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Building off of what I did last week, I wanted to take another dive into some systems in the new Legend of Zelda game and the strange push and pull that goes on. By which I mean that the game wants you to use certain mechanics, but other aspects of the game undermine that usage.
In describing a push and pull problem, we are talking about issues that don’t fall into a clean category. Sometimes it’s an issue of how that system interacts with other systems (new or old). Sometimes it’s a factor of how that system feels when it is meant to be used over and over and over again. Sometimes it is a problem for how many people engage with games and solve problems.
While obviously these are “problems” in the proper sense, we would be making a mistake to perceive them as “failures” per se. At best, these are mere lessons: bits and pieces of information for us to keep in mind for how to see and think about games from a bigger lens. Rather than merely saying that something “feels bad,” being able to explain in more specific and detailed ways how particular setups conflict with our aims as players allows us to deliver more thoughtful critiques.
I also wanted to try and examine this in its proper context. Tears of the Kingdom is not a game that exists in a vacuum. It is the latest game in the Zelda franchise – a franchise which has existed for nearly 30 years, and which has created numerous “standards” for what the games should include. Indeed, the concept of the “Zelda formula” is fairly well known to any fan of these games. Not only that, but Tears is a direct sequel to Break of the Wild, meaning it also has to conform to some basic elements of its predecessor.
I bring this context up because design often involves both giving players familiarity while also creating something new. I have written before about the tightrope that needs to be walked in creating a good sequel, and Tears does not escape the pull of this phenomenon. And so as the developers look to the flaws of Breath of the Wild, they seek to improve on the systems, and the question is to what extent those new elements help, and to what extent they don’t.
It should certainly be noted again that while I don’t plan on delivering narrative spoilers, for those who want to remain “pure” about the game they should stop reading immediately. As what will be discussed in this essay will reveal some core components of the gameplay.
Last week’s essay was on combat, the weapon degradation system, and the power of weapon fusion. I argued that while the new system gave players many more options for how they wanted to approach combat, the core system of degradation created major hindrances for the player. While the system worked well in its early stages to make combat feel tense because it could be costly, over time the loss of a weapon became a constant annoyance.
In this essay, I want to tackle the new power of Ultrahand, which is designed around putting objects together into unique constructions. And I wanted to pair this discussion with the game’s exploration mechanics – the way the player gets around the world. While there is plenty that could be said about the building mechanics, such as their awkwardness or the underlying issues with physics puzzles, I want to focus exclusively on the interaction of building and exploration because Ultrahand is in some ways an addition designed to aid in exploring.
Breath of the Wild Recap
So it would be best to start off, like in the previous essay, with a discussion of Tears’ predecessor.
In Breath of the Wild, you had several primary methods for traversing the map. The most obvious was just running. The game is fairly large, so it probably wouldn’t be ideal to run everywhere, but you were also able to sprint. Of course, sprinting requires stamina, which runs out fairly quickly.
You could also catch and ride horses. Horses were definitely faster, but came with a slight problem, being that you were somewhat chained to the horse if you wished to keep using it. While the game gave you a button to whistle and summon your horse, the whistle had a very limited range. So you would need to stay close to the horse to keep using it. Thankfully you don’t have to manually track it back down if you leave it in the middle of nowhere: a handful of stables are dotted throughout the world, and by visiting one you can easily just grab any of your horses, even if they’re miles away. But it still means that using a horse to explore requires a great deal of flat terrain and to start near a stable.
Then, of course, there’s climbing. There are a number of mountains, plateaus, and non-natural structures to climb on. Climbing requires stamina, but stamina requirements can be overcome by upgrading your stamina wheel (done by turning in collectibles that can also be used to increase your max health), or by cooking and eating foods that refill your stamina. There is a good deal of verticality to the world, and climbing is your primary method for going up.
For going down, you also get a paraglider early into the game. The glider requires stamina to use, but allows you to slowly float down to the ground, preventing fall damage. In addition, it also allows you to cover horizontal distances fairly quickly and safely. If there’s a big group of enemies in the way, just find a vantage point, jump off, and float over them. The paraglider could well be the single most used item across any BotW playthrough.
And then there’s teleportation. You can find shrines and towers dotting the map – shrines provide the aforementioned collectibles to increase your health and stamina, towers fill out the map. And unlocking those shrines and towers creates warp points. Altogether you get well over 100 places in the game to warp to, which covers a pretty good amount of the world. For just about any place you’d want to visit, there’s a shrine or tower that will be fairly close by.
There is actually one last thing: a motorcycle. As part of the major DLC for BotW, the player got a chance to uncover some new shrine puzzles, go through a new dungeon, fight a new boss, and as a reward get a motorcycle. It effectively worked as a horse that you could summon anywhere, requiring parts from the various robotic enemies you would encounter to fuel it. Once it was unlocked (which required completing the four main dungeons in the game, at the very least), it basically eliminated the value of the horses.
