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[jariw]

Dungeons should be optional in Zelda games.

 

[HeresSomeWeapons]

I've been thinking about this thread....and I think the real difference between what feels like padding and what doesn't is all in how it's presented. You could give me a fetch quest and tell me exactly what I need to get and where to find it, and it will feel like padding because there is nothing for me to do or think about other than just going through the motions. If, on the other hand, you give me only a single clue about what I need to do and leave the rest up to me, now it's not padding. Now I'm doing some thinking for myself and actually contributing to the process.

For instance, take the owl statues in TP. Mark 5 of them on my map and tell me I have to go to each of them and it will suck. I'm not doing anything other than following instructions. Now take the same 5 owl statues, but don't tell me I need to find them. Don't mark them on my map. Build it up slowly as I go through the game. Make them obvious so I notice where they are as I'm playing. Then when I see the room in Kakariko I think "ah, I've seen this statue before. I bet if I go find it, it will do something for me." Now the same exact quest is no longer padding. Now it's a puzzle. Also...maybe not 5 of them. Make it one, and then it's no different than restoring the Bridge of Eldin, or thawing Zora's Domain.

 

[10k]

Dungeons should be optional in Zelda games.

That's the core of the Zelda franchise though. Lol.

 

[StrategyFan]

In what way? Current 3D worlds are basically nice backdrops and that's all. If you take a look at the degree of interaction with the world in a Zelda game or the sheer density of gameplay relevant stuff in Skyward Sword or Banjo-Kazooie, I can absolutely not see how other developers have made any progress on the N64 era, let alone eclipsed that standard. In fact, modern open world design is so dull it hurts.

I've spent way more than half my time in GTA5 following GPS lines with my car (or one I had stolen, actually, but that's just a button press) without any challenge, even during main missions. In Xenoblade Chronicles X there is nothing to do other than walking around, collecting randomly appearing stuff and fighting enemies and Assassin's Creed, even though one of the better designed open world games, spends a huge amount of time with asking you to press into the direction of the radar.

i'm not really trying to say that zelda has better or worse gameplay than other large-world games. i'm just observing that other developers improved while Nintendo didn't, so the competition increased.
the more recent zelda games don't have the luxury of being interesting by default, even if they're just as good as they always were

maybe somebody likes the quests/lore/setting/loot in Morrowind/Oblivion more than 3d Zelda
maybe somebody likes the exploration/atmosphere in Metroid Prime more than 3d Zelda
maybe somebody likes the characters/story/presentation of GTA 3 more than 3d Zelda
so many games i didn't mention. MMOs too.

that's a huge difference from the state of affairs in 1998

 

[jariw]

That's the core of the Zelda franchise though. Lol.

Exploring the overworld, talking and connecting to the people/creatures, progressing in the story are just as much the core in a Zelda game - just as the straight-forward puzzles in a dungeon are. Dungeons can just as easily be seen as padding, it's just a POV.

 

[KeigoNiwa]

There really needs to be a set definition for padding in gaming. In my opinion padding is when they the game makes an over the top attempt to falsely extend a specific task in a game. I.e. 7 TriForce shards in the Wind Waker. Or the unnecessary spread of the Lanayru bugs in Twilight Princess.

I feel like people only want to play dungeons, and so they consider everything in between as padding. But that just isn't the case in my opinion. Some games are just better paced than others. I actually think OOT, TP and ALBW are well paced games, but MM and SS are horribly paced to me.

 

[Zipzo]

I'm just sitting here reminiscing on how I went through the original GC WW 6 times (2 reg and 4 hero quest) and 2 run throughs of WW HD (1 reg and 1 hero) and never felt like there was any padding.

I mean I get how people would think of it as padding but ocean curiosities was sort of the theme, so I was never low on enjoyment even during that part of the game.

 

[zsidane]

Today, I learned a new word: Padding.

 

[RagnarokX]

- Find all three Kikwis before the elder gives you the Slingshot.
- Find the five pieces of the key before you can access the Earth Temple.
- Fetch some holy water from the central chamber of the first dungeon, even though you already beat it.
- Fetch more water from the character you gave water to earlier in the game so you can access the Fire Sanctuary.
- Collect a bunch of tadpoles by swimming around a now-flooded version of the first area because one of the gods in the game (the same character mentioned in the two previous points) feels like making you jump through hoops to "earn" their magic.
- Collect tears of light because the goddess wants to test you - four times.

