Genuinely loved how this was broken down. I occasionally find myself bouncing off of games just from the tutorial due to that mental model problem, where some other games just instantly click with me. Breath of the Wild, for example, instantly clicked, but when I showed it to a friend, he couldn't find the fun. I disagree with simply stating "Oh, it gets better in 20 hours, just keep playing until you have fun." This is a great articulation of mental models, and how helping someone understand the model with gentle guidance can vastly improve the opening hours of a game.
A lot of games do get better after 20hrs. Day9 himself struggled to enjoy dark souls when he first played it. Even with elden ring he was pretty lukewarm about it until about 40hrs in. I don't get why a game not clicking with someone in the first few hours is such a bad thing when it is so commonplace
I stopped playing Breath of the Wild only on the basis of "I really don't like the weapons breaking". I understand the design decision - I just didn't enjoy it. Wife and kids are loving the game though.
@@pramitpratimdas8198 Because nobody wants to do something that's not really that fun for 20 hours just to get to the fun part. Just because it's common doesn't mean that it's okay. Games should be aiming for people to engage with the experience as soon as possible. It's about respect for the player's time.
Agreed on the fact that time and attention is at a premium. IMO, TotK took "It's about the journey, not the destination" and made that a core game mechanic.
Skipping breath of the wild magnified this effect for Day9. I remember feeling this same confusion during the great plateau in botw. Every zelda before was closer to a metroidvania. New dungeon, new ability, boss that can only be beaten with the new ability, open world that has a wall that can only be passed with the new tool to get to the next dungeon. When botw gave me all of the most valuable abilities instantly for free, I didn't understand what the point was going to be.... I already unlocked everything? Weird.
I don't think it makes a difference. BotW tutorial is much less painful, you have much less traveling between the 3 tutorial shrines. But the "problem" (using that word as lightly as possible) doesn't change. I lost focus after a while. I got a horse, reached the first story quest village, but thats it. the puzzles are cool. the fighting is cool. but it felt like a massive pain in the ass to travel between those things. And I still have no idea where you go to do the first ancient beast. I think Ubisoft open world with a million tags identifying every objective on your map is a million times worse. but the subtlety of the golden wind from some points of grace in elden ring is sooo brilliant. do whatever you want but the next "Big Guy" is over that way somewhere.
@@SquintyGears In TotK, direction is given in multiple unobtrusive ways to the point where, if you're confused about where to go, most landmarks you reach will get you caught on a thread that you can pull to find the major story beats that unlock various modes of exploration, travel, and unique equipment. It's one of those things that you can easily tune out if you're just going on your way and exploring what you want at your own leisure, but around the 10th time one of the Stable attendants said Lookout Landing was looking for people to help, I realized that I may have missed something there and, sure enough, going back put me on a path to unlock more tools to add to my arsenal. Even the most straightforward direction the game gives you, the mission waypoints, leave it completely up to the player to figure out how to get there, meaning that unless the player is _explicitly_ going for the mission, they're likely to stumble across multiple POIs and get distracted. (most likely Shrines, as the tutorial clearly sets up that they're the primary way to increase max health, something players are likely going prioritize once they realize most enemies in the game will 2-shot an unarmored Link with 4 hearts) I absolutely agree that the mindset the game requires is a significantly different one that in games where the path is clearly laid out for you, and your abilities have clear, cut-and-dry utilizations. But when I was playing the game, that room to be curious and creative felt like a breath of fresh air compared to some of the more hand-holdy games as of late. By the end of the tutorial, I had a pretty good grasp on the core tools at my disposal through good environmental design and testing. One of my fondest, early memories in the game was finding a shrine with a seesaw puzzle, noticing that it wanted me to use ultrahand to weigh down one side to use it as a ramp... and then promptly ignoring that, walking onto the seesaw to get it to tilt one way, tilting it the other way, and just using recall to rewind the ramp its initial position while I was on the end, solving the puzzle. It's that kind of clever ingenuity that the game not only allows for, but _rewards_ that makes me really appreciate the game personally. Sure, the rewards in and of themselves may not always be entirely worthwhile, but to me, coming up with a stupid solution to a puzzle that the game accepts is enjoyable in its own right. It's that same kind of, "there's no way the game allows this" and "what happens if I combine these elements in this way" that I've only ever really felt while playing Scribblenauts of all games, and the fact that I got that level of enjoyment out of a game that already had the core gameplay of its extremely solid predecessor just expounded on my overall enjoyment of the game.
@@pramitpratimdas8198 no. you get 1 marker for 1 quest. that's the only thing that goes on your map. you have the ability to put a maximum of 5 or 6 more markers manually. fast travel points get added when you unlock them on by one. it does not highlight every single point of interest and collectible in your vicinity when you '"tower scan/eagle vision". having manual marker points is a completely different system. these two zelda games and elden ring did almost the exact same thing with their maps.
It’s honestly the best content he puts out. I love everything else but the actual “inside scoop” of game design is so intriguing. I understand where’s he’s coming from with his approach, but it just doesn’t mesh with what TotK is doing, and it doesn’t help that it’s a sequel to a game he hasn’t played. TotK is a true sandbox game. It’s not meant to give the players any real direction. Like an irl sandbox you hop in, are given toys (tools), and the rest is up to you. It’s the absolute best-case scenario of a game designer telling gamers to (metaphorically), “Go out and play”.
I actually had this problem with Breath of the Wild. Coming from older Zelda games that were very linear, the open world aspect of the game wasn't clicking for me because I didn't understand how the game intended for me to have fun. It was only after I had left the game, saw people just chilling out and wandering around that I figured it out, came back, and had a blast.
This was the same for me. My initial takeaway for Breath was that it is was a really cool climbing simulator. Luckily I played it with several other people and had a similar experience to you. Thankfully because of this I was able to enjoy Tears pretty much as soon as I farmed a bit and ran in one direction, eventually heading to the major plot points.
In my mind, I agree they didn't succeed in making a compelling tutorial island, and the main reason was they had two competing things they wanted to get across to the player that were somewhat in conflict. On the one hand, they want to establish early on that you are open to go wherever you want, so they don't want to put obstacles that force the player on a certain path (i.e. what if the player does C->B->A instead of A->B->C?). If they force a certain path, then the worry would be that the player will be looking for a clear path the rest of the game. On the other hand, they want to show the player that their powers can be used to interact with the world in creative ways. But to do that without forcing a linear path, you need to either only show that off in the shrines, or create more of an incentive to explore "optional" parts of the island - maybe instead of just pointing you to the 4th shrine, the game could have also highlighted different challenges/treasures on the island you could get (i.e. a monster with armor that requires a rock fused weapon, an elaborate chasm gap/construction, etc.) By highlighting a few "optional" treasure chests that required creative use of the abilities, it might have been able to bridge the two ideas better.
Breath Of The Wild's tutorial area actually adressed all of this, by giving the player way more freedom. You can go to virtually any of the four main abilities in any order. It gives you a tiny open world. TotK's tutorial is very linear. I was confused too, for other reasons.
I think he just wasn't in the right mood for this game when he played it because it does all of the things he said it could have done to avoid confusing him. Enemies keep having new weapon rewards for killing them. He already got multiple gear upgrades and side-grades for exploration and combat. The environment has a ton of things to reward you for exploring and mastering the tools you are given in the shrines. All that seems to have been missing is his own investment into the mechanics and world which would push him to use and enjoy them properly.
One more thing that makes BoTW tutorial better is the story from the old man. You feel like he's there for nearly 100 year just waiting for a guy to rescue his daughter. 😢
The "old man" character that the King pretended to be was sketchy and unpleasant. "Do that shrine over there and I'll give you the paraglider." "Oh, good work, but actually I changed my mind. I want you to do three more shrines before giving you my paraglider." Rauru actually made you feel like he was helping you, which was a huge improvement
@@cleverman383 it's true that Rauru is clearly trying to help. That said, I enjoyed the uncertainty of who the mystery man is and what he's doing on the plateau. It was a fun mini-mystery to hook the player. I also really liked that you found him in random spots hunting and cooking. Rauru doesn't really *exist* on the island in the same way. He just pops in when he needs to.
TOTK is an improvement on BOTW in almost every way, but the tutorial was definitely better in BOTW. I think Nintendo struggled with making a tutorial that works for both new players and BOTW veterans at the same time, and kind of missed the mark. But the rest of the game is brilliant. And Sean should play the BOTW tutorial, which is almost perfect, in my opinion.
@@VexylObby I had well over 200 hours in BOTW when starting TOTK. I didn't have his issues either, but the tutorial area didn't capture me in any way. In fact, when I left the Sky Island for the first time I felt a bit unmotivated, which was the opposite feeling that I had when I left the starting area of BOTW. However, after getting the first tower and visiting the depths for the first time, I felt the magic return, and now I have over 130 hours in TOTK already. I guess it just shows that making a tutorial area for a game like this is very hard, even for possibly the most talented game designers in the world.
@@ksven I was captured by the Sky Island.... the music, the mysterious feeling of a different land, the new powers. I thought it was col. I think people are just looking for reasons to hate on the game because it is actually doing well.
@@VexylObby I really don't think so, I think it the tutorial genuinely didn't click for everyone. And that's fine. Clearly most people are loving the game. I was upset when I saw Sean's initial reaction too, but mostly because I felt he was denying himself a great experience by giving up just after the tutorial. I knew it would get so much better if he had given it just a few more hours. But he gave the game 5+ hours, so can't really blame him if it didn't click by then.
I think the obstacles in the tutorial do encourage you to use your creativity to some extent and aren't just "Lock and key", but that isn't necessarily clear until you see someone else play the game. That's the real problem here IMO. I saw a comment on the TOTK video saying "I just want to say that I've now watched 6 people do the hook puzzle, and I've seen 6 different solutions." So this puzzle isn't just "Lock and key", it is doing its job of encouraging creativity. What's actually happening here is that it's easy to solve the puzzle in one way and then say "Ah, clearly that was the only possible solution, I have just put the lock into the key," and then move on without even realising that your solution was unique and most people didn't solve it that way. This is an inherent problem with allowing player freedom and creativity. If a player has the freedom to solve a problem in a ton of different ways... then they also have the freedom to just go with the solution that seems most obvious to them. And they may not even realise that other solutions exist at all. It's very easy to just think "Clearly everyone must have solved it this way," because the solution seemed so obvious from your perspective. It's only when you see other people solve the problem that you realise that your solution was unique. I think this is why the epiphany with this game came when Day9 saw his wife play 20 hours in. It's not really about the 20 hours, it's more about seeing someone else do things that are totally different to what you would do. Day9 gives the example of how many unique creative ways there are to get past some trolls on a bridge, and that's totally true. But if those trolls were in the tutorial, how many people would actually realise that? A lot of people would just run past the trolls and come out of it thinking "Clearly that was the only possible solution" without even realising all of the crazy things they could have done. This is a pretty difficult thing to teach in a tutorial and it's fortunate that we live in an age where internet clips are so accessible. Watching a partner, a friend, or someone on youtube doing something crazy you never would have thought of - that's the true tutorial of BOTW and TOTK.
No I think the tutorial area definitely has "intended solution" to the problems that most players would gravitate to. Day9 was trying out funky builds too but after his build fell down he was out of stuff to make progress with.
@@pramitpratimdas8198 I'm sure literally every puzzle does have at least one "intended" solution, but pretty much none of them are limited to those solutions. I saw at least one streamer do the tutorial shrines in the opposite of the intended order, like the whole tutorial backwards, and it just worked.
Tears is pretty good at exactly the thing Sean spent his this video criticizing it for. It gives a mechanical tool in an enclosed shrine with respawning resources; it tells the buttons to use that tool. You go outside, and there are stations laid out to employ the mechanics in slightly more free-form, but still controlled and designed ways. Most of the tutorial island has clear rails and guideposts but multiple solutions. It gives the mechanic, then it gives little, progressively more complex puzzles about application. What I think really clearly ruined Sean's perspective for the whole game was the second little obstacle he ran into after getting Ultra Hand. There's a little lake you have to cross, and there are parts for a raft clearly laid out. There's also an NPC with dialog telling you that you how to chop trees down for logs to build things with. The obvious solution to the puzzle is to build a little raft and cross. Sean built the raft and kind of messed up, and the raft floated away from him. After that happened, Sean's reaction wasn't "ok, how do I solve this now?"; his words were very close to "ok, this is a game, so if I go away, the parts will come back." It was weird because at first, the thing he seemed excited about was finding lateral solutions to problems, and at that moment the game was telling him he had a bunch of tools, a bunch of resources, and a goal, but he was so fixated on trying to exploit the game that actually playing it didn't occur to him.
I think the primary purpose of the tutorial island was to teach you the bare minimum basics of the four major abilities as to not overwhelm you with complex mechanics and force you into creative solutions, and to teach you that sometimes the best course is just to soldier through the quests because you'll always get something neat out of them. Through the rest of the game, all of the main story quests unlock very interesting rewards, and many of the side quests do as well. It's very easy to feel a little directionless in this game, and them showing you that it's okay to just move on to the next shrine/tower/quest marker/etc that you see will still give you interesting things to do with fun challenges in between I think was the point. Eventually, you learn to make your own quest markers for yourself, saying "I'm going to figure out what's going on with this sky island/town/mountain/cave system/etc" and giving you a very goal-oriented mindset makes it so that you're less likely to shy away at a specific puzzle, obstacle, or enemy.
I feel less directionless and more like I have a bunch of things that I would like to do but I don't necessarily have to do any of them. Like I was on my way to one town to do this big quest, I accidentally ended up at this other town and did a big quest there instead.
This basically. Fuse is the best example of this, and probably the most egregious example of the tutorial island not showing you a "mental model" about what to do with Fuse other than "stick something onto your weapon." It's because they kinda don't want you to think "this is how this mechanic should be used" too much because your understanding of that is going to change drastically as you go through the game, and necessarily so. The discoverability of "wait, I can do THIS?" is the point.
Botw had the better tutorial in that you were promised something cool (the paraglider) before you embarked on a journey of shrine hunting. Totk doesn't do that
I played BotW and felt basically all the same things about TotK during the tutorial island. I spent even more time exploring the available terrain and climbing and not getting rewarded in any way for it. For example, I spent a bunch of time early on carefully climbing my way atop the palace at point X on Sean's map and also explored the back of it (where the tutorial island ends), before I had Ascend or knew it was a thing, in order to discover that there was absolutely nothing there, not even a chest with 5 arrows in it. It was kind of infuriating that doing almost anything that wasn't taking the absolute most obvious straight line to the thing that the game wanted you to go to would typically result in a whole lot of nothing, even though the game presented a lot of interesting-looking terrain and stuff to climb and explore. I got the idea pretty quickly that this wasn't what the game designers wanted me to do, but it felt like there was just a ton of wasted potential. When the game opens up, it's a lot better, but there are still things every now and then which make me say "what were they thinking?" with regard to the game presenting a very clear challenge and then either not following through on rewarding the player for solving it, or following through in a sort of insulting or funny way where you get a reward that is almost but not quite entirely worthless. A chest will be protected by monsters that drop much stronger weapons than the random decayed traveller's sword or whatever that it contains. It's a lot of hard work to get this kind of thing consistently right, but it feels like nobody could have been paying attention sometimes. Sending a couple of testers through the world with the authority to change the contents of most random reward chests to feel more appropriate for the area they were in could have improved things a lot. Even when the rewards are good, they sometimes make no sense in a way which can be a bit anger-inducing. There are 4 big rotating sphere things you can find in the skies, 3 of which contain somewhat cool puzzles and will likely provide you with one of your first Sage's Wills, and the 4th of which contains a piece of armour instead. Even if it's a good piece of armour, the fact that you need 4 Sage's Wills to get any benefit, and you now have no idea where to look for a fourth one is kind of infuriating. Instead of providing that satisfaction of figuring out the commonality between those spheres and using it to get an upgrade, you'll probably end up opening an ordinary looking chest somewhere relatively plain and easily accessible, and it'll randomly have a Sage's Will in it, and you'll be really confused and kind of angry that now the game is treating this item like nothing special. (To be fair, there are only a couple like that and the rest are mostly guarded by strong monsters, but the next easiest ones to get are just in unassuming random chests sitting out on easily accessible sky islands.) Despite all that, I've been enjoying the game, but yeah, the design decisions are really confusing sometimes.
@@cgibbard I felt the same way about Elden Ring. After every copy paste dungeon there's a boss which rewards you an item or weapon that you cannot use for your current build.
@@cgibbardI got bored with BotW for this exact reason. I feel like games have taught us to ignore the objective cause there'll be secrets, side quests or rare items if you go in the oppositve direction. I think Xenoblade does this well; you know where your next story obj is, but you get rewarded for exploring by finding landmarks, secret areas and new items. So to have BoTW/ToTK apply this concept inconsistently is dissapointing.
It took me a bit to warm up to ToTK because the first few hours are a linear "chute" and I kept ramming against the sides, trying to explore the world.
I think one of the big tutorial problems was that the fuse shrine focused on the different world interactions with fused weapons rather than it's combat capabilities. It builds the mental model that fuse is for in-world puzzle solving, but actually it's 99% a combat mechanic; it needs to be used either for creating stronger weapons or creating weapons that do different things like elemental damage. The period after the fuse shrine is full of enemies which do exactly that, they get progressively strong and drop stronger fuse items or they have things like flamethrowers or they drop ice explody jelly. The shrine built the wrong model, causing you to walk past the interesting combat and exploration of fuse. I personally didn't and made stronger weapons, got the RPG progression I expected, and did some cool elemental combat stuff. But I can see why the shrine builds the wrong idea and it's a big deal when the tutorial island is such a long period of gameplay.
This explains roughly how I felt after leaving tutorial island and why I didn’t play much further than that. It might be a problem that is only happening for very analytic people who always try to find „the correct way“ to do things
Starcraft definitely doesn't teach you to keep your building constantly going and resources low. That's something you learn through your own discovery.
The phrase “mental model” really clicked with me. I’ve been finding myself constantly approaching TOTK travel & some puzzles (only about 15-20hrs in so far) with a feeling of “why do I feel like I’m playing minecraft?”. With the new mechanics there’s so many methods to get from A -> B or accomplish your objective. It makes me as a player think like I’m in a sandbox game way, rather than an RPG game. Not really a bad thing, just different!
I very much wish the building mechanics didn’t take up so much of this game. There are big points of this game where it feels like Minecraft (which I hate everything about Minecraft) and ruins parts of the game. Breath of the Wilds abilities were much more interesting in their limited scope. I find myself disappointed because without these building mechanics, I feel Tears of the Kingdom would be a far superior game as a more straight forward RPG.
@@joshuagriffith9191 TotK seemed like the logical next step to botw which began by emboldening player freedom and creativity. The biggest difference with Minecraft is that its world is very different from a realistic one so it's much harder to intuit builds and stuff.
@@pramitpratimdas8198 Yeah. The problem is I don’t like building games. I love most the game, but the constant building aspect leaves me bored. I wish there was more of an optional aspect to using these mechanics. With it being such a large part makes me feel it’s slightly inferior to Breath of the wild. That being said breath of the wild wasn’t perfect either.
At 32:16 you basically hit the nail on the head; the game is all of those things and much more on top. Breath of the wild had a similar tutorial area but it felt more like an actual tutorial for the game itself rather than a tutorial for the new abilities. I hated the tears of the Kingdom tutorial Island myself but because I had experience from breath of the wild I knew that they were basically just showing me these new mechanics. I think the main issue is that the new mechanics are so powerful and varied that the devs decided they needed to teach the player these things up front. A friend of mine had some anxiety about ultra hand and weapon fusing. He felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things you can do with these tools. He incorrectly assumed that you need to use these abilities all the time.