I bring all of these methods up because one of key questions in open world design – perhaps even the key question – is how the player gets around. When there’s a wide expanse to be explored, how will the player actually explore it? Not just in the sense of what options are provided, but how do other elements of the game encourage or discourage the use of those options? If you want players to ride horses everywhere, but horses are clunky and annoying to use, then players won’t use them…and as a consequence, they will find the world too time-consuming because it was built for using a faster exploration method. If you want players search every nook and cranny for neat bits of content, but make it difficult to get from place to place, then players will generally stick closer to the beaten path…and they might find the game a bit boring because they’re missing out on so much.
So getting that exploration right is important. It’s also tough, because you usually have so many things you also want the player to do at the same time. And you might be trying to offer a particular kind of experience (for example, trying to make the game feel more realistic) that might prohibit certain systems. All of these things push and pull against one another and create tension or even conflict.
Getting Around in Tears
So for the most part, exploration in Tears is the same. The same basic mechanisms are in place, such as running, climbing, horses, gliding, and so on.
The major addition to exploration comes through one of primary abilities you uncover in the tutorial: Ultrahand. Ultrahand is an ability to physically manipulate a variety of objects and glue them together to create all sorts of different structures. The system can be clunky, but does allows for a more thoughtful gameplay experience in many cases. Figuring out how to put objects together to solve many puzzles in the game, transport a Korok, or just get around effectively makes for an experience that is more puzzle-y.
One thing you are expected to do with Ultrahand is use it to put together various contraptions for getting around. Early into the game you are introduced to various devices, which include fans, rockets, gliders, carts, cannons, balloons, and so on and so on. There is a pretty wide variety of these devices, some used for transportation, some for attacking, some for utility purposes. These devices can then be attached to make all sorts of things. Perhaps you’ve seen players goofing around and making statues with a giant flaming cock and balls. Perhaps you’ve seen a video of a player that made an incredibly powerful attack drone. You can use your time to make something incredibly complex, incredibly silly, or just minimalistic to help you get from Point A to Point B.
The problem enters in with how the game pushes and yet discourages the creation and use of these contraptions for the purpose of getting around. Which is not to say that these devices and what you can build with them are useless. There are absolutely times when they come in handy. And it’s still entirely possible to just have fun and get invested in letting your imagination run wild. None of the problems I list suggest that players can never or should never use this mechanic, or that using devices is inefficient or playing the game wrong. Indeed, to some extent what I am arguing is that the game in many ways is pushing players to use these mechanics, and then builds the game in ways that encourage just running and climbing. The mismatch does not make either style of play “right,” but rather just illustrates the conflict.
However, as a mere function of the game where you build contraptions and explore, the process of putting together vehicles to get around runs into problems that often makes it feel like too much trouble. I mentioned in the previous section how the constraints on getting around and using a horse could easily make it feel like it isn’t really worth using a horse in the first place – just run and climb everywhere.
There ends up being four main barriers to using vehicles more frequently.
Vehicle Building & Resource Collection
The first is the process of putting together vehicles. Since you need to manually put these vehicles together before using them, there’s some amount of time that goes into gathering the parts (either removing them from your inventory or pulling them from the game world when available), then grabbing them, moving them around, attaching them, reattaching some because you messed up, and so on. Building a simple vehicle might take a minute or so, but something more complicated may require upwards of five minutes to put together.
There is a power you can acquire relatively early on in the game called Autobuild which speeds up this process dramatically. You can combine devices in any which way provided that you either A) have acquired a schematic for a pre-designed contraption (which can be found in the game’s new underground layer), B) have recently made the contraption in the past (the game saves the last 30 things you’ve built), or C) have saved a built vehicle to your favorites (the game allows you to save eight contraptions to this list). Autobuild solves a good deal of the time problem…
…as long as you have the materials. Which means one of two things. Firstly, you can supply the devices yourself. And devices can be gathered from various gachapon machines in the sky layer – just deposit the items it asks for and you’ll get a semi-random assortment of devices (not all machines carry all devices, so you’ll need to explore to gather them all). So if you spend time gathering those devices, you’ll have a ready supply of vehicles…so you just need to grind out the collection. Alternatively, the game gives you the option to use a different resource to just create the materials for you. Thus meaning you don’t need to collect the device. You just need to grind out the replacement resource.
Whatever the case, to use vehicles regularly you need to 1) acquire Autobuild (which you could easily skip in favor of doing other side content), 2) build some good vehicles that helps you get around, and 3) grind for the materials needed to build that vehicle multiple times in case you end up losing them.
Battery
Okay, but let’s say you’ve got the materials together to use those vehicles. And you’ve got Autobuild, so you can bypass the whole process of physically building your little car or motorcycle or plane.
