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Aonuma on BOTW: So the puzzle solving in this game begins the moment the player starts to think about where they want to go. Do you agree?
- Thread starter balgajo
- Start date
I'd disagree; I'd say they can be critical components of good puzzles. Those two steps are a pivotal reason I haven't completed the final puzzle in Spacechem, after all!
Too many puzzle games are a bit too simple, and that's often because there's little actual intuition involved, the next step becomes obvious after each one. Monument Valley's a good example in that regard. That doesn't mean it's bad - a puzzle doesn't need to be difficult to be satisfying - but it's not the complete gamut of what makes a puzzle.
I think that moment in BOTW is probably most analogous with orienteering, which I would regard as a puzzle at heart.
So I brought the Switch to an outing event with my co-workers this weekend. I let one of them play BOTW to see how she'd fare. She has had some experience with video games in the past, so she's not completely clueless either. After an hour, I checked on her and she hasn't unlocked any of the tower yet, and she's already at the edge of the starting area. She just explored aimlessly because she had no idea where to go. Turns out that she hasn't even raised the towers yet.
Seems like very first the puzzle is already too hard for some people.
Seems like very first the puzzle is already too hard for some people.
This is a good point to bring up. Playing BotW reminds me a lot of how I approach Deus Ex or the new Prey in that I am presented with a set of rules and tools and a problem that has to be solved. How I get to that solution is up to me, however, and I think this is where the disconnect with many (but not all) people that don't like this approach happens.
Problem was that by making Link basically Spider-Man, most environmental "traversal puzzles" became redundant. Yeah, I can cut this tree to bridge this gap and walk across. I can try to move these boxes to make platforms to reach something. But I can also Revali's Gale, glide and reach everywhere.
The trade off is that exploration is a breeze and far more enjoyable than without these tools.
But let's be clear. It's an exploration based game, not a puzzle solving.
Disagree with Aonuma on this one
The trade off is that exploration is a breeze and far more enjoyable than without these tools.
But let's be clear. It's an exploration based game, not a puzzle solving.
Disagree with Aonuma on this one
Don't really agree with the quote. In a select few instances yeah it is a 'puzzle' but otherwise nah.
Honestly to a certain extent you have to discard the freedom available to you and go about the game "the way the developers intended" to get the optimal experience.
I don't think it takes a genius to figure out that the devs probably intended you to start the journey to gerudo town/zora's domain from the road and that you'd be missing out a tonne of content by just gliding to the town.
And as much as people say "but there is no intended route!", there is. And the game will turn out better if you follow that route.
Honestly to a certain extent you have to discard the freedom available to you and go about the game "the way the developers intended" to get the optimal experience.
I don't think it takes a genius to figure out that the devs probably intended you to start the journey to gerudo town/zora's domain from the road and that you'd be missing out a tonne of content by just gliding to the town.
And as much as people say "but there is no intended route!", there is. And the game will turn out better if you follow that route.
Everything you just said is entirely up to personal opinion my dude
I think the game is better because it recognizes you departure from the intended route at almost every opportunity. That's what adds value and and meaning to the phrase "no intended route".
Sure, you can replay the game the intended way, but that doesn't put its value over the above, especially when it's done as well as breath of the wild.
Not in the slightest. There is basically no other open world game where are you basically unlimited in exploration and traverse.
There are always many possibilities to reach a destination in BotW. In most other open world games even a 1m high wall is a insurmountable obstacle.
And there is no "right" route, every route you take can be rewarding.
It's only a puzzle if you're willing to engage it as one, and I don't think 95% of my time spent exploring Hyrule in Breath of the Wild would qualify as engaging anything. I solved the problems I stumbled across by carrying a lot of Stamina potions, and often brute forcing my way across Hyrule's various environmental hazards in the most tedious ways possible.
Chopping down a tree to gather wood in order to start a fire so I could create an updraft to create enough lift that I could soar over a chasm? That's a puzzle solution right there! Not one I ever did though, seeing as I could just leap off the ledge, activate my glider and climb up the rockface that I splatted against. Find a boulder near the shore of a lake, throw a stasis on it, aim it towards an island in the middle of the lake and climb on? That's a pretty good puzzle solution! You do that! In the meantime, I'm going to make a thousand ice pillars to reach that same island.
So yeah, I'm going to say naaaaaah.
Chopping down a tree to gather wood in order to start a fire so I could create an updraft to create enough lift that I could soar over a chasm? That's a puzzle solution right there! Not one I ever did though, seeing as I could just leap off the ledge, activate my glider and climb up the rockface that I splatted against. Find a boulder near the shore of a lake, throw a stasis on it, aim it towards an island in the middle of the lake and climb on? That's a pretty good puzzle solution! You do that! In the meantime, I'm going to make a thousand ice pillars to reach that same island.
So yeah, I'm going to say naaaaaah.
The thing is - it does. Like I said before you'll miss out a tonne of dialogue/context by skipping the intended route and miss out on the gradual reveal/discovery of a new area. And then when you backtrack it'll no longer have relevance and seems out of place.
Yes. I've ever seen the BOTW overworld as a natural and more organic evolution of the skyward sword overworld: every journey is full of puzzles, but this time everything is iintegrated in the overworld, with several solutions
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Normal Puzzle: resolve this algebric system
BOTW puzzle: have this numbers (6,2,27,9,√). How can i have 3 as results?
There are a fixed set of pieces and you can say you are finished whenever you like, just like a literal jigsaw puzzle. Also, the pieces only go together one way (beating all shrines and divine beasts is the only way to 100%).
It's planning, preparation and guesswork. Not really a puzzle IMO, although it can occasionally become one, depending on where it is. But no, managing stamina and prepping meals to go a certain place isn't really a puzzle.
There's some light puzzle stuff in the "immersive sim" features like using the leaf to row a boat and wearing warm weapons to act as a heat source in the cold.
I do think they did their best to create a world that feels real while gamifying the travel with Zelda styled problem solving.
But to me the puzzles are still the things like, the Shrines, the Divine Beasts and the weird woods where you gotta carry glowing orbs. Areas where it seems as though the game is inviting you to solve a thing to move into the obviously barred off room or pick up the item you're told to find.
I think both 1 and 2 describe puzzles inside dungeons in Ocarina of Time. They don't really describe the kinds of issues you stumble into when exploring BoTW's world. It's more that you have a sandbox with lots of opportunities and whatever you think might work will work as you hoped. I was never feeling like the game was showing me some "toy or problem to test ingenuity" through the exploration. In bits and pieces but I struggle to come up with a specific place.
Overall level of "puzzle satisfaction" in BoTW was 5/10.
There's some light puzzle stuff in the "immersive sim" features like using the leaf to row a boat and wearing warm weapons to act as a heat source in the cold.
I do think they did their best to create a world that feels real while gamifying the travel with Zelda styled problem solving.
But to me the puzzles are still the things like, the Shrines, the Divine Beasts and the weird woods where you gotta carry glowing orbs. Areas where it seems as though the game is inviting you to solve a thing to move into the obviously barred off room or pick up the item you're told to find.
I think both 1 and 2 describe puzzles inside dungeons in Ocarina of Time. They don't really describe the kinds of issues you stumble into when exploring BoTW's world. It's more that you have a sandbox with lots of opportunities and whatever you think might work will work as you hoped. I was never feeling like the game was showing me some "toy or problem to test ingenuity" through the exploration. In bits and pieces but I struggle to come up with a specific place.
Overall level of "puzzle satisfaction" in BoTW was 5/10.
I like the climbing mechanic but gliding has to go away in the sequel, or be severely gimped. Indeed, it defeats the purpose in my opinion.
I was honestly kinda surprised they didn't make the glider an item you could upgrade, starting with a very low-quality item like the sailcloth from Skyward Sword that functioned as little more than a parachute, to an actual long distant paraglider that'd cost nearly zero stamina to operate.
Giving us the glider early & if you prioritized stamina upgrades over hearts meant it was fairly easy to get to a lot of places just gliding.
No it absolutely does not!
Again, Spacechem - or Zachtronics games in general - are excellent examples of puzzle games without a single well-defined 'solution'.
