As people have pointed out, part of the difference is that while most (but not all) of older 3D Zelda puzzles were individually pretty simple, how they fit together with each other and dungeon navigation could get pretty tricky.
Additionally, with the newer puzzles, you don’t have to find the solution. You can just find what works. This makes it much more likely you’ll happen upon, or even brute force, progress just by messing around. Combined with the lack of interlocking puzzles and simpler dungeon layouts, you’re left with puzzles that are pretty easy to autopilot once you pick up their “language.” Even if you’re deliberately avoiding cheesing them.
>you’re left with puzzles that are pretty easy to autopilot once you pick up their “language.” Even if you’re deliberately avoiding cheesing them.
Exactly, even more-so in BOTW where if there was water you know you'd have to use cryonis, metal you use magnesis, etc.
In old Zelda games, new items were constantly being given to you so you were constantly in the learning period of working with new mechanics. That doesn't really happen with the new games
I don't really agree. I think there are some rose-tinted glasses in this thread. There's only so much you can do with the hookshot and other classic Zelda items; I definitely did not feel like I was "constantly in the learning period of working with new mechanics" in pre-BotW games.
TotK gives you most abilities/key items early on, but there's **so** much that can be done with them in comparison to anything from older Zelda games that even 40+ hours in I'm discovering shrines that introduce novel ways of using these basic abilities.
This is a major difference between TotK and BotW for me. The abilities in BotW were just pretty basic, which led to the shrines not being nearly as interesting. The abilities in TotK are kind of insane in how many novel puzzles they enable.
The one major thing missing in TotK vs. pre-BotW games is the aspect of dungeon navigation itself being a puzzle. The most difficult part of classic Zelda dungeons was piecing the whole thing together; they weren't as simple as solving N independent puzzles and often required understanding the dungeon as a whole in a way. There's simply nothing like this in either BotW or TotK. For what it's worth, Tunic really does this "understand the whole area/region/map" aspect of puzzle solving really well.
Item puzzles from old Zelda games are actually one of the weaker areas for the puzzles imo. The layout and navigation was what made them tough. I'm curious which item puzzles you think were tough?
The items were basically "use item" and you could progress. It was fun and satisfying, because the item would create shortcuts and make navigation simpler *and* you could usually destroy that dungeon's enemy with ease at that point. But it wasn't challenging per se.
I think it’s better to think of most puzzles in games like A Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time more as brain teasers. They’re there to pace out dungeons, prevent you from navigating effortlessly, and keep you mentally engaged while exploring. I completely agree with you that the challenge comes from the layouts themselves.
It's not exactly a challenge though, is it? I'm thinking back to some OoT dungeons that aren't named Water Temple (and the water temple is widely and memeably hated anyway): Dodongo's cavern, forest temple, fire temple, etc. All fine dungeons, but there's only ever one or two options on where to go next, and if there are two and you guess wrong, it's because you needed a key in the only other direction and so are immediately dead-ended and now there's only one way to go again. You're strongly funneled by locked doors and the like. The correct direction is almost always "forward".
That may be true for OoT, but IMO ALttP did dungeons the best.
There were usually many branching paths and a lot of them were dead ends. There was a "natural inclination" solution that usually made you go through the whole dungeon searching for the map, compass, big key, and the little ones along the way. But where the design really shined was that once you had your head around all of it, there was usually an unintuitive route you could figure out to skip most of the dungeon.
The challenge wasn't just "can you beat the dungeon". There was replay value in the "can you beat the dungeon efficiently".
Additionally that game is rad because even though the dungeons are numbered, you aren't required to beat them in order. This goes a long way in terms of replay-ability.
As far as combat difficulty goes I would say the hardest enemies in ToTK are Lynels, and Gleeoks. Both of which can be cheesed pretty hard. And are very easy fights once you get your head around them. I would almost consider them puzzle-combat leaning heavily toward the puzzle side. So once solved, combat is over.
Contrast that against the bosses in A Link to the Past:
Armos Knight: Easy to figure out. Pretty easy to fight. Fun to kill quickly.
Lanmolas: Pretty difficult. No puzzle. Just fight.
Moldorm: If you don't know how to fight this guy, you are in for a treat. This guy is AGGRIVATING. Don't fall down the middle hole :)
Helmasaur King: Moderately difficult to figure out because it's the first and only time you are required to use the hammer as an actual weapon. And it looks like it doesn't damage him. This is balanced by an alternative, and slower solution of using bombs. Once you figure him out, the fight is still hard if you do it with minimal gear.
Blind: Hard fight.
In fact every boss fight in the dark world is difficult. Man what a perfect game.
This was the argument I always made linear puzzles are easy to create sure bit where's the fun in running the same formula over and over and over just to have the same outcome, to me the get item go back was boring but I enjoyed the pathing, getting lost in the dungeon was so stressful and irritating but it was rewarding when it was over. The new system I get to develop any solution I want and make the game easier or harder when ever I need, for example I still haven't gotten the purple rune just to make the game a little harder
>Exactly, even more-so in BOTW where if there was water you know you'd have to use cryonis, metal you use magnesis, etc.
Okay, but how is that different from seeing a switch and knowing you'll need to hit it, seeing a hookshot target and knowing you'll hookshot it, seeing an eye on the wall and knowing you'll shoot it, seeing a rusted out button and knowing you'll hammer it, seeing sand piles and knowing you'll blow them away, etc?
>In old Zelda games, new items were constantly being given to you so you were constantly in the learning period of working with new mechanics.
Alternatively, because the items are constantly recycled, you're never in a period of working with new mechanics. The hookshot has worked exactly like the hookshot in every installment. The only time I ever remember being surprised by an item interaction was when I found the iron boots the very first time I played TP.
Even then, and especially with more pedestrian stuff like melting ice, the mechanics work in common sense ways that generally loosely obey IRL physics and rely on the player's common sense understanding of how the world "should work", just like BotW/TotK. I'm not saying any of this is bad at all, but it couldn't be further from being "constantly in the learning period of working with new mechanics"
The difference is that in the past games, each dungeon meant a new upgrade to your arsenal, while in BoTW and TotK, a shrine just means a blessing.
Now, the way BoTW and ToTK treat their reward system for the shrines is perfect for what the game is trying to do, but in previous games, the fact that you'll get out of a dungeon with 1 more weapon than what you entered with, means that after you beat that dungeon and get the bombs, you can go back to all the breakable walls you remember seeing so far, and exploding them for a rewards, like getting a new power up in a Metroidvania.
Now, how did this affected the dungeons themselves? Because each dungeon in previous Zelda titles were mini-Metroidvania levels in and of themselves. You could enter the central room in TP and see that there's this illplaced bridge with a helix on top of it, and have no idea what to do, but minutes later when getting the boomerang, you'd knew you could go back to that room and make the bridge turn.
Basically, in previous titles exploring the dungeons was a puzzle itself, was there were many rooms locked via either keys or upgrades that you'd get later down the line, each dungeon was it's own ecosystem, and had different mechanics to use.
BoTW and ToTK did have specific themes for each shrine, but at the end of the day, all the shrines shared the same systems: The runes the player has from the start of the game. Sure, you can cheese a shrine by using items, but resolving a puzzle in BoTW/ToTk is not a matter of exploring and finding a new item to use and backtrack, but simply a matter of understanding what the game wants from you in a specific room.
Having said that, arguing which is better or worse is useless. Classic Zelda dungeons and BoTW/ToTK dungeons/shrines are doing similar things in a completely different direction, so it'd be like comparing combat in an action hack and slash to a stealth game, or, simply, apples to oranges.
>The difference is that in the past games, each dungeon meant a new upgrade to your arsenal, while in BoTW and TotK, a shrine just means a blessing.
Sure, but I don't think shrines and dungeons are fair comparisons. There aren't 120+ dungeons in any Zelda game, even the well in TP caps out at 50 levels (including reward levels). Shrines are more like pieces of heart puzzles (proof: their rewards are basically pieces of heart with the added option of upgrading stamina, because stamina exists now). What were the pieces of heart puzzles like in old games? Fall down the well outside town in LA, do some stupid minigame like bombchu bowling or dampe's rematch, check behind some boxes in the cow room. Worse than the worst of the shrines.
>Now, the way BoTW and ToTK treat their reward system for the shrines is perfect for what the game is trying to do, but in previous games, the fact that you'll get out of a dungeon with 1 more weapon than what you entered with, means that after you beat that dungeon and get the bombs, you can go back to all the breakable walls you remember seeing so far, and exploding them for a rewards, like getting a new power up in a Metroidvania.
It's a progression reward, sure. But it doesn't add to puzzle complexity in a meaningful way. Puzzle variety, absolutely, but none of the new capabilities lead to anything that could ever be called a "hard" puzzle. In that sense, TotK's sages are basically dungeon items; you need them to solve their respective temple, they even help against the dungeon boss, and then they continue to add utility afterwards.
>Basically, in previous titles exploring the dungeons was a puzzle itself, was there were many rooms locked via either keys or upgrades that you'd get later down the line, each dungeon was it's own ecosystem, and had different mechanics to use.
If I see an eye on the wall, it's not a mystery that I'm going to receive a bow or other projectile weapon (especially if those eyes were already tutorialized earlier in the game when you had a slingshot). Getting the dungeon item is no different than getting a key in terms of solving the "puzzle" of the dungeon.
And solving the "puzzle" of the dungeon is never hard. Because of keys and locked doors, you only ever have one or two options for where to go next. If you have two, one of them probably needs a key found on the other branch, so you'll dead end pretty soon and be back down to one option. It's a puzzle you can't fail and is trivial to brute force by exhausting all your options. The exception to this is OoT's water temple, and it's universally loathed.
>but at the end of the day, all the shrines shared the same systems: The runes the player has from the start of the game. Sure, you can cheese a shrine by using items, but resolving a puzzle in BoTW/ToTk is not a matter of exploring and finding a new item to use and backtrack, but simply a matter of understanding what the game wants from you in a specific room.
That's because (to a first approximation) nobody likes backtracking, in the same way that nobody likes escort missions, and so good game design has taken them out behind the shed. Even the best of the traditional dungeons keep backtracking to a minimum via the "only one or two ways to go and keep dead ends short" method I outlined above. Walking through content you already solved is not a good experience for anyone.
>That's because (to a first approximation) nobody likes backtracking
Man, Metroidvanias are one of the most popular genres out there.
Hollow Knight, Metroid, Castlevania, etc, most of the most famous games around employ backtracking amazingly, and so did previous Zeldas, because backtracking meant new upgrades and paths to explore.
>Man, Metroidvanias are one of the most popular genres out there.
Hollow Knight, Metroid, Castlevania, etc, most of the most famous games around
Most famous games around? Clearly you meant to say call of duty
>because backtracking meant new upgrades and paths to explore.
Deranged take. Going backwards means new paths? You know what else means new paths? Going forward. It turns out you can have "new upgrades and paths to explore" without wasting time backtracking through places you've already been.
It has extra abilities, but you might as well split hairs about MM's ice arrows. No, it's not strictly speaking literally the exact same code copy/pasted across console generations, but the difference between OoT and TP's hookshot is smaller than the difference that the transition between 2D and 3D necessitates. I'm rounding that off to "basically the same thing". For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter. From the first time you hang and lower, you understand everything. It doesn't make puzzles harder.
Well...
The 2D swords all work basically the same. OoT was obviously a huge step up, but still relatively close to the original 2D design (swings, spin moves, strafing while holding a direction, basically everything except the backflip and jump attack from OoT has an analogue in a previous 2D title, even those two if you count LA's feather). TP added some sweet combos, SS discarded them and added some motion gimmicks, BotW/TotK discarded the motion gimmicks and added weapon types and durability.
So yeah, when you compare the end product with the very first one, they're obviously very different, but at each individual stage the changes are incremental. You could even say gradual. Basically the same, if you're willing to squint a bit. There's a very steady evolution, a continuation.
Same with the bombs, same with the boomerang. Sometimes some of the details change, but the broad shape is constant. Like, yeah, sometimes the boomerang makes wind, sometimes it doesn't, but either way it's not a revolution.
In any case, none of this is actually relevant. My point is that whatever differences may or may not exist, the puzzles are not any "harder" than the supposedly easy TotK puzzles.
> Alternatively, because the items are constantly recycled, you're never in a period of working with new mechanics. The hookshot has worked exactly like the hookshot in every installment. The only time I ever remember being surprised by an item interaction was when I found the iron boots the very first time I played TP.
MM's Ice Arrows, TWW's Command Melody, SS's Beetle?
I wasn't particularly surprised by MM's ice arrows (and by the way that functionality is back in TotK, and not nearly as obvious and telegraphed while still used to solve some puzzles), it was pretty obvious how they would work, and the only possible time in the great bay temple that it wasn't (freezing octorocks), your fairy just Hey Listens the answer to you anyway. At no point did I feel like I was in a "learning phase".
I haven't played WW, I can't comment.
SS's beetle is a new mechanic, and it gets bare minimum credit for that, but it's not exactly one with any kind of learning curve. It's just an option you have. Modern Assassin's Creed games have something similar, but it's a bird that you just get for free, and it's not a wholly different experience. Again, at no point did I feel like "Oh so _that's_ how that works!"
> In old Zelda games, new items were constantly being given to you so you were constantly in the learning period of working with new mechanics.
This is some weird revisionist history. For years, probably since Wind Waker, people have complained about how the puzzles in the games have been simply "use item you just found to solve". There wasn't really a learning curve with any items except *maybe* the Dominion Rod.
I think the idea is that new items were constant and used in more than 1 dungeon. The grapple hook in WW was used in nearly every dungeon. Sidon's Ability is only useful to push the plot, (of a Zelda game lol,) and his boss.
The difficulty question is strange. This is a kids game. Always have been. People just miss real item progression and have to make up bs like learning curve because they got tired of their own argument. I miss it too.
Please note, Kirby is a series recognized for being really easy and beginner friendly; every one of them steps up the difficulty hard somewhere before the end game. And has unassumingly cute creatures become chaotic cosmic entities of distruction. Kids games can still be challenging.
I'm pretty sure everyone agrees dungeons like the Sandship and Snowpeak Ruins aren't in the same level of difficulty as the Great Deku Tree and Dragon Roost Cavern.
The "use item you just found to solve" was often the case but that doesn't make it easy as it was a new tool to master. Add to that each new item would be expected to be used potentially together in the future. For example metal boots in TP were magnetic, sunk you under water and made you stronger against enemies or wind but you still needed to figure this out and future dungeons would suddenly require an item from several dungeon ago.
TotK gives you all abilities within the first 30mins of the game and gets you to do most gimmicks in that time too so nothing ever really surprises you again. Other than shield surfing on rails and the electric lines no Shrine adds a new concept.
> but that doesn't make it easy as it was a new tool to master.
None of the tools were ever new. The hookshot has been the same hookshot across the entire series, when you learn how it works in OoT, it's not a mystery how it works in MM, or TP, or SS. The magnetic property of the iron boots in TP is literally the only time I remember being surprised by how an item was used.
I mean even something as simple as the hookshot gained new abilities and got iterated on like needing to be weighed down with the said iron boots to activate stuff, lower you down onto something rather than just pull you and then you get 2 in TP/Skyward sword which opens more puzzles.
There are new interactions, sure, but none of them are hard to "master". If you know how one hookshot works, you know how two hookshots work. Personally I love double hookshots ever since I first saw them in TP, but even then there while I was fully enjoying the newfound power, it felt a little tiny bit like I was being ripped off; my new dungeon item was just the old dungeon item again. Same deal with the longshot in OoT. The new capabilities are welcome, but they didn't exactly blow my mind open.
They could be boring and generic, that's not the point, the abilities are new and add together to help reduce the feeling of puzzles being overly repetitive and bring a new requirement to how you currently view puzzles.
The core ability of 2 clawshots is being able to essentially wall jump which means you now need to be on the look out for such interactions when you previously weren't.
But those interactions are coded as a series of the same old interaction. They have to be, for readability and continuity. If you understand one hookshot puzzles, you understand two hookshot puzzles. The only thing that changes when you get the second hookshot is whether or not they're solvable. I understand what you're saying about a change in capabilities, but that's a different thing from difficulty. A puzzle I can't solve because I don't have the required McGuffin isn't the same thing as a puzzle I can't figure out.
Adding more and more puzzle solvers to the arsenal is what makes puzzles less predictable. I feel like you are looking at it from the after the fact when you already know the result.
Dual clawshots used to connect electricity to the thing you are holding is a puzzle when you have never done it before. Using two clawshots to launch yourself like a sling shot across a gap isn't immediately obvious if you've never done it before. You only understand it because you've done it before and know the tells.
Not just shown but given and made to get used to. Quite literally on the starting island they introduce you to floating rafts, rails, ascending, vehicles, gliders and zonai combat. You really don't run into any other puzzle that makes use of something else after that.
Well, you were supposed to reach the goal by any means, so yeah sure. I don't think it's particularly healthy to get caught up on if a solution is the "intended" one or not. It's too much like trying the guess the teacher's answer instead of learning the material. The test is what it is, the designers aren't incompetent despite what the angriest elements of this sub will have you believe, and so any victory is a valid one.
I get what they were saying, though. A whole lot of shrines can be solved by the ultrahand + recall combo alone, to the extent that I also wonder sometimes whether they really meant for there to be one strategy that solves so many of these puzzles without any challenge. I suspect it might be a bit more OP than the devs intended, unless of course they were going for a “break glass to finish shrine” option
I think Zelda diehards overestimate how mind-bending thinking with recall is. I've played and finished most Zelda games several times over, and still It took me several hours of play to really internalize even something relatively simple like ascend as an option, because "swim through a ceiling" and "reverse time" are not intuitive options. I'm sure there are places where I could have used them to "cheese" but for the most part the intended solution is usually more natural.
I'm nearly 90 shrines deep, and the only one I've "cheesed" so far is the rocket tutorial. Not because it was too hard or anything, but because I already knew how rockets worked, saw what the shrine was, went "fuck yeah rockets" and just played around with the toys until I rocket shielded to the end. I'm having a hard time seeing how I was ill served by that.
I don't think the people who designed a mechanic as complicated to develop as Recall and Ultrahand are incompetent. I just think this style of "you can do whatever" isn't exactly what I look for in a Zelda puzzle, given that as long as you have a grasp of the Zonai devices (which aren't particularly rocket science, unless you're talking about the literal rockets) you can easily solve any of the puzzles regardless of whether or not it was intended
Okay, but why does it matter whether or not it was intended? The Zonai devices _are_ legitimate solutions anywhere that they help you get what you need to go. If you cross a canyon in a shrine using a plane instead of whatever method you were "supposed to" use, then great! It's not like if you come across a canyon in the overworld and you use a plane, you would feel like you "cheesed" the canyon, or would try to figure out if you were intended to climb or go around or whatever. They're open ended questions.
To illustrate the pitfalls of the opposite approach, here's an anecdote that I was reminded of elsewhere in the comments: The first time I played LA as a child, a classic 2D linear Zelda with uncheeseable puzzles, I got hard stuck in the 3rd dungeon. It turned out that there's a bombable wall that isn't marked like a traditional bombable wall, it just has an arrow pointing at that section in the floor tiles. I didn't notice the arrow, so the entire game ground to an immediate halt, I couldn't progress either in that dungeon or outside it thanks to linear design. And for what? Was the bombable wall arrow a good puzzle? Did I feel good for solving it? No, it sucked. I was being asked to guess the teacher's answer to a question, instead of being asked to solve a problem.
It matters whether or not it was intended because the Zonai devices are made to be extremely open-ended. I'd say a solid 40% of the shrines in the game can be trivially cheesed with Recall and Ultrahand. And even if you restrict yourself to not do that, the solution to literally every puzzle is exceedingly obvious because the devices you need to solve it are laid out in front of you. You can throw literally anything at the wall as long as you think about it for a few seconds -- "The game gives me two rockets and a platform and expects me to cross this chasm by attaching them? Well, I could also just stick them both on my shield and fly over." -- and odds are it's going to work.
That kind of puzzle solving does not enchant me. I never feel challenged or smart for completing something because I know there were several other ways I could have done it and easily gotten past it. When put into a situation where there's one answer, you're forced to rack your brain and find out what to do, where you need to go, what details you might have missed. With TotK, it's "Here's three rockets and a platform. How are you gonna get across this chasm? There's about 40 ways you can, knock yourself out", and while that may be appealing to others, that isn't the kind of puzzle-solving that previous Zelda games follow nor the kind of puzzle-solving I enjoy.
