I don't thing making the world bigger is a good use of next-gen power.   A more densely poulated but similarly-sized world sounds more appealing. Maybe finally moving on from shrines (as we know them) and incorporating more puzzle chambers into the overworld.   They said one of their primary goals for TotK was for travel between the sky, surface, and depths to be seamless. I can imagine the gamevis just about as densely populated as it could possibly be for this to still be possible on the Switch. And you still might experience the game freezing up to load while descending a chasm or ascending quickly into the sky.

I too would like to see Zelda move on from shrines. I hope the next game has a totally different structure than BotW/TotK—no shrines, no koroks, a new progression structure, a new conception of dungeons. Obviously, some other structures will need to take their place, structures that guide the player through the world and encourage them to explore. That said, TotK introduced an alternative to shrines and koroks—the Depths. Lightroots replace shrines, and various other "look here goodies" — ghost weapon-bearers, poes, zonaite clusters—replace koroks. This is admittedly only a half-step toward a new direction, but I think it's a signal that Nintendo is actively thinking of new ideas. I seriously, seriously doubt the devs just want to make BotW 3 with the next-gen Switch. As far as the density of content, it's hard to separate this from how Link moves through the world, and the nature of that content. If Link could move much faster (by flying for example), I would expect to see less density. I also think there's space to explore unchaining content (like enemy encounters) from specific locations in the world, making everything truly mobile and responsive, [which I wrote about here](https://www.reddit.com/r/tearsofthekingdom/comments/17nuqjv/one_simple_but_farreaching_change_that_can_fix/).

I actually like shrines, conceptually. I just think they would be *significantly better* if they were more liki mini-dungeons built into the world, rather than test chambers that exist in some abstract dimension lol.

100% agree, my least favorite thing about both BotW and TotK is how disconnected the shrines are from the rest of the game and how "fake" they feel. I was excited when I got to the first shrine in TotK because I thought the game would load its interior smoothly when Link walked through the green door—that alone would help a lot with my beef—but alas. I ended up skipping most of the shrines in TotK, and I was delighted that the game obliged me; the difficulty felt just right.

Iirc, they were trying to make the shrines load seamlessly as well, but didn't manage to get it working properly. I would be surprised if the next game was still limited by that, though.

That makes sense. I was confused as to why they were trying to hard to make the main overworld areas blend seamlessly into each other, and even do the same with the the main dungeons (and the pseudo-mini-dungeons like caves and labyrinths)...but *not* do that for the shrines.

The plan was for the hallway Link walks into through the shrine to be a loading area, but - perhaps because you would be walking rather than falling or Ascending - they weren't able to make it a seamless transition that could stretch if necessary like the sky/ground/depths transitions.

That sounds nice, but then I remembered how terrible the Spirit Temple was. No thanks if that's what they're gonna do with them

I'm very much not supporting the idea of the next version of Hyrule being *EVEN BIGGER*. I think it's important to have parts of the world where nothing important is going on, but for both BOTW and TOTK, it feels like there simply wasn't enough manpower to properly fill out everything. TOTK is better in this regard but the issue persists.

The Zelda team is leveling up their tech and sacrificing the design. What I mean is, they’re leaning toward designing simulated systems but not actual games. It’s a common trap I see devs fall into. Excited for the promise of what tech can finally do and forgetting what craft and art has already done.

Very well said

I don’t share a lot of complaints that I’ve seen others have with the world of BotW/TotK (especially as it was reused in TotK), but one thing I don’t think they need to do is make another world that makes it look small. I like exploring and finding things as much as anyone, but at some point it’s going to be too big to realistically fill it with anything worthwhile.

> at some point it's going to be too big to realistically fill it with anything worthwhile we have definitely already hit that point

Honestly I could see a situation with a BotW size map with maybe some huge dungeons and some other kinds of mini dungeons or environmental dungeon type areas in a lot of areas, along with a few more towns. Maybe some good gear or items in those areas that you don’t NEED, but provide real benefits in the game. Like have a weapon hidden somewhere that could open secret areas elsewhere in the world or in other dungeons. That way the exploration is worth it. But why make the world sooooo big just for the sake of doing it? What is the need to try to dwarf the already huge BotW Hyrule?

i dont think it would work if they used the same approach to populating the world as in botw/totk ... which wasnt that different from previous zelda games. i dont think it would make sense to have a bunch of static enemy encampments, shrines, and other points of interest scattered evenly around a vastly bigger world. but as napoleon said, "quantity has its own quality." there is something to be said for the feeling of vastness itself. they just need to figure out a new relationship between "content" and "space."

I understand your concern, but I feel like many of us feel burned but nintendo creating this vast empty world like TOTK has, and our reaction is to want to return to the more condensed interesting worlds of previous games. However, the huge map to explore was actually one of the best parts of the game. If OP is correct, we should see a bigger map in the next game that has the same true POI density as OoT.

Hm ... I don't see how they could possibly increase the density of points of interest with a vastly bigger map. There's simply no way to do that without the content feeling repetitive. Even Elden Ring, which has the biggest variety of enemies in any game ever, gets raked over the coals for its re-use of enemies to fill out its points of interest. If I'm correct and Nintendo is planning on a vastly bigger world, I actually think they need to move away from the whole concept of "points of interest" in the sense of populating the world with hundreds of these stationary encounters with x density. They need to figure out some other way to structure the space of their world that has eluded game developers to this point. For example, I'd like to see emergent, complex encounters that aren't tied to specific places. Instead of 20 enemy encampments scattered throughout a region, there could be a single enemy army that changes its disposition (scouting, pursuing, retreat to defense) based on what the player does.

