[The following is the transcript of the video]

Evergreen Relevancy

After a brief introduction teaching the basic controls, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild stuns us with a beautiful shot of our protagonist Link looking out over an incredible view of Hyrule. This is an open invitation to explore. The game shows us we can go here, here, here, even here. Beyond the tutorial, nothing limits our choices. It is how Breath of the Wild introduces its central design ethos: the possibility to create our own unique adventure by going anywhere we want and doing anything we’d like. Beyond the tutorial, nothing limits our choices.

This freedom creates a unique Design challenge. Breath of the Wild has no idea where we’ll go next. And yet, no matter our path, it must feel relevant to the long-term goal set after the tutorial: grow strong enough to defeat the Big Bad Ganon. Exploration for its own sake works for some, but for consistency there needs to be external motivation. Becoming the hero who can defeat evil certainly fits the bill.

This means the game must ensure that wherever we go, the challenge and rewards should feel appropriate to our current power – even if we revisit already explored areas to find something we might have missed. Let’s call this ‘Evergreen Relevancy’.

Traditional linear progression can’t really achieve this. If the purpose of the world is to make us stronger, then the more we grow, the less reason we have to explore – the world loses relevance. True ‘Evergreen Relevancy’ requires temporary power boosts that fade unless we keep exploring. The upside is that even major power spikes don’t make the world obsolete as sooner or later those boosts wear off. The downside is that constantly losing power can feel like we’re stuck in a never-ending survival loop, rather than becoming a true hero.

Breath of the Wild blends both approaches. It gives us slow permanent progression to steadily raise our baseline power, while temporary boosts on top of that scale with how much we explore. But this still doesn’t maintain Evergreen Relevancy.

For example, early on we can cook food that temporarily boosts defense out of materials found in the world. That’s helpful – even after we buy our first armor sets, which provide a small but permanent defense increase. But the more we upgrade that armor, the less useful defense-boosting food becomes. The temporary spike is still technically there – it just doesn’t feel as impactful anymore. Permanent progression, even when slow, eventually makes temporary bonuses obsolete, and that affects the desire to explore.

To preserve Evergreen Relevancy, there still has to be something that offers temporary power boosts that can’t be replaced by permanent items. And it should be impossible to ignore this ‘something’, so it must tie directly to the ultimate goal of defeating Ganon.

And what do we need to destroy absolute evil? Deal damage. That’s why Breath of the Wild adds Durability to every item involved in dealing or blocking damage – melee weapons, bows and shields. Though shields aren’t strictly necessary for this purpose, including them adds consistency since they’re also gear Link physically holds. As a result, we ALWAYS have a reason to search for new and better weapons.

It’s a concept the game teaches from the get go. One of the very first things we’ll do in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is pick up a tree branch. But after smacking a Bokoblin a few times it snaps – a sad moment. Yet the impact sends the Bokoblin flying, letting us grab its club. This new weapon deals more damage and lasts longer – a happy moment… until it also breaks.

The intention is clear: the game wants to show us immediately that weapons break. That way, it’s not a nasty surprise several hours in. At the same time, it reassures us that we’ll be finding better gear with higher durability to replace them.

And even if we stockpile dozens of weapons, once we stop searching we’ll eventually run out, returning to exploration. That’s why even the iconic Master Sword ‘breaks’ – or rather, needs to recharge after enough hits. Even though the fact that you just have to wait does make the Master Sword dangerously close to being a permanent weapon that would make all others irrelevant, the cooldown is long enough that we’re forced to use other gear in the meantime.

Still, weapon durability isn’t the solution to Evergreen Relevancy – it’s the foundation. As we have defined before, two things must scale with our progression: challenge and rewards.

Power progression feels meaningful with contrast – when enemies seem powerful at first, but eventually we surpass them. To maintain this contrast, Breath of the Wild uses fixed enemy tiers. So a Red Bokoblin always has 13 hitpoints, while a Blue one – 72. This means that early on, reds are manageable while Blues feel like minibosses. Later, even Blues become easy – but then Black and Silver variants would provide challenge.

The actual scaling is handled by a hidden point system. Hitting certain thresholds replaces enemies with their stronger variants. But it only affects enemies marked as scaleable, and not every monster has that flag. This ensures a healthy mix of weaker and tougher enemies at any stage of our progression.

Rewards scale the same way. Or, to be more specific, weapons found in chests or held by enemies. Almost every weapon line has multiple tiers, each with higher damage and durability. On top of that, should there be enough hidden points, there are two levels of random bonuses that can be applied. So even after a weapon line hits its max tier, it can still drop with powerful perks. If we open a chest early on, the weapon fits our progression. If we open that same chest 100 hours later instead, we will find something much stronger – yet still relevant to our current power.

Together, durability and scaling maintain Evergreen Relevancy. Wherever we go, whenever we go, we’ll face appropriate challenges and find useful rewards. Except… not necessarily. There’s a flaw in the hidden points system.

Points come ONLY from killing enemies, with caps per each enemy type and variant. No other activities contribute anything to scaling. So if a player hoards weapons and avoids combat, their scaling progression stalls – both in terms of challenge AND rewards.

Early weapons are weak and fragile. As weapons scale, so does their damage and durability, reducing the need to constantly search for new gear. That’s fine. But if players fear losing weapons and therefore avoid combat, their rewards will lag behind those who engage in fights regularly. Even if both players spend the same amount of time and complete the same content, the hoarder ends up worse off – which only reinforces their hoarding behavior.

This goes against the reason Evergreen Relevancy exists. If we’re free to explore wherever we like, it also means we’re free to tackle whatever content or activity we like. But better rewards require combat. The point system itself makes sense. The limited way of adding points doesn’t.

That said, this flaw doesn’t invalidate the purpose of weapon durability. Without it, the game wouldn’t have the flexibility to support ANY possible path the player takes – which is a core value to Breath of the Wild. Without durability it would be enough to find just one strong weapon to make almost every other treasure chest and combat encounter irrelevant. 

And sure, even with durability, in the later stages we may stockpile enough strong weapons that we stop worrying about them breaking altogether and the motivation to explore fades. But it never becomes absolutely irrelevant, and it will reappear in time as we use weapons. Besides, the game’s goal isn’t to force us to scour every inch of Hyrule. It’s to let us explore in our own way – until we’re ready to face Ganon. Obviously that moment would sooner or later arrive, and Breath of the Wild would nudge us towards that final battle by showing that we’re strong enough now. From that perspective, the system makes perfect sense, it just needs some tweaks to better support different player behaviors. 

And while weapon durability of course is not the only potential solution to the design challenges of Breath of the Wild’s very open direction, it does make sense from the perspective of balancing the game’s scope and budget while meeting the very specific needs that many other games, even open-world ones, wouldn’t have.

But that’s the structural half – there’s also the emotional one. Obviously structure also influences our feelings, otherwise the flaw in the scaling system that affects people with hoarding behavior wouldn’t be a flaw in the first place. But the main emotional driver here is actually the weapon balance – as that’s what makes equipment feel useful.

Weapon Balance

First and foremost, Breath of the Wild tries to deal with the immediate sense of loss upon weapon breaking through a desirable bonus. There’s a critical hit mechanic that when activated deals double damage and forces the majority of enemies to drop their weapons, with the exceptions being particularly strong foes like Lynels. A Critical can be achieved through hitting a weak point with an arrow, successfully throwing a weapon, or it breaking during a combo. Among other things this ensures that if we happen to run out of weapons, we can quickly pick up the one a monster just dropped.

Then, there’s the actual numerical balancing of attack and durability values. Breath of the Wild applies pretty straightforward principles to its complex web of calculations – when fighting appropriately leveled enemies, a single weapon should always lead to a multiplication of gear. The only exceptions are items not designed to be weapons in the first place – like the tree branch the whole purpose of which is to teach the durability and critical hit mechanics to receive the ACTUAL first weapon in the game, the Boko Club. Most Red Bokoblins in the Great Plateau starting area have it.

