The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild doesn’t put you on a set path, it doesn’t hold your hand, and we love it for that. Nintendo had to conduct a lot of experiments in order to make a dynamic, open world game like it. We recently sat down with game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, technical director Takuhiro Dohta, and art director Satoru Takizawa to learn more about the process of behind creating one of the boldest entries in Nintendo’s lauded Zelda series.
Different teams take a variety of approaches when making prototypes at Nintendo according to Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi. “Even with the Zelda franchise, it’s different,” he said. “For example, Breath of the Wild started with less than 10 people.” Fujibayashi told us a small team can work on early ideas to make a game for roughly a year or possibly longer, and there isn’t a set time limit. The first phase is spent figuring out the game idea the team wants to make. Once the initial prototype is completed, the findings are presented to Nintendo’s senior staff. If it proves the ideas will work, the team begins staffing up.
After the first phase of the ideas was completed, technical director Takuhiro Dohta joined the team along with art director Satoru Takizawa, but plenty of decisions were left to be made. “When I became involved, the only thing that had really been decided at that point was that the game field was going to be huge,” Dohta recalls, “and then, Mr. Aonuma said ‘okay, we got that...where should we go from there?’” Takizawa remembers discussing art styles and aesthetic choices for the new Zelda with Dohta before they became full-time team members.
The developers knew they wanted to create a large field full of player-driven actions and interactions that could result in lots of possibilities. In order to better convey the ideas they had for a connected game world, the team decided to build a prototype and begin experimenting to see whether the results would lead to a more active game. The early prototype used sprite-based assets that resembled the original Zelda on the NES. Fujibayashi showed footage of it during a panel at the Game Developers Conference called “Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.”
“We didn't make the whole [game] map,” Fujibayashi told IGN. “We built it piece by piece and when there was a specific game element or a specific puzzle that we wanted to try.” The early prototype showed the team the impact of a dynamic world where Link could interact with lots of objects and use them in clever ways to explore the map.
The Zelda prototype also doubled as a great resource to help other programmers at Nintendo understand the team’s goal. “When making a prototype that we're going to have to show to programmers, we realize that reducing things to sort of a set of symbols is one way to really clearly get at the logic behind the idea that you're wanting to express,” Dohta said. By representing objects with sprites and backgrounds from the NES Zelda, the team found an elegant way to explain the world they wanted to make.
The early 2D Zelda prototype was used in a presentation to senior staff, a panel including Nintendo’s most famous designer and Zelda series creator Shigeru Miyamoto. Fujibayashi said Miyamoto was not involved in the making of it, but he was aware of the idea and the prototype was presented to him as a sort of surprise. “When we first showed the prototype to Mr. Miyamoto,” Dohta said, “he's not exactly a programmer, but he does have a gift for seeing the heart of an idea.”
“Basically, what he said was ‘it's not trying to create a world that's going to control and make these objects work, but it's a collection of all these objects that makes the world, ’” Dohta recalls. The type of game the team wanted make was conveyed clearly as intended, and the results of the presentation gave the team confidence to move forward.
Art director Satoru Takizawa revealed a bunch of concept art for Breath of the Wild at GDC, but the most interesting were a series of oddball ideas that you normally don’t see in Zelda games. For example, there’s Hyrule Wars, a concept where Link was running through a field filled with explosions and giant robots that shoot beams of energy, and Zelda Invasion, which depicts an invasion of Hyrule by alien forces. Takizawa describes these as part of a wild collection of things the team created.
The out there concepts were inspired by the idea at the core of the new Zelda: the team wanted to re-think the conventions of the series. “I thought it would be easier for the team to really be free with that if we came up with examples of stuff that was just sort of really beyond the pale and really out there,” Takizawa said, “it just opens up this creative energy.”
Takezawa recalls the team had several examples that were similar to Hyrule Wars, but none of them were developed further.
This short manga was made by Breath of Wild’s particle effects designer. In it, Ganondorf is wearing in a Metallica shirt in a panel on the second row.
In order to sift through all the design and artwork ideas, the art team used an online bulletin board where staff could freely upload their ideas.
“It almost worked like an internal social media where instead of a like button we used rupees,” Takezawa explained, “and if people liked the idea, they would put rupees into it. And so it provided different ideas not only in terms of design direction, but also it gave people an idea of what to focus on, what to use think of when they're creating something.”
“It also gave some of the younger staff kind of the sense that if they can do it,” he said. “Maybe they could submit some ideas that may be out of left field, or maybe they didn't feel extremely comfortable with yet. It gave them freedom to really propose any idea that was remotely interesting.”
Breath of the Wild’s unique sense of discovery manifested toward the end of the game’s experimentation phase, according to Fujibayashi. The team built a second prototype and tested the game out searching for feedback. “When we got all that feedback and looked at it,” Fujibayashi said, “we realized there's a common trait or commonality between all the ideas that weren't so popular and all the ones that were popular.”
“A lot of the ideas that weren't very popular or that didn't make it, a lot of them had to do with either it was hard to play the game or that it didn't break the convention in a way that we wanted to. It was just basically the same type of game.”
‘We went and removed all those aspects that weren't very popular,” Fujibayashi said, “and what was left was a game that gave the player a new sensation and a new sense of fun that people could enjoy.”
When the development team set out to create the world of Zelda, it basically turned out to be a test phase in and of itself according to Fujibayashi. The 2D prototype led to a lot of testing and when they tried to bring over the ideas into 3D world. “The Great Plateau ended up being a culmination of what we wanted to include in the game to see if it's really going to pan out,” Fujibayashi said. “Different cultures within the game and the NPCs were added in later, so we removed anything that isn't wild because it's really was the essence of this game.”
In Nintendo’s own making of video for Breath of the Wild, Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma shared a story about the origin of the Guardians, a large tentacled enemy that chases Link down in Breath of the Wild. “You know, for the Guardians, I just happened to be talking to one of the staff members, saying, ‘When I played the first Legend of Zelda game, I felt like the Octorok were pretty huge,’” Aonuma recalled. “‘They’d make all these complicated movements, and I really didn’t like those guys.’”
“So we thought about creating an enemy using that image, and that’s how we came up with the Guardians. But I didn’t anticipate that they’d end up shooting beams and stuff. We just happened to create this new enemy like that, but now it’s become sort of an iconic character for this game.”
Want to learn more about the details hidden in the world of Hyrule, check out 100 little things we found Zelda: Breath of the Wild that will blow your mind. If you’re stuck on a shrine puzzle or side quest, make sure to visit the Breath of the Wild wiki guide for help with the game.
Jose Otero is an Editor at IGN and host of Nintendo Voice Chat. You can follow him on Twitter.
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