The TV Mode PROBLEM In ZZZ (Zenless Zone Zero)

#zenlesszonezero #zzzero #zzz #gacha #f2p #zenless #zzztvmode #janedoe #caesarzzz #burnicezzz

It's time to discuss what the future of ZZZ could hold following the removal of TV mode from the story. We'll talk about how this is both a good and could potential be a bad thing. Let me know how your thoughts on this down below!

Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:25 The Good
2:08 The Main Character Problem
3:54 Overlistening To Feedback
5:31 The Future Looks Bright

[Voxet]

I think the biggest problem for tv mode to me was that its so hand holdy in the main quest, i love some of the tv mode side quests in ZZZ, but in the main quest have some of the most brain dead objectives made for the lowest common denominator. besides that sometimes the controls are clunky, like why do i need to wait for the animation to finish before I can move to the next square. Less tv but higher quality is definitely good

[Just_an_urn]

I personally didn't have the feeling that wise and Belle weren't there when I played. I kinda knew in my mind that they were there. I feel the better question is: why didn't they interact via their Bangboo with the Calydon Crew while in the hollow? I feel the writers just made them quiet.

[jacoblarison]

I am taking classes to learn how to make 3D assets for games rn, and one thing I can say for sure is that TV mode is a godsend for storytelling and the story missions will become very boring without it. The TV mode allowed the writers to get creative with the locations and the obstacles that the characters face during story missions. I know for a fact that it is impossible within 6 weeks between updates to create entirely bespoke custom rooms with puzzles and uniquely designed or animated encounters. People will complain about TV mode being tedious now, but how is a series of empty room -> combat -> hallway -> repeat, going to be less tedious in the long run.

I think chapter 3 is a great example. With TV mode they were able to create a spooky atmosphere, play around with light and darkness as a puzzle mechanic, and create the layout of an abandoned theater full of ghosts to explore; all without ever creating any new 3D models or environments. Plus, as other people have pointed out, you actually get downtime to hear the characters speak and banter, rather than all the dialogue and character development being crammed into endless text boxes like genshin. The voice acting and implementation of the story through tv mode and cutscenes is what has actually made me care about the story in this game where other mohoyo games have failed. I mean the cinematics are great as always, but they are undermined by depriving us of the opportunity to spend time with the characters.

And for people who only care about gameplay, realistically the only interesting gameplay we got in 1.2 was <5 minutes of riding a motorcycle. I really like the idea of ZZZ being the gacha of mini games and puzzles, I am all for it, but TV mode has way more practical benefits for the story than people give it credit for. Plus I am just a puzzle fiend and I want more mini games and more difficult puzzles to keep coming along side the regular gameplay.

[MrWTFcsc]

Puzzles in Tv mode = good
mindlessly holding down button for minutes at a time to progress left, right, up, down = bad

[AsdfFdsa-gpqg]

The whole appeal of ZZZ to me is that it blends puzzle and action gameplay. 1.2’s story comms felt far emptier to me for TV mode’s absence 😔

[CaptDiablo]

TV mode had issues, but the complete removal of it in 1.2 is absurd, they should have improved it, implemented it better and iterated on it going forward. Hopefully now that this fiasco has happened in 1.2 that is what they will be doing. Hope it comes back strong in 1.3 and beyond!

[SuspiciousScout]

I think it was very unnecessary for them to remove the TV mode this much. And I'm saying this as someone who enjoys the combat much more. I get toning down the frequency a bit, but I think it adds a lot of variety to the gameplay along with just more stuff to do, and like you mentioned it gives more significane to Belle and Wise's roles.

[ObliviousNaga]

My issue with TV mode is they don't leverage the dungeon crawler aspect. Hollows are supposed to be weird otherworldly corrupted places and you don't get that feeling in the story section except for cut scenes where I think it should matter. Items, collectables, and safe zones, they exist in the game, but where supposed to be a wacky group of hollow raiders trying to get through a world that's trying to twist you inside and out. Removing TV mode removes that aspect of it and removes a chunk of the games soul. Was it well implemented? Of course not. It was bare bones at best, but the side stories, hollow zero, and the various events show how goofy, fun, and challenging it could be if done right

[AndyBurnette-dr]

As long as they listen to player feedback instead of people on X complaining who don't even play the game.

