But yeah, the core of a game doesn't need to be platforming or combat. Setting aside Banjo-Kazooie and the collectathon subgenre, to me DK64 seems like it wants to be more of a traditional adventure game; the pillars of that genre (at least, before Telltale) are exploration, puzzles, and key-and-lock design, and adventure games lived and died based on the quality of those things and their overall flavor. And on that front... this game certainly has the flavor, but it's an extremely mixed bag at best in the other areas, both in execution and underlying design.1 week ago in the youtube comment section wrote: Rixithechao
25:28 This got me thinking about the free-switching hack that folks have brought up a few times and how it breaks that aspect of the game's design. What if, instead of changing kongs at the press of a button, the player could warp back to the last kong barrel they used? Of course, that doesn't cover the issue of having to revisit very out-of-the-way locations multiple times to get all the different colors of collectibles...
The only other approaches I can think of would be either disabling free-switching in certain areas (ehhh) or having all kongs present in the level and then preserving their positions when you switch. Granted, that latter solution seems like fairly unexplored territory in collectathons; the closest I can think of is Banjo Tooie with Mumbo and the split pads, but even then those require the other characters stay put until you return to them. Other games with character switching tend to have formations (Sonic Heroes, Zelda Four Swords Adventures), make the other playable characters be AI helpers that stick close when you're not controlling them (Lego games, DKC trilogy), relegate other playable characters to specific areas (Spyro 3), or take this game's approach and limit where you can switch (Sly Cooper series).
Dangit, now I kinda want to see some kind of spiritual successor to DK64 designed around this system. With good fast travel mechanics for getting around a world quickly you could have some neat puzzles designed around having like, 2 or 3 characters in different places/doing different things at once. And it'd be a very co-op multiplayer-friendly core mechanic to boot!
I don't think DK64 needs to be substantially reworked to salvage it. That would still make for a better game, but even just adding some QoL features/mechanics, a lot of tweaks to the level design (the majority of them being better color-coded collectible grouping), polishing up the platforming and overall game feel, and scrapping some minigames in favor of just giving the player the golden bananas would address a lot of its' major problems.
Sonic Adventure and its sequel say hi.Dragon Fogel wrote: ↑3 years ago I feel like the key step to making that work would be to make the characters play more differently. If you're essentially playing five games at once, it will feel less monotonous if they're five different games rather than five mild variants on the same game.
Not that an approach like that doesn't have risks, but I think even a failed attempt at it would be more interesting.
someone should make a DK64 hack that adds a chao garden