Alienating the Hardcore Gamer? I think so.

[Trace]

Let's start the Zelda board with some intelligent discussion...
This was one of the last threads I posted on the Zelda board, and was almost a definite victory for Post of the Week before Andy took NSider down.

Enjoy.


I've been playing Zelda for 18 years now, going on 19. Throughout those 18 years, I've defeated Gannon with the Magical Sword, I've awoken from the dream of Koholint (or was it a dream?), I've stopped the moon from crashing down on Termina, I've linked my adventures between Labrynna and Holodrum, I've traveled to an underwater Hyrule, and I've shrunk myself down and helped the Picori.

For a good portion of those years, I was faced with a challenge every time I inserted a Zelda game into whatever system I was playing, be it an NES, an N64, a GameCube, or a Game Boy. I would have to go out and find dungeons, but with little direction. I would have to fight enemies who when they attacked me, took away a good heart or two. I'd have to solve puzzles that offered little to no hints as to how to complete them.

I mean, who would've known that to get to Dungeon 7 in The Legend of Zelda that you'd have to play the Recorder at the fountain next to the fairy fountain near Dungeon 3? Or how was I supposed to know which way to go to get to each boss and keys in The Adventure of Link?

Earlier Zelda games offered a challenge. They provided few clues on what to do, and few directions. It was a guessing game to a large degree.

For example: in Link's Awakening, in Dungeon 2, the Bottle Grotto, you were told at one point to "First, defeat the imprisoned Pols Voice, Last, Stalfos..." Wait, what? In the room where you found this, there was no Pols Voice, nor a Stalfos. But later on in the dungeon, you found a room with a Pols Voice, a Keese, and a Stalfos. But even then, just attacking the Pols Voice with a sword didn't do anything. You had to think and pick up a pot with your recently acquired Power Bracelet to kill the Pols Voice, then the Keese, and then the Stalfos.

Or another example, an entire dungeon: Jabu-Jabu's Belly in Oracle of Ages. Oh man, now there was a near-impossible challenge. You weren't told which way you had to drain the water so you could access different areas in the dungeon. It gave gamers a hard time.

Ooh, I've got another difficult challenge that provided no clues whatsoever: In the Wind Waker, the King of Red Lions tells you this:

"The sages should be here in Hyrule...in the Wind Temple to the north and the Earth Temple to the south, praying to the gods.

You must head for these two temples to see what has happened to the sages and attempt to find a way to recover the power to repel evil....

As always, I shall mark these places on your Sea Chart."

Woah, WHAT? Excuse me? You're showing me precisely where I need to go? Wow... That was quite the surprise. You're telling me where my next goal is and how to get there? I'm sorry, but when did this start happening? Well... I guess it's fine, let's continue.

What came after Wind Waker? Minish Cap. Ah, Ezlo. Yes, a very stubborn, yet helpful guide. But hey... Are you telling me what to do and how to get where I need to go? Ok, well, I guess that works...

Twilight Princess, although I haven't actually played it myself, seemed to have followed this similar path. You were given directions on where to go, and you followed them. I hear that the same goes for Phantom Hourglass.

So what's going on here? Games are becoming too easy, in an attempt to pull in new fans. But what's happening to gamers like me, who appreciate a challenge? We're being pushed away.

I have yet to play Twilight Princess, partially because I don't have the money to spend, partially because I've heard that it's too easy. Yes, some may say that it's a challenge, but I've faced challenges before. Gannon in The Legend of Zelda was a challenge, not Gohma in Wind Waker.

I don't know if I'm gonna play Phantom Hourglass, because it's so radically different. It's supposed to be easier, and have almost no learning curve. Well, what about the gamers who want a learning curve?

Nintendo wants to pull in new fans, and that's understandable. New fans equal more sales which equals more money. Nintendo's a business, and money is good. But Nintendo has always been about giving the fans what they want. So why can't they give us a difficult Zelda game?

Why do I have to resort to playing Guitar Hero 2 on Expert to get a challenge? Why do I have to go back to classic games to enjoy a challenge? After all these years, and some games are still difficult. So why not these?

I've been pushed away from Zelda because I want a challenge. Am I alone?

[PsychoYoshi]

See, there's a fine line between a "challenge" (Oracle of Ages), and a "guessing game" (original LoZ). Yeah, you may get told where to go in WW and TP and such, but I play the Zelda games primarily because the dungeon mechanics are literally beautiful at best and slightly annoying at worst. I can't stand the NES games; too hard to hit enemies, the puzzles are usually extremely obtuse like killing all of the enemies in a room. TP starts off fairly tough, gets easier, and then gets harder again. The puzzles in TP are more subtle...yeah, you may still have Hookshot points and such, but there aren't many switches that sit on the floor and wait to be pushed.