Using that vehicle uses up a new meter added to the game: a battery. Every one of the devices drains power from the battery, with more devices drawing more power. The battery can drain pretty quickly in the early game. If your vehicle has only a single moving part, you might get a couple minutes of use out of it before your battery drains and you need to wait for it to recharge. If your vehicle has two or three or more, you may be lucky to get 30 seconds or so before each recharge period. Basically, it’s a process of moving, stopping, waiting, and then moving again.
So you’re left with one of two options. Firstly, you can just build your vehicles and use them, but with the knowledge that your trip will be a constant stop-and-go. If you can incorporate stops naturally into your journey – hopping off to gather food or fight enemies – then you can at least not feel that stopping as much. But if you just want to make a straight journey to wherever you’re going, then the need to stop and wait for the battery to recharge (or hop off and carry your vehicle a couple hundred feet before getting back onto it) is going to get annoying.
The other thing you could do is increase the size of your battery. Remember that resource I said you could use to create devices with Autobuild? You can also use that resource to purchase another resource, which can then be traded to increase the amount of charge your battery can hold. And you’ll need a lot of that resource…so you better get to gathering. Which means you’ll be spending a lot of time exploring and resource gathering just to be able to use the vehicles effectively.
So at the time when the game is supposed to be teaching you to use vehicles, get used to doing so, and learn to enjoy them, it runs into one of two problems. Either it limits your interactions in a way that makes the process of using vehicles feel annoying, or it sends you off to explore so you can eventually use vehicles.
Terrain
But alright, you’ve got the materials and a larger battery. Now you’re ready?
Well, there’s still the problem of terrain. This was the underlying problem in BotW with using horses: so much of your exploration would take you over valleys and canyons or over cliffs. Sure, there might be a relatively flat pathway somewhere that you could take a horse through. But that may well require going out of your way. Whereas you have so many tools at your disposal to just go straight there. Why bother with the horse, in that case?
Vehicles can often run into the same issue. At least on the ground. The various ground vehicles that you can make will likely run into one of two issues. Either they will struggle with difficult terrain, making them feel a bit useless, or else they will be able to handle that rougher terrain at the cost of speed. So you’re left with two choices that are going to feel a bit sub-optimal. Again, why bother with those solutions when you can just make a straight run and climb yourself?
Planes become the best solution to this issue: just fly over the problems altogether. But then that also makes so many of the other devices obsolete. And of course, flying planes is a great way to cover terrain quickly, but then that means you have to miss out on the little things on the ground (fights, pickups, finding caves, etc.).
Vehicle Life
Okay, so you’ve got your materials, your battery, and you’ve decided you want to fly. Why deal with terrain problems when you can just soar over them all?
Of course, you can’t really get around this way. Vehicles that allow you to cover vertical distances (gliders and balloons) tend to have a limited use life. After being used for too long, they begin to disintegrate. As you approach that limit, the vehicle will start to flash and make a pinging noise, getting more rapid until it just disappears into thin air.
Those bases do have a fairly long range. If I had to guess, maybe something like one quarter of the map’s size in a single vehicle. But that means if you do want to use a vehicle and do a lot of exploring, you’ll be using a good number of resources (and some time) rebuilding the vehicle over and over again.
Though at least as I mentioned this appears to only apply to flying. Ground-based vehicles appear to not disappear, or at least have a much greater range.
The cause of this disintegration is likely to prevent players from just traversing the entire map in a makeshift plane, which could take you basically anywhere. The limitation makes sense, but it still creates a problem for the actual desire to use vehicles. Because why make and use that vehicle to explore when I’m not sure that it will actually be able to get me to where I’m going?
Concluding Remarks
I find the Ultrahand building system and the addition of vehicles interesting. It definitely feels like the game wants players to make use of these new elements for getting around. Not only are the devices pretty easy to acquire, but the game’s world is filled pretty heavily with all sorts of things to build with. Planks of wood, wheels, fans, rockets, gliders, and so on. All there to be made use of.
The problem is that so much of the system feels in conflict with itself. Where the game wants you to make use of these systems, they keep running into a fundamental problem: why not just run instead? The limitations placed on the player can either make the process feel like too much trouble for everyday exploration, or else something to be done “later,” after you’ve gathered materials and built up your battery supply.
I would love to have had an excuse to use these mechanics more. There are absolutely uses I found for these systems at particular times. Balloons are great for making really big vertical climbs (very useful in the underground), and planes help you cover big horizontal distances (very helpful for the sky islands). But also these vehicles felt like something to use in response to very specific problems. The systems aren’t useless, but the game almost discourages players from getting the fullest use out of them. Players need to either be willing to spend time harvesting resources, or else have such a strong creative interest in making something that they don’t care if what they’re doing is incredibly resource – and time – intensive.
It is a system that is added to help you explore, and yet isn’t designed well for that exploration.
Abstracting Games 