Thumbnails #6

Obligatory Zelda content! // Open World Games // Some Thoughts on Game Design

May 12, 2023

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is out today, and to celebrate, I thought I’d post some Zelda themed pages from my graphic novel, Gamish: A Graphic History of Gaming.

We see a young Japanese boy exploring the mountains, rivers and caves of a Japanese landscape. The final panels shows him resting on a hill watching a sunset. Text reads: Few have captured the magic of discovery as well as Shigeru Miyamoto. A creative and inquisitive child, young Shigeru would spend his days wandering the Japanese countryside near his rural home. It was a world of mystery and awe, where new surprises lay around every corner. A young boy, alone with his imagination. A tiny adventurer in a big, dangerous world.

Images show the design of Link from the original Legend of Zelda, a small elf child in green with sword and shield. We see Shigeru Miyamoto designing the game. We see a bonsai tree with miniature garden. We see Link exploring a cave. Text reads: With The Legend of Zelda the adult Miyamoto sought to recapture these experiences. To bottle this sense of wonder for others to enjoy. Part of capturing this magic was in making a world worthy of discovery. Miyamoto: “Instead of thinking of it as making a game, think of it as nurturing a miniature garden called Hyrule.” (p189, Altice) The miniature garden is an idea at the heart of Miyamoto’s design philosophy - a concept with roots in the decorative gardens of Japanese culture, known as hakoniwa. As game designer Chaim Gingold explains: “Gardens are dynamic living systems, full of secrets, autonomous agents, transformation, and emergent behaviours. A garden has an inner life all its own. It is a world which goes on without you.” (p20) In this idea, Miyamoto found the perfect model for his game worlds. This wouldn’t be about creating enormous replicas of the real world, but fanciful microcosms. Worlds brimming with secrets and mystery, where our curiosity and sense of adventure was rewarded. Mythical lands that came to life at the flick of a switch.
We see comic artist Edward Ross standing in a landscape that transitions from fantasy Hyrule to blocky world of Mario. We see a Zelda cartridge. We see a child playing Zelda in a Japanese city. We see Link watching the sunset. We see a mushroom growing in a felled wood next to encroaching urbanisation. Text reads: From Link’s Hyrule to Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom, the worlds that Miyamoto created were more than a backdrop… They were worlds of wonder that responded playfully to our presence there. As iconic as the characters that explored them. A land like Hyrule couldn’t have come at more important time. As games historian Tristan Donovan argues, “for a generation of American and Japanese children whose freedom to wander, explore and play outside was being curtailed by urbanisation, it was a virtual substitute.” (p167) Fun, exuberant and finely tuned, Miyamoto’s magical worlds helped set a new standard for the medium and ensured Nintendo’s market dominance for years to come. And as the magic and mystery of nature gave way to condos and parking lots, video games like Miyamoto’s took on an ever more important role in the myth-making of childhood.

If you’ve enjoyed this sample, you’ll probably love the book, which is available in all good book stores, and via my own online shop.

If you’ve read it already, you can help out by leaving a review on online retailers or via Goodreads.

Open Worlds

Ever since the early 2000s when console technology made it possible, sprawling open-world games have become a mainstay of the medium, and possibly even the pre-eminent genre within gaming. Titles like Grand Theft Auto, Assassin’s Creed and Skyrim promise playgrounds of infinite possibility, stuffed with places to visit, things to do and quests to undertake. But something was rapidly lost as designers pushed to expand their maps to epic new sizes - a sense of discovery and mystique became a list of objectives to visit and content to consume, and players would spend more time staring at a waypoint on a mini-map than enjoying and exploring these digital worlds.

When it came out in 2017, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a breath of fresh air in a tired genre. Although the map is huge, and the world is stuffed with life, it never feels insurmountable. The game doesn’t hassle you to cross off its checklists or guide you towards waypoints, simply offering a wide open space to get lost in and explore, guided oh-so-gently by Nintendo’s genius world design.

This fantastic video by Game Maker’s Toolkit goes into some detail about Nintendo’s approach to designing this world and it’s well worth ten minutes of your time.

To summarise, the designers of Breath of the Wild worked to turn the game’s enormous map into a space that invited exploration, rather than directing the player what to do. This was achieved by using the landscape to conceal and reveal new landmarks that would naturally draw the player’s interest, allowing them to explore while marching to the beat of their own drum. Meanwhile, the game’s beautiful map isn’t riddled with objective markers, and instead encourages you to study it yourself, looking for clues of where to visit next.

It’s a subtle, smart piece of design and worldbuilding, fostering a sense of discovery in the player that feels earnt and personal. It’s the reason I’m so excited to dive into Tears of the Kingdom, which hopefully will afford a whole new landscape to discover.

Some Thoughts on Game Design

This all brings to mind something I’ve wanted to write about for a while, which is what I’d like to see less of in modern video games.

Smaller Worlds

As I point out above, video game worlds have been getting bigger and bigger over the last couple of decades, enabled by new computing technology. Processing power has allowed for bigger draw distances on maps, and more complex and detailed design, while procedular generation has meant game designers aren’t burdened with placing every single bush or sculpting hundreds of square kilometers of landscape. But just because you can make maps bigger doesn’t mean you should. I recently replayed one of my all-time favourites, Batman: Arkham City. Ostensibly an open-world Batman game, the city is a tightly designed map that’s less than 0.2 square km, a dot compared to GTA V’s 80 square km. This video game vision of Gotham is densely packed with detail, quick to zip around and absolutely the right size for an always-fun experience.

