Since BOTW is fresh on your mind, how would you go about improving its climbing system? Do you think climbing should have combat sections as well (Say spiders that can threaten to knock you off or whatever)
You’re not mobile enough to avoid spiders, so that would just get annoying.
The primary thing I’d do is just speed it up twice as much and have jumping consume maybe half as much stamina, enough that it’s still significantly more than climbing the same distance, but not so much that you only get like 3 jumps, thereby letting you scale things a bit faster.
Add the skyward sword stamina regen fruit, make them move in some way.
Add some rough patches that maybe you climb up slower at the same rate of stamina loss, or just lose more stamina while climbing, but you can jump over them fine.
Include more briars and other hazards to be avoided, similar to the akkala tower. Have more jumping between different walls.
The thing about the climbing sections is, they’re basically a pathfinding puzzle with stamina serving as a time limit/health. You need to find the shortest route to the top, with the constraints that you can regenerate stamina partially while running up shallower surfaces, and you can regenerate your whole meter if you can find flat ground to rest on. Making the climbing more interesting is a matter of making that pathfinding more interesting. Those shallower surfaces are a really good constraint, because you can’t stop on them, you need to move upwards, so it’s about milking them for all they’re worth, and doing the mental math about whether the amount you gain back from them will be enough to make it to the next rest stop. So you’re constantly losing stamina health, but you can find places to gain it back, and want to plot a course that runs over enough of those to get you to the next point you can rest, which is hopefully closer to the top.
Some floating platforms or spires would also be nice as alternate routes to jump back and forth between.
So add more hazards (but don’t place them such that there’s clearly defined routes, intersperse them across the surface), make the route more roundabout, make some things move a little maybe, but make the player fast enough to be able to dodge them without much issue, make them drain stamina instead of health (moving barriers might be more appropriate rather than things that can harm you).
Akkala Tower is kind of my gold standard for platforming in this game, it has the malice all over which you need to avoid to climb up it, and it’s cleverly placed so you need to glide and climb to get up.
Though if you approach from this angle, there’s a straight shot to the end. I came at it from off to the side and had a more fun time. Still, shows what they could do.
Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints 