Still not convinced on the non-love against non-diagonal topdown movement. The game, at least as-is, would be something of a cheese fest if you could approach enemies in a diagonal fashion, because it's an angle where they have no defensive and generally very little offensive capabilities. You could further argue that, well, if they had designed it to be an eight-way mover, they could've adopted enemy behaviour to match. Which ok, they could. But they didn't, even in A link to the past. Player moves in all directions. Enemies are easily defeated by not having offensive actions in diagonal directions.
I could totally see TLOZ be 8-directional movement based. But you'd also lose (or best case replace) a lot of:
-identity
-strategy
The strategies might be few in the game as it were, but they'd be even fewer with diagonal movement and attack.
Some personal principles:
-It's in the players' natural order to not like imposed restrictions - they tend to look for the path of least resistance.
-But at the same time, those restrictions are the real meat and bone of the game design which will guarantee the long-term satisfaction.
-It's the designers' goal to come up with an interesting combination of game rules.
-It is not necessarily the designers' goal to come up with a set of rules that players will find more agreeable just because they make a game leaner, even though it's an act of balance.
-And sometimes, players don't know what's best for them. You can fly all through a vast number of stages in smb3 circumvening any substantial challenge, but that's fast carbohydrates which won't yield a lasting impression or qualitative experience, and risks leaving you with a sugar rush hangover.
-This broadly open invitation to cheese it leaves the player with the hard choice to discipline her/himself while playing in order to not "ruin it", which generally isn't a pleasurable experience when not actively chosen and involving a new real challenge (like, for example, setting out to do a no death run).
This is all linked to Lacans' term jouissance:
"[...]a jouissance which compels the subject to constantly attempt to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle.
Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this "painful principle" is what Lacan calls jouissance."
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-(imo) a good designer aims to allow for the right amount of such transgressions. Not too little (creates a feeling of inagency), not too much (creates what the process describes above).
-Furthermore, everyone has a subjective and personal experience where the balance of that threshold is. For me, ALTTP allows for too much cheesing against many enemy types. As does Super Castlevania, mainly because they didn't care to balance the whip length against the multidirectional feature, thus overriding the much of the need for subweapons and a portion of the need strategic positioning by the player of the player character.
Perhaps ironically, i was at the other side of the argument table (4 vs 8-directional) when we started pinning down feature sets for the topdowner i've been working on together with rahsennor. I think it goes to show how sensitive any "general principle" is to practical context.
As for the "age poorly" concept. I think it is this simple:
-The games in themselves don't change
-Their context does, though, which plays at least some part.
-Fading nostalgia plays a strong part, but it's not all.
-the personal, human "pleasure apparatus" changes as we gain more experience, we grow older and change, and as life takes us in new directions.
-Most importantly (i think), our conceptions and the general discourse of what "good design" is is perpetually changing over time.