spemanig said:
1. Dungeons explorable in literally any order.
I want to start with the obvious. Aonuma has already stated that this will happen, but I want to be clear - I want to be able to play every single dungeon, except maybe the last, from the start of the game. If Zelda U has 8 dungeons, I want to be able to go to any one I want from the beginning, and be punished for it if I'm not ready.
I want it to feel exactly like Zelda 1 in that way. The only thing stopping me from beating the Lvl 8 dungeon its my lack of skill, not plot. I don't want it to be like ALBW either. No "beat the first three dungeons, then the last seven." I want complete freedom from the second I start the game, not limited freedom.
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Personally, I don't want it to be "you can beat any dungeon in any order", because it limits their ability to be creative with the dungeon designs in terms of use of items, etc.
However, I'd love to have access to all of the dungeons from the start, and a need to figure out which items you need for which dungeon, including items found in dungeons you can't yet beat (that is, you get item from Dungeon 3, which then gets used in Dungeon 1 before you are able to beat Dungeon 3). The trend of the games to have the item necessary for the dungeon found within that dungeon makes things relatively boring.
More generally, I want to see items located in other places more often, with the player having to figure out how to obtain it, rather than always being formatted more along the lines of stumbling upon the item as you work your way through a dungeon, with the item then used beyond that point in the dungeon. For instance, you are exploring a dungeon and come across various cracked walls. One specific wall has a bomb flower close enough that you can figure out quickly that it's how you break the wall (if you've never played a Zelda before - obviously there's no "figuring it out" for experienced players), but other walls clearly need a way to move bombs around. Thus, the player is effectively tasked with finding some way to get bombs.
This could play quite well if there were a character somewhere that would provide advice on how to get bombs, and they'll give that advice once you've blown up that wall with the bomb flower - basically, a trigger for Link to know to ask about it. The specific character could be a special one that gives out some advice for each such item. The item could be in another dungeon, it could be something you can buy somewhere, or it might be found in some out-of-the-way place. It might even be an item you can get from another character by doing some sort of quest.
I also would love to see dungeons designed to be solvable by multiple techniques, using various sets of items. So the same dungeon with the bombable walls and bomb flower might also be completable with a hookshot, via a different path. The only restriction would be that you wouldn't be able to reach the boss without items that are necessary to defeat the boss. So essentially, the game would restrict access to some of the bosses via items, and give a natural order to the dungeons, but you could defeat dungeons in any order, because many items aren't found in the dungeons. But you'd need to visit certain dungeons in order to beat other ones (and clever design could make it more interesting - perhaps three dungeons are Water/Fire/Forest types, and to beat each one, you need to obtain an item that you can only trigger by visiting the one that "beats" that type (Fire beats Forest, Forest beats Water, Water beats Fire). So you only have to visit one of the three twice.
In short, there are a lot of ways that they could mix things up without losing the ability to make dungeon design interesting in terms of items, etc. And I wouldn't want to see them lose that element.
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