A Zelda game with generated elements?

[Lord_Brand]

Today, I had an idea for a Zelda game that asks the player some questions at the beginning that lets you effectively tailor the adventure according to your tastes. This includes giving Link different backgrounds that provide him with different skillsets, allowing Zelda to play different roles, and even allowing a main villain other than Ganon(dorf) to appear. Whether you like tradition, innovation, or sheer randomness, you can have it in your Zelda adventure.

The core gameplay would be consistent across playthroughs, but the exact events that play out and how can vary. You can for example elect to have a more linear adventure with dungeons tackled in a specific order, or you can opt for another open world Zelda that lets you tackle the dungeons in any order. Link can tackle the adventure solo, or have a companion such as a fairy, an animal companion, a fellow warrior, or even Zelda herself. The main villain could be Ganon (either as a pig man or as a Gerudo mage-warrior), or could be someone new (perhaps using a kind of villain generator to combine various elements together). The NPCs can be pulled from a pool of recurring characters as well as new faces, and some could likewise be generated using a character creator. You can hand-craft characters yourself, or let the system randomize some or all of their traits.

Link's background gives you access to different skillsets, such as a blacksmith's ability to craft tools and weapons, a shepherd's ability to command animals, a soldier's ability to coordinate with fellow soldiers, or a prince's ability to command servants.

The number, order, and complexity of dungeons can also be decided. You can have a traditional nine dungeon set up, with one dungeon being accessible after the other eight are cleared, or you could go for four major dungeons that you can tackle in any order.

What do you all think?

[Zapp Branniglenn]

I too have proposed modeling the Six Prologues of Dragon Age: Origins into another established video game series. So my immediate thought is having Link, Zelda, or Ganon at all is the major pitfall to avoid. Think about it, those characters are all Chosen Ones within the established series mythos. To have one necessitates the other two, and suddenly we've lost the ability to go off-script in a Choose Your Own Adventure game. But Zelda can, and has, been a lot of different stories surrounding different characters. Embrace the side story aspect of a choose your own adventure framework. Separate origin story Prologues for a goron, a zora, a lowly Hylian knight as the "human" choice. And whatever other tribes they decide to include.

Make it an RPG (since we're literally playing a role), and include party members so that you have full access to all the skills and racial traits you didn't choose for your main character. Then design dungeons with puzzle elements that concern those skills. Hand the project to Camelot, and our Zelda Gaiden is a spiritual successor to Golden Sun.

 

[Jotari]

Sounds like the developers would need to make three distinctly different games and sell them as one when they could just make three games and sell them as three games.

[Lord_Brand]

10 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

So my immediate thought is having Link, Zelda, or Ganon at all is the major pitfall to avoid. Think about it, those characters are all Chosen Ones within the established series mythos. To have one necessitates the other two, and suddenly we've lost the ability to go off-script in a Choose Your Own Adventure game. But Zelda can, and has, been a lot of different stories surrounding different characters.

I would argue leaving them out completely would be the pitfall. Say what you will about them, but they are the most iconic characters of the series.

That said, Link in particular has been shown embarking on adventures without Zelda or Ganon in them. Link's Awakening (okay, Zelda is mentioned and Ganon's likeness is used by the final boss, but still), Majora's Mask (Zelda shows up in a flashback once), Four Swords (not one mention of Ganon), Minish Cap (again, not so much as a peep about Ganon), Phantom Hourglass (Okay, Zelda does technically appear as Tetra, but Ganon is simply alluded to in backstory), Spirit Tracks (Zelda is featured, but instead of Ganon, we get a lame Ganon expy; still, not Ganon per se), and most recently, Tri Force Heroes (Zelda's dress appears, but not the princess herself, to my knowledge - but of course, I only played the game once and have yet to pick it up again, so for all I know maybe she makes some kind of cameo and I just didn't know).

And seeing as Princess Peach Showtime is drawing enough attention to presumably get a sequel, I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see Zelda get her own proper solo outing one day. The "costumes as powers" gimmick would work just as well for her as Link or Peach, honestly.