Eh, of those only the return to Skyview Temple was really padding and even that took, what, 10 minutes?

Finding the Kikwis is straight up classic Zelda questing. You can actually find them without even talking to the elder and they give you a good reason to explore the area and use your skills. The quest naturally works into the story you're still moving forward. Ditto with the keys in Eldin. Getting to the summit required taking a linear winding path, but the you open the area up and find new sections. Finding them uses your Zelda skills to track them and solve environmental puzzles to reach them.

Escorting Scrapper... Well, I suppose the excuse for this is pretty lame but... I love the bow controls in SS and an excuse to use the bow was fine with me.

Tadtones presented a unique challenge. I wouldn't mind if they cut it but I enjoyed it.

The Silent Realms were some of the best parts of the game. Really fun and challenging.

I mean really by your standards the dungeons are all padding because they're just an excuse to keep you from the items. Can't get the master sword in ALttP because some jerk decided you needed 3 pendants for some reason and stuck them in dungeons. So the gods in SS decide to test you in different ways that still make great use of your skill. As long as there is adequate challenge and the stuff doesn't take too long I won't feel like the game is stalling.

Would agree with this. I actually think SM 64 is actually almost ALL padding. I was always under the impression that the whole "collect X number of stars from each level" mechanic was due to some sort of constraint during development, whether that was time, storage space on a cartridge, or some combination of the two.

Prior Mario games were nearly entirely about just getting to the end of a level. It always seemed to me that in Mario 64 there was a realization that players would have to play all of the levels multiple times or the game would seem really short, so we ended up with stars.

I get that it's a landmark game that redefined 3D movement for home video games, much like Super Mario Bros did on NES for 2D movement... but I always thought it was kind of overrated as a game, and would have preferred something with more levels, and less stars in each level.

This a point I've made in past Mario discussions. As great as Mario 64 is the stars are an excuse to pad the game. You'll have a mission where the goal is to go to point B. Then mission 2 is to go to point B again and take 10 more steps. About half of the missions shouldn't be standalone missions, but they all kick you back out of the level and force you to retread the entire level when you complete one. It's like if NSMB made you restart every time you got a star coin.

 

[ugly]

There's hope that Zelda U follows LBW's example. I remember that Aonuma frequently mentioned lessons learned in LBW would pay off in Zelda U. However, in my experience, open world games are often high in padding, so it will be interesting to see how this all pads out.

FTFY!! Ziiiiiinngggg

OoT definitely had padding. What do you think the Adult Link section was? With only few exceptions, all of the new areas are dungeons. Forest Temple has no new areas before it, Fire Temple has one new area (that really doesn't have much outside of the temple), Water Temple doesn't have any new areas, and Shadow Temple just has an area that you can't access without a Hookshot (IIRC). The desert was the only new area in the game, really.

That's not padding, that's just not having to make a whole new area to get to the dungeons, which is what we're all here for.

 

[Gsnap]

They don't. At least, not as much as people claim they do. Most people equate padding to "things I don't like", which is illogical and makes their definition of padding incredibly inconsistent. For instance, in this very thread you have people saying things from TP aren't padding, but things from SS are despite those things being basically the same thing.

The truth of it all is that we'll never really know what is and is not padding in a game because the real definition of padding is "things the developers added to increase the length of the game because they thought the game needed to be longer whether or not those things were actually worthwhile". And because we didn't make the game and we don't know what was going on in the devs heads when certain content was made, we can't actually discern what was padding and what wasn't. Entire dungeons could be padding for all we know.

Because we can't actually know these things, then we should at least try to come up with a definition of padding that avoids the pitfalls of "i like it" 'i don't like it", and can remain relatively consistent between games. Which is tough, yeah, but we should at least try. I propose we define padding as "Something in the game that adds no meaning to the game, either via gameplay or otherwise." Keep in mind, it's not "something that adds no meaning to you." It's something that adds no meaning period. Now, it might be difficult to discern between things that we personally find meaningless and things that are truly meaningless, but I still think it's important to try. For instance, a lot of people didn't like the tadtones in SS. Understandable. From a story point of view, it was pretty contrived. The Water Dragon asks you to prove your worth instead of just unflooding the place for you, despite you having proved your worth to her at least two times already. That, and a lot of people hate swimming levels no matter what. So it's no surprise that a lot of people would dislike this section. However, that doesn't mean that it is without meaning. It does add to the gameplay. It adds a unique challenge, and changes the way you interact with the entire forest, going from mostly 2-dimensional gameplay to complete 3-dimensional gameplay, allowing you to see the world from points of view you've never seen before, and challenging you with learning the layout of the forest all over again now that the new freedom of exploration will likely throw your sense of direction for a bit of a loop. So you didn't enjoy it? Ok, I didn't really care for it either, but it has meaning.