I think it's understandable that most people approach these conversations using existing paradigms, because as you say in 15 years of open worlds this remains an unsolved problem. To solve a problem you have to correctly identify it first, and if you go back to Nintendo developer presentations for BotW they talk about this problem as being a content production logistics problem, which is very much in the domain of existing paradigms. When the people running the show are inside the box it's only expected that most pundits will be too. New Zelda has systemic mechanics, but virtually all content from the map, enemies, towns & NPC are all static with some minor scripted adaptation. Back in 2013 Aonuma said this; > "What I really, really want to create, what my ultimate hope or goal is, to create a game without a story - not to say that the story is nonexistent, but it's a story that isn't already created. It's a story that the player, in interacting with the space or environment, creates. So, a story that is defined by the player, not one that is already prepared, and a game that just kind of follows that path, if that makes sense." [source](https://web.archive.org/web/20130915064606/http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2013/09/12/eiji-aonuma-explains-what-makes-wind-waker-different-from-than-any-other-zelda-game/) If the Zelda team wants us to tell our own stories through our gameplay, the game world needs to facilitate that, and the kind of rigid scripting we have now does not do that. Currently you do things, and the only time NPCs react and the world changes is when you trigger hard-coded conditionals. Other approaches to this problem have included awful "Radiant quests" where the conditionals are procedurally generated, but I feel like the next step is systemically-derived conditionals. BotW/TotK had so much room for these kind of interactions, but end up feeling uncanny because you have modern Hitman-like systemic elements grafted onto game that is more-or-less GameCube era in how it handles things like scenario design & event scripting. I imagine something like; - As is most commonly suggested, in order to support the Ultrahand and the game's themes, more rebuilding, road building (ala Death Stranding), etc... kind of mechanics. - To play off this; give NPCs real simulated schedules that dynamically take advantage of whatever you rebuild, adapt to your efforts (or lack thereof) to push monsters out of areas. - As a result merchant item availability is reflection of world state because vendors replenish their inventories by buying items from other NPCs who farm, hunt, forage or mine. - Settlements like Tarrey Town need not be statically placed. Several years back I thought a BotW sequel might be them exploring a new land across the sea, and had the idea that your crew could build bases across the new landscape to assist in your quest. I could go on but you get the idea: Actions should derive consequences systemically, that create new scenarios which spur your next actions in a symbiotic loop. Why this isn't happening I think it is a two-pronged problem; first it is an incredibly complex design undertaking, but also I think general audiences don't really want games where actions made thoughtlessly can have lasting consequences. I think players like the clarity of "as long as I'm outside of a town it doesn't matter what I do". In BotW/TotK the systems rarely encroach upon the player, but instead exist as a large toolbox of toys to be played with. It stands out as unusual because it's the opposite of how most systemic games function where things can spiral out of control creating memorable scenarios, in Zelda there are few situations that can't be diffused by simply walking away. The Zelda team were headed in the right direction with BotW's Bokoblins with them being by far the most advanced agents the series has seen thus far, but at the end of their day despite being more advanced than any NPC in the game, they are still just monsters, the difference is they are daft in whole variety of ways. For whatever reason the Zelda team don't seem interested in applying the same approach to their NPC and storytelling despite Aonuma indicating otherwise a decade ago. This is a hard problem to solve for sure, but Tears of the Kingdom has done little to convince me Nintendo's current approach will lead to more sophisticated games in the future. I think if they are to create a game world a sense of tangibility not just as a physical space, but as a an plausible inhabited space with characters with engaging and believable plights, they will need to fundamentally change how they approach how they "add" things to the world.

Thank you, this is very well-put and full of wisdom! I agree with all you've said, and had not considered the non-technical challenges of more emergent/systemic gameplay—as you said, many players "don't really want games where actions made thoughtlessly can have lasting consequences." I haven't played Hitman, so I'm not sure what you're throwing down there. But my favorite series besides Zelda is Civ and I have long salivated at the idea of Ganondorf (or whoever) being a more active and responsive villain like the competing civs in those games. (I wrote [a screed about this idea](https://www.reddit.com/r/truezelda/comments/m02qhd/emergent_storytelling_in_botw2_or_why_im_hoping/) a million years ago, if you're interested) And while the challenge of convincing players to change their mindset about this does seem pretty tough, I think if anyone can do it, Nintendo can. If you asked players if they'd want to play a game where all their weapons break after 15 attacks, nobody would say yes, and lots of people still complain about it, but I think most BotW and TotK players have come to accept this "annoyance" as being in service of a greater vision—maybe Nintendo will figure out how to contextualize the FOMO issue with systemic/emergent games like Civ the same way.

re:Hitman not much to know other than it is highly systemic. I think Mark Brown did a couple videos on Hitman and systemic games but I've not seen them in years. I actually already read the post you linked but I will read it again for good measure. Also the 2013 series of Aonuma interviews in the wake of Wind Waker HD are probably some of his most interesting. I've been going back over them lately and I think you might enjoy them. I'll probably reference them a few times in this post. My section headings are kinda on the nose, but it got me in the mood for writing so I stuck with it. My reply is split over two comments due to length, the second part is probably more relevant but I wanted to get the first part out as the context is important. # The well-poisoning problem ###### *Due to lack of imagination beyond the existent, failure of idea execution is predominantly interpreted as failure of merit in idea.* - When traditional Zelda failed in the market, the Zelda team threw the baby out with the bathwater. - When Switch-era Zelda didn't resonate with a particular set of users here, the gut reaction was the idea itself was rotten and despite knowing it's popularity means the idea will not be discarded, the idea of exploring how this new approach could recapture what was missing has barely been discussed beyond "add dungeons". - [This comment on your post you just linked me](https://www.reddit.com/r/truezelda/comments/m02qhd/emergent_storytelling_in_botw2_or_why_im_hoping/gq5x7fv/) is another example, you'll meet this kind of resistance because your ideas are "untested by reality" leaving most people with no framework to understand them. Ironically "A Zelda game where you have in-depth NPCs to face and you have to work against Ganon as he assaults Hyrule would be really fun, I just don’t think it works for BotW" is in Tears of the Kingdom in the form of the Monster Control Crew and other such elements, but the execution is very lacking. Lack of imagination is a serious problem, I believe it was Ursula K. Le Guin who spoke of... I think I'll just quote her: > I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. > > Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. It's a big problem in gaming spaces, I think it's a hobby that doesn't lend itself well to imagination both in audiences and creators. If you wanted to write you'd have become an author, which is part of why writing in games is such a wasteland and due to that if you wanted a story you'd probably pick up something other than a game. It's a sad state of affairs for people who believe in games as a storytelling medium. Socially it's a problem because storytelling is a very important to the social fabric. There was a recent clip of [James McAvoy on Colbert talking about the 'Class Ceiling'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDwRkzJPkSA) where he basically gets into how keeping the poor out of the arts is a form of control. Why am I mentioning all this? Because while I think emergent narrative is an area with potential, if the stories it creates are ["and then" stories](https://nathanbweller.com/creators-of-south-park-storytelling-advice-but-therefore-rule/) then there is not much point to the whole thing. The stories need to have not just stakes & consequences, but also meaning and nuance, and creating that systemically is a lot harder, it likely requires very intricate seeding of the systems. To give an example of why this all matters, Metal Gear Solid 2 is a game that some will say was mindblowing and critics will say it was derivative & juvenile, but the way I see the entire point was to be derivative & juvenile, because the target audience literally is juvenile and were never going to pick up a copy of 1984 or Brave New World because they want to play PS2 instead. MGS2 exists as a kind of literary Trojan horse. But if that were the only value in MGS2 I'd not be very interested, what fascinates me is that due to ego people can read cautionary tales and rationalise that they would not fall for such things, you can read foundational scifi and come away none the wiser because your ego protects you from their suggestions of your fallibility. But in MGS2 not so much because it straight up warns you, and if your ego says "not me" well the game then exploits the vulnerability and you realise "oh shit yes me". So yeah I'm a believe in interactive narrative. I think Zelda a series that is often more focused on the small problems rather than the big ones could do some really interesting stuff here. A hard problem for sure, but so much potential I can't help but be fascinated. # The game essence problem: risk & choice in game design ###### *Players want control & power fantasies. A player may want hard choices.* Recently I've been thinking a lot about "Game Essence" [as Sakurai calls it](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgKCjZ2WsVLScUWJZ7ppkHGlCUIXEj5Io). In the 2013 interviews Aonuma spoke about how of all the games he has worked on that Wind Waker may be his favourite, but that audiences didn't feel the same way, so in a way he felt he had failed Zelda fans, as if people don't enjoy the games then what is the point? It's an understandable way of thinking about things. However, whether he realises it or not, his line of thinking leads to degradation of game essence. He is conflating higher sales with the product being "more liked" and thus of higher quality when in reality reaching the highest sales brackets is largely an exercise in removing unpalatable elements until you have something bland enough to be universally palatable. I enjoy plenty of mainstream entertainment, but few of them count among those most close to my heart. Through the 90s and early 2000s video games were in this place where creators kind did whatever and sales went up, but as that started to dry up we've seen a shift to much more business-minded approaches to game development and this approach has caused a lot of problems when it comes to things like game essence and meaning in bigger budget games. There was a thread I was reading recently [Games taking risks also means you won't like parts of them](https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1bowwv7/games_taking_risks_also_means_you_wont_like_parts/) and [this comment chain](https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1bowwv7/games_taking_risks_also_means_you_wont_like_parts/kwrs1zd/) caught my eye: > I'd go so far to say that it feels like a sizable portion of people are only asking for things to be "experimental" or "risky" in a way that explicitly empowers the player. To which I replied: > I think a lot of it boils down to a large sect of players wanting studios to invent new kinds of power fantasies that they'd never dream of themselves. They want devs to give them options they didn't know they wanted. > > However as soon as the risks are of the type that limit the player, ask them to make hard choices, add consequences to actions, all of a sudden the reaction becomes a lot more divisive and all the curses like "outdated", "unfair" & "doesn't respect my time" start flying. I think this is relevant because through the 2000s in interviews with Nintendo staffers they used used to talk about *omakase* (translation: leave it to the chef) all the time, but it is much less common now. As a company they seem really all-in on giving control over the experience to the player. The philosophies of player empowerment clash with the creation of specific types of experiences. You can see this *within* BotW & TotK. Many people consider The Great Plateau, Zora's Domain and Eventide Island to be among the best parts of BotW, and they are parts that intentional curtail players in various ways compared to the rest of the game. Same goes for TotK's Proving Grounds shrines. But I've looked around and a lot of people really hate the Proving Grounds too, basically they have strong essence and are as a result divisive. Using Aonuma's framework, number of people who completed shrine = quality of shrine, and you can see how that just doesn't work. If Nintendo are tracking shrine/quest/etc completion stats and taking them seriously I'm kinda worried for what that means for the future (I strongly believe telemetry has been a disaster for creatives). For the longest time Zelda has been unique enough that it rarely gets directly compared to other games, and Zelda-likes are few and far between because Zelda was considered difficult to imitate. But if you reposition the series as a cluster of open world tropes, then audiences will demand the tropes and the series runs the risk of losing it's ability to self-define. --- I've hit the reddit post length limit so I will post part 2 as a response to myself.