I get what you're saying, I agree that as a veteran of Breath of the Wild, the experience was undoubtedly easier for me to take in. Can't say I HATED the tutorial, I look back on those first few hours of the game pretty fondly in hindsight, but I do remember at the time feeling like I was just having to grind through something that was keeping me from the actual game just so I could get to the actual game - rather than feeling like I was playing the game and it was Teaching me everything intrinsically through gameplay. Mind you, I do think the abilities introduced are so complex that it requires teaching players the most basic and core concepts of using them in a well-defined space - but like you're saying, It's kind of a lot to put on the player right at the beginning of the game, before they've even had the chance to just run around and have fun. Yes, there is some amount of freedom to running around on the sky islands, not everyone has to do things the same exact way, and people will have somewhat varied experiences with that part of the game. But nothing that comes close to what the actual game after the tutorial has to offer. But I realize that the game also kind of sets Itself up to need to do it that way, because of the fact that the entire game requires you to have and understand all of your abilities from the beginning, otherwise the world and the puzzles they designed couldn't be the way they are. But as a result, it's really like the game says, "OK, I know this Isn't the gameplay that you were hoping for but we need to just get this out of the way, so just bear with us for a few hours, and we promise it will be worth it, this game will be totally amazing!" And, yeah, having played BotW, I got through the great sky islands fairly comfortably knowing what was waiting for me at the end, knowing it would be worth it. But I still think it's somewhat risky game design that isn't completely sound despite the necessity, and I can understand how those who haven't played BotW but have only heard how great these games are would be a lot more skeptical from their experience of the Sky Islands, which basically asks them to have faith that it will eventually get WAY better.
@@turntsnaco824 I hated it because it felt too linear and contrived. There are better ways to teach these types of things in games than unskippable cutscenes and a contrived set of circumstances
Day9 talks about how he wishes TotK had explained to him how to have fun with the mechanics, but he also praises Starcraft for having the "mental model" of keeping resources low and always keep your production going. Is there a part in the actual game of Starcraft that explains this to you, or is it wisdom you have to gain from seeking external resources like the Day9 Daily?
He doesn't use Starcraft as an example of how the tutorialization should be, he just uses it to explain what mechaanics/mental model/strategy means to him. Of course, Starcraft (like a lot of older games) really just shows you the mechanics and then you have to figure out the "mental model" all by yourself or learn from others ...
You're exactly right, and even in Souls games, while his analysis is correct that it is a game that requires patience and timing, where a level 1 character can clear it immediately... The game itself doesn't say that. It would help you to know that right away, but the game has you pick a class/starting equipment, then fight an intro boss, and immerse yourself in the world. The end result of what he's describing as a mental model is accurate, but I don't think the games he references does that accurately. You can beat the campaigns of StarCraft on the highest difficulty at a Silver 3 level, and I don't think I understood the mental model of SC2 at that level. In Souls games, you could grind the same enemies for hours trying to level up and that WOULD work, it would just suck because before Elden Ring, the only good source of XP was the next boss, or the rooms right before it. Mental models give you mastery, and maybe the "best" way to have fun, but I don't think many games are in the business of instructing you that closely.
@@cryssanie Do you think if Day9 wiped his memory of Starcraft and decided to stream it for the first time, he would have similar complaints since the game doesn't guide you to the correct mental model on its own?
I had very similar feelings throughout the early game of TotK, although to a lesser degree (experience from BotW taught me to expect the unexpected, thus I withheld a lot of judgement). Even now I'm 20 hours into the game and I still don't feel fully on board with exactly how it wants me to have fun on a fundamental basis, rather than just waiting for fun moments to happen to me. I'm very slowly warming up to it, but it's taking a lot longer than I expected, and I still have certain complaints that I have no idea if the game will ever address.
The way I see it, ToTK is a great set of mechanics but not a great game, I didn't feel like building stuff because I didn't see the point. 99% of the time it is quicker and more convenient to glide/teleport to a tower. For me it offers too much freedom...is building a mech to fight ennemies powerful and fun ? Yes but I never did it myself because I never struggled enough in combat to need that. Building aerial vehicles is cool? yeah for sure but 90% of the time I can strap a rocket to my shield and climb a bit. Fusing anytong to your weapons is cool? Yeah but I don't need to experiment since fusing the best items nukes enemies. It seems like the kind of game you have more fun if you play it as a streamer because you get to meme in front of people, i.e. you get incentive to interact with the optional mechanics.
@@iopklmification That's my exact problem with the game. Add the fact that because the game is so huge, weapons break, and you get all your abilities upfront, there's essentially permanent growth to power or utility in the game, which I consider to be fundamental to the franchise. Why am i going to go into this 30th cave or climb this 18th mountain peak if I'm 99% certain I'm just going to get a korok seed or a cool spear I'll lose in a half hour? I feel absolutely no incentive to go do the tons of (copy pasted) activities in the game, leaving it feeling tremendously empty.
@@iopklmification frankly it is so nice to read this stuff because it feels like I'm the only one struggling to feel it with TOTK. For me, BOTW was one of the best games I've ever played but TOTK just gives me a headache and feels like it is wasting my time. They just tried to put way too much into the game on all fronts.
I think the knowledge about the game, especially knowing BOTW, really helps for you to not get bored with TOTK tutorial island. I spend a lot of hours with BOTW so I finished the tutorial island and even go through all the section of it without getting bored. It also didn’t take me a lot of time to finish it, 5 hours is just too long. I see other people says the tutorial is not very rewarding like getting the Paraglider in BOTW. I understand that. The tutorial island in TOTK seems to focus more on giving you the story that you need to uncover before going in the surface. I love TOTK so much and finished all the main quest except the final battle. Having the knowledge on how to travel the land in BOTW really helps me enjoy TOTK more. I also love watching UA-cam streams and play through and I think the best play though I see is with PointCrow. He’s really good in BOTW as well which is why he is excited on everything he’s doing in TOTK.
I agree that the tutorial island doesn't show you the crazy extent of the abilities, but I think it does a good job giving you the absolute basics of what you are able to do and shows you there is many more possibilities out there. I think the hate of the island itself really comes from how there is just so much really cool things you can do once your into the main game that it makes the limited feel of the tutorial feel bad when really in essence it showed everything you needed to know to succeed once leaving the island. It shows you basic traversal, basic combat, and basic item collection/food making. Day9 makes the point that the puzzle seemed to want to be solved in one way during the tutorial but also makes the point he wanted more examples of things to do, which in itself would have had to demonstrate a one way to solve puzzle. I also think Day9 and others who were turned off from the start of the game had a habit of overthinking the game the wrong way. The abilities should be "what can I do here" not "what do they want me to do". And playing games like Dark Souls or JRPGs or Mario it is very you need to do X to make Y happen, when in TOTK and BOTW it is very you can do A B C D E F G and Y will happen.
If totk is anything like botw I'm assuming you could finish the game without relying too much on these abilities even though itd make the game harder. It's possible Nintendo found that players weren't using these abilities as much with a shorter tutorial. So the ideal approach is as day9 said - tutorial shrine then whole area with that mechanic. However it'd make the tutorial excessively long, even day9 said it would be like 10hrs long. Nintendo found a middle ground with what they did with totk - shrine + few simple obstacles
@@pramitpratimdas8198 The thing that Sean unfortunately missed by not continuing is that the game _does_ do this. It's just in bite-sized chunks throughout the world... the Shrines. A HUGE percentage of the shrines are basically glorified showcases of various different creative ways you _could_ have been using the tools at your disposal, and after each shrine, you're likely to start noticing more and more opportunities to use the lessons that the shrines are practically training you for.
I think the shrines on the tutorial Island do that, but then it presents you with pretty much the same problem several times to solve in the same way when they should have been challenging you to be more creative from the get-go. It makes it feel very rote and too long.
I love how he finds a way to articulate feelings I had myself but didn’t understand. I only recently got through BoTW after my first attempt years ago fluttered out shortly after the tutorial. This has helped me understand why.
i was a zelda nerd as a kid, from ooc until twilight princes. i Didnt like breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom either. Games like darksouls and elden ring are my standarts now.
Im just confused because as someone who also hasnt played botw.. the mental model of the tutorial could not have felt clearer. The game gives you fuze and ultrahand pretty early and wants you to use those mechanics creatively to reach the third shrine. Either by making a cool strategy for travel or by creatively fuzing things together to more effectively beat up robots. Then you get ascend and it was clear that you were meant to combine ultrahand to get you to places where you could ascend to explore efficiently. At every corner the tutorial is throwing building blocks at you for you to solve problems. The shrines are a microcosm of this but the island itself is so clearly just a big shrine combining the three abilities
Day9's point is that the obstacles to reach the next shrine were pretty straightforward. It's subjective since for someone else building a boat and sailing across is a creative endeavour.
Here’s the thing: they did what you say, but they stretched it out across the entire game. You will encounter a shrine 2/3 through the game and face a puzzle where you have to use your mechanics in ways that you never expected, and with few clues on how to figure it out. It takes a lot of hours of gameplay to get to the point where you feel 100% proficient and know what to do at all times. I’d argue it feels that way all the way up to the end of the game.
2:50 speaking of chrono trigger.. Josh Strife Hayes made pretty good video about the entire game recently, well worth checking out if you haven't.. I think there could be great cross over between the audiences of Day9 and Josh because he also makes videos from very analytical perspective.
BOTW was my favorite game of all time and I am also enjoying TOTK and I must say, I also did not enjoy the tutorial island very much in TOTK. However I want to say that I think BOTW's tutorial plateau was perfectly designed. A masterclass in tutorial design.
Really liked the video, the mental model thing is something I'll definitely be thinking about more every time I run into games that don't click with me in the future. I feel like the with the Tears of the Kingdom opening (and gameplay in general) is that each of the shrines operate as what Day9 was wanting in varying levels of difficulty puzzle solving showcasing what you're able to do with specific mechanics (or combinations of the mechanics) as ways to let the player know that their toolbox is bigger than they potentially realized. Saying "Hey, here's a cool thing you can do by combining parts A, B & C to build this thing you may not have thought about and here are some uses for it" so that when you encounter it in the overworld you have the option to use that new tool to solve it, but they also have to account for the players that haven't done that shrine and maybe don't know about the 'new tool'. The tutorial island I think also did this, but admittedly poorly, and I think a large part of that is based on remembering that the game is also designed with the hopes that children and people who don't normally play video games can enjoy them. So the things on the tutorial island that were incredibly obvious solutions (put minecart on tracks with a fan and it can cross the tracks, rafts can float, etc.) were the game making sure that players had at least seen once that those were options in their toolbox. Probably not something necessary for 99% of players, but at least making sure that you have those very basics down somewhat so that you have a minimum floor you can expect from players in the wide open world (Every player who has made it to the open world should know that they can cross large bodies of water with a raft/other floating device for example) As for not using the fuse and the ascend mechanics that I think came more as a symptom of Day9 still trying to figure out his mental model than anything because while the Ultra Hand ability is a puzzle solving tool, the Fuse ability (at least primarily) is a combat tool, which he specifically said he ran past all of the enemies; and the Ascend ability is less a puzzle solving tool and more a combination of making traversal easier tool and a way to add alternate win conditions for puzzles (rather than having to arrive at the end goal in the puzzle, now it's also a viable solution to arrive below point B). All of this combined with the fact that because Day9 hadn't played Breath of the Wild he wasn't aware that he had been picking up permanent upgrades (in the form of 1/4th pieces of heart under a new name) it makes total sense that he could have the issues he did and struggle with 'finding the fun' Even as a person who had beaten Breath of the Wild, I was kind of lost when I landed on the main land again because there were just so many possible options that I had a ton of choice paralysis and couldn't let myself just run around finding things randomly, so I hesitated playing the game for a bit before deciding I would take a 'tour' through the world via getting every tower, and then from there decide which place seemed the coolest and start there, and found my fun in the game almost as soon as I actually had to tackle traversing the overworld and it's puzzles with my new tools/limited knowledge and got hooked.
I'm really glad you came back to articulate your thoughts further. There was a ton of negativity surrounding your initial opinion on the game. Folks just don't like hearing that their beloved game isn't loved by all, especially when it comes to their favorite content creators. I love TOTK, but you articulated your feelings surrounding the tutorial very well. Also big props to you for not faking your feelings surrounding the game.
@@juamibenito2558 Mainly his chief complaint here - that the game teaches you a mechanic but doesn't provide you obstacles to use those mechanics. It absolutely does. These obstacles are straightforward and doesn't force you to be creative - again this is subjective. Day9 plays a lot of puzzle games so making a boat to sail across is straightforward and boring but it may not be so for someone else - especially considering that it's the tutorial area. Day9 also says that he didn't get to use the 3rd ability at all after getting it. He must have forgot that he did use it to get the glider
The puzzles are amazing in totk. I've never liked puzzle games but this was actually really fun and rewarding. And yeah, the tutorial island is NOT the end of the tutorial, the tutorial is like when you do the first story bit with Purah and then several other bits. It really introduces things very gradually.
I've found them all either far too easy or boring for the most part, completed around 120 shrines so far, bar a few. In comparison to BOTW. Near every room you either solve instantly, or they give you the exact building items. None have stood out. Loving the game but this is the sore point for me personally.
The problem is trying to figure out the mental model in the tutorial. The tutorial explains mechanics and gives you time to play with them a bit. After the tutorial is when you should start working out what the mental model should be. Trying to figure that out in an area that was specifically designed to ONLY explain the mechanics simply takes the fun out of learning those mechanics.
The mechanical tutorial is the shrine where you get the ability, the space in between the shrines is no longer the tutorial, but the "Mental Model" space
I disagree. Part of the tutorial should be about teaching the player why/how the game is fun. Learning is fun, and the things you learn should also be fun, so it goes hand-in-hand.
Very interesting take. I think the holes you encountered were brought on by the designers having lightly assumed that the player is familiar with Breath of the Wild. They only give the very lightest of explanations from the mechanics that come over from that game (stamina, cooking, weapon breaking, exploration, etc.) where those were covered more extensively in BotW. I don't think ToTK is a perfect game or that the tutorial island could not use a little more polish. But I will say having the puzzles between ultra hand and fuse be simple is effective for children (my 7 yo liked this) and then having the fuse challenges just be "rock hammer smash stuff. do whatever you want." also worked for him. That is another challenge Nintendo faces that games like Elden Ring do not, the broad age range of their target audience.
I think they were trying to convey that all of the abilities are "simple to learn, difficult to master" by showing the most simple obvious uses for them first, then letting you experiment and figure out what else you could do with them on your own.
I loved this discussion, knowing what comes later it honestly makes me love this game even more! my favourite thing so far has been defeating shrines in ways they didn't intend by bringing EVERY piece of material they give me into the next room
28:50 I think he missed that when you leave the ‘go-up’ skill shrine, you can use it right away to get pants to no longer need food to keep you warm, and a sweet scenic glide through the air all the way back to ‘X’. There’s a lot of freedom in the game, which can cause you to miss really cool sections.
I completely missed that and ended up buying the helm from the rito shop. Then when I figured out I missed it I retraced my steps. Freedom is a double edged sword for sure.
It's really not a double edged sword, the idea is that the game is hard and annoying without exploration and that exploration alleviates that annoyance by giving you tools and cool things
@@Zaurthur the term "too much of a good thing" comes to mind. While freedom is appreciated in games, having some limitations can curb the extremes in the realm of possibilities. I enjoyed playing through TOTK, full stop. But I understand where Day[9] is coming from.
I think it would be interesting to see you play the BotW tutorial area after hearing this. To me I felt the TotK tutorial was super linear and flat and it made me worried for the rest of the game. In BotW I remember feeling like there were always multiple things I could do to get to my goal. I feel like the set up where everything is in the sky and on seperate islands kinda railroaded you into having to go in a more linear order. Each little island thing didnt have a ton of stuff you could do and the things like enemy varieties was pretty sparce. A lot of changes like the way weapons are all degraded made getting a new weapon not feel special. Getting a sword that does 4 damage doesnt feel super cool when you have a stick with 4 damage lol. Like you were saying, once I got into the game everything started to come together but I dunno I remember being super excited to get out there after the BotW tutorial, where as in TotK I was a little hesitant and unsure
I definitely had that concern at the start of the game too. The degraded weapons were an interesting design choice, and I almost immediately picked up that the reason was because they wanted the player to focus on the fuse mechanic. Still, it felt odd to make the weapons in and of themselves less useful... until I realized that every single base weapon type had its own unique "keywords" that modified how the weapon was best used in combat. They didn't make the old weapons into glorified hilts, they made them into _modifiers_ that you could add onto the _actual_ new weapons you got from killing monsters. Once it clicked, it easily became my favorite mechanics in the entire game.
Glad to see Day[J] still has his wits about him. Very insightful and articulate as always. Glad to have dipped in for this talk, Sean. I think the short of it is that the tutorial island is quite meandering and keeps things at a very basic level. The contraptions, rewind shenanigans and whatnot come later. Heck, some of the mechanics are only mandatory in shrines (even if they are incredibly useful in general). It took me a long time to remember/understand to use Acension regularly. I was so used to treating high places as climbing challenges as they were in BotW. Much of the game is, in the end, up to your own willingness to experiment and explore.
I think he's spot on with how the abilities are given to you and the world is initially presented. BOTW had the same issue I feel. They give you all the things quickly and you kinda use them but not much....then you're set loose to explore and do whatever after the tutorial. Both games rush it. I never thought that in BOTW that I'd get all those abilities so suddenly or soon. I expect it in TOTK since the previous game did it but that's only because I know now. Sean played no BOTW and probably saw almost zero footage from either game so its understandable he'd be confused a little.
I think another good example to look at for this mental model idea is puzzle games. For example, Baba is You spends a lot of time on very basic puzzles, like 1-3 step ideas to get you thinking a certain way.
My gf quit it about 10 minutes in, and I only pushed through because other people have said it was so good. I really like a lot of it, but I actually ran into a similar "tutorial" problem where I thought I HAD to do the picture quest and it ruined the game for me.
I pushed myself to play about 20 hours before quitting and I regret giving it that much of my time. It's definitely the worst AAA game I've played for more than an hour in maybe all my life. I've genuinely felt like the entire internet is gaslighting me about how much they like BOTW and now TOTK.
@@lunarath1 I will say that as soon as I realized I didn't need to do ANY of the pictures, I thought the gameplay and depth were very good. That said, I'm struggling to enjoy in because of the bad taste the pictures left. Also because durability in that game feels terrible.
I had a similar problem with the tutorial in BotW. I kept dying in the winter area from cold exposure. Even after I found out that a torch fends off the frost, I was extremely annoyed that the game hadn't explained such implicitly enough. It took me two nights of rage quitting from lack of progress before I accidentally had the torch out and was in the winter area and I was fine. It might seem like a really stupid mistake to make but I've been playing games for 25 years where cold exposure to the elements simply didn't exist and quite frankly, personally living in the great white north, a measly torch wouldn't save you from the cold wandering about, so it simply wasn't a logical deduction for me. edit: I ended up enjoying BotW in the long run but it's nowhere near my top 25 games of all time. And to clarify, the tutorial trouble I experienced didn't hurt my over all appreciation of the game. It was just too open world with a redundant quests, like those Korok seeds. I don't look games up so I collected something like 400 before a friend said that it's useless beyond a certain point. I also purely explored first, ignoring the main story and by the time I got to it, I was so overpowered that it felt lackluster. I'm certainly not used to that in a Zelda game.
