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Zelda: Breath of the Wild — triangles and gravity
Know first: Open-world design: regions and landmarks
This breakdown takes apart how Nintendo built the land of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017). It is a huge field where players roam without markers and still keep finding things. The source is a talk by the game’s director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and senior lead artist Makoto Yonezu at CEDEC 2017, the Japanese game developers’ conference. What makes it a good example: every rule comes with its reason. The talk also shows how the team checked its work: on heat maps of test players and on foot.
The whole picture
Fujibayashi spoke about gravity and about three rulers for the size of the world; Yonezu spoke about the triangle rule and the road to one tower. The report ends with a tool the team made for itself. The parts:
| Part | The problem | The answer |
|---|---|---|
| Gravity | Players either kept to the road and felt led, or left it and found little | Places that pay off, seen from afar, each pulling the player who wants what it gives |
| Triangles | Open land reads at one glance, and nothing is left to discover | Hills and rocks that hide what is behind them and make the player choose: over or around |
| The road to a tower | A straight road to a goal in sight is dull | Bend the road, hide the goal, show something else, reveal the goal all at once |
| Three rulers | Nobody on the team had built a world this big | Distance, density and time, measured on a real city |
| Signs in the world | Many artists working on the same land | Each task is a sign that stands where the work is |
Gravity and triangles together make a loop that the player runs again and again:
- Look around.
- If a place in sight is worth it for what you want, go there. If not, keep heading for your destination, such as a tower.
- On the way, the land hides places and reveals new ones.
- At the place, something happens. Then you head for your destination again, and the loop starts over.
The loop has no end, and that was the point: the team called it “an endless engine of play”.