Zelda: Breath of the Wild director on why you can’t pet dogs in the game
While journeying through Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you may encounter dogs. They tend to be found at stables and towns.
Dogs aren’t just there to make areas more lively. You can bond with them, they’ll follow you around, and can lead you someplace special. Unfortunately, you can’t actually pet them.
Director Hidemaro Fujibayashi commented on this while speaking with IGN in a new interview. When asked about why you can’t pet dogs in the game, Fujibayashi explained:
“In the game it seems like you can do anything, but what it really is are all these interlocking systems where you actually have a pretty limited number of actions that can do a ton of different things. So if it came down to something like petting a dog, we would actually have to put in a custom action just for petting a dog that couldn’t really be used for anything else.”
“In terms of design philosophy, it just didn’t fit with how we actually made the game world. It’s actually more about taking a smaller number of actions and using them in as many ways as possible.”
