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Zelda: BotW devs on changing direction, speedrunners, biggest influences on the game, squashing bugs

by rawmeatcowboy
11 March 2017
GN Version 5.0

A portion of a Verge interview with director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and technical director Takuhiro Dohta...

V: When you started in this direction, there are obviously a lot of established aspects of Zelda, but were there things that you thought of as intrinsic to the series, that couldn’t be changed?

Fujibayashi: One thing that I knew we didn’t want to change was the aspect of discovery and exploration, and the joy that you get from discovering something new. There’s also the idea of puzzle solving. You think about it, you try some ideas, and when you’re finally able to solve a puzzle, that joy and sense of accomplishment is something that I think speaks really truly to the Zelda franchise. And I wanted to make sure that that was still intact in the game.

V: Are you excited about what will happen when speedrunners pick this up and see what they can do with it?

Fujibayashi: We’re all looking forward to it, very much so. We’re really excited to see people who are able to figure out things we weren’t able to figure out. Because we made the game so that, even though you can do things that we weren’t expecting, it’s not a bug, it’s all part of the game mechanics and game logic. And once we decided to make it so that you could basically go to Hyrule castle after seeing it from the beginning of the game, we immediately thought, “Oh, we’re going to have to wait and see if someone actually figures out a way to do this.”

V: Of all the changes and additions you’ve made with Breath of the Wild, if you had to pick one that had the biggest influence on the game, what would it be?

Fujibayashi: In terms of impact, that one thing would probably be wall climbing. When we thought about making an open-world game, and a game that really focuses on freedom, we had to overcome the challenge of walls. Because those walls are usually places where you can’t go, you can’t pass. We had to change that into a place where you could engage with the game. That was what we needed to think about.

On top of that, there were a lot of other challenges that we needed to overcome. When you have this big field, you have to fill it with lots of gameplay and fun. There are all of these challenges, and when we started thinking of the challenge of overcoming walls along with the rest of the challenges we were facing, we were able to come up with this unifying answer to that problem.

What that answer was, was when you’re actually climbing a mountain or a wall or whatever, when you’re at the base of the mountain and you look up, you want to know what’s at the top. When you think of that, you have to think of how you’re going to get up there. You have to think of certain paths so that you can make it up without becoming too tired. And there’s also the idea of using food or medicine to make it up there.

So when you think about that, then you have to think about creating a method to create that food or medicine. So you go to hunting and gathering. And then you fill the field with lots of ingredients and lots of animals. So it started to create this overall game cycle where you prepare yourself for the climb, then you climb and you come to this reward. And it ended up solving a lot of the challenges that we were confronted with, and created this idea of a game cycle.

V: Open-world games are often really buggy, because there’s just so much going on. But I experienced very little of that in my time with Breath of the Wild. How did you pull that off? Was it just a really extensive QA process?

Dohta: There’s two points I’d like to underscore. Once we realized we wanted to go about filling the world, or linking the world, with a set of rules, as opposed to filling the world with a number of handmade objects, I think one of the positive effects we got was that the world was kind of stabilized by those rules. And that cut down on a number of bugs.

There was another point that we developed during our QA process. We came up with a number of scripts that would basically allow the game to be played automatically, and allow Link to run through various parts of the game automatically. And as that was happening, on the QA side of things, if a bug did appear I’d suddenly get a flood of emails about it. That was one tool that we found to be really handy.

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