Why the N64 Majora's Mask Could Not Be Made Today As a AAA Title

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

Why the N64 Majora's Mask Could Not Be Made Today As a AAA Title

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask was great for the Nintendo 64, but in today's development environment, could it have made it past the drawing board as a AAA first party game?

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[Thanatos2k]

I dunno. The whole craze is "Open World Games" now right? Even the next Zelda game is supposed to be open world.

Majora's Mask was the closest to an open world Zelda game that you had until now. Go wherever, do whatever, get your masks and stuff at your own pace discovering things mostly in whatever order you wanted. Non-linear story. Non-linear exploration, even more so than other games.

Some aspects of it might not have made the cut, but it resembles many of the latest AAA fads. Of course, there'd be waypoints on the map pointing you to where you're supposed to go....

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

"Could give a shit" ...?

Yahtzee, that use of vocabulary is beneath you! You are still British, right? We still say it the correct way round, by the way.
This one's for free, but any more, and i'll get my paddle...

 

[pcm971122]

HE IS BRITASH MATE

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

It might actually be able to hook people through Achievements; infinite loops means that you could come up with some crazy complicated sequences of events to unlock a given achievement, gathering all the tools/songs needed on a couple runthroughs and then making a mad dash to get certain story things done before the reset.

I'm not sure if it would get a AAA release, but I could definitely see it being something like Papers, Please or Braid where the audience obsesses over it and it wins tons of awards, sparking a bunch of cheap rip-offs of the mechanics in larger games.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I've never played it but from what I've heard it sounds kinda like Demon's Souls in the sense that you don't achieve anything except activate shortcuts through worlds that otherwise remain unchanged (I don't know how this works with boss fights, if there are any).

 

[Robyrt]

Like Jordan Mechner's The Last Express?

 

[Pyrian]

I have to admit, "Drops in the Ocean of Futility" is a much better description of Achievements.

 

[LordLundar]

Majora's Mask was the closest to an open world Zelda game that you had until now. Go wherever, do whatever, get your masks and stuff at your own pace discovering things mostly in whatever order you wanted. Non-linear story. Non-linear exploration, even more so than other games.

In some ways you're right, but in others I disagree. With MM you were beholden to the clock on the bottom, especially in the N64 version. Yes, you could do an event largely when you wanted but to do it you had to be in specific spot at a very specific time or you would miss it and have to do the cycle over again. When you factor in with some stuff missing that mark meant having to do the ENTIRE chain again because it would reset in it's entirety it's not nearly as open ended as you think it is.

The dungeon order is where it's really restrictive as you do have to do those in a specific order because the puzzles require it. you have to have the fire arrows to do Great Bay Temple for example but that requires Snowhead to be finished. Considering that the temples don't permit you to do multiples of them in one cycle and the temples reset when you reset the clock there's no real incentive to get the item, leave, and do another temple.

 

[Groverfield]

This article reminded me of a game that I wanted to make where your choices affected how the game plays out, but instead of accommodating the player, they subvert them, like you decide to become a scientist which triggers the potential end of the world as full hell's-open apocalypse, or you become a member of the clergy next playthrough and the potential end of the world disaster is a rogue planetoid collision, or something like that. Your actions not only affect the future, but your character's past. Make it a sort of timed visual novel sandbox to heighten the tension from "What am I doing wrong" to "what am I missing, I need to hurry." Then I remembered that I'll never make a game of that caliber because I'm too ambitious and the game would end up as another Fable 5 or Duke Nukem Forever, not for the hype, but because nothing would ever get finished.

 

[Broderick]

I've never played it but from what I've heard it sounds kinda like Demon's Souls in the sense that you don't achieve anything except activate shortcuts through worlds that otherwise remain unchanged (I don't know how this works with boss fights, if there are any).

Kind of true. Any shortcuts that may be activated are usually inactive when the days cycle back to the first day. However, you do get a song that lets you fly to any save point that you have activated. This is what is generally used to bypass a lot of the work the second time through an area. Of course, songs in general let you go to areas you otherwise couldn't have, as there are several that you need to do a lot of work to obtain; these let you access the dungeon area generally, which was closed off, or otherwise inaccessible.

As for bosses, if you defeat a boss, then you can warp straight back to them a stone plaque located in the dungeon's entrance. This of course makes things much easier if you are going after a specific goal that requires the boss to die after a second time through the area. Most notabley, beating the Snow Head Temple's boss and/or the Swamp Palace's boss will have a effect on the surrounding landscape outside of their respective dungeons. This will let you access events otherwise not possible to start or complete. Of course, you can always go back to boss with new gear and see how you fare as well.

You definitely have an impact on the world, but at Yatzee says, it is generally contributed to the masked form you took(which is generally a well known person of that area). Of course, this all gets erased when you turn back time, but you can always do it again if you so choose.

 

[CaitSeith]

Make no mistake, you might be the one with the ocarina shoved in his gob but you're dancing to its tune, ************.

That phrase kinda reminded me the part before the final mission in Mass Effect 2.

Spoiler

After the ship's crew is abducted by the Collectors, you can immediately go to the final mission and rescue them. But if you take a side-mission or two before instead, well... the ship was too crowded anyway.

 

[RJ Dalton]

That futility aspect is what I like about the game, really. Because the game isn't just about futility itself, but how you face it. Every side-quest (and a few of the main ones, too) are little vignettes about how people deal with an inescapable pending doom. And every single character is unique. Well, almost every single character, a couple of the shopkeepers are sans-personality, but most of the characters you meet repeatedly are unique and fleshed out. The world of Majora's Mask felt smaller than the one in Ocarina of Time (or any of the following Zelda games that I've played), but none of those games felt as DEEP as Majora's Mask did.

What I want is a game that's just the Majora's Mask sidequests. Drop the whole "save the world" story and just make a game that focuses on all the people and what they do, and how your involvement in their actions changes the way they live their lives. That's a game I'd gladly put down money for.

 

[Sight Unseen]

Majora's Mask was the closest to an open world Zelda game that you had until now. Go wherever, do whatever, get your masks and stuff at your own pace discovering things mostly in whatever order you wanted. Non-linear story. Non-linear exploration, even more so than other games.

I think that Windwaker has a few choice words for you, sir

 

[Kenjitsuka]

Another example are the punishing Dead Rising games.
You really need to know what you do and execute perfectly, or there won't be no rescuing everybody you can nor fighting all the bosses... And that sucks to some extent. Maybe a time rewind mod would make it perfect?

 

[Halla Burrica]

It might seem like I feel the need to go on the defensive every time someone, horror of horrors, accuses me of liking Nintendo now. But it's not the accusation that annoys me; it's this implied notion that you can only ever like Nintendo and support everything they do, or be one of the ignorant outsiders who don't. Come to think of it, that's the false dichotomy that blights virtually all internet debating.

Why is it everytime he says something like this, he completely misses the point of why people attack him for hating Nintendo? Or at least why I attack him. It's not so much that you don't like Nintendo Yahtzee, it's that you have the most ignorant reasons to hate on one of their games that you call criticism. It's beyond what I would call cynical when you devote a good chunk of your Mario 3D World review, yes I'm bringing this up again, to just complaining about the Miiverse functionality as if you were forced to use it. The points you made on that are completely lost by the simple fact that it's optional! And that's just one example. Don't get me started on the 5 years of badmouthing the Wii simply because you couldn't get your controller to work.

It's not that I have a problem with people like Yahtzee not liking Nintendo's products so much that I expect them to be fair and rarely I get that from Yahtzee when he reviews Nintendo's games.

This. Right here. And every time it's supposed to be okay that he comes up with these kinds of bullshit criticisms, because he's a "comedian" and not a reviewer. Seriously, if he ever tried to be a serious reviewer I doubt most people could take him seriously, especially after his look at Monster Hunter.

 

[jhoroz]

It might seem like I feel the need to go on the defensive every time someone, horror of horrors, accuses me of liking Nintendo now. But it's not the accusation that annoys me; it's this implied notion that you can only ever like Nintendo and support everything they do, or be one of the ignorant outsiders who don't. Come to think of it, that's the false dichotomy that blights virtually all internet debating.