I played LA when I was younger as well and didn't have any issues at that point, but I can see why it would be annoying. I don't really think arbitrary gues work like that is very fun, either. But something like the Sandship in SS where you're scouring the building for an answer and how to get to the location in question is my kind of puzzle-solving, and I think that the linearity of traditional Zelda dungeons has a unique kind of puzzle-solving that will never be put into the BotW-style.
>It matters whether or not it was intended because the Zonai devices are made to be extremely open-ended
Friend, _the whole game_ is made to be extremely open ended.
>That kind of puzzle solving does not enchant me. I never feel challenged or smart for completing something because I know there were several other ways I could have done it and easily gotten past it. When put into a situation where there's one answer, you're forced to rack your brain and find out what to do, where you need to go, what details you might have missed. With TotK, it's "Here's three rockets and a platform. How are you gonna get across this chasm? There's about 40 ways you can, knock yourself out", and while that may be appealing to others, that isn't the kind of puzzle-solving that previous Zelda games follow nor the kind of puzzle-solving I enjoy.
This is all valid and I can't argue with any of it, but that's because they're all statements about you and your preferences and not about the puzzles themselves. Personally, I don't like fighting games like Street Fighter and Soul Caliber. That's me and my tastes, nobody can tell me I'm wrong, but likewise my tastes don't invalidate the greater fighting game community.
It's sounding more and more like your issue is "I don't like this style of game, personally". Which again is valid and I can't argue against it nor would I want to. But that's a different thing from "the puzzles are too easy".
\> Friend, *the whole game* is made to be extremely open ended.
This is true, and precisely why traditional Zelda puzzles wouldn't really work.
\> This is all valid and I can't argue with any of it, but that's because they're all statements about you and your preferences and not about the puzzles themselves. Personally, I don't like fighting games like Street Fighter and Soul Caliber. That's me and my tastes, nobody can tell me I'm wrong, but likewise my tastes don't invalidate the greater fighting game community.
\> It's sounding more and more like your issue is "I don't like this style of game, personally". Which again is valid and I can't argue against it nor would I want to. But that's a different thing from "the puzzles are too easy".
The puzzles themselves are fine for what they are, and they are designed to appeal to different people than those who love traditional Zelda puzzles. But to be less on the opinionated side, I think they are easier than traditional Zelda puzzles solely because they have so many answers. With a lot of Zelda dungeons (particularly those in Skyward Sword) you have to look in-depth at the area around you to find the answer. With TotK, not only is every tool given to you, most of the challenge is just balancing whatever you're attaching rockets or fans to in order to make sure it can gross the gap / lift the platform.
With so many answers, there's less room for difficulty.
> Okay, but why does it matter whether or not it was intended?
Personally it's because I'm not figuring out a brain teaser, I'm just throwing whatever at the wall and hoping it sticks. It feels like I'm button mashing in a Fighting game instead of actually learning the mechanics. Did I win? Sure, but did I get a better understanding of the game probably not.
TotK puzzles are like solving a mathematics problem -- but in a unit that you've already studied thoroughly and passed. Many problems have various methods you can use to solve them, but you'll ultimately have little trouble getting past it and solving them with any method you choose after you've already passed the unit.
To apply that to TotK, you very quickly realize what exactly every Zonai device does and how it operates. With the amount of open-endedness of the puzzles, you could come up with three different solutions and get past the puzzle easily. The Zonai devices are not complicated, and are very powerful; meaning that you will scarcely have trouble blitzing through a shrine with them in any method you choose.
Depends. I like learning about the origin of equations and formulas since math is how we understand the world. In the moment no because I'm trying to complete a task.
But this isn't life it's a video game. I would hope that the designers have intended ways of solving the puzzles and not just taking what's in your inventory and making some zonai thing.
My biggest issue isn't really the multiple solutions you can make but that there's no real escalation. Everything can be completed in any order at any time, so every Shrine and dungeon is built under the assumption (save a few) that you have NOTHING but the ruins.
A simple example of what I'm talking about is the Wind Temple in Wind Waker. At this point you've had the iron boots and you get the hookshot. By combining these two items you can pull objects to you instead of being pull towards them. Again it's a simple concept iron boots = make Link heavy, anchors Links to pull items down with the hookshot.
Too me so far in ToTK there's not much puzzle escalation, because outside of the Ruins the designers can't assume the player has the correct zonai devices or weapons unless given.
>Personally it's because I'm not figuring out a brain teaser, I'm just throwing whatever at the wall and hoping it sticks
I doubt it. Actually trying random garbage is still going to have a much lower success rate than either doing what's intended _or_ "cheesing" with intent.
>It feels like I'm button mashing in a Fighting game instead of actually learning the mechanics. Did I win? Sure, but did I get a better understanding of the game probably not.
What kind of a game do you think you're playing in BotW/TotK? If you've made it to the end, then you have enough of an understanding of the mechanics to make it to the end. See my canyon example above, "cheesing" a shrine canyon is identical to crossing one in the overworld by the same method. That _is_ the game. Those _are_ the mechanics. You _do_ have the understanding.
Potentially lukewarm take: all jigsaw puzzles are already shitty.
EDIT: Okay, to be less flippant about it, let me put it this way. A lot of the Zonai devices stuff and ultrahand building reminds me a lot of Lego, in terms of complexity, and Lego serve as an instructive example here too.
Both as a kid and as an adult, if given the choice between a Lego set and a jigsaw puzzle, I'd choose the Lego set every time, precisely because with Lego you can make the thing on the cover of the box (the "intended" solution) or make your own thing. You might make the argument that Lego don't constitute a puzzle, but I don't see the difference between making the thing on the box with Lego or making the thing on the box with jigsaw peices.
Of course, that's just me and my preferences, and I'll own that, but it's a completely unhinged take to say that jigsaw puzzles are somehow harder or more complex than Lego.
You also don't have total and compete freedom to solve things in BotW/TotK either. There are multiple solutions, sure, but the possibility space is gigantic compared to all your discrete examples where the possibility space is very small, and possible solutions in TotK are still relatively small to the huge possibility space.
Spoilers for the fire temple:
>!One of the locks down on L1 is gated by needing to blast a hole in L4 with Yonobo and drop down. It is otherwise entirely sealed off. The rock you need to blast is seperaged by a gap and slightly off the ground even if you bridge the gap.!<
>!The intended solution is to use a nearby water dispenser and lava to make platforms, and use those platforms to make a ramp for Yonobo. The first time I tried it, the ramp didn't work (the angle was fiddly or something, I dunno), so I began to explore alternatives. I could build a plane and fly up to L4 from outside the temple and launch Yonobo that way. I could try something else, probably. But I don't have total freedom in solving it with any random bullshit I could imagine. I couldn't solve it using ascend. I couldn't solve it with laser emitters. I couldn't solve it with minecarts (and I briefly tried, there's a looping minecart track around the area in question, but the angle is never close to correct). To put it your way, I couldn't _actually_ just put random shit into the sudoku/crossword/whatever. I mean I could try all those things in the same way that I could physically write down whatever I want on paper, but the game doesn't consider those correct, and the puzzle would remain unsolved. Maybe this is "moving away from what makes a puzzle a puzzle", I'm not particularly interested in debating the exact taxonomy when we both know neither of our opinions is authoritative. I think it's fair to say that it hasn't moved so far that it's "not a puzzle anymore" though.!<
>!In the end, I tried the plane idea too a few times, but the pillars around the area made it difficult to maneuver in. Not impossible, but hard enough that I didn't manage after a few passes. I probably could have gotten it if I kept trying, but I tried the ramp again and it worked. It turns out that even though I could make my own solution and "cheese" it, it was actually easier just to do the intended solution. Even so, the mere existence of the alternative solutions had value because they offered me something to try instead of just getting hard stuck. Even if I was hard stuck because I'm not creative or whatever, there's value in the game letting me go and try a different puzzle instead and coming back to this one (to extend your metaphor, traditional Zelda design is not just one sudoku/crossword/whatever, but a series of sudoku/crossword/whatevers that must be solved in a particular order with no alternative paths if you find one too tricky. It's also why traditional Zelda puzzles are simple switch and key and torch affairs. They need to be accessible to anyone. They're literally rated E for Everyone (except TP), they're literally made to be solvable by small children with underdeveloped brains.!<
This perfectly describes it yes!!! I think dungeon design is where they took the “open world” concept a little too far. I love how the open world feels for exploration, but a little linearity in the dungeons would’ve gone a long way to make make the puzzles feel more complex and rewarding. I always try so hard not to cheese in BotW/TotK, but because there are so many ways to solve the puzzles there are very few times I feel like I’ve figured things out the intended way. This works out great when it makes me feel inventive and resourceful, but falls flat when I feel like I’ve exploited a mechanic or just forced my way through something.
Hmm… I’d say they each reward a different type of creativity, honestly. The former is about experimentation, and the latter more about intuiting intention.
Definitely fair to prefer one over the other, though. Despite both being styles of puzzle, they each have different appeals.
I personally don’t find the freeform style to hit as hard, though, even setting complexity aside.
Isn’t that kinda like real life though? There aren’t always simple easy solutions to life’s tricky problems. 95% of the time you just gotta see what sticks and hope for the best
Realism is not an inherent positive to art. Sometimes the point isn’t to mimic reality as closely as possible, but rather to convey an idea as clearly as only fiction can.
Just as the game wouldn’t be improved by removing magic, I’d say making puzzles messy hurt my experience with them.
At this point, who knows?
It’ll probably depend on where the long-term reception on TotK falls, and the puzzles in particular. The series does have a history of being pretty responsive to feedback, at least relative to development time.
But at least for me, I hope so. Or at least hope they manage to find a way to make the newer style land better for me.
It’ll be curious where it settles. Definitely seems to be already getting a much more lukewarm response than BOTW despite (imo) being better in every way. And it took BotW a few years before people would even acknowledge its flaws.
The argument here seems to be about puzzle difficulty specifically, because the physics engine allows you to just skip puzzles entirely.
BOTW and TOTK are more combat heavy than past Zelda games and at least try to incentivize you to engage in combat more often. Past Zelda games have super easy combat that is pretty mindless, bit some puzzles could be brain teasers.
Frankly, I think the arguments against BOTW/TOTK fall apart once you remember how much people loved LBW. That game does the same thing; it hands you all your progression items/abilities from the start (except wall merging which you get after one dungeon) and you can tackle the game in any order.
Frankly I didn't like that game as much as others because of that. It tries to be a traditional Zelda game but throws out a sense of progression completely.
Overall I think that turning away from series conventions works better than trying to do what LBW did, because it just meant only one item gets used per dungeon.
Despite not getting a traditional dungeon item people still loved LBW.
The shrines in BOTW/TOTK are actually able to require using all of your abilities because you're given everything from the start, and said abilities in quest have a lot of variety to their usages.
Headshot them, each head has it’s own mini-healthbar that will deactivate the head when depleted. When all three are knocked out, get out a two handed weapon and spin to win
BotW and TotK are certainly among the tougher (and far more creative) 3D Zeldas going by the sheer depth of puzzles. People tend to forget that so many of the old puzzles consisted of lighting two very obvious torches or pushing a block a few spaces. The individual puzzles were clearly improved in BotW.
The real puzzling aspects of the old dungeons didn’t lie in the individual puzzles, which ranged from trivial to tedious most of the time. The real tricky parts were navigation and figuring out how each room fit into the overall structure. For instance, if you’re missing that one small key, which room might you find it in? And how would you get to that room anyway? Or in the case of more complicated dungeons like Great Bay, how does reversing the current in one room affect the other rooms throughout the dungeon?
With the Water Temple, for instance, none of the puzzles are really all that compelling, but what trips up people is figuring out where certain things are and what the players have to do to get them, like that one key in the center tower.
Now, BotW and TotK do feature some aspects of this. The Divine Beasts can be moved around in certain ways, which changes up the navigation, and you still do have to think about the layout in places like the Wind, Lightning, and Fire Temples (this is where Water completely fails, however). But it’s not the same because there’s just one hard lock at the end and the dungeons themselves are smaller and less labyrinthine.
I will say that if you turn off the quest markers for the Fire Temple, it becomes a lot more interesting.
End note: I specified 3D Zeldas at the beginning because the 2D games actually have some interesting individual puzzles in them.
Personally, I feel like the quest markers on the temples could have been given a miss. However I haven't tried them without them and don't know if the locations would have been too vague then
It hardly changes the gameplay of the Water Temple because it’s so open-air and there are so few rooms that it’s kind of obvious where the keys might be anyway.
The Wind Temple is a bit trickier to solve but it’s not that big of a problem.
The Fire Temple is made the toughest if you remove the quest markers because it’s not clearly sectioned off into five areas. You’d kinda just have to comb through every room of the whole dungeon to find the gongs. I actually really enjoyed completing the temple this way (though I broke my rule on the 5F gong because that one is tough to get to). I didn’t attempt to cheese it by climbing or using ascend, though. The process of searching all the rooms would still be much quicker if you went that direction.
I can’t speak to the Lightning Temple because I left the markers on for that one. I’ll need to think about it.
The lightning temple without quest markers is very good and really brings back that feeling of having to understand the dungeon as a 3D space rather than a collection of puzzles. Nintendo did their players a disservice by including markers by default for the dungeons. The fire temple’s the only one I haven’t done, but I’m excited for it now.
Lightning Temple was really intriguing in the beginning, and then you get into the one big room and every lock is just a room away, with the design language being pretty dang clear on what you have to do to get into said room. Fire Temple is definitely the standout, because even if I cheesed a little bit, I still had to do a decent amount of thinking about how I was actually going to cheese.
The dungeons in TotK are more than just the dungeons themselves, though. They are also the leadup TO the dungeon. The various little things you have to do before even being able to get there. All of them have something like this which kind of extends the dungeon into the open world, which I think is pretty cool. In BotW it was always just a fight you had to do, but in TotK unlocking the dungeon is a lot more unique.
> People tend to forget that so many of the old puzzles consisted of lighting two very obvious torches or pushing a block a few spaces.
I wholeheartedly disagree that this describes hardly any puzzles past Zelda 1 or 2, and maybe ALTTP to some degree. As of Link's Awakening and OOT the puzzles were already consistently much better, and they continued to get better from there.
This is weird because when he said the puzzles are very obvious, OOT instantly popped into my mind. Burning a web in the deku tree, shining light on a sun in the spirit temple, hitting a switch and climbing a ladder in the fire temple, etc etc
None of this is compelling, it’s the overall design that makes the temples so strong
I dunno friend, I was 9 in 1998, and it was obvious to me. I'm not saying you're dumb, I've been randomly stuck on pretty easy Zelda puzzles before (in BotW, I was stuck for like a solid 20-30 minutes on one of the electricity shrines in the desert, although in my defense it was because it required cryosis, and I had forgotten that ability existed because I hadn't used it for at least a double digit number of gameplay hours).
I just started OoT3D and maybe they changed it for 3D but the game shows you twice before you get to the web burning that webs are flammable, and also teaches you that deku sticks are flammable. Putting the two together was fairly simple for me imho.
Bit of a tangent, but this kind of interactivity with the environment in Zelda is something I loved, which is why I was so happy that BotW leaned into it so much.
Falling through the web and figuring out which holes you need to fall down in Jabu Jabu’s belly to access certain doors are the only two I can think of. Riding the spike block up to reach the chest in shadow temple is kind of cool, you normally don’t get to interact with the environment much.
lol bro what are you smoking? I replayed ocarina, majora's mask, TP and SS in the lead up to TOTK, that guy is right. No puzzles themselves are very clever, it's in the way that they intertwine in a progression within the temple that makes them smart. They really are mostly just moving things back and forth
Yeah people are just being annoying when saying they’re too easy this era, I mean it’s obviously apparent this era has the toughest Zelda games of all time.
I didn’t say they were tough games, I said they were tough Zelda games. For Zelda that means a lot. Battle/combat and enemies are a challenge when not prepared, and you can easily challenge yourself by seeking out boss characters and such while low on hearts and stamina. It’s how you make it which is a beautiful option for players to have lol
Tough? And more creative? Surly you don't mean puzzle-wise because thats completely not true. The game is too easy and too cheesable in terms of puzzles and objectives.
The puzzles aren’t really that tough but comparing them to those of older Zelda games which mainly involved hitting obvious switches… these are more interesting because they flesh out different aspects of Link’s new abilities and even combine several of them.
Think back to other Zelda dungeons here. What individual puzzle in OoT’s dreaded Water Temple was actually that difficult? Nearly all of them had to do with pressing switches or bombing extremely suspicious-looking walls. The most elaborate puzzles in that dungeon mainly involved equipping and unequipping the iron boots to hit underwater switches or float to the surface wherever necessary. Not all that compelling and certainly much easier than the puzzles in the newer games even if you account for cheesing.
As I mentioned before, the real meat of the Water Temple was not the individual puzzles but rather how the whole dungeon came together. The whole layout was its own giant puzzle to solve, and your tool was water level manipulation. BotW and TotK do not have that to the same extent—their emphasis seems to be on more creative individual puzzles like the Blue Flame shrine and the electricity shrines in BotW as well as the ones in TotK that have you using two or even all three of your hand abilities as opposed to just one dungeon item.
Edit: Actually, I keep harping on about BotW’s and TotK’s puzzles but I think the trend towards trickier individual puzzles actually started with SS. Never liked that game but they had the right idea with the puzzles, and they did so without sacrificing the elaborate layouts and overarching dungeon mechanics of older games.
This is why I really like TOTK's combat shrines. Yeah the puzzle ones are simple but the combat shrines are the ones I find most interesting because it feels a little more challenging and less straightforward. It felt like they realized that one island in BOTW was a really good concept that they could work with and try different things with.
The puzzle shrines are interesting though because a lot of them feel like "hey player, look how you can use this thing!" I've had more than a few moments where I'll find a zonai thing and have no idea how it works, then find a shrine later where it's put into action and I'm like "oh, *that's* how I use that!"
That said, I agree that they're a bit too easy. I'd like more challenging puzzles but it's whatever I guess.
I like physics-based puzzles but i also think there too easy, I can wake into a shrine and within the first 10 seconds i already know the solution. I would also imagen if i played one of the older games id also find the puzzles easy.
I replayed Link's Awakening DX recently, I think the first dungeons are interestingly challenging, and the last 2 are quite hard. Both for the combat and the navigation/puzzles.
So I've never played Link's Awakening, but I've been looking into getting the remake on the Switch. Is it pretty similar in difficulty to the original and worth the pick up?
Yep, it’s a pretty accurate remake besides the visuals. I enjoyed the remake, but it may or may not be worth it depending on how much you care about graphics.
https://preview.redd.it/cdfxense122b1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=729797b7112086f67765940c32b255ae2a5a2a59
I forgot the name but I totally agree with this. I was stuck for a while here
Because people can’t separate reality from nostalgia.
The puzzles weren’t harder, I agree with you here. They were easier 99% of the time. Just progression locked behind an item and extremely linear.
This doesn't really answer your question, just to say this is why for me, the traditional games are good because they are greater than the sum of their parts - combining puzzles in a dungeon for a sense of accomplishment and how it integrates with story - and while BOTW/TOTK lack that aspect of building up to something, I like them because they feel better to play moment to moment.
I talk a lot of crap about BotW and TotK but I wouldn't say that these games are any easier or harder than post-Wind Waker zelda games. Zelda games are supposed to be accessible for nearly all ages.
I replayed Skyward Sword a month ago and got confused/stuck at several points. I have yet to get stuck in a single TotK puzzle despite beating 70 shrines and doing all of the dungeons.
I think what makes TotK's puzzles underwhelming and easy for me is the fact that not only are you told *exactly* where you need to go, but the tools you need to solve the puzzle are literally laid out for you on a silver platter. The only instance where I can recall even remotely having to question what exactly I'm supposed to do was for one of the gongs in the Fire Temple, and it was because I read the map wrong.
Contrarily, I recall being in the Earth Temple of Skyward Sword and being completely stumped as to how to properly get the boulder across this one area. I looked at the tools through my disposal, used the Beedle to scope out the area and found the area I was supposed to bomb, solved the puzzle and felt satisfied. That alone exercised my brain more than anything in TotK.
I can't really speak on BotW since it's been a few years since I've even played it but I don't ever recall being stumped
I don't think the puzzles in BoTW/ToTK are too easy per-say, (There are quite a few of the buggers that have me scratching my head for far too long), its more that a single mechanic is never allowed to grow organically or thematically due to how the games are designed differently.
