5 design lessons learned from Breath of the Wild

gamedeveloper.com:

Nintendo is not what you’d call an open, chatty company; its internal development is a process we’re rarely given a look at, making the fine details of its success sometimes a mystery. With Breath of the Wild, we may not have a universe of readily available insight as we might with other games, but over the years, Nintendo’s team has opened up on a few occasions to give us a peek behind the curtain, with a few tantalizing bits floating to the top.

With the sequel on the horizon, we thought it was a good time to revisit some of those lessons, as well as add in a few of our own observations. Here’s what we’ve learned.

Breath of the Wild was intentionally built as a convention-breaker, as technical director Takuhiro Dohta explained in the first part of the GDC 2017 talk, Breaking Conventions with Breath of the Wild. The design goal was to turn the game from a passive experience, where players were led through a linear story, to a more active one that encouraged player engagement by eschewing the progression gating that historically has accompanied its open-world design. This meant removing the unscalable walls from previous titles and letting players climb over any surface, and also buffering the consequences of their more impulsive behaviors by giving them a cushion (the paraglider) to mitigate fall damage.

The resulting feature, along with other, more traditional means of travel, rewarded player curiosity by allowing them to take the scenery however fast or slow they liked. Walking, riding horses, paragliding and even shield-surfing: if players were in a hurry to get to a tempting new spot or simply taking in the sights, they had a way to take each location at the pace they preferred. For a game as big as Breath of the