In my latest Future of Zelda article I mentioned the idea of a "Trial Maker" based on Breath of the Wild, which was supposed to be an alternative to a "Zelda Maker". You would slip into the role of a Sheikah Monk and build your own trials, where it's worth it to wait 10,000 years for a chosen hero to arrive and make it through your creation.
Breath of the Wild meets Super Mario Maker meets the Puzzle Creator of Portal 2 - this is probably the best way to describe it. Players will be able to create their own Sheikah Shrines, share them online and play the creations of others as Link. Let's put some more thoughts into the concept!
The Basics: Goal, Rewards & Inventory
Similar to Super Mario Maker you would need to complete your own level, before you can upload it. Here the "flag pole" would be represented by the shrine that houses the Sheikah Monk, who would give you a Spirit Orb. So, that's really it. You create trials and play trials, where you can rate the Sheikah Shrines made by others.
The Spirit Orbs earned by playing other trials could be used for some sort of progress in the game. Like in Breath of the Wild, you would be able to trade Spirit Orbs for either Heart Containers or Stamina Vessels. There would be a maximum, of course, but even if we keep it on the same level as in Breath of the Wild with 30 Heart Containers and three Stamina Wheels, you could still go for a total of 148 player created shrines (not your own), before you would have maximized everything. And Spirit Orbs as a reward would be a good incentive for you to actually try as many trials as possible.
At default the player only always has the Paraglider and the Sheikah Slate available, where a series of tutorial shrines could be used to introduce and activate the four basic runes - Bombs, Cryonis, Magnesis and Stasis - much like on the Great Plateau. Upgrades for Stasis and Bombs could be unlocked via Spirit Orbs or other means later on.
The rest of the inventory is predefined by the trial itself. So, the trial creator can hand the player a number of (already equipped) armor, weapon, bow and shield items from the start, as well as some food, similar to how it was done in the "Realm of Memories" in The Champions' Ballad. Alternatively all available items can be put into treasure chests somewhere in the trial as well.
To simplify things, the game would probably go without the materials. There's no need to collect them and the things you can do with them are rather limited, where using materials was never required to beat shrines of the main game. Armor would probably be reduced to one page, so the inventory here always only has five pages, where the need of a key item page is questionable as well.
Spirit Orbs could even be used to upgrade your weapon, bow and shield stashes in the inventory as a replacement for Korok Seeds. This probably shouldn't be exponential, where four Orbs for one slot seems fine, but the usefulness would depend heavily on trials, where you get and need many weapons. Otherwise the basic stashes should probably be enough for everything...
The Editor
Portal 2 has an excellent Puzzle Creator built into the game, which stands out with its simplicity. And since the test chambers of Portal are very similar to the Sheikah Shrines in Breath of the Wild, Nintendo could learn a lot from this tool, if they ever wanted to offer a 3D level editor of their own.
In the Puzzle Creator of Portal 2 everything is organized in a cube grid. Like with most 3D level editors you carve out a room in a space, but here you do it via cubes only, which would fit the Sheikah Shrines well enough, because often they use giant cuboid rooms as a basis. Anyway, on the grid you can then place elements like buttons, jump pads, laser emitters, turrets, stairs and more:
Some of this is even similar to what we would have in a Breath of the Wild trial creator. There would be droppers for orbs, bowls for orbs, crystal switches, bottom switches, gust emitters, Guardian enemies and even laser beams. Add treasure chests and torches on top of that and you get yourself a nice Zelda editor already.
You can connect elements, e.g. a bottom switch with a locked door, where the editor takes care of the mechanics for you. All you have to do is selecting the two elements that should be connected. Some connections might even be made automatically, e.g. while placing electric conduits.
Some features of the Sheikah Shrines from Breath of the Wild might be too complicated to be realized in such an editor, mainly the various versions of motion-controlled "Apparatus". But those were a nuisance anyway. Overall things should be kept as simple as possible.
The editor itself would be controlled with a mix of touchscreen controls and button inputs. Analog sticks could be used to turn the camera. However, this raises the question, how the game ultimately would work on a Nintendo Switch. For an editor like this, the touchscreen is a necessity, but this way the game would only be playable in handheld mode. To try a level on your TV, you would need to place the Switch back in its dock. It seems a little inconvenient. But we can also wait and see, how Nintendo will handle Super Mario Maker, if that game ever makes it to the Switch.
Survival Trials?
Technically, the "Trial of the Sword" was also just a larger shrine with many floors, where on each floor you have to defeat all enemies in order to proceed. On the one hand it could be interesting to offer something similar in a Trial Editor, but it certainly would make things already more complicated on the other hand, because you would create a series of rooms connected via travel gates, instead of one single room.
It's also questionable, whether such an editor would provide the same level of detail. This starts with creating terrains for the environments, where you don't want to have just flat surfaces. There are simple terrain editors out there, so it's still a possibility, but again it makes things more complex and would go beyond the scope of a cube grid.
At least the editor could offer certain elements from the environments like enemy towers or skull caves, which you could place according to the grid. And of course it could offer the option to add enemies other than the various types of Guardian Scouts, like Bokoblins, Moblins, Lizalfos and even Lynels.
Release
Nintendo could release this as an add-on DLC to Breath of the Wild, but it's more likely that they would release this as a separate game similar to Super Mario Maker. It could still have "Breath of the Wild" in the title, like "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Trial Creator". Or they could go with something simpler to emphasize the spin-off nature.
Anyway, if they were to release this as DLC, then Nintendo would need to update the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild as well. But they most likely would like to put the Wii U behind them as soon as possible and therefore be done with updating Breath of the Wild at some point.
A Wii U version would also bring the advantage of using a touchscreen for the editor while playing the game on TV. That's something the Switch currently can't offer, but Nintendo wouldn't want to put a superior version on the Wii U in any case.
So, ultimately this would probably turn out to be Switch only.
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