any game. Monster Hunter is another good example. Gotta eat before hunts and sure, the animation is neat the first time, but why in the world is there no auto skip option who on earth wants to watch it every. Single. Hunt. For. Eternity???
That and the mini-games. Those things take forever...
@@LittleBeanGreen ooooh the horse time trial minigame in Echoes of Wisdom having to wait for Falfa to nod for five seconds each time you want to play again... made getting the first course's top prize agonizing.
@@damiencouturee6240 Some of them are different for events, and it's part of the experience. It's also always skippable, so it takes little time to skip. It's not too bad. The more major issue was base MH World where you had to walk to the lever to get up there in the first place. Setting it to the hub and Iceborne helped with this.
MH Frontier Z (Japanese/Chinese MMO MH game) actually had Bentos, which acted like a party wide meal and is probably what you are more after. But MH is very focused on the experience of being in the world, so I don't see them doing this in mainline sadly.
as much as i dislike the Wilds games UI, i have to say that using abilities felt good. once you knew where an ability was, it was quick to switch between them without slowing combat. i would have loved to see that implemented elsewhere, especially with weapons. take your idea of favoriting weapons or ammo types. having a quick menu like the abilities would make combat much more seamless
well said.
Skyward Sword's item wheels are a great feature that translates very well into analog stick gameplay. They are real time, easy to navigate, give you a limited number of options, and can easily have upgradable capacity.
I personally think that it makes sense to have a "quick- inverntory" in the form of item wheels for selecting weapons, healing items, abilities etc, and a "storage inventory" where you can store more items, but cannot use them without first equipping them to your quick- inventory.
I think both inventories should be in real time, so that if you open the storage inventory in the middle of a fight, you have to be really quick to be able to move items to your quick- inventory without getting killed, then you have to select the item from the item wheel to be able to use it.
This would prevent you from being effectively invincible so long as you just keep pausing the game to heal, and would also encourage you to plan ahead what items you want to bring along before you get into battle.
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.
I hate the food in the three latest zelda games. I want the limit of only having 3 or 4 bottles of fairies/potions.
i don't think you're alone
I think another issue with EoW specifically is imbalance. The game encourages you to be creative and use various echoes to solve various problems. That's great. The issue is that some echoes just kinda suck lol. Obviously not all of them can be great but there are some that are just so bad that I pretty much never use them and mainly stick to, like, the same 10 echoes, at most.
So the game wants you to use a variety of solutions, but some solutions are simply not practical compared to others.
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.
Honestly, a big part of it is the limitations of gamepads. Terraria and Stardew are (primarily) PC games, where you have a keyboard (dozens of buttons that even non-gamers are familiar with) and mouse (point directly at the item you want) to eliminate the main annoyances of games with many potential actions. Button-combos and select wheels can help... but those were the main reason I couldn't finish TotK. You still need multiple inputs for every action, it's more elegant than a menu but also harder to remember.
Echoes needed at least 3 active slots for summons, and a 2D grid to select them from instead of one giant line. TotK was kinda just too complicated for its own good.
The point about PC games is a good one and something I didn't even consider. There were times where I was playing totk and I had to stop and remember what buttons to push to do what I wanted.
What if they made a system using the down button on the d-pad for healing like other games, however in the actual pause screen you can map which food item you want to eat since each item gives different amounts of hearts
I like the idea of still having food to eat that you can't do conveniently and healing that is quick.
I would prefer to have many options like the cooking gives you, but you need to place them into quick access that is limited to like 4 slots and you heal without pausing. This also would allow to balance the difficulty much better. In TOTK the enemies often hit harder than in Dark Souls, so you kind of need this giant supply of food. But because they usually don't one shot you, it turns into: you get hit, you eat, repeat until win.
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?
Not pausing in BotW/TotK would've been awesome.
But that style game would benefit from a Monster Hunter Style pouch, make it so you have a huge store of items but away from camps or towns you'd only have a limited pouch keeping what you need to scroll through low and not letting you keep 100 Potions to heal for free
seeing a lot of monster hunter comments - i haven't played it so i'll have to check it out
If the next zelda game continues with the BOTW-style itemization and menuing, I think it would be interesting if they used a Resident Evil type grid for inventory. To be more player friendly, let’s say link would have two grids: one for equipment, one for resource. Your equipment grid would hold weapons, armor, quivers, bomb bags and utility items (torches, pickaxes, Korok leaves, an instrument for horse calling etc…). While your resource grid holds materials (wood, stone, ore, etc), food, cooked dishes, potions, and raw ingredients/material for such.
This would theoretically encourage freedom in a way BOTW’s menus could not, since it’s an empty grid you can use and fill however you wish, with limited space being the only really limit. This also makes itemization more meaningful since you have to decide what to keep and what to leave behind as you adventure. And what you do choose to keep determines how well you can adapt to any given encounter, making preparation meaningful as well. Also-also, the extremely limited space makes it so that the divisive mechanic that which is weapon durability is no longer needed, as extremely limited inventory space is already enough of a limitation. Therefore, the actual freedom to prepare however you want BEFORE encounters is now what is encouraged and emphasized, as opposed to the “freedom” to be creative and adaptive DURING encounters because your options are forcefully (ironically) taken away from you through durability… Also-also-also, limited carry space for food means that you can’t spam heal to brute force encounters. Regardless of whether or not menuing pauses game time.
All in all, I think that an RE-style inventory grid seems to rectify most if not all issues that come with the menuing format of recent Zelda games, without really having any of its own issues. At least on paper. Though RE used its inventory system for survival horror reasons, I think it would be an interesting idea if a Zelda game used a similar system for survival adventure instead.