BOTW I screwed up, I did the tutorial, went to the village, and it said go to the “zora” area, but it was raining forever. I went straight to the point, trying to climb the mountains to the point, and struggled until I quit. I missed the stables, and missed I was supposed to follow the road to go the one entrance.
this explains so much why he seems to not get a ton of games, and often gives up on them quickly. I would say most gamers have a very narrow "Mental Model" Stage, day9 literally overthinks himself out of fun.
Eh I don't know if that's true. If someone plays a lot of a certain genre, you tend to carry over expectations from that genre. Open World games vary quite a bit, and RPGs on top of that as well. He uses Elden Ring as an example in the video. Very Bad Wizards, a Philosophy/Psychology podcast, did an episode with Ted Chiang about the game Soma, and they talked about playing through it. It was clear one of the hosts did not play many games and didn't pick up on what I like to call the "language" of the game, how they expect you to figure things out. I'm diverting a lot, but a clear example of this is the Green lights used in Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal to guide the player. Some people don't even consciously notice it.
The narrow mental model stage prevented day9 from liking dark souls and I'm pretty sure he'd have bounced off Elden Ring if he didn't already like the souls style combat. Even then he was pretty lukewarm about the game till about 40hrs in
No. You completely didn't understand Day9. To think that he "overthinks". Day9 was trying to articulate how TOTK's tutorial fail to teach him how to think about using tools to win the game by way of having hard challenges that he has to learn and overcome in order to understand how a player should approach when thinking about using game mechanics to win the game. He learnt what are the tools, how to use the tools by way of pressing what button to do what, but didn't teach him how to think about the game mechanics he was given in order to win the game. I haven't played TOTK myself yet, but from this video, it sounds like the tutorial just wasn't very good. Which is different than saying a game is bad, as talked about by Day9. Modern day games are notoriously bad at doing tutorials. New gamers suffer from this the most. It's exactly why non-gamers when try to play modern games, they also give up easily. It's because the game just scale so quick, hard and got complicated before players even had time to get used to and understand the approach toward a game. I advise you to watch a youtube video that literally discuss this very well: ua-cam.com/video/ax7f3JZJHSw/v-deo.html&ab_channel=Razbuten Notice particularly the one about Skyrim. The part about where the wife hid in the house from the dragon and thinking she can wait it out until the attack pass (which never does of course). This is what Day9 is talking about despite being a long time gamer - the tutorial didn't show him clearly enough how to approach TOTK.
@@Bloodark124 Day9 is also notorious for missing ques an average player would. Like his main criticism that the obstacles after the shrines weren't complicated enough doesn't work for the vast majority of the intended audience of Zelda, ie casual audience. For casual players the simple act of making a boat and sailing across is fun enough. The "intended audience" part is pretty important in game design Also I'd take Day9's first impression of any game with a huge grain of salt. He struggled a lot with dark souls and was pretty lukewarm about Elden Ring until about 40hrs in
Always happy to see content creators talk about their controversial opinions, especially someone who's so articulate about why they perceive things the way they do.
I think part of Day9's problem (because this is far from the first game where he runs into this), is that his favourite games tend to front-load a lot of the complexity. Starcraft, Dota2, M:TG and Dark Souls all give you the entire toolbox from the word go and expect you to use it. So Sean expects the depth of a game's systems to be made apparent right away. BotW and TotK introduce the player much more slowly to some very basic versions of their mechanics, and then, as he noted, the depth is explored gradually through the rest of the game. There are some hints at this greater depth, but they're quite out of the way and Sean doesn't tend to pay close attention to stuff in the periphery, at least not when he's streaming and constantly has to let himself get distracted by chat. So he basically ends up bumming around an area that is deliberately kept relatively simple and sparse to serve as a gentle introduction, and is then disappointed by the lack of depth because he doesn't realize that the game is telling him "you don't need to stick around here any longer then you must". I think that this immediately expecting the game's full complexity also leads to weird behaviour like him taking potshots from a distance at enemies in Doom 2016 with the starting pistol, even though the game is basically _screaming_ at him to rush in with the shotgun. He's too hardwired for methodically dissecting strategy games, basically. Another weird quirk I've noticed that I think would hurt him in this game is that Sean, more than any other gamer I've seen, _doesn't ever look up._
Don't even get me started on how much I forgot to use Ascend in my initial playthrough... One of the first caves I went into in the start of the game led me into a miniboss fight, and that was super rad... and then I spent 10-15 minutes trying to scale the sheer drop I fell into the cave from. And the amount of wells I saw and then ignored because I thought I would get stuck at the bottom because most drops in adventure games tend to be one-way gates... By the time I realized all these moments I could have just been using Ascend, I wanted to put my head through my desk.
@@firekirby123 I think most players severely underestimated Ascend when they first got it I know I did. It's crazy how many weird to reach places were ascendable. It would just be another gimmick in a lesser game
I don't think a game like TotK is served very well by a "gentle introduction." An introduction makes an impression on a player, it tells them what they can expect from the game and tries to entice them further in. If there is depth to TotK's systems, then the introduction should reflect that, which would both give the player a more accurate impression of the rest of the game and also help the game sell itself. It's like Sean said, if the tutorial island mixed together some very basic puzzles that have obvious solutions that show you the basic functions of your tools with some required abstract puzzles that require more creative thinking, it would have helped it to click for Sean that using the tools at his disposal to construct outside the box solutions to problems in his path was where the fun in TotK lies. If the game is telling him "you don't need to stick around here any longer than you must" then why have a whole island with hidden treasure to explore and find? This encourages you to bum around and explore. And if everything you find is simple and sparse, and all the weapons are roughly uniformly powerful, and there's nothing you find that wows you and makes you glad you went out of the way for it, then you may end up with the expectation that that is what the game is like. Because in that moment that literally *is* what the game is like. If all that tutorial island wants to do is rush you through the basic functions of your tools and then boot you into the overworld to explore, then it would have better served this function as one long shrine-puzzle type area, with only one path so the player is pushed forwards through it. As soon as you open your game up, you invite the player to wander around and explore. But if everything they find as they explore is simple and bland, that just trains the player to think that if they explore, they will find simple and bland things. If your game has content that is "sparse," you should cut it. It's pointless and distracting. Unless the sparseness is adding something to the atmosphere or the gameplay, it's doing more harm than good. An example of this is the starting pistol from Doom 2016 that you brought up. The developers eventually admitted that starting players off with a pistol with infinite ammo was a mistake, as it led to players playing conservatively, saving their ammo for tough enemies rather than getting into the groove of spending their ammo as fast as they can pick it up to blast through encounters. So, come Doom Eternal, there is no starter pistol. With no infinite ammo as a crutch to fall back on, players are forced to engage with the game's ammo system, and end up having more fun as a result. Removing the content that creates an inaccurate impression of what the game is like leads to a better overall experience. I also don't agree that the other games you mentioned are all front-loaded with their complexity. Starcraft 2's first mission doesn't have a base for the player to control, just units to order around. The second mission only lets you build like 2 kinds of buildings and 2 kinds of units. By limiting you options, it encourages you to spam out the few things you can build, getting you into the swing of keeping all your production lines busy. Throughout the campaign, Starcraft 2 introduces you to new units a few at a time, in missions designed to highlight their strengths as well as their weaknesses. In Dark Souls games, while you start with all your game actions available to you and a weapon's full moveset available to you, each game's tutorial walks you through all the game actions one by one in situations that highlight their use, each tutorial has like 2 kinds of enemies in it - very slow and sluggish hollow and slightly tougher sluggish hollow - to learn the movesets of, and you only start with one or 2 weapons in your inventory, with no more weapons available to you until after the tutorial, so you are forced to stick with and learn a single weapon's moveset rather than being overwhelmed with options. MtG and Dota 2 are front-loaded with their complexity, but that's because they are multiplayer-exclusive games - it is expected that you will be taught by other players, either working with you or fighting against you. To say that it's the player's fault for not engaging with the tutorial right and not rushing through it to get to the actually good bits is to miss some important points; that the game didn't do a good job of communicating with its design that these bits should be rushed through; and that, frankly, if there are bits in your game that aren't "good bits", that's a design mistake that's worth analysing.
@@LuciferLuckless I don't think you are supposed to rush through the tutorial area, I know people who spent 6+ hrs in the tutorial area. It took me 3hrs and I wasnt rushing or anything. The issue comparing with other games is that they have a fairly simple core gameplay loop. Dark souls tutorial takes less than 5 minutes to finish. Totk's mechanics are far more complex and the ideal tutorial would take 10hrs, according to day9 himself. Another important thing regarding and it's specially important wrt game design is intended audience. Zelda is primarily meant for a much more casual playerbase compared to the games you mentioned. So it makes sense why Day9, who is an avid fan of puzzle games felt disappointed with the obstacles after the shrines
I like TOTK *much* better than BOTW, but BOTW had the better, more concise tutorial area. Getting to Hyrule while still not having the sailcloth was my biggest complaint, but the tutorial also just took longer in general.
You've got a lot of great points and insights here, but I can't shake the feeling that, like, you've been trained by modern game design conventions to fit game experience into specific boxes. It sounds like you're disappointed that you can't label the game with existing genre-tags. I love your idea of the "mental model" layer that bridges mechanics and strategy, BUT I really like building that mental model myself from the ground up. I like a lot of experimental games because of that. Using genre tropes to "bootstrap" the player's mental model of the game certainly makes the game more accessible, and maybe make the game seem more well-designed. TOTK definitely feels like it works best when the player brings their BOTW mental model, and I think I agree that it's a flaw. But I think it's also valid game design to invite or even force the player to build mental models from scratch. (This isn't an attempt to minimize your opinions or vast experience, please understand. I'm not trying to tell you your taste is bad or your fun is wrong, that's absurd and toxic. Just wanted to present a different perspective.)
I think the "mental model" of TotK is exactly what you seemed to expect: "The game constantly puts small, simple problems in front of you, then you're allowed to solve those problems however you can with the tools the game gives you." I don't think the problems are ever super complex, but that's ok because the "palette of stuff" is an enormous web of interconnected systems. I think your criticism about the puzzles being "lock and key" is pretty specific to the tutorial... It gets more freeform with the open world exploration.
A lot of it is still lock and key later on. Sure you can go figure out your own way to get this crystal from A to B, or you could use the glider and fans that are conveniently right next to the crystal and just fly it over. Most shrines and most open world puzzles have a single very obviously intended solution.
I am one of the people who was flabbergasted by day9s opinion on totk and made a comment about it. I did not know that he hadnt played botw (assumed he must have if he was playing totk) and wondered why he was so critical of the tutorial. My thoughts were, "jeeze, youre being very impatient, Sean." Im glad he explained why it didnt gel with him immediately and can see how great the game is now. I wonder if he'll play some more on stream now. Would love to see gis creations for hitting the gorons bell 😀.
I think chess would be a good example of the mechanics/mental model/strategy separation. There is a clear differentiation between learning how the pieces move/the basic ruleset (mechanics), moving your pieces in a way that threatens the opponent/keep valuable pieces alive/move pieces into positions that maximise movement (mental model) and learning openings/pawn structures etc (strategy). I was initially struggling to understand how you were trying to differentiate strategy and mental models, and I know there is no concrete definition as it's just something you came up with, but the chess example made it a bit clearer for me. You could learn how all the chess pieces move and then move them all randomly with no rhyme or reason which would be perfectly within the rules but you aren't really interfacing with how the game is "supposed" to be played. The next level up (mental model) is you moving the pieces in a way that makes sense to try and achieve a win state (loosely speaking it's "how the game is supposed to be played") without actually engaging in any real strategy - and this I think is enough to just have fun.
For me some of the puzzles in TOTK seemed a little easier and requiring less creativity than I expected. My assumption is that the target audience they were thinking about might have less experience with these types of things, and might actually find them more challenging and feel like the objects given to the player didn't have a very clear purpose that you instantly recognize.
The first thing you can do with Ascend is give u a real treasure by just 1 min exploring after getting it by giving you the frost resist pants. The only problem I had in the starting area was fuse. That one was very "meh" in the start. Fusing some planks to give you 1 extra attack on the weapon felt very meh. Should have been a "break a wall with rock" puzzle for sure!
Totk is just a boring, tedious, slog. I love the classic style Zeldas. I tried my best to enjoy it, but 14 hours and I just couldn’t bring myself to play more. It was painful. It’s way too big, too much unnecessary work. The game felt like…work
I liked Tears of the Kingdom, but the tutorial island took me much longer to figure out how to complete than Breath of the Wild. Then it was kind of annoying that after many hours of sucking at combat, I would stumble across shrines that gave you information on how to parry and flurry, which I had no clue you could do, because they were not unlocked informationally in the menu until I had done the shrine. So it wasn't until after like 30 hours in the game was I playing more strategic during fights, instead of button mashing.
Very nice explanation D9! The issue with the rewards for going somewhere that picked your interest is actually a meme for z:botw. This was somehow mitigated by connecting the points of interest with the map exploration or character development, ie. new area discovered, more hearts for your character. However once you have found one, you knew what the others would give you. this was then addressed by altering the challenge a bit for each of those points - and this did work, kind of. But... there was a lot of side-quests, were the reward was literally your example - a few arrows, and those were always mood killers. At a certain point, the biggest reward was just discovering the event/location itself. The whole reward mechanic in Zelda Botw is quite... mallow. And yet, I couldn't stop playing it. It was just so... chill, beautiful, and interesting enough, to keep me moving forward. The challenge in this game was all the time on the edge of acceptance.
In chess there is analogous term for 'mental model' which is "General Principles" ie. knights before bishops, capture towards the centre, castle early. These general principles help you in a range of situations even if you are unfamiliar with any particular strategy
My reaction when someone says they dont like something: Oh, thats understabdable. Sometimes its not peoples cup of tea. More specifically on TOTK/BOTW: oh yeah, i can see how the button layout or controls could be annoying or off putting. The bad framerate of TOTK specifically can also be a turnoff. No worries! Still one of the things i laughed most at in my entire life is his first impression of Yu-Gi-Oh master duel. I was ROLLING!
I honestly had a very similar reaction when I first played Breath of the Wild. Finished the tutorial and thought "Okay, now where do I go next to actually have fun." Eventually figured it out, and got absorbed. Then, with Tears of the Kingdom, I already had the model and it was much easier to understand the game. TotK's tutorial is pretty long and boring though.
The mental model in my mind would be "There are a million right ways to accomplish the goal". The issue with that model in general is a lack of fully identifying the goal AND all the methods.
Honestly, I know a lot of people like playing these games blind, but for me watching the gameplay trailers and showcases really helped for creating a mental model. Also I played BoTW, so it was pretty easy to see these mechanics and immediately think of how much better they would make the game.
I've been thinking about this video periodically for the last month since it came out. I am so intrigued by listening to your experience, because I had such a different experience. I thought the tutorial island was the best execution of "teaching me how to think about a game" of the intro to any game I've ever played in my life. You were saying there should have been opportunities to use the abilities you just obtained in creative ways--from my perspective, there were. You said there could have been progression sooner on the tutorial island; I felt like I was getting much stronger immediately, within the first 20 minutes. Let me be clear; I'm not trying to say you're wrong. Just that my personal experience was very different, and I explicitly enjoyed feeling like TOTK was doing things that you felt like it was not doing.
I appreciate you putting in effort as to help us simmer down over your controversial opinion. I believe this generation of zelda games simply cannot "tell" the player the optimal method of employing mechanics, as you said yourself that you observed the game's penchant for allowing creative combinations of approaches; some of which were not foreseen by the developers. That expands out to the mode of tutorialization I saw in my own playthrough. The mode I saw was one of gentle suggestion and environmental storytelling. There cannot be temporarily impassable obstacles in the great sky island because the order in which the player reaches the shrines is up to the players themselves. If there were, it would be out of character for the endeavor for a truly open open-world game. This brings me to the mental model. I hear you say that you are trying to decode the playstyle of this new game by using the patterns of all other games in your repertoire. This is to be expected as we are pattern-seeking creatures. The problem with this is that one who does not move beyond demanding each new experience builds off the old will soon be alienated by an evolving interactive media climate. There is no *one* mental model in TOTK, as the game can be played in any manner of mindset, be it one of mechanical engineering, combat strategy, mobility optimization, or straight up cheese. You could choose any one of those and conquer ~80% of the game with your sole chosen method. This is evidenced by speedruns of the game. And on the topic of speedruns, seeing as how the current world record shaves off ~98% of the time it would take for a casual playthrough, we learn that most of the game's reward is intrinsic in nature, necessarily obviating the use of rail-roaded, unavoidable challenges. With recent developments, we see the rise of nontraditional games that offer a player experience that is more exploratory, with a rich world and increasingly interpretive, intrinsic goals to be met. The last two zelda games are a part of this wave, and I appreciate them for accomplishing such without diminishing the jeopardy. I could say something flippant about neuroplasticity and slowly becoming a curmudgeon, but I want to be taken seriously here. In sandbox games, a mental model is like that kid that knows how to solve a rubik's cube that one way they learned online, but they don't understand the innerworkings, or hasn't ever grown with it to create a unique relationship.
"...and you get there, and you finally open the chest and it's like... 3 arrows.." Me: But arrows are actually like.. really important lmao. It's funny how reasonable he is and how obtuse these games are in so many ways. It's really strange how I often find myself saying "ok I'm not excited about these arrows, or these bombs, I just had to work to pick up, but I'm REALLY glad I got them.
I was recently in a late game area and found two chests. The first one contained a pretty strong shield. I already had a full set of shields that were fused with stuff, so I left it in the chest. The other one contained 5 arrows. I took them and was like "Oh, I need those"
I thought the same thing! Arrows are arguably more important in Totk than any other Zelda game to date - the game doesn't really communicate that early however.
I think that's one of the valid criticisms here. A lot of chests you open after a few minutes killing some mass band of horriblins, and there's like a stick glued to another stick in the box. The other big factor in that is that by using the same map Breath did, the map-design cues tend to be misleading. Like there's that weird big round lake on a mountaintop on the way to the Zoras. It stands out visually and sets the gamer-senses tingling. In Breath, it's where one of the dungeons is, and is basically a big deal. In Tears, as far as I can tell, there are just two lizards chilling on a big rock. So that does feel like an issue to me, but I didn't think Sean got far enough in to experience that
To me the souls combat has always been pretty easy to understand (with the exception of Sekiro), what confused me the most back when I played my first souls game was the idea of "progression", at first I did not know where I was suppose to go or what exactly was I meant to do, I felt like I was just running around randomly killing stuff or getting killed, it was not until I started to unlock bonfires and shortcuts when the game started to click for me. The realization that the true progression of a souls game is exploration and unlocking the map rather than killing stuff is what ultimately led me to truly enjoy them. They are 3D metroidvania games.
This sounds like a Mechanics > Implementation > Strategy thought flow to me. Games show you the mechanics or tools they’ve created for you to work with, but if they neglect to show you how they should be implemented the mechanics never establish a clear purpose. Put differently, if I shove you into a carpentry workshop, demonstrate ten different tools for you, then point to a block of wood and say, “Make a chair,” that’s unlikely to happen because you never learned the purpose for each tool beyond their basic function. The disconnect isn’t just about not being shown how to think about something or how to have fun, it’s about not being provided with the proper context for using the mechanics available to you. This makes strategizing agonizingly difficult (the part I think is more closely associated with “fun”) to the point that the mechanics undermine your ability to have fun. You arrived on the main island with a bunch of tools but no clear understanding of how the game intended for you to implement all the mechanics it provided you with. Your strategy was a vague “whatever” that didn’t allow your creativity to formulate “fun” solutions, and nothing about the game up to the point suggested that would change.
