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Does Kirby and the Amazing Mirror count as a metroidvania?  It was sort of a weird case, because the world was totally open and interconnected from the start, and the only real advances you made were beating bosses, finding little secret treasures (that did things like change your Kirby's color), exploring every bit of the map, and generally finding out how the game worked.

It was kinda of a nice feeling to be so confused from the apparent lack of direction, to be left to stumble around from area to area until you could make sense of the whole.  I don't know if it really counts, though.

There are kinda places locked off by a specific powerup from time to time, but you still get abilities in the traditional Kirby sense.

I really, really like this approach. It's a large part of why I think it's the best Kirby game. There aren't really any other games that work this way.

[C.D Buckmaster]

What if you made it that instead of your player's mechanics changing, you make the environment change so that the applications of the mechanics change?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

that could work too but i'd think of that as just "disguised" abilities. for instance, let's say instead of finding jump boots you find a space station's gravity reactor, and change the gravity of the space station so that you can jump higher (but also so that all the enemies jump higher). functionally it's the same deal

[s0]

find a space station's gravity reactor, and change the gravity of the space station so that you can jump higher (but also so that all the enemies jump higher). functionally it's the same deal

uhm...

[baconman]

You could just design the entire world within the players' capabilities to begin with, and give some indirect motivation for exploring your way around, like score or treasures.

[SirNiko]

find a space station's gravity reactor, and change the gravity of the space station so that you can jump higher (but also so that all the enemies jump higher). functionally it's the same deal

uhm...

What's wrong with this concept, CA?

Jumping higher doesn't imply the foes become more dangerous. For example, some small foes may leap so high that the protagonist can simply run under them without fear of damage. Or perhaps the foes jump and kill themselves on the ceiling, rendering them harmless.

Later zones become more dangerous as all your environmental alterations give them new abilities, like a tank-like foe becomes more agile. This could provide the difficulty curve for the game without even requiring new foes.

[SaturnineGames]

find a space station's gravity reactor, and change the gravity of the space station so that you can jump higher (but also so that all the enemies jump higher). functionally it's the same deal

uhm...

If you're messing with gravity, you want it to effect everything. I did high/low gravity levels in Antipole, and all the feedback was that they were good specifically because it effected everything in the level. At one point during testing I had a bug preventing the full impact of the gravity changes from showing, and people noticed it quickly and commented that things felt off.

[C.D Buckmaster]

Well, what I meant was more like: You have some kind of energy whip that originally was only used as a weapon, but later in the game you can come across ancient machines that can be powered by your whip, which you can use to complete puzzles and defeat enemies.

But I guess that is still a disguised power up of sorts.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i think a world that's completely accessible right from the start would feel less interesting to explore than one that gradually opens up as you gain more powers. the shadow of the colossus world for instance was big and open and you could go anywhere without powerups, but i found that less interesting to explore than, say, the zelda 3 world, which had parts you couldn't reach until later. figuring out how to reach new parts of a map is a big part of the fun

but there are games where it can work, like seiklus, where you can reach pretty much anywhere at the start, but the time-consuming nature of getting there (you walk slow and there's no teleporting or shortcuts) and all the secrets (even though you can go anywhere there are still secret areas that you can find if you look carefully) makes exploring interesting

so i'd say that if you're going to make a big explorable world without powerups or restricting access to areas based on abilities, at the very least you need a lot of "secret" areas that you don't notice at first but which you can figure out if you explore carefully. don't make everywhere easy to get to, there needs to be some type of challenge to exploration, whether it's ability-access or secret-access

[DrDerekDoctors]

Isn't a metroidvania without upgrades basically just how a bunch of old games were? Like Auf Weidersehen Monty, Jack The Nipper 2, Spooked, etc - you can just roam all over the place. Of course back then they were called Arcade Adventures.

[DrDerekDoctors]

i think a world that's completely accessible right from the start would feel less interesting to explore than one that gradually opens up as you gain more powers. the shadow of the colossus world for instance was big and open and you could go anywhere without powerups, but i found that less interesting to explore than, say, the zelda 3 world, which had parts you couldn't reach until later. figuring out how to reach new parts of a map is a big part of the fun

I partially agree, however there's no reason it has to be an ability which allows you access to another area. Why not player skill instead? I think it's just as satisfying to see a new room if it's been tricky to get there by the simple nature of it being harder to get there.

[letsap]

I always like thinking of this, because I love worlds that allow you to get lost in them. That was one of the best parts of the original Metroid, once you got missiles and bombs the world was your oyster. Sure, you got things that improved your chances and allowed a couple more places to pop up, but there was a great deal of exploration that could be done.

This made me think, what about simply locking and unlocking doors? Effecting the environment in ways that let you reach new places, effectively making the environment your powerups. For instance, in Life+ flooding a certain cave not only removes a drowning hazard from one area but allows you to swim to new heights in another.

