This week again, Nintendo published a blog post about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the official blog of the Legend of Zelda portal in Japan. This time, the post was written by Takuhiro Dohta, who was the Technical Director.

He starts by explaining that the goal of this game to allow players to do lots of various things. Naturally, they didn’t go and add actions individually: they took one at a time, and then worked to “multiply” them in order to broaden the scope of each action. With this blog post, Takuhiro Dohta is introducing some of the ideas programmers came up with during development.

The first example is “climbing”. Since it’s one of the most important actions in the game, there were quite a few ideas.

One of the programmer said: “It would be fun to climb moving things!”. This would be the following combination: “climbing x moving object (in that case, a windmill)”. This idea was actually added to the game pretty early in development, but it apparently took a while for some of the staff members to realise that.

Below is an example of the “climbing x battle” combination, with Link climbing a Stone Talus. This came to be thanks to the input of one of the developers in charge of the battle system.

Naturally, this kind of combination isn’t just for climbing.

The Octo Ballon is an item that came to be following the experimentations of a programmer, who asked themselves: “Heh? Is that really ok?”, since everyone thought it was a strange idea. In the picture above, we have the following combination: “object (Octo Balloon) x object (Barrel)”.

Maybe you’ve already tried it yourself, but in case you haven’t: yes, you can climb something that is being lifted by some Octo Balloons!

By combining various actions, objects, the game’s world itself, and all the various elements that makes the game, you end up with so many possibilities for gameplay. By keeping those combinations in mind, you may be able to find a new strategy or solution (to defeat enemies, overcome an obstacle, etc.).

This blog post is yet another proof that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was designed to give as much freedom to the player as possible!

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Source: Nintendo