I had the same interaction with totk, where I finished the island, landed, and felt... abandoned, sort of, and worse, felt like I had 4 fun 10 minute segments, each separated by an hour of.. dawdling in an absolutely-optional sandbox. And I landed on the surface and was like, okay, so it's the same game as last time, but now I have all these extra abilities and I guess it's time to go chase down the 120 shrines so I have something fun to do.... no thanks. I went back, days later, enticed by all my friends raving, and slowly I began to understand what the game is actually about, what the core loop ACTUALLY is. The core loop isn't finding puzzles, or upgrading gear, or obtaining hearts, or collecting poops. It's not even about designing elegant or hilarious machines, a la factorio or railroad tycoon. It's about mastery. I lost track of the number of times I would find myself stymied only to realize- oh wait, I can ascend, *even here*. Or oh wait, I don't need to parry that, I can rewind time. Or oh wait, I don't really need to go scavenge for weapons- I'll just knock this one out of his hands, pick it up, fuse it with something nearby on the fly. I can just stick this to that. I can just float that to here. The game's core loop, and what the shrines all do, is slowly teaching you to appreciate the mechanics and tools *that you had all along*. The shrines are basically loading tips, prodding you into remembering all your various moves and consider new permutations that you might have overlooked. And by the time you're doing your fourth temple, you probably won't even be that much more powerful in terms of gear, but you'll be fusing and gluing and rewinding and ascending with barely a thought because you are finally immersed, embodying this god-powered little twink with the world at his fingertips. Tears has issues, but I'm not sure I've ever played a game that made me feel so much like I had developed such a mastery and control over my environment as this one.
Sorry, I know I’m 2 months late here but - I think this is the most appealing way I’ve heard the game described, as a sort of “pursuit of mastery.” I finished the game after spending about 130hrs with it. Thinking about it from a perspective of mastery, I agree, times when I felt like a master of the mechanics were probably the most fun. Running up to a puzzle, or group of enemies, already knowing how I’m going to overcome the challenge is a nice feeling. Having things play out the way you envision is cool and feeling like you’re in total control because you’ve mastered the mechanics is fun. Some critique on TotK: While you were able to find your own fun in the game, I would argue that not being able to find that fun sooner, is a symptom of poor game design. Overall, TotK truly feels like a confused game, that doesn’t know what it wants to be. It tries to be so many things and be so open, that everything is left feeling flat and shallow. So, the player is left with the responsibility of finding the fun. Which isn’t inherently bad, but in the case of TotK, “go find your own fun” isn’t what they tell you to do. To your point, the tutorial island left you feeling confused and abandoned instead of excited to explore and master the tools that were given to you. In this case, I think you found mastery as your personal motivation for playing the game as opposed to you finally uncovering the mental model they intended to give you. In a lot of ways, I feel like TotK suffers from having too much stuff for the sake of more stuff and only having a very limited variety of obstacles to overcome. Aside from the shrines where your building is limited, traversal-related obstacles can almost always be solved by flying over everything with two fans and a joystick. The bulk of enemies can be defeated in much the same way - button mash / shoot weak point / use bomb / use opposing element. I feel there was a huge missed opportunity to create more creative and interesting obstacles to overcome. So much of the game feels copy/pasted that things get old fast.
Most people went A to B to C in the tutorial island. I went C to B and then i was stuck being unable to cross a lake so cooked a bunch of stamina shroom to cross the lake...to A
I actually think the earlier a player says: Fuck you game, i'm not doing what you want me to do, the earlier a player will understand the point of the game :)
Horizon Zero Dawn's first "Proving Grounds" (Lancehorns) was hellishly difficult for me given the timed events. Like I spent 3 hours struggling to make bronze times with the challenges. And then somewhere near hour 4, the "Mental Model" finally clicked for me regarding the creature's weaknesses. Once I finally understood the concept of exploiting the creature's vulnerabilities for easy takedowns, it really opened up the whole game for me. All that goes a long way to say that while the mechanics of Horizon Zero Dawn made sense, and the strategy of "leveling up" and "getting better weapons" made sense, it wasn't until I fully grasped the Mental Model that I felt competent in that game. I'm deff stealing this mental model concept to explain things going forward :D
The higher end knowledge base of TotK is, in a lot if ways, uncapped. I think the tutorial does a good job of creating a strong foundation with which you can confront the rest of the game. For example, BotW didnt actually teach you how to cook, you kind of had to stumble on the Bag->Hold Item->"A" to cook method if you didnt watch the first gameplay trailer. This game is much more "eat to win more" though it did help tremendously in BotW (in summation, it centers cooking food more in-game for learners). The strengths of TotK tutorial are the quaint robot npc's, the strange environ, dynamic movement, and space to learn. The weaknesses are that it can be droll, dull, slow etc. It's risky plotting your in-game experience in a way that obscures the meat and potatoes, but it is an all ages game. Assuming the user has played BotW or any other video game cannot be done. I think they handled the story "retcons" and "rewrites" gracefully so that the game is legible for new and returning players. The tutorial embodies this as well but has all the downsides of a typical tutorial. I will say, at least they give you the wing platform, it's a great opportunity to just have a fun time with the new toys.
I notoriously (to my friends) wrote a frustrated Facebook post about 5 hours into TOTK saying how much it disappointed me, and I LOVED Botw. I decided to continue trekking though, and everything clicked shortly after. I'm not saying it would have changed for Sean, but take it from someone who did the same, thinking you understand the game based on the tutorial is not a fair assessment. And that doesn't take into account the pressure Sean has as a streamer as well, which I know can also affect your gameplay experience. Either way, I wish he would give it another shot, but I'll concede it may just not be for him.
I understand and can sympathize with your confusion. However, there were very specific and clearly conveyed paths that teaches you and lets you play with the different powers as soon as you leave the shrine you get them from. You only found it with Ultrahand, but it existed for all the others. If you don't have the impulse to ask "Now how can I use this? What if I use this here?" when you get a new mechanic in a game without getting fully railroaded into it, then maybe you should consider playing games with a walkthrough. I genuinely think that will help you enjoy games more.
...to that last point of primitive strategy/advanced strategy - I remember one particular poster on gameFAQs that always opened their walkthroughs with a "bare bones walkthrough" - essentially, for something like Banjo Kazooie it would be something like: -collect jiggies to complete puzzles to open new levels -collect notes to open note doors and access further sections of the world -look for molehills, that's where you learn new moves which basically covers the basic strategy, just as a way to clue you in on how the game operates on a very basic level - is there a difference between that and a mental model, not 100% sure? But I think it's a very neat idea, but didn't really think much of it, beyond thinking it's endearing to have something like that at the start of a full walkthrough As for TOTK...I really didn't mind the tutorial area? Though I will say, I played BOTW, so that might have set the starting point for me at a different place, so from there, we had a different experience, go figure. But at the same time...my experience of the tutorial island is that I started off playing the game with the idea of exploration in mind - I got the ultrahand shrine, and that blew my mind, just the two examples in there, then I got out and built a smallish bridge to cross one gap, then carried that bridge with me, found more pieces, made it bigger, crossed another gap, do the same again, uh oh, now the bridge is 10 pieces long and unwieldy, and yet... beyond it being unwieldy...nothing is stopping me - if I wanna do dumb stuff, I'll get dumb, often fun results, that most of the time can still be salvaged into something that works fine, that was sort of my takeaway. And then... at some point, I wanna say after the second shrine, I saw a cave, went in there, found more of the friendly constructs, learned about zonaite, OK, so that's a thing we'll have to look out for, OK, then played around with the cart tracks and that was cool, pretty sure there's Koroks that wanna go to their friend around there too, got introduced to that... basically my point is, I don't remember the tutorial island being quite as empty as you describe it? And what is there introduced me to the abilities well enough, in my opinion? ...one thing that baffles me is that you say you don't really use ascend after leaving the shrine...I mean, you are within your rights to not use it? But I swear there's a material gacha close to the ascend shrine reachable by ascending a couple of times, as well as a chest, and then those have a launching pad for the wing close by, to glide you back down to where you came from... so yeah, you can go back to the starting zone without using ascend, probably... but from my memory, there are clear applications of ascend near its shrine, that you can avoid without recourse. Which I think is fine? One of the temples I completed by essentially completely ignoring what the game shoves prominently in my face, and I love it so much for it. "Here, you can use this! ...or not, your choice, really" Honestly, most things this game shows you, are less orders, and more suggestions, but my experience is that you have an astounding level of freedom to do what comes to your mind, and most things that come to your mind, game kinda just says "...yeah, that works too, dw" So, comparing our experiences, I think the mindset of "OK, tutorial island, let's get these abilities, and let's just move on to the main meat and potatoes of this game" is partly what caused the confusion?
regarding the dark souls mental model description: this is largely the same for fighting games, but there's another person in control of the monsters you're fighting/studying the moves of
@@pramitpratimdas8198ark souls tricked people who traditionally dont play fighting games into learning fighting game mechanics. It's literally megaman with RPG and Fighting Game elements on a 3d plane. Not for me, but I could immediately identify that a new crowd was learning how to use "Daigo's Psychic Dragon Punches" aka using invincibility frames to bypass your enemy's offense.
I am not sure whether I agree with your differentiation between the notions of strategies and mental models. I personally would consider your notion of mental models as game specific, beneficial strategies. What you consider strategies, I would call exercises or tasks, that a game gives you to apply mechanics in certain strategies. Anyway, I love how you think and talk about your thoughts, it is so compelling. And I never knew anyone could weild ms paint as you do 😏
The fun for me in BotW was just wandering the world discovering everything I could. The actual gameplay was secondary. The monsters were fun to fight and the shrines were fun to solve but it's all fairly standard Zelda fare. The locations were extremely memorable to me though. I haven't played TotK but I imagine it has a similar vibe. Sean, you are overthinking this one. Just dive into the open world and go find out what's up with that misty forest, or that glowing mountain, or the isolated island in the distance. If that doesn't tickle your fancy then maybe it's just not the game for you, and that's perfectly okay.
I'm looking forward to playing the Tutorial Island again with this in mind, I also didn't watch you playing, but found your reasoning interesting especially as someone who didn't really like BotW, but absolutely love TotK and can't put it away. One of the reasons I didn't enjoy BotW is that I struggle with open world games, too many things to check out, but no real insentive to do so and I usually just find myself not starting the game again for a few days then weeks and eventually years. I still haven't finished Elden Ring even though I enjoy it a lot. I think my expectations is part of how I feel about these games as well. I still have a hard time accepting that Ocarina of Time doesn't have the best approach for how a Zelda game should be. So when Breath of the Wild came out I wanted and expected something that followed the OOT formula closer and I also knew I have a hard time enjoying open world games. I also bought it on Wii U which didn't help. So when I got repetative enemies, shrines, boring travel and no dungeons to look forward to, I struggled with finishing the game and didn't do so till I bought it on switch a few weeks before TotK and just powered through it. The mental model aproach is interessting. I can see how it is easier to approach TotK after having played BotW the same way it is easier to get into a Souls game if you've played one before.
I am so happy to finally find a way to talk about the concept that you call Mental Model! I have also struggled to talk about that concept with people and encountered the same problems, so finally having a term for it makes me incredibly happy and I hope you don't mind me stealing it and using it as much as possible, because I hope to god that it catches on. With all that said, I think that I would use the term to mean something slightly different than how you define it in the video. I would use the term Mental Model to talk about the mental state achieved when the player has enough knowledge about the mechanics of the game, both about what they can do as a player and what the world can do to the player, where they can start to hypothesize correctly about whether actions they can take within the game are either good or bad. When the player identifies that one of their hypothesis was correct, it adds to their knowledge of the game that they can use to build further hypotheses. So it is a thing that builds on itself leading to strategy. I know that the distinction is subtle. What I am talking about is the difference between knowing enough about the game to think "maybe I should never let this building go idle again" and being able to recognize intuitively that, when you don’t let it go idle, things do go better for you vs the knowledge itself that you shouldn't let that building go idle in that game. You can read online that you shouldn't let the building go idle, but it takes experience with the game to be able to build the mental model where you understand that intuitively. I don't know if we are talking about the same thing or you would consider that a separate thing altogether from what you are talking about. Either way, I am really glad that someone is pointing it because giving players the environment to build that mental model is one of those things that makes the difference between good and great games. I could end my post right there but there a a couple of things that I would like to mention as well about my experience with Tears of the Kingdom. I also had a terrible time in the tutorial island. Which is weird because I thought that the tutorial section of Breath of the Wild was really fun and they sound really similar to one another on paper. I couldn't quite tell you exactly where they went wrong, or what they could have done to fix it. But I think I know what it is that they were trying to do. Essentially they are trying to make sure that, before the player is let loose on the world, they have some time to familiarize themselves with the mechanics of what they can do so that, when they experience the actual world, they for sure have the knowledge that they need to start building a mental model of the game. But that ends up with a lot of complications. The biggest one is that every single player needs to be able to finish this section of the game because, if the tutorial ends up being too difficult for some people, you risk them dropping the game before they even really experience it. But that leaves certain things, like adding more complicated things to do with the skills you are acquiring, out of the table. At least they should not be mandatory. And I do think that there are enough things to play around in the starting island to test your new abilities which are not mandatory. The problem? The rewards are not worth the effort. Or at least they don't feel like they are. Funnily enough, I got to a point in the game where I am immensely glad to get any arrows the game would give me because, even buying out every arrow from every store I come across, I am constantly running out of arrows because fusing things to arrows is just so strong. So them giving you arrows in a chest that is out of the way is actually a decent reward. But they can't give you so many where it becomes easy to accidentally trivialize the whole tutorial and so the amount that they do give you feels terribly underwhelming. At that point they should have given the player that went out of their way something else entirely. But what? Money? Zonaite? Each has their problems. I really don't know what they should have done, and I honestly thing that the problems are more fundamental than just the choice of rewards, but they should have done something differently. The beginning of Tears of the Kingdom is a stain on an otherwise amazing game. The fact that I loathe the music in the sky only made things worse for me.
Don't take this as a negative. The reason this is happening is the expectations, and how carrying them into new experiences can not only make those experiences worse but also make you worse. As an example: I hate tutorials, but at the same time I don't like how the mechanics of Elden Ring are just left unexplained until you figure them out (even though you can read a lot of them just by reading everything in the menus). My expectations for game mechanics dragged down my Elden Ring experience even though it did exactly what I wanted - left me hanging without the guidance of a tutorial.
It's really that he didn't play BotW. Let me explain how I thought about the game during the tutorial island: "Oh, you can fuse rocks to weapons to break things? This will help where the bombs previously helped in BotW" "Oh, you can ascend through platforms/ceilings? This will help climb things faster which is awesome because climbing was so slow in BotW" "Oh, you can move things AND fuse things together? This is like a much better version of Magnesis from BotW" If you had previously played BotW before TotK then you already knew what all of these abilities were for essentially. I guess I took that for granted.
I understand the criticism of the intro area. The puzzles get much more open ended after the into area and allow you to use any tools and combination of them.
Hey Day9, Just FYI, the term you coined as “Mental Model” is called a heuristic. You still did a great job explaining things just thought you’d like to know.
Introductory areas for video games so often are exhausting for adult gamers. It's usually more designed for kids which is what makes it exhausting. Adults usually could just play the game and upon dying change their approach then look for some answers online if they get seriously stuck.
Why don't care much for tears of the kingdom. 1 Too many complex detours. And no champions abilities. 2 Zelda still friend zones link. 3 there's too many characters that are bland and just there. But most important of all. 4 Revali's not there!
I wonder what you would define the mental model of previous smaller scale Zelda game like aLttP or OoT. I feel like exploration of new areas using tools that you gain from dungeons and events, ultimately unlocking a new dungeon with the dungeon itself being the climax or "reward" for that exploration would be the mental model of a game like Ocarina of Time. Like a Metroid game where you use new items to seek out new paths of progression. But because past Zelda games are much smaller scale and there's an "order" to things, it seems like a more easy to grasp model of what you're supposed to be doing to have fun. BotW and TotK expand this exploration part before the dungeons heavily but still offer that buildup in each region, and the climactic dungeon at the end of each section. I wonder if the Tutorial Island simply had a dungeon at the end of it that made you use all your newfound techniques creatively and finished it up with a boss, if you would have felt much more satisfied with mental model, and immediately went out seeking to explore for the next dungeon and everything required for it. One of the most common criticisms I see from detractors of BotW and TotK is the very small amount of dungeons present in the game. And I would bet that the imbalance between the extremely prolific "exploration" phases and the scarce "reward" phases is what causes a lot of people to not really mesh well with the games.
That's well said. This makes me think of intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards. These 2 new zelda games drive people to explore mostly for explorations sake (intrinsic), as there isn't that much of a reason IN the game to do the majority of the exploring that's possible. While I know this would never happen, I think heavily increasing the difficulty of BotW and TotK would really improve them. The intrinsic motivations would still be there, but now there would be a lot more extrinsic motivation as well. Every small improvement to weapons, health, armor, etc. would be "necessary" and actually feel like a reward. Exploring to improve your character would actually have an in-game benefit because it would help you progress. I played a romhack of ALttP called "Parallel Worlds" that was very much like this. It was fucking hard and I was driven to explore not just for some personal satisfaction of completionism, but rather because I felt like I needed every character upgrade I could find to help me progress through the game.
I also never played breath of the wild or any Zelda game ever for that matter. I finished the tutorial island and then left the game for a bit, didn't really feel like playing. Then I went back into the game and did the first objective on the story mission and it clicked after that, once Purah lights up the SkyView towers and you get the glider, that is when I couldn't put the game down anymore. It would have been nice if the game dropped me directly on top of the main base so I could do that 1st main story mission immediately then I wouldn't have gotten lost on what to do.
Day9 StarCraft daily disguised as a TOTK criticism.
A Zelda stream starting with "welcome to funday Monday!" Would be a nostalgia trip for sure.
This actually kind of hurt to read
Genuinely loved how this was broken down. I occasionally find myself bouncing off of games just from the tutorial due to that mental model problem, where some other games just instantly click with me. Breath of the Wild, for example, instantly clicked, but when I showed it to a friend, he couldn't find the fun. I disagree with simply stating "Oh, it gets better in 20 hours, just keep playing until you have fun." This is a great articulation of mental models, and how helping someone understand the model with gentle guidance can vastly improve the opening hours of a game.
A lot of games do get better after 20hrs. Day9 himself struggled to enjoy dark souls when he first played it. Even with elden ring he was pretty lukewarm about it until about 40hrs in. I don't get why a game not clicking with someone in the first few hours is such a bad thing when it is so commonplace
I stopped playing Breath of the Wild only on the basis of "I really don't like the weapons breaking". I understand the design decision - I just didn't enjoy it. Wife and kids are loving the game though.
@@pramitpratimdas8198 Because nobody wants to do something that's not really that fun for 20 hours just to get to the fun part. Just because it's common doesn't mean that it's okay. Games should be aiming for people to engage with the experience as soon as possible. It's about respect for the player's time.
@@neomone1989 The best games of the last few years, like Rdr2 for example, don't do that so maybe your assumption is wrong
Agreed on the fact that time and attention is at a premium.
IMO, TotK took "It's about the journey, not the destination" and made that a core game mechanic.
Skipping breath of the wild magnified this effect for Day9. I remember feeling this same confusion during the great plateau in botw. Every zelda before was closer to a metroidvania. New dungeon, new ability, boss that can only be beaten with the new ability, open world that has a wall that can only be passed with the new tool to get to the next dungeon. When botw gave me all of the most valuable abilities instantly for free, I didn't understand what the point was going to be.... I already unlocked everything? Weird.