I don't think it's a bad idea but I hate inventory management like that haha
NONONONONO... Don't Multi-Bind Buttons. I have NEVER seen a good implementation of multi-binding. You mix Abilities on one Button, that have nothing to do with each other. Grapple hook and boost jump may go together, because they are both movement based, but don't you mix in an attack on the same button
You know how ultrahand can be used to stick stuff together but also in battle pull stuff apart? I'm thinking of it more like that...there isn't an actual 'attack' so much as one ability has more than one application. Maybe it's the same problem you're speaking of but I'm not sure it is. Someone will have to build a proof of concept.
@@LittleBeanGreen (needless to say, this is all my subjectiv opinion)
"Ultrahand" did basically one thing. Grab something and move it. The "glue together" or "pull apart" is context sensitivity, which is fine.
I have thought about the problem and actually I have played a game that had Multi binds (well kinda) done right, which is Mario 64. You could combine "Duck" (Z) and "Jump" (A) in various context sensitiv ways ways (Long Jump, High Backflip,....)
Combining distinctiv actions to new actions is a good example for (kinda) Multibind a key
Thing is, I don't know which button I'm actually pressing to jump. I press the "Jump"-Button. When the game tells me to jump, it's an easy task for me. If the game tells me to press the 'A' button... i have to look at the controller (I'm really bad in most quick time events)
If I did understand you correctly, you said you wanted a Main-Button for the Item (with multiple distinct abilities), and a selector (on a secondary-Button) for which power of that item to use.
I'd turn that around. Use main Buttons (A,B,X,Y) only for basic acions (jump,attack, interact) or customizable basic items (bow, boomerang, sword, shield...) and secondary buttons (L,ZL,R,ZR, arrow buttons) to infuse the basic action with a special ability or magic (which might be customisable on its own, if you want to have more than one type of magic)
@@blackshaddow5005 Hm interesting. and fair enough. I'm not tied to which button does the trick as long as the trick can be done, as it were (and save me some pausing and menuing).
no pause advantage, that also means locking out gear switching once combat starts until combat ends (like how kingdom hearts works where pausing in combat blocks access to any menus while in combat)
and we think this is a good thing yes?
I like the idea of real-time item usage, but a bullet-time slowdown for inventory management… so perhaps if you go through all of your prepared healing items in the midst of a fight, you can still conceivably reload, but you don’t have unlimited time to do so.
also, a type of “fullness” meter could be nice, so you have to choose and time your healing item usage carefully, rather than just cramming down apples by the dozen every time you take a hit 🤷🏻♂️
fullness reminds me of Ark: Survival, which sends me into a fever dream.
Skyward Sword was definitely on the right track for item selection, but it meant every item had to put you into a specific mode, making them a little less snappy to use. That kinda system would be cool to see in a 2D Zelda game where there's more item buttons, but it would prove annoying as you'd have to move your thumb back and forth between the right stick and face buttons.
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.
As I grow older, I don't mind longer menus. I don't even notice them. When you are a kid, time flows differently, so I understand the impatience.
As I grow older, I have less time to play games so when I'm constantly taken out of the game to scroll through menus, that isn't very appealing.
@@LittleBeanGreen BotW and TotK are slow games. You are supposed to take your time with them, so I don't mind if I spend a few minutes every session scrolling through the menus.
@@Izelor I thought I was supposed to be free from restrictions and play how I wanted?
@@LittleBeanGreen adventure games are generally slower games. You are allowed to choose the way you approach your quests and puzzles but the core of the game remains the same.
game developer and zelda fan here: modern zelda needs to give too many options because AAA titles diferentiate themselves by the ability of the studio of making lots and lots of assets. breath of the wild initate a new trend in zelda, huge world and lots of equipament and itens. in old zeldas every item matter, it was almost like one diferent mechanic each. in modern zelda is not that much. in the echoes of wisdom they made basicly almost all game assets into itens. this is WAY diferent from the old zelda. zelda needs now huge menus, cant be avoided, because they arent making anymore each item unique. But I truly liked your gamedesign concept of having more options easily accessible than usual
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.
This is why the 3DS needs a true successor.
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
One solution for healing could be to embrace the "eating food for health" angle differently by converting the hearts gained to a seperate resource. These will be a kind of vitality that is called upon with a single button press during battle, limited in healing amount and frequency according to what you ate (and possibly an upgradeable stamina-like mechanic).
Actually eating the meal swould take long enough to not be viable in combat at all - solving that "eat 100 apples in 0.5 seconds" bit of weirdness. Special effects of food could also be reserved for when they are needed instead of set on a timer.
What's nice about this is you can use food this way but also have (a limited nber of) potions for immediate emergency healing - returning value and importance to that more classic feature.
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.
I'm a be real, having to hold down a button to access a menu is the problem. Every time I hold down the Dpad to bring up the "quick menu" I am reminded of how horrible the idea is in practice.
Having multiple mappable buttons is the solution. There are at least 10 different buttons that could be mapped to a single power/item: Dpad, L/LZ/R/RZ, and if we are being totally honest, X/Y Leaving +/- to access the deep menu is just fine. And 10 quick access points is beyond reasonable.
It would also help if they trimmed down the unnecessary gimmicks. Like why are Clockworks even a thing in EoW?
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.
Another reason why I believe Majora's Mask deserves some more props is that I think the transformation masks help mitigate this issue. Example: The Zora is both the boomerang and iron boots tied in one item slot. Although admittedly, the game isn't perfect (cough cough switching between Fire and Ice Arrows)
I sure do hope this is an issue the Zelda dev team pays attention to in the future.
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 have to disagree on the context sensitivity thing. The lack of context sensitive abilities was a deliberate choice by developers and an integral part of BotW dynamic gameplay and game feel. The lack of context sensitivity is modern Zelda's special sauce and what sets it apart from other open world games.
so do you think in a game where the ocean is a huge part of the world, and unlike botw where you can't explore underwater, that if you had abilities that worked differently when completely submerged that that would make a game feel less dynamic?
