Five years on, Breath of the Wild’s open world is still unmatched
When Breath of the Wild was released five years ago today, its rapturous reception didn’t just happen because of how it represented a long-overdue revamp of the Legend of Zelda series’ stale formula. That certainly helped. But what really made it resonate was its revolutionary approach to open-world game design.
Unlike typical open-world games that overwhelm you with endless quests and icons on the map, Breath of the Wild told you the endpoint right from the start and trusted the player to make their own way there. You get more powerful in Breath of the Wild by exploring the freely traversable world for yourself and mastering its emergent systems. Once you feel ready, you can take on the final boss — or put it off forever because, hey, simply existing in the world is a joy unto itself.
Breath of the Wild is undoubtedly a landmark game, but five years on, I’m surprised it hasn’t had more impact on the genre at large. Open-world games take a lot of time to create even when society hasn’t been derailed by a pandemic, of course, but in a design sense, Breath of the Wild still stands alone.
It’s not like games haven’t attempted to imitate Breath of the Wild in various ways, but the similarities tend to be superficial. Genshin Impact is the obvious example, an extremely popular free-to-play game that lifts the aesthetic, glider, bow-and-arrow combat, and a few other elements. But the minute-to-minute experience of playing Genshin is completely different — it’s more of a conventional action RPG and doesn’t adopt anything about Breath of the Wild’s world design.
The same is true for Ubisoft’s Immortals: Fenyx Rising, a Greek mythology-themed adventure that, for all its qualities, feels like a bargain-bin knockoff. Ubisoft is as
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