Another part of SS, the part where you have to go down to the surface and gather the pinwheel, I would say is actually padding because when I try to view it as objectively as possible I still can't find any meaning in it. It adds nothing new or interesting from a gameplay perspective. All you do to get it is walk to it, just like you've been walking everywhere else (hell if I remember correctly there's a bird statue right next to it so you can just drop right in 5 feet from it without even having to traverse the volcano again), and the task of gathering it doesn't add anything to the story as well. Now, keep in mind that it was necessary for the pinwheel to be missing from one of the towers because if it wasn't you could activate them earlier than the game wanted you to. However, it wasn't necessary for it to be lying on the surface. You could have just had the handyman character working on fixing it, preventing Link from accessing it. Because talking to him and him saying "Oh yeah, it's in my house, I'll go grab it for you real quick" adds just as much meaning to the game as you going down to the surface to get it (ie not that much).

I didn't really enjoy either of these sections, tadtones or pinwheels, but I'd only classify one of them as padding. So, with this in mind, Zelda games don't actually have that much padding. It's just a bunch of people telling you that they don't like doing certain things, but are ok with doing other things.

 

[Haganeren]

Hum, for a lot of people padding seems to mean "returning to place your already visited". It's actually something i love to do myself. I think it's part of how you make some place really memorable. Of course, sometime it doesn't work at all but in Zelda it mainly work for me and i know a whole sub genre which i love especially for that. (collect-a-thon like Banjo or Mario 64)

 

[WrenchNinja]

It's returning to a place you already visited with an uninteresting or tedious twist.

 

[BGBW]

It's returning to a place you already visited with an uninteresting or tedious twist.

Does that mean opening a light world save file in aLttP is considered padding?

 

[WrenchNinja]

I don't know what that means

 

[Dimmle]

If by padding you mean stuff like Tears, Triforce pieces, tadtones, etc., yeah, I absolutely agree. I'm not sure when collectible sequences became a staple in 3D Zelda.

 

[A Link to the Past]

FTFY!! Ziiiiiinngggg



That's not padding, that's just not having to make a whole new area to get to the dungeons, which is what we're all here for.

That's the thing, before OoT only ALttP even remotely did the "retreading" thing, and even then in completely new ways. LA, AoL, and LoZ had entirely original areas to traverse for nearly every dungeon. In the end, both the reuse of locations for the Adult Link section and the Triforce Quest exist to extend game length.

 

[LegendofLex]

Finding the Kikwis is straight up classic Zelda questing.

If you never had to do something like it in the original game, it's not really accurate to call it "straight up classic Zelda questing."

You can actually find them without even talking to the elder

But this doesn't let you progress in the story.

and they give you a good reason to explore the area and use your skills.

When the most interesting thing to find in the world is the mandatory fetch quest objectives, there is no good reason to explore the area (except for that the game is making you). How does that come off as good design?

Getting to the summit required taking a linear winding path, but the you open the area up and find new sections. Finding them uses your Zelda skills to track them and solve environmental puzzles to reach them.

The only point of the opened-up part of the environment was to find the pieces of the key.

It doesn't stand up for its own sake.

Escorting Scrapper... Well, I suppose the excuse for this is pretty lame but... I love the bow controls in SS and an excuse to use the bow was fine with me.

This is a lame excuse. You didn't need an escort mission to have a reason to use the bow; you could have just had an area with tough enemies that are much easier to fight with the bow.

Tadtones presented a unique challenge. I wouldn't mind if they cut it but I enjoyed it.

I enjoyed it, too.

It didn't need to be part of the main quest.

The Silent Realms were some of the best parts of the game. Really fun and challenging.

I agree, I liked these and thought their existence was justified in the main quest.