[carlfishy]

Apart from the motorcycle event, every trip into the Hollow in the latest patch felt like an anticlimax. Get teleported into an irrelevant environment. Fight a couple of waves of straightforward enemies. Done. I already do that every day to spend my fuel, it's hard to get enthusiastic about doing it more.

TV mode was the build-up, combat was the pay-off. You can't get rid of one without cheapening the other.

[Jumanimation]

There were some instances where the TV mode felt fun and interesting, like Camelia Golden Week, and the towers with the ghosts and the bulbs, but it was poorly implemented and felt disruptive throughout a lot of the story. For example, I really disliked being stuck twiddling my thumbs while Wise was explaining something obvious instead of being able to move while the dialog ended. Boy, was that annoying, TV mode tutorials were BAD. Oh, and the TV mode got really old for me FAST on Hollow Zero, I actually have fun there now with the new mode.
I don't think the TV mode should disappear as it can actually be pretty fun, but they shouldn't add it just fort the sake of it being there.
I'm all for more entertaining and inventive ways to use the TVs, but I'd be lying if I said they didn't feel like a chore 70% of the time.

[dva_is_bae]

It’s a shame, it felt like the identity of the game. The story felt bland in 1.2 because of the lack of puzzles and fun interesting non-combat interactions. Which sucked cause I love Caesar and the sons of calydon! But what I got instead was “go here, kill things, start next mission, kill more things”

[Law-of-EnTropy]

Removing the TV mode from the story not only removed the problems that came with it, it also removed the benefits it provided for story-telling. Downtime, exposition, dialogues and banters. These were the things that felt missing during chapter 4. The entirety of the story, we didn't get any downtime at all. We just kept moving and moving, not really giving the story the space to breathe and figure itself out. That ended up with things either ending too abruptly or too fast, leaving us with bad pacing overall. Looking back at my experience of the main story, we went from Act 1 to Act 1 to suddenly finding ourselves in Act 3. There is no Act 2 in this chapter. We weren't given time to gather ourselves, we weren't given the opportunity to further get to know the setting nor the characters beyond their introductions, we weren't given space to approach the foreboding conflict. This led to the payoffs and setups of the story to be rather lacking in impact. The only real setup we got was the Sunflint story that foreshadowed Caesar's dive into the lake. And yes, that part was masterfully done. But anything beside that? If you can't think of one, it's because there were barely anything beyond that. This is made it feel like a large chunk of the story was missing even when the story itself was supposed to be this grand event. It didn't feel grand at all. Because again, we weren't given downtime to explore and learn about the place. Not even a scouting mission or anything. We just went from.. looking for parts and collecting data to.. immediately leaning how Lucius was sabotaging us.

Despite its flaws, the TV mode did provide these things. If you are someone who simply don't like the experience of TV, then that's perfectly fair. But if you also assert the idea that TV doesn't provide any narrative purposes, then you'd be deadass wrong. What made TV a key tool for the storytelling of ZZZ is that it provided us a place to slow down and breathe. It given us space to learn about characters through dialogue and banters while trudging through TVs. It gave Phaeton and Fairy time to converse with each other and contextualize the application of their expertise inside a Hollow. More importantly, TV was integral in both showing and telling the story through the eyes of us, the Proxy. You know, the two people that we actually want to care about because they're the ones driving this story. Without TV, as a tool for storytelling, we actually lose out on these things. And the fact that people would rather remove the TV for simple inconveniences that could easily be fixed and completely abandoning the numerous upsides of this feature is severely shortsighted. I really hope people could understand that you don't remove a problem by deleting them, you fix them. The TV had problems but these are things that can be fixed, can be adjusted and can be changed.