I think both can be fun, but the downside of powerups is that it winds up feeling like a long fetch quest as more and more metroidvanias are simply "See this place? Go get something then come back. Then go get something else." There's less and less exploration that doesn't seem to serve any more purpose than getting to a platform you couldn't get to before. That kind of thing bothers me. Getting extra missiles like in the case of Metroid doesn't feel all that satisfying to me, either. That might be part of why I prefer not relying on powerups to open up exploration, maybe.

I think that the "metroidvania" genre is about collecting powerups though, so why not just call it an exploration platformer?

[SaturnineGames]

This made me think, what about simply locking and unlocking doors? Effecting the environment in ways that let you reach new places, effectively making the environment your powerups. For instance, in Life+ flooding a certain cave not only removes a drowning hazard from one area but allows you to swim to new heights in another.

Sounds like Metroid Fusion.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I partially agree, however there's no reason it has to be an ability which allows you access to another area. Why not player skill instead? I think it's just as satisfying to see a new room if it's been tricky to get there by the simple nature of it being harder to get there.

i've never played a metroidvania or zeldalike that required significant skill, but i suppose that's possible. but then you'd permanently close off areas to bad players

another way that it's often done in RPGs like dragon quest 2 was to have the world be largely generally explorable, but have some areas have much harder enemies than other areas that you are very likely to die to, so in order to access new areas you need to gain levels in easy areas first

i forget how the ultima series handled exploration -- the early ultima games i mean (1 through 4). i think the world was largely explorable, but in most areas you couldn't really do much without having the right items, so it was usually pointless to skip too far ahead. but most of the tasks in those games can be done in any order

[sonicblastoise]

hmm...Konjak's Iconoclasts has certain sections that require you to use a downward charged blast to reach a ledge in order to proceed. By no means "impossible" or "challenging" but an interesting way of encouraging mechanics-learning.

I think there are a lot of games like Metroid and MMZ series which ask some skill of the player to acquire optional upgrades. I like this approach rather than having mandatory skill requirements.

Or you could just pull a Hammerfight and allow the player to sacrifice huge amounts of resources to get past a particularly dexterous sequence

[Moczan]

Wall-jump is an undocumented feature of most Metroids and it requires some practice before you can fully use it to reach previously unreachable places.

[Ishi]

Interesting to hear people's viewpoints on this. In the game I'm currently making, I'm trying to avoid upgrades / powerups, simply because it doesn't fit the fiction of the world (something that bugs me slightly in games like the Metroids, although I still really enjoy them). It can feel a bit unrealistic to have your legendary bounty hunter / whatever character's abilities advance so much in such a short space of time, even if it is satisfying in terms of gameplay.

In theory if the environment is interesting enough to explore, then the possibility of seeing more of it should be enough to encourage the player to continue. I think if the level design can tease the player with glimpses of places they want to get to, so they can form their own goals and decide "I'm gonna try and reach that point next, so I'll get around this obstacle", then upgrades become less important. (Pretty much what baconman suggested).

I like what Giaddon said about searching for knowledge or something too, the game would reach a natural non-hostile conclusion with the completion of the player's discovering what they set out to find.

I looked up Kirby and the Amazing Mirror because I've never heard of it, and it turns out it's part of the 20 free 3DS games - sweet.

[gimymblert]

http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/features/recursive_unlocking.php

might be interesting

[Moczan]

Interesting to hear people's viewpoints on this. In the game I'm currently making, I'm trying to avoid upgrades / powerups, simply because it doesn't fit the fiction of the world (something that bugs me slightly in games like the Metroids, although I still really enjoy them). It can feel a bit unrealistic to have your legendary bounty hunter / whatever character's abilities advance so much in such a short space of time, even if it is satisfying in terms of gameplay.

In theory if the environment is interesting enough to explore, then the possibility of seeing more of it should be enough to encourage the player to continue. I think if the level design can tease the player with glimpses of places they want to get to, so they can form their own goals and decide "I'm gonna try and reach that point next, so I'll get around this obstacle", then upgrades become less important. (Pretty much what baconman suggested).

I like what Giaddon said about searching for knowledge or something too, the game would reach a natural non-hostile conclusion with the completion of the player's discovering what they set out to find.

I looked up Kirby and the Amazing Mirror because I've never heard of it, and it turns out it's part of the 20 free 3DS games - sweet.

The problem with it can be the lack of reward. You will need an awesome artistic design to encourage player to get to places just because they look nice. And removing the upgrades removes one of the most important part of metroidvania genre, so as somebody suggested, let's call them exploration-platformers.

[baconman]

That's not entirely true. You could have a set of undocumented abilities, and your "rewards" for successful exploration could be hints to, or outright giveaways to the commands/abilities, or maybe even an unexpected place to use them.

You can also have a set of collectible items available in 4 initially-open passageways that all feed into a loopback chamber, returning you to the starting point. In fact, that was the basis of one map design project I once did here. Then the collectibles would open the final, and most treacherous loop, and going through that would take you to a final encounter at the very beginning of the game. It's perfect for that "full circle" story trope.