I don't think it makes a difference. BotW tutorial is much less painful, you have much less traveling between the 3 tutorial shrines. But the "problem" (using that word as lightly as possible) doesn't change. I lost focus after a while. I got a horse, reached the first story quest village, but thats it. the puzzles are cool. the fighting is cool. but it felt like a massive pain in the ass to travel between those things. And I still have no idea where you go to do the first ancient beast. I think Ubisoft open world with a million tags identifying every objective on your map is a million times worse. but the subtlety of the golden wind from some points of grace in elden ring is sooo brilliant. do whatever you want but the next "Big Guy" is over that way somewhere.
I skipped BotW and am thankful, TotK felt completely fresh to me. Reminded me of playing Ocarina of Time as a kid.
@@SquintyGears In TotK, direction is given in multiple unobtrusive ways to the point where, if you're confused about where to go, most landmarks you reach will get you caught on a thread that you can pull to find the major story beats that unlock various modes of exploration, travel, and unique equipment. It's one of those things that you can easily tune out if you're just going on your way and exploring what you want at your own leisure, but around the 10th time one of the Stable attendants said Lookout Landing was looking for people to help, I realized that I may have missed something there and, sure enough, going back put me on a path to unlock more tools to add to my arsenal. Even the most straightforward direction the game gives you, the mission waypoints, leave it completely up to the player to figure out how to get there, meaning that unless the player is _explicitly_ going for the mission, they're likely to stumble across multiple POIs and get distracted. (most likely Shrines, as the tutorial clearly sets up that they're the primary way to increase max health, something players are likely going prioritize once they realize most enemies in the game will 2-shot an unarmored Link with 4 hearts)
I absolutely agree that the mindset the game requires is a significantly different one that in games where the path is clearly laid out for you, and your abilities have clear, cut-and-dry utilizations. But when I was playing the game, that room to be curious and creative felt like a breath of fresh air compared to some of the more hand-holdy games as of late. By the end of the tutorial, I had a pretty good grasp on the core tools at my disposal through good environmental design and testing. One of my fondest, early memories in the game was finding a shrine with a seesaw puzzle, noticing that it wanted me to use ultrahand to weigh down one side to use it as a ramp... and then promptly ignoring that, walking onto the seesaw to get it to tilt one way, tilting it the other way, and just using recall to rewind the ramp its initial position while I was on the end, solving the puzzle. It's that kind of clever ingenuity that the game not only allows for, but _rewards_ that makes me really appreciate the game personally. Sure, the rewards in and of themselves may not always be entirely worthwhile, but to me, coming up with a stupid solution to a puzzle that the game accepts is enjoyable in its own right. It's that same kind of, "there's no way the game allows this" and "what happens if I combine these elements in this way" that I've only ever really felt while playing Scribblenauts of all games, and the fact that I got that level of enjoyment out of a game that already had the core gameplay of its extremely solid predecessor just expounded on my overall enjoyment of the game.
@@SquintyGears In botw you get a map and your objective is pointed on that map, just like in a ubisoft game
@@pramitpratimdas8198 no. you get 1 marker for 1 quest. that's the only thing that goes on your map. you have the ability to put a maximum of 5 or 6 more markers manually. fast travel points get added when you unlock them on by one.
it does not highlight every single point of interest and collectible in your vicinity when you '"tower scan/eagle vision".
having manual marker points is a completely different system. these two zelda games and elden ring did almost the exact same thing with their maps.
This analytical type of content is why I got into Day9 years ago, really great breakdown.
So true. Never liked playing Starcraft myself, but the way he explained the game made me a fan. Of both him and Starcraft xD
It’s honestly the best content he puts out. I love everything else but the actual “inside scoop” of game design is so intriguing.
I understand where’s he’s coming from with his approach, but it just doesn’t mesh with what TotK is doing, and it doesn’t help that it’s a sequel to a game he hasn’t played.
TotK is a true sandbox game. It’s not meant to give the players any real direction. Like an irl sandbox you hop in, are given toys (tools), and the rest is up to you.
It’s the absolute best-case scenario of a game designer telling gamers to (metaphorically), “Go out and play”.
I grew up playing StarCraft, I completely disagree with this critique
It is not that complicated
@@asault Curious how successful you've been in ladder....no cap
I actually had this problem with Breath of the Wild. Coming from older Zelda games that were very linear, the open world aspect of the game wasn't clicking for me because I didn't understand how the game intended for me to have fun. It was only after I had left the game, saw people just chilling out and wandering around that I figured it out, came back, and had a blast.
This was the same for me. My initial takeaway for Breath was that it is was a really cool climbing simulator. Luckily I played it with several other people and had a similar experience to you. Thankfully because of this I was able to enjoy Tears pretty much as soon as I farmed a bit and ran in one direction, eventually heading to the major plot points.
In my mind, I agree they didn't succeed in making a compelling tutorial island, and the main reason was they had two competing things they wanted to get across to the player that were somewhat in conflict. On the one hand, they want to establish early on that you are open to go wherever you want, so they don't want to put obstacles that force the player on a certain path (i.e. what if the player does C->B->A instead of A->B->C?). If they force a certain path, then the worry would be that the player will be looking for a clear path the rest of the game. On the other hand, they want to show the player that their powers can be used to interact with the world in creative ways. But to do that without forcing a linear path, you need to either only show that off in the shrines, or create more of an incentive to explore "optional" parts of the island - maybe instead of just pointing you to the 4th shrine, the game could have also highlighted different challenges/treasures on the island you could get (i.e. a monster with armor that requires a rock fused weapon, an elaborate chasm gap/construction, etc.) By highlighting a few "optional" treasure chests that required creative use of the abilities, it might have been able to bridge the two ideas better.
Breath Of The Wild's tutorial area actually adressed all of this, by giving the player way more freedom. You can go to virtually any of the four main abilities in any order. It gives you a tiny open world. TotK's tutorial is very linear. I was confused too, for other reasons.
He is so good at articulating his thoughts. I could listen to him explain anything.
I think he just wasn't in the right mood for this game when he played it because it does all of the things he said it could have done to avoid confusing him. Enemies keep having new weapon rewards for killing them. He already got multiple gear upgrades and side-grades for exploration and combat. The environment has a ton of things to reward you for exploring and mastering the tools you are given in the shrines. All that seems to have been missing is his own investment into the mechanics and world which would push him to use and enjoy them properly.
One more thing that makes BoTW tutorial better is the story from the old man. You feel like he's there for nearly 100 year just waiting for a guy to rescue his daughter. 😢
The "old man" character that the King pretended to be was sketchy and unpleasant. "Do that shrine over there and I'll give you the paraglider." "Oh, good work, but actually I changed my mind. I want you to do three more shrines before giving you my paraglider."
Rauru actually made you feel like he was helping you, which was a huge improvement
@@cleverman383 it's true that Rauru is clearly trying to help. That said, I enjoyed the uncertainty of who the mystery man is and what he's doing on the plateau. It was a fun mini-mystery to hook the player.
I also really liked that you found him in random spots hunting and cooking. Rauru doesn't really *exist* on the island in the same way. He just pops in when he needs to.
TOTK is an improvement on BOTW in almost every way, but the tutorial was definitely better in BOTW. I think Nintendo struggled with making a tutorial that works for both new players and BOTW veterans at the same time, and kind of missed the mark. But the rest of the game is brilliant. And Sean should play the BOTW tutorial, which is almost perfect, in my opinion.
That's a good point. Thinking that BOTW is the tutorial makes a lot of sense.
I did not have these issues with the tutorial that he mentions.
@@VexylObby I had well over 200 hours in BOTW when starting TOTK. I didn't have his issues either, but the tutorial area didn't capture me in any way. In fact, when I left the Sky Island for the first time I felt a bit unmotivated, which was the opposite feeling that I had when I left the starting area of BOTW.
However, after getting the first tower and visiting the depths for the first time, I felt the magic return, and now I have over 130 hours in TOTK already.
I guess it just shows that making a tutorial area for a game like this is very hard, even for possibly the most talented game designers in the world.
@@ksven I was captured by the Sky Island.... the music, the mysterious feeling of a different land, the new powers. I thought it was col. I think people are just looking for reasons to hate on the game because it is actually doing well.
@@VexylObby I really don't think so, I think it the tutorial genuinely didn't click for everyone. And that's fine. Clearly most people are loving the game.
I was upset when I saw Sean's initial reaction too, but mostly because I felt he was denying himself a great experience by giving up just after the tutorial. I knew it would get so much better if he had given it just a few more hours. But he gave the game 5+ hours, so can't really blame him if it didn't click by then.
I think the obstacles in the tutorial do encourage you to use your creativity to some extent and aren't just "Lock and key", but that isn't necessarily clear until you see someone else play the game. That's the real problem here IMO.
I saw a comment on the TOTK video saying "I just want to say that I've now watched 6 people do the hook puzzle, and I've seen 6 different solutions." So this puzzle isn't just "Lock and key", it is doing its job of encouraging creativity. What's actually happening here is that it's easy to solve the puzzle in one way and then say "Ah, clearly that was the only possible solution, I have just put the lock into the key," and then move on without even realising that your solution was unique and most people didn't solve it that way.
This is an inherent problem with allowing player freedom and creativity. If a player has the freedom to solve a problem in a ton of different ways... then they also have the freedom to just go with the solution that seems most obvious to them. And they may not even realise that other solutions exist at all. It's very easy to just think "Clearly everyone must have solved it this way," because the solution seemed so obvious from your perspective. It's only when you see other people solve the problem that you realise that your solution was unique.
I think this is why the epiphany with this game came when Day9 saw his wife play 20 hours in. It's not really about the 20 hours, it's more about seeing someone else do things that are totally different to what you would do. Day9 gives the example of how many unique creative ways there are to get past some trolls on a bridge, and that's totally true. But if those trolls were in the tutorial, how many people would actually realise that? A lot of people would just run past the trolls and come out of it thinking "Clearly that was the only possible solution" without even realising all of the crazy things they could have done.
This is a pretty difficult thing to teach in a tutorial and it's fortunate that we live in an age where internet clips are so accessible. Watching a partner, a friend, or someone on youtube doing something crazy you never would have thought of - that's the true tutorial of BOTW and TOTK.
No I think the tutorial area definitely has "intended solution" to the problems that most players would gravitate to. Day9 was trying out funky builds too but after his build fell down he was out of stuff to make progress with.
@@pramitpratimdas8198 I'm sure literally every puzzle does have at least one "intended" solution, but pretty much none of them are limited to those solutions. I saw at least one streamer do the tutorial shrines in the opposite of the intended order, like the whole tutorial backwards, and it just worked.
Tears is pretty good at exactly the thing Sean spent his this video criticizing it for. It gives a mechanical tool in an enclosed shrine with respawning resources; it tells the buttons to use that tool. You go outside, and there are stations laid out to employ the mechanics in slightly more free-form, but still controlled and designed ways. Most of the tutorial island has clear rails and guideposts but multiple solutions. It gives the mechanic, then it gives little, progressively more complex puzzles about application.
What I think really clearly ruined Sean's perspective for the whole game was the second little obstacle he ran into after getting Ultra Hand. There's a little lake you have to cross, and there are parts for a raft clearly laid out. There's also an NPC with dialog telling you that you how to chop trees down for logs to build things with. The obvious solution to the puzzle is to build a little raft and cross. Sean built the raft and kind of messed up, and the raft floated away from him.
After that happened, Sean's reaction wasn't "ok, how do I solve this now?"; his words were very close to "ok, this is a game, so if I go away, the parts will come back." It was weird because at first, the thing he seemed excited about was finding lateral solutions to problems, and at that moment the game was telling him he had a bunch of tools, a bunch of resources, and a goal, but he was so fixated on trying to exploit the game that actually playing it didn't occur to him.
I think the primary purpose of the tutorial island was to teach you the bare minimum basics of the four major abilities as to not overwhelm you with complex mechanics and force you into creative solutions, and to teach you that sometimes the best course is just to soldier through the quests because you'll always get something neat out of them.
Through the rest of the game, all of the main story quests unlock very interesting rewards, and many of the side quests do as well. It's very easy to feel a little directionless in this game, and them showing you that it's okay to just move on to the next shrine/tower/quest marker/etc that you see will still give you interesting things to do with fun challenges in between I think was the point. Eventually, you learn to make your own quest markers for yourself, saying "I'm going to figure out what's going on with this sky island/town/mountain/cave system/etc" and giving you a very goal-oriented mindset makes it so that you're less likely to shy away at a specific puzzle, obstacle, or enemy.
I feel less directionless and more like I have a bunch of things that I would like to do but I don't necessarily have to do any of them.
Like I was on my way to one town to do this big quest, I accidentally ended up at this other town and did a big quest there instead.
This basically. Fuse is the best example of this, and probably the most egregious example of the tutorial island not showing you a "mental model" about what to do with Fuse other than "stick something onto your weapon." It's because they kinda don't want you to think "this is how this mechanic should be used" too much because your understanding of that is going to change drastically as you go through the game, and necessarily so. The discoverability of "wait, I can do THIS?" is the point.
I’m curious whether having played Breath of the Wild would have helped understanding the mental model.
Botw had the better tutorial in that you were promised something cool (the paraglider) before you embarked on a journey of shrine hunting. Totk doesn't do that
I played BotW and felt basically all the same things about TotK during the tutorial island. I spent even more time exploring the available terrain and climbing and not getting rewarded in any way for it. For example, I spent a bunch of time early on carefully climbing my way atop the palace at point X on Sean's map and also explored the back of it (where the tutorial island ends), before I had Ascend or knew it was a thing, in order to discover that there was absolutely nothing there, not even a chest with 5 arrows in it. It was kind of infuriating that doing almost anything that wasn't taking the absolute most obvious straight line to the thing that the game wanted you to go to would typically result in a whole lot of nothing, even though the game presented a lot of interesting-looking terrain and stuff to climb and explore. I got the idea pretty quickly that this wasn't what the game designers wanted me to do, but it felt like there was just a ton of wasted potential.
When the game opens up, it's a lot better, but there are still things every now and then which make me say "what were they thinking?" with regard to the game presenting a very clear challenge and then either not following through on rewarding the player for solving it, or following through in a sort of insulting or funny way where you get a reward that is almost but not quite entirely worthless.
A chest will be protected by monsters that drop much stronger weapons than the random decayed traveller's sword or whatever that it contains. It's a lot of hard work to get this kind of thing consistently right, but it feels like nobody could have been paying attention sometimes. Sending a couple of testers through the world with the authority to change the contents of most random reward chests to feel more appropriate for the area they were in could have improved things a lot.
Even when the rewards are good, they sometimes make no sense in a way which can be a bit anger-inducing. There are 4 big rotating sphere things you can find in the skies, 3 of which contain somewhat cool puzzles and will likely provide you with one of your first Sage's Wills, and the 4th of which contains a piece of armour instead. Even if it's a good piece of armour, the fact that you need 4 Sage's Wills to get any benefit, and you now have no idea where to look for a fourth one is kind of infuriating. Instead of providing that satisfaction of figuring out the commonality between those spheres and using it to get an upgrade, you'll probably end up opening an ordinary looking chest somewhere relatively plain and easily accessible, and it'll randomly have a Sage's Will in it, and you'll be really confused and kind of angry that now the game is treating this item like nothing special. (To be fair, there are only a couple like that and the rest are mostly guarded by strong monsters, but the next easiest ones to get are just in unassuming random chests sitting out on easily accessible sky islands.)
Despite all that, I've been enjoying the game, but yeah, the design decisions are really confusing sometimes.
@@cgibbard I felt the same way about Elden Ring. After every copy paste dungeon there's a boss which rewards you an item or weapon that you cannot use for your current build.
@@cgibbardI got bored with BotW for this exact reason. I feel like games have taught us to ignore the objective cause there'll be secrets, side quests or rare items if you go in the oppositve direction. I think Xenoblade does this well; you know where your next story obj is, but you get rewarded for exploring by finding landmarks, secret areas and new items. So to have BoTW/ToTK apply this concept inconsistently is dissapointing.
It took me a bit to warm up to ToTK because the first few hours are a linear "chute" and I kept ramming against the sides, trying to explore the world.
I think one of the big tutorial problems was that the fuse shrine focused on the different world interactions with fused weapons rather than it's combat capabilities. It builds the mental model that fuse is for in-world puzzle solving, but actually it's 99% a combat mechanic; it needs to be used either for creating stronger weapons or creating weapons that do different things like elemental damage. The period after the fuse shrine is full of enemies which do exactly that, they get progressively strong and drop stronger fuse items or they have things like flamethrowers or they drop ice explody jelly. The shrine built the wrong model, causing you to walk past the interesting combat and exploration of fuse. I personally didn't and made stronger weapons, got the RPG progression I expected, and did some cool elemental combat stuff. But I can see why the shrine builds the wrong idea and it's a big deal when the tutorial island is such a long period of gameplay.
This explains roughly how I felt after leaving tutorial island and why I didn’t play much further than that.
It might be a problem that is only happening for very analytic people who always try to find „the correct way“ to do things
Starcraft definitely doesn't teach you to keep your building constantly going and resources low. That's something you learn through your own discovery.
I don't think I ever learned that until other people told me. Like, Day9.
The phrase “mental model” really clicked with me. I’ve been finding myself constantly approaching TOTK travel & some puzzles (only about 15-20hrs in so far) with a feeling of “why do I feel like I’m playing minecraft?”. With the new mechanics there’s so many methods to get from A -> B or accomplish your objective. It makes me as a player think like I’m in a sandbox game way, rather than an RPG game. Not really a bad thing, just different!
Botw was the same way but much smaller scope
@@pramitpratimdas8198 Agreed, but i think the scope factor makes for a very different feel (at least for me)
I very much wish the building mechanics didn’t take up so much of this game. There are big points of this game where it feels like Minecraft (which I hate everything about Minecraft) and ruins parts of the game.
Breath of the Wilds abilities were much more interesting in their limited scope.
I find myself disappointed because without these building mechanics, I feel Tears of the Kingdom would be a far superior game as a more straight forward RPG.
@@joshuagriffith9191 TotK seemed like the logical next step to botw which began by emboldening player freedom and creativity. The biggest difference with Minecraft is that its world is very different from a realistic one so it's much harder to intuit builds and stuff.
@@pramitpratimdas8198 Yeah. The problem is I don’t like building games. I love most the game, but the constant building aspect leaves me bored. I wish there was more of an optional aspect to using these mechanics. With it being such a large part makes me feel it’s slightly inferior to Breath of the wild.
That being said breath of the wild wasn’t perfect either.
At 32:16 you basically hit the nail on the head; the game is all of those things and much more on top. Breath of the wild had a similar tutorial area but it felt more like an actual tutorial for the game itself rather than a tutorial for the new abilities. I hated the tears of the Kingdom tutorial Island myself but because I had experience from breath of the wild I knew that they were basically just showing me these new mechanics.
I think the main issue is that the new mechanics are so powerful and varied that the devs decided they needed to teach the player these things up front. A friend of mine had some anxiety about ultra hand and weapon fusing. He felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things you can do with these tools. He incorrectly assumed that you need to use these abilities all the time.
I get what you're saying, I agree that as a veteran of Breath of the Wild, the experience was undoubtedly easier for me to take in. Can't say I HATED the tutorial, I look back on those first few hours of the game pretty fondly in hindsight, but I do remember at the time feeling like I was just having to grind through something that was keeping me from the actual game just so I could get to the actual game - rather than feeling like I was playing the game and it was Teaching me everything intrinsically through gameplay.
Mind you, I do think the abilities introduced are so complex that it requires teaching players the most basic and core concepts of using them in a well-defined space - but like you're saying, It's kind of a lot to put on the player right at the beginning of the game, before they've even had the chance to just run around and have fun. Yes, there is some amount of freedom to running around on the sky islands, not everyone has to do things the same exact way, and people will have somewhat varied experiences with that part of the game. But nothing that comes close to what the actual game after the tutorial has to offer.