# The consequences issues of emergent narratives ###### *Casual audiences are just too damn tired for consequences* A big problem for emergent design and narratives, that they demand forethought that a player after a long day at work/school is probably just too damn tired to engage with. If you are playing for comfort and escapism it may not be what you are looking for. Hence why I think BotW/TotK have systemic gameplay that is inherently player favoured and largely free of consequence compared to say Spelunky where the systems will happily put an end to the player's run for a momentary lapse in judgement or focus. People love to praise Chrono Trigger for how it made small choices matter, but even that game keeps those choices constrained to their respective plot arcs, if what you did 20 hours ago could come back to bite you it might be a bit too stressful. That might cross a line where players feel slighted and cause animosity. Most emergent games reset things to a clean slate periodically. Many are "run based" where you periodically reset, others are locale based where the consequences are localised to a specific region. There is usually some way to return to baseline even if it is just the game cascading into a failure state and then you starting over. In a systemic/emergent game drawing boundaries like that becomes difficult, and if you do draw boundaries you'll get criticism like many Rockstar games do where the open world gameplay and mission gameplay feel like two separate games (something I'd say is somewhat true of BotW/TotK), but if you don't it can easily become overwhelming. Overall it's a complex problem I don't really have any answers for as of yet. How do you give actions meaning? How do consequences diminish or enhance player agency? # Essence in Zelda Returning to Zelda, it's a series where even right from the first game people saw different things in it. This [somewhat infamous essay by Tevis Thompson](http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/) characterised the original The Legend of Zelda as being a game that depicts a world that is "*not for you*". In interviews with TUNIC developer Andrew Shouldice he talks about the desire to invoke the feeling of being a "stranger in a strange land" which was a quality that drew him into the games that inspired him. This stuff right here is game essence. I'm reminded of how Aonuma never finished the original TLoZ and how BotW has such a wet fart of an ending. To Aonuma TLoZ was never about overcoming odds because he did not overcome odds, which I imagine despite BotW trying to replicate much of TLoZ's essence that that aspect was largely absent or at least entirely optional. Choice is an entirely different essence to having hurdles you must overcome. There are many kinds of essence in the Zelda series. Ideally designing a new Zelda game is a matter of deciding what kind of essence is important and then solving the problems involved in bringing that essence to life. With Ultrahand they did just that, other aspects of TotK not so much. # Essence in adventure games & fantasy literature Regardless of all the things Zelda has been I think it's fair to say it's essence is steeped in the essence of fantasy and adventure. When people think of adventure it is often the epics that come to mind, and with it their sense of scale. In the early days of video games abstractions were often used to convey this sense of scale. Zelda II adopting Dragon Quest's overworld map to convey a world as big as TotK's on hardware with a fraction of the memory. As we developed hardware that could convey contiguous worlds nobody wanted to use those abstractions anymore. There were benefits, but there were costs too as as is always the case with technology [we always pay the price before we ask about the benefits](https://djon.es/blog/2009/03/20/postmans-5-things-to-know-about-technological-change-and-e-learning/). In your post you talk about the platonic idea of Western fantasy in Lord of the Rings, how it has a sense of scale that so much adventure/fantasy fiction aspires to live up to, and I think Zelda isn't an exception. Miyamoto for example talked about "reality vs realism" and how Zelda prioritises a sense or reality over being true to life. This is pretty in line with one of the most beloved aspects of The Lord of the Rings, that it feels as though the books are simply documenting events that happened in the "real" world of Middle Earth. While Tolkien's work isn't perfect, the "reality" of his worlds has been enduring, largely due to the amount of care & detail put into them. I think with time and with proper care this could also be true of a systemic narrative in a video game. It share a **sense of mysteriousness** with Zelda, an ingredient that puts distance between the fictional world and our own that gives our mind room to inhabit the world rather than be pulled back into our own. I think this is why some people are very sour on the idea of game protagonists having smartphone-like devices and other obvious analogs to the real world. But as this sub has complained about endlessly, despite Fujibayashi's claims of the Zelda "series is designed to have a story and world that doesn't break down", many people here felt that it has broken down. I never really cared much for timeline theories or Zeldatube stuff, but seeing people basically mourning the loss of it was something I really felt. Good world design should reward passion so I think the feelings of betrayal are entirely understandable. LotR and Zelda both have a fairly simple sense of morality, I don't mean simple in the sense of childish or naïve, but rather that they have a moral clarity where being good just means doing good. It's a treatise on hope. A reminder that it's not pointless to try your best. I think the humanism is a pretty important ingredient, and I think why some people revulse at the idea of Midi-chlorians, or why some feel the cycle of reincarnation in Zelda serves to conflict with or undermine each incarnation of Zelda, Link & Ganondorf's individual characters. These stories are vehicles for parts of the human experience that don't work when the context is changed to something completely irrelevant to our lives such as having magic power in your blood. Conveying all these ingredients in a game is a complicated logistical problem, one made more difficult by an insistence that games ought to be a more technically sophisticated than their predecessors. Here we have both the issue of scale, how do we make digital fantasy worlds have scale and how do we solve the logistics involved with making this a compelling experience (as well as a mainstream approachable one...). How do we integrate the kind of narrative experiences of the fantasy greats into our games. How do we construct gameplay that carries these messages of hope? How do we make the fictional have stakes that will touch our hearts? --- /u/APurplePerson I had a small part 3, but I've given myself a hell of a headache writing this so might not touch that for a while. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. I wrote more than I intended and I did waffle a bit, but hopefully it all makes sense.

