The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Zelda had hardened into one repeated loop that Nintendo chose to tear up. After Ocarina of Time every Zelda followed the same structure: enter a dungeon, find an item, beat the boss, unlock the next part of the map. Skyward Sword followed it so closely that it felt like a paint-by-numbers parody, and Eiji Aonuma feared fans would stop playing.

In 2013 Aonuma promised a "newborn Zelda" that would re-think the series' conventions, naming fixed dungeon order and playing alone. Each game had its own world, tone and gimmick but the same skeleton. His order to the team: "Let's stop thinking about what Zelda has been up until now."

List every stress point in the formula and replace each one. Director Hidemaro Fujibayashi's team wrote down everything that made Zelda games less enjoyable and swapped each for a new idea. The first pitches were wild (UFO aliens, missile attacks, Lovecraftian monsters, a motorbike), but the real fix turned out to be structural.

"We wrote down all of the stress points, the things that make Zelda games less enjoyable, and we replaced them with new ideas."

Five structural changes moved Zelda from passive to active design. Breath of the Wild added a non-linear structure, a fully open world, laid-back hints, systems-driven problem-solving and a bigger moveset. Only the tutorial and the Ganon fight are mandatory; the four divine beasts and 120-odd shrines can be done in any order.

Fujibayashi calls older Zelda passive because the player follows the designer's lead. In an active game the designer builds a sandbox, hands over toys, sets a goal and lets the player get on with it. Call of Duty and The Last of Us sit at the passive end of that spectrum, Minecraft and Factorio at the active end.

Fresh eyes, fan requests and rival games fed the reinvention. The team leaned on younger staff who weren't set in their ways, on fans who wanted to explore the gaps between Skyward Sword's disconnected areas, and on playing Minecraft, Terraria and Skyrim, which Nintendo rarely admits.

Art director Satoru Takizawa: "You need to be creatively reckless."

The result converted Aonuma, so later games pushed freedom further. Aonuma once thought letting players get lost was a "sin", then learned "getting lost wasn't so bad after all". He now calls single-solution puzzles old design and asks why anyone would go back to a more restricted game.

Tears of the Kingdom added Ultrahand for gluing objects into vehicles after Nintendo watched players' stunts, and Ascend began as a debug tool for skipping content. Hideki Dohta: the aim is a game that "enables players to do exactly what they think they can do". Grezzo's Echoes of Wisdom kept the rule, with Sano saying limiting mechanics eases development but frustrates players.

Active and passive design are different, so the next Zelda may blend both. Mark Brown argues Breath of the Wild's philosophy isn't better than Ocarina of Time's, just different, and suits a different mood. The next game won't be a Tears sequel or reuse Ultrahand, and could pair a free overworld with classic-style dungeons.

Donkey Kong Bananza shows a blend: you can skip content freely, but it still hands out transformations across the adventure like classic Zelda items. "Sometimes I want to go on my own adventure across an uncharted landscape. But sometimes I just want to be delighted by a developer's carefully curated experience."

Let the world guide instead of companions and quest markers. Breath of the Wild drops the chatty helper and leads with terrain, harder enemy placement and curiosities. Only the four divine beasts get markers, and all four show on the mini-map at once in the map's corners so players take them in any order.

Elden Ring borrowed the approach, skipping question marks and checklists so players scan the horizon and feel they are investigating a world rather than cleaning up a map.

Build the world from interacting properties so players invent solutions. Instead of one intended answer per puzzle, Breath of the Wild uses wind, fire, electricity, ice and gravity, which players exploit to solve puzzles, beat enemies and bypass obstacles. Brown calls Zelda's chemistry engine the furthest any game goes with environmental awareness.

Fujibayashi: "I really want players to relish those moments where you do something and think, oh my gosh, I'm a genius."

Player-driven solutions also bring repetition and exploits. Open answers create surprise and delight, but just as often the same few cheesy tricks solve many challenges in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Free movement clashes with lock-and-key dungeon design. Classic temples need a narrow lock and key structure and hand-crafted solutions, so climbing, gliding and systemic tricks let players cheese the new dungeons. In Tears of the Kingdom you can phase through the floor and skip half the puzzles.