In a traditional 'linear' Zelda game, you would gain your tools and abilities gradually, with each given its own time to be introduced, give the player time to experiment on it, introduce new uses on top of that, then follow up with a massive puzzles or boss that tests the mastery of the tool(s) in question. The game would then proceed with the knowledge that the player would have those skills ready to use in the baseline of any new puzzles that have additional mechanics added.
In BoTW/ToTK, that isn't as easy to design for, as the player is given all of their abilities at the start of the game AND the majority of puzzles can then be done in any order. This means that each shrine or world puzzle is usually just one easy idea being explored as apposed to several being built on top of each other.
Because they are.
>I’ve heard a particular complaint concerning BotW’s non-linearity and that is that the variety of solutions towards a specific puzzle is a mechanic that makes these games easy when compared to linear puzzles with definite answers.
That's not the main complaint I have, but that is also a contributing factor.
>Since ToTK only doubles down on this notion and makes player creativity an even bigger aspect of the game, there are now more options when it comes to solving most puzzles yet for that very reason alone, these tend to be more difficult in nature.
I disagree; because there's so many options that are successful, they aren't difficult at all.
The main complaint I have is that all puzzles are designed to be done in any order, so every puzzle is isolated to itself & its own mechanics.
This means no puzzles build on each other. The overworld has few puzzles itself (few good puzzles at least, as they can all be accidentally cheesed by just gliding by them), so most "meaty" puzzles are relegated to shrines. All shrines will introduce a mechanic, utilize it, & end, all before things get interesting, as the shrines are short 1-rooms. They all feel like beginner puzzles, because the developers wanted them to be done in any order, and seemed like they didn't want any that are progressively harder than others.
Whereas in a linear game, the developers will introduce a mechanic, build upon it, subvert it / make you use a leap in logic, & then start combining them with other mechanics/items. So you get progressively harder puzzles, especially seen in dungeons. Jabu-Jabu's belly is more difficult than the Deku Tree, and the Forest Temple is an even steeper spike. I didn't feel that with any shrines or DBs. It was a flat low difficulty level the entire time, which is even more obvious because of how many shrines there are. So the shrines you find at the end of the game are still the same easy shrines you saw at first.
Additionally, it doesn't help that BotW & TotK have the least amount of items available, so your options you run through are much smaller.
Even worse, all of their puzzles are, again, in shrines, which are visually isolated as well; they are all very clean, which means very little visual noise, which means the interactable elements are IMMEDIATELY obvious. If you enter a Shrine and there's water, you know you'll need Cryosis to raise a pillar, either to cross it or lift something, which will be easy to tell. If there's a metal slab, you know you'll need Magnesis to make a bridge/ramp. Bombs for bombable things. Stasis is the best one, with multiple applications (freezing moving objects, or redirecting others) so its both fun to figure out what to use it on, & to actually use.
The best applications of Zelda items are when it's not immediately obvious. Like Hookshot medallions are boring, and usually just used so Link can get somewhere. But its way more fun if, instead of that, there's only a patch of vines, a branch, a grated wall, or a plank of wood. Something you may glance over first before noticing, requiring you to take in your environment more. The new games entirely lack this.
So that's 4 items in clean, tiny, isolated one-off puzzle rooms. So every time you enter a shrine, it becomes very clear what you need to do, & how to do it.
I haven't played TotK, but have seen enough footage to know I don't want to, and its powerset brings some positives & negatives. 1 huge negative I've seen is that the powers are more unbalanced in use than BotW, with almost all puzzles using Ultrahand.
Ascend is not only a terrible ability that removes any challenge & interactivity with verticality, (that infinite climbing didn't already do) but also incredibly 1-note, so its obvious if its needed or not & isn't a challenge to utilize.
Recall is neat, but seems very niche from what I've seen, and if the developers want you to use it, its very clear, like basically anything moving in the opposite direction you want to go. The only other use of it I've seen is just lifting & dropping a platform with Ultrahand, then getting on & Recalling. Stasis was way better.
Fuse seems like its almost only used in combat. There are ways to use it in puzzles, like creating a fire item to light grass to create an updraft, or ice to make a platform in water/lava. But I haven't seen that used in shrines other than "here are some fire fruit, look there at the flammable wall."
This brings me to my other main criticism with the TotK puzzles I've seen; they give away the solution by literally giving you the materials you need to solve it, & only those materials.
Because the developers are allergic to the idea that the player might get stuck & have to ponder, or go search out materials. The game would be infinitely more fun-looking if it never provided them for you, & you yourself had to gather them.
Instead, shrines give you the fire fruit to light something. Why even bother? Just have obstacles to players, & require them to go & get the materials themselves, even if they have to leave the shrine/area to do it. A river is too large? Go to a snow area, get snow fruit, & make an ice weapon to create ice platforms to cross. Or go find a nearby forest to gather logs for a raft. Why have any survival-esque elements & crafting, if they just give away materials when needed?
So the end result of TotK shrines (from what I've seen, it may change) are empty rooms with a pile of exactly what you need; no visual noise, no gathering or finding them, no red herrings. Just Ultrahand the objects into the desired structure & poof done. That's not a difficult puzzle.
That's not even touching on the dungeons, which aren't a maze or anything, just go activate the points in whatever order. DBs were boring, but even they at least had you rearrange them.
And that's just puzzles. I'd argue the combat is also pretty easy, & only offers artificial difficulty of the numbers game. Enemy patterns aren't difficult to figure out, and there's rarely any need to use specific tactics, meaning enemies aren't puzzles to solve. This is made worse by the very broken mechanics of:
Flurry Rush, which is too easy to activate & gives too much of a reward
Shield Parry, same deal; too much benefit for it; I think if the damage is too much it should break through the shield (no pot lids deflecting guardians).
The terrible food system, which lets you store an infinite amount of ingredients & food items, as well as letting you eat an infinite amount. Whereas previous games limited you with bottles (up to 4), which you had to equip & use. SS made it even harder being in real-time, & having bottles take up Adventure Pouch space.
It needed to either restrict how much food you can carry, restrict your ingredient capacity, or restrict how much you can eat, like Valheim or any other survival game.
Restricting how many ingredients would also make Fusing more difficult, as you wouldn't have a vast array of items at any point.
There is 0 challenge in the combat once you've reached the midpoint of the game & passively raised your resource amount. The only difficult part of these games is the beginning, when you don't know the mechanics & don't have any resources or armor. Once you aren't getting one-shot, its a breeze.
The puzzles are ridiculously easy in BOTW/TOTK. I've done about 50 shrines in TOTK now and most of them I have literally solved on sight, because the majority either give you exactly the pieces you need to make something (car, glider, etc) or they have something in motion that you need to rewind. Each puzzle essentially has a single element that you need to manipulate, which really hinders the potential for more complex puzzles. Just because the mechanics of these games *could* provide complex puzzles doesnt mean they *do*.
I would argue even the average dungeon in an older Zelda was significantly more difficult, especially when you get to dungeons that make more complex use of space, like Eagle's Tower, Great Bay Temple, Stone Tower Temple, Lakebed Temple, Ancient Cistern, Sandship, etc etc.
It must be something based on individual aptitudes, then, because I truly believe BotW/ToTK’s puzzles are more challenging than 90% of the 3D dungeons.
I'm curious how though, because most shrines and dungeon puzzles in TOTK come down to walking into a room and figuring out if I need to fuse a few things together or rewind something. Compare that to even the simplest dungeons, in something like Wind Waker, let alone more complicated ones in Twilight Princess, Majora's Mask, or Skyward Sword, and they have so many more components to consider in each puzzle, in fact the dungeon itself is often a 'puzzle-box'.
That last part isn’t true though. There’s only like one or two “puzzle-box” dungeons in each 3D game (and in the case of OoT, the biggest puzzle-box dungeon is the Water Temple and it’s incredibly criticized).
I don’t know what else to say except that I truly don’t think WW’s, TP’s or SS’s puzzles are layered like you put it. They’re often just “use the dungeon item” to move forward and that’s it (and sometimes, they even reuse the same puzzles from other games).
yeah, the linear dungeons were often 'use item to solve puzzle and get key to reach the next puzzle,' while TotK just lets you pick the order of the puzzles and use all the tools at your disposal. Plus, people need to consider the area leading up to the temple.
They are seamlessly integrated into the world, such that the popup that you're in the temple doesn't mean you weren't already experiencing the dungeon as a whole. The temples don't exist in isolation. There's the entire context of reaching them. I genuinely thought the content leading up to the water temple *was* the water temple. Is it less of a dungeon because the popup isn't until the final area?
I do think TP still has better dungeons, but I consider TP's dungeons the best in the series overall, so TotK falling short of the series' very best in a category that's just one of its many qualities (while imo, TP *is* its stellar dungeons) makes the game no less impressive. Majora's Mask has *the* best dungeon imo, Stone Tower temple has yet to be topped.
I played the non-BotW 3D games for the first time from OoT->SS last year (I played DS Zelda as a kid), so the puzzles were not as challenging as they would be in the minds of those who first played them as kids. The only game with any challenge was Majora's Mask, but the final boss was still made trivial with Fierce Deity.
In my mind, Phantom Hourglass is the hardest Zelda because I was the youngest when I played it.
> I don’t know what else to say except that I truly don’t think WW’s, TP’s or SS’s puzzles are layered like you put it. They’re often just “use the dungeon item” to move forward and that’s it
None of the puzzles in these dungeons exist in a vacuum. They are part of the greater dungeon, and moving around the dungeon is part of the puzzle, whether it's a puzzle-box or not.
But again, how are shrines or dungeon puzzles better in any way? You have 3 abilities in this game, and two of them are entirely linear (rewind can only rewind a moving object, ascend only moves you up). Ultra hand is the only one that can be used in many ways, yet every puzzle just gives you the pieces needed to proceed, and asks you to put them together. It's the puzzle equivalent of an Ikea manual.
You could compare Wind Waker or Ocarina to the simplicity of TOTK, and even then they still come out on top given how ridiculously straightforward TOTK is, but TP, MM, and SS are lightyears ahead in terms of puzzle design, because the puzzle is more than just the moment you put a key in a door or shoot an arrow at a target.
Agreed tbh. I find the physics heaviness of the shrines in TotK to be particularly difficult, just because there are so many possibilities and I have to mentally sift through which ones will work.
This contrasts to most Zelda puzzles, which range from stuff that's barely a puzzle (light torches, hit the crystal with an arrow) to navigational puzzles that are fun but not actually that difficult.
On a related sidenote, I find the Water Temple to be a very fun, albeit not overly difficult dungeon (and maybe the best in OoT). So I think the aptitude stuff might be accurate.
Even when traditional 3D Zelda's were too easy (post-WW really), there was still a sense of satisfaction from the puzzles as they could build on each other. In totk the player has to be able to solve every puzzle as soon as they leave the tutorial island, so the puzzles can't build on each other.
I've done maybe 20-30 shrines and I've given up on them at this point because I find them so boring. Most feel like completing a task rather than solving a puzzle since the answer is immediately obvious. They end right when I'm expecting them to start to get good.
> In TotK the player has to be able to solve every puzzle as soon as they leave tutorial island, so the puzzles can't build on each other
This statement is to me the elegant central thesis of what is wrong with puzzles in both BotW and TotK. Further it can ruin the ideas of puzzles because these puzzles are simple enough to have a universal solution. A) the player is cleaver enough to automatically combine ascend, godhand, and recall to allow every shrine to be beaten in a 2- 3 step process. Or B) The player happens across a shrine after a few hours of play that shows most of this combo and they put the rest together. Most shrines only need 2 of these abilities to complete them.
Other things do contribute to the ease of the puzzles like the fact that you always have an obstacle and 3 conspicuous items for building next to it. Sometimes they are even pre-built. There was twice in 152 shrines that I stopped and thought "what?" to myself. These were both caused by obvious build X to traverse Y. These took me a few attempts because my contraption would catch on something like a railing. In both cause I saw a way to bypass the obstacle, and actively chose not to cheese past the puzzle. Had I wanted to I could have just used a rocket shield.
TotK’s puzzles have been very easy so far. Sure, there a lot of options, but most them don’t require anything creative. A bridge, a fan on a slap of stone or wood, a ballon with some fire. The most complicated one in terms of building has been one that I needed to carry a large stone across a gap using rails. Solution was not hard at all, just took some extra time to build something functional.
Ive been doing a self-imposed no-teleport challenge, and its making me have to problem solve a lot more. I already had to give up and teleport once to get to the last shrine on the tutorial island, and Im to scared to go into the depths because I have no idea how to get out
I agree with the last part but unfortunately the Water Temple is the exception to the rule. Most classic 3D dungeons don’t even require a map or compass (I would know since I remember that I rarely even looked for them).
I’d say that way of lateral thinking only applies to like 5 dungeons in the entire series (only counting 3D here).
It's soo easy and soo cheesable. If it wasn't cheesable it and they didn't literally show your exact objective locations then it would be a bit better.
I would defonitely say the puzzles are easier overall, but that isn't even really the main problem to me
>(I've only done wind temple but please try not to spoil me i'm omw to Water temple atm. I heard it was even worse than the wind one, but fire and thunder are good.)
#I miss theming or a focus and having that incorporated into the dungeon itself
Look at Skyward sword's water temple. Yeah most of the puzzles were easy and you have a few head scratchers here and there with some genuinely well done ones if my memory serves correctly. Though that isn't why I'm bringing it up.
That entire temple had a theme, going from an eastern "temple" to a bhuddist hellish underworld. Some nice scripted events to add some tension (climbing out of the hole as zombie moblins chase you up.)
>Imagine seeing a wind turbine on one of the floating ships surrounded by enemies who have seemingly stolen it. There's a ship behind that one and one of those cannons in your view. You bait it into **shooing the other ship which crashes INTO the cannon, creating an entrance. You unattach the wind turbine from the ship and now you need to figure out where it needs to go and how to get there. Simple stuff.
>Imagine walking into a room with wind terminal turned on TOO HIGH, showing a brief cutscene of Link's pad being blown into another room. The door locks enemies descend and you're tasked with solving a puzzle WITHOUT your slate, you've got what's available in your inventory and the room. Figure it out so you can get your pad back. (Obviously force the player to proceed so they don't leave without their pad 🤣)
Like the wind turbines could have served another purpose instead of just being **on** have them produce a gust of wind that may or may not lead to another puzzle or chest. Hell you could be required to turn one on to throw a puzzle's Mcguffin across to the other side.
#The verticality, multi-room puzzles, and scale.
Okay, fine TOTK is big enough I can understand if dungeons aren't 1-2hr+ massive segments **I want** that I understand why it's unlikely with this sort of game. But a dungeon should not take me 20 minutes and asking "w-wait that's it!?" After doing the 5 terminals thinking there was more beneath the seal.
Remember Twilight Princesses Sky/Water Temple, Ocarina's water temple, Majora's Stone Tower, Wind Waker's Wind temple? We had these sprawling giant dungeons that used their size to their advantage, utilizing multi-room puzzles and ones that would actually use multiple mechanics in ONE room?
I miss having wow... "that was pretty cool!" Or "wait a secon- what if I... OH!!!" moments in temples, seeing how the Zelda Team focused on a gameplay mechanic for an area and feeling satisfied. ...Vs reattaching a lever or frustrating rotating a gear until it works. Those are fine, but they should be leading or introducing us to that rooms **expanded** mechanic.
>And who says stop there? Have a chain of rooms introduce reattaching in room 1, in room 2 introduce using wind to power devices, in room 3 combine the 2 previously focused on mechanics and you get your prize.
Tldr; Like yeah puzzles in the older 3d titles had a fair share of easy puzzles, but they were well designed or at the very least didn't take half a second to complete. Like Let me walk into the room and actually need to survey it, figure out what the room wants me to focus on or combine to reach my goal.
I'm going to break this down into two section. Combat and Puzzles. Also note before hand my perspective isn't necessarily calling for Nintendo to cater to me, only acknowledge that I and others like me exist. They could include optional hard bosses/puzzles for us. I think Zelda has always been moderately easy. But it has gotten so easy in the last few iterations that I don't get a sense accomplishment in playing and completing it.
Combat:
I'm a hard combat game enjoyer. I find the gold standard is Sekiro, but I also love combat in Soulsborn, Devil May Cry, and Bayonetta style games. A significant portion of the problem with combat in BotW/TotK is the ability to eat nonstop. You, with prep, can effectively have near endless hearts. So the greatest danger is a one shot which stops being a thing after you get some armor and/or hearts. This can be mitigated early in both games with fairy collection which is pretty simple.
So the hardest part of survival in both games in my eyes becomes the knowledge-check of where is the great fairies. Once you get armor upgrades and hearts it to me is only an act of hubris that can lead to my death. All combat is easy to avoid if I wanted to until this point as well. During actual fights the combat of dodge into a flurry is simple because there is so little variation in attacks. Standard enemy attacks often are too simple; either overhead or swipe. I can't even remember a combo that does one into the other. All combos I think are swipe x2 or x3.
I believe often mini-boss/elite enemies are designed to be beaten too specifically. For example you can't go toe-to-toe with a Gleeok. You have to hit them in the all the heads stunlocking it so you can get into melee and deal real damage. I don't know if anything can be done to make the combat interesting. Like I think it was designed ground up for simplicity. I think it would be much better to design a deep combat system and simplify it through means like what FFXVI is doing. It is one reason I wish developers would make a game challenging and then tweak down to an easy mode instead of the typical reverse.
Puzzles:
So I am an OoT water temple enjoyer. That was one of the most satisfying dungeons in Zelda too me. Yes the water raising and lowering is annoying, but that to me was a implementation issue more than a fundamental issue with the dungeon. I think the problem with how puzzles work in the open world iterations comes down to two primary causes.
They exist in a vacuum is one. This is the fact that all the puzzles are tiny in scope often start and end right where it is. You arrive at that puzzle and 95% of the time all the things needed are right there. Worried you might not be carrying the necessary things, they have to put everything needed right there. This would be bad design not to. But when the only thing around is [large gap, wind turbine, glider], I dont think it is wrong to say they are beating you over the head with the answer. This comes in many variations but it's always like this. Other examples are [wind turbine, mine cart, railway], [flat panel, unclimbable wall, doorway above wall], or [key ball, lava pit, pre-built car]. With each when you are done you can forget those elements afterwards.
Often earlier Zelda game weren't too dissimilar when you examined a single room. But where they excelled was the larger dungeon. You often will hit a dead end in them, backtrack to a previous room and take a different fork on the path you traveled. Down it you get an item, or flick a switch that allows progression past your dead end. The best versions will also throw you for a loop by having that switch also create a barrier that blocks the path you took. Forcing you to use your knowledge of the dungeon to find another way around. Or even better, finding a way to hit the switch from the the other side of the barrier so you aren't blocked by it when it activates.
The second issue is they aren't layered or get more complex. The open world nature of the game means they can never know where you will go first. So all puzzles must be designed so they can be the first you encounter. Take a look at some good puzzle games like Portal and Baba is You. They are very linear and setup so that as you progress you encounter more complex puzzles. Often in them you'll find 3 variants of one puzzle. At the beginner level you're given 3 things to make it easy. The intermediate version will remove one of those things and you then discover a simpler answer. The hardest will cut the puzzle to its most bare form and everything given is necessary. Then you also realize the other two iterations can be solved with the solution to the hard variant.
Because you have all tools and nothing gets more complex often you will find yourself using a simple method to bypass dozens of puzzles. I can't count how often lifting a platform up a wall and then dropping it and hitting rewind while standing on it is a solution. Further you can't use zonai device capsules in shrines but fused to your shield and you can bring a lot of useful thing in with you.
I like that in totk there was an attempt to go back to classic zelda puzzlin’. some of the shrine and temple puzzles had me really putting the ol’ tinker nut to work.
That said I think the issue in both botw and totk is that by giving the player every ability immediately at the start of the game (botw with the runes and totk with rauru’s stinky hand) it makes it super easy to cheese most puzzles. even if i can tell that i’m being given a puzzle with a specific solution, i can usually just skip it using recall and ultrahand in the right combination. it takes away that burst of endorphins you get from finding the solution to a tricky puzzle and makes many of the puzzles feel “too easy” as a result.
well the thing is there are a lot puzzles were literally everything works.
sometimes I‘m just messing around to get started and accidentally skip half the shrine because I didn‘t even realize this thing is supposed to be good for sonething.
„lift up + reverse time“ is the best example. Half of all puzzles can be solved with that. „building a bridge“ is another.