With this single club, we can kill two Bokoblins. Which means – two more clubs. Now we can kill 4 more Red Bokoblins, and that’s 4 more weapons. If one of them happens to be a Traveler’s Sword, then we can kill 7 Red Bokoblins with it. That’s 7 more items out of a single one.

However, a Traveler’s Sword is enough to kill only one Blue Bokoblin, whose health pool is almost six times larger. But being a tier higher, Blue Bokoblins have better weapons. Most commonly they would wield either a Spiked Boko Club, which is enough to kill 2 more Blue Bokoblins, or a Soldier’s Broadsword – with which we’re guaranteed to kill 4 Blue Bokoblins or 25 Red ones. Wooden weapons are generally weaker than metallic ones, but they have the advantage of not attracting lightning during thunderstorms, so it’s still helpful to have them.

Now, you might have noticed that 4 Blue Bokoblins for Soldier’s Broadsword is less than 7 Red Bokoblins for Traveler’s. And with the Royal Broadsword we’re guaranteed to kill only one Silver Bokoblin. Enemy health is scaled exponentially across their tiers, but this doesn’t mean that weapons become more useless the farther we get into the game. 

As part of reward scaling they get various upgrades which include improved attack and durability values. I do have to mention it’s very weird that the Long Throw bonus which just increases the throwing range of a weapon is considered a Level 2 upgrade, and thus replaces the potential Level 1 Critical Hit upgrades that double attack at the end of every combo, which is far less situational. Also quite frankly it kinda feels bad to get a Long Throw bonus instead of attack or durability boosts for anything other than boomerangs.

But that doesn’t change the fact that eventually we can find an upgraded Royal Broadsword capable of killing 3 Silver Bokoblins, all of which are going to have weapons of their respective level. And that is if we don’t mention that Lynels drop even better gear. However, it can be very difficult to kill a Lynel with just a single weapon, which brings us to the next specificity of balancing.

Since with its numbers Breath of the Wild makes sure that fights with appropriately-leveled monsters leads to a multiplication of weapons, it also means that should we decide to fight higher-leveled enemies, we will have to use multiple weapons in exchange for just one. However, that weapon is far stronger, and can be used to either kill far more enemies of the difficulty we’re used to, OR we can switch our attention to stronger monsters with better drops.

As such, it might be a challenge to kill a single Black Moblin if we try exploring Hyrule Castle early in the game – multiple equipment items would be needed. But killing that Black Moblin is going to provide a very good weapon that’s going to be enough to kill 3 more Black Moblins and get THEIR strong weapons.

It’s a constant exchange of power, but what it really means is that there’s no disadvantage to getting into a fight and breaking weapons – there can be only positive results. Either we get more weapons, or we exchange multiple weapons for one that’s much stronger.

Which actually creates an interesting dynamic with the Master Sword balance. While it’s dangerously close to being considered unbreakable if not for the recharge timer, at its default state it’s not the strongest weapon in Breath of the Wild. In many late-game fights it’s actually more advantageous to use other weapons rather than the Master Sword. As its primary purpose is to seal the darkness, the Master Sword is at its full power only when fighting against Malice-ridden opponents – including Ganon himself. So it has a very specific purpose.

Despite some of the flaws in structural implementation, Breath of the Wild is balanced specifically in such a way that there’s no reason to be afraid of using weapons. The game rewards utilizing gear and being somewhat aggressive – it’s extremely improbable to be worse off after a combat encounter than before it.

Now, during the discussions on Evergreen Relevancy, power scaling, reward scaling, and weapon balance, you might have noticed that even with permanent progression spread throughout Hyrule, a meticulous approach to a smaller region can yield temporary boosts just as significant as when exploring in a wider, more scattershot style. Which is exactly what Breath of the Wild wants – validate any possible path taken through its world.

But considering the principles of power progression mostly remain the same regardless, it does mean that more obsessive explorers won’t really have a change of gameplay style when visiting a new area, even though they would still be technically successfully participating in the core loop. The feeling of monotony is a death sentence for a game like Breath of the Wild, so it becomes quite clear that even though the long-term goal is to defeat Ganon, power progression alone is not enough for continuous engagement. This is why Breath of the Wild adds a second progression axis – Survivability. It doesn’t factor into the main goal, but it does inject meaningful differentiation between regions.

Survivability

One core aspect of Survivability is the Stamina meter. Though not the first Zelda title to feature stamina, Breath of the Wild elevates it to the same status as health – both require the Spirit Orb resource to be permanently improved. While stamina does influence special combat moves, its true value is in recontextualizing traversal. Decisions when climbing cliffs and paragliding will vary dramatically depending on the amount of stamina wheels Link has from permanent and temporary buffs.

But the far more important Survivability aspect is that of the Elements. In the tutorial area we’re going to climb a snowy mountain where it gets really cold. The severe weather is going to chip away at our health unless we protect ourselves using appropriate elixirs, spicy food or warm clothes. Later in the game we can discover that equipping a flaming sword also provides heat, and therefore can be used to melt ice just like any other flame source.

Indeed, Breath of the Wild weaves an intricate physics and chemistry framework where many various elements can create realistic, and most importantly consistent, chain reactions. Lightning is attracted to metal, and any grass surrounding the strike point is going to get ignited. A sufficient amount of flames will create an updraft that we can ride with our paraglider. Beyond systemic interactions, the game has specific challenges that take advantage of various elements, many of which we can circumvent in creative ways.

From a design and technical standpoint, the level of coherence is remarkable, and the systems have instantly recognizable affordances that make logical sense. However, these elemental interactions occupy a relatively small slice of our playtime. In fact, the majority of players are going to engage with them mostly through specifically designed elemental challenges rather than these dynamic systemic stories as memorable as they can be.

What’s far more important structurally speaking is the wrapper surrounding the elemental mechanics – the weather, which is imperative for progression on the Survivability axis. No amount of defense upgrades, powerful weapons, or Spirit Orbs will shield you from Hypothermia in a freezing zone.

And of course, winter gear won’t save you from the scorching heat under a desert sun. And any new temporary or permanent heat protection is still useless in the extreme temperatures of lava fields surrounding a volcano. And solving that problem doesn’t help against a thunderstorm’s ever so strong desire to hit your metallic weapons. 

By distributing these elemental dangers across distinct zones, Breath of the Wild makes sure that no matter how advanced your power level is, there’s always a fresh survivability hurdle to overcome.

And just like weapon durability makes sure that our power can never reach a fixed ceiling for the purposes of Evergreen Relevancy, there’s a weather condition that does the same for survivability – rain. Slippery wet cliffs remain treacherous throughout, with no way to fully negate them.

First and foremost rain pushes us to find alternative routes to reach the top of whatever it is we’re climbing. But if there’s no other way, we can still make progress by timing our jumps at appropriate moments to make sure slipping doesn’t negate it. Stamina upgrades, potions and food are certainly going to help with that. There’s also a satisfying mechanic that grants a small height boost to our jumps when we’re almost out of stamina near a cliff’s top leading to memorable ‘phew, made it’ moments.

At some point we can receive a special ability called Revali’s Gale – using it creates a powerful updraft for our paraglider which is an excellent way to bypass any slippery slopes. But just like the Master Sword it is not a permanent solution and needs time to recharge. Encountering rain during that window is still more than possible since it’s a dynamic weather condition that affects almost the entirety of the world.

Obviously, the physics and chemistry-focused gameplay can be very satisfying, but it’s how those systems are utilized in weather and how different environmental conditions are spread across the world that keeps Breath of the Wild from falling apart – even if players happen to strengthen their power in either meticulous or circular or even weird roundabout ways, the world remains engaging by making sure there’s another progression axis to advance on when reaching a new zone. The Elemental systems in Breath of the Wild don’t just influence its structure, but also the core gameplay itself – specifically Link’s abilities. 

The Sheikah Slate

At the very beginning we get a Sheikah Slate, and throughout the tutorial area we unlock several runes within it that become an integral part of our toolkit throughout the entire game.

