As I write this, I’ve played 162 hours of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I think that may be all I need to tell you about the game. It has enough depth that one 110 hour play through didn’t exhaust all of the fun in the game and now, 52 hours into a Master Mode run, I’m seeing things I’ve never seen before and I’m still having a ton of fun.
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| Out of the cave and off to explore. |
Beyond being the game I turn on pretty much every time I get some time to play, I think that Breath of the Wild is a great demonstration of how video games can be made. In making Breath of the Wild, the creators looked deeply at all of the decisions made in all of the previous games in the Zelda franchise, and evaluated whether every aspect of game play was important to the game, or not. The result is a game, that, for me at least, has at least 162 hours worth of play in it.
I think Breath of the Wild should be required reading for everyone making games. It stands head and shoulders above games in the Zelda series. I’ve never been a huge fan of open world games, but compared to the ones I’ve played, BotW stands head and shoulders above those as well.
As always, this post contains spoilers for the whole of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I will say that I’m not sure how much spoilers will really influence your enjoyment of this game. As I discuss below, it’s not a game about the journey, not the destination. Still, I think now is probably a good time to start your first hundred hours.
Things I Liked
I’m not sure how apocryphal the story is, but apparently the seeds of Zelda were formed when Shigeru Miyamoto was young, and exploring the wilderness near his home. As he climbed over a hill he saw the entrance to a cave, and got a thrill of adventure, "Let's go see what's there!" Years later, when designing the original The Legend of Zelda, he took that thrill as a guide: Let’s go on adventure and see all of the amazing things in the world.
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| Through the tunnel and then... |
Breath of the Wild returns to that point: Let’s go on adventure, and see all of the amazing things in the world. You get a stick to hit bad guys with, (which I missed for the first couple hours in my first play through) and you can eat apples to refill your health, and you can go anywhere you want.
The game does put you through a small tutorial. Although as Zelda tutorials go it is incredibly short and sweet. You have to visit four shrines (mini dungeons) on the opening “Great Plateau” to get the four powers (Freezing objects in time, Lifting metal objects, Placing square or round bombs, and creating frozen platforms in water). This gives you all of the powers you’ll need in the game. You have every tool right up front, it’s up to you to learn how to use them.
Additionally, visiting the four shrines gives you four orbs, which you can trade to The Goddess to get an extra heart of health or an extra chunk of stamina (or not, that’s cool too). With that, and a rough pointer to where someone will give you more ideas of things to do in the world you’re on your own.
From there, you can go and beat the game. You can walk down the hill, climb the Castle and kick Ganon in the teeth (if you’re good enough). For completeness, there is one quest that the game wants you to finish before, which gives you “the best ending,” but there’s absolutely nothing else holding you back.
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| Hyrule Castle is always there |
Except, it’s really not a game for beating. It’s a game for exploring. Even as you work on the first four shrines, you see things off in the distance that catch your interest. Is that a shrine down there? Is that a flying city? Why is that mountain split in two? What’s up on that ridge? Is that a dragon? Then as you start to investigate things you get new inklings of things out there that you should check out.
You’ll meet people in the world, they might give you quest to do something for them, or they might give you a quest to go find a particular shrine, or they might just mention something that’s neat in the next valley over. Over and over you’ll find there’s a new next thing to do, just over there, and then over there, and then over there and then over there.
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| Adventure is right over there. |
The game gives you so many “over there”s. The world is huge, and tightly packed, and there is always somewhere to explore. While there may not be “story” at each point, everywhere you go is interesting: This outcropping looks cool, Hey that’s neat the way the waterfall flows through there, Huh, what an interesting place for a grave. Sometimes you are rewarded with the experience itself, but often the creators leave a Korok there to say, yeah, we thought this was cool too!
Where there is story, it’s often told through the environment. Guardians piled up against a wall where the Hylians made their last stand a hundred years ago, Old rusted weapons left leaning against the remnant of houses in a destroyed town, The makeshift barricade thrown up halfway across the bridge. As I played I felt like every view I saw was carefully crafted, so even though the world is giant, it isn’t sparse and it all feels like part of a cohesive whole.
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| What happened here over the last hundred years? |
One thing I loved about Breath of the Wild, is the way it gives you a thrill as you reach somewhere new. I’m reminded of playing Illusion of Gaia, or Secret of Mana when I was a kid. You’d finish up somewhere and then you’d get whisked off to a new part of the world, where there were new cool things to do, see, and fight. Except, in Breath of the Wild, you don’t have to wait for the story to take you. If you want to go see a new cool thing, climb a mountain and see which way the cool takes you.