3 - Non-advantageous pausing-is that really what we want from games? Restricting the ability to change equipment or use items mid-game feels unnecessarily limiting. It blocks players from enjoying the game in the way they want.
When I started playing Zelda, I used advantageous pausing to help defeat bosses. Over time, as I improved, I chose not to rely on it anymore. This feature helped me learn without resorting to the tedious "run back to the boss" mechanic seen in Souls games-a process that adds little value once you've already cleared the area.
If a player wants to "cheese" a boss, they'll find a way regardless. In Souls games, for example, you can upgrade weapons to make bosses trivial, often defeating them in under five hits. Should we remove weapon upgrades because of that? Of course not; it’s an option for the player to explore.
Yeah, some shortcuts for making changes in real-time would be cool, but I don’t want inventory management optimization to become something I have to master in every game I play.
5 - Limit our options - Zelda Botw and TOTK are games that aim to have limitless options, this is bonkers to say.
The other points are valid.
I am not advocating for NO mid-game pausing, just some limits on what or when. I think there needs to be some balance, because being able to pause to get out of a tough spot, paradoxically, blocks me from enjoying the game the way I'd like.
Zelda games are also incredibly generous with when and where the player can save and the 'run back to the boss' mechanic (that I also don't like in other games) can be completely avoided by having the game autosave directly before a boss.
I've never played any of the Souls games but I imagine that the upgrade system is demanding in that being weaker and taking longer to kill a boss might take as long as being so strong you kill it in give hits but it takes a long time to upgrade. I don't even think bosses need to be 'cheesed' but could be designed to be beaten in a multitude of ways.
I'm also not advocating for making pausing and menuing optimized to oblivion, but in a game like Echoes of Wisdom where you have to open your menu every time you have to make a decision (and because you can 'play your own way,' every move could be a choice), that's too much menuing.
That may very well be their design philosophy, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with it, especially in a game like totk where there are hundreds of items and, because puzzles have so many solutions, many can be solved in the same way. To me, that isn't interesting. I'm also not advocating for a game that is botw or totk, but a conceptual next Zelda game, one where I don't have to pause every 2 seconds.
This can easily be fixed in both TOTK and Echoes. Change the first level inventory slider to only be items you’ve selected to be there with a secondary press brining up the full menu. That would give players freedom to speed up menu flow as a payoff for better understanding what they need in battle. Worse players would still have the full menu at the cost of more inefficient menu scrolling, so there would be a real world incentive to get good.
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.
It's baffling to me that Nintendo already solved this issue with Skyward Sword's item wheel but then reverted back to a tedious system. And they're clearly willing to learn, since they changed Link's abilities to a wheel in TOTK, compared to the linear menu from BOTW.
To me, Monster Hunter's 5th generation already adressed this issue very well. The series has always struggled with item management until World. But they always made them a limited ressource that you can carry on yourself and being taken in real time while the monster can attack you. This not only prevents trivializing the game's healing, but it also makes it rewarding by comparison, because knowing when to heal is a skill in and of itself that you need to learn.
Other games that also have lots of menuing and/or item management streamlined it in a rewarding way like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 with its fusion arts system instead of the single line from Xenoblade 1 and X.
As you suggested, it can be done in various ways, either changing specific keys when you maintain a trigger pressed, or by using the right stick like Monster Hunter does nowadays. This way you could have preselected types of meals / clothing / potions preset on your radial menu shortcuts to use in the middle of a fight, but not have access to your entire inventory. You don't necessarly need to make it a lot more difficult by having a limited inventory like Monster Hunter or Skyward Sword. Simply prevent opening your full inventory to setup your radial menus when you're in a combat encounter. This way you could still spend the time you need setting up your shortcuts when you're just chilling in a safe place.
makes perfect sense to me!
Item wheels are the way to go! (as long as the joysticks work correctly 😅)
A game that uses a mixture of this and the paused inventory menu is Phoenotopia: Awakening (a 2D Zelda-like. It's good, play it).
You have a limited inventory for food (healing) and loot, and a separate one for tools/weapons. You can equip items from the menu, or you can set them on a wheel of eight items to fast-equip them without pausing. So you have a selection of eight items/weapons to keep the action fluid but you still need preparation for the right healing items since your inventory is limited and eating takes time.
Technically this last point is a difficulty option. You can set it so that you are allowed to eat in the menu, but the points about quick weapon changing and limited inventory still stands.
To get back to the topic of the video, honestly I don't have a problem with pausing when item scrolling, as long as it's well implemented. I would prefer a limited number of different items, but when the inventories are as big as they are in the last Zelda games, not being able to pause to select an item would ruin the experience and discourage me even more from engaging in combat.
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.
This is not really a "big zelda problem." More a reality of adventure games. Don't really see the need to have an overcomplicated pausing system in Zelda. ❤
My whole point is that the last three games have become needlessly overcomplicated demonstrations in pausing...
While the 3ds was solid for item management, I didn’t like that it paused the game. Now the Wii U, that solved all my issues. Having everything on the gamepad in WWHD and TPHD was amazing. Never having to pause the game to look at the map (especially in the boat) or quickly drag items into the slots was so seamless. I fully believe that BotW had these features scrapped so the Switch version would be better, and they did show the map working like this in 2015. I also feel that WWHD and TPHD would be slightly worse on Switch, but will still be nice for more people to play them.
you're probably bang on - what could've been
The newer monster hunter games have fully customizable radial menus for drinking potions all the way to crafting items on the go, alongside a quick select item bar. If totk and botw had customizable radial menus they would be so much more enjoyable
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.
Even so, I still prefer the og MH item menu.