Each rune ties directly into a specific aspect of the game’s physics or chemistry systems, while also having distinct limitations. Magnesis lets us move objects – but only if they’re made of metal. Cryonis allows us to create climbable columns – but only on bodies of liquid that aren’t hot. Remote Bombs can push or destroy objects – but only those that can actually be damaged. And Stasis lets us freeze objects in place and build up kinetic force by hitting them.

On a side note, even after hundreds of hours with Breath of the Wild I don’t always understand how kinetic force works and I hate with a passion every challenge revolving around using it in a precise manner. Just freezing objects is fine, but I digress.

We all love the idea of being free to do absolutely anything, and Breath of the Wild certainly encourages the thought with its freedom to go anywhere we want. But in Game Design what you can’t do is often just as important as what you can. With restrictions a game can actually have a variety of challenges with clear parameters defining the player’s possibility space – which actually makes it easier to come up with creative solutions, not harder. 

Since players know Cryonis only works on water, they might choose to use it for climbing a waterfall during rain instead of risking slipping down a wet cliff. And since the game knows this is a possible solution, it might hide a secret chest halfway up the waterfall. Now players feel smart AND rewarded.

If a mechanic is TOO flexible, it risks becoming a boring, one-size-fits-all solution. And fire in Breath of the Wild is actually like that. It is one of the easiest elemental effects to generate, especially with common tools like fire arrows, which can trivialize a lot of puzzles asking to use fire in specific ways. Even the game acknowledges this by occasionally incorporating Blue Flame – a special fire source we can’t create ourselves. That limitation forces us to work within specific parameters again, while still retaining the potential for creativity.

But have a scenario with an external flame source raining down, an ice cube that has to be protected from it, and a movable metal box – and suddenly there’s an array of interesting potential solutions. An array that wouldn’t exist had the icecube been just as easily manipulated with Magnesis like the metal box. 

So even though Breath of the Wild has an incredibly robust physics and chemistry system, it doesn’t let us manipulate everything however we want. And that’s a good thing. The key is consistency – every object with a particular parameter behaves predictably within their ruleset. That consistency, paired with intentional limitations, allows the game to craft satisfying challenges that we can solve in creative ways. The consistency that is imperative for Breath of the Wild’s physics and chemistry frameworks is also key for its Core Gameplay. 

Consistent Gameplay

One might say that’s what makes gameplay shine in the first place, as let’s face it, Breath of the Wild’s mechanics are polished, but not particularly exciting on their own. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Breath of the Wild’s combat can’t compete with games where that’s the main mechanical focus. There’s your basic attack, charged attack, blocking, jumping, and a couple special states after successful parries or perfect dodges. It’s… well, it’s enough, especially when taking into account the animation differentiation between various weapon types.

Horse riding despite the interesting concept of building a relationship with your steed feels functional at best – mainly due to climbing lots of terrain horses can’t reach, so even a hundred hours might not be enough to make riding comfortable in this paradigm. Climbing is… climbing, just hold the direction and that’s it, the engagement instead comes from the strategic choices that depend on Link’s stamina. 

But not every game needs excessively deep core systems. Breath of the Wild prefers to ensure that players have a consistent way to interact with the game’s world. So a simple climbing system where Link just moves across the surface with a certain speed and stamina drain depending on the cliff angle with a possibility to jump for farther distances at the expense of more stamina fits Breath of the Wild far better than some elaborate handhold climbing mechanic would’ve had even if it were technically more engaging moment to moment.

Breath of the Wild from the get go sets up a principle of ‘once you press a button, something related to its core action will happen’. So when we press Y it’s an attack. When we hold it, it’s a charged attack. When we hold it even longer we can activate Urbosa’s Fury special ability should we have it. Other special abilities are also integrated into related controls – Daruk’s Protection is active only when we’re raising our shield up with ZL, while Revali’s Gale being an updraft is an extension of the jump button – again we have to hold it for activation. Only Mipha’s Grace doesn’t have any button assigned to it since it’s just about reviving Link upon death.

Breath of the Wild also wants to make sure that even when Link is in different states the buttons would still make sensible actions. So when we press Y while in the air, it’s a jump attack. And while A is the core interaction button, it is recontextualized into shield parry when we hold our shield up, since we still have to ‘use’ something and what would make sense to use when blocking? The shield!

Now, you can pick up objects with A even while jumping and gliding. This means that A has to do something even when holding up a shield in the air. And it does – just like the jump attack sends Link flying down with his weapon, pressing A while blocking will send Link flying down with his shield to start surfing on it. So while riding on a shield is fun and it can be a useful traversal tool, the mechanic exists for the most part to preserve consistency of interactions and make sure that Link can perform appropriate actions from any possible state.

Shield-surfing might seem auxiliary on the surface, but systemic and input consistency is really the reason why it’s in the game while something like petting dogs is not – as cool as it would’ve been. Petting would have to be a very specific unique contextual action, which of course can fit plenty of games – but this type of specific interaction is not what Breath of the Wild is going for.

So, yeah, we can interact with dogs only through systemic ways by giving them food utilizing the mechanics of holding inventory items and dropping them. And those are multi-purpose systems that we can use for many other reasons, from trying to set up a campfire to throwing everything we’ve got into a cooking pot – which in turn activates another systemically consistent layer of every possible food or elixir item having a core property based on main ingredients and potency based on additional ones.

It would be fair to note that petting could’ve been achieved through dialogue interaction, but that still raises the questions of consistency – if we would be able to talk with dogs why wouldn’t that be the case for all other animals in the game? And those animals behave consistently relative to other rules the game has – coocoos are small so they can be picked up like any other small object, while bears and deer are large so you can mount them like horses. Even Lynels are mountable for the sake of consistency, though obviously they are untameable.

And that’s the kind of exception Breath of the Wild is fine with having – not something that changes a rule, but a logical property that adds variety and still fits within the system. We can mine ore with absolutely any weapon, but Iron Sledgehammers are created specifically for mining and their durability doesn’t go down as fast when used for that purpose. Every food can be thrown into pure fire to bake it, but spicy peppers are going to create updrafts… as do all other spicy materials!

So while Breath of the Wild is definitely interested in having as big a variety of object properties as possible, in terms of player input it doesn’t want to have tons of mechanics with narrow, contextual scope – but rather as widely applicable actions as possible that at the same time make as much sense as possible whenever a button is pressed from whichever state possible. And this way, the game can ensure that our means of interaction with the world are as consistent as the world’s rule sets themselves.

World Design

So far we have discussed a considerable amount of Breath of the Wild’s aspects, ranging from structure to core gameplay, but they all exist to serve the game’s world – Hyrule. After all, exploring this world is so important that it’s part of the title – BREATH of the WILD. Not a macguffin, not a plot point, not a character, the WILD. That’s the star of the show.

It’s so important that Breath of the Wild minimizes the amount of icons and markers put by the game on the map. Only one quest can be tracked at a time, and many don’t feature any markers at all, at least not for the quest goal – just a general explanation where to go. The automatic markers that do appear on the map are hidden until the respective location is actually discovered. An important part of Breath of the Wild’s design ethos is to let players put whatever icons they deem fit and useful, either via pins or large noticeable glowing Sheikah Slate markers that are also visible in-world through the scope. 

This ties back to the game’s invitation to shape our own adventure including what path we take and what locations we deem interesting, and as such it’s the world itself that should beckon our curiosity – not icons or markers. I have to mention that I do not believe an approach focused on content-consumption in an open world is invalid, it’s just not the path Breath of the Wild is interested in pursuing. 

Now – all players are different, and therefore are not necessarily going to be drawn towards the same things. However, if there is something that absolutely everybody has in common, it’s that regardless of our preferences we’re all better drawn to things we haven’t seen before. Obviously a game’s world can’t consist of only unique objects, there’s a lot of common elements – trees, water, rocks, to name a few. But Breath of the Wild makes sure that whenever we see a location it’s a combination of these elements that we haven’t ever seen before in the game and won’t find anywhere else.

