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Valdney on 02 July 2023
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IcaroRibeiro said:
Valdney said:

There’s undoubtedly a lot of room to improve. My main complaint is the shrines. I think they don’t fit the universe at all. The Zelda team should completely ditch the shrines. Some are fun but most of them involve solving some stupid puzzles that feel more like work than anything else. What we should get instead is more expensive dungeons spread across the world that we could explore at own pace much like Hyrule castle.

The idea of the shrine design was to not make people stay "locked" in someplace instead of exploring the world. They wanted to put a puzzle to make use of the mechanics, but to not make you spend more than a couple of minutes because they wanted you discovering the world 

It was always a dumb reasoning of them. Elden Ring has extensive dungeons and they are the highlights of the game

That's said, I really liked thr shrines, I think most of puzzles are fun, and I never wanted them to let go. Just wanted them to abandon the stupid and clunky motion controls , and they did that so I'm pleased 

Doing the sky islands and even some overworld puzzles makes me think the shrines are necessary to create self contained puzzles that otherwise impossible to design in a open map. I very much prefer the puzzles in the overworld/skies/dungeons compared to shrines, but without shrines I can't see many of Zelda puzzles being possible to make 

Your perception of developers not wanting us to be locked in a certain place for hours makes a lot sense but I actually agree with that idea. That is why I used Hyrule castle as what I think is the  perfect example for what I was trying to say, because you’re never actually locked in there, you’re free to explore the place however you want, Hyrule castle feels like an expansion of the world in an indoors settings. It’s perfect! 

As for the necessity of puzzles in the Zelda universe, that is a whole other conversation. I don’t think they are. People who grew up with OoT tend to think they are and I don’t blame them. But I think the LoZ series would be way more fun if they ditched the puzzles and  was more like a light hearted Elden Ring or the original LoZ for that matter. 

Puzzles are overrated.