Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. It is something that connects our childhood to our adulthood, for those creative types like game developers, it is a source of inspiration in how to bring joy to other people. But something that nostalgia can do to people is paint a better picture of the world that what it really was. This usually leads people to place the cherished memories of their past on a pedestal, as a source of aspiration rather than a source of influence, and for games, this leads to a lot of criticism that a modern game is simply not a older title.
I was reading a game essay called Saving Zelda the other day, which was basically a long rant about why modern Zelda games suck when compared to the original The Legend of Zelda. What struck me as the most odd though is that that author Tevis Thompson, spends so little time actually explaining why the original was so great, of which I can think of a few reasons but rather just stated its perfect as a matter-of-fact and that modern Zelda games need to return to mimicking that 1986 classic rather than learning from it, like it has.
Clearly games can get no better than this.
One particular section of the Saving Zelda essay that sums up my fears is the example of how new Zelda games should be more like the first.
“If Zelda is to reclaim any of the spirit that Miyamoto first invested in its world, it needs to do a few things. It needs to make most of the map accessible from the beginning. No artificial barriers to clumsily guide Link along a set course. Players know that game; they know when they’re being played. Link must be allowed to enter areas he’s not ready for. He must be allowed to be defeated, not blocked, by the world and its inhabitants.”
The language of this section hides the meaning and when simplified, would make any game design shudder. Thompson is basically suggesting that the Zelda games should have the same kind freedom to let players explore and get into trouble when they go out of bounds. What this is saying, is to essentially punish the player for doing what they are suppose to do, which any game designer will tell you is a terrible thing to do. In some regards, the original Zelda game isn’t even that much about exploration, and these “shackles” that Thompson discusses, these artificial barriers, are just as present and just as artificial in the original but instead of simply acting as a marker of progression, they use the threat of the game over screen, which to many, signifies the end of the play session. Not exactly ideal, because it leaves players guessing at where they need to go, to tread cautiously everywhere they go in fear that the game will yell at them that they walked off the right path and kill them.
Another example of this include criticism of Diablo III‘s art design, thought of by long time fans as too colorful to be be as “serious” as the old games were. This is despite the fact that Blizzard gave several reasonable explanations of how the new art style benefited the game:
“Now in terms of the actual texturing, this texturing, where they grayed out everything and it’s very flat and the monsters are all kind of a similar tone — that does not play well. It’s very boring to run through more than a couple of times, and it’s very difficult to tell creatures apart and pop them out of the environment. So those things don’t really work for us. A lot of the lighting stuff I think is very cool, but it’s also not very doable for us.“
Oh God, its like looking at Loco Roco.
The Blizzard team even mentioned how even though they remembered Diablo II has dark and gritty, there were a lot more colors than they remembered. Nostalgia is also pretty unreliable, only remembering the good and usually forgetting the bad and these are not isolated incidents. Fans have complained about the usually most hated features of point and click adventure games being removed, Even games like Resident Evil have received flak for removing some of the most obnoxious design choices (mainly the awkward camera) though I’ll stop there because I don’t have much experience with that particular series.
It is this idolization of bad game design that I think also puts a greater rift between players and developers. I have read a couple of articles already warning developers about taking player feedback seriously, for example this interview with game designer Simon Strange:
“When someone says ‘I don’t like this,’ that’s really important and you have to believe them. But when someone says ‘I don’t like this because-,’ you can often kind of ignore their ‘because,’ because they often don’t have the data to understand what’s going on,”
In this case, Thompson is missing the data on why Zelda games have become more guided over the years because his nostalgia glasses prevent him from seeing that the original Zelda game made a mistake and nearly all future titles have streamlined something that just as counter-intuitive as it was unnecessary.
One of the worst features added to any Zelda game.
Other instances are the criticism of the motion controlled combat, Thompson saying:
“It creates a moment-to-moment pacing problem, inserting pauses, start-stop-repeat, and thus you rarely chain moves together with any sort of fluidity. Enemies are patient, almost polite, and usually allow for individual encounters, yet in a game about mastering a sword, you never even duel. “
Aside from the fact that I’m pretty sure you duel at least 3 bosses and some mini-bosses, to me this is a tell-tale sign that Thompson is unaware of the finer points of designing mechanics around motion control, in this case, not exhausting the player with flailing endlessly. The pacing “problem” is actually a pacing solution to keep the game engaging, the pauses are necessary for the game to flow at a pace that won’t turn people away from the game, and I do believe it is because Thompson has the original Zelda game in such high regard that he can’t see this, but rather can only what makes it different, which in his mind, means its wrong and like he prefaced, the games feel like work because they’re different.