But I realize that the game also kind of sets Itself up to need to do it that way, because of the fact that the entire game requires you to have and understand all of your abilities from the beginning, otherwise the world and the puzzles they designed couldn't be the way they are. But as a result, it's really like the game says, "OK, I know this Isn't the gameplay that you were hoping for but we need to just get this out of the way, so just bear with us for a few hours, and we promise it will be worth it, this game will be totally amazing!"
And, yeah, having played BotW, I got through the great sky islands fairly comfortably knowing what was waiting for me at the end, knowing it would be worth it. But I still think it's somewhat risky game design that isn't completely sound despite the necessity, and I can understand how those who haven't played BotW but have only heard how great these games are would be a lot more skeptical from their experience of the Sky Islands, which basically asks them to have faith that it will eventually get WAY better.
@@turntsnaco824 I hated it because it felt too linear and contrived. There are better ways to teach these types of things in games than unskippable cutscenes and a contrived set of circumstances
Day9 talks about how he wishes TotK had explained to him how to have fun with the mechanics, but he also praises Starcraft for having the "mental model" of keeping resources low and always keep your production going. Is there a part in the actual game of Starcraft that explains this to you, or is it wisdom you have to gain from seeking external resources like the Day9 Daily?
Nope. You learn basically all that stuff on the internet
He doesn't use Starcraft as an example of how the tutorialization should be, he just uses it to explain what mechaanics/mental model/strategy means to him. Of course, Starcraft (like a lot of older games) really just shows you the mechanics and then you have to figure out the "mental model" all by yourself or learn from others ...
You're exactly right, and even in Souls games, while his analysis is correct that it is a game that requires patience and timing, where a level 1 character can clear it immediately... The game itself doesn't say that. It would help you to know that right away, but the game has you pick a class/starting equipment, then fight an intro boss, and immerse yourself in the world. The end result of what he's describing as a mental model is accurate, but I don't think the games he references does that accurately. You can beat the campaigns of StarCraft on the highest difficulty at a Silver 3 level, and I don't think I understood the mental model of SC2 at that level. In Souls games, you could grind the same enemies for hours trying to level up and that WOULD work, it would just suck because before Elden Ring, the only good source of XP was the next boss, or the rooms right before it. Mental models give you mastery, and maybe the "best" way to have fun, but I don't think many games are in the business of instructing you that closely.
@@cryssanie Do you think if Day9 wiped his memory of Starcraft and decided to stream it for the first time, he would have similar complaints since the game doesn't guide you to the correct mental model on its own?
I had very similar feelings throughout the early game of TotK, although to a lesser degree (experience from BotW taught me to expect the unexpected, thus I withheld a lot of judgement). Even now I'm 20 hours into the game and I still don't feel fully on board with exactly how it wants me to have fun on a fundamental basis, rather than just waiting for fun moments to happen to me. I'm very slowly warming up to it, but it's taking a lot longer than I expected, and I still have certain complaints that I have no idea if the game will ever address.
The way I see it, ToTK is a great set of mechanics but not a great game, I didn't feel like building stuff because I didn't see the point. 99% of the time it is quicker and more convenient to glide/teleport to a tower.
For me it offers too much freedom...is building a mech to fight ennemies powerful and fun ? Yes but I never did it myself because I never struggled enough in combat to need that.
Building aerial vehicles is cool? yeah for sure but 90% of the time I can strap a rocket to my shield and climb a bit.
Fusing anytong to your weapons is cool? Yeah but I don't need to experiment since fusing the best items nukes enemies.
It seems like the kind of game you have more fun if you play it as a streamer because you get to meme in front of people, i.e. you get incentive to interact with the optional mechanics.
@@iopklmification That's my exact problem with the game. Add the fact that because the game is so huge, weapons break, and you get all your abilities upfront, there's essentially permanent growth to power or utility in the game, which I consider to be fundamental to the franchise. Why am i going to go into this 30th cave or climb this 18th mountain peak if I'm 99% certain I'm just going to get a korok seed or a cool spear I'll lose in a half hour? I feel absolutely no incentive to go do the tons of (copy pasted) activities in the game, leaving it feeling tremendously empty.
@@iopklmification frankly it is so nice to read this stuff because it feels like I'm the only one struggling to feel it with TOTK. For me, BOTW was one of the best games I've ever played but TOTK just gives me a headache and feels like it is wasting my time. They just tried to put way too much into the game on all fronts.
I think the knowledge about the game, especially knowing BOTW, really helps for you to not get bored with TOTK tutorial island. I spend a lot of hours with BOTW so I finished the tutorial island and even go through all the section of it without getting bored. It also didn’t take me a lot of time to finish it, 5 hours is just too long.
I see other people says the tutorial is not very rewarding like getting the Paraglider in BOTW. I understand that. The tutorial island in TOTK seems to focus more on giving you the story that you need to uncover before going in the surface.
I love TOTK so much and finished all the main quest except the final battle. Having the knowledge on how to travel the land in BOTW really helps me enjoy TOTK more.
I also love watching UA-cam streams and play through and I think the best play though I see is with PointCrow. He’s really good in BOTW as well which is why he is excited on everything he’s doing in TOTK.
I agree that the tutorial island doesn't show you the crazy extent of the abilities, but I think it does a good job giving you the absolute basics of what you are able to do and shows you there is many more possibilities out there. I think the hate of the island itself really comes from how there is just so much really cool things you can do once your into the main game that it makes the limited feel of the tutorial feel bad when really in essence it showed everything you needed to know to succeed once leaving the island. It shows you basic traversal, basic combat, and basic item collection/food making. Day9 makes the point that the puzzle seemed to want to be solved in one way during the tutorial but also makes the point he wanted more examples of things to do, which in itself would have had to demonstrate a one way to solve puzzle. I also think Day9 and others who were turned off from the start of the game had a habit of overthinking the game the wrong way. The abilities should be "what can I do here" not "what do they want me to do". And playing games like Dark Souls or JRPGs or Mario it is very you need to do X to make Y happen, when in TOTK and BOTW it is very you can do A B C D E F G and Y will happen.
If totk is anything like botw I'm assuming you could finish the game without relying too much on these abilities even though itd make the game harder. It's possible Nintendo found that players weren't using these abilities as much with a shorter tutorial. So the ideal approach is as day9 said - tutorial shrine then whole area with that mechanic. However it'd make the tutorial excessively long, even day9 said it would be like 10hrs long. Nintendo found a middle ground with what they did with totk - shrine + few simple obstacles
@@pramitpratimdas8198 The thing that Sean unfortunately missed by not continuing is that the game _does_ do this. It's just in bite-sized chunks throughout the world... the Shrines. A HUGE percentage of the shrines are basically glorified showcases of various different creative ways you _could_ have been using the tools at your disposal, and after each shrine, you're likely to start noticing more and more opportunities to use the lessons that the shrines are practically training you for.
I think the shrines on the tutorial Island do that, but then it presents you with pretty much the same problem several times to solve in the same way when they should have been challenging you to be more creative from the get-go. It makes it feel very rote and too long.
I love how he finds a way to articulate feelings I had myself but didn’t understand. I only recently got through BoTW after my first attempt years ago fluttered out shortly after the tutorial. This has helped me understand why.
i was a zelda nerd as a kid, from ooc until twilight princes. i Didnt like breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom either. Games like darksouls and elden ring are my standarts now.
Im just confused because as someone who also hasnt played botw.. the mental model of the tutorial could not have felt clearer. The game gives you fuze and ultrahand pretty early and wants you to use those mechanics creatively to reach the third shrine. Either by making a cool strategy for travel or by creatively fuzing things together to more effectively beat up robots. Then you get ascend and it was clear that you were meant to combine ultrahand to get you to places where you could ascend to explore efficiently. At every corner the tutorial is throwing building blocks at you for you to solve problems. The shrines are a microcosm of this but the island itself is so clearly just a big shrine combining the three abilities
Day9's point is that the obstacles to reach the next shrine were pretty straightforward. It's subjective since for someone else building a boat and sailing across is a creative endeavour.
Those are adds to existing gameplay aspects. Which is what this discussion is meant to establish
Here’s the thing: they did what you say, but they stretched it out across the entire game.
You will encounter a shrine 2/3 through the game and face a puzzle where you have to use your mechanics in ways that you never expected, and with few clues on how to figure it out.
It takes a lot of hours of gameplay to get to the point where you feel 100% proficient and know what to do at all times. I’d argue it feels that way all the way up to the end of the game.
2:50 speaking of chrono trigger.. Josh Strife Hayes made pretty good video about the entire game recently, well worth checking out if you haven't.. I think there could be great cross over between the audiences of Day9 and Josh because he also makes videos from very analytical perspective.
the sage abilities match more with the traditional zelda way of introducing mechanics than the tutorial island
BOTW was my favorite game of all time and I am also enjoying TOTK and I must say, I also did not enjoy the tutorial island very much in TOTK. However I want to say that I think BOTW's tutorial plateau was perfectly designed. A masterclass in tutorial design.
I think the big reason was that in botw you were promised something cool (the paraglider) before you embarked on shrine hunting. Totk doesn't do that
Really liked the video, the mental model thing is something I'll definitely be thinking about more every time I run into games that don't click with me in the future. I feel like the with the Tears of the Kingdom opening (and gameplay in general) is that each of the shrines operate as what Day9 was wanting in varying levels of difficulty puzzle solving showcasing what you're able to do with specific mechanics (or combinations of the mechanics) as ways to let the player know that their toolbox is bigger than they potentially realized.
Saying "Hey, here's a cool thing you can do by combining parts A, B & C to build this thing you may not have thought about and here are some uses for it" so that when you encounter it in the overworld you have the option to use that new tool to solve it, but they also have to account for the players that haven't done that shrine and maybe don't know about the 'new tool'. The tutorial island I think also did this, but admittedly poorly, and I think a large part of that is based on remembering that the game is also designed with the hopes that children and people who don't normally play video games can enjoy them. So the things on the tutorial island that were incredibly obvious solutions (put minecart on tracks with a fan and it can cross the tracks, rafts can float, etc.) were the game making sure that players had at least seen once that those were options in their toolbox. Probably not something necessary for 99% of players, but at least making sure that you have those very basics down somewhat so that you have a minimum floor you can expect from players in the wide open world (Every player who has made it to the open world should know that they can cross large bodies of water with a raft/other floating device for example)
As for not using the fuse and the ascend mechanics that I think came more as a symptom of Day9 still trying to figure out his mental model than anything because while the Ultra Hand ability is a puzzle solving tool, the Fuse ability (at least primarily) is a combat tool, which he specifically said he ran past all of the enemies; and the Ascend ability is less a puzzle solving tool and more a combination of making traversal easier tool and a way to add alternate win conditions for puzzles (rather than having to arrive at the end goal in the puzzle, now it's also a viable solution to arrive below point B).
All of this combined with the fact that because Day9 hadn't played Breath of the Wild he wasn't aware that he had been picking up permanent upgrades (in the form of 1/4th pieces of heart under a new name) it makes total sense that he could have the issues he did and struggle with 'finding the fun' Even as a person who had beaten Breath of the Wild, I was kind of lost when I landed on the main land again because there were just so many possible options that I had a ton of choice paralysis and couldn't let myself just run around finding things randomly, so I hesitated playing the game for a bit before deciding I would take a 'tour' through the world via getting every tower, and then from there decide which place seemed the coolest and start there, and found my fun in the game almost as soon as I actually had to tackle traversing the overworld and it's puzzles with my new tools/limited knowledge and got hooked.
I'm really glad you came back to articulate your thoughts further. There was a ton of negativity surrounding your initial opinion on the game. Folks just don't like hearing that their beloved game isn't loved by all, especially when it comes to their favorite content creators.
I love TOTK, but you articulated your feelings surrounding the tutorial very well. Also big props to you for not faking your feelings surrounding the game.
I may not agree with his takes but it's better than 99% of the "critiques" on UA-cam even if he's only talking about the tutorial island
@@pramitpratimdas8198 which specific things did you not agree with if i may ask? (trying to learn game design here)
@@juamibenito2558 Mainly his chief complaint here - that the game teaches you a mechanic but doesn't provide you obstacles to use those mechanics. It absolutely does. These obstacles are straightforward and doesn't force you to be creative - again this is subjective. Day9 plays a lot of puzzle games so making a boat to sail across is straightforward and boring but it may not be so for someone else - especially considering that it's the tutorial area.
Day9 also says that he didn't get to use the 3rd ability at all after getting it. He must have forgot that he did use it to get the glider
The puzzles are amazing in totk. I've never liked puzzle games but this was actually really fun and rewarding. And yeah, the tutorial island is NOT the end of the tutorial, the tutorial is like when you do the first story bit with Purah and then several other bits. It really introduces things very gradually.
I've found them all either far too easy or boring for the most part, completed around 120 shrines so far, bar a few. In comparison to BOTW.
Near every room you either solve instantly, or they give you the exact building items. None have stood out.
Loving the game but this is the sore point for me personally.
The problem is trying to figure out the mental model in the tutorial. The tutorial explains mechanics and gives you time to play with them a bit. After the tutorial is when you should start working out what the mental model should be. Trying to figure that out in an area that was specifically designed to ONLY explain the mechanics simply takes the fun out of learning those mechanics.
The mechanical tutorial is the shrine where you get the ability, the space in between the shrines is no longer the tutorial, but the "Mental Model" space
I disagree. Part of the tutorial should be about teaching the player why/how the game is fun. Learning is fun, and the things you learn should also be fun, so it goes hand-in-hand.
Very interesting take.
I think the holes you encountered were brought on by the designers having lightly assumed that the player is familiar with Breath of the Wild. They only give the very lightest of explanations from the mechanics that come over from that game (stamina, cooking, weapon breaking, exploration, etc.) where those were covered more extensively in BotW.
I don't think ToTK is a perfect game or that the tutorial island could not use a little more polish. But I will say having the puzzles between ultra hand and fuse be simple is effective for children (my 7 yo liked this) and then having the fuse challenges just be "rock hammer smash stuff. do whatever you want." also worked for him.
That is another challenge Nintendo faces that games like Elden Ring do not, the broad age range of their target audience.
I think they were trying to convey that all of the abilities are "simple to learn, difficult to master" by showing the most simple obvious uses for them first, then letting you experiment and figure out what else you could do with them on your own.
I loved this discussion, knowing what comes later it honestly makes me love this game even more! my favourite thing so far has been defeating shrines in ways they didn't intend by bringing EVERY piece of material they give me into the next room
28:50 I think he missed that when you leave the ‘go-up’ skill shrine, you can use it right away to get pants to no longer need food to keep you warm, and a sweet scenic glide through the air all the way back to ‘X’. There’s a lot of freedom in the game, which can cause you to miss really cool sections.
No he did actually do that, just forgot about it
I completely missed that and ended up buying the helm from the rito shop. Then when I figured out I missed it I retraced my steps. Freedom is a double edged sword for sure.
It's really not a double edged sword, the idea is that the game is hard and annoying without exploration and that exploration alleviates that annoyance by giving you tools and cool things
@@Zaurthur the term "too much of a good thing" comes to mind. While freedom is appreciated in games, having some limitations can curb the extremes in the realm of possibilities. I enjoyed playing through TOTK, full stop. But I understand where Day[9] is coming from.
@@TheValorious I think this entire video is DayJ coping. All his points are superficially fine but lacking under any scrutiny.
I think it would be interesting to see you play the BotW tutorial area after hearing this. To me I felt the TotK tutorial was super linear and flat and it made me worried for the rest of the game. In BotW I remember feeling like there were always multiple things I could do to get to my goal. I feel like the set up where everything is in the sky and on seperate islands kinda railroaded you into having to go in a more linear order. Each little island thing didnt have a ton of stuff you could do and the things like enemy varieties was pretty sparce. A lot of changes like the way weapons are all degraded made getting a new weapon not feel special. Getting a sword that does 4 damage doesnt feel super cool when you have a stick with 4 damage lol. Like you were saying, once I got into the game everything started to come together but I dunno I remember being super excited to get out there after the BotW tutorial, where as in TotK I was a little hesitant and unsure
I definitely had that concern at the start of the game too. The degraded weapons were an interesting design choice, and I almost immediately picked up that the reason was because they wanted the player to focus on the fuse mechanic. Still, it felt odd to make the weapons in and of themselves less useful... until I realized that every single base weapon type had its own unique "keywords" that modified how the weapon was best used in combat. They didn't make the old weapons into glorified hilts, they made them into _modifiers_ that you could add onto the _actual_ new weapons you got from killing monsters. Once it clicked, it easily became my favorite mechanics in the entire game.
In botw tutorial you had a goal to work towards - the paraglider. In totk there's no such hint as to what you might be getting for doing the shrines
Glad to see Day[J] still has his wits about him.
Very insightful and articulate as always.
Glad to have dipped in for this talk, Sean.
I think the short of it is that the tutorial island is quite meandering and keeps things at a very basic level.
The contraptions, rewind shenanigans and whatnot come later.
Heck, some of the mechanics are only mandatory in shrines (even if they are incredibly useful in general).
It took me a long time to remember/understand to use Acension regularly. I was so used to treating high places as climbing challenges as they were in BotW.
Much of the game is, in the end, up to your own willingness to experiment and explore.
I haven't watched a video in a while and man do i miss these thoughtful breakdowns and ideas.
I think he's spot on with how the abilities are given to you and the world is initially presented. BOTW had the same issue I feel. They give you all the things quickly and you kinda use them but not much....then you're set loose to explore and do whatever after the tutorial. Both games rush it. I never thought that in BOTW that I'd get all those abilities so suddenly or soon. I expect it in TOTK since the previous game did it but that's only because I know now.
Sean played no BOTW and probably saw almost zero footage from either game so its understandable he'd be confused a little.
I think another good example to look at for this mental model idea is puzzle games. For example, Baba is You spends a lot of time on very basic puzzles, like 1-3 step ideas to get you thinking a certain way.
The scope of totk is much bigger than a simple puzzle game so designing that perfect tutorial is going to be difficult
Well Day9 explains how most of us experienced Breath of the Wild. I almost quit BotW but in the end was the best game I ever played
My gf quit it about 10 minutes in, and I only pushed through because other people have said it was so good.
I really like a lot of it, but I actually ran into a similar "tutorial" problem where I thought I HAD to do the picture quest and it ruined the game for me.
I pushed myself to play about 20 hours before quitting and I regret giving it that much of my time. It's definitely the worst AAA game I've played for more than an hour in maybe all my life. I've genuinely felt like the entire internet is gaslighting me about how much they like BOTW and now TOTK.
@@lunarath1 I will say that as soon as I realized I didn't need to do ANY of the pictures, I thought the gameplay and depth were very good.
That said, I'm struggling to enjoy in because of the bad taste the pictures left. Also because durability in that game feels terrible.
I had a similar problem with the tutorial in BotW. I kept dying in the winter area from cold exposure. Even after I found out that a torch fends off the frost, I was extremely annoyed that the game hadn't explained such implicitly enough. It took me two nights of rage quitting from lack of progress before I accidentally had the torch out and was in the winter area and I was fine.
It might seem like a really stupid mistake to make but I've been playing games for 25 years where cold exposure to the elements simply didn't exist and quite frankly, personally living in the great white north, a measly torch wouldn't save you from the cold wandering about, so it simply wasn't a logical deduction for me.
edit: I ended up enjoying BotW in the long run but it's nowhere near my top 25 games of all time. And to clarify, the tutorial trouble I experienced didn't hurt my over all appreciation of the game. It was just too open world with a redundant quests, like those Korok seeds. I don't look games up so I collected something like 400 before a friend said that it's useless beyond a certain point. I also purely explored first, ignoring the main story and by the time I got to it, I was so overpowered that it felt lackluster. I'm certainly not used to that in a Zelda game.
