General Zelda Does Size Matter?

[Spirit]

Bit of a misleading title....

the question is this; with games like ALttP, OoT, WW and TP having some of the biggest overworlds in Zelda and gaming (at the time for some) and now that time has passed for them, do they still feel large to you?

I can't help but load up OoT now and think of Hyrule Field as a small circular meadow with branching paths rather than the expansive field i once viewed it to be in my younger days.

Same with WW even though it can still take 7 minutes to get from one side of the map to the other at full wind speed without being interrupted it feels as if it is shrinking to me.

Of course this si to do with the progression of the gaming medium, games keep getting bigger and older games begin to feel smaller in comparison, but hiw about you guys, are you getting the sense of this in Zelda?
Are you beginning to feel as if the worlds aren't as big as they seemed anymore?

 

[HyruleHistory10]

I still think that they are large because A) I only have enough money to Play Zelda games and I think that for the System they are on they are great.

That is just me though.

 

[Ventus]

OoT only feels small to me if I'm playing the 3DS version, smaller resolution go figure. Still, it's bad to say that the games aren't smaller than a lot of modern day games, especially any open world title or MMORPG. So, yes, the games ARE smaller but they don't feel claustrophobic to me.

 

[CynicalSquid]

I think the design matters more than the size. You could have a giant overworld that has nothing in and it would be boring and you would have no reason to explore.

 

[DarkestLink]

I don't know how Wind Waker is shrinking when it still has the biggest overworld.

 

[misskitten]

It's not the size that matters, it's how much it contains. If it's empty, a large size is annoying, but if it contains a lot of things to do and discover, then it gets fun So whatever size the overworld of a game has should fit how much it contains.

 

[Castle]

Nope. It's not the size that counts it's how you use it. *Ahem!* Make the best use of space that is.

Really, just as it would be silly to purchase a house with a massive dining room then put nothing in it, in a video game you've gotta have something to do. Large stretches of empty virtual space serves nothing even if it's pleasing to look at. A game is meant to be played so there's gotta be toys to play with.

Twilight Princess is huge and empty. Nice to look at with a few things to fight here and there but largely an empty wasteland that just serves to make traveling in real time all the more time consuming. Then there's Wind Waker, the Zelda title that is most guilty of having a freakishly huge explorable game space with the greatest ratio of nothing happening per cubic yard of toon-shaded graphics.

Termina is comparably small yet densely packed with a ton of stuff to do crammed into every corner. Certainly the best use of virtual game space. Look at games such as Arkham City or Tomb Raider and you'll find goodies and stuff to collect or shoot or climb on within a few feet in any given direction.

So yes size matters. If you design a very big virtual space and don't put anything to do in it then it amounts to nothing more than a sight seeing tour.

Sometimes it seems to me that games that tout themselves as being freakishly huge but are largely empty are compensating for something ...

 

[Justac00lguy]

I actually think it does matter...

Of course people will be with the obvious argument and say it's about quality or the amount of content, that's all well and good and of course it is needed in some sort of fashion but in my opinion Zelda needs to have these larger worlds. I have talked about this before on how scale increases the overall grandeur of the game and makes it feel like an actual world rather than several landscapes being crammed into a small sandbox separated by Hyrule Field. You need this sort of scale the whole adventuring aspect come to life, if we are presented with a small overworld crammed with content there can be less emphasis on true exploration.

That leads me onto a point I made in a thread a few weeks back about overworld being sparse. I think this is important to again make the overworld feel actually more like a world and it adds to the whole adventuring aspect. We as a gamer need room to breath in a so called "open world", games like Skyward Sword may have had the content but it didn't have that open space in between, this put very little emphasis on exploration and if anything it made us feel trapped within a fish bowl.

Trust me I don't think there is anything wrong with content but it should be distributed in a manor that we have a contrast of areas with large open spaces that encourage exploration to areas brimming with stuff to do. The sparse areas should generally be the likes of Hyrule Field and instead of linear hallways leading into a province we should have large open areas that lead from one landscape into another. The high content areas should be the actual provinces themselves, slightly more open and less linear but still full of content that eventually leads us up to the dungeon.

Bigger isn't necessarily better but in my opinion if done correctly with a good differentiation between sparse and packed areas it would be a must I my eyes.

 

[dustinb12]

i just finished my second play of TP and i guess it did feel a little empty compared to WW. i actually didnt realize how big WW is until seeing this thread, because there is so much to do and explore which is why i enjoy zelda games. i must admit i dont know how big SS is compared to the others, but i did feel it was way too big to the point where i almost got bored with it, couldnt wait to just finish it. So i think size does matter, i rather a game with more to explore, not one in which it's made geographically bigger just to make the game a certain length

 

[misskitten]

I've been playing the HP games recently and I think they are a good example of how growth of an area needs to have an equivalent growth in content. The first two games had a relatively small area to explore (one smallhallway and a couple of rooms per floor), then the third game expanded on size, but at the same time added more to do (skipping the fourth, because it's the black sheep of the HP games), then the fifth had a massive growth of area, but was at the same time packed with things to do and discover, pretty much everywhere you went there was some secret to discover, some magic to perform, and finally you had a school where you felt like you really could take your time exploring, because the layout wasn't as straightforward as before, the staircases really did shift and move all over the place - sometimes to your advantage, other times not (unlike the first three where they barely moved at all).

The Zelda overworlds needs a similar pattern in terms of growth and content. If it's just big an empty it's gonna become an annoyance, because it will take forever to go anywhere you want and there's nothing much to do on the way.

 

[ihateghirahim]

Honestly they all pull off what they sought to achieve years ago (although I've never played alttp, woops). OoT provides the overworld it seeks to provide. So does the first game. WW was too big and empty. The quality of the games doesn't really change much over time. Its all about how an overworld is used within the game its in. OoT pulls this off perfectly; with exploration and enough size to make you have fun while not getting tedious. WW overdid the size bigtime, and it still fails today. Also, LOZ provides a big enough overworld to be fun and challenging within your search for the nine dungeons. Each game, except WW, has a great overworld for what it set out to do. WW failed when it came out in regards to size. It was too big then, and its too big now. (Nobody say anything inappropriate no matter how tempting)




Size matters not.
Moving rocks was one thing, but this is completely different.
No. No different. Only different in your mind.