Overview
"The Legend of Zelda-Breath of the Wild", as a game released in 2017, gave a textbook answer to the question of how to make an open-world game. While Breath of the Wild gives the player as much freedom as possible, it also reduces the player's negative experience brought by the high degree of freedom through indirect control. The first part of this article analyzes the source of the sense of freedom from the three dimensions of freedom of exploration, freedom of play, and freedom of goals. The second part analyzes how the game solves the guidance, narrative, and pacing brought by the highly liberalized and open world.
The dimension of freedom
Freedom of exploration: Accessible Verticality
Large maps and rich details have always been a selling point of open-world games. A major feature of Breath of the Wild is its climbing and paragliding. The player can climb every peak he can see and jump down from it, making the contour lines on the map meaningful.
Climbing and Paragliding
Climbing and paragliding are two complementary systems, which are very important gameplay in Botw. The player can climb every peak and every building he sees on the big map without limit. This gameplay mainly plays the following three functions:
1. Diversify the path of exploration
Every time a player climbs a mountain or climbs a building, he will constantly make a decision: do I climb directly against this cliff? Or walk up the side road? This involves a game involving time, space, and difficulty, and different players will choose an optimal solution suitable for themselves according to their preferences. In this way, the player will feel that his exploration path is free, and it can also differentiate the player's path.
However, climbing should not be unlimited. Just imagine if climbing is not restricted by stamina, many players may have begun to challenge various peaks in the early stage of the game, instead of following the designer's road. Finally, they abandoned the tour during the long climb. The design of the stamina not only gives the player one more pursuit in character development but also makes the player more interesting when climbing. Every time you climb a mountain, you can feel like solving a puzzle. And the stamina is also very suitable for controlling the pacing of the game. Players with short energy bars in the early stage of the game are more inclined to walk along the uphill road designed by the designer, which is convenient for the tutorial. In the later stage of the game, they are given Players have a higher degree of freedom to choose their path with sufficient stamina.
2. Realize three-dimensional freedom
Although everyone is now sitting in 3D games, not every game has achieved three-dimensional freedom. For example, although GTA and The Witcher 3 has a huge map, the actual players in the game are like shuttles back and forth on a 2D plane. Although gta5 enriches the experience of the game on the vertical axis through its low falling speed set by its "very real physical system", it is still very limited compared with the climbing and paragliding of Botw.
3. Emotion Regulation
The whole process of climbing can be divided into multi-stage climbing -> lookout -> paragliding. The entire process of climbing is usually tedious, but smart designers usually put a few steamed mushrooms on the cliff to give some small rewards for the player to climb up, and also hint the player: use hasty steamed mushrooms to cook! The process of climbing is a kind of accumulation of emotions, and everything is prepared for the comfort of waiting to see the distance from the top of the mountain and when jumping down from the top of the mountain.
Freedom of gameplay: multiplicative gameplay
Breath of the Wild brings the richness of the interaction of various elements in the game to a new height. Take the fire element as an example. The fire element can interact with other elements, ignite the grass to generate updraft, and the fire can melt the ice. In addition, the fire element is integrated into the terrain, into the equipment, into the monster, into the game temperature, into the gameplay. In 2017 GDC, producer Hidemaro Fujibayashi described how the team used multiplicative gameplay to create such a rich interaction.
In the Zelda series, simple natural theories or scientific knowledge have always been used to create puzzles, but many of the mechanisms used in the past works were made only for a single puzzle. Although this method can strictly control the experience of each level, if it is placed in an open world like Botw, it will consume too many resources. So, the team thought of creating infinite gameplay through multiplication:
In the game, players can perceive Link's current situation and goals to be achieved, but players can use Player Actions × Field × Object to achieve their goals in different ways so that players can produce numerous solutions under the same situation and goals.
At last, since the element interaction in Botw restores the laws of physics and chemistry in nature, although multiplicative gameplay creates rich interaction and gameplay, it has no cost for players to understand. When you see the frozen shrine, you will naturally think about whether you can build a fire next to it or use a fire sword to melt it.
Freedom of goals: Cultivate diversity
Botw maintains the tradition of light cultivation of Zelda series, and the entire numerical system is very elegant. Even the calculation of damage is as simple as attack minus defense. The designer set some simple and lightweight player level-up goals as external motivations to inspire players to continue to explore the world. The player's goal will change dynamically according to his needs throughout the game.
1. Equipment
The equipment in the game is divided into five categories: weapons, bows, shields, armors, and horses. Except for armor and horses, other equipment has durability, which also encourages players to constantly collect and use different equipment. Due to the durability limit, only armor can be strengthened.
2. Stamina & Health
The stamina and health can only be increased by beating four divine beasts or completing shrines.
3. Item Collection
Many things can be collected in Botw, such as collecting various materials to make top-level cooking, collecting 900 distributed in Korok seeds, collecting memories…
Equipment building, stamina and health increase, and item collection are not independent of each other. To prevent players from focusing on only one aspect of cultivation, the designer cleverly linked those cultivation goals. For example, the collected Korok seeds can help expand the weapon slot. Master Sword needs to have more than 13 HP, which requires the player to complete at least 40 shrines.
Highly liberalized problem solving
The high degree of freedom also brings some negative effects. For example, how to guide the player toward the path laid by the designer in the open world? How to do storytelling? How to control the pacing of the game? What players need is a feeling of freedom. Let us see how Nintendo solves these problems.
Guidance
At CEDEC 2017 in Japan, the producer of Botw generously shared some tips and tricks in solving guidance problems in making this "open-air" game:
Gravity
They use a ‘gravity’ in field design, by placing structures of varying visibility/importance in different places, leading players in different directions, and allowing players to get sidetracked. This became a catalyst for "Infinite play" - going back and forth between different structures.
Different places have different appeals for different players. Some people are eager to increase their stamina, then the shrine might be more attractive to them, but for those players who are eager to plunder weapons, the monster fortress will be more attractive instead.
To make the tower and temple look more attractive, orange lights are lit. This color seems to be engraved with the feeling of "epic". And this light will be extra prominent and easy to find on a large area of the green field.
Using Shapes
From a field design standpoint, they discuss the "Triangle Rule". The whole map of the breath of the wilderness is basically designed based on large and small triangles. This rule carries out two objectives:
1. Gives players a choice as to whether to go straight over the triangle, or around it.
2. Obscure the player's view, so designers can utilize them to surprise players, make them wonder what they'll find on the other side.
Storytelling
Botw is about a warrior Link, who woke up after sleeping for 100 years, try to beat four divine beasts, and fought against Gagnon to save princess Zelda. The story is simple, relationships between the main characters are clear, and there is no big dramatic situation or big turning point in this game. Which makes it easier to tell the story with a non-linear method. The breath of the wilderness is not a story-driven game like the game Wizard, you don’t need to follow the storyline to complete the quest one by one.
Breath of the Wild uses non-linear story progression. Each story piece might be a totem or a villager's ballad. This method usually makes it difficult to introduce a complicated story compared to a linear narrative like Wizard. But thanks to Zelda's simple story, a non-linear narrative is a suitable choice.
I also posted this article on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/botw/comments/q0386h/zeldabotw_how_to_give_players_a_feeling_of/
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