How Zelda Does This Right: Sure, BotW has a huge map, but it maintains a sense of discovery, keeping you present in the moment rather than focussed on ticking items off a list. It balances areas of density with wide open spaces, and makes sure that traversal is fun and commesurate with the scale of the world.

Fewer Side-Quests

I picked up Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla last year and after a few hours I just switched off. A huge map dotted with a million things to do quickly felt like a bore and a burden. Compare this with Arkham City, which is a map dotted with riddler trophies to solve and iconic locations to photograph, and that’s it. Rather than bloating a game with content (which may or may not be fun but certainly lets you boast about the sheer length of your game), give me a few extra things to do that make the experience rounded and satisfying and leave it at that.

How Zelda Does This Right: Side quests are chanced upon rather than marked on a map, and the to-do items scattered around the map (koroks, towers, shrines) are rewarding enough that it rarely feels like bloat.

Less Crafting

Along with open-world mechanics, crafting has become a cliche of modern video games. But, really, is crafting fun? Is it interesting? Well… it can be. Taking a page out of Resident Evil 4’s book, The Last of Us uses crafting to great effect, incorporating it sparingly and with precise intent. With just a few types of resources (blades, binding, bandages, bottles, alcohol) we are able to craft a small list of items crucial to survival, and which (beautifully, painfully) we must choose between. Bottles can be used to distract enemies or can be crafted into deadly molotovs, if you’re also willing to spare the bandages and alcohol necessary for healing. As Tim Rogers outlines in his excellent and looong video review of the game, this mechanic feels almost board-game like in its beautiful simplicity - a bloody, fungal-apocalypse version of Catan.

But that’s not crafting in most games. Horizon Forbidden West features literally hundreds of crafting items, needed to create dozens of items. Here, all meaning is lost - you just hoover up whatever you find and hope it will come in useful. In The Last of Us finding some alcohol or a blade could turn the tides of an encounter. In Horizon, who even knows the functional difference between any two resources, or how you should feel if you find one?

The difference to gamefeel is stark. One makes every item, every moment of crafting feel meaningful - a choice worth thinking about, a part of the story. The other turns crafting into mindless busywork - something in the way of the actual fun of the game - a sort of videogame equivalent of self-service checkouts.

How Zelda Does This Right: While this is a world filled with resources, it turns its crafting mechanic into something fun and experimental. Rather than being told what to combine to create things, we’re asked to throw ingredients together and see what comes out the other end. This delightful cooking mechanic is one of the best parts of the game.

Smaller RPG Mechanics

Complex levelling up trees have become synonymous with open-world adventures, but again bloat has set in. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was perhaps the breaking point for me, presenting multiple constellations of inscruitable upgrade trees to contend with. Worse, each upgrade felt like small potatoes, upgrading abilities by mere fractions. It’s insulting, really, making character progression feel like a drag, and creating a dull sense of fomo from all the choices you aren’t making.

Compare this to one of my favourite upgrade trees of all time - Far Cry 3 - which allowed you to unlock a series of satisfying and bad-ass moves throughout the course of the game - perfect in capturing the Die Hard action hero feel the game was going for. Each level-up felt like a moment to savour - opening up significant new ways to tackle encounters and making you feel like you’d actually levelled up.

How Zelda Does This Right: BotW doesn’t really bother with this stuff, and thank goodness. Instead we’re given chances to upgrade either stamina or health, and can unlock further strengths and abilities by finding weapons and outfits, or cooking potions and meals that give stat buffs.

Shorter Games

I just finished replaying the Resident Evil 4 remake, which reminded me that AAA games don’t need to demand 40+ hours of my time. I’ve lost count of the number of games that I’ve given up on after months of play because the end wasn’t even in sight. Horizon Forbidden West and Red Dead Redemption II were two that I truly enjoyed but, c’mon, who has the time? This may be because I no longer have the freedom I once did to plunge endless hours into completing something huge, and I don’t begrudge those who do.

So, here’s to the games that provide a nice 10-20hr experience that delivers a steady rhythm of enjoyment and keeps the momentum going right to the end. And the ironic thing is, when a game does that for me, I’m much more likely to come back multiple times. I’ve completed Resident Evil 4, Batman: Arkham City and the Hitman series multiple times now, all games that can be completed in a reasonable number of hours.

How Zelda Does This Right: BotW is really, really long, and both times I played it, I stopped not long before the end, and had to come back months later to complete it. But, maybe that’s a me problem - the game tells you what you need to do (defeat Ganon) in the first few hours, tells you how to do it, and sends you on your way. Unlike other epic open-worlders, you can jump to the climax as quickly or as slowly as you like, allowing you to tailor your playthrough to your own needs. Completists struggle with this idea of course, but it offers the flexibility if you want it.

Final Recommendations!

A few things I enjoyed recently, Zelda edition:

🌐 This article about the music of Breath of the Wild really captures why it’s such a magical soundtrack. // 🎬 This video by Cool Ghosts really captures some of my feelings about why BotW succeeds where other open-worlds don’t.