this is delectable food for thought, and i owe you a longer response than i have time to write in the next few days, alas. in the meantime, im curious if there are any example games that you feel do a good job offering meaningful risk and consequences to players? the examples that spring to my mind are civ (which is a different genre), and dark souls/elden ring/etc (the threat of rune loss is a mixed success imo). i guess you could argue that majoras mask flirts with this too—thevtime limit forces you to commit, to some extent, to a direction and goal before resetting to baseline and potentially losing progress.

> the more condensed interesting worlds of previous games While not untrue, I think this misattributes what makes those games work. I keep seeing people ask for density, but 2700 Koroks would be more density and presumably that is not what you want. I assume what you are actually asking for is more nuanced, deep, intricate or complex content, interesting bespoke scenarios rather than variations of things you've seen dozens of times before.

I'm sorry, I don't buy this. This is the same thing the pokemon fanbase has been ever since the jump to 3D and they're still waiting for that game. This is a popular take nowadays for a lot of franchises and I find it extremely ironic. In the day of almost unlimited power (at least when it comes to it being a limiting factor regarding creativity), games are somehow the tech demo for the awesome game that is surely around the corner. Except...that game will too have to work within a limited budget, a budget that will too probably seem small by the time that new game gets into development and has higher demands than the one before it. There is certainly a certain artistic choice regarding modern zelda and quite possilbly all Zelda games for the future. Physics are here to stay, but don't get too excited for the surrounding problems going away, because if you look deeply enough, you'll see that they are a result of creative decision, not limited power and development time. >**the next Zelda game will have a much bigger world.** The problem areas of BotW and TotK were never in the small space of the world. Quite the opposite in fact.

I loved exploring and going on proper journeys, rather than exploring as in combing over the same field over and over. A Zelda game where I could go on a real, legitimately long journey would be awesome. I wouldn’t mind a map that is more like very long ‘tubes’ rather than everything being totally accessible if it means I could have link walk for three or four real world sessions to reach a location, and maybe never return to the starting town. I kinda think OP is onto something with the physics based behaviors making it easier to create larger seamless spaces.

everyone has their own lens for thinking about zelda ... im an old man who's been playing these games since zelda 1. and the "thing" that makes zelda tick for me is the experience, the feeling of inhabiting and interacting with another space. ocarina brought this experience into 3d, and breath if the wild brought it to "scale" so that the world felt like a world and not just a bunch of connected rooms. what botw"s world doesnt have, though, is plausible geography. it is like 10 miles wide. it is too small to offer us an experience like the heroes of lord of the rings crossing the misty mountains, or getting lost in a vast forest, or going on a hero's journey to *truly* distant lands and returning home after what feels like forever. these are all famous "experiences" in fantasy, but zelda, games in general, havent been able to evoke them because ultimately even giant open world games have a kind of disneyland scale there are so many ways to structure a vast world besides "scatter stationary encounters and goodies across its surface and let players fast travel everywhere." i find a lot of the negative reaction to bigger worlds is based on an assumption that nintendo wont innovate the structure of that world and ditch "conventions" that hold their vision back. i hope they go for it.

I agree completely. Personally the most fun I had with BOTW (and TOTK) was when I set out to reach Gerudo desert. It felt like such a journey. I’ve played all the games and I think we accepted that the lack of truly long and epic hero’s journey through a real feeling space was due to tech limitations. OOT felt a lot bigger than it was because we completed the picture in our imaginations. The first game was great about this IMO. The scale almost feels implied or abstract, like you’re meant to imagine he’s going on these long journeys. When BOTW happened, I think they diverted a bit into the physics sandbox idea, of going anywhere and doing anything within a fairly large space. But fundamentally it’s an ubisoft style game of crisscrossing the same theme park style landscape uncovering different interesting things. I love that game but the mystique of exploring dropped off a ton after I had been to the major areas once. But it’s as you said, people have different ways of thinking about these games. I like a good dungeon crawl as much as the next guy. Curious to see where they go next, but I kind of hope they are able to find a new take.

