Dear Reader:
Zelda: Breath of the Wild director on finding fun in falling and dying
The following comes from a Verge interview with Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi...
“There’s actually kind of a fun to be had from falling and dying. You learn to be careful and to be cautious. And we felt that that gave a lot of players the emotional preparedness to take on the rest of the world. So we ultimately decided that we should let them die.
There’s a development tool that we use that takes all of the data from these monitor tests, and it centralizes it in one location so that you can see that data in real time. It shows how many hearts people have, or where people have died, or what path they’re taking. And it’s kind of on this one singular timeline so that you can see in real time where people are struggling, where people are really dying a lot, what path they’re taking. So we took all of that into consideration as we tried to balance the game out.
When we watched people play at E3 we realized that they were playing in the way that we envisioned and when we saw that and people were reacting positively, that’s when I said ‘Alright, this is the right direction.’”