I think inventory wise the best zelda games were ALBW and OOT/MM (for me at least)
I think I'd tend to agree with you - especially the 3D remakes
I played RPGs so many times, I kind don't have the problem with going to through menus. I pretty much know what I'm going to do before I need to do it, and it's rare I can't find what I'm looking for (and I usually don't need half the crap the game gives me even though I'm a big item user).
How would you feel about having fewer things but being able to do more with them?
@@LittleBeanGreen That does sound like a good idea,
Here is the thing: the more open the games, the more vapid, useless item baggage we will get to give the illusion of choice and openness. The more trash we can get in the modern empty worlds, the worse this problem will be. Better UI like an item wheel or favorite list will only go so far, but the more stupid trash we can get in game, the worse this problem will be.
Thank you for making me hate open air even more now, just goes to show zelda lost its magic, and details like this are why.
Nintendo is usually full of surprises - hopefully, when it comes to Zelda's open worlds, they have one more.
The thing is, open-world is the logical continuation for Zelda. Exploration is in its foundations, and honestly, BOTW/TOTK were the first Zelda games since the 2D Zeldas to nail that aspect (it's especially clear when you see BOTW/TOTK map is made like 2D Zelda, with the whole world fitting into a square/rectangle and not something with a central place and corridors for each "region" to try to emulate a feeling of exploration that is actually artificial)
You can do open-world in various ways too and Nintendo will definitely demonstrate that with the next 3D Zelda game
The only thing I can think to solve this is the game has an learning system to assist the player. Exemple: when you arrive in a cold ambience and open the menu, it opens instantly in the rito set to be switched. But if instead you’re fighting a Lynel in cold, it opens instantly in a cold resistance recipe so you can keep the defense of the atual gear.
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.
Me and my sister are developing a 2D zelda-esque and have attepted to address these problems...
We consolidated 22 key items into 8 items that have multiple actions (i.e. the bow can also fire sleep darts or a grappling hook) through upgrades.
Holding Y will bring up an item wheel with 8 slots. One can select by pointing the Dpad and then releasing X. Then the different actions are performed with Y, A, and B.
Other inventory like healing items, maps, etc. has been grouped into 8 categories that are handled similiarly with the Dpad in a menu accessed with -
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.
Bring back real time healing or at the very least limit the amount of food you can eat at one time. Maybe we need a stomach meter.
Oh no then it becomes too much like ARK: Survival and I don't know if I could handle that 🤣
I disagree with the no pause healing. The wild games were already heartbreaking to play for some people I know who grew up playing and loving lower difficulty games like wind waker, twilight princess and skyward sword and could already barely get through the wild games as is. This would have just made it a game entirely not for what used to be zelda fans.
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.
@@LittleBeanGreenor just play Dark Souls
@@gydgeza8646 I feel like the vast majority of deaths in the Wild games come from getting 1-shot, which usually just makes it feel like you're doing an encounter way under-equipped (unless it's a death due to random explosives lol). If you're not getting 1-shot, food is pretty much so abundant after a few hours that you might as well just instantly pause and fully heal.
I reckon the older Zelda games' more limited healing item slots made the encounter balance much better, along with there being only a few places in the game you can actually create/buy potions. You only had maybe a few potions which heal like 5+ hearts at a time which you don't want to waste straight away, so you often go between encounters at half health. Your playstyle changes at low health as you try to risk fighting more enemies hoping they'll drop hearts, or you play more defensively by weaving around enemies, hoping to make it to the next safe area. That tension from the risk/reward is extremely compelling.
To BotW's credit, the insane 1-shot damage of the Guardians actually worked in their favor, making them really intense and fun encounters. It's a shame TotK doesn't really have an equivalent (maybe the hand enemies? ehh)
In BOTW style games meals shouldn't heal you but regenerate hearts over time for the 24 minute day and grant long lasting weak buffs. Potions should be instant healing in battle or short lasting strong buffs but limited to the number of bottles you've collected
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!
Real-time swapping is what multiplayer Zelda-likes need. Pausing in the middle of a game usually frustrates the other players around you. The Mana series is doubly guilty of its stop-and-go gameplay because you have to dig items and spells out of a menu in most cases.
That being said, in my own personal experience, using the shoulder buttons one-push-at-a-time to sift through item menus in real-time is a bad idea when you've got a boss chasing you. I've made a game that does that, and it made me want to push the Pause button to get what I need. Then again, my goal with that game was making a multiplayer Zelda-like that, if necessary, can control both characters with one XBox controller when playing solo.
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 didn’t have an issue with totk menu scrolling since you don’t need that many different arrow head but echoes of wisdom echoes scrolling is pretty bad and that’s the only big flaw with the game.
I do wish for a Zelda game with less interruptions.
They need gameplay ideas that don’t require a giant inventory lol
Exactly - to me it really hurts immersion.
3 games with bad menus in a row. Maybe Nintendo is trying to set a record?
Certainly seems like they're trying!
Thoughts:
* Thank you for pointing out that pausing's always been a problem, even in the pre-Wild games.
* Cross Code looks like it learned from the Style Switch from Devil May Cry in 4-onward (later backported to 3's re-releases).
* THE BIG ONE: That's really a bold statement asking that Zelda outright LIMITS options. But honestly, I actually agree to some extent. It feels like the Wild Era games swapped out those "filler" Rupee chests with "weak" materials, which is better for worldbuilding but sucks for inventory clutter.
I think they should focus on making a few extremely versatile items (even "small/expendable" items) instead of overspecialized items, problems that TP and SS suffer in their "tools" and BotW, TotK, and EoW suffer in their "small items."
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.
They can double the number of Item slots by allowing you to assign two Items per button where you hold another button to switch between them. For example let's say you have a bow and bomb assigned to the LT C button. Pressing the button alone let's you use the bow. But holding L and pressing LT C button gives you bombs. This makes you go to the menu far less often and makes gameplay smoother.
kinda similar to what I suggested here for one item at least.