What Thompson has ended up doing is basically declare that the faults of the newer Zelda titles are that they are not the original Zelda, or they are not Demon’s Souls (which seems like was the inspiration for the entire article because what he ended up describing was Demon’s Souls but that is an entirely different beast all together), which to me seems a bit unfair. His nostalgic view of the original The Legend of Zelda has him advocating bad design choices and his entire thought process seems entirely self-centered on creating a game that caters to him and him alone. This is ultimately what nostalgia does for people who cannot accept it as a perspective but instead as a fact. To strip down improvements made to long running game titles, or anything really, because the past was better and it doesn’t need an explanation. I’m scared of this because if the nostalgic were to get their way, we would never experience new ideas in a franchise, it would be the same show over and over again, and while people like Thompson claim it can be different, that a franchise like Zelda or Star Fox, or Metroid can be different and still the same, they offer no solutions. Even Mario, who Thompson claims needs no saving because it has held true to its core, has actually changed so much since the original game, with new ways to play, new items, and more and more features. I think nostalgia is great, but when it begins to ruin your future experiences, then I think its time to let go of the past.
If you want a brief look at other incidents of where nostalgia can poison a person’s perceptions of modern games, check out the TVtropes page: They Changed It, Now It Sucks for video games.
3 comments
Naphtali
October 25, 2012 at 5:23 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Sorry if this is a way long. I’ll split it up!
1) You say: “What Thompson has ended up doing is basically declare that the faults of the newer Zelda titles are that they are not the original Zelda, or they are not Demon’s Souls.”
Erik G
October 25, 2012 at 2:40 PM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Thank you for commenting, and for the sake of brevity, I’m going to do my best to keep this short and not another article. Unfortunately, your comment did not contain simple questions, so I feel like simple answers would be doing it a disservice so we’ll see how it turns out.
1) What Thompson describes as “wrong” about modern Zelda games are all things that can be found in Demon’s Souls. The reduction of “verbs”, the exploration where you can die, the removal of a solid plot, removal of a map, his description of the combat, etc. I found all of that in the first few hours of playing Demon’s Souls and while I think Demon’s Souls is a fine game with issues, they had very specific workarounds to ensure that their bad game designed was compensated with good ideas (players being able to warn each other for example and no real game over screen).
2) Have those things really disappeared from Zelda games? That was one of my points is that nostalgia has blinded people like Thompson from seeing what is right in front of him. There are still secrets in every Zelda game, and guided or not, you are still exploring. As a game designer though, I know when not to purposefully hinder the player’s experience for those reasons though. I reality, I want to make a path just obvious enough so that players know that they aren’t just looking at a wall. I know plenty of experienced gamers who didn’t have trouble with the game, but felt like it achieved those things that Thompson says are lacking, myself included.
The difficult thing about game design is creating those authentic emotions because everyone plays differently and everyone feels something different based on their experience with the game. For example, when I played the original Legend of Zelda game, I didn’t feel like a pathfinder or a survivor, I just felt annoyed. I felt annoyed how if I went off the beaten path, the game kills me. I felt annoyed that enemies weren’t exactly engaging me, but rather just ways for me to get more hearts or rupees. One reason I really liked Skyward Sword is because getting into a fight felt like getting into a fight, where if I messed up I could lose more than I came in with.
I have no problems with people disliking the game, it is possible for people to like bad games, but when a person starts declaring it broken then I have a problem. When someone ignores all the good points of the game, and their only reasons are incredibly subjective “it just didn’t feel right” nostalgia fueled rants, then I do have an issue. In this case, it was the avocation of what I feel is bad design such as punishing players for exploring and not giving them a direction to head in. The best example of a game that is essentially a modern 3D Zelda game and definitely achieves, at least for me, everything Thompson described was the original Metroid Prime game. If you haven’t, you should check it out because I personally think it is the best game ever made.
