Ever since Malstrom made his name by fostering divisions in fandoms we've had "puzzles vs mazes" As if mazes are not a kind of puzzles.
They are, but they operate in different ways.
In Zelda games, "puzzles" resemble the kinds of challenges you'd find in an adventure game. You need to judge the atmosphere and the things you can interact with in a room, then find the "solution" that lets you proceed past a certain obstacle that stands in your way.
In past Zelda games, the "maze-like" qualities came from the layout of the entire dungeon. You had to keep exploring rooms, taking various routes until you found the right way to the center of the maze. Sometimes these rooms had puzzles in them, so you wouldn't necessarily find a way to the center unless you solved the puzzle (but sometimes there were alternate routes involving bombable walls, for instance).
The "puzzles vs. mazes" issue largely revolves around
Zelda games gradually reducing the maze-like qualities and increasing the puzzles. Why is this a problem? It's because it's generally easier for people to replicate the solution to a puzzle (for example, on subsequent puzzles or subsequent playthroughs) than it is to memorize a path or strategy for getting through a maze.
In the most recent Zeldas, the dungeons have more or less led the player by the hand from one puzzle to another, and most of the puzzles are iterations of other puzzles found in the same dungeon (or previous dungeons). This has led to Zelda dungeons feeling very "played out" and not especially tricky to navigate or "solve."
Meanwhile, I think most people would probably still get thrown a little in the early Zeldas, simply because it's harder to be readily familiar with how to get through them (not to mention getting lost + lots of enemies opens you up to getting killed).
Why do you always bring this flawed argument up in every Zelda thread?
It doesn't work that way...
As the gaming population grows, and more people get into other games that do similar things to Zelda,
why is it that Zelda is actually losing players?
That is not a flawed argument. If gaming is becoming bigger, and Zelda is becoming smaller (while at the same time becoming more expensive), Zelda will eventually cease to make the kinds of money it needs to to continue to exist (in its current form). So it needs to change form. Why the heck do you think Aonuma keeps talking up the nature of the world and breaking conventions every single time he makes a new game?
Also Skyrim isn't an action adventure game it's an action-rpg, it has almost no relation to Zelda outside of having a fantasy setting; bringing that game up in a Zelda discussion baffles me.
It's an open world game that offers a bigger/more impressive game world than Zelda.
Zelda is a series whose game world is one of its most defining features. Genre quirks and game mechanics aren't going to stop a game like Skyrim from stealing from its market if it does one or more of the basic level things (combat, items, overworld, dungeons) in a way that people like better than Zelda.