Brown skipped a Boss Keys episode on Tears of the Kingdom for that reason.

Front-loading every ability ended the steady drip of new items. Because Nintendo never wants you at a shrine needing an ability you lack, nearly all mechanics arrive in the tutorial. Revali's Gale is the only dungeon reward that adds a new wrinkle to the moveset.

Classic Zelda gave an item per dungeon, so players always wondered what ability was around the corner.

Telling the story as found memories fixed a 25-year problem, at a price. Miyamoto said in 1992 that the open 1986 Zelda made the plotline go screwy and NPC messages stop making sense, so A Link to the Past tightened structure. Breath of the Wild sets its story in the past as memories found at locations, so order doesn't matter.

Brown's criticism: the jumbled memories have "no emotional escalation, no dramatic timing, no pace, no structure, no arcs."

Huge worlds can feel empty compared with crafted spaces. The new Hyrule must be massive, so it can feel empty, soulless and repetitive, even algorithm-generated, while Ocarina of Time's hand-crafted spaces have resonated for decades.

Some rules should stay deliberately unknowable. What a cook-pot mix will produce is cited as a rule Zelda rightly leaves ambiguous, alongside Super Metroid's untaught wall jump.

Guiding players tower to tower worked so well it killed the feeling of choice. Nintendo first linked about 15 Sheikah Towers with roads lined with characters, camps and goodies. Playtesters complained of being trapped on "an invisible, but obvious guide rope", and those who left the line got lost or found little of interest.

Nintendo explained this at the 2017 CEDEC conference in Japan; the lecture was never uploaded and the details come from journalists' slides.

Playtest heat maps exposed the problem and later confirmed the fix. Plotting where testers walked showed a split: about 80 percent dutifully followed the tower route and 20 percent wandered randomly. After the redesign, the same heat map showed players exploring freely landmark to landmark while almost all still reached the key locations.

Many landmarks with clear benefits pull players like moths to a flame. Shrines raise health or stamina, enemy camps hold weapons, and stables, once just horse registration points, gained beds, a shop and NPCs with rumours and sidequests. Players follow a breadcrumb trail of interesting places rather than a line.

Appeal shifts with the player's need: shrines and camps win when seeking power, and night makes other places stand out.

Scarce resources turn the whole map into a reason to travel. Nintendo removed heart drops so players visit forests for mushrooms or hunt animals, and made rupees very rare so players mine ore in mountains and quarries to sell.

Small landmarks need silhouettes readable from far away. Shrines glow, campfires send up tall smoke, enemy bases sit around skull-shaped rocks, and stables are marked by a giant wooden horse.

"Wherever you look, you should find something interesting to do."

Triangle-shaped terrain hides most options and reveals a few at a time. Hyrule's hills and rocks are mostly pyramids and cones. They force a climb-or-go-around choice, draw the eye to a peak where Nintendo puts points of interest, and block what's behind so dozens of nearby landmarks don't overwhelm the player.

Cresting a hill reveals two or three new places, which pulls players off their plan; they remember the goal, head back, get distracted again, and eventually reach a tower. Brown calls it "an infinite loop of discoveries".

Let the world guide instead of companions and quest markers. Breath of the Wild drops the chatty helper and leads with terrain, harder enemy placement and curiosities. Only the four divine beasts get markers, and all four show on the mini-map at once in the map's corners so players take them in any order.

Elden Ring borrowed the approach, skipping question marks and checklists so players scan the horizon and feel they are investigating a world rather than cleaning up a map.

Nintendo calibrated scale by running Link around real Kyoto. Early tests used Google Maps data so Link could run around Kyoto and climb Himeji Castle, giving the team a feel for distance and density.

As Nintendo's first proper open world, it also needed all-new tools so a large team could work on a single map.

