Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom devs on why we likely won’t get a Zelda Mario Maker game
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom devs on why we likely won’t get a Zelda Mario Maker game
I can see making a Mario level with very player friendly tools because the game is so conceptually simple.
A Zelda game on the other hand is much more conceptually complex. The complexity of the editor you'll need to build a Zelda dungeon is either going to be very simple, but you then get a "shuffle the pre-made challenge rooms in the order YOU want" or maybe a mediocre maze editor, or you'll basically have to ship a copy of Godot with the tile sets and enemies and such already made.
There's also the fact that a single Zelda dungeon isn't as interesting by itself. Without the context of the overworld, the dungeons that came before, the overworld puzzles, a given dungeon is "solve a maze and fight a boss." Whee.
Exactly. I love Zelda games because of the progression in each dungeon (also why I didn't like BotW much). The dungeons themselves are rarely challenging (some bosses can be though), and the puzzles are mostly interesting because you use tools you've collected along the way, sometimes in ways you didn't think of at first. You may do something a certain way in dungeon A, and then when you get a new tool, you see something similar but solve it differently (i.e. the old way is blocked) using the new tool. It all builds on each other.
Standalone dungeons miss that context.
That said, maybe it makes sense in TotK because it likely has BotW-like shrines that aren't tied to progression elsewhere. Idk, I didn't play it because I was disappointed w/ BotW.
I suspect it's more about the difficulty of generalizing a bug-free experience. Nintendo likely has internal tools which do this in a relatively reasonable and user friendly way, with the major caveat that it relies on a QA stage for production viability. The complexity is just too high to not have that safety net, so turning users loose on it would just make the experience too unstable to be viable.
They already did it as a minigame that nobody cared about in the Link's Awakening remake.
It also wasn't well done. Specifically because solving a Zelda dungeon requires solving a puzzle. The dungeon builder they let you make was just "beat all the rooms" which isn't fun.
To follow the traditional formula you need explore the dungeon and run into obstacles. Then you get the dungeon item. Now you return and unlock new rooms. It usually starts with obvious/easy uses of the item, then more complicated.
Give me an F-zero 99 + Mode7 Mario Kart Mario Maker game. Simple 2D maps.