Zelda: Breath of the Wild director on having fun with falling and dying
Many would agree that Breath of the Wild is the toughest Zelda game in years. That’s something the development team accepted early on.
Last week, director Hidemaro Fujibayashi spoke about the game’s difficultly with The Verge. Nintendo observed that many players were falling off of Hyrule’s towers while development was ongoing, resulting in deaths. The team ended up making some tweaks, but in the end, they accepted the fact that many players would fall and die.
Fujibayashi said:
“When we saw that, we also didn’t see it as something negative. There’s actually kind of a fun to be had from falling and dying. You learn to be careful and to be cautious. And we felt that that gave a lot of players the emotional preparedness to take on the rest of the world. So we ultimately decided that we should let them die.”
Fujibayashi also touched on having to balance Breath of the Wild’s freedom while also ensuring that players wouldn’t become too frustrated. One element that helped the process was a special tool created to analyze how different users would approach the open world.
“There’s a development tool that we use that takes all of the data from these monitor tests, and it centralizes it in one location so that you can see that data in real time. It shows how many hearts people have, or where people have died, or what path they’re taking. And it’s kind of on this one singular timeline so that you can see in real time where people are struggling, where people are really dying a lot, what path they’re taking. So we took all of that into consideration as we tried to balance the game out.”
“When we watched people play at E3 we realized that they were playing in the way that we envisioned. And when we saw that and people were reacting positively, that’s when I said ‘Alright, this is the right direction.’”
Finally, Fujibayashi stated that players getting lost in Breath of the Wild is “a very positive thing.”