Nintendo polishes old flaws with small tweaks. The Wind Waker Wii U version sped up a contentious late-game fetch quest after the team discussed what they wished they had done differently.

Durability shapes how players feel, not just what they carry. Breaking swords push players toward sneaking, ambushes and improvising, and create drama mid-fight. The resulting feelings are being underpowered, crafty, and an explorer in a decaying world.

Let the world guide instead of companions and quest markers. Breath of the Wild drops the chatty helper and leads with terrain, harder enemy placement and curiosities. Only the four divine beasts get markers, and all four show on the mini-map at once in the map's corners so players take them in any order.

Elden Ring borrowed the approach, skipping question marks and checklists so players scan the horizon and feel they are investigating a world rather than cleaning up a map.

Puzzles are nearly all the beasts offer. Combat is a few guardian scouts, floating skulls and one boss, with no mini-bosses. All five share murky brown textures and understated music, and only Ruta has a clear flow from the water wheel up to the elephant's head.

The 120 shrines escalate one idea at a time and Hyrule Castle, with combat, branching paths and many entrances, comes closest to a classic dungeon. Elden Ring's catacombs were later compared to the shrines for feeling alike.

The open world responds to the player and rebalances itself. Changes like Tarrey Town being built happen only in response to the player, and Breath of the Wild drops stronger enemies in after a number of kills to handle open-world difficulty.

Breakable weapons make the safe, reliable route costly. Weapons turning to dust works as a drain on the player's arsenal, pushing them to try new swords, explore for replacements and attempt creative plans instead of repeating one dependable tactic.

Brown calls the choice controversial. Deathloop shows the opposite: its infusion system lets players keep favourites permanently, cancelling the forcing function that shattering weapons provide.

Breakable weapons make the safe, reliable route costly. Weapons turning to dust works as a drain on the player's arsenal, pushing them to try new swords, explore for replacements and attempt creative plans instead of repeating one dependable tactic.

Brown calls the choice controversial. Deathloop shows the opposite: its infusion system lets players keep favourites permanently, cancelling the forcing function that shattering weapons provide.

Zelda's classic mechanics are both models and cautionary tales for other designers. The hookshot locks Link into a fixed animation, the opposite of Titanfall 2's steerable grapple. Oracle of Seasons' magnetic glove, held back by a top-down Game Boy view, inspired Mark Brown's platformer Mind Over Magnet.

Zelda 1's unsignposted bombable walls were the model for Dark Souls' illusory walls, and Zelda's instant teleport out after a boss is what Metroid Prime 2 forgot to borrow.

Zelda's classic mechanics are both models and cautionary tales for other designers. The hookshot locks Link into a fixed animation, the opposite of Titanfall 2's steerable grapple. Oracle of Seasons' magnetic glove, held back by a top-down Game Boy view, inspired Mark Brown's platformer Mind Over Magnet.

Zelda 1's unsignposted bombable walls were the model for Dark Souls' illusory walls, and Zelda's instant teleport out after a boss is what Metroid Prime 2 forgot to borrow.

Aonuma's clockwork puppet hobby shaped the series' shifting dungeons. Aonuma built Karakuri puppets, gear-driven marionettes, at university; that impressed Miyamoto, who put him in charge of Ocarina of Time's dungeons. The result was dungeons where the whole building is the puzzle.

Examples include the Water Temple's water depth, the robot elephant divine beast and Majora's Mask's Stone Tower flipping floor and ceiling.

A switch must change the dungeon somewhere other than where you stand. In the Water Temple a cracked wall can't be bombed underwater, so you must go to another room, set the water to floor two and return. If a button let you change the level on the spot, the puzzle would vanish.

This forces players to build a mental map of the dungeon and remember where to go back to.

Limited views and reversible states rule out trial and error. Seeing only your own room means predicting effects out of view, like solving a Rubik's cube from the inside. Settings can be flipped back and forth, so players must choose one with intention: three water levels in the Water Temple, four staircase positions in Lakebed Temple, 64 combinations in Vah Naboris.

A permanent change would tell the player it was right and let them stop thinking about the mechanism.

