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Zelda: Breath of the Wild devs talk player freedom, emergent gameplay, and going back to the series' roots

by rawmeatcowboy
02 March 2017
GN Version 5.0

The following comes from Zelda: Breath of the Wild director, Hidemaro Fujibayashi...

“I wanted to find a way to enable the player to experience true freedom in an expansive play field, to discover a new sense of adventure over and over again while playing. I wanted to build a game where the user can decide where they want to go and what they want to do.

I thought about the original NES game. Didn’t my vision sound like that of the original? To battle daunting enemies while scrolling across a huge, expansive field? A game where the player can think what they want to do and experience excitement and adventure? The original land of Hyrule has all of the ingredients for this kind of adventure.”

- a problem with this was the amount of effort required to fill an open world of this scale with handcrafted puzzles
- this lead to the inclusion of the realistic physics to let players play their own way and make unique solutions
- adding in the ability to lift metal objects using magnetism, letting players ride updrafts using a parachute, the ability to freeze certain objects then infuse them with kinetic energy all helped aid in this
- this is when the 2D test was put together and was found to be really engaging
- this ended up with what the team called “multiplicative gameplay”
- devs ended up trying all sorts of things that others never envisioned to solve puzzles/problems
- it is possible to roll a boulder all the way from the game’s start point to the final boss’s arena
- another element of this gameplay is the chemistry engine, which allows any object in the game to be affected by elements such as fire and water, or to be combined to create new items and effects

[Link]