Dear Reader:
Miyamoto is a big fan of tree-climbing in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Coming from a Kotaku interview with Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi...
“My response to Mr. Miyamoto and Mr. Aonuma was: You can do everything. But I had to sell it to them. How we’re going to make this happen. And I felt like the best way to convey this idea to them was to show them that you could climb walls. We put rupees at the top of the tree to let them know that this is something we’re taking into account, but I didn’t tell them. All I did was say, ‘Here, play the game.’ So the first thing [Miyamoto] did was start climbing, and he climbed the tree, and once he was able to do that and see that he can go anywhere within this small field, he got how this game will play out and that’s how I presented it to him
When we first presented this to Mr. Miyamoto, he spent about an hour just climbing trees. We left little treats like rupees on the trees, but we also left other things in other places we thought he might go. But he just kept climbing trees. Up and down. And so we got to the point where we go, ‘Do you want to look at other stuff?’ But he just kept on going. Once [he] got out of the Shrine of Resurrection, he spent an hour just within a 25-50 meter radius outside of that cave just climbing trees.
As you’re climbing trees you use up stamina, and once you run out of stamina, instead of just falling you can input a key and you start dragging down the wall. Even that provides another level of fun... What we realized was instead of trying to make all these new ideas and building them from scratch and adding them, we decided to look at what we have. We realized there are so many ways of playing the game hidden within the world we built.”