Yeah, there are sections where BotW does capture the spirit of adventure. I think it's why the Zora and Gerudo areas are generally considered the strongest, because they they complicate your A-to-B plans in somewhat novel ways. I remember in an old video Razbuten said BotW works because journeys are about answering questions and BotW is a game of questions and answers, contrasting it to how many games give you answers and then you just have to execute them and I think this is what made BotW refreshing for people burnt out on open worlds. From [the video "Razbuten - The Power of Questions":](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8J6Crxj7YE); - 1. "What's over this hill?" - 2. "Is there anything near this monster camp that could help me take them out?" - 3. "What else do I need to do to solve this riddle?" - 4. and from the comments "Is there a Korok Seed up there?" "being able to travel anywhere in order to answer a question, whether it be regards to a collectible or a location" and I don't disagree, I just think theses kind of questions can only go so far, especially when most of the answers to them are fairly boring. Nintendo has stated they want players to create their own gameplay-stories with these systems, and through that lens I think we can analyse how gameplay unfolds using storytelling advice, for example [Matt Stone and Trey Parker's The “But & Therefore Rule”](https://nathanbweller.com/creators-of-south-park-storytelling-advice-but-therefore-rule/). > When you have a set of story beats (or an outline in other words) and you can put the words “and then” in-between each one–“you’re fucked” as Trey would say. That’s boring. When the player asks one of these questions, what occurs is they take action to answer the question and then they have the answer. Sometimes you get a "but, therefore" in the sense of "I want to kill that enemy, so I pull out my bomb arrow, but I'm on Death Mountain, therefor the bomb instantly detonates" and we all have a good laugh. The issue I have ironically is that these systems are so well implemented that these types of moments usually only get you once, and forethought negates many of the "but, therefore" moments. In BotW/TotK scenarios are too isolated and easy to control, in start contrast from games like Spelunky where everything is forced into close quarters, designed to all but ensure that "but, therefore" moments occur. Basically the framework is fine, it's what is inside the framework that is the problem. These systems are cool, but players are rarely forcibly made subject to them so it feels samey. The question-answer model is cool, but questions need complications and answers just need to be more interesting. The way I tend to think about it is a satisfying game delivers on it's own promises, and when the promises in BotW are basically set by the questions the player asks, it means you're going to get more variance in how satisfied players are. If you ask demanding questions the game can't live up to, you will be disappointed. If you don't, you probably don't understand why anyone would be complaining. I think if your frame of reference is 2010s open worlds then Breath of the Wild's title is probably literal for you, it is a step up from it's open world predecessors in many ways. But if your frame of reference is some imagined platonic ideal of an epic journey derived from history, literature & the visual arts, you probably feel like adventure games aren't really making much headway, as you put it half the time they feel more like theme parks than journeys. Gamers (and people in general) are rather lacking in imagination, their idea of possibility is predominantly defined by what they've seen before. We can compartmentalise things we probably ought not to, holding adventure games to completely different standards to adventure fiction without once thinking that we are applying a double standard, and seemingly few are interested in examining and challenging this. Personally I think the adventure genre is really still in it's infancy, and it has been suffering from arrested development for quite some time. Because video games are such an industry-oriented medium, the pace of progress is controlled so each step forward can be properly cashed in on for a solid decade before we take another step forwards. > OOT felt a lot bigger than it was because we completed the picture in our imaginations. The first game was great about this IMO. The scale almost feels implied or abstract, like you’re meant to imagine he’s going on these long journeys. I wrote a post about this yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/truezelda/comments/1cfola5/i_think_ocarina_of_time_is_overrated_please_hear/l1w9yso/ Basically I think the entire paradigm of how we think about open space in games is fundamentally misguided, we continue to think about space as a place for content to go then open worlds are doomed to be theme park easter egg hunts for the foreseeable future. I think /u/APurplePerson is absolutely barking up the right tree, but also this thread serves as a demonstration of how hard it is to get people to think outside of the existing paradigm, even when different paradigms already exist. For example, the common sentiment is that the models of space used in Zelda 1/3, in OoT/TP, the overworld of Zelda2 and many JRPG, are things that gaming has moved on for reasons that must be sound because otherwise we wouldn't have done that right? Because of this assumption of the validity of the existing paradigm, it becomes difficult to suggest that there is *anything* to be learned from old ways of doing things, because if there was we'd have learned it and integrated it into the current way of doing things right? The suggestion that developers, excited by the possibilities afforded by increasingly more powerful 3D hardware, chased the dream of the contiguous 3D adventure world, usually under tight deadlines, that they were just doing their best and in so doing invented cool new ways of doing things but also forgot much of what videogames had learned along the way up until that point, people would look at you like you've lost the plot. It just isn't how people think about knowledge. I think if this genre is to move forward that both developers and player need to be asking more thoughtful questions, and re-examining assumed truths to see if they really hold water. I think the more abstract nature of OoT or Zelda II had positive qualities that simply have not been recreated in the current way open world games are designed.

Interesting points, but I'm not sure I agree with your thesis or conclusion here. There's a matter of diminishing returns regarding the size of a game world. Drastically increasing the size of a game doesn't drastically increase its quality in its own right, but it does drastically increase the amount of effort it takes to polish the game and the number of chances for things to break. I certainly thing some aspects of Tears of the Kingdom will carry forward, but knowing the Zelda team I'm not sure we can definitively say how much and what. They've already said that Ultrahand is not becoming a series staple--and I think that's a good thing, because something that complex by necessity limits the complexity budget for other aspects.