10 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Embrace the side story aspect of a choose your own adventure framework. Separate origin story Prologues for a goron, a zora, a lowly Hylian knight as the "human" choice. And whatever other tribes they decide to include.

Make it an RPG (since we're literally playing a role), and include party members so that you have full access to all the skills and racial traits you didn't choose for your main character. Then design dungeons with puzzle elements that concern those skills. Hand the project to Camelot, and our Zelda Gaiden is a spiritual successor to Golden Sun.

The ability to play as a different race definitely sounds like a good idea for a Zelda game. A long time ago on another forum (that I have since left), I suggested a Zelda MMO that would let you do exactly that.

But, I think it's unfair to shunt the idea off solely to RPG land, as interesting as a Zelda gaiden RPG sounds (perhaps deserving of its own topic). I think there's real untapped potential here for a Zelda game where, for once, you choose Link's background instead of having it chosen for you, where you can choose Zelda's role in the story, where you choose whether or not Ganon even appears (and if so, in what form), and for that matter what kinds of other NPCs you encounter.

Shoot, maybe you can even choose a land outside Hyrule to be the setting. Good place to bring back Holodrum, Labrynna, Termina, or even introduce someplace new (but that's stepping towards an outright Zelda Maker, though fans have been requesting that for years now). Think of it as a chance to write your own Legend of Zelda, and set it in virtually any era of the series. The game could even allow players to save their particular Legend seed and share it with other players.

We've seen "Open World Zelda". So how about "Open Worldbuilding Zelda"?

[vanguard333]

I don't think a Choose-your-own-adventure Zelda game would be a good idea. Choose-your-own-adventure games are always fraught as they run headfirst into the limitations of video games as a medium. Different media have different strengths and weaknesses, and the structure of choose-your-own-adventure games are held back by the natural limitations of video games; Yahtzee once did a decent video about why choose-your-own-adventure games almost never take off. And this idea is far more ambitious than a typical choose-your-own-adventure game.

 

20 hours ago, Lord_Brand said:

The core gameplay would be consistent across playthroughs, but the exact events that play out and how can vary. You can for example elect to have a more linear adventure with dungeons tackled in a specific order, or you can opt for another open world Zelda that lets you tackle the dungeons in any order.

The main advantage of a linear dungeon order is that the developer can know exactly what the player has already completed and craft each dungeon with that prior progress in mind: what items the player has found, how much they have learned, and each dungeon can be more challenging than the last because the developers know what the player has already had to overcome to get to each dungeon. Dungeons that can be completed in any order can't do this, and the strength of that approach is instead in giving the player agency to choose when they tackle each dungeon.

The problem that I'm seeing is this: let's suppose the game has four dungeons, and the player can choose to either have the four dungeons be given in a fixed order or have the dungeons be completed in any order. Then, there are three options, each with their own problems:

1. The game has two different versions of each dungeon aside from the first: one that can safely assume that the player has already completed the preceding dungeons in the fixed order and one that doesn't for the latter options, meaning the game must have essentially eight dungeons, only four of which the player can experience in one playthrough.
2. The game's dungeons are crafted with a specific order in mind. Then, although the player can theoretically complete the dungeons in any order, they will absolutely be encouraged to complete them in a specific order, and may possibly be outright required to visit the dungeons in a specific order (think the original NES Zelda game, where certain dungeons can only be accessed after the player acquires an item from another dungeon even though the dungeons can technically be completed in any order).
3. The game's dungeons are crafted to be completed in any order. Then anyone playing the dungeons in a fixed order is getting nothing from doing so.

 

7 hours ago, Lord_Brand said:

Spirit Tracks (Zelda is featured, but instead of Ganon, we get a lame Ganon expy; still, not Ganon per se)

I will not tolerate this Malledus slander! Just kidding; yeah, Malledus was a bit lame.

[Jotari]

4 hours ago, vanguard333 said:

I don't think a Choose-your-own-adventure Zelda game would be a good idea. Choose-your-own-adventure games are always fraught as they run headfirst into the limitations of video games as a medium. Different media have different strengths and weaknesses, and the structure of choose-your-own-adventure games are held back by the natural limitations of video games; Yahtzee once did a decent video about why choose-your-own-adventure games almost never take off. And this idea is far more ambitious than a typical choose-your-own-adventure game.