3) I don’t think I addressed “access to difficult enemies”, but rather the perceived pacing problem that Thompson described. Skyward Sword had difficult enemies, some bosses in particular but a necessity was they would be slowed down, giving the player a chance to re-evaluate the situation and rest their arm. If I did address access to difficult enemies, then it was only in the context of not going outside of your boundaries. Honestly, if a basic enemy takes more than, say, 100 hits to defeat without the proper upgrade then player psychology is usually going to associate that with doing something wrong, which really sucks if they are in fact, doing something right. And if you put a lot of those difficult enemies in the game to essentially block players from entering that area, then that is an artificial barrier and is in fact, totally unnecessary. You aren’t really robbing anyone of anything because you have a keep out sign that players are going to ignore and essentially not even be rewarded for doing it because they were suppose to go there later unlike the Zelda games that have those difficult areas that are totally optional and yield great rewards.
Of course, in Zelda games difficult enemies isn’t necessarily the case, but its really items that limit how far they can go. Afterall, if you skipped the hookshot and you need it for a dungeon, then you’d have to leave and go get it. A good game designer wants to guide the player to where they need go, ideally without letting them know that they are being guided but that point becomes rather moot when players are always trying to outsmart the designers. That said, a bad design decision would be giving players access to a place they can’t really access yet. In some cases, it works, especially for optional stuff and in places they might be more likely to come back to, like a village, but otherwise, the designer just wasted the player’s time. A good example is in Super Mario 64, where in the first world you are able to select a star that you can’t possibly achieve in your first run (get the 8 red coins) because it requires the wing cap, which is unlocked later. This is bad because now the player is just stuck. Unless they know about another star they can get, they’d have to get an old star or just quit. This is why later Mario games dropped that kind of format for later games.
I agree that establishing tension and danger is a part of a good game design, as long as that was the intended purpose. But it needs to be done right and usually with care, because people can, essentially, overdoes one it and then no longer care. This is usually accomplished by story, atmosphere, and sometimes a change in mechanics. Skyward Sword was actually very careful about this, making each Trial section more difficult and pretty much restricting you to just running. Basic encounters shouldn’t be too tense because that is when the player should be somewhat relaxed and receptive, so they can learn the game.
Again, its hard to judge a game based on personal experiences, because moments where you didn’t feel tense and in danger might be completely different for someone else. Instead, we have to objectively analyze where we can suspect the designers wanted players to feel that way. The trials for example, given the music and conditions, the boss battles for sure, and emotionally, the game is so diverse that it doesn’t feel like non-stop tension, non-stop silly, non-stop love story, etc. This is a good thing.
To finally address the last points, I’m not sure how any of that is relevant to the criticism of Skyward Sword. Enemies that require you to pause after one swipe are among the most basic of enemies, ones that teach and reinforce the sword mechanics in the game while bosses actually require multiple swipes at a time when they are left open. The lack of emergent gameplay is also solved by Skyward Sword because most enemies can be taken down a variety of ways. I think Deku Babas are the best example because you either slice them the correct way, or shield bash them as a counter and cut the stem (you can also apparently roll a bomb up to them and they’ll eat it, which I didn’t know before looking at the enemy guide). The final boss is another example, where my girlfriend and I ended up defeating him in two totally different ways. A puzzley boss is not a bad thing, and can be made more interesting if conditions changes or if there are multiple solutions. Sometimes, if the solution is a difficult one to pull off, just doing that three or four times is all the challenge it needs because it is a survival tests that doesn’t care if you know the answer.
As for the Simon Says comment, I think I struggled with that part the most in writing this article not because I was trying to disagree with it, but because he was right and it was a good thing. Almost all games are essentially Simon Says and I might have to write an separate article why that is a good thing but for now I can break it down into a few points (and throw brevity out the window…sorry).
What makes Simon Says easy and hard? Speed and size. The more things you have to remember faster, the more difficult the game becomes. Children are taught Simon Says because it encourages listening and applying motor skills to verbal commands. Video games do the same thing and it can be as vague or as precise as it needs to be. When an enemy attacks, Simon Says not to get hit either by dodging or blocking. When an enemy is open, Simon says attack. When lava fills the room, Simon Says get to higher ground. When your health is low, Simon Says heal. With some exceptions, Simon Says is the foundation for most games and I can probably tell how without much difficulty, provided I have played the game.
Despite what Thompson seems to imply, Skyward Sword becomes harder and harder as the game progresses. The evolution of the basic enemies, the bokoblins, is a good example since they change from being a one on one enemy who rarely attacks and dies in one hit. To swarms of them who will attack you even if you aren’t focused on them, to the technoblins where making the wrong move doesn’t just make your attack ineffective, it hurts you. The faster you can respond to each one, the better at the game you are becoming. It doesn’t make the game broken, it makes the game actually work.
