Some thoughts on Zelda and "objectively good/bad" game design

This was originally an informal post that sort of blew up on Cohost, in which I used the discourse surrounding the open world Zeldas as an example of something that irks me in video game criticism.

I've been thinking a lot lately about game design literacy. I often see people who, if asked, would more than likely respond that yes, video games are art - and yet they seem to refuse to engage with elements of game design on that artistic level. Not just trying to suss out Themes from mechanics, but even simple things like trying to understand why a dev team might have made the design choices they did, how individual things that you may find annoying may be important for the overall experience. There's a lack of curiosity about design. Maximum convenience for the player and every single second of your experience being "fun" are still treated as universally desirable, even though no other artistic medium is widely judged in this way.

I've been seeing these sorts of things a lot lately specifically because of Tears of the Kingdom, which is a game that's gotten nearly unparalleled praise from critics while also departing from the traditional design of both older Zelda games and other open world games. This leads to many, many debates over the design of these games. Some of this is fair, but so often random takes fall into "this personally annoyed me, so it's bad" without any further thought.

"Why does this game need so many wide open fields with nothing in them?" Because empty space isn't necessarily wasted space. There's value in wide open areas. There's value in travel time. There's value in quiet time. There's value in having pretty landscapes to ride your horse across. This is true of composition in other forms of visual art, and it's true in level design.

"Why can't the game just give me a Piece of Heart directly instead of making me backtrack to a goddess statue?" Because it gives you a reason to go back to town. Maybe you go back to redeem your Spirit Orbs, and while there you find a side quest, or do some cooking, or sell your excess items, or notice that the NPCs are doing something else due to advances in the state of the game world. These sorts of games intentionally create a contrast between the dangers of the rest of the world and the safety of towns as part of their core loops, and they give you reasons to go back (you have to rest at an inn, you have to restock your potions, etc.) so that the main towns become comfortably familiar environments. You'll most likely have a much stronger emotional attachment to a video game town you visited regularly throughout your playthrough compared to one you passed through exactly once.

The big one is, of course, the weapon durability, which people have been arguing about nonstop for the last six years. I won't deny that I think weapons break a little too easily, and that it wouldn't kill the game to make everything last twice as long. I don't begrudge people who decide it's not for them. But that gear system is central to the game's design and the way it distributes rewards. The fact that you can go off in any direction and potentially find a really good sword is crucial - as is the fact that that sword will break.

But there's a fundamental incuriosity about why the game is designed that way, sometimes even among professional gaming pundits. I keep thinking back to James Stephanie Sterling's controversial review of the game, which opens with:

Nobody has ever been enjoying a videogame and thought, "this would be more fun if my sword broke." That is an absolute statement, and literally nobody on earth is more averse to absolutes than I am, but for as long as I live I’ll assert this particular statement on weapons to be 100% true.

Said review was, inevitably, swarmed with angry and/or transphobic gamers, and thus any hope for good faith criticism of her piece was out the window. But it feels very illustrative of this whole phenomenon. This design element annoyed me, so therefore it's Objectively Wrong and should not be in any game ever. Further down in the review, arguments trying to explain the thought behind the durability system are written off as excuses and/or blind Nintendo fanboyism.

Game design is complicated. I don't expect this to be instinctual knowledge everyone is born with. Most players will never really have a reason to think about these things. You get a better understanding of design choices when you try to make games yourself, or when you listen to designers talk about their own work. I don't think it's a coincidence that Game Maker's Toolkit started getting less prescriptive about game design and has shifted more to a "here's how different developers have tried to solve the same problems" approach now that Mark's making his own game and interviewing other devs directly. (No shade towards Mark Brown - I have watched the 2D Zelda "Boss Keys" episodes too many times as research for my own dungeon design work.)

And the thing is, if you do try to think about these things on a design level, fitting individual choices into the big picture, and you still don't like it? Then at least now you have a more informed opinion on it. To me, that just leads to better criticism and healthier discourse. You are allowed to see what a game is going for and still not like it for any number of reasons. You do not have to like open world Zelda more than other types of Zelda. Games are art, and art is subjective. But I just wish more people would get to that point. I wish it wasn't always a rhetorical question when people ask "what were they thinking?" I wish it could be a conversation with some back and forth at all, rather than being boiled down to angry hot takes over what is or isn't Objectively Fun.