Aonuma, Miyamoto, Trinen on Zelda: BotW – towns, clothing, missions, story
IGN is back with another feature on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The site has more commentary from producer Eiji Aonuma, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Bill Trinen on the game. Topics include towns, Link’s clothing (including the blue tunic), missions, and story.
Head past the break for the rundown of Aonuma, Miyamoto, and Trinen’s comments on these aspects. The rest can be found here.
On towns…
“I can’t share too much about villages because the way they work is interconnected to the story and overall world. It would be spoilers, so I wouldn’t want to do that now. I think that in adventure games the idea of meeting people and saying farewell to them is an important aspect. So that’s definitely in there.” – Aonuma
On clothing…
“The clothes he’s wearing right now is actually the same clothes that he was wearing in the trailer that we’ve shown previously. We thought that having him wear this tunic for this demo would make it a little more familiar to people watching the game demo and trailer this time around. Link gets that blue suit at a very important juncture in the storyline, and we also showed suit of armor you can get too. There’s also times when Link will venture out into the cold and he’ll need to appropriately equip himself, so there’s definitely a lot of variation types of clothes he can wear.” – Aonuma
On how the story will unfold and if players will find narrative-driven side-quests…
“Sandbox games is what they’re typically called here. But before anybody called them sandbox games, I always described Nintendo games as being a garden in a box. Zelda is a garden in a box game where the player can freely go around and experience [the world]. There are quests. Sometimes we call them little chores that we need to do, but there are missions. On the systems side, you get a list of missions that’s easy to look into and check on.” – Miyamoto
“Those missions are, obviously, optional. And even the way the story is set up, once you get off the plateau you’ll get to a point where you’re given some options of things you can pursue. You might want to pursue the story. You may want to try to learn more about Link’s background, or you might want to go and try to solve all of the Shrines. You get to this point where you’re able to choose which one of these directions you want to do first, and then you’ll get missions that are layered on top.” – Trinen
On the story…
“This game has a heavy focus on experience and also freedom. It’s not really story heavy. You can choose to do all of the tasks and all of the missions and you’ll still get to the end, or you could choose not to do all of them, and you can still get to the end. The story isn’t as clear cut as it was in the past with the existence of Ganon, Link, and Zelda. With this one it’s a little bit more vague. You’ll kind of feel what Ganon is, and you’re going to feel maybe this is what Zelda is like, or this is what Link is like. It’s really Link’s adventure in discovering all of that.” – Miyamoto
“They’ve done a really good job of weaving the story into the world, giving you just enough direction to know, generally, where you need to go to pursue it. If you’re off doing other things and you decide you want to go complete the Shrines, or you want to go climb mountains, or you want to go look at deer in the field, or find that pond that had all the ducks in the trailer, you can do that. I get into the game and then go off to do random things. Then, maybe after a couple days of playing, I’ll think that maybe I should actually go to that place [someone I met in the story] talked about. Then, you go there and get enough clues to point you in [the next] direction. It’s does a really good job of guiding you to where the story is, but it still feels like a sort of chance encounter out in the world when you come across somebody who has a role to move the story forward.” – Trinen