Each state should open some paths and close others. In Skyward Sword's Sandship you open a door in the present, then need the past to power the machine inside. In Twilight Princess's Ancient Cistern, lowering the elevator cuts off a chest, so you keep it raised and climb down a rope.

Majora's Mask's Great Bay Temple does the same with reversed water currents opening some tunnels and blocking others.

The same global thinking works in 2D and with rule-breaking dungeons. Oracle games' spinning platforms turn 90 degrees and flip, so you set one and then walk around the dungeon to use it. Link's Awakening's Eagle's Tower uses one irreversible change and a ball you must throw over gaps between floors.

Complexity made these dungeons polarising and Nintendo backed away. The Water Temple stalled progress, sent players to walkthroughs and required menu boot changes every few minutes, which Aonuma apologised for and the 3DS remake fixed. Wind Waker and Twilight Princess went simpler, and Skyward Sword buried its puzzles under hints from an aggravating sidekick.

Teach the rules, structure the space and keep help optional. Skyward Sword teaches timeshift stones in two areas before the Sandship. Hub and spoke layouts give players a base for their mental map, and the hardest puzzles can guard optional rewards, like reversing all of Lakebed Temple for a heart piece.

Hints are fine, but only after players have had a chance to try. Brown argues every Zelda should include one such dungeon, since no other game tests spatial reasoning this way.

Putting dungeon controls in the menu made the puzzles too easy. Because beasts can be moved from the map screen anywhere, players can fiddle until things line up instead of planning, unlike the Sandship where you choose an era before going below deck. It saves backtracking but trivialises many puzzles.

Vah Naboris resists fiddling best: break a circuit to lower the tail, stand on it, fix the circuit to lift Link, or rotate a chamber so a caged terminal lines up with a window.

The 1986 original turned RPGs into real-time action. The Legend of Zelda joined the 1984 to 1986 wave of real-time action RPGs, with Miyamoto citing The Black Onyx and Ultima as influences.

The open world responds to the player and rebalances itself. Changes like Tarrey Town being built happen only in response to the player, and Breath of the Wild drops stronger enemies in after a number of kills to handle open-world difficulty.

Zelda's classic mechanics are both models and cautionary tales for other designers. The hookshot locks Link into a fixed animation, the opposite of Titanfall 2's steerable grapple. Oracle of Seasons' magnetic glove, held back by a top-down Game Boy view, inspired Mark Brown's platformer Mind Over Magnet.

Zelda 1's unsignposted bombable walls were the model for Dark Souls' illusory walls, and Zelda's instant teleport out after a boss is what Metroid Prime 2 forgot to borrow.

Let the world guide instead of companions and quest markers. Breath of the Wild drops the chatty helper and leads with terrain, harder enemy placement and curiosities. Only the four divine beasts get markers, and all four show on the mini-map at once in the map's corners so players take them in any order.

Elden Ring borrowed the approach, skipping question marks and checklists so players scan the horizon and feel they are investigating a world rather than cleaning up a map.

Telling the story as found memories fixed a 25-year problem, at a price. Miyamoto said in 1992 that the open 1986 Zelda made the plotline go screwy and NPC messages stop making sense, so A Link to the Past tightened structure. Breath of the Wild sets its story in the past as memories found at locations, so order doesn't matter.

Brown's criticism: the jumbled memories have "no emotional escalation, no dramatic timing, no pace, no structure, no arcs."

Zelda's classic mechanics are both models and cautionary tales for other designers. The hookshot locks Link into a fixed animation, the opposite of Titanfall 2's steerable grapple. Oracle of Seasons' magnetic glove, held back by a top-down Game Boy view, inspired Mark Brown's platformer Mind Over Magnet.

Zelda 1's unsignposted bombable walls were the model for Dark Souls' illusory walls, and Zelda's instant teleport out after a boss is what Metroid Prime 2 forgot to borrow.