I have no problem with how the old games use items but i dont like how breath of the wild games brake items and gives you too mutch healing and the game feels less like zelda and closer too something like elder scrolls. Good games in there own right but if i want too play somethimg thatvis not zelda i wouldnt play a zelda game and i would feel the same if elder scrolls made a game similer too the old zelda games they need too stop
Fair enough. I think the 2D games, especially Link's Awakening and the Oracle games have a lot of pausing for item swapping but it certainly isn't worse than the latest installments.
I think the best i've seen in the OOT romhacks is one that keeps the standard 3 Cs for main item usage, then adds alot of other options to the D-pad, things that are like toggles, masks, eye of truth, or switching equipment, and they made it so the L buttom switched the D-pad between two sets of 4 items, and pressing an equipment button could cycle through the equipment on the fly, e.g. normal boots, iron boots, hover boots, normal boots again, repeat. And that 2-level D-pad is 8 options accessible easily!
Skyward sword definitely made the game feel the least likely to have interrupted flow. Two circle menus complete with a little tied motion control goes MILES forwards in progress. That non-interruptive menu navigating was SMOOTH.
smooth indeed! for as maligned as that game is, that was certainly done right
Sooooooo…..when are we getting another video about your Zelda game?
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
I don’t understand why they don’t have a radial menu kinda like TP/SS except they could nest items into categories. You could quickly select a category in the radial menu & then keep ‘blooming’ it deeper & deeper until you get to what you want. It would be like 3 quick flicks of the wrist (using the gyroscope).
That would at least be a big step in the right direction. Or allow us to customize those categories so maybe it's on two quick flicks.
Xenoblade 2 and 3 handle ability swapping really well
Each attack is set to a face button input, you can set which attack goes to which input
In 2 you have a group of options on the d pad to swap to different sets of attacks to take over the face buttons which you can also set the positioning of
While in 3 you have a preset order of swapping between characters and different movesets, 3 more attacks set to the dpad, and holding the trigger buttons brings up a whole other set of attack and ability options on every button
never played it. will have to check it out
@LittleBeanGreen it's the series that heavily inspired BotW/TotK and made by the same development studio, some of the best and biggest games Nintendo has ever put out
Wait i didnt understand the "wrongly categorizing items" part. All boots belong in the boots column tho 🤔
Yeah I don't mean that they aren't boots, but they are on a separate screen where they can't be equipped in real time (like the hookshot or bow etc.). Instead you have to go into the menu and 'take' them on and off.
I wish instead of a straight line like it is in TotK and EoW I wish it would pull up some kind of a grid.
I've seen some mockups of this and, although it may be better, it still seems like a lot of options.
I love Zelda 64, I think they need to go back to basics with a similar direction as that game but just expand on what was so loved about OOT. The mechanics and ideas of OOT, with the size of botw.
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.
How are the older Zelda pause menus slow???, they're perfect and show everything the player needs in a screen
It's less about the speed of the menus and more about inventory management. A quick menu doesn't matter when I have to access it every two seconds.
Thank you so much for working with me LBG!!!
THANK YOU.
anytime!
For Echos of Wisdom, I would have welcomed a "favorites" menu so I could add my commonly used.
The developers just came out and said they made that long string of echoes so that you would have to run through them and maybe find new ones you'd want to experiment with...while I understand that rationale, I still think it's dumb.
The legend of menus: breath of the bloat.
botw in retrospect seems like the least worst offender after the last two installments
Ehhh.....
Ehhh.....
Crosscode has amazing dungeons and story, unlike tears of the kingdom
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.
the fact that the menus pause in botw make the game so much easer because you can just heal right before you were about to die
that's considered the problem.
How i would fix fuse is adding autofuse and add a favorite items category thag you can make to quick select an item without needing to scroll for ages.
Autofuse works when you hold your bow and go in to fuse menu and press Y while on lets say a fire fruit.
You would now have that itam be locked in as your auto fuse material which would be shown in a small icon on the creen so you dont forget that you still have it on.
This goes away as soon as you put your bow away, auto fuse should be something you do deliberately and not in a pinch, for that spamming regular arowss exists.
But you you got the distance you go activate autofuse and you can rain down a hailstorm of fused arows.
could've been useful but I think fuse is gone after totk
@LittleBeanGreen they should bring it back in some shape or form.
I don't want to go back having my inventory be filled with 999 monster parts because they practically do nothing.
I can live without ultrahand in the next game but I just hope fuse returns even if it's only limited to arrows.
Healing
"Do you think they could have implemented a 'limited healing items during combat' rule with a cooldown timer? For example, maybe you could use up to five healing items per minute or two. This would allow you to pause to heal, but you wouldn’t be able to fully restore health at will, avoiding the spamming of healing items while paused. Another approach might be a slight slowdown mechanic while healing in real time, giving the player a bit of buffer without fully pausing the game. I wonder what other workarounds could be available if a developer thought real-time healing was too punishing, but spamming items while paused was too easy.
Of course, there could be drawbacks. With the slowdown mechanic, players might exploit it to slow down combat and gain extra reaction time. And with the timed item limit, it might feel restrictive or messy if players feel limited by a timer rather than skill-based actions like running to a safe spot to heal. But maybe with the right balance, one of these approaches could work.
Another idea for real-time healing could be to adjust the speed at which healing occurs. Healing could be made very fast, even if players could still technically take damage while healing. The time it takes to heal could be adjusted to be as slow or as fast as developers find appropriate. (And, of course, this is assuming blocking healing while the game is paused, in combat).