BOTW I screwed up, I did the tutorial, went to the village, and it said go to the “zora” area, but it was raining forever. I went straight to the point, trying to climb the mountains to the point, and struggled until I quit. I missed the stables, and missed I was supposed to follow the road to go the one entrance.
See, I accidentally dropped something I was supposed to use and was forced to get creative. That's how I learned...
this explains so much why he seems to not get a ton of games, and often gives up on them quickly. I would say most gamers have a very narrow "Mental Model" Stage, day9 literally overthinks himself out of fun.
Eh I don't know if that's true. If someone plays a lot of a certain genre, you tend to carry over expectations from that genre. Open World games vary quite a bit, and RPGs on top of that as well. He uses Elden Ring as an example in the video.
Very Bad Wizards, a Philosophy/Psychology podcast, did an episode with Ted Chiang about the game Soma, and they talked about playing through it. It was clear one of the hosts did not play many games and didn't pick up on what I like to call the "language" of the game, how they expect you to figure things out.
I'm diverting a lot, but a clear example of this is the Green lights used in Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal to guide the player. Some people don't even consciously notice it.
The narrow mental model stage prevented day9 from liking dark souls and I'm pretty sure he'd have bounced off Elden Ring if he didn't already like the souls style combat. Even then he was pretty lukewarm about the game till about 40hrs in
No. You completely didn't understand Day9. To think that he "overthinks".
Day9 was trying to articulate how TOTK's tutorial fail to teach him how to think about using tools to win the game by way of having hard challenges that he has to learn and overcome in order to understand how a player should approach when thinking about using game mechanics to win the game. He learnt what are the tools, how to use the tools by way of pressing what button to do what, but didn't teach him how to think about the game mechanics he was given in order to win the game. I haven't played TOTK myself yet, but from this video, it sounds like the tutorial just wasn't very good. Which is different than saying a game is bad, as talked about by Day9.
Modern day games are notoriously bad at doing tutorials. New gamers suffer from this the most. It's exactly why non-gamers when try to play modern games, they also give up easily. It's because the game just scale so quick, hard and got complicated before players even had time to get used to and understand the approach toward a game.
I advise you to watch a youtube video that literally discuss this very well:
ua-cam.com/video/ax7f3JZJHSw/v-deo.html&ab_channel=Razbuten
Notice particularly the one about Skyrim. The part about where the wife hid in the house from the dragon and thinking she can wait it out until the attack pass (which never does of course). This is what Day9 is talking about despite being a long time gamer - the tutorial didn't show him clearly enough how to approach TOTK.
I agree. It felt like he overthought his way out of fun.
@@Bloodark124 Day9 is also notorious for missing ques an average player would. Like his main criticism that the obstacles after the shrines weren't complicated enough doesn't work for the vast majority of the intended audience of Zelda, ie casual audience. For casual players the simple act of making a boat and sailing across is fun enough. The "intended audience" part is pretty important in game design
Also I'd take Day9's first impression of any game with a huge grain of salt. He struggled a lot with dark souls and was pretty lukewarm about Elden Ring until about 40hrs in
Always happy to see content creators talk about their controversial opinions, especially someone who's so articulate about why they perceive things the way they do.
This breakdown made me nostalgic about Day[9] dailies 🥺🥰
I think part of Day9's problem (because this is far from the first game where he runs into this), is that his favourite games tend to front-load a lot of the complexity. Starcraft, Dota2, M:TG and Dark Souls all give you the entire toolbox from the word go and expect you to use it. So Sean expects the depth of a game's systems to be made apparent right away. BotW and TotK introduce the player much more slowly to some very basic versions of their mechanics, and then, as he noted, the depth is explored gradually through the rest of the game. There are some hints at this greater depth, but they're quite out of the way and Sean doesn't tend to pay close attention to stuff in the periphery, at least not when he's streaming and constantly has to let himself get distracted by chat. So he basically ends up bumming around an area that is deliberately kept relatively simple and sparse to serve as a gentle introduction, and is then disappointed by the lack of depth because he doesn't realize that the game is telling him "you don't need to stick around here any longer then you must".
I think that this immediately expecting the game's full complexity also leads to weird behaviour like him taking potshots from a distance at enemies in Doom 2016 with the starting pistol, even though the game is basically _screaming_ at him to rush in with the shotgun. He's too hardwired for methodically dissecting strategy games, basically.
Another weird quirk I've noticed that I think would hurt him in this game is that Sean, more than any other gamer I've seen, _doesn't ever look up._
Don't even get me started on how much I forgot to use Ascend in my initial playthrough... One of the first caves I went into in the start of the game led me into a miniboss fight, and that was super rad... and then I spent 10-15 minutes trying to scale the sheer drop I fell into the cave from. And the amount of wells I saw and then ignored because I thought I would get stuck at the bottom because most drops in adventure games tend to be one-way gates... By the time I realized all these moments I could have just been using Ascend, I wanted to put my head through my desk.
That's a gamer quirk not just limited to Sean. Valve's Portal team found exactly that during their playtesting
@@firekirby123 I think most players severely underestimated Ascend when they first got it I know I did. It's crazy how many weird to reach places were ascendable. It would just be another gimmick in a lesser game
I don't think a game like TotK is served very well by a "gentle introduction." An introduction makes an impression on a player, it tells them what they can expect from the game and tries to entice them further in. If there is depth to TotK's systems, then the introduction should reflect that, which would both give the player a more accurate impression of the rest of the game and also help the game sell itself. It's like Sean said, if the tutorial island mixed together some very basic puzzles that have obvious solutions that show you the basic functions of your tools with some required abstract puzzles that require more creative thinking, it would have helped it to click for Sean that using the tools at his disposal to construct outside the box solutions to problems in his path was where the fun in TotK lies. If the game is telling him "you don't need to stick around here any longer than you must" then why have a whole island with hidden treasure to explore and find? This encourages you to bum around and explore. And if everything you find is simple and sparse, and all the weapons are roughly uniformly powerful, and there's nothing you find that wows you and makes you glad you went out of the way for it, then you may end up with the expectation that that is what the game is like. Because in that moment that literally *is* what the game is like.
If all that tutorial island wants to do is rush you through the basic functions of your tools and then boot you into the overworld to explore, then it would have better served this function as one long shrine-puzzle type area, with only one path so the player is pushed forwards through it. As soon as you open your game up, you invite the player to wander around and explore. But if everything they find as they explore is simple and bland, that just trains the player to think that if they explore, they will find simple and bland things. If your game has content that is "sparse," you should cut it. It's pointless and distracting. Unless the sparseness is adding something to the atmosphere or the gameplay, it's doing more harm than good. An example of this is the starting pistol from Doom 2016 that you brought up. The developers eventually admitted that starting players off with a pistol with infinite ammo was a mistake, as it led to players playing conservatively, saving their ammo for tough enemies rather than getting into the groove of spending their ammo as fast as they can pick it up to blast through encounters. So, come Doom Eternal, there is no starter pistol. With no infinite ammo as a crutch to fall back on, players are forced to engage with the game's ammo system, and end up having more fun as a result. Removing the content that creates an inaccurate impression of what the game is like leads to a better overall experience.
I also don't agree that the other games you mentioned are all front-loaded with their complexity. Starcraft 2's first mission doesn't have a base for the player to control, just units to order around. The second mission only lets you build like 2 kinds of buildings and 2 kinds of units. By limiting you options, it encourages you to spam out the few things you can build, getting you into the swing of keeping all your production lines busy. Throughout the campaign, Starcraft 2 introduces you to new units a few at a time, in missions designed to highlight their strengths as well as their weaknesses. In Dark Souls games, while you start with all your game actions available to you and a weapon's full moveset available to you, each game's tutorial walks you through all the game actions one by one in situations that highlight their use, each tutorial has like 2 kinds of enemies in it - very slow and sluggish hollow and slightly tougher sluggish hollow - to learn the movesets of, and you only start with one or 2 weapons in your inventory, with no more weapons available to you until after the tutorial, so you are forced to stick with and learn a single weapon's moveset rather than being overwhelmed with options. MtG and Dota 2 are front-loaded with their complexity, but that's because they are multiplayer-exclusive games - it is expected that you will be taught by other players, either working with you or fighting against you. To say that it's the player's fault for not engaging with the tutorial right and not rushing through it to get to the actually good bits is to miss some important points; that the game didn't do a good job of communicating with its design that these bits should be rushed through; and that, frankly, if there are bits in your game that aren't "good bits", that's a design mistake that's worth analysing.
@@LuciferLuckless I don't think you are supposed to rush through the tutorial area, I know people who spent 6+ hrs in the tutorial area. It took me 3hrs and I wasnt rushing or anything. The issue comparing with other games is that they have a fairly simple core gameplay loop. Dark souls tutorial takes less than 5 minutes to finish. Totk's mechanics are far more complex and the ideal tutorial would take 10hrs, according to day9 himself. Another important thing regarding and it's specially important wrt game design is intended audience. Zelda is primarily meant for a much more casual playerbase compared to the games you mentioned. So it makes sense why Day9, who is an avid fan of puzzle games felt disappointed with the obstacles after the shrines
I like TOTK *much* better than BOTW, but BOTW had the better, more concise tutorial area. Getting to Hyrule while still not having the sailcloth was my biggest complaint, but the tutorial also just took longer in general.
You've got a lot of great points and insights here, but I can't shake the feeling that, like, you've been trained by modern game design conventions to fit game experience into specific boxes. It sounds like you're disappointed that you can't label the game with existing genre-tags.
I love your idea of the "mental model" layer that bridges mechanics and strategy, BUT I really like building that mental model myself from the ground up. I like a lot of experimental games because of that. Using genre tropes to "bootstrap" the player's mental model of the game certainly makes the game more accessible, and maybe make the game seem more well-designed.
TOTK definitely feels like it works best when the player brings their BOTW mental model, and I think I agree that it's a flaw. But I think it's also valid game design to invite or even force the player to build mental models from scratch.
(This isn't an attempt to minimize your opinions or vast experience, please understand. I'm not trying to tell you your taste is bad or your fun is wrong, that's absurd and toxic. Just wanted to present a different perspective.)
I think the "mental model" of TotK is exactly what you seemed to expect: "The game constantly puts small, simple problems in front of you, then you're allowed to solve those problems however you can with the tools the game gives you."
I don't think the problems are ever super complex, but that's ok because the "palette of stuff" is an enormous web of interconnected systems.
I think your criticism about the puzzles being "lock and key" is pretty specific to the tutorial... It gets more freeform with the open world exploration.
A lot of it is still lock and key later on. Sure you can go figure out your own way to get this crystal from A to B, or you could use the glider and fans that are conveniently right next to the crystal and just fly it over. Most shrines and most open world puzzles have a single very obviously intended solution.
Me making it 15 minutes in only to finally hear the “I haven’t played BOTW” and immediately realizing that’s why he didn’t get it lol
BOTW makes this game redundant as hell though...
How is getting a new ability/mechanic not progression?
I am one of the people who was flabbergasted by day9s opinion on totk and made a comment about it. I did not know that he hadnt played botw (assumed he must have if he was playing totk) and wondered why he was so critical of the tutorial. My thoughts were, "jeeze, youre being very impatient, Sean." Im glad he explained why it didnt gel with him immediately and can see how great the game is now. I wonder if he'll play some more on stream now. Would love to see gis creations for hitting the gorons bell 😀.
I always hate playing through the tutorial island in BOTW. In TOTK, at least I get cool movement options; I never felt railroaded in TOTK.
I think chess would be a good example of the mechanics/mental model/strategy separation. There is a clear differentiation between learning how the pieces move/the basic ruleset (mechanics), moving your pieces in a way that threatens the opponent/keep valuable pieces alive/move pieces into positions that maximise movement (mental model) and learning openings/pawn structures etc (strategy).
I was initially struggling to understand how you were trying to differentiate strategy and mental models, and I know there is no concrete definition as it's just something you came up with, but the chess example made it a bit clearer for me. You could learn how all the chess pieces move and then move them all randomly with no rhyme or reason which would be perfectly within the rules but you aren't really interfacing with how the game is "supposed" to be played. The next level up (mental model) is you moving the pieces in a way that makes sense to try and achieve a win state (loosely speaking it's "how the game is supposed to be played") without actually engaging in any real strategy - and this I think is enough to just have fun.
For me some of the puzzles in TOTK seemed a little easier and requiring less creativity than I expected. My assumption is that the target audience they were thinking about might have less experience with these types of things, and might actually find them more challenging and feel like the objects given to the player didn't have a very clear purpose that you instantly recognize.
The first thing you can do with Ascend is give u a real treasure by just 1 min exploring after getting it by giving you the frost resist pants.
The only problem I had in the starting area was fuse. That one was very "meh" in the start.
Fusing some planks to give you 1 extra attack on the weapon felt very meh. Should have been a "break a wall with rock" puzzle for sure!
Totk is just a boring, tedious, slog. I love the classic style Zeldas. I tried my best to enjoy it, but 14 hours and I just couldn’t bring myself to play more. It was painful. It’s way too big, too much unnecessary work. The game felt like…work
I liked Tears of the Kingdom, but the tutorial island took me much longer to figure out how to complete than Breath of the Wild. Then it was kind of annoying that after many hours of sucking at combat, I would stumble across shrines that gave you information on how to parry and flurry, which I had no clue you could do, because they were not unlocked informationally in the menu until I had done the shrine. So it wasn't until after like 30 hours in the game was I playing more strategic during fights, instead of button mashing.
How did you not know to parry and flurry if you had already played breath of the wild?
Very nice explanation D9! The issue with the rewards for going somewhere that picked your interest is actually a meme for z:botw. This was somehow mitigated by connecting the points of interest with the map exploration or character development, ie. new area discovered, more hearts for your character. However once you have found one, you knew what the others would give you. this was then addressed by altering the challenge a bit for each of those points - and this did work, kind of. But... there was a lot of side-quests, were the reward was literally your example - a few arrows, and those were always mood killers. At a certain point, the biggest reward was just discovering the event/location itself. The whole reward mechanic in Zelda Botw is quite... mallow. And yet, I couldn't stop playing it. It was just so... chill, beautiful, and interesting enough, to keep me moving forward. The challenge in this game was all the time on the edge of acceptance.
In chess there is analogous term for 'mental model' which is "General Principles" ie. knights before bishops, capture towards the centre, castle early. These general principles help you in a range of situations even if you are unfamiliar with any particular strategy
The other term often used is 'heuristics.'
My reaction when someone says they dont like something: Oh, thats understabdable. Sometimes its not peoples cup of tea.
More specifically on TOTK/BOTW: oh yeah, i can see how the button layout or controls could be annoying or off putting. The bad framerate of TOTK specifically can also be a turnoff. No worries!
Still one of the things i laughed most at in my entire life is his first impression of Yu-Gi-Oh master duel. I was ROLLING!
You had me at "best RPG of all time, Chrono Trigger". Great to see fun analytical videos like this!
I honestly had a very similar reaction when I first played Breath of the Wild. Finished the tutorial and thought "Okay, now where do I go next to actually have fun." Eventually figured it out, and got absorbed.
Then, with Tears of the Kingdom, I already had the model and it was much easier to understand the game. TotK's tutorial is pretty long and boring though.
The mental model in my mind would be "There are a million right ways to accomplish the goal". The issue with that model in general is a lack of fully identifying the goal AND all the methods.
Honestly, I know a lot of people like playing these games blind, but for me watching the gameplay trailers and showcases really helped for creating a mental model. Also I played BoTW, so it was pretty easy to see these mechanics and immediately think of how much better they would make the game.
I've been thinking about this video periodically for the last month since it came out. I am so intrigued by listening to your experience, because I had such a different experience. I thought the tutorial island was the best execution of "teaching me how to think about a game" of the intro to any game I've ever played in my life. You were saying there should have been opportunities to use the abilities you just obtained in creative ways--from my perspective, there were. You said there could have been progression sooner on the tutorial island; I felt like I was getting much stronger immediately, within the first 20 minutes.
Let me be clear; I'm not trying to say you're wrong. Just that my personal experience was very different, and I explicitly enjoyed feeling like TOTK was doing things that you felt like it was not doing.
I appreciate you putting in effort as to help us simmer down over your controversial opinion.
I believe this generation of zelda games simply cannot "tell" the player the optimal method of employing mechanics, as you said yourself that you observed the game's penchant for allowing creative combinations of approaches; some of which were not foreseen by the developers. That expands out to the mode of tutorialization I saw in my own playthrough. The mode I saw was one of gentle suggestion and environmental storytelling. There cannot be temporarily impassable obstacles in the great sky island because the order in which the player reaches the shrines is up to the players themselves. If there were, it would be out of character for the endeavor for a truly open open-world game.
This brings me to the mental model. I hear you say that you are trying to decode the playstyle of this new game by using the patterns of all other games in your repertoire. This is to be expected as we are pattern-seeking creatures. The problem with this is that one who does not move beyond demanding each new experience builds off the old will soon be alienated by an evolving interactive media climate. There is no *one* mental model in TOTK, as the game can be played in any manner of mindset, be it one of mechanical engineering, combat strategy, mobility optimization, or straight up cheese. You could choose any one of those and conquer ~80% of the game with your sole chosen method. This is evidenced by speedruns of the game. And on the topic of speedruns, seeing as how the current world record shaves off ~98% of the time it would take for a casual playthrough, we learn that most of the game's reward is intrinsic in nature, necessarily obviating the use of rail-roaded, unavoidable challenges.
With recent developments, we see the rise of nontraditional games that offer a player experience that is more exploratory, with a rich world and increasingly interpretive, intrinsic goals to be met. The last two zelda games are a part of this wave, and I appreciate them for accomplishing such without diminishing the jeopardy.
I could say something flippant about neuroplasticity and slowly becoming a curmudgeon, but I want to be taken seriously here. In sandbox games, a mental model is like that kid that knows how to solve a rubik's cube that one way they learned online, but they don't understand the innerworkings, or hasn't ever grown with it to create a unique relationship.
"...and you get there, and you finally open the chest and it's like... 3 arrows.."
Me: But arrows are actually like.. really important lmao. It's funny how reasonable he is and how obtuse these games are in so many ways. It's really strange how I often find myself saying "ok I'm not excited about these arrows, or these bombs, I just had to work to pick up, but I'm REALLY glad I got them.
I was recently in a late game area and found two chests. The first one contained a pretty strong shield. I already had a full set of shields that were fused with stuff, so I left it in the chest. The other one contained 5 arrows. I took them and was like "Oh, I need those"
I thought the same thing! Arrows are arguably more important in Totk than any other Zelda game to date - the game doesn't really communicate that early however.
I think that's one of the valid criticisms here. A lot of chests you open after a few minutes killing some mass band of horriblins, and there's like a stick glued to another stick in the box.
The other big factor in that is that by using the same map Breath did, the map-design cues tend to be misleading. Like there's that weird big round lake on a mountaintop on the way to the Zoras. It stands out visually and sets the gamer-senses tingling.
In Breath, it's where one of the dungeons is, and is basically a big deal. In Tears, as far as I can tell, there are just two lizards chilling on a big rock.
So that does feel like an issue to me, but I didn't think Sean got far enough in to experience that
You articulated yourself so well, really good video that allows me to see your view on the issue way better!
To me the souls combat has always been pretty easy to understand (with the exception of Sekiro), what confused me the most back when I played my first souls game was the idea of "progression", at first I did not know where I was suppose to go or what exactly was I meant to do, I felt like I was just running around randomly killing stuff or getting killed, it was not until I started to unlock bonfires and shortcuts when the game started to click for me. The realization that the true progression of a souls game is exploration and unlocking the map rather than killing stuff is what ultimately led me to truly enjoy them. They are 3D metroidvania games.
