Nintendo on maintaining Zelda: BotW's freedom for future Zelda titles, and the notorious Korok Seed reward

IGN continues to share snippets from their interview with Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi. You can see their answers to the latest questions below.

On shrine and other in-game shortcuts

HF: “That was definitely one of our goals. That's totally all according to plan. A big theme of this game was that there should be multiple answers, multiple methods, multiple ways of doing anything. All the dungeons, we wanted to make it so that the players would be able to solve problems in any way they wanted to without us even being able to know what they would do to solve it.

It had to be an environment where they could do things we couldn't predict if it would work. So we have a lot of fun watching the videos and seeing people do things that we didn't actually predict and things that are totally unique. So yeah, it worked out.”

On maintaining Breath of the Wild's freedom for future Zelda games

EA: “You know, I can't speak to what other people, other companies will do in their own games, but I think for me, especially just in terms of the Zelda series, the incredible freedom that this game offers you and how well that's been received…to me, it means that freedom, that level of freedom is something that needs to be maintained in Zelda games going forward. My eyes have been opened to how important that is. So one of the things that we definitely consider is that we always wanted to make sure the player could understand what their challenges or what their hurdle is. We always wanted to make sure the challenge could be challenged. So we always wanted to make a linear way of [overcoming] a hurdle."

"So for example, if there was like, ‘you can't do this because you don't have the right tools' or 'you don't meet the certain requirements,’ players are going to not want to do that anymore. So we wanted to very much incorporate that. Going forward, I think we would definitely consider that way of thinking when we create something in the future."

On the reward for collecting all 900 Korok Seeds

HF: "We just kind of thought it would be funny to make that a big joke. It's just the backstory, the kind of hidden kind of thing in the game the whole way is that the Korok seeds are actually Korok poop.”