Quick Menus
These are great points. I didn’t notice many issues with the quick menus in Breath of the Wild since they were mainly for switching weapons, shields, and bows. With a set maximum number of each, it rarely felt overwhelming-maybe a bit near the end of the game. But in Tears of the Kingdom, I’ve definitely noticed the 'lag' of scrolling through the quick menu for the Fuse ability, with so many items available. This menu, designed for quick, intuitive access, can feel tedious as the list grows, making it harder to find specific items. With an optimally sized list, though, I think these menus are fantastic! I really liked them in Breath of the Wild because they kept the immersion intact. Instead of fully pausing in the inventory, you could quickly switch weapons or items on the fly.
Radial Menus vs. Linear Menus
Some people might feel that radial menus would improve these quick-access options, but I think the linear format works best as long as there aren’t too many items. Radial menus tend to be more limiting because they only hold a few options comfortably and require precise control, like moving diagonally. This can make them challenging to use in fast-paced gameplay, especially if joystick drift is a factor. In contrast, the linear format in Breath of the Wild works well because it allows you to scroll left and right quickly, giving access to a few more options without feeling cluttered. It’s easy to understand and feels intuitive, even for new players.
Radial menus also require remembering where items are positioned in 2D space, which can feel more complex than a straightforward left-to-right list. With the linear format-especially when the list is a manageable length-it’s easy to navigate and keeps players immersed in the game. I think Nintendo made the right choice in Breath of the Wild by using a list for quick swaps. It maintains accessibility, and as long as the list doesn’t get too long, it really does feel like the quickest option!
Multi-Binding Inputs
As pointed out by blackshaddow5005 in the comments, while your controller scheme idea might sound okay at first, I’d agree that it could become very messy and hard to remember which buttons handle what. It requires a lot of abstract thinking (constantly remapping everything) and isn’t as intuitive as having modifiers that adjust the specific function of a button. The modifier buttons can affect each button/action in different ways. This approach is more intuitive because the player can remember each button and its associated action, along with its modified variants. This avoids the need to set buttons repeatedly and risk forgetting the current layout, which can make it hard to keep track of what each button does.
It sounds like you might be thinking of the way many Zelda games let players set certain items to specific buttons and use them directly. But that approach is simple-set a button once, and it’s ready when needed. What you suggested, though, involves a list of options tied to each button. So, rather than simply setting a button with an action, you would need to remember how to access the list, then set the action, and then use it. It’s more abstract, which makes it less intuitive than simply having a button with a main action and modifiers for variations.
The shoulder buttons (L, R, ZL, ZR) work great as modifier buttons. You might think you can access more options the way you planned it (clicking A, B, or X to set Y while holding a shoulder button like R), but you could use each shoulder button to get four additional actions on top of the default action (e.g., L + Y, R + Y, ZL + Y, ZR + Y, and Y alone). That’s five options instead of just three. If some of these shoulder buttons are already assigned specific functions (like ZL for targeting), you might have fewer options available, but it would likely still be more intuitive-and probably still offer more options-than the alternative approach.
If you’re worried about each of these shoulder buttons having context-specific functions (like R for a special variant of an action and ZL, ZR, or L for something else entirely) and only want a single button like Y for a certain set of actions, then you might be more limited in your options. But it seems you’d still benefit from this approach in terms of how much more intuitive it is. It feels like you tried to take the 'set item' concept from inventory management and apply it in an abstract way to 'set button' in a list of abstract buttons, which isn’t as clear to the player as it could be.
Another idea is to use the D-Pad to change out a set of the A, B, X, Y buttons. Pressing the Right D-Pad button, for instance, could map these primary buttons to all of the Y-related actions you wanted. However, changing out sets like this comes with its own drawbacks. If you have primary actions that you’d like the player to always be able to perform, like jumping, this approach might not be ideal since it could interfere with those core actions.
the only problem I find with the d-pad is that I have to take my hand off of the stick that makes me move
I agree that the one giant horizontal bar only method of item selection in Tears of the Kingdom is awful, and there are definitely ways it could be done better. And I agree that there is too much item selection in Zeldas overall and I am super happy whenever an item gets a dedicated button rather than being manually equipped/selected like the Pegasus shoes. Or is just a totally passive upgrade. Less manually swapping which items are currently mapped to a button = more good.
But, and this is a huge all caps level but, I ABSOLUTELY HATE REALTIME ITEM SELECTION. IN EVERY GAME THAT USES IT EVER. Seriously, no matter how good the game otherwise is, if it makes me select items (or equipment or spells etc) in real time, it's like walking around with a shard of glass in my shoe that can't be removed. (Lookin' at you, every From Soft game.) So while improvements are needed, realtime item selection is the most opposite of an improvement there can be under current control standards, and should never be done short of the game being able to read my mind and thereby skip selection menus entirely. A dedicated button combination for each item slot is acceptable as well, but that also would be basically skipping selection menus for that matter. So really, the point is that in-game time passing and moving a cursor around and/or scrolling through menus should never mix. EVER. Letting you pause to select stuff, even if the selection menus themselves could be sooooo much more efficient and direct, is really the only thing Zeldas always do right in that regard.
For example, I'm playing Hyrule Warriors Definite Edition right now, and I like a lot about it, but I hate having to select the items in realtime, even like a hundred hours in, with their order fully memorized. Pretty much means I almost never use them except against giant bosses where they're totally necessary. I get selecting in realtime when you're playing co-op, but there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't be able to pause to switch items when you're playing single player. And that goes for all games. Optional paused item selection would be legally required for all games when playing singleplayer if it were up to me. I feel that strongly.