Nintendo, I think, believes the hardcores should be satisfied by "cleaning out" the game; all 20 Heart Containers, sword upgrades in the 2D games, ALL OF THE FIGURINES in Wind Waker. That ain't easy stuff to do. But I do see your point.

[NINTENDOMASTER21]

There is obviously a growing distinction between "old school gamers" and "new school gamers", which is unfortunate really, because we shouldn't have to divide ourselves along those lines.

Though I have grown up a new school gamer, I was severely disappointed by the temples of TP.  Heck, even WW was harder, and that was only five years ago.  Zelda games have gotten easier and easier to the point that you only play for the story (which TP failed to execute well)...

However, I will stand up for the new Zelda games.  I think that they require you to think more and consider "real-life applications" (i.e. burning curtains to find the sunlight/switches, dropping things from a certain height) rather than the hack-n-slash model of the original games.

Yet I also think that the original games required an ingenuity not seen in video games today, so I respect old school gamers for that.

What Nintendo needs to do (and I can't believe I'm saying this) is a return to the N64 gameplay/difficulty level.  OOT and MM are considered great games for that, and remain top games for both old and new school gamers.  Nintendo ought to take a good hard look at those two, and settle on a new gamer similar in style and gameplay.

[t2wave]

Know what's sad? I've been gaming long enough to have played the original LoZ yet TP was my first.

[Generalq]

You know, I've always tried to defend Zelda and this trend, but with the announcement of Link's Crossbow Training, I do have to agree with both the poster and PsychoYoshi.

I have to agree with PsychoYoshi that the zelda games are trying to reel in the old-school crowd with collect-a-thon challenges and completionism, which just became a bit more obvious with the new rumor that one can "unlock" Zelda as a playable character in Link's Crossbow Training if you do enough.

I also agree with the poster (not sure if it was you, Blink190) in that the games have been getting easier. Gleeok, Manhandla, Thunder Bird, Dark Link, Trinexx, and even standard enemies like Blue Wizzrobes and Blue Bird Warriors made the game an extreme challenge. Nowadays, the hardest boss in the game is defeated with a simple pattern that usually takes three steps, but can often be defeated much faster in two or even one cycle.

All it took to convince me of this problem was to imagine what Wind Waker would have been like without everyone telling you where to go. I felt rather confused at first in the Wind Waker, because the story was very jumpy, and all I heard was, "Go here! Do this!" The story may have still been able to be jumpy, if only they didn't require you to do everything they wanted you to. I would have loved asking around the island until someone said, "Oh yeah! Dragon Roost Island is due east from here! But you might want to go north to the next island first, where I hear there's a man that sells hoyi pears." Something like that would have been perfect.

So, yeah, I completely agree with both sides.

... :D

[Baka]

Nintendo wants to appeal to a casual gamer and the hardcore, and therefore has to lower the difficulty so that its playable by the casual audience, but therefore alienating many hardcore gamers. Unless they create a difficulty setting, its always going to be like this. To increase the difficulty for a dungeon-solving based game, you can't just increase the AI; another dungeon design would be required, similar to master quest.  Also, the difficulty of the original games wasn't always a good thing. There's not really any sophisticated art to randomly bombings things.  The create sensible, but difficult puzzles, is quite a challenge, I'm sure.

[MasterSword]

I agree with everything you said.
Nintendo is makig these games too easy by all these hints in there games.
I guess that's why i like the older zelda games.
oh, by the way, i know this sounds ironic, but you spelled ganon wrong.
Remember, there is only one N ;)

[Nintendo Guru]

Nintendo needs give more thought to its older fans as well as the newer ones.  As we've seen with the Wii, Nintendo is definitely heading in a different direction that it used.  Nintendo is way too focused with pleasing the casual gamers so that they can make more money.  And it's not just in the Zelda series either, but that's definitely one of the bigger examples.  Nowadays, some of the best games that I can find are ones on the Virtual Console.

But I also agree with what PsychoYoshi said about challenges and guessing.  The real challenge of older Zelda games was finding out how to get to new areas and puzzle solving in dungeons, but sometimes you just had to make random guesses on what to do next.  It just made things more complicated, and that's one part of older games I didn't like as much.