To achieve this goal, Breath of the Wild handles the design of its world in three layers. Let’s examine all of them on an example of an existing region, let’s sayyyyyy Faron. The top layer is a region’s theme. In the case of Faron it’s a lush tropical jungle full of rain and thunderstorms. This theme defines the terrain features, type of vegetation, atmosphere and object properties. Due to the prevalence of thunderstorms electricity is common both as means to solve or open shrines as well as being part of the enemy arsenal – many archers in this region use electric arrows.

On the top layer this is the only region like this that has this precise combination of in-game elements. Electricity is a feature of the Gerudo region too, but that one is not a jungle. Rain is in general a dynamic element, but there’s another place where it has big importance for story reasons – Lanayru, a part of which features never-ending rain until we complete a quest. But it’s just rain, not thunderstorm, and the terrain features overall are very different. So, just on a high level, Faron is distinct on its own already.

Then, there’s the middle layer which we can call Location Clusters. A great example is the Faron forest in the center of the region – it’s not the only forest in the game, but it’s the only one that’s AS large and as DENSE. The only other one that can compete is the Great Hyrule Forest in the north, but due to the labyrinthian nature of the Lost Woods where going into fog is going to set us back to the beginning of the area it can’t be explored as meticulously as the Faron jungle.

Right next to that jungle area are the Floria Falls. Again, these are not the only waterfalls found in the game. But it’s the only place where there’s so many of them so close to each other and with so many lakes and layers to the cliffs. This makes the overall area distinct from any other we have seen. Lurelin Village to the east does not resemble any other settlement in the world, focused on a fishing and sea-faring thematic, while Faron Grasslands to the west that form a big contrast with the jungle are still tropical in nature – they’re not comparable to the plains in Central Hyrule.

And finally, there’s the bottom layer of the actual locations within these clusters, and once again they follow the same rule – combine elements in such a way that wouldn’t be seen anywhere else. Dracozu River and Lake are far from the only water surfaces in the game, but they’re the only ones that have a form of a serpent – with a giant related ancient statue right at its jaw to boot. Floria Bridge is far from the only man-made bridge in the game, but it IS the only one that’s built on actual trees reaching out from a lake.

Should we go beyond the Faron region we will see these principles all over. There’s a number of flooded ruins and villages, but exploring the remains of Goponga Village in Lanayru Wetlands with its island-based configuration is far different from checking out Deya Village ruins that has a lot of wells with sneaky snails inside them – a tiny detail like an unusual amount of particular interactables is also part of making these locations more distinct from each other.

There’s lots of Cliff Pillars throughout the world, but there’s only one place where there’s a whole cluster of them standing right next to each other, making this location more memorable. Even lakes, there’s tons of them across Hyrule, but only a single one that looks like Lake Sumac – a body of water near Hateno village with lots of fish and a small island in the middle with a single gigantic tree on it. 

And if somebody doesn’t care about Lake Sumac at all that’s fine, they’re not obligated to like it or even notice it in the first place – it’s one of hundreds locations with a unique composition and sooner or later those players will notice something they’re more readily drawn to instead. One aspect that helps with that is the way Breath of the Wild handles sightlines.

All the aforementioned layering happens across a variety of heights and elevations – some regions or locations are massive, others are really small, some are high, some are not. Breath of the Wild mixes all that up to draw attention without overwhelming players with information – avoiding choice paralysis.

For example, the Dueling Peaks is a massive mountain range, instantly noticeable from the starting area. At that moment it’s the only landmark that large in the eastern direction, so it doesn’t compete with anything as the main point of interest. However, on the way, it’s natural to discover a bunch of smaller points of interest while maintaining Dueling Peaks in view.

And once we reach Dueling Peaks, then either by climbing them or going through them we will discover there’s a whole different region behind them, with lots of locations of various visual importance. Their view was blocked by the Dueling Peaks to not overwhelm with unnecessary at the time visual information. This principle doesn’t apply just to huge towering landmarks of course, it is used throughout the entire map, only at different scales – just like a huge mountain can hide an entire different region behind it, a small hill can hide a little pond. In both cases, there’s something for players to discover, and this interplay between hiding and revealing locations ensures that sooner or later something will draw our eye.

This principle of sightlines revealing potential places to explore combined with the overarching three-layered approach to world design immerses us in this adventure that we’re creating for ourselves – not based on icons or the game’s desired content cadence, but just on our own tastes, interests, and whatever location or part of the world draws us intrinsically.

Korok Design

Even though Breath of the Wild is not interested in following the principles of ‘content consumption’, its intricately designed world would still feel quite empty without, well, content – having something to DO. It’s just that ‘something’ needs to fit the overall principles of the world having utmost importance, with the focus remaining on locations being the core driving force for exploration. So in that sense monster camps for example are not content in and of themselves, but are one of potential goals players may set out to reach if they so desire. They in particular can never be truly cleared anyway, a special Blood Moon event happens regularly that respawns all monsters to maintain Evergreen Relevancy.

Only very rarely does Breath of the Wild utilize special events specifically designed to take us off our current path into potential unknown. First there’s the falling stars, one of the rarest materials in the entire game, which have to be picked up before dawn and as such players are incentivized to drop whatever they’re doing and follow the light at the landing location. There’s also three dragons drawing inspiration from the series’ Hyrule cosmology – serene music plays whenever they appear, and shooting at different body parts is going to spawn some of the other rare materials that can be used for upgrades and cooking.

Other than that, Breath of the Wild isn’t really interested in distractions that drastically change the current goal we have defined for ourselves. Rather it prefers to provide additional sub-goals on the way. Introducing Koroks. For all intents and purposes they are collectibles – upon finding them these little creatures reward with strangely looking, and smelling, seeds. What makes Koroks perfectly fit the game’s world design paradigm is that they don’t just sit there in the open, they’re represented by little oddities that we have to notice.

The most obvious are block and rock formations where we have to recognize the pattern, and then place the block or rock respectively in the correct position. But Koroks can simply hide under strangely placed objects, roam around in the form of a sparkle for us to catch, or require some sort of skill challenge – shoot all balloons that appear once we stand in a specific spot, throw a stone into a ring of rocks, follow popping up flowers, or reach a certain position before time runs out.

All these and other Korok activity types are united by one important aspect – they’re very quick to complete. The longest ones take up a minute, in rare cases two at most. They don’t take a lot of effort from the player, so even when Korok puzzle styles start to repeat themselves – it’s not a chore to complete them.

Now, it should be noted that the game tries to the best of its ability to implement Koroks in the same way as it does locations – even when elements repeat, they’re put in configurations that do not. As such even though there are many rock patterns across the world, we may find that in one case a rock has to be taken across a tiny dangerous cliff path, in another we have to cross-reference complex patterns from different ruined buildings, in the third a rock may be guarded by a couple Bokoblins, and so on.

The attempt is certainly admirable, even though it doesn’t always work – but how can it with a whooping 900 Koroks spread across the world? That’s… that’s just a lot of Korok seeds to find. But such a huge number is required because most players will miss a LOT of these Koroks simply due to not looking at a particular place in a specific moment, and that’s fine. Breath of the Wild doesn’t want us to find absolutely every Korok. In fact, once we find half of all seeds they stop being useful, but really a comfortable playthrough is more than possible with about one hundred.

And since we touched upon their usefulness – these Korok seeds aren’t just abstract objects to fill a counter, they’re required to upgrade the inventory space for weapons – which in turn feeds into the whole exploration loop driven by durability. An exceptionally big Korok Hestu needs these seeds for his maracas, and his dance when expanding our inventory NEVER gets old.

[Hestu’s dance]

However, the way to find Hestu goes a bit against the game’s freeform principles. By default he is not far from Kakariko village, ready to provide a quest to get back his maracas from Bokoblins that stole them. After a couple upgrades, he is going to start heading back home to the Great Hyrule Forest. There are some stables where he can appear after this, but regardless whenever we actually reach his home he will always be there for the rest of the game – even if we did so before encountering him in any of the stables.