With all that being said though, I do agree that INSTANTLY using items from within paused menus, for example healing items, can cause a balance issue. Though even then, paused item usage is still a much, much lesser evil than realtime item selection regardless, it's like choosing between being shot with a nerf gun and a real gun. But the good news is that you don't need horrible realtime item selection to solve the lesser problem of instant apple eating- Just have the game pause while you're in the item menu, but then play the flask drinking or eating animation in real, unpaused time once you've selected and chosen the healing item from the pause menu. That's the way to go if you ask me: Pause to navigate menus and select what you want to use, unpause and play the usage animation once you've made your selection. There's no reason that pausing for menus and usage animations can't coexist, which gets you the best of both worlds.
Yeah I don't actually like picking items in real time. I think the Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask way of doing things for the most part was pretty good - you had items you could pick in real time without having to resort to a menu.
It's amazing how much a scroll wheel somewhere on a controller would fix so many of these problems
you're exactly right
What I really want is to be able to swap Z targets like in souls. Z targeting has been driving me crazy for 20 years.
yes absolutely!
☝😺 Yes! Menu scrolling is why I havn't picked up Echoes, I became burnt out from TOTK's menus.
Imagine playing one of the Wild games with just your basic skills and no menu items..
I find the menu of EOW tedious as well, but it forced me to think through problems, and it's pretty minor compared to how enjoyable the rest of the game is! I hope you'll pick it up eventually.
My experience with EoW was: early on there weren't that many echoes, so you could open up the full menu and see them all in a boxed grid; mid-game there were too many and most of the time you were just scrolling through menus and throwing things at the wall to see what stuck; late game you had a handful of really powerful things and that's all you used...
But I still enjoyed it.
I didn't expect a mention of Indigo in this video. People are getting really excited for this ROM hack to release.
it looks great!
What a flawless video. Clear, concise, respectful, constructive yet still open-minded. Great stuff!
Appreciate the kind words - thanks for checking it out :)
I kinda liked using the menu in BOTW, call me crazy ig.
it's been awhile since I've played that came so I can't speak too decisively about my feelings on it....but there were definitely waaaaaaaaaay to many things to collect and organize - something totk doubled down on
Zelda really loves introducing genre defining mechanics and then giving said mechanics the most clunky UI possible.
classic zelda
Wii U was so advanced to our time.
we didn't deserve her
I agree with the problem, but am strongly against the solutions. It's a whole bunch of complexity that reduced the flow of the games just as much as the problems they're trying to avoid.
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.
Being able to pause the game and heal at any time is pretty much the only reason I was able to beat breath of the wild and tears of the Kingdom. It's balanced because you have to farm for all of those materials.
You do not have to spend much time farming at all. You can get 5 hearty radishes and have 5 free full heals, no question asked. That's not balance.
Honestly question, do you actually enjoy face-tanking damage with healing items? I don't see why it wouldn't it just be better for enemies hit less hard.
Do you think it would still be possible for you to beat it if you had to assign a set of meals to a button that you had to eat in real time?
@@LittleBeanGreen if the game is also rebalanced so that a stray shot won't immediately cripple your health yes, but in a game where most basic creatures will two shot you, that sounds like it would be sadistic. We don't need zelda to turn into dark souls.
@@gydgeza8646 that may be true for the early game but as soon as you get any semblance of an armor upgrade, this trivializes most enemies. I still don't think strong enemies is more of an issue than pausing to heal and I think it can still work out where the difficulty isn't dark souls, but also not brainless.
We need the Wii U Gamepad back in some capacity for the “Switch 2…”
I have this curious feeling you may be on to something.
It is not even that convenient without a third hand to tap on the screen.
@elio7610
Say that to the two weapons only trope in every FPS game you come across.
@@TomMooreT2S I don't see the connection, that is just a whole different thing.
@elio7610
I’m aware of that.
But ever heard of the saying back in 03:
“Unless you got three hands, you can only carry two weapons. [Beside your sidearm and grenades.]”
And most just took all of that away!
Now who says I can’t hold a 2nd screen gamepad with two hands in real life?
Frankly, even FPS titles can benefit for weapon selection with the gamepad in mind.
My All Time Zelda Ranking 🛡️🙏
#1 Majora’s Mask
#2 Twilight Princess
#3 A Link Between Worlds
#4 Ocarina of Time
#5 Breath of the Wild
#6 A Link To The Past
#7 Minish Cap
#8 Zelda 2: Adventure of Link
#9 Link’s Awakening
#10 Original Legend of Zelda
#11 Skyward Sword
#12 Tears of the Kingdom
#13 Oracle of Seasons
#14 Oracle of Ages
#15 Phantom Hourglass
#16 Wind Waker
#17 Echoes of Wisdom
#18 Four Swords Adventure
#19 Spirit Tracks
#20 Four Swords
#21 Triforce Heroes
the oracles so lowwwww
It’s so funny because this is an extreme version of one of the biggest issues in og ocarina of time. That they then fixed in the remakes. (Most of the Zelda remakes of the Wii U 3ds era fixed menuing) Now look at where we ended up 😂
It's crazy how far they've come and how far they've fallen behind hahaha
Don't worry the next Zelda will take one of your suggestions and make you scroll through a menu of 504 items in real time. The strategy is to never select a new item in combat. 😂
oh god...
As a game developer, I quite like that idea
which one's that?
careful, you give nintendo ideas and we're in for a land of copy-right
then I'll be turning the tables on em!
@@LittleBeanGreen you better
I love the comparisong to traffic it was so good 😂
well some times it is!
Use a radial menu like in Monster Hunter. It works wonders and is fully customizable
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
i love terrarias inventory lolz and quick healing in the real time makes fighting bosses so much more fun
some times I freak out and can't find my potions hahahah
@LittleBeanGreen it can be binded to a button ;>
I'm sorry but this video is kinda like a mess
Why is it bad to give too many options? If a game wants to give more options than it needs to, so some players can be extra creative, then why is it a bad thing?