Why is it everytime he says something like this, he completely misses the point of why people attack him for hating Nintendo? Or at least why I attack him. It's not so much that you don't like Nintendo Yahtzee, it's that you have the most ignorant reasons to hate on one of their games that you call criticism. It's beyond what I would call cynical when you devote a good chunk of your Mario 3D World review, yes I'm bringing this up again, to just complaining about the Miiverse functionality as if you were forced to use it. The points you made on that are completely lost by the simple fact that it's optional! And that's just one example. Don't get me started on the 5 years of badmouthing the Wii simply because you couldn't get your controller to work.

It's not that I have a problem with people like Yahtzee not liking Nintendo's products so much that I expect them to be fair and rarely I get that from Yahtzee when he reviews Nintendo's games.

This. Right here. And every time it's supposed to be okay that he comes up with these kinds of bullshit criticisms, because he's a "comedian" and not a reviewer. Seriously, if he ever tried to be a serious reviewer I doubt most people could take him seriously, especially after his look at Monster Hunter.

Or his complete disregard and utter ignorance towards the fighting game genre. The amount of irrelevant nitpicks, research failure and downright lazy manner of approaching games and evaluating them is the reason why I stopped paying attention to his videos altogether throughout the years. He occasionally brings up some good points in his written articles, but then releases one like the Smash Bros. Wii u one that make you roll your eyes out of your skull.

 

[iller3]

^loving the Nintendo-knight h8 in this so far, keep it up guys! Just remember when Steam & Mobiles with their open style platform completely overtake all of your console's market share ... that Yahtzee tried to warn them while you (Sterling included) were too busy having a Pretentious-Off.


On-Topic:
Considering its polycount & dated graphics fidelity .... we could literally remake it right now as a Cooptional-Indie project with the access to mostly free development tools we now have. ....Minus the actual Gameplay-designing skill that only Triple-A designers seemed to have back then. Even those developers today seem to have completely lost their flare in actually making stuff FUN and challenging. It's almost like they have TOO MANY options to pursue now, therefore they are guaranteed to always deliver a bland POS that greatly pleases no one

 

[immortalfrieza]

I've never played it but from what I've heard it sounds kinda like Demon's Souls in the sense that you don't achieve anything except activate shortcuts through worlds that otherwise remain unchanged (I don't know how this works with boss fights, if there are any).

Kind of true. Any shortcuts that may be activated are usually inactive when the days cycle back to the first day. However, you do get a song that lets you fly to any save point that you have activated. This is what is generally used to bypass a lot of the work the second time through an area. Of course, songs in general let you go to areas you otherwise couldn't have, as there are several that you need to do a lot of work to obtain; these let you access the dungeon area generally, which was closed off, or otherwise inaccessible.

As for bosses, if you defeat a boss, then you can warp straight back to them a stone plaque located in the dungeon's entrance. This of course makes things much easier if you are going after a specific goal that requires the boss to die after a second time through the area. Most notabley, beating the Snow Head Temple's boss and/or the Swamp Palace's boss will have a effect on the surrounding landscape outside of their respective dungeons. This will let you access events otherwise not possible to start or complete. Of course, you can always go back to boss with new gear and see how you fare as well.

You definitely have an impact on the world, but at Yatzee says, it is generally contributed to the masked form you took(which is generally a well known person of that area). Of course, this all gets erased when you turn back time, but you can always do it again if you so choose.

I'd say what Yahtzee has been saying about it being futile is largely false overall. Sure, everything is reset after turning back time, but the player keeps any equipment, hearts, songs, and all masks they received in the meantime, which makes doing the same thing again much faster and easier. In fact, once the player has already done so once they can complete all dungeons and help everyone in a single cycle, it's just very difficult and requires making effective use of every available second but it can be done, and even if the player doesn't do that the ending shows everyone the player helped together and happy anyway. I don't even know where Yahtzee got the idea that nothing the player does matters or that the themes of the game were futility, indifference, and identity crisis from, especially the last one. The game has some pretty grim themes sure, but the people in it are definitely all trying to make the best of a really horrifying situation and get on with their lives, plenty are trying to do something but everybody but Link lacks the actual ability to do anything, and everybody else is dealing with their own pressing issues.