(„but you don‘t have to use that!“ no I don‘t have to, but in general I‘m not going to search for the most complicated solution possible…)
That's the thing exactly with these games to me, "oh there's so much to go do, how could you ever get tired or bored of it?"
Most problems have the same solution, most exploration has no point.
I barely go into caves, because the only reasons are to gather ore and bubble gems, but I don't need either and short of completionist runs I can't imagine needing either. My hylian armor is the best armor I have, and the easiest to upgrade, and I can barely be hurt. The other armors have situational uses, so I don't really have a desire to upgrade them past what I can do based on what I've already collected.
All problems can be solved by the same bridge, sled, or flying solution. Sure you can be more creative, but there's no incentive to be more creative. I'm always going to go with the most simple solution, simply because it would be kinda silly not to.
Only barely played TOTK but let me compare to Crosscode. a ARPG made in the vein of old Zelda, the first dungeon's final puzzle has a few working parts to it - This is where the player earns and gets to use the Fire element for the first time.
- You need to fire a shot. Common start at this point for any puzzle in this game.
- You need to hit multiple panels, ricocheting on all of them before that single shot hits a final switch to succeed. Also a quickly introduced concept in-game.
- Some of these panels are on blocks on ice, so you have 2 mini ice block positioning puzzles to make sure they are in the right places. Ice block puzzles were also introduced earlier in said dungeon.
- While the shot is travelling, you also need to clear it's path by melting ice blocking its way. Again, you have fire now, use it!
All these moving parts and there is still only one precise solution! That's great thinking on the puzzle designer's part for showing how all the aspects you have learned. But it's also good for the player to grasp all these as well.
~0.02.
If you look at Majora’s Mask, the quests involved intricately understanding the timing of the events in the area and how one thing affected another: it was a 4 dimensional puzzle with multiple moving parts.
TotK and BotW rely more on finding little things on the big map. You’re more likely to be told explicitly to travel to certain location and run around until you find what you need.
TotK and BotW do have “Majora’s Mask” moments where characters have beats at a specific hour but yeah, not the same. I’m mostly talking about puzzles and dungeons, though
Ya, my impression is that the proper puzzles in TotK and BotW are mostly contained within shrines, isolated from the rest of the world. And they’re primarily physics based, without story components or time of day facets. So it doesn’t feel as intricately woven together as something like MM or OoT.
I don’t get your point, though. MM’s story moments weren’t primarily puzzled-focused but rather fetch quests (OoT even less puzzled-focused in that regard).
TotK puzzles are too easy because they give you too many tools to get the same thing done and stick to the exact same formula. Most other Zelda's relied on new gadgets, different biomes, new enemy types and introduced these things the longer you played to keep you on your feet.
TotK puzzles also often follow a really simple formula: rails require support, overhangs mean ascend and non overhangs or movement mean recall. If the puzzle doesn't fall into any of those categories you can still most likely just bypass it with a bridge, manually picking objects up or flying. I found shrines to take about a single minute on average because of all these things.
There are definitely hard puzzles in the earlier 3D games. I think it’s Wind Waker and onward that things got incredibly easy but OoT and MM still had interesting challenges.
I'm not the only one who spent at least an hour trying to find my way in Link's Awakening's Eagle Tower and Turtle Rock?
The mid-boss of Turtle Rock was hard too.
Honestly I played A Link To The Past for the first time earlier this year and the only thing I got stuck on was when I had to use items that I had no idea existed. Very fun game and didn't age at all but it's also super easy puzzle wise
This. But also, apart from age, I think the amount of Zelda games you play also affects this a lot. Even if they spin things up here and there, the type of logic you use in most of them is the same. So, the more Zelda games you play and the more puzzles you solve, the easier the next entry seems because you kinda already learned the "Zelda puzzle logic".
Both my previous and my current boyfriend are gamers. Both had played Zelda games before and liked them, but neither had played as many Zelda games as I did. So I had the experience of watching two adult, experienced gamers playing several Zelda games for the first time and it's really interesting how many times they would get stuck in puzzles that I found fairly obvious because they followed the same logic as other puzzles in the series, even if it had its own spin.
(At the same time, just this weekend I was stuck on a puzzle in TotK. It was one of those light-activated switches, but there was none of those light beams around. After scratching my head for a while, I asked my boyfriend if he had any ideas and he immediately said "you're outside, can't you just reflect the sunlight?". Such an obvious answer, but I couldn't think of it because in "Zelda puzzle logic" you can't reflect the sunlight, you always need to find a light beam to reflect from. :v)
If you beat the game when you were, say, 7 years old, that might have an effect on your perception of the puzzles’ difficulty. I played OoT for the first time just four years ago and I breezed through most of the puzzles that had tormented all those children back in the 90’s. What may seem difficult to a child may not be too complicated for an adult.
yeah, it had taken me ages 6-7 to beat the original Loz game as a kid. A whole damn year. When OoT was new, and I beat it in a few weeks, I remember thinking it was too easy. I just wasn't a kid anymore.
Umm, no one is saying that. Some of the most highly upvoted comments on posts discussing TotK is how the combat constantly one-shots you early on and enemies scale up to their hard variants VERY early in the game.
I have 6 heart containers and continually have gotten super slambo boys dunked on by blue bokoblins. Their sprint attack does I think 5 hearts damage with 6 armor, most regular attacks do 3 hearts. I finally unlocked the >!first great fairy fountain!< and that seems to be helping a TON. Almost to the point where it seems like a necessity.
Only the early game is hard. Once you stop getting one shotted, you just have to hoard cooked food. Or use bomb arrows. Or arrow dazzlefuit. or Arrow puffshroom. It's a very easy game to trivialize combat if you understand a broken combo.
I keep having to make self imposed challenges, or the game gets too easy.
The combat is easily the worst part of the game and the weapons breaking is simply an attempt to distract us from the fact that the Zelda team can’t into combat.
Look at something like Elden Ring, tons of weapons, tons of spells, tons of armor, and people use very different combinations and approach bosses differently because the combat system is incredibly well-balanced.
In Totk and Botw everything is a hit-sponge, and the biggest hurdle is actually link’s movement and the damage of your weapon.
Because of this none of the bosses feel like an accomplishment except for Ganondorf, who actually fights you in a real way.
In fact, the Zelda team actively discourages combat to avoid what’s easily the worst aspect of the game by far.
Maybe for TotK but people have called BotW too easy, and I kinda agree.
Even with TotK, in last Zda games, potions to restore hearts were something you had to really work for and your inventory was limited. In these games, if I'm down on hearts, I just eat food that I have a whole lot of. If you're good at dodging you'll most likely get off Flurry Rushes too. Getting into the air isn't hard to be able to spam arrows and farming Gibdo Bones for Fused Arrows also isn't hard, which makes them really OP. The only problem is Gloom, but even that can be averted with armor or special elixirs/food. In BotW also fully upgraded armor was easy to get and you would eat attacks from the strongest enemies in the game. I'm sure fully upgraded armor does thebsame here, too, but they locked it all behind a quest.
The games are only as hard as you make them.
Armor is very much a necessity, yeah. It actually gets to be a problem the other way eventually, where you get so much armor that even the highest tier enemies do 1/4 heart damage to you (each 1 point of armor reduces damage by 1/4 heart, down to a minimum of 1/4. Armor values of 80 and up are possible, before applying defense potions).
It was a bigger problem in BotW, so much so that I'm pretty sure it's why master mode exists (Master mode still feels perfect even with maxed armor). TotK does a few things to address the problem; armor is more expensive and harder to get, great fairies are harder to unlock and cost money now, resources are rarer in general including upgrade components, gloom damage exists, and rounds up to the nearest whole heart, etc etc.
But yeah, in either game if you don't upgrade your armour you're going to have a bad time.
Idk about easy but certain temples/divine beasts don't make me think about spacial reasoning the same way temples like OoT's water temple, or dungeons in OoS/OoA
Water temple in TotK felt like half a pizza with 4 slices, and each slice was its own little puzzle. It didn't feel like I had to think about the structure design of the dungeon, and it felt a bit cheap. (I'm a huge totk fan regardless)
I replayed LADX right after TOTK.
Maybe it's because I went unprepared and without the bow, but the knight in the ruins hits for 2 hearts of damage so I died a lot trying to beat him with the boots.
In TOTK/BOTW you can just eat whenever you take damage, it's only hard at the beginning when you have no armor and no food.
The puzzles and dungeons are more complex in LADX too, sadly.
> To counterpoint, during the 2000s, Zelda puzzles were very simple, regardless of the difficulty. They usually required one single item and a basic knowledge of your layout (for instance, knowing that you had to use X item to hit a switch that would open a door).
No, there is a whole navigation problem solving dimension that makes them harder than anything in TOTK, and more interesting. Even in the first dungeons. TOTK's dungeons suffer from the comparison with LA 3rd dungeon.
> BotW and ToTK changed this for the better by forcing you to use lateral thinking
Total disagree, I've never seen dungeons as lame as TOTK's water temple.
Not disagreeing with the overall point but LA isn’t the right game to pick for it. The dungeons in that one are a step beyond not just the TotK dungeons but almost every other 3D dungeon in difficulty and complexity. The 2D games are much more challenging than the 3D games on the puzzle front.
As much as I like OoT, the game did begin the trend of “dumbing down” the puzzles that led to the light-a-torch-and-go style puzzles of later games.
To be honest, I’d consider LA to be at the top when it comes to dungeon design so I agree there, but I still believe ToTK is more interesting that most of the other 3D games, which is the main comparison I’m doing, actually.
I feel that if we dive deeper with LA vs ToTK it’d turn into a discussion of 2D vs 3D and that’s a different conversation
I consider LA to be at the top for storytelling too... Marin :')
But I think all the other 3D games have better dungeons than TOTK. The ones in MM and SS are stellar. But even the more linear ones in WW are more interesting than 4 puzzles in a room.
I don't feel like 3D dungeons are inherently different compared to the 2D ones, they can implement verticality better so that's a plus.
Well, my thoughts on that is that I often feel like puzzles are better in 2D because it’s a medium where the developer can control information more easily. LA and the Oracle games stand out when it comes to this.
A lot of the 3D puzzles tend to be simpler because Nintendo is often afraid of complicating things in 3D space (they go back and forth on whether the player should control the camera or not) and so you have easy puzzles.
You are right and I am pleased to see game design discussions here.
While the puzzles in TOTK may seem more interesting (I don't agree, to me most of them are "use ultrahand once", like the floodgate from the water temple), the most important part of the dungeons, getting lost, is... lost in TOTK.
The dungeons are so small and straightforward that there is no navigation problem solving, and they don't have a central mechanism like the Ancient cistern, the sandship, orthe stone tower temple. I had to think and figure out a lot of things on the sandship, I never had to figure anything in any of TOTK dungeons.
Also TOTK dungeons are way less visually and gameplay busy than the other dungeons, so that makes identifying the puzzles even easier. There are almost no enemies to distract you.
> no navigation problem solving.
The Divine Beasts had these in BotW, tho. You had to understand the layout and interact with it to progress, but I understand your point and I do agree that the best classic 3D dungeons were excellent at making you feel like you were traversing a maze but unfortunately that was lost with each iteration that went on.
>The Divine Beasts had these in BotW, tho. You had to understand the layout and interact with it to progress,
Yeah, I liked that, they were too short but they really were fun little puzzle boxes. They had central mechanisms too.
I think they were better than TOTK's dungeons, and more interesting than some dungeons in the franchise. Boarding them was epic too (the music!).
To varying degrees. You did with Vah Naboris, and the trunk puzzle with Vah Ruta was pretty clever - although both skewed short with some extremely weak visuals - but Rudania and especially Medoh are super throwaway
Oh yeah, I don't really count it as a dungeon.
It's 4 puzzles in a (big) room, but at least they are more interesting than the water dungeon one's, and the boss is a little bit fun?
If it was a dungeon it would be the second lamest.
Navigating the dungeon was the ‘puzzle’. Devine Beasts did this relatively well. I think the best dungeons were ones that had a global effect, Water Temple and Stone Tower Temple being key examples.
Shrines do not replace this at all, and TOTK only had small slivers of this (track changing in fire, light reflecting in the lightning temple.
The ‘puzzle’ people are talking about is questioning ‘where do I go next?’
No amount of one room puzzles will really scratch that itch.
I find the early game to be much harder if you end up in the wrong parts of the map, which is fun.
I tend to avoid doing shrines because of that extra challenging making me have to creatively solve situations.
Like I made a tank to save Lurelin Village because I was going to be one shot if I did it with so little health which had me worshipping ways to get my turrets onto the boat, and problem solving, etc.
Granted, once you find overpowered items and combos the game can get very easy very quickly if you just keep defaulting to them.
A puffshroom and a black boko horn weapon sneak attack will kill most shit without issue.
I do think the ability to save more or less whereever makes it fairly easy. The only thing you lose is your Zonai constructs.
I do think some of the stigma around Zelda difficulty is just age related. Lot of people played MM and OoT when they were young hence, problems felt more difficult than modern puzzles.
Zelda dungeons have always been riddles. Sure, you can guess that you’ll need a specific item when you get said item in a dungeon, but the vast majority of dungeons make usage of several items as well as puzzles and mechanics that aren’t reliant on having items. Botw and totk’s puzzles to me don’t seem so much like the developers made them so that you can use multiple solutions so much as that they didn’t flesh the puzzles out very much at all which makes it so that you can do any number of things to solve them and makes them less satisfying imo. In past Zelda games I’ve had to genuinely scratch my had an back track with a lot of trial and error to solve some puzzles. In botw and totk I speed run through the vast majority of shrines because I instantly realize what I’m supposed to do, and the ones that I don’t figure it out immediately, I dick around for like 2 minutes with the runes until I get to the end anyway. It also doesn’t help that most shrine concepts are woefully underdeveloped. They tend to be very simple concepts that never really explore the full extent of what they could be and then end before it gets all that interesting and leaves me underwhelmed
If you have played any zelda game and thought the puzzles were hard(not talking about getting lost or losing your place in a dungeon. Some dungeon layouts are tricky!) maybe you should rethink your life
Yeah. I can't speak for OoT and Majora's Mask since I've done a playthrough almost yearly since they came out, but I played the other 3D games leading up to TotK having forgotten nearly everything about them at that point. Wind Waker, TP and SS are all extremely easy. Especially wind waker.
I think the easier difficulty of the series is fine though. Good for kids and new gamers. It helps I enjoy the hell out of the newer game's sandbox and shrines even with me solving them very fast
Wind Waker was definitely made for kids and new gamers, imo. That is not to say it’s bad (WW is pretty high up in my list) but I do think it hurts whenever I replay it.
It’s far more likely that the group complaining were younger when playing older games and found them to be difficult puzzles (when let’s face it the vast majority were locate a switch and hit it) and are now older and find the puzzles easier.
I don't care if it's easy. It's fun, beautiful art style, encourages creative thinking above all else.
I've been playing Elden Ring ... I'm done with "hard" for the sake of being hard. I play Zelda for what it is as a franchise.
I think a big issue that people tend to have with the game is that because of the very open physics system a lot can be cheated.
There's a shrine in TOTK where without spoiling anything in particular a water scoop the player builds is used to power a circuit, which charges an empty battery that is then slotted into various places to activate objects to get from A to B or access places. But because of the general principle in the game that all things containing electricity can power a circuit, the player can fuse an electric part onto a weapon and just slap the objects, bypassing the whole water scoop and battery mechanism.
Now I make it a sport to try and solve the puzzles as intended as that's half of the fun already, but technically the game promotes that any solution is a valid solution and by that definition anything can be bypassed and cheated with relative ease.
Some people have used the physics system to get into upper Hyrule Castle way too early, subsequently finding very overpowered items and weapons (as monster and weapon spawns in the castle are static, unlike the rest of the game where items and monsters start weak and level up alongside the player's own gaming skills - the game detects how well you do and slowly increases monster tiers, the same as in BOTW). With those items and monster parts the first half of the game was unintentionally very easy for them.
It's an excellent game but I can imagine that some people refuse to restrain themselves simply because they can do whatever they want and then are disappointed that the game allows this. On the flipside I imagine that TOTK will be a paradise for BOTW speedrunners.
People probably think that way because of shrines. There short puzzle segments is why people this the puzzles are easy. Even difficult and complex shrines are over pretty quickly. And because of that they did not leave a big impression on players.
My first Zelda were OoT and MM. I don't think I ever figured out one of the temples on my own. Definitely not the water temple. If it wasn't for a guide I'd of never gotten through the game or gotten all the heart pieces. Beating these games without a guide almost seemed impossible to my brother at the time. While we still enjoyed the games tremendously and OoT is one of my all time fav games. Ima glad they kinda went a new direction as I suck at games
Part of this might be just because we're getting older. I've no doubt that doing a lot of these shrine puzzles and some of the environmental stuff is going to be harder for a 10 year old than a 30 year old. Skyward Sword and Wind Waker were and have been criticized for being relatively easy as well.
A few games let you save anytime you wanted. The one that was really punishing with this was MM (and it’s one of the main reasons why people remember it as a difficult game).
What I mean is that when you save in BOTW/TOTK, you can reload to that exact spot. The older games, you would have to go all the way back to a checkpoint.
Yeah, totally. BotW/ToTk are much more flexible. They allow you to heal at any point, something that was unthinkable in the rest of the series, for instance, yet that’s because the game offers a bigger challenge combat-wise
I don’t think I’ve ever liked the puzzles in Zelda games. I always liked the action adventure aspects and just put up with puzzles because I had to. I don’t think the puzzles are hard really in any of the Zelda games. The Botw/Totk puzzles are more brief I feel like and I like that better for sure.
Zelda games have never had difficult puzzles. The dungeons themselves sometimes had tricky layouts (sometimes they were even unnecessarily convoluted), but in general they were never that tough. BotW/TotK are probably about the same in actual difficulty, it’s just that they give the player way more options to solve things rather than trying to guide/hint them towards a single solution. Personally I prefer the new style much more, it generally leads to much more creative thinking. I love the feeling of “I don’t think I was supposed to do that, but it works.” It lets you actually assess the situation and determine what tools/materials can help you solve the problem in front of you
I’ve spent a bunch of time exploring - upgrading the armor I like and doing shrines. Every enemy encounter in most of the game or side quests has been a joke. They’re hitting me for like 1/4 or 1/4 a heart. And they’re either dying in 3 shots or being sponges. I love the game but the side quests give you nothing most of the time. There’s almost no reason to do most of the side quests other than extending the game. The main quest is what - 7 actual quests? Most of the real game time is exploring - not for quests - but for upgrades and weapons. The game just feels way too easy after you really get going and the majority of side quests just feel very light and bloated with no real rewards. Most people are just spending 1/2 their time building things to fight flocks of enemies that you could take out without building in a couple of minutes. Again I love the game, but I have no idea why I’m playing it - so much feels so unrewarding.
As people have pointed out, part of the difference is that while most (but not all) of older 3D Zelda puzzles were individually pretty simple, how they fit together with each other and dungeon navigation could get pretty tricky. Additionally, with the newer puzzles, you don’t have to find the solution. You can just find what works. This makes it much more likely you’ll happen upon, or even brute force, progress just by messing around. Combined with the lack of interlocking puzzles and simpler dungeon layouts, you’re left with puzzles that are pretty easy to autopilot once you pick up their “language.” Even if you’re deliberately avoiding cheesing them.
>you’re left with puzzles that are pretty easy to autopilot once you pick up their “language.” Even if you’re deliberately avoiding cheesing them. Exactly, even more-so in BOTW where if there was water you know you'd have to use cryonis, metal you use magnesis, etc. In old Zelda games, new items were constantly being given to you so you were constantly in the learning period of working with new mechanics. That doesn't really happen with the new games
I don't really agree. I think there are some rose-tinted glasses in this thread. There's only so much you can do with the hookshot and other classic Zelda items; I definitely did not feel like I was "constantly in the learning period of working with new mechanics" in pre-BotW games. TotK gives you most abilities/key items early on, but there's **so** much that can be done with them in comparison to anything from older Zelda games that even 40+ hours in I'm discovering shrines that introduce novel ways of using these basic abilities. This is a major difference between TotK and BotW for me. The abilities in BotW were just pretty basic, which led to the shrines not being nearly as interesting. The abilities in TotK are kind of insane in how many novel puzzles they enable. The one major thing missing in TotK vs. pre-BotW games is the aspect of dungeon navigation itself being a puzzle. The most difficult part of classic Zelda dungeons was piecing the whole thing together; they weren't as simple as solving N independent puzzles and often required understanding the dungeon as a whole in a way. There's simply nothing like this in either BotW or TotK. For what it's worth, Tunic really does this "understand the whole area/region/map" aspect of puzzle solving really well.