This sounds like a Mechanics > Implementation > Strategy thought flow to me.
Games show you the mechanics or tools they’ve created for you to work with, but if they neglect to show you how they should be implemented the mechanics never establish a clear purpose.
Put differently, if I shove you into a carpentry workshop, demonstrate ten different tools for you, then point to a block of wood and say, “Make a chair,” that’s unlikely to happen because you never learned the purpose for each tool beyond their basic function.
The disconnect isn’t just about not being shown how to think about something or how to have fun, it’s about not being provided with the proper context for using the mechanics available to you. This makes strategizing agonizingly difficult (the part I think is more closely associated with “fun”) to the point that the mechanics undermine your ability to have fun.
You arrived on the main island with a bunch of tools but no clear understanding of how the game intended for you to implement all the mechanics it provided you with. Your strategy was a vague “whatever” that didn’t allow your creativity to formulate “fun” solutions, and nothing about the game up to the point suggested that would change.
I had the same interaction with totk, where I finished the island, landed, and felt... abandoned, sort of, and worse, felt like I had 4 fun 10 minute segments, each separated by an hour of.. dawdling in an absolutely-optional sandbox. And I landed on the surface and was like, okay, so it's the same game as last time, but now I have all these extra abilities and I guess it's time to go chase down the 120 shrines so I have something fun to do.... no thanks.
I went back, days later, enticed by all my friends raving, and slowly I began to understand what the game is actually about, what the core loop ACTUALLY is. The core loop isn't finding puzzles, or upgrading gear, or obtaining hearts, or collecting poops. It's not even about designing elegant or hilarious machines, a la factorio or railroad tycoon. It's about mastery. I lost track of the number of times I would find myself stymied only to realize- oh wait, I can ascend, *even here*. Or oh wait, I don't need to parry that, I can rewind time. Or oh wait, I don't really need to go scavenge for weapons- I'll just knock this one out of his hands, pick it up, fuse it with something nearby on the fly. I can just stick this to that. I can just float that to here.
The game's core loop, and what the shrines all do, is slowly teaching you to appreciate the mechanics and tools *that you had all along*. The shrines are basically loading tips, prodding you into remembering all your various moves and consider new permutations that you might have overlooked. And by the time you're doing your fourth temple, you probably won't even be that much more powerful in terms of gear, but you'll be fusing and gluing and rewinding and ascending with barely a thought because you are finally immersed, embodying this god-powered little twink with the world at his fingertips.
Tears has issues, but I'm not sure I've ever played a game that made me feel so much like I had developed such a mastery and control over my environment as this one.
Sorry, I know I’m 2 months late here but - I think this is the most appealing way I’ve heard the game described, as a sort of “pursuit of mastery.” I finished the game after spending about 130hrs with it. Thinking about it from a perspective of mastery, I agree, times when I felt like a master of the mechanics were probably the most fun. Running up to a puzzle, or group of enemies, already knowing how I’m going to overcome the challenge is a nice feeling. Having things play out the way you envision is cool and feeling like you’re in total control because you’ve mastered the mechanics is fun.
Some critique on TotK:
While you were able to find your own fun in the game, I would argue that not being able to find that fun sooner, is a symptom of poor game design. Overall, TotK truly feels like a confused game, that doesn’t know what it wants to be. It tries to be so many things and be so open, that everything is left feeling flat and shallow. So, the player is left with the responsibility of finding the fun. Which isn’t inherently bad, but in the case of TotK, “go find your own fun” isn’t what they tell you to do. To your point, the tutorial island left you feeling confused and abandoned instead of excited to explore and master the tools that were given to you. In this case, I think you found mastery as your personal motivation for playing the game as opposed to you finally uncovering the mental model they intended to give you.
In a lot of ways, I feel like TotK suffers from having too much stuff for the sake of more stuff and only having a very limited variety of obstacles to overcome. Aside from the shrines where your building is limited, traversal-related obstacles can almost always be solved by flying over everything with two fans and a joystick. The bulk of enemies can be defeated in much the same way - button mash / shoot weak point / use bomb / use opposing element. I feel there was a huge missed opportunity to create more creative and interesting obstacles to overcome. So much of the game feels copy/pasted that things get old fast.
I believe the word you are looking for is heuristic.
clicked on this video so damn fast, you have no idea
Most people went A to B to C in the tutorial island. I went C to B and then i was stuck being unable to cross a lake so cooked a bunch of stamina shroom to cross the lake...to A
I actually think the earlier a player says: Fuck you game, i'm not doing what you want me to do, the earlier a player will understand the point of the game :)
Horizon Zero Dawn's first "Proving Grounds" (Lancehorns) was hellishly difficult for me given the timed events. Like I spent 3 hours struggling to make bronze times with the challenges. And then somewhere near hour 4, the "Mental Model" finally clicked for me regarding the creature's weaknesses. Once I finally understood the concept of exploiting the creature's vulnerabilities for easy takedowns, it really opened up the whole game for me.
All that goes a long way to say that while the mechanics of Horizon Zero Dawn made sense, and the strategy of "leveling up" and "getting better weapons" made sense, it wasn't until I fully grasped the Mental Model that I felt competent in that game.
I'm deff stealing this mental model concept to explain things going forward :D
I'd like to see Day9 review books too, can't wait to hear all about the covers
The higher end knowledge base of TotK is, in a lot if ways, uncapped. I think the tutorial does a good job of creating a strong foundation with which you can confront the rest of the game.
For example, BotW didnt actually teach you how to cook, you kind of had to stumble on the Bag->Hold Item->"A" to cook method if you didnt watch the first gameplay trailer. This game is much more "eat to win more" though it did help tremendously in BotW (in summation, it centers cooking food more in-game for learners).
The strengths of TotK tutorial are the quaint robot npc's, the strange environ, dynamic movement, and space to learn. The weaknesses are that it can be droll, dull, slow etc.
It's risky plotting your in-game experience in a way that obscures the meat and potatoes, but it is an all ages game. Assuming the user has played BotW or any other video game cannot be done.
I think they handled the story "retcons" and "rewrites" gracefully so that the game is legible for new and returning players. The tutorial embodies this as well but has all the downsides of a typical tutorial.
I will say, at least they give you the wing platform, it's a great opportunity to just have a fun time with the new toys.
Basically, tutorial island in any game should be a microcosm of the whole game, like a little summary of what to expect.
I notoriously (to my friends) wrote a frustrated Facebook post about 5 hours into TOTK saying how much it disappointed me, and I LOVED Botw. I decided to continue trekking though, and everything clicked shortly after. I'm not saying it would have changed for Sean, but take it from someone who did the same, thinking you understand the game based on the tutorial is not a fair assessment. And that doesn't take into account the pressure Sean has as a streamer as well, which I know can also affect your gameplay experience.
Either way, I wish he would give it another shot, but I'll concede it may just not be for him.
I understand and can sympathize with your confusion. However, there were very specific and clearly conveyed paths that teaches you and lets you play with the different powers as soon as you leave the shrine you get them from. You only found it with Ultrahand, but it existed for all the others. If you don't have the impulse to ask "Now how can I use this? What if I use this here?" when you get a new mechanic in a game without getting fully railroaded into it, then maybe you should consider playing games with a walkthrough. I genuinely think that will help you enjoy games more.
...to that last point of primitive strategy/advanced strategy - I remember one particular poster on gameFAQs that always opened their walkthroughs with a "bare bones walkthrough" - essentially, for something like Banjo Kazooie it would be something like:
-collect jiggies to complete puzzles to open new levels
-collect notes to open note doors and access further sections of the world
-look for molehills, that's where you learn new moves
which basically covers the basic strategy, just as a way to clue you in on how the game operates on a very basic level - is there a difference between that and a mental model, not 100% sure? But I think it's a very neat idea, but didn't really think much of it, beyond thinking it's endearing to have something like that at the start of a full walkthrough
As for TOTK...I really didn't mind the tutorial area? Though I will say, I played BOTW, so that might have set the starting point for me at a different place, so from there, we had a different experience, go figure.
But at the same time...my experience of the tutorial island is that I started off playing the game with the idea of exploration in mind - I got the ultrahand shrine, and that blew my mind, just the two examples in there, then I got out and built a smallish bridge to cross one gap, then carried that bridge with me, found more pieces, made it bigger, crossed another gap, do the same again, uh oh, now the bridge is 10 pieces long and unwieldy, and yet... beyond it being unwieldy...nothing is stopping me - if I wanna do dumb stuff, I'll get dumb, often fun results, that most of the time can still be salvaged into something that works fine, that was sort of my takeaway. And then... at some point, I wanna say after the second shrine, I saw a cave, went in there, found more of the friendly constructs, learned about zonaite, OK, so that's a thing we'll have to look out for, OK, then played around with the cart tracks and that was cool, pretty sure there's Koroks that wanna go to their friend around there too, got introduced to that... basically my point is, I don't remember the tutorial island being quite as empty as you describe it? And what is there introduced me to the abilities well enough, in my opinion? ...one thing that baffles me is that you say you don't really use ascend after leaving the shrine...I mean, you are within your rights to not use it? But I swear there's a material gacha close to the ascend shrine reachable by ascending a couple of times, as well as a chest, and then those have a launching pad for the wing close by, to glide you back down to where you came from... so yeah, you can go back to the starting zone without using ascend, probably... but from my memory, there are clear applications of ascend near its shrine, that you can avoid without recourse. Which I think is fine? One of the temples I completed by essentially completely ignoring what the game shoves prominently in my face, and I love it so much for it. "Here, you can use this! ...or not, your choice, really"
Honestly, most things this game shows you, are less orders, and more suggestions, but my experience is that you have an astounding level of freedom to do what comes to your mind, and most things that come to your mind, game kinda just says "...yeah, that works too, dw"
So, comparing our experiences, I think the mindset of "OK, tutorial island, let's get these abilities, and let's just move on to the main meat and potatoes of this game" is partly what caused the confusion?
regarding the dark souls mental model description: this is largely the same for fighting games, but there's another person in control of the monsters you're fighting/studying the moves of
I'd say it's more like moba than dark souls where you need to know the abilities of your own character as well as your opponent's.
@@pramitpratimdas8198ark souls tricked people who traditionally dont play fighting games into learning fighting game mechanics. It's literally megaman with RPG and Fighting Game elements on a 3d plane. Not for me, but I could immediately identify that a new crowd was learning how to use "Daigo's Psychic Dragon Punches" aka using invincibility frames to bypass your enemy's offense.
I am not sure whether I agree with your differentiation between the notions of strategies and mental models. I personally would consider your notion of mental models as game specific, beneficial strategies. What you consider strategies, I would call exercises or tasks, that a game gives you to apply mechanics in certain strategies.
Anyway, I love how you think and talk about your thoughts, it is so compelling. And I never knew anyone could weild ms paint as you do 😏
The fun for me in BotW was just wandering the world discovering everything I could. The actual gameplay was secondary. The monsters were fun to fight and the shrines were fun to solve but it's all fairly standard Zelda fare. The locations were extremely memorable to me though. I haven't played TotK but I imagine it has a similar vibe.
Sean, you are overthinking this one. Just dive into the open world and go find out what's up with that misty forest, or that glowing mountain, or the isolated island in the distance. If that doesn't tickle your fancy then maybe it's just not the game for you, and that's perfectly okay.
You're expected to find the best way that works for you. Teaching you how to have fun goes against the principals of the game.
I see "Mechanics > Mental Models > Strategy" as" Puzzle pieces > Synergies > Structure", probably because I'm learning about Emergence Theory
I'm looking forward to playing the Tutorial Island again with this in mind, I also didn't watch you playing, but found your reasoning interesting especially as someone who didn't really like BotW, but absolutely love TotK and can't put it away.
One of the reasons I didn't enjoy BotW is that I struggle with open world games, too many things to check out, but no real insentive to do so and I usually just find myself not starting the game again for a few days then weeks and eventually years. I still haven't finished Elden Ring even though I enjoy it a lot.
I think my expectations is part of how I feel about these games as well. I still have a hard time accepting that Ocarina of Time doesn't have the best approach for how a Zelda game should be. So when Breath of the Wild came out I wanted and expected something that followed the OOT formula closer and I also knew I have a hard time enjoying open world games. I also bought it on Wii U which didn't help. So when I got repetative enemies, shrines, boring travel and no dungeons to look forward to, I struggled with finishing the game and didn't do so till I bought it on switch a few weeks before TotK and just powered through it.
The mental model aproach is interessting. I can see how it is easier to approach TotK after having played BotW the same way it is easier to get into a Souls game if you've played one before.
I'm like 10 minutes in and this exactly explains my feelings on BotW.
I am so happy to finally find a way to talk about the concept that you call Mental Model!
I have also struggled to talk about that concept with people and encountered the same problems, so finally having a term for it makes me incredibly happy and I hope you don't mind me stealing it and using it as much as possible, because I hope to god that it catches on.
With all that said, I think that I would use the term to mean something slightly different than how you define it in the video. I would use the term Mental Model to talk about the mental state achieved when the player has enough knowledge about the mechanics of the game, both about what they can do as a player and what the world can do to the player, where they can start to hypothesize correctly about whether actions they can take within the game are either good or bad. When the player identifies that one of their hypothesis was correct, it adds to their knowledge of the game that they can use to build further hypotheses. So it is a thing that builds on itself leading to strategy.
I know that the distinction is subtle. What I am talking about is the difference between knowing enough about the game to think "maybe I should never let this building go idle again" and being able to recognize intuitively that, when you don’t let it go idle, things do go better for you vs the knowledge itself that you shouldn't let that building go idle in that game. You can read online that you shouldn't let the building go idle, but it takes experience with the game to be able to build the mental model where you understand that intuitively.
I don't know if we are talking about the same thing or you would consider that a separate thing altogether from what you are talking about. Either way, I am really glad that someone is pointing it because giving players the environment to build that mental model is one of those things that makes the difference between good and great games.
I could end my post right there but there a a couple of things that I would like to mention as well about my experience with Tears of the Kingdom.
I also had a terrible time in the tutorial island. Which is weird because I thought that the tutorial section of Breath of the Wild was really fun and they sound really similar to one another on paper. I couldn't quite tell you exactly where they went wrong, or what they could have done to fix it. But I think I know what it is that they were trying to do.
Essentially they are trying to make sure that, before the player is let loose on the world, they have some time to familiarize themselves with the mechanics of what they can do so that, when they experience the actual world, they for sure have the knowledge that they need to start building a mental model of the game. But that ends up with a lot of complications.
The biggest one is that every single player needs to be able to finish this section of the game because, if the tutorial ends up being too difficult for some people, you risk them dropping the game before they even really experience it. But that leaves certain things, like adding more complicated things to do with the skills you are acquiring, out of the table. At least they should not be mandatory. And I do think that there are enough things to play around in the starting island to test your new abilities which are not mandatory. The problem? The rewards are not worth the effort. Or at least they don't feel like they are.
Funnily enough, I got to a point in the game where I am immensely glad to get any arrows the game would give me because, even buying out every arrow from every store I come across, I am constantly running out of arrows because fusing things to arrows is just so strong. So them giving you arrows in a chest that is out of the way is actually a decent reward. But they can't give you so many where it becomes easy to accidentally trivialize the whole tutorial and so the amount that they do give you feels terribly underwhelming.
At that point they should have given the player that went out of their way something else entirely. But what? Money? Zonaite? Each has their problems. I really don't know what they should have done, and I honestly thing that the problems are more fundamental than just the choice of rewards, but they should have done something differently. The beginning of Tears of the Kingdom is a stain on an otherwise amazing game. The fact that I loathe the music in the sky only made things worse for me.
Don't take this as a negative. The reason this is happening is the expectations, and how carrying them into new experiences can not only make those experiences worse but also make you worse. As an example: I hate tutorials, but at the same time I don't like how the mechanics of Elden Ring are just left unexplained until you figure them out (even though you can read a lot of them just by reading everything in the menus). My expectations for game mechanics dragged down my Elden Ring experience even though it did exactly what I wanted - left me hanging without the guidance of a tutorial.
It's really that he didn't play BotW. Let me explain how I thought about the game during the tutorial island:
"Oh, you can fuse rocks to weapons to break things? This will help where the bombs previously helped in BotW"
"Oh, you can ascend through platforms/ceilings? This will help climb things faster which is awesome because climbing was so slow in BotW"
"Oh, you can move things AND fuse things together? This is like a much better version of Magnesis from BotW"
If you had previously played BotW before TotK then you already knew what all of these abilities were for essentially. I guess I took that for granted.
I understand the criticism of the intro area. The puzzles get much more open ended after the into area and allow you to use any tools and combination of them.
Hey Day9,
Just FYI, the term you coined as “Mental Model” is called a heuristic.
You still did a great job explaining things just thought you’d like to know.
Introductory areas for video games so often are exhausting for adult gamers. It's usually more designed for kids which is what makes it exhausting. Adults usually could just play the game and upon dying change their approach then look for some answers online if they get seriously stuck.
I finished botw and still couldn't get into totk and stopped after 10 hours. I think I'm just done with open world games.
Why don't care much for tears of the kingdom.
1 Too many complex detours. And no champions abilities.
2 Zelda still friend zones link.
3 there's too many characters that are bland and just there. But most important of all.
4 Revali's not there!
I wonder what you would define the mental model of previous smaller scale Zelda game like aLttP or OoT. I feel like exploration of new areas using tools that you gain from dungeons and events, ultimately unlocking a new dungeon with the dungeon itself being the climax or "reward" for that exploration would be the mental model of a game like Ocarina of Time. Like a Metroid game where you use new items to seek out new paths of progression. But because past Zelda games are much smaller scale and there's an "order" to things, it seems like a more easy to grasp model of what you're supposed to be doing to have fun. BotW and TotK expand this exploration part before the dungeons heavily but still offer that buildup in each region, and the climactic dungeon at the end of each section. I wonder if the Tutorial Island simply had a dungeon at the end of it that made you use all your newfound techniques creatively and finished it up with a boss, if you would have felt much more satisfied with mental model, and immediately went out seeking to explore for the next dungeon and everything required for it.
One of the most common criticisms I see from detractors of BotW and TotK is the very small amount of dungeons present in the game. And I would bet that the imbalance between the extremely prolific "exploration" phases and the scarce "reward" phases is what causes a lot of people to not really mesh well with the games.
That's well said. This makes me think of intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards. These 2 new zelda games drive people to explore mostly for explorations sake (intrinsic), as there isn't that much of a reason IN the game to do the majority of the exploring that's possible.
While I know this would never happen, I think heavily increasing the difficulty of BotW and TotK would really improve them. The intrinsic motivations would still be there, but now there would be a lot more extrinsic motivation as well. Every small improvement to weapons, health, armor, etc. would be "necessary" and actually feel like a reward. Exploring to improve your character would actually have an in-game benefit because it would help you progress.
I played a romhack of ALttP called "Parallel Worlds" that was very much like this. It was fucking hard and I was driven to explore not just for some personal satisfaction of completionism, but rather because I felt like I needed every character upgrade I could find to help me progress through the game.
I also never played breath of the wild or any Zelda game ever for that matter. I finished the tutorial island and then left the game for a bit, didn't really feel like playing. Then I went back into the game and did the first objective on the story mission and it clicked after that, once Purah lights up the SkyView towers and you get the glider, that is when I couldn't put the game down anymore. It would have been nice if the game dropped me directly on top of the main base so I could do that 1st main story mission immediately then I wouldn't have gotten lost on what to do.