They're still padding, though. They hide a bunch of objects in an area you've already explored and make you go find them. Alternatively, they could have hidden the item you get for beating the Silent Realms in a new area and had you find them the traditional way. Lord knows there wasn't anything really interesting surprising to find in the overworld otherwise.

I mean really by your standards the dungeons are all padding because they're just an excuse to keep you from the items.

The dungeons are the levels of the game. They are themselves the areas you're meant to conquer and explore.

Fetch quests aren't levels; they're tedious chores required of the player, layered on top of areas that could have existed/should have been able to exist without fetch quests. They could have been replaced by dungeons and/or new overworld segments that lead you to the same result.

This a point I've made in past Mario discussions. As great as Mario 64 is the stars are an excuse to pad the game. You'll have a mission where the goal is to go to point B. Then mission 2 is to go to point B again and take 10 more steps. About half of the missions shouldn't be standalone missions, but they all kick you back out of the level and force you to retread the entire level when you complete one. It's like if NSMB made you restart every time you got a star coin.

I agree; this is a really big problem I have with Super Mario 64. I think Super Mario 64 is horrendously overrated; I think there's a reason Galaxy surpassed it.

So going by this definition, every time you're required to find something in a game is padding? Having to find a key in a dungeon to unlock a door is padding? Collecting stars in Mario 64 is padding? Most games are entirely padding?

Lock-and-key dungeon design isn't padding. The keys are integrated into the design of the dungeon; good dungeon design is design that makes it difficult to get to the heart of the maze. (Even then, I think Zelda should minimize its reliance on keys; in the original game you could often skip large segments of dungeons if you found the proper shortcut.)

The collect-a-thons I'm talking about all exist in areas that you can otherwise freely explore. There's no innate trait of overworld design that makes a mandatory collect-a-thon essential to good overworld design. They're simply arbitrary mandatory tasks introduced to keep the player from moving forward even if their free exploration leads them to what would have otherwise been the "end" of the area.

In classic Zelda, you could go straight to almost any dungeon if you wanted. But sometimes the dungeon (or the pathway to the dungeon) would be too tough, and it'd be beneficial to explore the rest of the area and find secrets like Heart Containers and shops to power yourself up before you entered the dungeon. And sometimes you'd get lost on the way to the dungeon; finding the dungeon itself was a kind of challenge.

Collect-a-thons are a novelty that was introduced because this kind of design simply disappeared from the franchise. They're a poor substitute for that classic balance, and so I think they're relatively speaking poor design and should be pruned in favor of the classic approach to overworld progression. When I talk about padding, I'm talking about the game having to introduce extra hoops for the player to jump through because the natural gameplay - the free exploration, the combat, etc. - fail to offer any kind of challenge for the player to overcome on the way to the next level.

 

[Nerrel]

I think Skyward Sword has next to no padding.

I'm sorry, but... no. I'm one of the people who loves Skyward Sword and I'd play it over TP any day of the week, but it has a shitload of uninteresting content. The tadtone collection is maybe the best example, but there are plenty of moments where you have to revisit previously cleared areas and essentially clear them again, just with a few twists. Fighting the imprisoned 3 times over was pretty ridiculous, since he didn't change much other than gaining a single new ability each time. Fighting him twice, with the second time adding his arms, flight, and Groose all at once might have differentiated the battles enough to keep it fun. I didn't mind Ghirahim being repeated because he's fun enough to fight over and over.

In general, a lot of the content doesn't feel that inspired of fun. The gratitude crystals kind of reminded me of the mask collection in MM, but they weren't really that vital to collect and there didn't seem to be much reward for doing it. Just getting the required amount to earn all the heart pieces and then quitting is fine. There's a lot of optional content, but a lot of it is random, tedious stuff that doesn't provide a very big payoff. I don't feel compelled to help everyone and see everything the way I was in MM. Again, I think the problem is a lack of focus and spreading things too thinly.

 

[Yoshi]

I'm sorry, but... no. I'm one of the people who loves Skyward Sword and I'd play it over TP any day of the week, but it has a shitload of uninteresting content. The tadtone collection is maybe the best example, but there are plenty of moments where you have to revisit previously cleared areas and essentially clear them again, just with a few twists. Fighting the imprisoned 3 times over was pretty ridiculous, since he didn't change much other than gaining a single new ability each time. Fighting him twice, with the second time adding his arms, flight, and Groose all at once might have differentiated the battles enough to keep it fun. I didn't mind Ghirahim being repeated because he's fun enough to fight over and over.

