CronoDAS comments on A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy - Less Wrong
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Now I'm wondering how you could subvert that. I'm imagining something like a Legend of Zelda game which is split into two phases:
A fairly long preliminary phase, where you don't know about saving the world or anything. This should have maybe one or two boss fights and teach you how to play the game well.
A race against time to save the world. Bad stuff starts happening at preset times (plus or minus some randomness), and you've got to hurry and go for the high-probability ideas in order to maximize your chance of not losing. Skip the side-quests and mini-dungeons unless they've got some important items, because Kakariko village will be destroyed in 4-5 hours of game-time. To enhance the sense of urgency, make save-scumming impossible and make it harder to die in order to compensate for the increased difficulty of gameplay. Make sure there are several ways to win in any scenario, so the player doesn't have to rely on trial-and-error to find the one officially blessed way of doing something. And to hell with switch mazes.
I would definitely play this game. It would be intense. And the quest for 100% completion would result in absolutely crazy Let's Play videos.
That sounds a lot like the actual game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. You have a fixed time limit in which to save the world, and if you don't, you have to go back in time and watch most of your progress become undone.
Yeah, right! I'm playing through this right now, and all the important things get saved when you play the Song of Time. But the most important part is that there's no penalty to wasting time: you could spend all 3 days looking for one heart piece, and whether you did or didn't find it, you'd be no worse off after playing the Song of Time again.