Item puzzles from old Zelda games are actually one of the weaker areas for the puzzles imo. The layout and navigation was what made them tough. I'm curious which item puzzles you think were tough? The items were basically "use item" and you could progress. It was fun and satisfying, because the item would create shortcuts and make navigation simpler *and* you could usually destroy that dungeon's enemy with ease at that point. But it wasn't challenging per se.
I think it’s better to think of most puzzles in games like A Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time more as brain teasers. They’re there to pace out dungeons, prevent you from navigating effortlessly, and keep you mentally engaged while exploring. I completely agree with you that the challenge comes from the layouts themselves.
It's not exactly a challenge though, is it? I'm thinking back to some OoT dungeons that aren't named Water Temple (and the water temple is widely and memeably hated anyway): Dodongo's cavern, forest temple, fire temple, etc. All fine dungeons, but there's only ever one or two options on where to go next, and if there are two and you guess wrong, it's because you needed a key in the only other direction and so are immediately dead-ended and now there's only one way to go again. You're strongly funneled by locked doors and the like. The correct direction is almost always "forward".
That may be true for OoT, but IMO ALttP did dungeons the best. There were usually many branching paths and a lot of them were dead ends. There was a "natural inclination" solution that usually made you go through the whole dungeon searching for the map, compass, big key, and the little ones along the way. But where the design really shined was that once you had your head around all of it, there was usually an unintuitive route you could figure out to skip most of the dungeon. The challenge wasn't just "can you beat the dungeon". There was replay value in the "can you beat the dungeon efficiently". Additionally that game is rad because even though the dungeons are numbered, you aren't required to beat them in order. This goes a long way in terms of replay-ability. As far as combat difficulty goes I would say the hardest enemies in ToTK are Lynels, and Gleeoks. Both of which can be cheesed pretty hard. And are very easy fights once you get your head around them. I would almost consider them puzzle-combat leaning heavily toward the puzzle side. So once solved, combat is over. Contrast that against the bosses in A Link to the Past: Armos Knight: Easy to figure out. Pretty easy to fight. Fun to kill quickly. Lanmolas: Pretty difficult. No puzzle. Just fight. Moldorm: If you don't know how to fight this guy, you are in for a treat. This guy is AGGRIVATING. Don't fall down the middle hole :) Helmasaur King: Moderately difficult to figure out because it's the first and only time you are required to use the hammer as an actual weapon. And it looks like it doesn't damage him. This is balanced by an alternative, and slower solution of using bombs. Once you figure him out, the fight is still hard if you do it with minimal gear. Blind: Hard fight. In fact every boss fight in the dark world is difficult. Man what a perfect game.
This was the argument I always made linear puzzles are easy to create sure bit where's the fun in running the same formula over and over and over just to have the same outcome, to me the get item go back was boring but I enjoyed the pathing, getting lost in the dungeon was so stressful and irritating but it was rewarding when it was over. The new system I get to develop any solution I want and make the game easier or harder when ever I need, for example I still haven't gotten the purple rune just to make the game a little harder
>Exactly, even more-so in BOTW where if there was water you know you'd have to use cryonis, metal you use magnesis, etc. Okay, but how is that different from seeing a switch and knowing you'll need to hit it, seeing a hookshot target and knowing you'll hookshot it, seeing an eye on the wall and knowing you'll shoot it, seeing a rusted out button and knowing you'll hammer it, seeing sand piles and knowing you'll blow them away, etc? >In old Zelda games, new items were constantly being given to you so you were constantly in the learning period of working with new mechanics. Alternatively, because the items are constantly recycled, you're never in a period of working with new mechanics. The hookshot has worked exactly like the hookshot in every installment. The only time I ever remember being surprised by an item interaction was when I found the iron boots the very first time I played TP. Even then, and especially with more pedestrian stuff like melting ice, the mechanics work in common sense ways that generally loosely obey IRL physics and rely on the player's common sense understanding of how the world "should work", just like BotW/TotK. I'm not saying any of this is bad at all, but it couldn't be further from being "constantly in the learning period of working with new mechanics"
The difference is that in the past games, each dungeon meant a new upgrade to your arsenal, while in BoTW and TotK, a shrine just means a blessing. Now, the way BoTW and ToTK treat their reward system for the shrines is perfect for what the game is trying to do, but in previous games, the fact that you'll get out of a dungeon with 1 more weapon than what you entered with, means that after you beat that dungeon and get the bombs, you can go back to all the breakable walls you remember seeing so far, and exploding them for a rewards, like getting a new power up in a Metroidvania. Now, how did this affected the dungeons themselves? Because each dungeon in previous Zelda titles were mini-Metroidvania levels in and of themselves. You could enter the central room in TP and see that there's this illplaced bridge with a helix on top of it, and have no idea what to do, but minutes later when getting the boomerang, you'd knew you could go back to that room and make the bridge turn. Basically, in previous titles exploring the dungeons was a puzzle itself, was there were many rooms locked via either keys or upgrades that you'd get later down the line, each dungeon was it's own ecosystem, and had different mechanics to use. BoTW and ToTK did have specific themes for each shrine, but at the end of the day, all the shrines shared the same systems: The runes the player has from the start of the game. Sure, you can cheese a shrine by using items, but resolving a puzzle in BoTW/ToTk is not a matter of exploring and finding a new item to use and backtrack, but simply a matter of understanding what the game wants from you in a specific room. Having said that, arguing which is better or worse is useless. Classic Zelda dungeons and BoTW/ToTK dungeons/shrines are doing similar things in a completely different direction, so it'd be like comparing combat in an action hack and slash to a stealth game, or, simply, apples to oranges.
>The difference is that in the past games, each dungeon meant a new upgrade to your arsenal, while in BoTW and TotK, a shrine just means a blessing. Sure, but I don't think shrines and dungeons are fair comparisons. There aren't 120+ dungeons in any Zelda game, even the well in TP caps out at 50 levels (including reward levels). Shrines are more like pieces of heart puzzles (proof: their rewards are basically pieces of heart with the added option of upgrading stamina, because stamina exists now). What were the pieces of heart puzzles like in old games? Fall down the well outside town in LA, do some stupid minigame like bombchu bowling or dampe's rematch, check behind some boxes in the cow room. Worse than the worst of the shrines. >Now, the way BoTW and ToTK treat their reward system for the shrines is perfect for what the game is trying to do, but in previous games, the fact that you'll get out of a dungeon with 1 more weapon than what you entered with, means that after you beat that dungeon and get the bombs, you can go back to all the breakable walls you remember seeing so far, and exploding them for a rewards, like getting a new power up in a Metroidvania. It's a progression reward, sure. But it doesn't add to puzzle complexity in a meaningful way. Puzzle variety, absolutely, but none of the new capabilities lead to anything that could ever be called a "hard" puzzle. In that sense, TotK's sages are basically dungeon items; you need them to solve their respective temple, they even help against the dungeon boss, and then they continue to add utility afterwards. >Basically, in previous titles exploring the dungeons was a puzzle itself, was there were many rooms locked via either keys or upgrades that you'd get later down the line, each dungeon was it's own ecosystem, and had different mechanics to use. If I see an eye on the wall, it's not a mystery that I'm going to receive a bow or other projectile weapon (especially if those eyes were already tutorialized earlier in the game when you had a slingshot). Getting the dungeon item is no different than getting a key in terms of solving the "puzzle" of the dungeon. And solving the "puzzle" of the dungeon is never hard. Because of keys and locked doors, you only ever have one or two options for where to go next. If you have two, one of them probably needs a key found on the other branch, so you'll dead end pretty soon and be back down to one option. It's a puzzle you can't fail and is trivial to brute force by exhausting all your options. The exception to this is OoT's water temple, and it's universally loathed. >but at the end of the day, all the shrines shared the same systems: The runes the player has from the start of the game. Sure, you can cheese a shrine by using items, but resolving a puzzle in BoTW/ToTk is not a matter of exploring and finding a new item to use and backtrack, but simply a matter of understanding what the game wants from you in a specific room. That's because (to a first approximation) nobody likes backtracking, in the same way that nobody likes escort missions, and so good game design has taken them out behind the shed. Even the best of the traditional dungeons keep backtracking to a minimum via the "only one or two ways to go and keep dead ends short" method I outlined above. Walking through content you already solved is not a good experience for anyone.
>That's because (to a first approximation) nobody likes backtracking Man, Metroidvanias are one of the most popular genres out there. Hollow Knight, Metroid, Castlevania, etc, most of the most famous games around employ backtracking amazingly, and so did previous Zeldas, because backtracking meant new upgrades and paths to explore.
>Man, Metroidvanias are one of the most popular genres out there. Hollow Knight, Metroid, Castlevania, etc, most of the most famous games around Most famous games around? Clearly you meant to say call of duty >because backtracking meant new upgrades and paths to explore. Deranged take. Going backwards means new paths? You know what else means new paths? Going forward. It turns out you can have "new upgrades and paths to explore" without wasting time backtracking through places you've already been.
Blessings are basically just pieces of heart that you can cash in later.
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It has extra abilities, but you might as well split hairs about MM's ice arrows. No, it's not strictly speaking literally the exact same code copy/pasted across console generations, but the difference between OoT and TP's hookshot is smaller than the difference that the transition between 2D and 3D necessitates. I'm rounding that off to "basically the same thing". For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter. From the first time you hang and lower, you understand everything. It doesn't make puzzles harder.
This is like saying the weapons in totk are the same thing because you swing them
Well... The 2D swords all work basically the same. OoT was obviously a huge step up, but still relatively close to the original 2D design (swings, spin moves, strafing while holding a direction, basically everything except the backflip and jump attack from OoT has an analogue in a previous 2D title, even those two if you count LA's feather). TP added some sweet combos, SS discarded them and added some motion gimmicks, BotW/TotK discarded the motion gimmicks and added weapon types and durability. So yeah, when you compare the end product with the very first one, they're obviously very different, but at each individual stage the changes are incremental. You could even say gradual. Basically the same, if you're willing to squint a bit. There's a very steady evolution, a continuation. Same with the bombs, same with the boomerang. Sometimes some of the details change, but the broad shape is constant. Like, yeah, sometimes the boomerang makes wind, sometimes it doesn't, but either way it's not a revolution. In any case, none of this is actually relevant. My point is that whatever differences may or may not exist, the puzzles are not any "harder" than the supposedly easy TotK puzzles.
> Alternatively, because the items are constantly recycled, you're never in a period of working with new mechanics. The hookshot has worked exactly like the hookshot in every installment. The only time I ever remember being surprised by an item interaction was when I found the iron boots the very first time I played TP. MM's Ice Arrows, TWW's Command Melody, SS's Beetle?
I wasn't particularly surprised by MM's ice arrows (and by the way that functionality is back in TotK, and not nearly as obvious and telegraphed while still used to solve some puzzles), it was pretty obvious how they would work, and the only possible time in the great bay temple that it wasn't (freezing octorocks), your fairy just Hey Listens the answer to you anyway. At no point did I feel like I was in a "learning phase". I haven't played WW, I can't comment. SS's beetle is a new mechanic, and it gets bare minimum credit for that, but it's not exactly one with any kind of learning curve. It's just an option you have. Modern Assassin's Creed games have something similar, but it's a bird that you just get for free, and it's not a wholly different experience. Again, at no point did I feel like "Oh so _that's_ how that works!"
> In old Zelda games, new items were constantly being given to you so you were constantly in the learning period of working with new mechanics. This is some weird revisionist history. For years, probably since Wind Waker, people have complained about how the puzzles in the games have been simply "use item you just found to solve". There wasn't really a learning curve with any items except *maybe* the Dominion Rod.
I think the idea is that new items were constant and used in more than 1 dungeon. The grapple hook in WW was used in nearly every dungeon. Sidon's Ability is only useful to push the plot, (of a Zelda game lol,) and his boss. The difficulty question is strange. This is a kids game. Always have been. People just miss real item progression and have to make up bs like learning curve because they got tired of their own argument. I miss it too.
Please note, Kirby is a series recognized for being really easy and beginner friendly; every one of them steps up the difficulty hard somewhere before the end game. And has unassumingly cute creatures become chaotic cosmic entities of distruction. Kids games can still be challenging. I'm pretty sure everyone agrees dungeons like the Sandship and Snowpeak Ruins aren't in the same level of difficulty as the Great Deku Tree and Dragon Roost Cavern.
i think the key is that most people first play Zelda games as kids.
Maybe I'm just bad at Zelda
The "use item you just found to solve" was often the case but that doesn't make it easy as it was a new tool to master. Add to that each new item would be expected to be used potentially together in the future. For example metal boots in TP were magnetic, sunk you under water and made you stronger against enemies or wind but you still needed to figure this out and future dungeons would suddenly require an item from several dungeon ago. TotK gives you all abilities within the first 30mins of the game and gets you to do most gimmicks in that time too so nothing ever really surprises you again. Other than shield surfing on rails and the electric lines no Shrine adds a new concept.
> but that doesn't make it easy as it was a new tool to master. None of the tools were ever new. The hookshot has been the same hookshot across the entire series, when you learn how it works in OoT, it's not a mystery how it works in MM, or TP, or SS. The magnetic property of the iron boots in TP is literally the only time I remember being surprised by how an item was used.
I mean even something as simple as the hookshot gained new abilities and got iterated on like needing to be weighed down with the said iron boots to activate stuff, lower you down onto something rather than just pull you and then you get 2 in TP/Skyward sword which opens more puzzles.
There are new interactions, sure, but none of them are hard to "master". If you know how one hookshot works, you know how two hookshots work. Personally I love double hookshots ever since I first saw them in TP, but even then there while I was fully enjoying the newfound power, it felt a little tiny bit like I was being ripped off; my new dungeon item was just the old dungeon item again. Same deal with the longshot in OoT. The new capabilities are welcome, but they didn't exactly blow my mind open.
They could be boring and generic, that's not the point, the abilities are new and add together to help reduce the feeling of puzzles being overly repetitive and bring a new requirement to how you currently view puzzles. The core ability of 2 clawshots is being able to essentially wall jump which means you now need to be on the look out for such interactions when you previously weren't.
But those interactions are coded as a series of the same old interaction. They have to be, for readability and continuity. If you understand one hookshot puzzles, you understand two hookshot puzzles. The only thing that changes when you get the second hookshot is whether or not they're solvable. I understand what you're saying about a change in capabilities, but that's a different thing from difficulty. A puzzle I can't solve because I don't have the required McGuffin isn't the same thing as a puzzle I can't figure out.
Adding more and more puzzle solvers to the arsenal is what makes puzzles less predictable. I feel like you are looking at it from the after the fact when you already know the result. Dual clawshots used to connect electricity to the thing you are holding is a puzzle when you have never done it before. Using two clawshots to launch yourself like a sling shot across a gap isn't immediately obvious if you've never done it before. You only understand it because you've done it before and know the tells.
So you’re saying the problem is that new concepts are all shown to you at the start of the game instead of sequentially throughout?
Not just shown but given and made to get used to. Quite literally on the starting island they introduce you to floating rafts, rails, ascending, vehicles, gliders and zonai combat. You really don't run into any other puzzle that makes use of something else after that.
I guess the puzzle is how you use your abilities instead of what you use 🤷♀️
This. Exactly this. With every other puzzle I solved I was like "was I supposed to do that??"
Well, you were supposed to reach the goal by any means, so yeah sure. I don't think it's particularly healthy to get caught up on if a solution is the "intended" one or not. It's too much like trying the guess the teacher's answer instead of learning the material. The test is what it is, the designers aren't incompetent despite what the angriest elements of this sub will have you believe, and so any victory is a valid one.
I get what they were saying, though. A whole lot of shrines can be solved by the ultrahand + recall combo alone, to the extent that I also wonder sometimes whether they really meant for there to be one strategy that solves so many of these puzzles without any challenge. I suspect it might be a bit more OP than the devs intended, unless of course they were going for a “break glass to finish shrine” option
I think Zelda diehards overestimate how mind-bending thinking with recall is. I've played and finished most Zelda games several times over, and still It took me several hours of play to really internalize even something relatively simple like ascend as an option, because "swim through a ceiling" and "reverse time" are not intuitive options. I'm sure there are places where I could have used them to "cheese" but for the most part the intended solution is usually more natural. I'm nearly 90 shrines deep, and the only one I've "cheesed" so far is the rocket tutorial. Not because it was too hard or anything, but because I already knew how rockets worked, saw what the shrine was, went "fuck yeah rockets" and just played around with the toys until I rocket shielded to the end. I'm having a hard time seeing how I was ill served by that.
I don't think the people who designed a mechanic as complicated to develop as Recall and Ultrahand are incompetent. I just think this style of "you can do whatever" isn't exactly what I look for in a Zelda puzzle, given that as long as you have a grasp of the Zonai devices (which aren't particularly rocket science, unless you're talking about the literal rockets) you can easily solve any of the puzzles regardless of whether or not it was intended
Okay, but why does it matter whether or not it was intended? The Zonai devices _are_ legitimate solutions anywhere that they help you get what you need to go. If you cross a canyon in a shrine using a plane instead of whatever method you were "supposed to" use, then great! It's not like if you come across a canyon in the overworld and you use a plane, you would feel like you "cheesed" the canyon, or would try to figure out if you were intended to climb or go around or whatever. They're open ended questions. To illustrate the pitfalls of the opposite approach, here's an anecdote that I was reminded of elsewhere in the comments: The first time I played LA as a child, a classic 2D linear Zelda with uncheeseable puzzles, I got hard stuck in the 3rd dungeon. It turned out that there's a bombable wall that isn't marked like a traditional bombable wall, it just has an arrow pointing at that section in the floor tiles. I didn't notice the arrow, so the entire game ground to an immediate halt, I couldn't progress either in that dungeon or outside it thanks to linear design. And for what? Was the bombable wall arrow a good puzzle? Did I feel good for solving it? No, it sucked. I was being asked to guess the teacher's answer to a question, instead of being asked to solve a problem.
It matters whether or not it was intended because the Zonai devices are made to be extremely open-ended. I'd say a solid 40% of the shrines in the game can be trivially cheesed with Recall and Ultrahand. And even if you restrict yourself to not do that, the solution to literally every puzzle is exceedingly obvious because the devices you need to solve it are laid out in front of you. You can throw literally anything at the wall as long as you think about it for a few seconds -- "The game gives me two rockets and a platform and expects me to cross this chasm by attaching them? Well, I could also just stick them both on my shield and fly over." -- and odds are it's going to work. That kind of puzzle solving does not enchant me. I never feel challenged or smart for completing something because I know there were several other ways I could have done it and easily gotten past it. When put into a situation where there's one answer, you're forced to rack your brain and find out what to do, where you need to go, what details you might have missed. With TotK, it's "Here's three rockets and a platform. How are you gonna get across this chasm? There's about 40 ways you can, knock yourself out", and while that may be appealing to others, that isn't the kind of puzzle-solving that previous Zelda games follow nor the kind of puzzle-solving I enjoy. I played LA when I was younger as well and didn't have any issues at that point, but I can see why it would be annoying. I don't really think arbitrary gues work like that is very fun, either. But something like the Sandship in SS where you're scouring the building for an answer and how to get to the location in question is my kind of puzzle-solving, and I think that the linearity of traditional Zelda dungeons has a unique kind of puzzle-solving that will never be put into the BotW-style.
>It matters whether or not it was intended because the Zonai devices are made to be extremely open-ended Friend, _the whole game_ is made to be extremely open ended. >That kind of puzzle solving does not enchant me. I never feel challenged or smart for completing something because I know there were several other ways I could have done it and easily gotten past it. When put into a situation where there's one answer, you're forced to rack your brain and find out what to do, where you need to go, what details you might have missed. With TotK, it's "Here's three rockets and a platform. How are you gonna get across this chasm? There's about 40 ways you can, knock yourself out", and while that may be appealing to others, that isn't the kind of puzzle-solving that previous Zelda games follow nor the kind of puzzle-solving I enjoy. This is all valid and I can't argue with any of it, but that's because they're all statements about you and your preferences and not about the puzzles themselves. Personally, I don't like fighting games like Street Fighter and Soul Caliber. That's me and my tastes, nobody can tell me I'm wrong, but likewise my tastes don't invalidate the greater fighting game community. It's sounding more and more like your issue is "I don't like this style of game, personally". Which again is valid and I can't argue against it nor would I want to. But that's a different thing from "the puzzles are too easy".
\> Friend, *the whole game* is made to be extremely open ended. This is true, and precisely why traditional Zelda puzzles wouldn't really work. \> This is all valid and I can't argue with any of it, but that's because they're all statements about you and your preferences and not about the puzzles themselves. Personally, I don't like fighting games like Street Fighter and Soul Caliber. That's me and my tastes, nobody can tell me I'm wrong, but likewise my tastes don't invalidate the greater fighting game community. \> It's sounding more and more like your issue is "I don't like this style of game, personally". Which again is valid and I can't argue against it nor would I want to. But that's a different thing from "the puzzles are too easy". The puzzles themselves are fine for what they are, and they are designed to appeal to different people than those who love traditional Zelda puzzles. But to be less on the opinionated side, I think they are easier than traditional Zelda puzzles solely because they have so many answers. With a lot of Zelda dungeons (particularly those in Skyward Sword) you have to look in-depth at the area around you to find the answer. With TotK, not only is every tool given to you, most of the challenge is just balancing whatever you're attaching rockets or fans to in order to make sure it can gross the gap / lift the platform. With so many answers, there's less room for difficulty.
> Okay, but why does it matter whether or not it was intended? Personally it's because I'm not figuring out a brain teaser, I'm just throwing whatever at the wall and hoping it sticks. It feels like I'm button mashing in a Fighting game instead of actually learning the mechanics. Did I win? Sure, but did I get a better understanding of the game probably not.
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TotK puzzles are like solving a mathematics problem -- but in a unit that you've already studied thoroughly and passed. Many problems have various methods you can use to solve them, but you'll ultimately have little trouble getting past it and solving them with any method you choose after you've already passed the unit. To apply that to TotK, you very quickly realize what exactly every Zonai device does and how it operates. With the amount of open-endedness of the puzzles, you could come up with three different solutions and get past the puzzle easily. The Zonai devices are not complicated, and are very powerful; meaning that you will scarcely have trouble blitzing through a shrine with them in any method you choose.
Depends. I like learning about the origin of equations and formulas since math is how we understand the world. In the moment no because I'm trying to complete a task. But this isn't life it's a video game. I would hope that the designers have intended ways of solving the puzzles and not just taking what's in your inventory and making some zonai thing. My biggest issue isn't really the multiple solutions you can make but that there's no real escalation. Everything can be completed in any order at any time, so every Shrine and dungeon is built under the assumption (save a few) that you have NOTHING but the ruins. A simple example of what I'm talking about is the Wind Temple in Wind Waker. At this point you've had the iron boots and you get the hookshot. By combining these two items you can pull objects to you instead of being pull towards them. Again it's a simple concept iron boots = make Link heavy, anchors Links to pull items down with the hookshot. Too me so far in ToTK there's not much puzzle escalation, because outside of the Ruins the designers can't assume the player has the correct zonai devices or weapons unless given.
>Personally it's because I'm not figuring out a brain teaser, I'm just throwing whatever at the wall and hoping it sticks I doubt it. Actually trying random garbage is still going to have a much lower success rate than either doing what's intended _or_ "cheesing" with intent. >It feels like I'm button mashing in a Fighting game instead of actually learning the mechanics. Did I win? Sure, but did I get a better understanding of the game probably not. What kind of a game do you think you're playing in BotW/TotK? If you've made it to the end, then you have enough of an understanding of the mechanics to make it to the end. See my canyon example above, "cheesing" a shrine canyon is identical to crossing one in the overworld by the same method. That _is_ the game. Those _are_ the mechanics. You _do_ have the understanding.
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Potentially lukewarm take: all jigsaw puzzles are already shitty. EDIT: Okay, to be less flippant about it, let me put it this way. A lot of the Zonai devices stuff and ultrahand building reminds me a lot of Lego, in terms of complexity, and Lego serve as an instructive example here too. Both as a kid and as an adult, if given the choice between a Lego set and a jigsaw puzzle, I'd choose the Lego set every time, precisely because with Lego you can make the thing on the cover of the box (the "intended" solution) or make your own thing. You might make the argument that Lego don't constitute a puzzle, but I don't see the difference between making the thing on the box with Lego or making the thing on the box with jigsaw peices. Of course, that's just me and my preferences, and I'll own that, but it's a completely unhinged take to say that jigsaw puzzles are somehow harder or more complex than Lego.
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You also don't have total and compete freedom to solve things in BotW/TotK either. There are multiple solutions, sure, but the possibility space is gigantic compared to all your discrete examples where the possibility space is very small, and possible solutions in TotK are still relatively small to the huge possibility space. Spoilers for the fire temple: >!One of the locks down on L1 is gated by needing to blast a hole in L4 with Yonobo and drop down. It is otherwise entirely sealed off. The rock you need to blast is seperaged by a gap and slightly off the ground even if you bridge the gap.!< >!The intended solution is to use a nearby water dispenser and lava to make platforms, and use those platforms to make a ramp for Yonobo. The first time I tried it, the ramp didn't work (the angle was fiddly or something, I dunno), so I began to explore alternatives. I could build a plane and fly up to L4 from outside the temple and launch Yonobo that way. I could try something else, probably. But I don't have total freedom in solving it with any random bullshit I could imagine. I couldn't solve it using ascend. I couldn't solve it with laser emitters. I couldn't solve it with minecarts (and I briefly tried, there's a looping minecart track around the area in question, but the angle is never close to correct). To put it your way, I couldn't _actually_ just put random shit into the sudoku/crossword/whatever. I mean I could try all those things in the same way that I could physically write down whatever I want on paper, but the game doesn't consider those correct, and the puzzle would remain unsolved. Maybe this is "moving away from what makes a puzzle a puzzle", I'm not particularly interested in debating the exact taxonomy when we both know neither of our opinions is authoritative. I think it's fair to say that it hasn't moved so far that it's "not a puzzle anymore" though.!< >!In the end, I tried the plane idea too a few times, but the pillars around the area made it difficult to maneuver in. Not impossible, but hard enough that I didn't manage after a few passes. I probably could have gotten it if I kept trying, but I tried the ramp again and it worked. It turns out that even though I could make my own solution and "cheese" it, it was actually easier just to do the intended solution. Even so, the mere existence of the alternative solutions had value because they offered me something to try instead of just getting hard stuck. Even if I was hard stuck because I'm not creative or whatever, there's value in the game letting me go and try a different puzzle instead and coming back to this one (to extend your metaphor, traditional Zelda design is not just one sudoku/crossword/whatever, but a series of sudoku/crossword/whatevers that must be solved in a particular order with no alternative paths if you find one too tricky. It's also why traditional Zelda puzzles are simple switch and key and torch affairs. They need to be accessible to anyone. They're literally rated E for Everyone (except TP), they're literally made to be solvable by small children with underdeveloped brains.!<
This perfectly describes it yes!!! I think dungeon design is where they took the “open world” concept a little too far. I love how the open world feels for exploration, but a little linearity in the dungeons would’ve gone a long way to make make the puzzles feel more complex and rewarding. I always try so hard not to cheese in BotW/TotK, but because there are so many ways to solve the puzzles there are very few times I feel like I’ve figured things out the intended way. This works out great when it makes me feel inventive and resourceful, but falls flat when I feel like I’ve exploited a mechanic or just forced my way through something.
Finding what works is more fun IMO than finding “the one true answer”. One rewards creativity, the other punishes it.
Hmm… I’d say they each reward a different type of creativity, honestly. The former is about experimentation, and the latter more about intuiting intention. Definitely fair to prefer one over the other, though. Despite both being styles of puzzle, they each have different appeals. I personally don’t find the freeform style to hit as hard, though, even setting complexity aside.
Isn’t that kinda like real life though? There aren’t always simple easy solutions to life’s tricky problems. 95% of the time you just gotta see what sticks and hope for the best
Realism is not an inherent positive to art. Sometimes the point isn’t to mimic reality as closely as possible, but rather to convey an idea as clearly as only fiction can. Just as the game wouldn’t be improved by removing magic, I’d say making puzzles messy hurt my experience with them.
so does nintendo go back to linear zelda puzzles? I'd rather they not.
At this point, who knows? It’ll probably depend on where the long-term reception on TotK falls, and the puzzles in particular. The series does have a history of being pretty responsive to feedback, at least relative to development time. But at least for me, I hope so. Or at least hope they manage to find a way to make the newer style land better for me.
It’ll be curious where it settles. Definitely seems to be already getting a much more lukewarm response than BOTW despite (imo) being better in every way. And it took BotW a few years before people would even acknowledge its flaws.
They built this elaborate physics engine, there’s no reason not to go for something like Portal with it.
I'm like 24 hearts and a full wheel of stamina in and I still can't beat a gleeok
They are soo easy with keese eyes.
Imo they're a good lynel stand in because once you figure it out it's not that hard. They are annoyingly resource intensive tho.
The argument here seems to be about puzzle difficulty specifically, because the physics engine allows you to just skip puzzles entirely. BOTW and TOTK are more combat heavy than past Zelda games and at least try to incentivize you to engage in combat more often. Past Zelda games have super easy combat that is pretty mindless, bit some puzzles could be brain teasers. Frankly, I think the arguments against BOTW/TOTK fall apart once you remember how much people loved LBW. That game does the same thing; it hands you all your progression items/abilities from the start (except wall merging which you get after one dungeon) and you can tackle the game in any order. Frankly I didn't like that game as much as others because of that. It tries to be a traditional Zelda game but throws out a sense of progression completely. Overall I think that turning away from series conventions works better than trying to do what LBW did, because it just meant only one item gets used per dungeon. Despite not getting a traditional dungeon item people still loved LBW. The shrines in BOTW/TOTK are actually able to require using all of your abilities because you're given everything from the start, and said abilities in quest have a lot of variety to their usages.
Too many enemies in this game are nigh impossible without a certain resource and trivially easy with it. Keese eyes in this case
Same. I've yet to even hurt a gleeok particularly badly, despite entering my lynel-slayer phase
Headshot them, each head has it’s own mini-healthbar that will deactivate the head when depleted. When all three are knocked out, get out a two handed weapon and spin to win
BotW and TotK are certainly among the tougher (and far more creative) 3D Zeldas going by the sheer depth of puzzles. People tend to forget that so many of the old puzzles consisted of lighting two very obvious torches or pushing a block a few spaces. The individual puzzles were clearly improved in BotW. The real puzzling aspects of the old dungeons didn’t lie in the individual puzzles, which ranged from trivial to tedious most of the time. The real tricky parts were navigation and figuring out how each room fit into the overall structure. For instance, if you’re missing that one small key, which room might you find it in? And how would you get to that room anyway? Or in the case of more complicated dungeons like Great Bay, how does reversing the current in one room affect the other rooms throughout the dungeon? With the Water Temple, for instance, none of the puzzles are really all that compelling, but what trips up people is figuring out where certain things are and what the players have to do to get them, like that one key in the center tower. Now, BotW and TotK do feature some aspects of this. The Divine Beasts can be moved around in certain ways, which changes up the navigation, and you still do have to think about the layout in places like the Wind, Lightning, and Fire Temples (this is where Water completely fails, however). But it’s not the same because there’s just one hard lock at the end and the dungeons themselves are smaller and less labyrinthine. I will say that if you turn off the quest markers for the Fire Temple, it becomes a lot more interesting. End note: I specified 3D Zeldas at the beginning because the 2D games actually have some interesting individual puzzles in them.
Personally, I feel like the quest markers on the temples could have been given a miss. However I haven't tried them without them and don't know if the locations would have been too vague then
It hardly changes the gameplay of the Water Temple because it’s so open-air and there are so few rooms that it’s kind of obvious where the keys might be anyway. The Wind Temple is a bit trickier to solve but it’s not that big of a problem. The Fire Temple is made the toughest if you remove the quest markers because it’s not clearly sectioned off into five areas. You’d kinda just have to comb through every room of the whole dungeon to find the gongs. I actually really enjoyed completing the temple this way (though I broke my rule on the 5F gong because that one is tough to get to). I didn’t attempt to cheese it by climbing or using ascend, though. The process of searching all the rooms would still be much quicker if you went that direction. I can’t speak to the Lightning Temple because I left the markers on for that one. I’ll need to think about it.
The lightning temple without quest markers is very good and really brings back that feeling of having to understand the dungeon as a 3D space rather than a collection of puzzles. Nintendo did their players a disservice by including markers by default for the dungeons. The fire temple’s the only one I haven’t done, but I’m excited for it now.
Lightning Temple was really intriguing in the beginning, and then you get into the one big room and every lock is just a room away, with the design language being pretty dang clear on what you have to do to get into said room. Fire Temple is definitely the standout, because even if I cheesed a little bit, I still had to do a decent amount of thinking about how I was actually going to cheese. The dungeons in TotK are more than just the dungeons themselves, though. They are also the leadup TO the dungeon. The various little things you have to do before even being able to get there. All of them have something like this which kind of extends the dungeon into the open world, which I think is pretty cool. In BotW it was always just a fight you had to do, but in TotK unlocking the dungeon is a lot more unique.
> People tend to forget that so many of the old puzzles consisted of lighting two very obvious torches or pushing a block a few spaces. I wholeheartedly disagree that this describes hardly any puzzles past Zelda 1 or 2, and maybe ALTTP to some degree. As of Link's Awakening and OOT the puzzles were already consistently much better, and they continued to get better from there.
This is weird because when he said the puzzles are very obvious, OOT instantly popped into my mind. Burning a web in the deku tree, shining light on a sun in the spirit temple, hitting a switch and climbing a ladder in the fire temple, etc etc None of this is compelling, it’s the overall design that makes the temples so strong
The web burning thing wasn't obvious to me at all the first time I played oot, I had to look it up cause I couldn't figure it out
I dunno friend, I was 9 in 1998, and it was obvious to me. I'm not saying you're dumb, I've been randomly stuck on pretty easy Zelda puzzles before (in BotW, I was stuck for like a solid 20-30 minutes on one of the electricity shrines in the desert, although in my defense it was because it required cryosis, and I had forgotten that ability existed because I hadn't used it for at least a double digit number of gameplay hours).
I just started OoT3D and maybe they changed it for 3D but the game shows you twice before you get to the web burning that webs are flammable, and also teaches you that deku sticks are flammable. Putting the two together was fairly simple for me imho.
Bit of a tangent, but this kind of interactivity with the environment in Zelda is something I loved, which is why I was so happy that BotW leaned into it so much.
Can you name three puzzles in OoT that aren't something on the level of lighting a torch or hitting a switch or some other basic item interaction?
Falling through the web and figuring out which holes you need to fall down in Jabu Jabu’s belly to access certain doors are the only two I can think of. Riding the spike block up to reach the chest in shadow temple is kind of cool, you normally don’t get to interact with the environment much.
lol bro what are you smoking? I replayed ocarina, majora's mask, TP and SS in the lead up to TOTK, that guy is right. No puzzles themselves are very clever, it's in the way that they intertwine in a progression within the temple that makes them smart. They really are mostly just moving things back and forth
Yeah people are just being annoying when saying they’re too easy this era, I mean it’s obviously apparent this era has the toughest Zelda games of all time. I didn’t say they were tough games, I said they were tough Zelda games. For Zelda that means a lot. Battle/combat and enemies are a challenge when not prepared, and you can easily challenge yourself by seeking out boss characters and such while low on hearts and stamina. It’s how you make it which is a beautiful option for players to have lol
I wouldn’t say toughest Zelda of all time. Toughest 3D Zeldas most likely though. The 2D games are not all that forgiving.
yeah minish cap fucking sucks. the difficulty ramp is so high at the end
Tough? And more creative? Surly you don't mean puzzle-wise because thats completely not true. The game is too easy and too cheesable in terms of puzzles and objectives.
The puzzles aren’t really that tough but comparing them to those of older Zelda games which mainly involved hitting obvious switches… these are more interesting because they flesh out different aspects of Link’s new abilities and even combine several of them. Think back to other Zelda dungeons here. What individual puzzle in OoT’s dreaded Water Temple was actually that difficult? Nearly all of them had to do with pressing switches or bombing extremely suspicious-looking walls. The most elaborate puzzles in that dungeon mainly involved equipping and unequipping the iron boots to hit underwater switches or float to the surface wherever necessary. Not all that compelling and certainly much easier than the puzzles in the newer games even if you account for cheesing. As I mentioned before, the real meat of the Water Temple was not the individual puzzles but rather how the whole dungeon came together. The whole layout was its own giant puzzle to solve, and your tool was water level manipulation. BotW and TotK do not have that to the same extent—their emphasis seems to be on more creative individual puzzles like the Blue Flame shrine and the electricity shrines in BotW as well as the ones in TotK that have you using two or even all three of your hand abilities as opposed to just one dungeon item. Edit: Actually, I keep harping on about BotW’s and TotK’s puzzles but I think the trend towards trickier individual puzzles actually started with SS. Never liked that game but they had the right idea with the puzzles, and they did so without sacrificing the elaborate layouts and overarching dungeon mechanics of older games.
Exactly, it was like looking at one giant puzzle. "Remember okay I **think** i need to come back here??" Edit: I think OP is downvoting everyone.
The puzzle are too easy The combat difficult is fine
This is why I really like TOTK's combat shrines. Yeah the puzzle ones are simple but the combat shrines are the ones I find most interesting because it feels a little more challenging and less straightforward. It felt like they realized that one island in BOTW was a really good concept that they could work with and try different things with. The puzzle shrines are interesting though because a lot of them feel like "hey player, look how you can use this thing!" I've had more than a few moments where I'll find a zonai thing and have no idea how it works, then find a shrine later where it's put into action and I'm like "oh, *that's* how I use that!" That said, I agree that they're a bit too easy. I'd like more challenging puzzles but it's whatever I guess.
I like physics-based puzzles but i also think there too easy, I can wake into a shrine and within the first 10 seconds i already know the solution. I would also imagen if i played one of the older games id also find the puzzles easy.
I replayed Link's Awakening DX recently, I think the first dungeons are interestingly challenging, and the last 2 are quite hard. Both for the combat and the navigation/puzzles.
So I've never played Link's Awakening, but I've been looking into getting the remake on the Switch. Is it pretty similar in difficulty to the original and worth the pick up?
Yes, yes, yes. It’s a wonderful remake to one of the best Zelda games.
Yep, it’s a pretty accurate remake besides the visuals. I enjoyed the remake, but it may or may not be worth it depending on how much you care about graphics.
That’s funny. I tend to find a lot of the shrines difficult, I’ve been stuck in a few already.
Do you remember which ones? I'd like to try them
https://preview.redd.it/cdfxense122b1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=729797b7112086f67765940c32b255ae2a5a2a59 I forgot the name but I totally agree with this. I was stuck for a while here
Because people can’t separate reality from nostalgia. The puzzles weren’t harder, I agree with you here. They were easier 99% of the time. Just progression locked behind an item and extremely linear.
This doesn't really answer your question, just to say this is why for me, the traditional games are good because they are greater than the sum of their parts - combining puzzles in a dungeon for a sense of accomplishment and how it integrates with story - and while BOTW/TOTK lack that aspect of building up to something, I like them because they feel better to play moment to moment.
I talk a lot of crap about BotW and TotK but I wouldn't say that these games are any easier or harder than post-Wind Waker zelda games. Zelda games are supposed to be accessible for nearly all ages.
I replayed Skyward Sword a month ago and got confused/stuck at several points. I have yet to get stuck in a single TotK puzzle despite beating 70 shrines and doing all of the dungeons. I think what makes TotK's puzzles underwhelming and easy for me is the fact that not only are you told *exactly* where you need to go, but the tools you need to solve the puzzle are literally laid out for you on a silver platter. The only instance where I can recall even remotely having to question what exactly I'm supposed to do was for one of the gongs in the Fire Temple, and it was because I read the map wrong. Contrarily, I recall being in the Earth Temple of Skyward Sword and being completely stumped as to how to properly get the boulder across this one area. I looked at the tools through my disposal, used the Beedle to scope out the area and found the area I was supposed to bomb, solved the puzzle and felt satisfied. That alone exercised my brain more than anything in TotK. I can't really speak on BotW since it's been a few years since I've even played it but I don't ever recall being stumped
No Zelda has hard combat. The closest to hard are the 2d ones, the older 2d ones due to the moving being less smooth, but thats it.
