QUOTE(Nolornbon @ May 9 2011, 05:46 PM)
I am grateful for the welcome. I feel that my thoughts and ideas could make a lasting impression. Too bad about the stroke, though. Know well what you use for it before you use it. Very important to do so.
While playing a gameboy-style quest, I felt the dissapointment of getting a heart piece instead of something better (like a blue ring, since red wizzrobes do four hearts of damage.) So I can see how getting heart pieces can be sad. It is also sad that most overworlds and dungeons in Zelda Classic quests look very much the same and therefore are not really worth much exploration. Even making custom palletes, provided they are well made, can give a sense of uniqueness. This is very important if you want exploration to be a major reward in place of heart pieces. Make a good and original story, and learning more about it can also be a reward. It should be known that when choosing a quest to play I am looking for one that has places worth exploring. A good, original story is also what I look for. Too many times have I found quests not worthy. I do also consider gameplay when choosing a quest.
As I have stated in my last post, have exploration and story be prominant rewards instead of heart pieces.
Sorry I sprung the stroke on the conversation there. It's pretty common knowledge around here; I was just using it to be sarcastic. Basically, I want to finish my big quest, but I have had much bigger things to worry about.
Side note: I have heard that the fact that red Wizzrobes were supposed to do 2 hearts of damage, and Zelda 1 had a bug/error that swapped its damage with blue Wizzrobes. I think that'd be a worthwhile change for the enemy editor, for people who use ZC 2.5.
...Anyway, I agree with most of what you say. Not only do overworld need to be interesting, there should be a little story behind them, so you care about what is where.
One thing I differ on: although story is a good reward (if you do it half as well as Majora's Mask did), but I think it's best to give exploration along with OTHER rewards. If your only reward is access to the next area, then the item might not do anything
fun. This is why I'm not fond of the Bracelet item and never want it to be a dungeon item in ZC quests.
Anyway, mention of Majora's Mask leads into the next reply...
Anthus:What you speak of is, in a sense, HCPs used "properly." However, even used "properly," as rewards for extremely tiny tasks and incremental exploration, I don't like them because of the lopsided "collect 4" idea. For a reward that small, there needs to be some immediacy. Items that are broken into pieces should come in other flavors, like the multi-part Big Key in the Goron Mines in Twilight Princess.
And for the record, I didn't mind Majora's Mask's way of doing things, but it wasn't because HCPs worked better in that game. It was because along with each HCP, you got a much more valuable reward:
story and resolution. If you didn't do most of the sidequests, you didn't get nearly as satisfying an ending. If all Zelda games did it as well as MM, I would be quite satisfied.
Again, I would like to point out that your argument for using HCPs to encourage exploration is entirely about the journey and not the reward itself. You could take a Zelda game, keep every single quest the same, and change all the HCP rewards, and the enjoyability of the searching would be exactly the same. But if you disregard all that, the value of the REWARD can be measured on its own. If the reward is useless, and your interest in seeing every part of the game world ever falters, then you no longer have a motive to keep exploring.
And as I swear I've said before in this thread, I agree that 9 out of 10 Zelda games have a broken rupee economy. But that's a slightly different issue, though still part of the overarching "worthless reward" problem.
Hinsburg:I really enjoy token collection, and I think it'd be great in a ZC quest. Something to that effect may be possible, but the problem is that ZQuest doesn't have a built-in feature for doing it, so people have to be really creative in order to implement something like that.
Anyway, great suggestion for action/adventure games in general, but problematic in ZC.