When Nintendo was first conceptualizing the next big Zelda game, Miyamoto and Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma asked the directors to describe Breath of the Wild’s main theme. What, they asked, could you do in this new Zelda?
Zelda: Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi decided to get a little ambitious.
“My response to Mr. Miyamoto and Mr. Aonuma was: You can do everything,” Fujibayashi told me during an interview last week in San Francisco, speaking through a translator.
“But I had to sell it to them,” he said. “How we’re going to make this happen. And I felt like the best way to convey this idea to them was to show them that you could climb walls.”
Fujibayashi and his team built a prototype of Breath of the Wild. They put together a starting area with a small field and a handful of trees, then stuck rupees all across the world, hiding them in places that the development team thought Miyamoto and Aonuma might explore. Then Fujibayashi presented their demo to the two Nintendo elder statesmen.
“We put rupees at the top of the tree to let them know that this is something we’re taking into account, but I didn’t tell them,” Fujibayashi said. “All I did was say, ‘Here, play the game.’ So the first thing [Miyamoto] did was start climbing, and he climbed the tree, and once he was able to do that and see that he can go anywhere within this small field, he got how this game will play out and that’s how I presented it to him.”
Then they watched and waited. And watched. And waited.
“When we first presented this to Mr. Miyamoto, he spent about an hour just climbing trees,” Fujibayashi said. “We left little treats like rupees on the trees, but we also left other things in other places we thought he might go. But he just kept climbing trees. Up and down. And so we got to the point where we go, ‘Do you want to look at other stuff?’ But he just kept on going. Once [he] got out of the Shrine of Resurrection, he spent an hour just within a 25-50 meter radius outside of that cave just climbing trees.”
It was then that Fujibayashi and his team realized they’d made something special—a game where the act of climbing could be just as fun as riding horses and slashing monsters.
Q: The concept "to review everything that we take for granted in LoZ". How did you judge how much it should be reviewed? After all, it would disappoint fans if too much of what we knew about Zelda were changed.
A: In fact we were exploring the borderline while developing the game. Through thinking about "what is a Zelda game should be", we were able to define a Zelda game to be a game with moments when you engage a dungeon, a question, the surrounding of unknown puzzles, and also the surprising moments when you finally solve them.
After keeping those basic elements, we started some conversations such as: "Can't we play the way we used to play in the dungeons now on the field?" Or on the contrary: "It might also be interesting if we play the way we used to play on the field in the dungeons?" This is a kind of multiplication of playing I mentioned before. Players could get through a puzzle by method 1, method 2 or change method 3 into method 4, even completely different method A or B. It naturally differed a lot from other Zelda games. We just simply tried to change the "I am getting tired of another routine of Zelda" experiences. We considered why we're getting tired meanwhile thinking about how to make puzzles more interesting in another way. And these thoughts became part of the multiplication of playing experiences.
I didn't set principles of changing. I just tried to convince the staff that it's possible for us to change the concept that "if we change something, it wouldn't be Zelda anymore".
Q:It seems that you not only changed the routines, but also got rid of the old frame of Zelda games.
A: Yes, you can say that we want to break the frame. With this idea, we have to create something different.
Excerpts from
http://kotaku.com/when-miyamoto-first-played-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-h-1793017234
and
...they have 3000 hit points
I lost so any bows and arrows on that shyt that I just went to bed. I knew that I needed a good night's sleep or I'd just keep screwing up. FINALLY got the job done. Can't imagine how the other three beasts are going to be.
i did thunderblight
Finally completed Eventide Island Shrine. Stayed 2 days on there and it took me 2 days irl to finish.