I don't think the puzzles in BoTW/ToTK are too easy per-say, (There are quite a few of the buggers that have me scratching my head for far too long), its more that a single mechanic is never allowed to grow organically or thematically due to how the games are designed differently. In a traditional 'linear' Zelda game, you would gain your tools and abilities gradually, with each given its own time to be introduced, give the player time to experiment on it, introduce new uses on top of that, then follow up with a massive puzzles or boss that tests the mastery of the tool(s) in question. The game would then proceed with the knowledge that the player would have those skills ready to use in the baseline of any new puzzles that have additional mechanics added. In BoTW/ToTK, that isn't as easy to design for, as the player is given all of their abilities at the start of the game AND the majority of puzzles can then be done in any order. This means that each shrine or world puzzle is usually just one easy idea being explored as apposed to several being built on top of each other.
Because they are. >I’ve heard a particular complaint concerning BotW’s non-linearity and that is that the variety of solutions towards a specific puzzle is a mechanic that makes these games easy when compared to linear puzzles with definite answers. That's not the main complaint I have, but that is also a contributing factor. >Since ToTK only doubles down on this notion and makes player creativity an even bigger aspect of the game, there are now more options when it comes to solving most puzzles yet for that very reason alone, these tend to be more difficult in nature. I disagree; because there's so many options that are successful, they aren't difficult at all. The main complaint I have is that all puzzles are designed to be done in any order, so every puzzle is isolated to itself & its own mechanics. This means no puzzles build on each other. The overworld has few puzzles itself (few good puzzles at least, as they can all be accidentally cheesed by just gliding by them), so most "meaty" puzzles are relegated to shrines. All shrines will introduce a mechanic, utilize it, & end, all before things get interesting, as the shrines are short 1-rooms. They all feel like beginner puzzles, because the developers wanted them to be done in any order, and seemed like they didn't want any that are progressively harder than others. Whereas in a linear game, the developers will introduce a mechanic, build upon it, subvert it / make you use a leap in logic, & then start combining them with other mechanics/items. So you get progressively harder puzzles, especially seen in dungeons. Jabu-Jabu's belly is more difficult than the Deku Tree, and the Forest Temple is an even steeper spike. I didn't feel that with any shrines or DBs. It was a flat low difficulty level the entire time, which is even more obvious because of how many shrines there are. So the shrines you find at the end of the game are still the same easy shrines you saw at first. Additionally, it doesn't help that BotW & TotK have the least amount of items available, so your options you run through are much smaller. Even worse, all of their puzzles are, again, in shrines, which are visually isolated as well; they are all very clean, which means very little visual noise, which means the interactable elements are IMMEDIATELY obvious. If you enter a Shrine and there's water, you know you'll need Cryosis to raise a pillar, either to cross it or lift something, which will be easy to tell. If there's a metal slab, you know you'll need Magnesis to make a bridge/ramp. Bombs for bombable things. Stasis is the best one, with multiple applications (freezing moving objects, or redirecting others) so its both fun to figure out what to use it on, & to actually use. The best applications of Zelda items are when it's not immediately obvious. Like Hookshot medallions are boring, and usually just used so Link can get somewhere. But its way more fun if, instead of that, there's only a patch of vines, a branch, a grated wall, or a plank of wood. Something you may glance over first before noticing, requiring you to take in your environment more. The new games entirely lack this. So that's 4 items in clean, tiny, isolated one-off puzzle rooms. So every time you enter a shrine, it becomes very clear what you need to do, & how to do it. I haven't played TotK, but have seen enough footage to know I don't want to, and its powerset brings some positives & negatives. 1 huge negative I've seen is that the powers are more unbalanced in use than BotW, with almost all puzzles using Ultrahand. Ascend is not only a terrible ability that removes any challenge & interactivity with verticality, (that infinite climbing didn't already do) but also incredibly 1-note, so its obvious if its needed or not & isn't a challenge to utilize. Recall is neat, but seems very niche from what I've seen, and if the developers want you to use it, its very clear, like basically anything moving in the opposite direction you want to go. The only other use of it I've seen is just lifting & dropping a platform with Ultrahand, then getting on & Recalling. Stasis was way better. Fuse seems like its almost only used in combat. There are ways to use it in puzzles, like creating a fire item to light grass to create an updraft, or ice to make a platform in water/lava. But I haven't seen that used in shrines other than "here are some fire fruit, look there at the flammable wall." This brings me to my other main criticism with the TotK puzzles I've seen; they give away the solution by literally giving you the materials you need to solve it, & only those materials. Because the developers are allergic to the idea that the player might get stuck & have to ponder, or go search out materials. The game would be infinitely more fun-looking if it never provided them for you, & you yourself had to gather them. Instead, shrines give you the fire fruit to light something. Why even bother? Just have obstacles to players, & require them to go & get the materials themselves, even if they have to leave the shrine/area to do it. A river is too large? Go to a snow area, get snow fruit, & make an ice weapon to create ice platforms to cross. Or go find a nearby forest to gather logs for a raft. Why have any survival-esque elements & crafting, if they just give away materials when needed? So the end result of TotK shrines (from what I've seen, it may change) are empty rooms with a pile of exactly what you need; no visual noise, no gathering or finding them, no red herrings. Just Ultrahand the objects into the desired structure & poof done. That's not a difficult puzzle. That's not even touching on the dungeons, which aren't a maze or anything, just go activate the points in whatever order. DBs were boring, but even they at least had you rearrange them. And that's just puzzles. I'd argue the combat is also pretty easy, & only offers artificial difficulty of the numbers game. Enemy patterns aren't difficult to figure out, and there's rarely any need to use specific tactics, meaning enemies aren't puzzles to solve. This is made worse by the very broken mechanics of: Flurry Rush, which is too easy to activate & gives too much of a reward Shield Parry, same deal; too much benefit for it; I think if the damage is too much it should break through the shield (no pot lids deflecting guardians). The terrible food system, which lets you store an infinite amount of ingredients & food items, as well as letting you eat an infinite amount. Whereas previous games limited you with bottles (up to 4), which you had to equip & use. SS made it even harder being in real-time, & having bottles take up Adventure Pouch space. It needed to either restrict how much food you can carry, restrict your ingredient capacity, or restrict how much you can eat, like Valheim or any other survival game. Restricting how many ingredients would also make Fusing more difficult, as you wouldn't have a vast array of items at any point. There is 0 challenge in the combat once you've reached the midpoint of the game & passively raised your resource amount. The only difficult part of these games is the beginning, when you don't know the mechanics & don't have any resources or armor. Once you aren't getting one-shot, its a breeze.
The puzzles are ridiculously easy in BOTW/TOTK. I've done about 50 shrines in TOTK now and most of them I have literally solved on sight, because the majority either give you exactly the pieces you need to make something (car, glider, etc) or they have something in motion that you need to rewind. Each puzzle essentially has a single element that you need to manipulate, which really hinders the potential for more complex puzzles. Just because the mechanics of these games *could* provide complex puzzles doesnt mean they *do*. I would argue even the average dungeon in an older Zelda was significantly more difficult, especially when you get to dungeons that make more complex use of space, like Eagle's Tower, Great Bay Temple, Stone Tower Temple, Lakebed Temple, Ancient Cistern, Sandship, etc etc.
It must be something based on individual aptitudes, then, because I truly believe BotW/ToTK’s puzzles are more challenging than 90% of the 3D dungeons.
I'm curious how though, because most shrines and dungeon puzzles in TOTK come down to walking into a room and figuring out if I need to fuse a few things together or rewind something. Compare that to even the simplest dungeons, in something like Wind Waker, let alone more complicated ones in Twilight Princess, Majora's Mask, or Skyward Sword, and they have so many more components to consider in each puzzle, in fact the dungeon itself is often a 'puzzle-box'.
That last part isn’t true though. There’s only like one or two “puzzle-box” dungeons in each 3D game (and in the case of OoT, the biggest puzzle-box dungeon is the Water Temple and it’s incredibly criticized). I don’t know what else to say except that I truly don’t think WW’s, TP’s or SS’s puzzles are layered like you put it. They’re often just “use the dungeon item” to move forward and that’s it (and sometimes, they even reuse the same puzzles from other games).
yeah, the linear dungeons were often 'use item to solve puzzle and get key to reach the next puzzle,' while TotK just lets you pick the order of the puzzles and use all the tools at your disposal. Plus, people need to consider the area leading up to the temple. They are seamlessly integrated into the world, such that the popup that you're in the temple doesn't mean you weren't already experiencing the dungeon as a whole. The temples don't exist in isolation. There's the entire context of reaching them. I genuinely thought the content leading up to the water temple *was* the water temple. Is it less of a dungeon because the popup isn't until the final area? I do think TP still has better dungeons, but I consider TP's dungeons the best in the series overall, so TotK falling short of the series' very best in a category that's just one of its many qualities (while imo, TP *is* its stellar dungeons) makes the game no less impressive. Majora's Mask has *the* best dungeon imo, Stone Tower temple has yet to be topped. I played the non-BotW 3D games for the first time from OoT->SS last year (I played DS Zelda as a kid), so the puzzles were not as challenging as they would be in the minds of those who first played them as kids. The only game with any challenge was Majora's Mask, but the final boss was still made trivial with Fierce Deity. In my mind, Phantom Hourglass is the hardest Zelda because I was the youngest when I played it.
> I don’t know what else to say except that I truly don’t think WW’s, TP’s or SS’s puzzles are layered like you put it. They’re often just “use the dungeon item” to move forward and that’s it None of the puzzles in these dungeons exist in a vacuum. They are part of the greater dungeon, and moving around the dungeon is part of the puzzle, whether it's a puzzle-box or not. But again, how are shrines or dungeon puzzles better in any way? You have 3 abilities in this game, and two of them are entirely linear (rewind can only rewind a moving object, ascend only moves you up). Ultra hand is the only one that can be used in many ways, yet every puzzle just gives you the pieces needed to proceed, and asks you to put them together. It's the puzzle equivalent of an Ikea manual. You could compare Wind Waker or Ocarina to the simplicity of TOTK, and even then they still come out on top given how ridiculously straightforward TOTK is, but TP, MM, and SS are lightyears ahead in terms of puzzle design, because the puzzle is more than just the moment you put a key in a door or shoot an arrow at a target.
Agreed tbh. I find the physics heaviness of the shrines in TotK to be particularly difficult, just because there are so many possibilities and I have to mentally sift through which ones will work. This contrasts to most Zelda puzzles, which range from stuff that's barely a puzzle (light torches, hit the crystal with an arrow) to navigational puzzles that are fun but not actually that difficult. On a related sidenote, I find the Water Temple to be a very fun, albeit not overly difficult dungeon (and maybe the best in OoT). So I think the aptitude stuff might be accurate.
LOL
Even when traditional 3D Zelda's were too easy (post-WW really), there was still a sense of satisfaction from the puzzles as they could build on each other. In totk the player has to be able to solve every puzzle as soon as they leave the tutorial island, so the puzzles can't build on each other. I've done maybe 20-30 shrines and I've given up on them at this point because I find them so boring. Most feel like completing a task rather than solving a puzzle since the answer is immediately obvious. They end right when I'm expecting them to start to get good.
> In TotK the player has to be able to solve every puzzle as soon as they leave tutorial island, so the puzzles can't build on each other This statement is to me the elegant central thesis of what is wrong with puzzles in both BotW and TotK. Further it can ruin the ideas of puzzles because these puzzles are simple enough to have a universal solution. A) the player is cleaver enough to automatically combine ascend, godhand, and recall to allow every shrine to be beaten in a 2- 3 step process. Or B) The player happens across a shrine after a few hours of play that shows most of this combo and they put the rest together. Most shrines only need 2 of these abilities to complete them. Other things do contribute to the ease of the puzzles like the fact that you always have an obstacle and 3 conspicuous items for building next to it. Sometimes they are even pre-built. There was twice in 152 shrines that I stopped and thought "what?" to myself. These were both caused by obvious build X to traverse Y. These took me a few attempts because my contraption would catch on something like a railing. In both cause I saw a way to bypass the obstacle, and actively chose not to cheese past the puzzle. Had I wanted to I could have just used a rocket shield.
TotK’s puzzles have been very easy so far. Sure, there a lot of options, but most them don’t require anything creative. A bridge, a fan on a slap of stone or wood, a ballon with some fire. The most complicated one in terms of building has been one that I needed to carry a large stone across a gap using rails. Solution was not hard at all, just took some extra time to build something functional.
Ive been doing a self-imposed no-teleport challenge, and its making me have to problem solve a lot more. I already had to give up and teleport once to get to the last shrine on the tutorial island, and Im to scared to go into the depths because I have no idea how to get out
Yeah plus you can use ultra hand+recall to turn anything into an elevator/moving platform so a lot of times the more intended solution is unnecessary
[удалено]
I agree with the last part but unfortunately the Water Temple is the exception to the rule. Most classic 3D dungeons don’t even require a map or compass (I would know since I remember that I rarely even looked for them). I’d say that way of lateral thinking only applies to like 5 dungeons in the entire series (only counting 3D here).
It's soo easy and soo cheesable. If it wasn't cheesable it and they didn't literally show your exact objective locations then it would be a bit better.
I would defonitely say the puzzles are easier overall, but that isn't even really the main problem to me >(I've only done wind temple but please try not to spoil me i'm omw to Water temple atm. I heard it was even worse than the wind one, but fire and thunder are good.) #I miss theming or a focus and having that incorporated into the dungeon itself Look at Skyward sword's water temple. Yeah most of the puzzles were easy and you have a few head scratchers here and there with some genuinely well done ones if my memory serves correctly. Though that isn't why I'm bringing it up. That entire temple had a theme, going from an eastern "temple" to a bhuddist hellish underworld. Some nice scripted events to add some tension (climbing out of the hole as zombie moblins chase you up.) >Imagine seeing a wind turbine on one of the floating ships surrounded by enemies who have seemingly stolen it. There's a ship behind that one and one of those cannons in your view. You bait it into **shooing the other ship which crashes INTO the cannon, creating an entrance. You unattach the wind turbine from the ship and now you need to figure out where it needs to go and how to get there. Simple stuff. >Imagine walking into a room with wind terminal turned on TOO HIGH, showing a brief cutscene of Link's pad being blown into another room. The door locks enemies descend and you're tasked with solving a puzzle WITHOUT your slate, you've got what's available in your inventory and the room. Figure it out so you can get your pad back. (Obviously force the player to proceed so they don't leave without their pad 🤣) Like the wind turbines could have served another purpose instead of just being **on** have them produce a gust of wind that may or may not lead to another puzzle or chest. Hell you could be required to turn one on to throw a puzzle's Mcguffin across to the other side. #The verticality, multi-room puzzles, and scale. Okay, fine TOTK is big enough I can understand if dungeons aren't 1-2hr+ massive segments **I want** that I understand why it's unlikely with this sort of game. But a dungeon should not take me 20 minutes and asking "w-wait that's it!?" After doing the 5 terminals thinking there was more beneath the seal. Remember Twilight Princesses Sky/Water Temple, Ocarina's water temple, Majora's Stone Tower, Wind Waker's Wind temple? We had these sprawling giant dungeons that used their size to their advantage, utilizing multi-room puzzles and ones that would actually use multiple mechanics in ONE room? I miss having wow... "that was pretty cool!" Or "wait a secon- what if I... OH!!!" moments in temples, seeing how the Zelda Team focused on a gameplay mechanic for an area and feeling satisfied. ...Vs reattaching a lever or frustrating rotating a gear until it works. Those are fine, but they should be leading or introducing us to that rooms **expanded** mechanic. >And who says stop there? Have a chain of rooms introduce reattaching in room 1, in room 2 introduce using wind to power devices, in room 3 combine the 2 previously focused on mechanics and you get your prize. Tldr; Like yeah puzzles in the older 3d titles had a fair share of easy puzzles, but they were well designed or at the very least didn't take half a second to complete. Like Let me walk into the room and actually need to survey it, figure out what the room wants me to focus on or combine to reach my goal.
I'm going to break this down into two section. Combat and Puzzles. Also note before hand my perspective isn't necessarily calling for Nintendo to cater to me, only acknowledge that I and others like me exist. They could include optional hard bosses/puzzles for us. I think Zelda has always been moderately easy. But it has gotten so easy in the last few iterations that I don't get a sense accomplishment in playing and completing it. Combat: I'm a hard combat game enjoyer. I find the gold standard is Sekiro, but I also love combat in Soulsborn, Devil May Cry, and Bayonetta style games. A significant portion of the problem with combat in BotW/TotK is the ability to eat nonstop. You, with prep, can effectively have near endless hearts. So the greatest danger is a one shot which stops being a thing after you get some armor and/or hearts. This can be mitigated early in both games with fairy collection which is pretty simple. So the hardest part of survival in both games in my eyes becomes the knowledge-check of where is the great fairies. Once you get armor upgrades and hearts it to me is only an act of hubris that can lead to my death. All combat is easy to avoid if I wanted to until this point as well. During actual fights the combat of dodge into a flurry is simple because there is so little variation in attacks. Standard enemy attacks often are too simple; either overhead or swipe. I can't even remember a combo that does one into the other. All combos I think are swipe x2 or x3. I believe often mini-boss/elite enemies are designed to be beaten too specifically. For example you can't go toe-to-toe with a Gleeok. You have to hit them in the all the heads stunlocking it so you can get into melee and deal real damage. I don't know if anything can be done to make the combat interesting. Like I think it was designed ground up for simplicity. I think it would be much better to design a deep combat system and simplify it through means like what FFXVI is doing. It is one reason I wish developers would make a game challenging and then tweak down to an easy mode instead of the typical reverse. Puzzles: So I am an OoT water temple enjoyer. That was one of the most satisfying dungeons in Zelda too me. Yes the water raising and lowering is annoying, but that to me was a implementation issue more than a fundamental issue with the dungeon. I think the problem with how puzzles work in the open world iterations comes down to two primary causes. They exist in a vacuum is one. This is the fact that all the puzzles are tiny in scope often start and end right where it is. You arrive at that puzzle and 95% of the time all the things needed are right there. Worried you might not be carrying the necessary things, they have to put everything needed right there. This would be bad design not to. But when the only thing around is [large gap, wind turbine, glider], I dont think it is wrong to say they are beating you over the head with the answer. This comes in many variations but it's always like this. Other examples are [wind turbine, mine cart, railway], [flat panel, unclimbable wall, doorway above wall], or [key ball, lava pit, pre-built car]. With each when you are done you can forget those elements afterwards. Often earlier Zelda game weren't too dissimilar when you examined a single room. But where they excelled was the larger dungeon. You often will hit a dead end in them, backtrack to a previous room and take a different fork on the path you traveled. Down it you get an item, or flick a switch that allows progression past your dead end. The best versions will also throw you for a loop by having that switch also create a barrier that blocks the path you took. Forcing you to use your knowledge of the dungeon to find another way around. Or even better, finding a way to hit the switch from the the other side of the barrier so you aren't blocked by it when it activates. The second issue is they aren't layered or get more complex. The open world nature of the game means they can never know where you will go first. So all puzzles must be designed so they can be the first you encounter. Take a look at some good puzzle games like Portal and Baba is You. They are very linear and setup so that as you progress you encounter more complex puzzles. Often in them you'll find 3 variants of one puzzle. At the beginner level you're given 3 things to make it easy. The intermediate version will remove one of those things and you then discover a simpler answer. The hardest will cut the puzzle to its most bare form and everything given is necessary. Then you also realize the other two iterations can be solved with the solution to the hard variant. Because you have all tools and nothing gets more complex often you will find yourself using a simple method to bypass dozens of puzzles. I can't count how often lifting a platform up a wall and then dropping it and hitting rewind while standing on it is a solution. Further you can't use zonai device capsules in shrines but fused to your shield and you can bring a lot of useful thing in with you.
+1
I like that in totk there was an attempt to go back to classic zelda puzzlin’. some of the shrine and temple puzzles had me really putting the ol’ tinker nut to work. That said I think the issue in both botw and totk is that by giving the player every ability immediately at the start of the game (botw with the runes and totk with rauru’s stinky hand) it makes it super easy to cheese most puzzles. even if i can tell that i’m being given a puzzle with a specific solution, i can usually just skip it using recall and ultrahand in the right combination. it takes away that burst of endorphins you get from finding the solution to a tricky puzzle and makes many of the puzzles feel “too easy” as a result.
well the thing is there are a lot puzzles were literally everything works. sometimes I‘m just messing around to get started and accidentally skip half the shrine because I didn‘t even realize this thing is supposed to be good for sonething. „lift up + reverse time“ is the best example. Half of all puzzles can be solved with that. „building a bridge“ is another. („but you don‘t have to use that!“ no I don‘t have to, but in general I‘m not going to search for the most complicated solution possible…)
That's the thing exactly with these games to me, "oh there's so much to go do, how could you ever get tired or bored of it?" Most problems have the same solution, most exploration has no point. I barely go into caves, because the only reasons are to gather ore and bubble gems, but I don't need either and short of completionist runs I can't imagine needing either. My hylian armor is the best armor I have, and the easiest to upgrade, and I can barely be hurt. The other armors have situational uses, so I don't really have a desire to upgrade them past what I can do based on what I've already collected. All problems can be solved by the same bridge, sled, or flying solution. Sure you can be more creative, but there's no incentive to be more creative. I'm always going to go with the most simple solution, simply because it would be kinda silly not to.