Build the world from interacting properties so players invent solutions. Instead of one intended answer per puzzle, Breath of the Wild uses wind, fire, electricity, ice and gravity, which players exploit to solve puzzles, beat enemies and bypass obstacles. Brown calls Zelda's chemistry engine the furthest any game goes with environmental awareness.

Fujibayashi: "I really want players to relish those moments where you do something and think, oh my gosh, I'm a genius."

Rain shows how one system can reach into almost everything. Rain makes rock slippery to climb, hushes Link's footsteps, boosts electrical damage, turns fire arrows into normal arrows, puts out campfires, brings out the electric darner and sends people running for cover.

Puddles evaporate when the sun returns. Rolling weather also keeps systems out of equilibrium, producing unpredictable thunderstorms without the player pushing.

Accept any solution that follows the rules, even if it feels like cheating. In shrines, laying metal objects on the floor conducts electricity to a switch. When an electric ball is missing in Vah Naboris, a chest, sword, bow or shield can carry the current instead.

Consistent rules let players trust their plans; such solutions "might feel a bit like cheating", which is what makes systemic games fun.

Breakable weapons make the safe, reliable route costly. Weapons turning to dust works as a drain on the player's arsenal, pushing them to try new swords, explore for replacements and attempt creative plans instead of repeating one dependable tactic.

Brown calls the choice controversial. Deathloop shows the opposite: its infusion system lets players keep favourites permanently, cancelling the forcing function that shattering weapons provide.

Accept any solution that follows the rules, even if it feels like cheating. In shrines, laying metal objects on the floor conducts electricity to a switch. When an electric ball is missing in Vah Naboris, a chest, sword, bow or shield can carry the current instead.

Consistent rules let players trust their plans; such solutions "might feel a bit like cheating", which is what makes systemic games fun.

Aonuma's clockwork puppet hobby shaped the series' shifting dungeons. Aonuma built Karakuri puppets, gear-driven marionettes, at university; that impressed Miyamoto, who put him in charge of Ocarina of Time's dungeons. The result was dungeons where the whole building is the puzzle.

Examples include the Water Temple's water depth, the robot elephant divine beast and Majora's Mask's Stone Tower flipping floor and ceiling.

The divine beasts drop keys, items and locked doors entirely. Link has all his powers from the start. Inside each beast you find the map terminal, activate a handful of terminals in any order, then the main terminal to fight the boss.

There are no separate rooms; doors appear only when a puzzle needs one. Brown: "You might as well chuck my graphs in the ocean for this game."

Moving the whole beast makes each one a puzzle box. The elephant's trunk has 10 positions, the salamander turns 90 degrees, the bird tips left or right, and the camel has three rotating chambers. Movement both carries Link around and solves puzzles.

Unlike the Stone Tower, which flips in a cutscene, the beasts move in real time with Link inside, so in Medoh he must hold a fan with magnesis while the tilt sends a hammer at a gong.

Putting dungeon controls in the menu made the puzzles too easy. Because beasts can be moved from the map screen anywhere, players can fiddle until things line up instead of planning, unlike the Sandship where you choose an era before going below deck. It saves backtracking but trivialises many puzzles.

Vah Naboris resists fiddling best: break a circuit to lower the tail, stand on it, fix the circuit to lift Link, or rotate a chamber so a caged terminal lines up with a window.

Puzzles are nearly all the beasts offer. Combat is a few guardian scouts, floating skulls and one boss, with no mini-bosses. All five share murky brown textures and understated music, and only Ruta has a clear flow from the water wheel up to the elephant's head.

The 120 shrines escalate one idea at a time and Hyrule Castle, with combat, branching paths and many entrances, comes closest to a classic dungeon. Elden Ring's catacombs were later compared to the shrines for feeling alike.

Free movement clashes with lock-and-key dungeon design. Classic temples need a narrow lock and key structure and hand-crafted solutions, so climbing, gliding and systemic tricks let players cheese the new dungeons. In Tears of the Kingdom you can phase through the floor and skip half the puzzles.

Brown skipped a Boss Keys episode on Tears of the Kingdom for that reason.