In general, a lot of the content doesn't feel that inspired of fun. The gratitude crystals kind of reminded me of the mask collection in MM, but they weren't really that vital to collect and there didn't seem to be much reward for doing it. Just getting the required amount to earn all the heart pieces and then quitting is fine. There's a lot of optional content, but a lot of it is random, tedious stuff that doesn't provide a very big payoff. I don't feel compelled to help everyone and see everything the way I was in MM. Again, I think the problem is a lack of focus and spreading things too thinly.

There is a huge difference between "I do not like" and "it is padding". Revisting areas is not padding in itself and SS always changes up the gameplay when revisting something with the exception of that one instance where you needed to go back into the first dungeon. This was padding. The Tadtones absolutely are not padding. I enjoyed them but even if I didn't that would not make them padding. I would also not have needed three fights against the Imprisoned, but still, it's three different fights with some similarities. These new abilities the Imprisoned gains are not miniscule, they play an important role in the fights.

 

[WrenchNinja]

The tad tones are absolutely padding given the stupid ass context you're told to do them in. Just because you like it doesn't make it not padding.

 

[LegendofLex]

There is a huge difference between "I do not like" and "it is padding". Revisting areas is not padding in itself and SS always changes up the gameplay when revisting something with the exception of that one instance where you needed to go back into the first dungeon.

"Changing up the gameplay" is not the thing that makes a gameplay segment something that doesn't get in the way of progress through the game purely for the sake of filling up playtime rather than for the sake of implementing a full-featured world/dungeon.

 

[The Boat]

The tad tones are absolutely padding given the stupid ass context you're told to do them in. Just because you like it doesn't make it not padding.

Even if they are stupid, they serve the purpose of having the player traverse the forest in a completely different way, you're essentially flying through the forest and fighting and progressing in a totally different way.
Just because you don't like the context they're given, doesn't mean they're padding.

 

[EatinOlives]

You finished TWW faster because it has 5 dungeons

Oddly enough I think this is the only instance where 3D Zelda padding has worked REALLY well.

I actually really, really, really liked that part and I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I think people miss the ways that it was designed well. The game dumps you to the overworld and tells you you're supposed to find long-lost Triforce shards. It really conveys the feeling of "where the hell ARE these things??", and if instead of thinking "ugh I gotta do these random things to get to the next dungeon" and instead take your time exploring the world, it actually works really well pacing-wise.

Everything around that sequence is centered around exploration. To find the maps you have to chart the islands, which is something you didn't really have to do until now. Then the fish can sometimes tell you this is where a map may be. You complete a small side dungeon or other task and acquire the map, but now you have to pay an increasingly higher amount of rupees to get them deciphered. So now there's a real reason to collect rupees (which is always an issue in Zelda games since you always get more rupees than you need), and it encourages exploration of the world since you actually want to find the wallet now. It brings forth a lot of the mechanics and different hidden things of the world in an organic way. For instance, you have to find the wallets because you want to, not because there was a contrived plot reason for you to go do it. You start looking for ways to make a lot of money which in itself leads to you looking into a lot of the minigames that reward you with money. This is different from minigames in TP such as the ranching minigame where they tell you "go do this because I say so".

3D Zelda games are increasingly more linear, and I found that stepping back and letting the player do whatever they want in WW as they look for the shards to be a really nice change of pace, and I think it's an incredibly underrated part of the game. Hell, I think this part is actually the reason why I consider WW to be the best, because it's the only Zelda game in a really long time where exploration is a key part of the main quest.

The other kind of padding, such as in TP where they continue to pointlessly force you to go from one place to another because of story reasons, is the on-rails kind of padding that is truly terrible, and is completely the opposite of what WW did. I don't think it's fair to treat both as the same.

 

[WrenchNinja]

Even if they are stupid, they serve the purpose of having the player traverse the forest in a completely different way, you're essentially flying through the forest and fighting and progressing in a totally different way.
Just because you don't like the context they're given, doesn't mean they're padding.

If only different meant good

 

[whiterabbit]

I'm planning on getting Ocarina of Time if the price drops on the eShop tomorrow. I'm glad to hear it doesn't have much padding compared to the newer Zelda games. I owned OoT on N64, but it's been a long time since I played it.