Miyamoto on making Nintendo games less formulaic, fun more quickly, less tutorial
Nintendo’s games of this generation are very, very different than the ones released back in the day – specifically the first Mario and Zelda.
Whereas you could essentially start playing the meat of the games within a couple of minutes, that’s not the case with some current releases. Kotaku, for instance, pointed out that it takes over an hour to reach the first dungeon in Zelda: Skyward Sword.
Fans may also say that some of Nintendo’s recent games have been “playing it safe”. As an example, all four New Super Mario Bros. games seem to be comparable in a number of aspects.
Shigeru Miyamoto was quizzed about some of these topics at E3 2012 last week.
Miyamoto was first asked if he noticed that Nintendo’s franchise games feel formulaic and how his teams are addressing the problem of being too formulaic with its franchises.
“This is a hard question. Specifically with regards to the New Super Mario games, Takashi Tezuka is the producer on both of the new Mario games, and is working on the Mario series and New Super Mario series for quite a while now, and he is the main developer on those games and is in fact the one you would want to ask specifically about that.
“With something like Zelda, we’re in the process of now of discussing what is the right form for the next Zelda game. What should that be?
“One thing I should point out is that the New Super Mario Bros. series in particular exists as a way for the traditional Super Mario Bros. game style to remain in a relatively traditional state. And that’s done specifically because there are certain players for whom that style of games is really what’s best suited for them. So that sort of series is designed to retain those traits and retain that safeness that you described.
“But, at the same time, we’re continuing to look at different ideas and different ways we can bring Mario to new experiences, for example, with something like Super Mario 3D Land we’ll continue to look at new ideas and maybe as a new experiment or idea comes up maybe we’ll find that Mario is the right character to pair with that.”
Miyamoto next tackled a question regarding how long it takes for a game to become entertaining.
“This is actually a topic that has been a big discussion internally for us lately. I think there a couple of things going on. One is that, often times we’re creating games where you’re doing a lot of different actions. Zelda is an example of one of those. And, particularly with these types of games, you have to first learn the action and then you have to master the action and then you have to have more actions added in and master those. Then, when you have a lot of actions you can do all at once is when the game really becomes fun. And with a game like Zelda, on top of that, you have the story elements that also take additional time to tell.
“So one of the things we’re talking about internally is how can we get people to that point of fun more quickly, and ‘How do we balance the need to teach them how to do something with the need for them to be able to master it and feel they can do it well?’—and also tell the story—and ‘What is that overall balance and how we approach it?’ That’s one of the key things we’re talking about with Zelda right now.”
Lastly, Miyamoto commented on the possibility of returning to a design more similar to the first Super Mario Bros. and Zelda, which had no tutorial text.
“That’s the exact topic that we’re discussing. It used to be that actions [in older games] were very simple and you could do them very quickly and easily. Now we’re making games that have so many more actions that you have to learn how to do them.
“I think back and actually was discussing Super Mario World with Tezuka-san and how that was a game where, for the first time, you would run along and hit blocks and these text messages would pop up and they would have a little bit of tutorial information in them. That worked very well for that game and we thought that was a great idea, and then, gradually, that type of tutorial sort of became rather commonplace and now we’re starting to have these games where it is taking longer and longer to sort of get to that core fun. So that’s precisely what we’ve been having discussions about.”