Another beautiful thing about Breath of the Wild is it’s ability to surprise you. The world is so big, and in 110 hours, I felt like I’d seen most of it. Starting a second play through, I saw things I’d missed before. Often things I’d missed by being just on the wrong side of a hedge or a valley, or even I’d flown directly over without looking down, or back at the right angle. There were also parts of the world I’d just somehow never wandered too.
One quest I got fairly early in my first play through was to find a woman who was washed down a river. I never found her. Not in 110 hours of searching (I mean, I didn’t spend all 110 hours looking, but my eyes were always open). On the one hand this is can be frustrating, but on the other hand what an amazing game that there can be a mission in “plain sight” that I can’t do, just because I’m not thinking the right way or looking in the right place.
The first DLC pack is generally great. The best part of the DLC, though, might be the “Hero’s Path”. The Hero’s Path allows you to see exactly where you’ve been over the last 200 hours of game play. Having finished my first play through, I now have the chance to go back, and find the place’s I haven’t found before. I think it might have robbed some of the exploration from the first play through, but I’m really enjoying it in the second. It’s also a fantastic storytelling tool and often when I’m done playing for the day I’ll just rewind the Hero’s Path and watch my own progress from the last little while.
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| My adventure this far. |
The other great addition in the first DLC is Master mode. In it the game bumps up the level of the bad guys by a bit, and adds in a few new things to make you more wary traveling through the world. But it’s not just a simple change in difficulty, master mode has reformed the game for me, and made it just as engaging as it was the first time around, if not more so. Now, you have to be careful and think a lot more about where you want to go, how you want to get there and what you’re going to do when you get there. It forces you back out into the space of the game, and then gets to surprise you all over again.
I think the creators spent a lot of time thinking about how to push players out into the world. One of my favourite aspects of the game is the rain. If you look around online, you see a lot of people complaining about the rain. It makes it hard to do what you want to do. In Breath of the Wild, you can basically climb anything you want, so long as you have the stamina, and if you spend a little time with the cooking pot you can usually have the stamina. When it rains though, everything gets slippery, and it gets very hard to climb anything.
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| A dark and stormy night. |
This makes people upset, because it “takes away their choice,” but I think it actually makes the game stronger. It makes you stop and think about how you’re trying to solve a problem. Why would I go look at the path at the back of the hill, when I can just straight climb up the steep side? Rain.
Rain makes you rethink your plans, and it pushes you to see new things in the game. Similarly, weapons and shields break, which again force you to adjust and adapt how you want to solve the problems in front of you. They both feel a little overused, so I think it would have been nice to see them spiced up with some other ways of making your readjust your plans.
I like the way the decide to break up the challenge of the game. In most Zelda games (especially the 3D ones) the overworld is there for your to explore, but is mostly just the place where you travel between dungeons and story bits. There might be some combat, there might be a some puzzles and there will be a few cool things to see and explore. Then in dungeons there will be puzzles linked together in some order (checkout Mark Brown’s series Boss Keys to see how those links have evolved over time), with combat thrown in between.
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| How many shrines can you see right here? |
Breath of The Wild is about seeing the world, so it wouldn’t make sense for the game to shove you into a dungeon for hours and hours at a time. Instead you get a little bit of overworld exploration (possibly while following a quest or a clue) and then a little bit of dungeon challenge. It’s another mark of how this game holds to its theme of Adventure over everything else.
I especially like the times when the game pulls the puzzles out of the shrines and into the world. A few times you will find an ancient labyrinth, or other challenge, in the world and have to traverse it. At the end of these overworld challenges you get shrines where you don’t get a challenge, you only get a reward, which again is a nice, “You found (or did) something cool” moment.
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| Then there was the time I got stuck in a labyrinth. |
I think one of the things to like best about Breath of the Wild is just how tightly the creators stuck to the theme of Adventure. Every aspect of the game calls back to it, and, while some of the other aspects of the game such as combat or story may be a little weakened by that, it creates a special experience that is really rewarding.
Things I didn’t Like
There’s not too many things that I don’t like about Breath of the Wild. The biggest is probably unfair given my tendencies as an AI researcher and a fan of simulation games, but they cheated with the NPCs. You don’t notice it too much, other than possibly that guy carrying all the stuff somehow made it from that other stable quicker than you did, … on your horse …, but the NPCs aren’t doing much in the world if you’re not right there. There are times where you’ll catch an NPC “leaving” then follow them as they walk just out of sight of somewhere, then turn around and “be arriving” again.
