Over the past month, I've observed a disturbing trend in the Zelda Classic community: everything has grown dangerously and depressingly stagnant.
With all of Zelda Classic's potential, especially the expanding potential of the new betas, I'm saddened to find that not only is it under-utilized, but is done so in unimaginative ways. We still see Link slogging his way through one water temple or forest temple or fire temple after another. We have approximately what, three or four decent and usable graphics sets in existence, despite that almost all of them cross over with one another in some way? Take a look at RPG Maker communities sometime. They have dozens.
Ask yourselves: Why are we still able to count the number of truly innovative quests out there on one hand?
Are quest makers that easily bored, or do they just suffer from a crippling lack of vision? Well, I'd say both of these things are true. Many authors with new and interesting ideas often shelf their work after a while and some even say "never again", like Exate, the pioneer of the original and shockingly decent Metroid quests. Many others continue to churn out retread after retread. And yes, even in the face of real, forward-thinking change that users have been asking for over the course of years, we are still faced with luddites who will actively complain about inane concerns of overcomplication.
Neofirst in particular can be cited as the ultimate example here. With the Zelda Classic community united in one project, we could have had something really unique and special! Heck, I would have loved to see some awesome new graphics and cool ideas that have never been done before, like C-Dawg's marshmallow dungeon. So what did we get?
Standard graphics pack, make some typical tweaks, toss in some tricks that everyone has done before, add your usual Forest Temple and Water/Fire dungeon, top off with a plot that comes across as someone's "epic" Zelda fanfic and ship with ZC by default. Congratulations, you've done nothing new or exciting. You've just made every quest ever.
This sort of thinking is apparently entrenched so deep in the community psyche that it's causing more and more to leave, and turning off those who are discovering the game for the first time. Why is there only one Sabotage Dragoon? Why is there only one Metroid quest that doesn't suck?
ZC enthusiasts need to be asking these questions. Otherwise, I fear what they may do to the future of such a wonderful creative tool. What will the history of the Internet have to say about Zelda Classic? Will it be "this was a fun program that let people make Zelda quests. Some of them were really great, but the rest were just like playing Nth quests or some kid's fanfic over and over and over and after a while nobody cared"? Or could it be "This thing started out as letting you make your own Zelda quests, but turned into something even cooler and went from Link killing Ganon in dungeons to stuff that's every bit as prolific as any new Nintendo game, Zelda or otherwise"?