What’s weird about this whole set up is that despite this dynamic rule, Hestu WON’T be home if we visit Great Hyrule Forest before finding him at Kakariko village. And this means that if at any point players want to add new inventory slots, they MUST go to Kakariko first, even if that’s not something they want to do right now. Yes, the maracas quest is a nice little way to introduce Hestu’s main role, but considering how important freedom of direction is for Breath of the Wild to the point that after the tutorial we can just go straight to the main boss at any moment we want, it’s a bit against the grain that Hestu doesn’t appear in his abode unless we complete a very specific quest. Besides, even though Breath of the Wild does suggest visiting Kakariko village first, there are far more ways to enter it than just the road where Hestu waits for a maracas savior.

Still, this flaw doesn’t really negate the strengths of the Korok collectible design. They’re numerous enough that players will find a bunch naturally, without being pushed by icons or getting forcefully distracted to go out of their way to find some. No, they’re just something one can incidentally notice in the world to receive a reward that can expand our inventory and therefore plays a role in the overall progression paradigm defined by Breath of the Wild’s design ethos.

Shrine Design

At some point I’ve mentioned Spirit Orbs – that’s the most important permanent progression resource in the game as they can be exchanged for stamina and hearts. Plus you need a certain amount of permanent hearts if you ever want to take the Master Sword from its pedestal.

Introducing Shrines – small literally stand-alone challenges that on average take 5 to 10 minutes to complete and reward a Spirit Orb at the end. This is essentially one more possible goal for the player to choose while exploring the world. In Hyrule itself Shrines exist only as entrances that are difficult to miss, considering that they’re glowing either red if they haven’t been completed or blue if they have been. In terms of world-building Breath of the Wild contextualizes that through shrines using ancient Sheikah technology – the same as our Slate that’s required to open them. So while shrines do stand out for our comfort they don’t feel out of place. 

After entering a Shrine we are taken to an entirely separate self-contained zone with its own little challenge. Which means that structurally speaking Breath of the Wild doesn’t REALLY care what’s in any particular shrine, only that all 120 of them are spread out effectively across the whole world – which is important since every shrine is also a fast travel point. However, as abstract as shrines can look with their glowing walls that can’t be climbed, they do usually attempt to have some sort of connection to the outer world from their part so as to not feel entirely detached.

As such, in the volcanic Eldin region many shrines are related to fire, while in the lands of the Gerudo there’s plenty of electricity-based ones. But regardless of their connection to Hyrule, they all try to follow the same rule as the world itself and Koroks – provide challenges in such configurations that wouldn’t be encountered in any other shrine. With some exceptions.

20 of the Shrines are Tests of Strength with various difficulties. They are battles against Guardian Scouts. Now, 20 out of 120 Shrines being just similar combat arenas might seem a lot, because it is, but there are two things to consider. First – they are a way for the game to provide good weapons to those players who don’t fight a lot in the open world and therefore don’t actively add to the hidden scaling points.

Second – the majority of players are not going to 100% the game and complete all 120 Shrines, and therefore it’s unlikely that they’re going to encounter all of the Tests of Strength. And in the context of the first point the game has to ensure that less completionist-focused players are going to find some as well.

In general, it is worth noting that overall the game seems to be balanced around players completing 60 shrines on average. The farther from this half-point you go, the more balance sort of falls apart – the game’s scaling can’t keep up with the power increase, and after about 100 shrines you are pretty much at the top of the food chain. This relates not just to hearts and stamina but also things like armor upgrades since the more shrines you visit the more materials you are likely to collect on the way, and obviously the weapon arsenal you’ll be carrying around.

When put that way it doesn’t sound good, but it also is not bad either. I always position a flaw as an aspect that fails to reach a game’s goals. But this type of balance is not a failure per se – more of a reality that when the approach is as freeform as in Breath of the Wild, there has to be a reference point regarding what percentage of it is going to be considered sort of mandatory to comfortably beat the game while feeling fulfilled – and the higher it is the more people won’t. Obviously there could be systems put in place so that engaged completionists wouldn’t start eventually feeling unchallenged, but that opens up a whole slew of other required considerations, so… design and production choices have to be made.

Regardless, the other type of recurring Shrines is Blessings – which don’t have any challenge inside at all, only the rewards. There’s 29 of them, and they exist primarily because there’s either a world or quest challenge required to open these Shrines in the first place, and we’ll discuss those later.

This leaves us with 71 of what we can call puzzle shrines, and those are the ones that follow this unique challenge principle to the fullest. And really there’s no other way to go about it since, once again, Breath of the Wild has pretty much zero control over which shrines you’ll visit first so it can’t set up a concept in one shrine to then build on top off it in another – everything has to be set up and resolved within the same space.

This is why every Shrine focuses only on a single concept, even if it does reuse previously existing elements. For example, there are several shrines focused on large scales. However, in one we have to manipulate the weight on each scale to rise up towards a certain platform. In another, we have to use physics to launch ourselves into the air by throwing something onto the scales. And there’s another where we have to set everything up in such a way that we don’t get damaged by the spikes above one half of the weights. Even though the same core element is reused in these three shrine examples, they’re not the same conceptually – on a logical level. One requires spatial thinking, another manipulation of the game’s physics in a specific manner, and third – understanding of material properties, and that’s why they all work nicely as separate shrines, and don’t have to be combined into one huge shrine full of scales.

Breath of the Wild does Shrine separation more based on logical themes than active elements. For example Steady thy Heart shrine has lots of seemingly disconnected active elements – there’s gates that we have to open by setting a torch on fire, a rotating bridge full of spikes, a room full of guardian scouts standing in the water, and huge metal spiked balls rolling down towards us, and every time we complete one room we discover a button or another way to open up the next one. But even in this quick description you can probably note a singular theme – that of avoiding traps and unraveling secrets. 

And let’s face it, focusing on that brings a far bigger sense of variety than having a shrine that’s all about different ways metal balls can roll down slopes. That’s just an element that can be reused in varying configurations, for example in a shrine where you actually have to keep climbing one huge slope while rupees AND obstacles keep rolling down your way on different lanes of this slope.

The Wind Guide shrine is not about pushing a floating platform while avoiding obstacles, it’s about the Korok Leaf, and that’s why there’s a variety of other situations in this shrine that the Korok Leaf can be used for. This conceptual separation principle is also why the length of the shrines in Breath of the Wild can vary significantly, because their design is less about strictly adhering to the paradigm of ‘introduction-progression-mastery’, and more about ‘is there anything else interesting that can be done with this logical concept?’

I find a lot of Apparatus shrines in Breath of the Wild pretty annoying, less so because of their design and more so because of how inconsistent full rotation motion control can feel in the game. But there is an Apparatus shrine that I actually like – the Katosa Aug one, because it’s about swinging a hammer so you just have to tilt the joycons a bit and not wildly rotate them. And to complete this shrine, it’s enough to push an orb with the hammer over a straight bridge into a hole. That’s it.

However, in each shrine there’s at least one treasure chest, and after completing this first part, instead of finishing the shrine you might decide to go further and find another hammer apparatus, only this time with a curved bridge instead of a straight one. Successfully launching the orb into that hole will unlock a path to the treasure chest, and not only is the shrine fully complete now, there’s no more motion-controlled golf-like challenges in the game.

Now we’re getting to why any design principle is a tool and not a rule, because one could argue that Katosa Aug is an under-developed shrine. That it could progressively keep adding obstacles like moving and rotating walls, floating platforms, then at the end test our mastery of all the concepts, and that this would make it a better, more engaging shrine. There’s certainly merits to this type of argument… IF Breath of the Wild was a game where the ability to properly hit orbs with a motion-controlled hammer was a core part of it. But it’s not, and regardless of what kind of challenges would appear after, in terms of logic you would still be only hitting in a straight line, or at an angle, and that’s it. 

So Breath of the Wild decides that there’s nothing else interesting that it can do with this concept and ends it. You will find other motion controlled objects in the game, including another hammer in another shrine – only there instead of being precise you have to be powerful and smash through obstacles as that’s the logical theme of THAT shrine. Logical concepts over abstract adherence to level elements progression – and that’s how Breath of the Wild shrines manage to provide a healthy amount of variety while being pretty big in number.

Quest Design

With so many systems in place in such a big world with a lot of challenges and progression mechanics, Breath of the Wild has a lot of functionality that players have to learn as they go through the game. And while a fair share of it is auxiliary enough to just be left there accidentally discovered by players who would then later share this knowledge with others online or in person, there’s still quite a lot that can be considered pretty important knowledge that shouldn’t rely on communication with others.

How to teach all these mechanics without overwhelming players with information? Breath of the Wild’s answer to that is through quests. Most of them are less about telling a particular story, and more about, ‘hey, did you know that you could do X in this game?’

For example, in one of the stables in Faron, which as we have discussed before as a region focuses a lot on thunderstorms, there’s a quest – lightning keeps hitting the stable roof for some reason. All we have to do is climb the roof and find a metallic axe there. If you think of quests as the ‘core narrative and challenge content’, you might be disappointed with its simplicity. But it’s NOT the core narrative and challenge content in Breath of the Wild. Imagine that in this game where you can go anywhere and do anything, you happened to not encounter any thunderstorms yet and haven’t been hit or killed by lightning when accepting this quest – which is a considerable possibility, and I would know because it happened to me when I played Breath of the Wild for the first time. Well, now thanks to this quest you know that metal and metallic weapons attract lightning strikes. Which is logical in terms of real-life thinking, but players need to know what kind of systems are there in the game.

You didn’t know that bugs aren’t just in the environment for ambiance, and you can catch them? Well, there’s a quest where you have to get 10 crickets – now you know. Did you ever meet the Great Fairies who after a donation would get their power back and be ready to upgrade your armor? Well there’s a quest that teaches just that, and you get the required rupees to boot which would be enough if that’s your first Great Fairy encounter. Each consecutive Great Fairy you find needs more money, which makes me think this is more of a pyramid scheme than anything, but whatever. Armor upgrades are always nice and require only materials anyway.

Tons of quests exist just to teach various systems, because it’s not unlikely that someone might not know about them when encountering said quest. Another type of quest Breath of the Wild has is about pushing players towards exploration and discovery.

There’s a boy in Hateno who wants to see various weapons. Well, they pertain to different regions or enemy types, so you will have to explore before being able to show something to him. Similarly, there’s quests that ask you to take pictures of some very specific beasts or locations. Although these have a problem akin to the one with Hestu – before you can accept any of these quests you have to visit a very specific place to unlock the camera in your Sheikah Slate, and that sort of restricts the flow. It’s not game-breaking of course, but it would be nice if at least the quests would get added to the log regardless.

There’s a quest about finding treasure in a particular cave – the quest-givers provide various hints that help to pinpoint the exact location of the loot. But the point of this quest is not the loot, it’s the fact that you have to look at the world or the map and while searching for the specified location you can discover other places of interest, and maybe even turn this sort of behavior into a habit.

Then, there are shrine quests – special missions required for certain shrines to open up. Most of them lead to Blessing Shrines, but some shrines actually have additional challenges often somehow related to what the Shrine Quest was.

If most of the normal quests are designed to teach about the systems, shrine quests usually test your knowledge of the systems. For example, one shrine needs to be hit by lightning to open up. If you know that metallic weapons attract lightning, either thanks to the quest or your own unfortunate experience, then you know how to complete the quest.

A test of will where you have to stand on a hot plate without fire-resistant clothing? Well nobody banned fire-resistant elixirs. And there’s a different quest that teaches what elixirs are in the first place!

Even shrine quests that are closer to being outright challenges are still in many ways about testing your knowledge of systems. For example on Eventide Island all our equipment is taken away, and we have to bring three orbs to three slots with the only tools available being those found on the island itself. Successful completion of this shrine quest is not just about our skill in combat, but also understanding of everything that we can use to our advantage. Even reaching the island itself is not a linear challenge – there are at least three general ways to get there.

Honestly, I feel this type of quest design works best for Breath of the Wild, and it does wonders when combined with compelling narrative wrapping. For example there’s a quest chain where we help Hudson build an entire village. Really the quest is about gathering wood and going around the world searching for people whose name ends in -son as that’s an important policy of the company he is working for. We even help Hudson and Rhondson, one of the people we had to find to help out with the village, get married in a very cute and funny scene.

This is one of the most memorable quest chains in the game even though in terms of actual design it can feel quite simplistic, but it FITS the direction, the freedom Breath of the Wild gives us. And there are quests that try to either restrict some of that freedom or take it away entirely, and those tend to be some of the poorer experiences in the game, with the worst example being a forced stealth segment where getting noticed leads to tons of enemies jumping in – enemies who will arbitrarily kill you in one hit even though in other instances they wouldn’t.

And the stealth systems in Breath of the Wild are fine and more than usable, it’s just that the design of this quest in particular is very jarring, and I suppose it doesn’t help that it’s one of the few quests designated as a ‘main’ one. Yeah, there’s only 15 main quests in the entire game, and they all somehow revolve around defeating Ganon. Most of them are connected to the Divine Beasts – ancient Sheikah machines that got corrupted and are now in Ganon’s control. They are located in the regions of various races – Zora, Goron, Rito, Gerudo.

Reclaiming a Divine Beast will remove one of the smaller Blight bosses protecting Ganon himself, AND decrease some of his starting health, so there is a definite advantage in completing them. The process is straightforward – we visit the home of one of these races, get acquainted with our main ally among them, who helps us to disable the defenses of the Divine Beast in a fight, and then it’s up to us to finish the job inside the Divine Beasts themselves.

Divine Beast Design

Now, the Legend of Zelda series is known for its dungeons, and it might seem like Divine Beasts are essentially dungeons of Breath of the Wild. But I think it would be unfair to judge them as one would judge dungeons… because they are not dungeons. Divine Beasts are environments focused on spatial and elemental manipulation – which in other Zelda games could be part of dungeons, but was not what dungeons were about conceptually.

But in Breath of the Wild completing a Divine Beast defines a mastery of an element – water, fire, wind or electricity, within space that you can manipulate systemically. Raise the trunk of Vah Ruta to control the flow of water, rotate parts of Vah Naboris to define what sections of the Beast receive electricity, stuff like that.

And just like Breath of the Wild itself as a game is about being free to complete various segments in any order you’d like, so are the Divine Beasts to keep in line with the direction. Yes, all four Divine Beasts follow the same core pattern – you activate a terminal to get a map and be able to manipulate parts of the Divine Beast, you then have to activate five other terminals by completing various spatial/elemental challenges in whatever order to then at the end fight a Blight Ganon wielding the related element.

I admit, the structure can feel repetitive, but as with many other parts of Breath of the Wild it’s important to consider that any of the Divine Beasts can be visited in any order, so a linear progression between them is impossible without making several variations of every beast that would depend on the order you visit them in which would be pretty expensive. So Breath of the Wild focuses on side-progression more than anything. 

Even though Divine Beasts have the same structure they don’t play the same. There’s considerable differences between manipulating the roll of Vah Medoh to be able to glide to its various parts safely and rotating the body of Vah Rudania to be able to bring blue flame to a specific location.

Like the Shrines, Divine Beasts are a combination of thematically-related challenges more than anything, just with the added aspect of being able to choose the order of which challenges to tackle first. And from that perspective, they might not be amazing… but they’re fine.

If anything, the biggest problem with Divine Beasts to me is not the actual design of the Beasts – but the boss battles. Blight Ganons are… boring. I mean, all of them have technically two stages that technically activate different parts of the environment for additional spice and technically they have varying movesets that take advantage of their element… but that’s all that it is. Technicalities. In reality they’re practically the same boss you fight with some differences there and there. Certainly not distinct enough anyway, although honestly their master doesn’t fare MUCH better.