And that, in so many words, is my point. It isn’t that some aspects of game design are just outdated, nostalgic relics that we can move past, but that those things have been improved, made better to enhance the overall experience. Thompson and those like him, choose to ignore these though. Because the game isn’t like some game they remember from long ago, they can’t see how new theories and techniques are being applied and especially why they’ve been changed. It is in fact, really scary to think that the next generation of game designers might revert to creating problems that were already solved (thanks God for playtesters) and to me that is like a worst possible scenario.
Naphtali
October 26, 2012 at 4:09 AM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
I am terrible at html apparently. Also I suddenly don’t feel too bad for typing so much. That is quite the response.
2) If we can’t even agree that the roles of being an “explorer, a pathfinder and labyrinth conqueror, a fighter and survivor, a finder of secrets” have at least been less emphasised over the years, I don’t know if we can reach a consensus on anything. You singled out two things: Exploration and secrets.
Exploration
Diminished (not eliminated) by –> A landscape that is overly mechanical and segregated.
Segregated: Simply put, there’s less to explore at a time. Too many small sections that funnel into other small sections. It not only feels artificial but reduces your options. Not that all areas are like this now, but objectively there’s been more of this, yes?
Overly mechanical: It’s the difference between an amusement park and a playground. An amusement park may seem big but really there’s 9 things to do. Once you go on a roller coaster, you’ve done it; you’re done. A playground might have a jungle gym that you can swing from, crawl under, race to the top, see how high you can jump from, etc. That’s an sort of abstract way of exemplifying the danger of making a landscape that’s too mechanical and puzzle-y. When the seams start to show, some of the wonder is lost.
Secrets
Diminished by –> Incessant telegraphing.
If I go into my closet, look behind the paper towels and find a wrapped cookie, I’ve found a secret. If I go into my pantry and reach into a jar labeled “cookies” and find a cookie, same result but can you really call that a secret? Exaggerated? I guess, but to make a point. Nintendo is so scared you won’t find all the clever cookies they’ve hid, you’re constantly being telegraphed to and sometimes even outright told what to go on. Imagine if in ALTTP you’re told to go buy flippers from the zora as soon as you get 500 rupee and then watch the camera slowly pan over to the Waterfall of Wishing and the dude under the bridge. Your creativity doesn’t get to be exercised and you’re robbed of a moment of discovery.
Listen, I can appreciate the value of a well placed hint, and I don’t advocate having to blow up every inch of Hyrule’s geometry just to find a cavern, but good game design doesn’t have to be condescending game design. It should not be governed by fear. Can we agree that any of these points are actually happening? Or am I just out of touch and all these needs are being met by modern Zeldas in spades? I think Nintendo is aware of all this, but to them it’s an acceptable loss. Compared to action/adventure games, a puzzle/action game is easier to direct and control. They’d ship the next Zelda on a cartridge that’s also a rubix cube if they could lol.
3) I was surprised to read you taking what I said about tension/danger and advocate using story/atmosphere for that. To be frank, this reminded me of the Star Wars prequel philosophy to tell and not show. Characters constantly declaring what they feel instead of actually seeing character growth. The world’s most unbelievable romance. Here you go, two characters that act petty, creepy and bored around each other. But they’re main characters that say they’re in love, so they must be in love. In any case, if not coupled with gameplay, I think this would be ineffective at best, and misleading at worst.
With regards to your response to my Simon Says comments: It’s not that Simon Says can’t be hard or a fun exercise. And I get what you mean when you say “everything is Simon Says”, but it’s that when you reduce Zelda’s battle’s down to this form, you throw out the elements of finesse, creativity and unpredictability that can come from a good, more open battle system. This literal form of call and response fighting can be interesting, but it can’t replace what would be lost imo.
I hope I have sufficiently shown that these aren’t “problems” that Nintendo has “solved.” They are features Ninendo has chosen not to bring over and translate through modern game design. They have consolidated their vision of what “Zelda convention” is and what it isn’t, so that they could instead concentrate on designing ways to lead their players along, keep them from boredom, keep them unchallenged, keep them playing. There are many things Zelda still does well, but there are also certain feelings Zelda does not evoke anymore. It’s not because not because Nintendo isn’t able to, and it’s not because I or others are blinded by nostalgia. It’s because Nintendo chooses not to; with priorities elsewhere.