I agree that a puzzle implies there's a way to crack the code that was though of before, but that applies to BoTW as well. "The door is locked with electricity. Can you power it up?" and then it involves a few steps about placing an electrically charged object between circuits in the right place, which you must figure out by observing the patterns but whichever object you use and how you get the electricity is up to you.
Any way that reaches the solution is the solution, but I would argue the overall complexity of puzzles takes a step backwards in BoTW at least compared to pre-SS Zelda in how easy they are to figure out.
But no, I rarely felt the overworld applies that approach to puzzles. It's like saying Skyrim is a puzzle game because you have to get good equipment but ensure you aren't over-encumbered.
Any way that reaches the solution is the solution, but I would argue the overall complexity of puzzles takes a step backwards in BoTW at least compared to pre-SS Zelda in how easy they are to figure out.
But no, I rarely felt the overworld applies that approach to puzzles. It's like saying Skyrim is a puzzle game because you have to get good equipment but ensure you aren't over-encumbered.
That's fair. One advantage of a setpiece puzzle is that it can be defined under extremely rigid constraints; there's no creativity in finding the solution, but that doesn't mean the solution isn't satisfying, and can be particularly interestingly complex.
BOTW gives the player a powerful toolbox with few constraints, which means there's a lot of creativity in the overworld, but it can devolve once you're familiar with the game into a bit of a one-size-fits-all solution. I'd compare it with Trine, actually; there's potentially a decent scope for interesting puzzle solutions in that, but so much of it can be solved by "Use the Wizard and just throw more boxes at it".
The shrines in BOTW heavily increase the amount of constraints on the player, which opens up the scope for more intricate puzzles (although still with the caveat that they can on occasion be trivialised if you bring a specific tool from outside into the mix); I'd love to see them take those a little further.
OP
OP
Agreed. A lot of times I did the same thing with ice pillars. Some great solutions would require a metagame where you make pretend being limited. I'm not the kind of person that will try creative stuff if the obvious or brute force one works. Most of times I solved something on a creative way was because the game limited my possibilities. And I consider being limited a good thing.
If I was to design the game, I would make the paraglider a little bit clunky to use; very weak to the side wind for example, not usable in free fall but only jumping from solid ground, and I would limit the capacity the slow down on the horizontal axis; probably give it a more weighty feeling when controlling it. It would still be a useful tool in some instances, but not the answer to every traversal issue in the overworld.
it is, but puzzle solving means a lot of things mechanically.
It's not as "puzzle solving" as presented in the previous Zelda's, so I voted no.
It's not as "puzzle solving" as presented in the previous Zelda's, so I voted no.
I'd rather be performing dumb tasks inside a lengthy dungeon than just traveling. Outside of the staring area, I didn't care for the open world at all. Maybe because I didn't find any payoffs, but I understand that I'm in the minority with that opinion.
I agree with him. You look across the landscape and decide to go to a mountain in the distance. The planning and pathing on how to get there is a start of a puzzle.
Which is OK if I choose to.
My first few visit to the castle was stealthy just to get good weapons and run away.
Afterwards I wanted to beat Ganon and after completing the memories Quest I came back and enjoyed exploring it with the right equipment.
I never returned to a dungeon that many times in a Zelda game and really enjoyed it.
You're comparing a state of play to a scenario that's distinctly not play. Obviously the real life version is not enjoyable; our world isn't designed for enjoyable interactions in the same way BotW is.
A puzzle doesn't imply any kind of solution.. Something can be puzzling without there being a correct answer
Like, I appreciate the semantic discussion but let's not pretend the word means something it doesn't.. We won't get very far that way.
Like, I appreciate the semantic discussion but let's not pretend the word means something it doesn't.. We won't get very far that way.
Puzzle-solving in Ocarina is almost non-existent. It does a great job of dungeon crawling, but you're practically never solving an actual puzzle in Ocarina.
Proper question
OP
OP
Now that I think about it the question is really confusing. I'm sorry about that.
Given how Aonuma defined puzzle do you think the game delivered it? That would be the proper question.