Ganon

Sooner or later, whenever we feel ready, we have to face Ganon in Hyrule Castle. Maybe that’s at the very beginning, maybe that’s after completing some shrines, maybe that’s after freeing 1, 2, 3 or all 4 of Divine Beasts from Ganon’s control, doesn’t matter. By the way, one great detail is that every liberated Divine Beast is going to have a laser sight pointing from their location all across the world towards Hyrule Castle – our final destination, an amazing indicator of our global progress.

And Hyrule Castle is an amazing location… with the worst map possible. Divine Beasts use 3D maps, and it works for them partially because they have very simple animal shapes. Hyrule Castle… is a large castle. And even though the game tries to showcase various parts of it on the map depending on whether we are inside or on the outer grounds… really, it doesn’t help. The space is too big, too interconnected, with too many rooms and corridors and secret pathways.

Which is precisely the reason why it’s so amazing to explore. It’s also not a dungeon, it’s just an intricate location that we can tackle in whatever manner we so desire – be it by going through the main entrance or finding a hidden tunnel underground or equipping Zora armor to swim up a waterfall – we can find use for pretty much absolutely everything at our disposal to reach the Sanctum where Ganon is residing.

And when we do, the powers of Princess Zelda who has been holding off Calamity Ganon from escaping the castle for the past 100 years start to wane, and we have to fight Evil itself. Which sounds more epic than it is in practice.

Now, look, the boss fight with Ganon is not bad. It’s fine. But that’s also why it’s disappointing because the nature of the entire game’s structure raises our expectations, since everything is so focused on getting stronger to defeat Ganon, and then he is just like… a more or less normal boss.

He has a respectable amount of different moves, he can jump on a wall to start shooting from there making sure that throughout your adventure you have learned how to parry blasts from guardians, he can use Sheikah Slate abilities against us, look it’s all absolutely fine and sensible and it works, but… he just lacks something special. Something that would make us go, ‘holy shit this is epic’.

I guess the second part of the fight was supposed to be that, since after we defeat Ganon’s first form his rage gets unbounded and he transforms into one huge giant boar monster reminiscent of how he looked in a bunch of previous Zelda games. He rampages over the plains of Hyrule, priming us for something truly, absolutely epic… but in the end we have to fire at a couple specific spots on his body using a special bow that Zelda sends us. Again, I can’t say that it’s BAD. It’s fine. It’s just… ‘fine’ doesn’t necessarily feel emotionally compelling in this case. Though the entire endeavor is definitely saved by absolutely stunning music, sound and visual design.

Aesthetics

Stunning music and sound design is a sentiment that can be applied not just to the final moments, but the entire game itself. But I think it’s worth pointing out that these segments of infiltrating the Castle and fighting Ganon are the only times where Breath of the Wild consistently plays full-blown orchestral music. 

It’s the only time when we’ll hear front and center some iconic leitmotifs like the main series theme, Ganon’s theme, Zelda’s Lullaby. 

[example]

They are present in other parts of the game but in a much subtler, more muted manner. The musical contrast to the rest of the game is striking, and really priming for heroic deeds and victory. Similar contrast though not to the same epic levels is used when liberating the Divine Beasts. But outside of that even active combat is not going to be accompanied by very motif-heavy tunes.

[bokoblin fight example]

Although, this style of music does allow the game to naturally add dynamic cues depending on player actions. Look at this.

[guardian parry]

Those crescendos in the otherwise tense and a bit scary Guardian motif are actually dynamically added after successfully dealing damage.

Outside of combat there is traditional ambient music for settlements. But most of our time is going to be spent in the Wild, and there the musical style is far, far different.

[example]

It’s very… sparse. But it’s also soothing in a way, and really helps to immerse oneself into the vast world of Hyrule. But with such a distinct musical style of just some notes playing now and then while exploring, the sound effects become so much more important.

Foley is a very interesting discipline, because the better it is implemented, the less noticeable it is for players as everything just feels natural to them. Now, Breath of the Wild of course has tons of sound effects connected to various animals, monsters, creatures that are played at appropriate moments depending on their actions.

But the absolute star of the game’s soundscape is actually Link himself – the character that we’ll be hearing throughout the entirety of our playthrough which can potentially last hundreds of hours. I can’t even imagine how many sound effects are connected to him, it feels like there’s something for absolutely every possible variation.

Just the basic act of movement – not only are there different footstep sounds depending on the surface we are moving on, but also they are different depending on whether we are running, walking, or crouching, and all those have variations depending on what material and weight Link’s currently equipped pants have, and these principles are applied to everything – from the upper clothes he wears to what kind of weapons shake a bit while moving. I think it’s best if I just showcase a bunch of different examples so you’d understand what I’m talking about.

[Link walking examples]

Isn’t this amazing? But we can not only hear Link, we can see him as well, and he also takes full advantage of the game’s pastel-like visual design. One of the reasons it works so well in Breath of the Wild as a whole is because everything becomes extremely readable.

Obviously that helps with exploration and noticing locations, but also with tiny visual details on Link himself – and even if we don’t pay attention to them, our subconscious still does. Elements like sweat drops flying off Link while running or climbing, his cheeks becoming red in cold weather, and of course the myriad of facial expressions that depend on his actions, be it in gameplay through our agency, or in cutscenes in the game’s attempt to deliver a coherent narrative to the overall freeform experience.

Narrative Design

A lot of video games tell stories in pretty traditional ways, so this distinction is not always that important, but in the case of Breath of the Wild we have to discuss the difference between Narrative Design and, well… Narrative. The latter is usually associated with a connected series of events that in the end tell a story, which is applicable to multiple mediums.

The first is not specific only to games but very closely connected to them – and that’s the possibility to utilize all the other tools at our disposal, from NPC AI to obstacle representation to the premise to what our goals are to how mechanics interact between one another and all those other things to contextualize everything that’s happening in gameplay in such a way that it would make sense.

And in terms of Narrative Design, Breath of the Wild is absolutely exceptional. The world is trying to heal from the Calamity that happened over a 100 years ago – that’s why there’s lots of ruins, monsters, and abandoned treasures, but also some civilization, people trying to live and rebuild their lives. However, the Calamity is not over – Ganon is still constantly looming in Hyrule Castle being held off only by the power of Zelda, which is why there is a sense of importance to our goal to defeat him but not a particular sense of urgency as he hasn’t escaped in the last 100 years and an extra day or two is not going to matter as long as we properly prepare ourselves for the battle.

And really everything that we do is somehow preparing us for it – every quest, every systemic interaction, every picked up item leads to something that can eventually help us become strong enough to fight the ultimate evil. And the reason why this world is unfamiliar to both us AND Link is because he has been in a slumber for the past 100 years, recovering from a disastrous defeat, and losing his memory in the process. Amnesia is a standard trope, but, hey, can’t blame what works, right?

So everything is set up from here on now that Link’s story as a character, and our story as a player, is one and the same. And, yes, like in every amnesia-related story, we can recover our memories. The Sheikah Slate that we have was actually owned by Zelda in the past, and she took a bunch of photos with it. And by visiting locations from the pictures that Zelda took, we can remember various tidbits from Link’s life 100 years ago.

And this is where things start to sort of… fall apart a bit, because when we’re watching those memory cutscenes we are essentially interacting with the actual story/narrative part of the game. For what it’s worth, I find what it’s going for compelling.

Breath of the Wild, through Zelda’s arc in the past, attempts to explore the burden of expectations, the guilt of attempting to find your own path when the one placed on you doesn’t work out, and the shame that one can feel when failing through no fault of your own. I think the story of Zelda not being able to awaken her powers as the impending doom approaches, while everybody else including Link and the Champions chosen to control the Divine Beasts seem to fit into their fates and destinities perfectly, has a lot of potential. And it does lead to a very poignant moment when after the Champions have perished while fighting Blight Ganon creatures and Link was severely wounded, Zelda finds the strength to awaken her dormant powers her own way, not through the means that were attempted to be forced upon her.

