As the first DLC releases today for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it’s time to look back on just what it did right in the first place. While the DLC adds such things as a progress tracker, a temporary fast travel medallion and, of course, the harder difficulty of Master Mode and the great looking Trial of the Sword, none of that would really matter if the main game wasn’t so good to begin with.
Breath of the Wild raises the bar for how enjoyable an open world game can be, and it quickly became my favourite game in the last three years, which is hypocritical of somebody who initially didn’t want to invest in Nintendo’s shiny new machine. I must admit I was very intrigued after reading reviews, especially our own take on the game, but I’d shrugged off the Switch’s launch to the staff here at TSA due to Zelda being the only AAA game on Nintendo’s new platform at its launch. Of course, after spending the past few months with the game things have since changed.
I still vividly remember unboxing my Switch console and vigorously ramming Zelda into it as fast as I could. It was after a mere hour with the game that I began to understand that Breath of the Wild isn’t just a new chapter in Zelda game design, but it actually fixes many problems in open world games.
The game starts by introducing players to the varied but compact landscapes within the Great Plateau, but it’s here, as I arrived at the snow-covered peak within this area, that I discovered that the conditions would slowly cause Link to freeze to death. There’s ways around this, if players make a fire, wear protective armor or weapons, consume spicy food or cook cold resistance potions, but it was just a taste of how the harsh environments could kill Link and how your ingenuity – particularly with cooking) can try to overcome those conditions.
Adding unforgiving enemies and environments made Breath of the Wild feel as challenging as Dark Souls at times due to the simplified Zelda combat controls. This was particularly nice because it added a survival aspect to the somewhat simplistic Zelda mechanics, meaning you had to think about where you’d like to go based on your resources sometimes, this was often a puzzle within itself.
Hidden behind Hyrule’s vast open spaces are hundreds of both familiar and unexpected things to discover. The most enjoyable aspect that I found were the 120 Shrines, each of which is a puzzle or challenge in their own right. The first part of the game teaches you to seek these out, as it requires the player to complete the Great Plateau’s four shrines to unlock the Sheikah Slate powers and then also acquire a paraglider, which is both a fun and efficient way of travelling.
The shrines work on multiple levels, creating a web of fast travel points that sprawl across the world on the one hand, but also encouraging the player to play around with physics, observe the environment – some shrines are solved by uncovering them with environmental puzzles in the world – or kill enemies in particularly special ways. It’s a lot of fun and helps to familiarise players with the various abilities that Link has. In addition to the shrines, there are many item quests, a ridiculous 900 Korok seeds to collect – I’m glad for the DLC’s Korok seed hunting mask! – and mini-bosses to hunt. As you could imagine, it’s easy to get side-tracked and that’s not a bad thing.
Even uncovering Link’s memories requires exploration and discover, as you hunt through the world for locations shown in photos on the Sheikah Slate. These memories trigger story cutscenes which serve to flesh out the game’s backstory and add more layers to the characters you meet elsewhere, but again, there’s the joy of discovery behind all of this. While each photo has clues and landmarks in sight, you can gain a few pointers from a travelling painter that you bump into at stables and various places in the world. Talking to the people living in the shadow of Calamity Ganon can often give you small hints in a rather natural fashion.
After personally playing for well over 130 hours, I have beaten the main quests and all of the shrines, but still have new mounts to tame and hundreds of Korok Seeds to find. Even without The Master Quest’s temptation of restarting the game, I still have lots more to look forward to.
However, with the upcoming instalment of the game’s first DLC just releasing today, the game will offer a 42 stage Master Sword trial which when completed allows the Master Sword to become even more powerful. In addition to this, the game will feature a path tracker, which will track the entire journey the player has made on the world map, allowing players to easily see less-explored areas.
Having learnt how to use the Sheikah Slate’s abilities, you can take those abilities out into the world, using them to manipulate the game’s physics, sabotage enemies with cunningly crafted traps, and so on. If you have the ingenuity, you can really take advantage of the free space in Zelda, as it gives players freedom to make their own spectacular gaming moments.
Zelda’s weapons and shields are also interesting because about 98% of them can be broken relatively easy. This can be frustrating in the beginning when you’re limited to just a few hearts, but it influences the player to find better weapons and learn to use them. You want to learn the dodge and parry mechanics, though you don’t have to. It allows the player to be a little more creative with weapons and not just to depend on hugely powerful ones, in turn letting you save those same weapons for bosses and larger enemies.
What makes Zelda so great is that it has shown how open world games can evolve. It’s not just simplifying long-winded gameplay mechanics we’ve grown accustomed to, but allowing the player to take advantage of the environment without being too heavily directed to do so and still feeling like game progression is being made. It’s obvious that Nintendo wasn’t keen on incorporating the traditional checklist of objectives and waypoints that open-world games are so guilty of, but rather wanted players to freely discover Link’s past by exploring the region at their own pace. It’s because of this feeling that I actually played the game with the HUD turned off, for the most part, as I feel that’s best way to feel like you’re not following a set path, but rather exploring and discovering secrets – How I’m still discovering things is beyond comprehension!
Everyone I know has played and beaten the game in an entirely different way thanks to the above mechanics and features. In fact, players are still finding crazy ways to do things in the game, whether that be an inventive solution to a puzzle or just to navigate the beautiful landscapes across Hyrule at their own pace – the upcoming path tracker I mentioned earlier compliments this even further.
Breath of the Wild continues to be a marvel in open world game design and it would be nice to see other games take a page or two out of its book. There’s also the second expansion pack on the way, which is set to be a larger and more substantial expansion when it’s out later this year. At this point I’m simply wondering what else could they include to improve one of the best games in the past decade.
Severn2j
“…vigorously ramming…”
*snurk*