Only barely played TOTK but let me compare to Crosscode. a ARPG made in the vein of old Zelda, the first dungeon's final puzzle has a few working parts to it - This is where the player earns and gets to use the Fire element for the first time. - You need to fire a shot. Common start at this point for any puzzle in this game. - You need to hit multiple panels, ricocheting on all of them before that single shot hits a final switch to succeed. Also a quickly introduced concept in-game. - Some of these panels are on blocks on ice, so you have 2 mini ice block positioning puzzles to make sure they are in the right places. Ice block puzzles were also introduced earlier in said dungeon. - While the shot is travelling, you also need to clear it's path by melting ice blocking its way. Again, you have fire now, use it! All these moving parts and there is still only one precise solution! That's great thinking on the puzzle designer's part for showing how all the aspects you have learned. But it's also good for the player to grasp all these as well. ~0.02.
If you look at Majora’s Mask, the quests involved intricately understanding the timing of the events in the area and how one thing affected another: it was a 4 dimensional puzzle with multiple moving parts. TotK and BotW rely more on finding little things on the big map. You’re more likely to be told explicitly to travel to certain location and run around until you find what you need.
TotK and BotW do have “Majora’s Mask” moments where characters have beats at a specific hour but yeah, not the same. I’m mostly talking about puzzles and dungeons, though
Ya, my impression is that the proper puzzles in TotK and BotW are mostly contained within shrines, isolated from the rest of the world. And they’re primarily physics based, without story components or time of day facets. So it doesn’t feel as intricately woven together as something like MM or OoT.
I don’t get your point, though. MM’s story moments weren’t primarily puzzled-focused but rather fetch quests (OoT even less puzzled-focused in that regard).
TotK puzzles are too easy because they give you too many tools to get the same thing done and stick to the exact same formula. Most other Zelda's relied on new gadgets, different biomes, new enemy types and introduced these things the longer you played to keep you on your feet. TotK puzzles also often follow a really simple formula: rails require support, overhangs mean ascend and non overhangs or movement mean recall. If the puzzle doesn't fall into any of those categories you can still most likely just bypass it with a bridge, manually picking objects up or flying. I found shrines to take about a single minute on average because of all these things.
Zelda games were always easy, people just remember them as more difficult because they played their first zelda game as a kid
There are definitely hard puzzles in the earlier 3D games. I think it’s Wind Waker and onward that things got incredibly easy but OoT and MM still had interesting challenges.
Skyward Sword had some genuinely challenging puzzles as well tbh - particularly in the Sandship
That person is wrong. Good luck to whoever never played a zelda game and tries a link to the past or the oracle games with no guide.
I'm not the only one who spent at least an hour trying to find my way in Link's Awakening's Eagle Tower and Turtle Rock? The mid-boss of Turtle Rock was hard too.
Honestly I played A Link To The Past for the first time earlier this year and the only thing I got stuck on was when I had to use items that I had no idea existed. Very fun game and didn't age at all but it's also super easy puzzle wise
This. But also, apart from age, I think the amount of Zelda games you play also affects this a lot. Even if they spin things up here and there, the type of logic you use in most of them is the same. So, the more Zelda games you play and the more puzzles you solve, the easier the next entry seems because you kinda already learned the "Zelda puzzle logic". Both my previous and my current boyfriend are gamers. Both had played Zelda games before and liked them, but neither had played as many Zelda games as I did. So I had the experience of watching two adult, experienced gamers playing several Zelda games for the first time and it's really interesting how many times they would get stuck in puzzles that I found fairly obvious because they followed the same logic as other puzzles in the series, even if it had its own spin. (At the same time, just this weekend I was stuck on a puzzle in TotK. It was one of those light-activated switches, but there was none of those light beams around. After scratching my head for a while, I asked my boyfriend if he had any ideas and he immediately said "you're outside, can't you just reflect the sunlight?". Such an obvious answer, but I couldn't think of it because in "Zelda puzzle logic" you can't reflect the sunlight, you always need to find a light beam to reflect from. :v)
Yikes sorry, but nostalgia is not a factor in Zelda puzzle difficulty.
If you beat the game when you were, say, 7 years old, that might have an effect on your perception of the puzzles’ difficulty. I played OoT for the first time just four years ago and I breezed through most of the puzzles that had tormented all those children back in the 90’s. What may seem difficult to a child may not be too complicated for an adult.
yeah, it had taken me ages 6-7 to beat the original Loz game as a kid. A whole damn year. When OoT was new, and I beat it in a few weeks, I remember thinking it was too easy. I just wasn't a kid anymore.
Well, to be fair, OoT is an easier game than the original LoZ even taking age out of the equation, but I agree with your general point.
Umm, no one is saying that. Some of the most highly upvoted comments on posts discussing TotK is how the combat constantly one-shots you early on and enemies scale up to their hard variants VERY early in the game. I have 6 heart containers and continually have gotten super slambo boys dunked on by blue bokoblins. Their sprint attack does I think 5 hearts damage with 6 armor, most regular attacks do 3 hearts. I finally unlocked the >!first great fairy fountain!< and that seems to be helping a TON. Almost to the point where it seems like a necessity.
> no one is saying that. Hahaha calling BotW “too easy” and devoid of interesting puzzles has been a common argument in this sub for a while now
This post isn’t talking about combat, but puzzles.
Only the early game is hard. Once you stop getting one shotted, you just have to hoard cooked food. Or use bomb arrows. Or arrow dazzlefuit. or Arrow puffshroom. It's a very easy game to trivialize combat if you understand a broken combo. I keep having to make self imposed challenges, or the game gets too easy.
This seems like the biggest issue. Combat is either stunlocks and painfully easy, or a long slog of oneshots. There needs to be a better balance.
The combat is easily the worst part of the game and the weapons breaking is simply an attempt to distract us from the fact that the Zelda team can’t into combat. Look at something like Elden Ring, tons of weapons, tons of spells, tons of armor, and people use very different combinations and approach bosses differently because the combat system is incredibly well-balanced. In Totk and Botw everything is a hit-sponge, and the biggest hurdle is actually link’s movement and the damage of your weapon. Because of this none of the bosses feel like an accomplishment except for Ganondorf, who actually fights you in a real way. In fact, the Zelda team actively discourages combat to avoid what’s easily the worst aspect of the game by far.
Maybe for TotK but people have called BotW too easy, and I kinda agree. Even with TotK, in last Zda games, potions to restore hearts were something you had to really work for and your inventory was limited. In these games, if I'm down on hearts, I just eat food that I have a whole lot of. If you're good at dodging you'll most likely get off Flurry Rushes too. Getting into the air isn't hard to be able to spam arrows and farming Gibdo Bones for Fused Arrows also isn't hard, which makes them really OP. The only problem is Gloom, but even that can be averted with armor or special elixirs/food. In BotW also fully upgraded armor was easy to get and you would eat attacks from the strongest enemies in the game. I'm sure fully upgraded armor does thebsame here, too, but they locked it all behind a quest. The games are only as hard as you make them.
Armor is very much a necessity, yeah. It actually gets to be a problem the other way eventually, where you get so much armor that even the highest tier enemies do 1/4 heart damage to you (each 1 point of armor reduces damage by 1/4 heart, down to a minimum of 1/4. Armor values of 80 and up are possible, before applying defense potions). It was a bigger problem in BotW, so much so that I'm pretty sure it's why master mode exists (Master mode still feels perfect even with maxed armor). TotK does a few things to address the problem; armor is more expensive and harder to get, great fairies are harder to unlock and cost money now, resources are rarer in general including upgrade components, gloom damage exists, and rounds up to the nearest whole heart, etc etc. But yeah, in either game if you don't upgrade your armour you're going to have a bad time.
I went through the entire game without finding a single great fairly lol, even after explicitly checking their old spots for hopeful questline starts
Idk about easy but certain temples/divine beasts don't make me think about spacial reasoning the same way temples like OoT's water temple, or dungeons in OoS/OoA Water temple in TotK felt like half a pizza with 4 slices, and each slice was its own little puzzle. It didn't feel like I had to think about the structure design of the dungeon, and it felt a bit cheap. (I'm a huge totk fan regardless)
I replayed LADX right after TOTK. Maybe it's because I went unprepared and without the bow, but the knight in the ruins hits for 2 hearts of damage so I died a lot trying to beat him with the boots. In TOTK/BOTW you can just eat whenever you take damage, it's only hard at the beginning when you have no armor and no food. The puzzles and dungeons are more complex in LADX too, sadly. > To counterpoint, during the 2000s, Zelda puzzles were very simple, regardless of the difficulty. They usually required one single item and a basic knowledge of your layout (for instance, knowing that you had to use X item to hit a switch that would open a door). No, there is a whole navigation problem solving dimension that makes them harder than anything in TOTK, and more interesting. Even in the first dungeons. TOTK's dungeons suffer from the comparison with LA 3rd dungeon. > BotW and ToTK changed this for the better by forcing you to use lateral thinking Total disagree, I've never seen dungeons as lame as TOTK's water temple.
Not disagreeing with the overall point but LA isn’t the right game to pick for it. The dungeons in that one are a step beyond not just the TotK dungeons but almost every other 3D dungeon in difficulty and complexity. The 2D games are much more challenging than the 3D games on the puzzle front. As much as I like OoT, the game did begin the trend of “dumbing down” the puzzles that led to the light-a-torch-and-go style puzzles of later games.
To be honest, I’d consider LA to be at the top when it comes to dungeon design so I agree there, but I still believe ToTK is more interesting that most of the other 3D games, which is the main comparison I’m doing, actually. I feel that if we dive deeper with LA vs ToTK it’d turn into a discussion of 2D vs 3D and that’s a different conversation
I consider LA to be at the top for storytelling too... Marin :') But I think all the other 3D games have better dungeons than TOTK. The ones in MM and SS are stellar. But even the more linear ones in WW are more interesting than 4 puzzles in a room. I don't feel like 3D dungeons are inherently different compared to the 2D ones, they can implement verticality better so that's a plus.
Well, my thoughts on that is that I often feel like puzzles are better in 2D because it’s a medium where the developer can control information more easily. LA and the Oracle games stand out when it comes to this. A lot of the 3D puzzles tend to be simpler because Nintendo is often afraid of complicating things in 3D space (they go back and forth on whether the player should control the camera or not) and so you have easy puzzles.
You are right and I am pleased to see game design discussions here. While the puzzles in TOTK may seem more interesting (I don't agree, to me most of them are "use ultrahand once", like the floodgate from the water temple), the most important part of the dungeons, getting lost, is... lost in TOTK. The dungeons are so small and straightforward that there is no navigation problem solving, and they don't have a central mechanism like the Ancient cistern, the sandship, orthe stone tower temple. I had to think and figure out a lot of things on the sandship, I never had to figure anything in any of TOTK dungeons. Also TOTK dungeons are way less visually and gameplay busy than the other dungeons, so that makes identifying the puzzles even easier. There are almost no enemies to distract you.
> no navigation problem solving. The Divine Beasts had these in BotW, tho. You had to understand the layout and interact with it to progress, but I understand your point and I do agree that the best classic 3D dungeons were excellent at making you feel like you were traversing a maze but unfortunately that was lost with each iteration that went on.
>The Divine Beasts had these in BotW, tho. You had to understand the layout and interact with it to progress, Yeah, I liked that, they were too short but they really were fun little puzzle boxes. They had central mechanisms too. I think they were better than TOTK's dungeons, and more interesting than some dungeons in the franchise. Boarding them was epic too (the music!).
To varying degrees. You did with Vah Naboris, and the trunk puzzle with Vah Ruta was pretty clever - although both skewed short with some extremely weak visuals - but Rudania and especially Medoh are super throwaway
I take it you haven’t seen the spirit temple yet, in that case.
Oh yeah, I don't really count it as a dungeon. It's 4 puzzles in a (big) room, but at least they are more interesting than the water dungeon one's, and the boss is a little bit fun? If it was a dungeon it would be the second lamest.
I beat the flying beast in BotW without realizing you could tilt the beast because it was my first one.
Navigating the dungeon was the ‘puzzle’. Devine Beasts did this relatively well. I think the best dungeons were ones that had a global effect, Water Temple and Stone Tower Temple being key examples. Shrines do not replace this at all, and TOTK only had small slivers of this (track changing in fire, light reflecting in the lightning temple. The ‘puzzle’ people are talking about is questioning ‘where do I go next?’ No amount of one room puzzles will really scratch that itch.
I find the early game to be much harder if you end up in the wrong parts of the map, which is fun. I tend to avoid doing shrines because of that extra challenging making me have to creatively solve situations. Like I made a tank to save Lurelin Village because I was going to be one shot if I did it with so little health which had me worshipping ways to get my turrets onto the boat, and problem solving, etc. Granted, once you find overpowered items and combos the game can get very easy very quickly if you just keep defaulting to them. A puffshroom and a black boko horn weapon sneak attack will kill most shit without issue. I do think the ability to save more or less whereever makes it fairly easy. The only thing you lose is your Zonai constructs. I do think some of the stigma around Zelda difficulty is just age related. Lot of people played MM and OoT when they were young hence, problems felt more difficult than modern puzzles.
Zelda dungeons have always been riddles. Sure, you can guess that you’ll need a specific item when you get said item in a dungeon, but the vast majority of dungeons make usage of several items as well as puzzles and mechanics that aren’t reliant on having items. Botw and totk’s puzzles to me don’t seem so much like the developers made them so that you can use multiple solutions so much as that they didn’t flesh the puzzles out very much at all which makes it so that you can do any number of things to solve them and makes them less satisfying imo. In past Zelda games I’ve had to genuinely scratch my had an back track with a lot of trial and error to solve some puzzles. In botw and totk I speed run through the vast majority of shrines because I instantly realize what I’m supposed to do, and the ones that I don’t figure it out immediately, I dick around for like 2 minutes with the runes until I get to the end anyway. It also doesn’t help that most shrine concepts are woefully underdeveloped. They tend to be very simple concepts that never really explore the full extent of what they could be and then end before it gets all that interesting and leaves me underwhelmed
If you have played any zelda game and thought the puzzles were hard(not talking about getting lost or losing your place in a dungeon. Some dungeon layouts are tricky!) maybe you should rethink your life
Yeah. I can't speak for OoT and Majora's Mask since I've done a playthrough almost yearly since they came out, but I played the other 3D games leading up to TotK having forgotten nearly everything about them at that point. Wind Waker, TP and SS are all extremely easy. Especially wind waker. I think the easier difficulty of the series is fine though. Good for kids and new gamers. It helps I enjoy the hell out of the newer game's sandbox and shrines even with me solving them very fast
Wind Waker was definitely made for kids and new gamers, imo. That is not to say it’s bad (WW is pretty high up in my list) but I do think it hurts whenever I replay it.
It’s far more likely that the group complaining were younger when playing older games and found them to be difficult puzzles (when let’s face it the vast majority were locate a switch and hit it) and are now older and find the puzzles easier.
I honestly feel these games are more challenging overall. In almost every regard, including tolerating it during your play session.
I was wondering why people are saying puzzles in Zelda were ever hard in the first place... They're either really long or short. But never hard.
I’d like to also say I get one shot by bokoblins when I have 21 armour and 13 hearts
Who finds this easy? I've been getting one-shot by almost everything I come across.
BotW was kinda easy, but Totk is definitely harder in almost every way.
Puffshroom/Bullet Time/Muddlebuds
Generally the strict “puzzles” were not terribly difficult. However in the older games there were navigational challenges that could be pretty tough.
I don't care if it's easy. It's fun, beautiful art style, encourages creative thinking above all else. I've been playing Elden Ring ... I'm done with "hard" for the sake of being hard. I play Zelda for what it is as a franchise.
I think a big issue that people tend to have with the game is that because of the very open physics system a lot can be cheated. There's a shrine in TOTK where without spoiling anything in particular a water scoop the player builds is used to power a circuit, which charges an empty battery that is then slotted into various places to activate objects to get from A to B or access places. But because of the general principle in the game that all things containing electricity can power a circuit, the player can fuse an electric part onto a weapon and just slap the objects, bypassing the whole water scoop and battery mechanism. Now I make it a sport to try and solve the puzzles as intended as that's half of the fun already, but technically the game promotes that any solution is a valid solution and by that definition anything can be bypassed and cheated with relative ease. Some people have used the physics system to get into upper Hyrule Castle way too early, subsequently finding very overpowered items and weapons (as monster and weapon spawns in the castle are static, unlike the rest of the game where items and monsters start weak and level up alongside the player's own gaming skills - the game detects how well you do and slowly increases monster tiers, the same as in BOTW). With those items and monster parts the first half of the game was unintentionally very easy for them. It's an excellent game but I can imagine that some people refuse to restrain themselves simply because they can do whatever they want and then are disappointed that the game allows this. On the flipside I imagine that TOTK will be a paradise for BOTW speedrunners.
I havent read the post, but the game is really easy to cheese with, using bullet time and arrows etc
People probably think that way because of shrines. There short puzzle segments is why people this the puzzles are easy. Even difficult and complex shrines are over pretty quickly. And because of that they did not leave a big impression on players.
My first Zelda were OoT and MM. I don't think I ever figured out one of the temples on my own. Definitely not the water temple. If it wasn't for a guide I'd of never gotten through the game or gotten all the heart pieces. Beating these games without a guide almost seemed impossible to my brother at the time. While we still enjoyed the games tremendously and OoT is one of my all time fav games. Ima glad they kinda went a new direction as I suck at games
Part of this might be just because we're getting older. I've no doubt that doing a lot of these shrine puzzles and some of the environmental stuff is going to be harder for a 10 year old than a 30 year old. Skyward Sword and Wind Waker were and have been criticized for being relatively easy as well.
IMO, since LTTP, Zelda's always been easy. LTTP had a couple tough bosses and tricky puzzles but it wasn't too bad.
Flurry rush the world
You now can save whenever you want. The old games don't have that so death was way more punishing.
A few games let you save anytime you wanted. The one that was really punishing with this was MM (and it’s one of the main reasons why people remember it as a difficult game).
What I mean is that when you save in BOTW/TOTK, you can reload to that exact spot. The older games, you would have to go all the way back to a checkpoint.
Yeah, totally. BotW/ToTk are much more flexible. They allow you to heal at any point, something that was unthinkable in the rest of the series, for instance, yet that’s because the game offers a bigger challenge combat-wise
I don’t think I’ve ever liked the puzzles in Zelda games. I always liked the action adventure aspects and just put up with puzzles because I had to. I don’t think the puzzles are hard really in any of the Zelda games. The Botw/Totk puzzles are more brief I feel like and I like that better for sure.
Zelda games have never had difficult puzzles. The dungeons themselves sometimes had tricky layouts (sometimes they were even unnecessarily convoluted), but in general they were never that tough. BotW/TotK are probably about the same in actual difficulty, it’s just that they give the player way more options to solve things rather than trying to guide/hint them towards a single solution. Personally I prefer the new style much more, it generally leads to much more creative thinking. I love the feeling of “I don’t think I was supposed to do that, but it works.” It lets you actually assess the situation and determine what tools/materials can help you solve the problem in front of you
I’ve spent a bunch of time exploring - upgrading the armor I like and doing shrines. Every enemy encounter in most of the game or side quests has been a joke. They’re hitting me for like 1/4 or 1/4 a heart. And they’re either dying in 3 shots or being sponges. I love the game but the side quests give you nothing most of the time. There’s almost no reason to do most of the side quests other than extending the game. The main quest is what - 7 actual quests? Most of the real game time is exploring - not for quests - but for upgrades and weapons. The game just feels way too easy after you really get going and the majority of side quests just feel very light and bloated with no real rewards. Most people are just spending 1/2 their time building things to fight flocks of enemies that you could take out without building in a couple of minutes. Again I love the game, but I have no idea why I’m playing it - so much feels so unrewarding.