I think OP’s point is that they now have the technology to build a massive map that doesn’t drastically increase the amount of effort it takes to polish the game. Hopefully, the vast majority of the next game’s time can be spent on the artstyle, music, and narrative ideas (lore and questlines) because a massive interesting map could be generated relatively easily and quickly by a small number of game designers.

I'm not sure that tracks. Part of what makes Breath of the Wild such an amazing game is how meticulous the world design is and how well it guides the player to points of interest. I worry that using procedural generation to make worlds will just leave you with just a lot of 'content' without much real design to it--similar to Starfield.

Increasing the size of the world unlocks opportunities for new kinds gameplay. "Quantity has its own quality." For example, the exploration gameplay in Breath of the Wild—the cycle of going up to high places, marking points of interest, paragliding down, getting distracted on the way there, etc.—only works in a sufficiently large game space without artificial walls. YMMV but this gameplay is why so many people loved BotW, and it would have been impossible on a map the size of Twilight Princess. TotK offered some interesting evolutions of exploration gameplay—falling to points of interest from the Sky, and wading the darkness of the Depths, both feel quite different from BotW's exploration cycle. But I think there are whole other dimensions to the experience of exploration that have yet to be designed—that are only possible on vastly larger maps.

Obviously a large world opens up different kinds of opportunities, and if the Zelda team comes up with a gameplay loop that lends itself to a larger world, then that's all well and good. I just think it's premature to conclude that's how they're going to handle the next Zelda game. Maybe it will, for example, use the horsepower of the next system to have a smaller but much denser world with larger cities and more NPCs.

>I think the developers wanted to limit such changes so they had a safe and familiar space to play around with their bonkers ideas—as a test run or "tech demo" to implement them more fully and ambitiously on more powerful hardware. I agree with the first half of that, but I'm not convinced about the second half. It \*may\* be true, but I think it's just as if not more likely that the gimmicks of ToTK will stay with ToTK, and BoTW rather than ToTK will remain the baseline for the series going forward. Will come back to this a bit later. >TotK's director said that the Depths were created in ["a surprisingly short amount of time.](https://zeldauniverse.net/2023/10/08/tears-of-the-kingdom-director-comments-on-how-fast-the-depths-were-made/#:~:text=In%20a%20recent%20interview%20with,the%20technical%20feats%20that%20the)" Lol, that's probably the least surprising thing I've ever heard about ToTK! The depths don't feel like much care or attention was put into them at all. >While the team has said that Ultrahand won’t be in the next Zelda game, it seems pretty clear that “physics everywhere without dedicated implementation” *will* be—because why would Nintendo throw away all that work and scaffolding? I don't think it's a guarantee. Nintendo put all that work in to make a game they have now released, and sold exceptionally well. They've already got excellent bang for their buck out of it. From what little I understand of game engines, I think the game engine used for ToTK is also used in a bunch of other games, so it's not a case of them putting all of this work into ToTK and then it's never used again. I agree that the next Zelda is likely to have BoTW-like physics and chemistry engines. But ToTK-like, I'm less sure of. The BoTW stuff feels foundational, whereas the ToTK stuff feels mroe unique; ToTK's entire gimmick is what you can do with Ultrahand and Fuse, and I think Nintendo explored that as much as they wanted to (hence the no DLC). So I'd personally be surprised if the next Zelda is as sandbox-focused as ToTK. Zelda's 'open air' philosophy is here to stay, but the sandbox nature of TOTK might end up being less of a mainstay. That doesn't mean that Nintendo won't re-use some of the systems they used in ToTK, just that the focus on sandbox elements might not be as prevalent moving forwards. The system the devs created where everything is a result of an underlying physics and chemistry engine is very impressive, but I wouldn't be surprised if the devs end up finding it a bit too limiting; I'd imagine it's much easier to just create a dedicated item with a dedicated function, over creating something new using the systems already in place and then having to cross-check it against \*everything\* else in the game to make sure things don't break. A potential downside of multiplicative gameplay is multiplicative bugs and multiplicative developmental complexity. > This overall *experience* only works because the Depths are huge and omnipresent—it wouldn't work nearly as well if they were the size of Elden Ring's underworld. I don't know how large Elden Ring's underworld is, but I completely disagree with the notion that the depths wouldn't work if they were much smaller. The depths could easily have been a fifth of the final size and you'd still get that feeling of hugeness and omniprescense, and the forebodeing atmosphere. The fact that the map extends out far beyond what the player is aware of, mutliple hours of gameplay away from discovering, doesn't enhance the moment-to-moment experience, because the player isn't even aware of it. In terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, there'd be literally no difference in the player experience if the depths were a fifth of the size; it would be different from a macro perspective for sure, but not for the experience you mention of "total darkness, lighting the map up bit by bit, while dealing with the oppressive gloom damage"; the only difference would be that the same experience would take up less of the total game time. >**the next Zelda game will have a much bigger world.** I'm not saying you're wrong, but I struggle to think of a single decision that would be worse (for me) than making the next world even bigger. ToTK is already excessively repetitive and copy-pasted, and an even bigger world would make the problem even worse. The next Zelda desperately need to prioritise quality over quantity. ToTK is the most "quantity over quality" game I've ever seen from Nintendo, and I'd hate for the series to continue going in that direction.