Also, what is the vision and intent behind BoTW and ToTK? Do they want every single player to have to worry when to heal? I've beaten Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne and Elden Ring, and I would have dies multiple times in BoTW if I was vulnerable while healing. Is BoTW supposed to be a demanding game to play in that sense?
Sure I would like that change, but I don't think it would be a good change for BoTW. I think it is part of the game to make food, get materials to upgrade stuff... So opening the menu, and being able to choose which speed buff to chose is fine by me. If it is freezing, I also think its fine to be able to select which of the 5 meals I have for cold resistance without the time passing as I die of cold.
At the end of the day, it comes down to the vision the developers had behind the game. If they don't want to lean that much to action with so much precise and highly demanding combat skills, then they won't do that, and they are not wrong.
I played Final Fantasy XV and took me more than 1000 hours to really understand what the devs meant by "the game was balanced".
You can easily spend more than 100 hours in the base game version of that game doing all end game challenges. You can spam potions with no penalty in that game... Many people, including myself, would spend 30 elixirs and many other healing potions in a single fight. Now imagine the game was harder, imagine you could not carry 99 potions but 20 or 30, or you had to use healing at the correct time... that game would be just too dificult, and god knows how many hours it would take to complete the end game content.
The game is actually hard, not easy. If you have to use 40 potions in a fight, it was not easy, but you still succeded with struggle. That was the balance they wanted to achieve: a hard game with no game over. You never receive a game over, but you constantly use most of your resources, you fail to fight properly, enemies overwhelm you...
Do you feel the same about TotK and EoW's menus?
Yet another reason Skyward Sword is actually the best Zelda.
of all the things to carry over to botw...
I miss Empty Bottles.
same :/
If I play indigo chapter 2 will I be lost
you'll do great!
@ like without playing the first one. I heard the first one is like a demo or something
Skyward sword and twilight princess did it best
and were quickly abandoned😅
Arkham City gadgets
Never played - I'll have to check that out.
Given the length of TOTK development and the loud complaints leading into EOW, there is no flipping way they devs didn't playtest or experiment with alternatives.
Remember the "cheating" philosophy of the game is to give the player more power than normal so they feel empowered.
There is no way they didn't try a favorite / customization version.
But my guess is that as soon as they opened that window, playtesters wanted more and more organization and customization options and powers... and spent more and more time optimizing their Echoes... and less and less time playing.
I guarantee the menu that we all complain about is an intentional beauty mark following playtesting with what we all claim we want but, in testing, hurt the game for the same reasons you raise with limits.
Hey man. Their catchphrase is 'play your way' or some nonsense. So let me.
DS Zelda massive W
gotta play em!
Another Zelda(ish) inspired game like A Hat In Time (albeit more inspired by Mario 64) suffered with this problem probably more than the TOTK horizontal menu…
You see, while getting around each world, you’re at the mercy of saving up pons (in-game currency) to buy badges from the freaky-looking though friendly Badge Seller. Your character, Hat Kid (Toon Link’s girlfriend in another universe…), has a wide variety of hats that can easily swap with a hat wheel… Each one having room to equip badges with… Even her default hat is so big, she could have just decorate it with every badge she found! Unfortunately… she can only fit a max total of 3 at a time…
From the very start, Hat Kid is only limited to one badge pin. She can buy two more from the Badge Seller to equip a total of 3 selected badges… And as soon as you equip a certain badge, you replace one of the badges you’ve equipped. So you have to go back into the menu to equip it again! And at the tip of the iceberg, you better make sure you have a certain badge equipped right of the bat because things are going to not end well for Toon Link’s girlfriend!
And even more insulting is that modders have more convient ways to improve the gameplay, and they’re solely for PC users! Have the game on console? Too bad! You gotta have a PC and mods downloaded for the better experience! What the devs, Gears for Breakfast, could’ve done is improve the game with updates. Give us badges that permanently stay equipped, let us select what we want to equip, give Cooking Cat a purpose like cook meals in case we go to face a boss, turn every useless ball of yarn into Rift Tokens, do away with the slot machine for selecting different cosmetics, let us buy what we want, fix the camera, give us a difficulty setting, they could have done all of that for everyone! BUT NO!!! Every benefit is locked behind mods that you can only download for the PC version! And that is a cruel joke!
As much as I love A Hat In Time (more specifically, the base game by itself, didn’t like the DLCs…), it’s left with flaws that could’ve been updated or even have a deluxe version throughout the time it’s been released, but to Gears for Breakfast, it’s all a one and done deal! No “Yooka-Replayee” treatment, no sequel, no love for those who can’t afford top-of-the-line PC specs! X(
You thought BOTW, TOTK, EOW, had such bad item selection, Toon Link’s girlfriend had just as much of a bad time for herself with such limited customization options!
(And there’s a bug with the damn slot machine that takes away your Rift Tokens and the cosmetic you just bought… AND THEY NEVER FIXED IT!!!)
I feel like developers could learn a whole lot from modders.
Hogwarts legacy
never played
that is why I HATE crosscode. too many options and they all do the same thing. it all becomes pointless. not a good example. totk and botw are aberrations and not even zelda, so thats also not a food example. but i agree 20 slots for smoothies is too much. 8 would be enough.
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?
Crosscode❤❤❤
that game slaps
Meh, your way is equally confusing and annoying.
Maybe it was a flaw in my description but I'm thinking about pushing two buttons quickly as compared to scrolling through menus and I'm neither confused nor annoyed 😅
I think pausing to swap weapons and instant healing are fine for these games. They are meant to be games you lay back and relax with, not meant to stress you out in fast paced combat and thinking.
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.
Sorry but the implementation of your idea sounds worse than the "problem" trying to solve. Not everyone live alone. You can't just say "no" to someone saying "Come here and do that for me." or "Take a look at this." in your home. If this happens, with your implementation, your run is over. You will have to let your character die.
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.