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| The cutest, and probably most story aware NPCs. |
I know that you only really need “enough” AI to make the game work, but deep in my heart I’d have loved to see the people of the world implemented a little more realistically. It would be fun to see someone travel across the world trying to accomplish their own goals and it would make the world more immersive. At the end of the day it’s not game breaking, or even actually that annoying, but it is a thing I always hope for and the rest of the game has such attention to detail.
Another (small) problem I had with the game is that the the combat does get a little repetitive. Effectively there are three main types of enemies (bokoblins, lizalfos and moblins) you’ll meet and fight as you go through the game, with a few more “mid boss” style ones for special occasions. These three types of enemies can all wield a bunch of different kinds of weapons, and so can you, but eventually it feels a bit like you’ve done it all.
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| A fight, which was cool (but that I did not win) |
I’d have liked it if the game had a little more combat diversity, and a few more enemies that popped up at different times or different places. Beyond that if there were a few different ways to fight it would have made the combat a little more engaging. Between the combat sameness and the increased difficulty I’ve found in my Master Mode playthrough, I’ve skipped combat fairly often. (Which may have been a part of their plan to force me out to explore more again).
The other aspect of the game that feels like it could use more diversity is the architectural design. You wake up in a world 100 years after the near destruction of the world by Ganon, and before the world was almost destroyed the kingdom was trying to retrieve relics from a hyrule 10,000 years past. This seems like a lot of history, but it feels boiled down to “recently built stuff,” “stuff Ganon smashed,” “ruins” and “stuff from 10,000 years ago”. There are some differences, especially in the modern buildings, but it’s a little disappointing to travel through a vast unique landscape and arrive at a ruin that’s 100% identical to the one you found last hour.
I don’t mind as much with the “tech” stuff, such as the shrines and the towers, they’re part of the game play and within the game it makes sense that the look like they do. But I found the ruins a little disappointing, especially given how dynamic and exciting all the natural landscape is. Again, it’s nothing game breaking, and I can’t imagine how much longer “more exciting man made artifacts” would have taken, so I’ll content myself with the natural wonders instead.
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| One moment in the world. |
Oh. Motion control dungeons. Those suck. Doubly since I didn’t use the gamepad for 99% of my playthrough. Stop it Nintendo.
Things I Noticed
It’s not a good, or bad, thing, but reducing the role of dungeons really changes the face of a Zelda Game. Thinking about what I remember of different games from the past, I find that I can remember the dungeons of a game (especially a zelda game) far better than I can anything about the world, the story or the mechanics. I’m worried then that as it ages Breath of the Wild may just dissolve into a pleasant feeling.
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| Divine Beast Van Medoh watching over the Rito Village |
The lack of dungeons is interesting, because I think I’d say to you that it makes the game a little less engaging, but on the other hand I spent an hour hour last night running along a mountain range and didn’t feel disengaged once. I’d also be tempted to say that the game feels a little sparse, but there again I think you’re finding something new every few minutes and as I already said, the game is always ready with the next “go over there”.
I guess that means that this is a low-density game. And I guess since it works, a low-density game works. One aspect of the open world design is that there’s much less of a difficulty spike across the game, most shrines are about as hard as any other and the great beast dungeons are not that much harder either.
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| The World |
I think this risks making the game tepid. I think the creators kept the game interesting through good design and relying on the Zelda mythos. I suspect that if a new IP, like Horizon Zero Dawn, was this sparse in its design it would not be treated as well as Breath of the Wild has been. I think the fact that Breath of the Wild has more than a quarter century of history of Zelda games to draw on, saves it with a lot of gamers. It is able to use that history to shorthand a lot of things that another game might need to explain more fully.
I also feel a little conflicted about the way gender is handled in this game. This comes in two parts, one the gender roles implicit in the world and the other in the handling of gender identity and the Gerudo. At the end of the day I can’t say that the game handles either of these badly, so much as I think the creators didn’t take the opportunity to better consider these cases. I also suppose it’s worth noting that this is a Japanese game, and so it really doesn’t reflect my cultural biases.
The original Champions who support Zelda (the Princess) and Link (her Hero) are Daruk, Mipha, Revali and Urbosa. This gives you a gender balanced team, but it also gives you a team which died before the beginning of the game. In the game three of the four champions’ descendants who help you enter the divine beasts are male. Now this is complicated by having two “species” who are monogendered one all males and one all females, but this means that the majority of the hero type people meet in the game are males unless they have to be women.