Seeing it phrased as choose-your-own-adventure so much reminds me that Zelda genuinely got a pair of choose-your-own-adventure books in the early 90s.

[vanguard333]

13 hours ago, Jotari said:

Seeing it phrased as choose-your-own-adventure so much reminds me that Zelda genuinely got a pair of choose-your-own-adventure books in the early 90s.

Really? I had no idea about that.

By the way, what did you think about my main point?

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, vanguard333 said:

Really? I had no idea about that.

By the way, what did you think about my main point?

I think you're right in the broad strokes, but that open choice dungeon order can still be pulled off. A Link Between Worlds manages to strike a decent, though not perfect, balance between an intended order for dungeons and a free choice order. Though to pull that off they had to, effectively, give you access to every item at once and simultaneously not allow more than one weapon to function per dungeon. Which is, just kind of weird.

[vanguard333]

1 minute ago, Jotari said:

I think you're right in the broad strokes, but that open choice dungeon order can still be pulled off. A Link Between Worlds manages to strike a decent, though not perfect, balance between an intended order for dungeons and a free choice order. Though to pull that off they had to, effectively, give you access to every item at once and simultaneously not allow more than one weapon to function per dungeon. Which is, just kind of weird.

To be clear; I'm not saying that open-choice dungeon order can't be done; A Link Between Worlds did have some really good dungeons. I'm saying that dungeons can be optimized for either a fixed order or for open-choice order, but not both, and a game that asks the player "Would you like the dungeons to be open-choice order or a fixed order" would either need two versions of almost every dungeon or have the dungeons be optimized for only one of those options.

[Jotari]

3 minutes ago, vanguard333 said:

To be clear; I'm not saying that open-choice dungeon order can't be done; A Link Between Worlds did have some really good dungeons. I'm saying that dungeons can be optimized for either a fixed order or for open-choice order, but not both, and a game that asks the player "Would you like the dungeons to be open-choice order or a fixed order" would either need two versions of almost every dungeon or have the dungeons be optimized for only one of those options.

Well that does back to my original comment on this thread where I said it sounds like the developers would be expected to make three different games for the cost of 1.

[vanguard333]

7 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Well that does back to my original comment on this thread where I said it sounds like the developers would be expected to make three different games for the cost of 1.

True. Possibly more than three games depending on how many choices the game would want to include.

Personally, I think it would be cool to see something like Oracle of Ages/Seasons again: multiple parallel games that each place emphasis on something specific (Ages emphasized puzzle-solving, while Seasons emphasized action and the cancelled third game likely was supposed to emphasize exploration). However, doing this would likely be tricky: Oracle of Ages & Seasons got to benefit from being 2D 8-bit Gameboy Colour games that could reuse a lot of Link's awakening assets.

[Armchair General]

Honestly, the Zelda series is perfect for an roguelike, if you think about it: Some random cursed dungeon that regularly craps out monsters, Link is tasked with clearing it but it'll be his largest endeavor to date, and most of his gear was stolen by something that fled into the dungeon.

But the "choose your own background" bit is something that might be too intensive for the series, outside of it being given the Warriors treatment

[Lord_Brand]

16 hours ago, Jotari said:

I think you're right in the broad strokes, but that open choice dungeon order can still be pulled off. A Link Between Worlds manages to strike a decent, though not perfect, balance between an intended order for dungeons and a free choice order. Though to pull that off they had to, effectively, give you access to every item at once and simultaneously not allow more than one weapon to function per dungeon. Which is, just kind of weird.

I figured they could implement a dungeon-building algorithm based on a general layout with some skeleton components (like a tower or split path), then fill that out with different specific elements based on the theme of the dungeon chosen, as well as the placement in the order if applicable.

Ultimately, I realize combining all these together might be a bit too hefty, but I still think giving the player multiple origins for Link would be cool, allowing them to pick different secondary skills to make their playthrough different each time.