Chrkeller said:
Spindel said:
Starting with 3 hearts in Zelda is a perfect way to annoy the player. It’s a consequence of the player messing up and maybe the player learns to be more careful in the future. Same with Adventures of Link, restarting in the entrance is a consequence of messing up. Consequences for poor actions are good design and something lacking in most of the games from the last 20 years.ÂÂ
I haven’t played Battletoads in ages but as I remember it it wasn’t to punishing up until the motorcycle stage. And I’ll admit I’ve never made it past the motorcycle stage. But that was more an issue of never owning the game myself.ÂÂ
And again I’m going to disagree with you on Metroid. The no in game mini map is a feature (specially in hindsight) that I hold to a high esteem. You want to know how both me and most of my friends played it the first time? With a pen and a stack of paper next to the TV and we drew our own map. That added to the experience and sense of wonder and discovery. I’m currently on a play through of it again on Nintendo Online, but nowadays I don’t need pen and paper I still remember where to go.ÂÂ
I’ll add another game that you probably hate that I love and that is Simon’s Quest. The NPCs giving misleading information is a stroke of genius that I would dare developers do today in the age of arrows pointing at the objective and where to go. But let us say this, I think you and me will not agree to much in this discussion. |
Kids naturally have a stronger sense of discovery. Gaming hasn't changed, the discovery is there, but likely we have gotten older.  |
Sense of discovery is still there if the game is designed in the right way, it’s just that most games aren’t designed in the right way nowadays.
BOTW is an example of a newish (it was released 7 years ago! Time flies damn it) that awoke the sense of discovery as long as you didn’t look things up online.
But let’s take games released fairly ”close” to each other where the dumbing down of the game franchise killed it. Morrowind you start and then have to figure out what to do and where to go from your journal (that is filled by events and talking to NPCs). You have to explore, understand ques given about directions and the geography and while trying to find your way you discover a bunch of stuff. Oblivion and Skyrim isn’t even go to the x on the map it’s just go where the arrow points. This in combination with a bunch of other changes make Oblivion and Skyrim so shallow compared to Morrowind with ni sense of discovery and exploration. Morrowind is a superior game because of this, even if the visuals are dated as hell.