This continues in the general NPC population. Of the people you meet out in the wild, the gender parity seems fairly even, but amongst the ones who interact with the monsters far more female characters need to be rescued vs the male characters who fight (though there are some of both). More generally in towns and at stables it feels a bit like there is “men’s work” and “women’s work”, which I don’t know is necessary in a fantasy game. The game is not terribly out of tune, but I still feel like there could have been better representation all around, especially among the action characters.
I was also bothered by the handling of the Gerudo. Gerudo are an all female race of humaniods (I think), into whom a male is born very rarely. In Breath of the Wild, the Gerudo are all women and they live in the desert, and only allow women from the other races to enter their walled city. Link can enter, but only when he’s received a Gerudo outfit from a man, who was using it to sneak into the city to … uh … well it is actually the nicest city.
So that’s one part of the problem, the game enforces a fairly strict gender binary, and deviations tend to be treated more as jokes than as serious moments. Even if Link does look somewhat androgynous (a decision the creators made on purpose), the game is serious about letting you know that he’s MALE.
The other part of the problem is that, while the Gerudo are a proud warrior race, they spend a lot of time researching how to find husbands. Because what else would a bunch of women do when they’re gathered together, I guess. It’s disappointing because a lot of the rest of the text in that part of the game is very explicit about how there’s really nothing holding women back from doing whatever they’d like.
I think that’s what bothers me about the way the game treats gender, it has the chance to do a lot of very interesting things and it doesn’t. It falls back to being tropy and so even where they do get something approaching a nuanced look at gender the rest of the game holds it back. For a game that questioned so much else about gaming and it’s own series history, it’s a little frustrating that this area didn’t receive nearly so much examination.
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| Treasure hunters (almost) defending themselves. |
Things I’d Include in a Game
The biggest thing I think that I'd take out of Breath of the Wild is their fearlessness with the tutorials. Or, rather their lack of tutorials. Or, their fearlessness trusting their players. Especially considering that this is the series that insisted on teaching you how the money worked every time you started the game again.
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| There's quite a bit going on here really. |
I did really enjoy how I was able to meet each new problem in the game with my own wits. I do feel like they reduced the overall difficulty of the game a little bit to compensate for this lack this, but they managed to produce a game that left me feeling fairly smart for the most part (and really dumb the two times I had to look things up).
The thing I wonder about reducing tutorials, is how much Breath of the Wild is able to rely on people having played a Zelda game before. By my calculation there have been more than 65 million copies purchased over all of the previous games (source). So, I wonder if it’s easier for Nintendo to rely on 30 plus years of history than it might be for a new company, or a new game. I certainly can’t tell having played almost all of the history of Zelda as the games came out.
Still I think the design of the game is a good one, regardless of how much history a player has with it. They limited the amount of mechanics in the game. Looking at the different items in various previous Zelda games, there’s usually somewhere between 6 and 12 different items/mechanics in the game (Taken quickly from Gamepedia). Breath of the wild has 6, if we count generously: bombs, Magnesis, Stasis, arrows, melee combat and Thrown Weapons. They aren’t even combined that often.
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| I spent an embarrassingly long time working this one out. |
As I said, this does reduce the overall difficulty of the game, but in counter argument I’ve now played 162 of the game and I’m still happy. They’ve managed to introduce interest without complexity and I think that’s part of how I’ve managed to play so much. It’s not Darksouls and that’s fine, I don’t have to git good every time I play.
Breath of the Wild is also a great reminder that you can tell a compelling story without talking it to death. As a story Breath of the Wild is like a short story, whereas Skyward Sword is like a novel. Gameplay offsets this though and by keeping the story short and focused, it stays with me even when I’m not advancing it. Environmental storytelling in the world then helps reinforce that. I don’t know that this says you shouldn’t try to tell a big story in a game, but it certainly works well this way.
Final Things
I love The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I’m 162 hours in, and can easily see myself playing double that over the rest of the year, even before you count what the DLC adds to the game. I think if you’re looking for entertainment and fun in a game, this is where you should be looking. Play it, and I guarantee you an adventure.
Additionally, I think the game does a great job in revisioning how games are designed. As I said at the beginning, I think this should become required reading for all game makers in the future. The mix of story and gameplay and environment is fantastic and the trust the game shows its players is great. I don’t think, by any means, that all games should play like Breath of the Wild. I don’t even want the next Zelda to play exactly like this, but I do think that it says a lot about how deeply examined, bold choices will pay off. More than anything else, this game leaves me feeling inspired to play and create.
