| mZuzek said: I disagree. Maybe the early Zelda games didn't tackle this as well, but it was common for games in the 80s to do that. But this is the Wii U we're talking about. They got a bit more power going on in that machine that in a NES. You don't need to either have a health bar showing you how strong your enemy is or hack away mindlessly hoping to understand. We're not limited to 8-bit sprites anymore - the developers can and should make tougher enemies look tougher. I just came back from a Metroid Prime 2 session and I can tell you, everytime a new enemy shows up it's pretty easy to tell how tough and/or annoying it might be just by looking at it. I'd much rather have it this way. |
I don't think that simply making stronger enemies look "tough" is clear enough. There are so many complex things that go into designing an enemy, and you don't want to ever have to limit how tough an earlier enemy looks just so you can make a later enemy look more intimidating by comparison later. And even with that in mind, that language doesn't translate at all to judging how you stack up on a constant basis. An enemy that looks "the toughest" in the beginning of the game will still look "the toughest" at the end of the game. That information alone is not nearly enough information to judge just how favorably you stack up compared to your opponent. You need to be able to judge, in real time, just how much damage you're dishing out so you can make the appropriate discision based on that knowledge.
No offense to Metroid, but 99% of the enemies in their games are not even remotely difficult to defeat, so the way they are designed is completely different from the way enemies in Zelda are. They aren't made to be challenges. They are merely tiny obstacles in traversal an platforming, like in other platformers. They are more like enemies in Mega Man or even Mario than enemies in Zelda 1, where the harder enemies act as a literal road block to stop you from accessing specific areas until you were better equipt to handle them. None of the enemies in Metroid are designed in this manner at all.