And like you said, the game's are giving to too much direction on what to do instead of letting players figure things out for themselves, but another aspect of Zelda games that has become much easier is fighting the bosses.  In Twilight Princess, the bosses were incredibly easy in comparison to what they should have been.  The bosses are supposed to be one of the most difficult parts of the dungeon, but in Twilight Princess, they were fairly easy to beat.

In my opinion, Nintendo really needs to bring back the hardcore aspect to their game series, and that doesn't just mean decorating the games with side quests like collecting all the heart pieces.  Hopefully, Nintendo will bring back the challenges to series like Zelda in the future and not just disregard the hardcore games.  Great post, Blink190. ;)

[Commander Awesome]

The thing I'd love is if we stopped abusing ALttP elements that OoT 'borrowed' over and over again. Sure, it was cool the first two times, but the story has taken a predictable turn for the worse.

As for difficulty, that was shot clear back in OoT, and killed in Wind Waker. OoT's puzzles/Monsters were painfully obvious on how to proceed, and Wind Waker... You had to try to die.

[Matrix4Yeshua]

There were difficulties in TP, but it wasn't that difficult. It more than made up for it IMO with a beautiful and expansive world as well as a captivating storyline.

TWW was a masterpiece, I believe. And one of the things that made it so was making the music fit so well with the atmosphere, as well as including during battle actions.

The only games that seem to present me with a real challenge are the 8-bit games, every one of them. In fact, I have not beaten Zelda II in nearly 20 years that I've owned the game. In the GB/C games, I die frequently, but I can eventually beat them. They aren't HARD, but sometimes I run out of hearts quickly. The original Zelda was difficult and still poses a challenge.

ALttP was hard at first, but once I beat the game the first time, I was able to beat it with easy each time thereafter. I can still beat it with collecting most of the side stuff in less than 8 hours.

OoT only gives me difficulty in one or two areas, and I got through it without dying very often.

MM, I didn't like it as much as the other games

Minish Cap, I don't think I died a single time.

TP, some areas repeatedly killed me, but I could get through it. It just took a while.

TWW seems to be the longest game, but I don't think I died at all in the game except when attempting the Cave of Ordeals.

Jumping from 2-D to 3-D completely revolutionizes gameplay. It adds a new style of fighting enemies and a new way to solve puzzles. the fighting style often makes it easier than the 2D games. I, personally, love all the Nintendo games, except MM. I like it, but don't love it. The CD-i games are abominations and don't count.

[butterflyboy1974]

yes I know exactly what you're saying and I can agree.  I haven't been turned off of Zelda, but I definitely think the games have gotten much easier.  It's only compounded by the fact that peeps who've been playing a long time are only getting better at the games overall as time goes by.  The last LoZ game that was a real challenge IMO was MM, and its sales paled in comparison to OoT.  I love the fact that the original LoZ had a second quest, and that there's a Master Quest for OoT, I really hope that Nintendo has plans to create a harder version of TP, maybe even downloadable via the VC on the Wii.    I;m not sure how that would work since there's so little storage room on the console. 

[Link2768]

If you want to be hardcore and want a challenge play WoW imo

[7Deadly$ins]

I don't mind being told where to go. In fact, I like it. Video games are primarily about having fun, which I can do. I don't know about any of you, but I don't specifically enjoy wandering around for a couple of hours looking for the dungeon. There can still be challenges in the dungeons and they don't have to give me any clues for that. But aimlessly travelling around looking for the next location? I don't think that's a well made challenge in the least.

[GrimTuesday]

I agree with everything you said.
Nintendo is makig these games too easy by all these hints in there games.
I guess that's why i like the older zelda games.
oh, by the way, i know this sounds ironic, but you spelled ganon wrong.
Remember, there is only one N ;)

He's been Gannon Banned  :)

[BOREDFOREVER]

Well, I suppose it's about what you look for in the game.

TP was kind of a joke on difficulty.

But the great thing about PH was that I was never thinking about the difficulty. I was just enjoying the game.  I started with the original NES, and I've made my way forward, only missing a few titles (CD-I and Oracles).  I'm not trying to brag, but I beat Zelda II before anyone had even heard of OoT. 

But to me the Zelda series has always been about great gameplay, not just difficulty.  PH was an innovative, amazing game.  And there were rewards for those of us who have always been Zelda fans.  I was amazed when I found out that Bombachus were actually extremely useful in PH.  The gameplay certainly stood up to it's predecessors IMO.

The good thing is that you can always make a Zelda game harder for yourself by doing things like a 3 heart quest.

And while some of the hints do get really patronizing at times, I don't think I would trade them for random guessing games.

You make a strong point, and you have every right to make it.  But I hate to see you walk away from the series because of it.