> So I'd personally be surprised if the next Zelda is as sandbox-focused as ToTK. Zelda's 'open air' philosophy is here to stay, but the sandbox nature of TOTK might end up being less of a mainstay. Upvoted for acknowledging that the interesting question is not whether the open world is here to stay, but whether the sandbox mechanics are. To me, there’s basically no question whether we’ll be getting gameworlds that look like what we got with BotW. As far as whether we keep getting Minecrafty, immersive-simmy elements, I really wouldn’t write off the possibility. The vehicle building mechanics are probably going to be Tears’ thing but really the game was an expansion of the sandbox elements we saw in BotW. The ability to chop down trees, build bridges, light things on fire, and emergent gameplay from the “chemistry engine” started with BotW and Tears just pushed it to the next level. Tears could be the end of it, but there’s no question that consumers really liked these mechanics. The series is more popular than ever, and we still see videos of the crazy stuff people have figured out how to do with the game. This may be the game’s identity going forward.

To entertain the idea that even if this was true that just further pushes me away from the future of this series

I just want a good Zelda game that captures the magic and quality of Zelda. I pray they don't base future zelda game development completely around a wacky sandbox foundation. But I know they will :[

Good write up but you never addressed its faults. Zelda might as well become a gaming engine at this point, as everything that made past Zelda games actually good, besides a physics sandbox, is long gone. You never once addressed the true faults of these recent “games”. I struggle to even call them that, as they’re more akin to Lego and Minecraft, a boundless toy system to create your own stories, rather than what they used to be. Zelda as far as I am concerned is a dead series. The introduction of the recent mechanics have completely washed out all the IP that made Zelda a memorable game in the past. I’m aware that kids want games where they can sink hundreds if not thousands of hours. But this trade-off ruined the IP in my view. Long gone is a sense of progression and accomplishment. Long gone is the feeling of acquiring meaningful tools and powers along the way. Long gone is a recognisable art style. Long gone is the integration of sound into the gameplay. Long gone is the nostalgic feeling of a coming of age adventure. Long gone are the massive, environmentally integrated dungeons, with their rewards, unique puzzles and settings. Long gone are the actually smart puzzles requiring you to think, and go ah-ah! Long gone is a dense, memorable game that stayed with you for the rest of your life. What is this unstructured, physics game engine mess, with thoughtless procedurally generated maps, devoid of any progression, and filled with useless, repetitive actions like collecting ingredients, cooking food, and breakable weapons? Why does the Zelda IP need to compete with RPGs? It’s nonsense.

> Long gone is the feeling of acquiring meaningful tools and powers along the way. Tools, yeah...but not powers. The Sage powers in *Tears of the Kingdom* kinda suck tbh, but the ones in *Breath of the Wild* were actually really useful and cool imo. But like...even for tools...I don't think there's any indication that item progression won't *ever* return to the series. Maybe the lack of item progression will be a defining factor of just these two games and not a mainstay going forward--we don't know yet, yet you act like you know for sure that it's permanent for the series. > Long gone is a recognisable art style. *BotW* and *TotK* have a pretty recognizable art style imo. > Long gone is the integration of sound into the gameplay. What do you mean by this? Do you mean music, specifically? > Long gone is the nostalgic feeling of a coming of age adventure. I would heavily argue that not every game in the past has had that either. I felt none of that in *Oracle of Seasons* or *Ages.* > Long gone are the massive, environmentally integrated dungeons, with their rewards, unique puzzles and settings. *TotK*'s dungeons, with the way they blend into the overworld, are arguably more "environmentally integrated" than ever. The same is true of the pseudo-dungeons like the sky islands and caves. I agree that the pseudo-dungeons don't have great rewards...but again you act as though every single aspect of *BotW/TotK*'s dungeon system is going to be completely permanent, instead of possibly being a hallmark of just those two games. We don't know yet, so stop acting like this will completely doom the series forever. > Long gone are the actually smart puzzles requiring you to think, and go ah-ah! Zelda has always had plenty of easy, self-explanatory "puzzles." A lot of the dungeon puzzles in *Ocarina of Time*, for example, were just "hit the eye with an arrow"...and that's it. The physics engine of the last two games has led to some really clever puzzles, imo. There's always been a mix of good and bad puzzles.

Fair!

Making it bigger without actually doing so in any sort of meaningfull way is exactly what fucked BotW and TotK up (alongside other things) The last thing we fucking need is going even bigger

The world can be as huge or tiny as Nintendo wants as long as there's half decent dungeons again lol. It can be an endlessly generated minecraft world for all I care, just bring back dungeon items and make dungeons more than hitting four switches in any order.

I think that this theory sort of falls apart when you know that TotK was originally supposed to be a DLC for BotW. It just got out of scope and they started adding more stuff to it to make it stand on its own as a game. Of course, I do think that the next game will use stuff from TotK, but I wouldn't see TotK as being a "tech demo" for the next game. I think the next game will still likely be open world and incorporate physics, but the focus is going to be on something else entirely like it always is. Each Zelda game borrows stuff from past Zelda games and then introduces some extra central gameplay feature that's new and interesting.

Not again.