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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an audacious product. Over the course of almost 40 years, this is a franchise that has explored multiple dimensions in A Link to the Past when most games struggled to craft one robust dimension. Ocarina of Time fully embraced 3D with an immense offering when most studios were struggling in the space with anything at all. Majora’s Mask gave players the tool to transform into different creatures within a tense three day time loop. Wind Waker discarded the franchises’ familiar look in favor of cel-shading and a focus on terrestrial exploration in favor of the ocean. Skyward Sword fundamentally altered the game’s control paradigm. Then, Breath of the Wild broke free of any notion of linearity or player guidance to provide a truly open experience.
This is not a conservative franchise, but still, Tears of the Kingdom is brazen even by the established standards of the series. Think of its offering:
Enormous open world, including land, sky, and underground areas.
Standard stuff like a narrative, a spectrum of combat encounters, equipment and supply crafting, and quests.
Hundreds of puzzles not remotely attempting to tie themselves to a narrative or level design.
World altering construction, such as bridges and elevators and vehicles where the game is designed for your experimentation and exploits.
A similar level of construction specifically related to combat.
Yes, a few of these are a continuation of ideas introduced in Breath of the Wild. But, if you consider the fact that most games of this nature are merely (in comparison) trying to execute a subset of the first two bullets, and occasionally a single novel element in addition, I’d say that we can forgive Nintendo just this once. Honestly, most studios struggle with those first two bullets. They’re tough bullets to bite.
I really enjoy the video game podcast Triple Click, and after a recent episode in which they gushed in awe about the features and experience of Tears of the Kingdom for an hour, a question entered my head: Would consumers tolerate such bold innovation from another studio?
Nintendo is an exceptional development studio. But for the sake of this argument, let us assume that several other studios could have the vision, patience, and skill to conceive and deliver such a feature set.
My gut tells me “absolutely not.” Consumers have been trained that physics-driven sandboxes often lack polish just as often as they delight. They’ve played dozens of open-world games that repeat the same five quests after the first few hours, for the next 50 hours. They’ve seen sequels that borrow too much, add more of the same, and lose the spark that made the original so exciting.
But, I don’t know. The reality is that Ubi Soft and Electronic Arts and Activision and Blizzard do not generally release games that venture so far from the path. Not many do. Yes, Elden Ring is absurdly bold, but if you follow From Soft’s trajectory, it totally makes sense. God of War (2018) is a fairly substantial shift in narrative, perspective, and pacing, but you are still engaging in melee combat in a mythological setting. Red Dead Redemption II is not just Grand Theft Auto on horseback, but you can see it in the family portrait.
An absence of evidence is not conclusive, but perhaps it indicates the recognition these studios have of the difficulty they would face. I think Sony Santa Monica and Rockstar Games are good enough to make anything they want. Is there a reason they do not?
As a brief aside, I think it is interesting to examine the Super Mario franchise in parallel. Whereas The Legend of Zelda is wildly experimental, Super Mario is rather conservative. They are incredibly consistent, but generally stay within 15% of their predecessors. Consistency is valuable, but it drives expectations for consistency, much in the same way The Legend of Zelda’s pattern of experimentation unlocks that.
My hypothesis is that the strength of The Legend of Zelda brand is what allows Nintendo to innovate and change as they do. No, I do not work in marketing or branding, but as I ruminated on my original question above, I remembered7 Powers: The Foundation of Business Strategy by Hamilton Helmer. It’s an excellent, quick read that I highly recommend.
I’m going to paraphrase/quote, but he argues that branding allows for a customer expectation of consistency and quality. It is an asset that communicates information and evokes positive emotions in the customer.
A distinct benefit it provides is uncertainty reduction, meaning customers are comfortable engaging with the product versus the competition. It is only a power if it provides both a benefit and a barrier against competition. The barrier is that a brand can only be created over a lengthy period of reinforcing actions.
Say, about forty years, with over a dozen mainline entries delivering wildly distinct and novel experiences?
Think about some of your other favorite franchises, or just highly successful, recurring franchises. Think about how often they have a poor launch, a poor version, take a break, or have a highly controversial feature. Through that lens, they do not have the strategic power of branding. And therefore, customers are not comfortable with most of them showing up with audacious mechanisms.
Nintendo has meticulously built the right to try whatever they want in the land of Hyrule. It’s an incredible position for them as a developer. But, when customers and critics alike lament repetitive and recurring experiences, it makes me ponder the possibilities for the industry sustaining its growth if more studios do not also earn the right to be so bold.
Indie studios tend to create smaller, more focused experiences that, paired with financial freedom, empower them to innovate. Some AAA studios like Nintendo, Rockstar, and From Software have the vision, craft, and financial backing to take massive swings. For the health of the industry and the attention of our customers, we have to create an actionable path to consistent innovation, which means establishing studio cultures built around experimentation, patience and funding for such experiments to bear fruit, and for customers to try the weird new stuff, even if it doesn’t have Zelda in the title.
Edited by Joshua Buergel
This veers a little inside baseball for me as someone outside the dev/publishing industry, and strictly a consumer (albeit hopefully discerning one) of video games, but I can absolutely speak to the fact that the game experiences I crave are the bold ones that shake me out of systems boredom and apathy. I will pay good money and spend hundreds of hours on the latest from a studio that isn't putting out its annual iteration of a decade+ old formula, but is demonstrating something truly exciting with its next release.
I'm not looking for experimentation or sweeping innovation necessarily, just a sense of assurance and confidence that their next game is one they actually wanted to put out in the world.
I really enjoy the challenge to game makers that you set forth. Stagnation and commodification and tentativeness are a big challenge we face. And the panacea is a willingness to be audacious.
It will take time to truly earn that trust from players but if major game studios can walk forward arm in arm on this vision for the game industry I think players will be quite receptive once we can get out of the safe place of eminently knowable and just barely sufficient entertainment experiences.
Maybe that’s just the nudge we all need to get out of all this.