- In what kind of setting you'd like to find them?
They get a bad rap but for years I've wanted a dungeon in the sewers under a big town. I don't know why but I love sewers in video games. Maybe it's because that's where I belong, who can say. I can just picture these grand, white stone waterways built as an engineering marvel many years before that are now filthy, the walls stained green and black, nearly forgotten and filled with creatures that like the dark and damp, and much worse besides. I mean, nasty things happen in big cities. People die, and you don't always have the means to bury the body, you know. Wonder, er, wonder where some mean-spirited people might dump a body they need to get rid of. Hey, if nothing else, it could give 'cleansing the dungeon' a literal reinterpretation.
- What would be the lore around said dungeon?
I fall somewhere between
@Castle and
@DarkestLink when it comes to lore. I don't want dungeons to be disconnected from the world with no justification or reason, but I also don't want everything spelt out for me.
Castle mentioned how Snowpeak Ruins makes no sense as a location, but I disagree. For starters, it's a mansion, so it was someone's house. That's a reason for it to exist already. But it's also full to the brim with weapons, armour, even cannons. The proportions of the doors are human but the armour clearly isn't. So what's going on? The location also very suspect. It's isolated and inhospitable, but the approach to the mansion is a narrow strip of rock that must have been eroding for some time. Maybe Snowpeak looked entirely different in centuries past and this mansion is all that's left of a once thriving community. We don't get any explicit answers, but there's enough unique and interest details and aspects that the player is invited to speculate (
the way I did in this thread here, go on, give it a click
).
This is how I like my dungeon lore. I want something to form a foundation for my own speculation. Dungeons are more fun for me this way. Arbiter's Grounds is another good example. We know it's a prison, we know it was built by Hylians, we know it's in the Gerudo Desert, we know there don't seem to be any Gerudo around, we know the Hylians fought the Gerudo king, and we know the prison is full of ghosts, zombies, and skeletons.
Hmmmm... There's a very dark story in there and I prefer that the game doesn't tell it. It speaks to the history of Hyrule and the way the society feels about that history. Such a grand structure being abandoned suggests a deep shame about what happened there. Or maybe there is no shame and the Hylians were driven out by vengeful ghosts. Either way, I prefer being free to read whichever of those stories I want.
As for my idea of sewer dungeon specifically, well I already hinted above about it once being a source of pride and now being a dumping ground for the city's less savoury characters. I'd be hesitant to go any further and rather let environmental design do the rest of the heavy lifting, suggesting things, insinuating ideas, but never outright telling anything.
- What kind of architecture would be cool?
A SEWER!
This is something I've not thought about as much, but I like when there's a mix of broad architecture. What I mean is I like when the game mixes things up between flat, wide dungeons and tall, thin ones. Towers offer interesting opportunities for puzzles and navigation. You could do like WW's Tower of the Gods and have each floor be an isolated set of challenges that get progressively harder as you ascend. Or you could do like also WW's Dragon Roost and have the player navigate inside and outside the tower.
Dungeons that alternate between indoors and outdoors is also something that I generally like but see very little of in Zelda. It's so infrequent that the sheer fact the boss for ALBW's Desert Palace is in Lorule while the dungeon itself is in Hyrule still makes me giddy with excitement. It's such a cool idea. ALttP's Desert Palace is split between two sections and you need to go outside in order to get to the second part, such a simple thing that has been in my memory for literally twenty-five years. Goron mines in TP has an open air section and WW's Dragon Roost
and Tower of the Gods have you go on the outside of the towers. SS even manages to do this (!!) in the Fire Sanctuary, with the bridges over the central canyon. I love all this kind of design and want to see it more. Not in every dungeon, of course, just more than we currently do.
- What kind of core mechanic/theme/objective would drive it (things like timeshift stones, or changing water flow)?
This wouldn't be appropriate for a sewer dungeon, but I have had an idea in mind for a long time about a dungeon that uses steam as a central mechanic. There are several ways this could be done. Perhaps you have a water-based dungeon and Link has some means of starting fires to boil the water, driving machines and such to change the shape of the dungeon or open new paths and all that business. I do thing this idea would be best done if Link had a means to start fires
and produce water. That way the player wouldn't just have to figure out the fire part, but how to get the water where it needs to be, too.
Similarly, an ice-based dungeon where you use fire to create water instead of steam. It could work in much the same sort of way. Knid of like TP's Lakebed Temple but instead of opening grates to make water flow you have to figure out how to melt ice. I think something like that, using elemental environments in a more direct manner, could be really fun.
-Would you like them to continue to have elemental themes (forest, fire, water etc.) or be more generic?
I would, but I agree with
@Spirit that some themes are overdone. I think one way to make them fresh would be to combine elements, like what I was talking about above with regard to creating steam. getting out of that mindset of 'red, green, blue' would be good for the series overall. Arbiter's grounds was desert, but full of ghosts. Snowpeak was ice, but full of soldiers. Bottom of the Well was a torture dungeon. Jabu-Jabu was the inside of a giant fish. Thieves Town was a bandit hideout. It's the greatest tragedy of WW that the Ghost Ship isn't a dungeon.
Dungeons can be absolutely anything, and even elemental ones can defy archetypes by putting unexpected things in them. I don't want elemental dungeons to go away, but I do want them to display more creativity to cover for their commonality.
Thank you for attending my ZeD talk.