This is all very cool. Conceptually. In practice… Well… Let’s say there are problems. This is the first time a core Legend of Zelda title features voiced cutscenes. And I think it’s been a mistake to leave Link silent in them, because… you know, Link is not mute, we choose what he says in gameplay. But in cutscenes the writing has to revolve around Link not saying anything, and that makes a lot of stuff seem unnatural, especially when one of the Champions – Mipha, essentially proclaims her love for the protagonist. And like a true asshole Link just… doesn’t say anything, for arbitrary reasons of not having a voice when everybody else does. Technically it’s been like that in previous Zelda games too, but the feeling is different when there’s voice acting involved.

In part this makes it more difficult to relate to what’s happening. But also, while Zelda herself still remains a compelling character, the Champions are… meh. There are some interesting characterizations, but we don’t see them a lot so there’s really no sense of who they are. Which is a problem since, first: when liberating the Divine Beasts we have to free the spirits of the Champions who would then take over and eventually find eternal rest after Ganon’s defeat, which is supposed to be emotional, but it’s difficult to care.

Second, everyone in the present day looks up to the Champions and the memory of them. Including our allies among the different races who… again, they have cute moments like the Thunder Helm not properly fitting Riju’s head as she attempts to meet expectations placed on her as the young ruler of the Gerudo, and Sidon’s habit of showing his muscles and crystal-white smile. But that’s not enough.

Breath of the Wild DOES have really memorable characters, but they are memorable more due to narrative design than actual story or characterization. For example, one Shrine has a garden around it – and the challenge is to reach the Shrine entrance without stepping on the flowers. This failure state is contextualized by a lady who’s VERY protective of her garden.

Or Kass – a traveling Rito bard. In terms of writing, he is quite bland. However, because we meet him in different regions of Hyrule giving hints regarding treasures or shrine quests, the game creates a very positive association between Kass and meaningful rewards, creating a sort of relationship with him. As such, hearing his music in the distance always leads to positive emotions and we can’t wait to meet him again.

[Kass playing music]

But without that gameplay-connecting aspect, Kass is… really nothing special. Like pretty much everyone else. And it’s a problem because far from everyone has a direct mechanical connection to the game, so the  distinct lack of interesting characterization really does feel like a huge flaw, even though there are examples of good, funny, tragic, or otherwise memorable lines, everybody just feels… underdeveloped. As a result, with some exceptions we remember the world and our journey across it far better than the people we meet – who are supposed to add more depth to everything… but they don’t. 

And I guess on this regrettable note we have finished covering all the important Breath of the Wild topics. I know, anyone who has played the game will say that there’s so much I haven’t discussed! For example, in this whole analysis I haven’t even mentioned towers. But, towers are noticeable from afar like shrines, attempt like every other location and content type to have unique configurations so climbing them wouldn’t feel the same, and while they have their own special functionality of uncovering terrain on your map they don’t fill the world with icons and are more important as vantage points for sightlines. Discussing them doesn’t add anything new to understanding the game’s design principles.

There are things that I did mention or allude to but didn’t dive deep into, like the tutorial on the Great Plateau. But the reason it works is because it’s basically Breath of the Wild in miniature form, barring the fact that we gradually unlock all the core abilities while completing it, so, again, no really meaningful additions there.

And there are topics that I did dive into but maybe one would expect more, like maybe someone would’ve wanted a design dissection of every Divine Beast separately. But that, once again, really wouldn’t add anything to my main point that they’re essentially mega-shrines with spatial manipulation, and shrines were discussed in great detail.

Breath of the Wild is an absolutely massive game with tons of details, but it also is a very systemic title built around a strong framework, so I’d say an analysis focused on dissecting the framework itself is far more useful than making sure absolutely every element based on it is covered, which would just be full of redundancies. I hope that you agree with me on this as we’re getting to rating Breath of the Wild with my Stasocritic system.

The Stasocritic Rating

I have a personal scoring system I call the Stasocritc with which I like to summarize my thoughts about a game. It is not meant to be a replacement of my arguments or an objective rating, it’s just something I do for fun. The system is divided into five categories of various weights, each one having a score from 0 to 10 with their own criteria.

The first category is Design, with the biggest weight – that of 4, as how a game is built and structured influences our experience the most. In this one I will assign a 10. Look, Breath of the Wild is not perfect, it has flaws, some parts are undercooked… but also, not undercooked enough to drastically take away from the quality of the experience. Absolute perfection is not possible and therefore not required for a 10, and none of the issues take away from the fact that Breath of the Wild’s design is extremely elegant. We can compare the game to a very intricate machine where every facet and the way it has been implemented makes perfect sense for the purposes of the game itself, and should you try taking out a gear from that mechanism or replacing it with something else – it will just fall apart and stop working. 

There are issues related to Weapon Durability, but without it there’s no Evergreen Relevancy that’s required to validate the game’s direction. Quests might not seem the greatest out there, but they’re imperative for teaching players about the game’s systems. Breath of the Wild has so much in it and yet there’s very few things that are just objectively problematic, like the Blight Ganon bosses. It’s such an intricately thought out game and as a whole is just an example of masterful craftsmanship. 

And it should be no wonder then that in the next category, Emotions, with its weight of 3 as personal feelings also matter a lot, I will assign a 10 as well. I’ve spent several hundreds of hours with Breath of the Wild across several playthroughs, I’ve watched my wife spend several hundreds of hours with the game across her several playthroughs. I’ve played the game too much, and have too many fond memories of it for any other score to matter – it is truly undeniable how it has ingrained itself into… not just my life, but family life as well.

Then, we have the Cohesion category that has a weight of 2. This part is about how well all the different aspects of a game work together to form a singular, cohesive experience. And I hope that throughout all the previous discussions I’ve made it clear why I would definitely assign a 10 here as well. Breath of the Wild has one single goal – to allow players to create their own adventure by exploring everywhere they can and doing anything they want, and every system, every high-level and low-level decision from gameplay to narrative design to visuals work together to achieve that goal in a sensible way. And everyone will truly have their OWN adventure unlike any other.

That is also enhanced by Context, which is a category that’s all about plot, worldbuilding, character arcs, and everything else that provides context to the game – including players’ own personal stories. I will assign a 7 here. The game’s story is not devoid of interesting ideas, like Zelda’s poignant arc. But many characters in the game sort of end up being… somewhat bland, and because of that a lot of narrative moments don’t really hit as hard as they should. Plus the decision to keep Link silent in the voiced cutscenes leads to strange moments, it’s just… it doesn’t really manage to pull itself together. But the personal journey that we create in this adventure within the intricately designed world with massive amounts of interesting lore represented through area design, now THAT is actually cool and memorable, and elevates Breath of the Wild in this regard, but not enough for a higher score.

And finally, there’s Aesthetics which is all about visual design, sound design, music, and… yeah, it’s a 10. There are so many intricate little details woven into just an overall aesthetically pleasing design, I love how silence is just as important as sounds, and how visuals work not only for the purposes of just looking good in general but for the purposes of comfortable gameplay affordances as well.

And when all the scores and their weights are taken into account, we get an overall Stasocritic Rating of 97. The Stasocritic criterias are specifically balanced in such a way that it’s extremely difficult to get to any of the numerical extremes – both the lowest AND the highest. As such, the fact that Breath of the Wild is literally just 3 meager points away from a 100 is a testament to its quality as far as I’m concerned.

The Call to Adventure

But look, at the end of the day, a number is just a number, what really matters is all the arguments behind that number. And all the arguments point to Breath of the Wild being a fantastic experience that might not be for absolutely everyone as no game is, but it’s one of those titles that I’d say absolutely everyone should at least try to be able to decide for themselves.

You might not like the game… but if you do, it will be difficult to find an experience that’s similar to playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the first time. Breath of the Wild is not a game of limitless possibilities, but it doesn’t promise any. Breath of the Wild is not a game about deep mastery of complex mechanics.

Breath of the Wild is a game about adventure. Sense of wonder. Curiosity. And within that context, there’s literally no way to play the game wrong. It’s all up to you, your tastes, your motivation, how deep or far you are willing to go. Breath of the Wild is a Call to Adventure. Your own adventure. And it’s up to you, to accept it.