Edit: to preface, i personally enjoyed the story and actually loved it for what it is. that said, my love for this chapter is not a good enough reason to completely ignore the parts that soured my experience. i am critical of this chapter not because i'm a hater or a TV lover or whatever. I am critical of this chapter because i genuinely love and enjoy ZZZ for what it is and I'd rather be honest about the things that i enjoy. If I'd rate this chapter, it's an above average 6.5/10. The ideas and themes of this chapter was top-notch but the execution of the beginning and the middle was borderline messy. I loved every character that we got to know through this chapter but at the same time, this chapter left me feeling like we could have gotten to know them more better had we been given proper time to do so. If I were to consider the Cheesetopia as a continuation of the main story, then I'd rate it 8/10 because we did learn more about the Sons of Calydon in this event. But the fact that an event outside of the main story is what bumped my enjoyment of this chapter is indicative of the flaws the persisted in the story.

[daniel.deguzman]

Wtf, I was really caught off guard. 6:43

[davidcassidy]

“Hoyo have been collecting feedback since the first public beta” is a rare but true viewpoint. Just because I only learned about ZZZ right at launch, doesn’t mean they haven’t been getting consistent feedback for a significant time.
“TV Mode won’t disappear, it’ll just get more fun” is very reassuring to me. Give me more special events for TV mode like #CamelliaGoldenPeak, and more Agent-focused, pre-Phaethon ‘and that’s how I met your mother’ stories for the patch MSQs, and I’m happy.

[eeughwhatyearisit]

TV mode serves a lot of importance to the story than people give it credit for. It gives us, the players, the breather we need from all the action so we can process things. We get to hear the banter of the characters more, and learn about who they are as a result of that. That's not something you can do in combat because you'd be too busy doing combos on enemies. That's kinda why I didn't like 1.2 at all personally. It was just go, go, go with no break, no time to actually know anyone besides Lucy and Ceasar (which wasn't that much either), and then randomly see Lucius's true colors (which were obvious from the beginning).

I know majority would rather remove the TV and keep the Hollow run, but honestly... that's just boring. It's not like Hi3rd where the player is running in a map with different areas and rooms, and you get places to rest and have the characters talk. ZZZ uses the same battle grounds, same boss arena, same everything depending which on Hollow you're in and there are hardly any breaks because all you're doing is running straight into another danger zone. It's just not fun. I don't wanna be hacking and slashing enemies all the time. If I wanted that, I'd just replay Musou Warriors 2 for the 1, 000th time. Instead of getting rid of TV mode, they should improve it to give a better experience for players. Now I fear they're gonna remove it all together because people wanna complain about it rather than ask for improvement. I know some people are, but majority I've seen just keep saying to get rid of it. Which is just sad, because the devs wanted this to work and they should be able to keep something they clearly worked hard on and were proud of.

[kiel]

The point of the TV mode is that it is the interface with which Phaeton engages the Hollows through Eous. To reduce its role is to reduce Phaeton's involvement in the story process. Plus I really loved the creativity it brings to the table when it comes to presentation. Particularly loved what they did with Rina's Agent Story and Qingyi's Mindscape stuff. For Chapter 4, I'd say it's at least a bit forgivable considering they're in the Outer Ring, so the commission is done outside of Random Play (where their TV board is). I do agree with the rest saying that it can be too spoonfeed-y and tedious, but overall TV mode gives ZZZ a breath of fresh air.

[Exaar]

I think the truth of the matter is the TV mode is good.. in moderation. I think the game is worse when its all TV mode, and all worse when its no TV mode. Give us a good even mix- a couple TV mode missions, a bunch of non-TV-mode missions. TV mode DOES add something to the game, just don't overuse it.

[Lord_Hengar]

My first exposure to ZZZ was being impressed by cutscenes. Then after I learned it was going to be this mix of action game and classic dungeon crawler type thing was when I got excited to actually _play_ it. So losing half of that isn't great to me.

[Chaos]

I honestly didn't mind the TV mode and love the unique dialogue characters had to say when diving in the hollows.

Still this story felt like the protags was missing. Navigating through hollows are their job. Removing that takes away their identity.