February Eve
ZD District Attorney
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2010
- Location
- USA
Twilight Princess had changing seasons in the fishing hole - the wiki has screenshots of it. It was used to make fish rarer to catch, particularly the Hylian Loach. I'm having trouble figuring out how it could be implemented on a large scale, however.
The thing about Majora's Mask is that nothing was ever permanently changed. Defeating Snowhead Temple did make the winter disappear, but it would return when you played the Song of Time again. Other Zeldas are more linear and it would be harder to work into the storytelling. But the game needs an ability to switch between seasons so that it's not impossible to miss a secret in the game. That is, if there were a heart piece you could only get during winter, once spring came you knew that you could eventually switch it back. To keep this characteristic there would have to be some ability to change seasons back and forth, as well as an in-game explanation of why Link could do that.
The closest I can think of is doing something like that of the WiiWare game, LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias. In that game, an unnatural winter had fallen upon parts of the world, but there were statues in most areas. At a certain point of the game you learned something that let you activate these statues, and it allowed you to change between winter and summer. It did change the puzzles significantly. If I recall correctly, waterfalls normally blocked entrances, but in winter they turned to fragile ice, allowing you to break the ice and go behind the waterfall. You also needed to change some ponds to ice in order to carry things across, and in reverse, you had to unfreeze some to get treasure from the bottom.
I could see Zelda using a game mechanic like that - such as the Song of Seasons - to make the terrain different. And someone mentioned weather up thread; they've done that before, too, with the Song of Storms being used to make it rain. It would be a nice way to add nonlinearity to the game, and if some changes were fairly static - Hyrule field, for example, slowly going from winter to fall - a neat way to show the passage of time on Link's journey.
The thing about Majora's Mask is that nothing was ever permanently changed. Defeating Snowhead Temple did make the winter disappear, but it would return when you played the Song of Time again. Other Zeldas are more linear and it would be harder to work into the storytelling. But the game needs an ability to switch between seasons so that it's not impossible to miss a secret in the game. That is, if there were a heart piece you could only get during winter, once spring came you knew that you could eventually switch it back. To keep this characteristic there would have to be some ability to change seasons back and forth, as well as an in-game explanation of why Link could do that.
The closest I can think of is doing something like that of the WiiWare game, LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias. In that game, an unnatural winter had fallen upon parts of the world, but there were statues in most areas. At a certain point of the game you learned something that let you activate these statues, and it allowed you to change between winter and summer. It did change the puzzles significantly. If I recall correctly, waterfalls normally blocked entrances, but in winter they turned to fragile ice, allowing you to break the ice and go behind the waterfall. You also needed to change some ponds to ice in order to carry things across, and in reverse, you had to unfreeze some to get treasure from the bottom.
I could see Zelda using a game mechanic like that - such as the Song of Seasons - to make the terrain different. And someone mentioned weather up thread; they've done that before, too, with the Song of Storms being used to make it rain. It would be a nice way to add nonlinearity to the game, and if some changes were fairly static - Hyrule field, for example, slowly going from winter to fall - a neat way to show the passage of time on Link's journey.
