Unfold Your Game II - Organic World

Yi Yin
Mar 31, 2018
4 min read

Updated: Apr 3, 2018

The first way (Persona 5) involves a lot of things outside the game design field, as well as luck--because not all themes can be expressed so well simultaneously by that many kinds of art, from game systematic design to even UI design. Some core ideas may be best expressed by game design, some may be best expressed by narrative, etc.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Establishing an Organic World

Here, let's talk about a more classic example: the recent release of The Legend of Zelda. Zelda does not have any change from the list above in the paragraph discussing Persona 5. I know you may feel lazy to go back, so let me copy the list here:

Game rules
Game narrative
Teammates
Game characters' roles

Unlike Persona 5, Zelda's game rules remain stable. For the game narrative, Persona 5's evil boss also gets stronger while the player and his friends are getting stronger; but in Zelda, the boss is very classical--it just sits there watching you defeat all his subordinates, until you defeat him. Also, in Zelda, you play by yourself, so no teammates. Last, the roles of game characters are fixed.

Then, without proper systematic progression, how to make this game interesting?

When I played Zelda: Breath of the Wild, there was such a scene: several goblin-like enemies (the actual name may be bokoblin/moblin/etc.) are standing in a high platform you can not reach. However, you have to get an item from the treasure box, which is also on the high platform. The difficulty is that once you approach that platform, the enemies will shoot arrows at you, making it very hard for you to climb up the platform.

There are several common solutions: 1) get good bow and arrows to carefully shoot them down; 2) prepare sufficient food that recovers your HP while you climb up under attack; 3) buy stealth clothes to sneak up onto the back of the enemies.

However, as a person graduated from game design major, I decided to test the designer's thought. So I skipped this scene temporarily and went to the next scene, where there was a metal door lies on the snowy ground, as well as a river. Clearly, the designer was implying that you should use your "metal control" ability to place the metal door over the river, so you can go across the river. Please also note that if I went directly into the river, I would be quickly frozen and lose HP to death, unless I had special equipment (some players may already have that at that phase, but I didn't).

So I used the metal control ability to float the huge metal door mid-air, and then went back to the goblin-like enemies. Having noticed the huge door, the enemies still wandered about freely as usual. I floated the huge metal door high above one enemy's head and suddenly drop down. After a "Bang!" the enemy was severely injured. And after seeing this, the other enemies began to panic, trying to flee from the huge door, making it harder for me to hit them.

Therefore, I came up the second idea: use the angular momentum. When holding a metal object with that skill, if I turn around, the metal object turns around in a much larger circle with me, and the radius of that circle is the distance between the metal object and me. So I hold the door to the farthest distance and began to rotate. Just as I had expected, the side of the door hit the enemy, and because it moved fast, the enemy didn't have a chance to dodge.

This is one of my most interesting memory playing Zelda. Why is that scene so compelling? Why is that scene so different from both the reality and traditional games? Here's my answer:

Zelda builds a better procedural rhetoric of the reality, while avoiding the downside of the reality.

What does it mean? In reality, everything is closely connected: of course you can use a metal door to kill an enemy. However, in most games, the designers simplified the model: a door is only to be opened and closed. This is a technical requirement, otherwise, the game engine will become too complicated. Zelda combines the advantages from both sides. But games have its own advantage: in a game, you can do wild things like saving the world or killing an enemy--in reality, there's almost no chance for you to do them.

Zelda takes the advantages from both of them.

In reality, we:

solve a problem in creative ways (like using a metal door to hit the enemy)
have limited interesting problems to solve (you can not save the world/kill an enemy)

In traditional games, we: