Breath of the Wild was a massive shakeup for the Zelda series and one of the more successful reinventions in recent memory, but the team at Nintendo didn't fully know it was the right call until they started seeing some of the unexpected ways players were tinkering around with the game's reactive systems.
Hidemaro Fujibayashi, director for Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and longtime series producer Eiji Aonuma looked back on the open-world pivot in a conversation published in Keza MacDonald's new book Super Nintendo (via Polygon).
"There were times that I’d see something on YouTube and think, 'This is amazing! Isn’t this amazing?'" said Aonuma.
Breath of the Wild has been out for almost nine years, and it's endured as one of the games I most frequently return to, in large part because it feels like there's a limitless amount of things to do and discover. I still remember all sorts of viral YouTube videos about things you didn't know you could do in Breath of the Wild. It seems Aonuma and Fujibayashi went beyond those and found player creations even they weren't expecting to see.
"It gave us such confidence," added Fujibayashi. “After we released the game and saw what people were doing with it, we realized that this was the right direction to head in . . . We saw that people were exploring how to play."
As it turns out, it was this same kind of experimentation of systems that gave the Zelda leads the idea to expand on that for a sequel, which would ultimately become 2023's Tears of the Kingdom.
"We thought there was a lot of potential even just using what was already in Breath of the Wild," Fujibayashi said. "That's where I came up with the idea that we could continue to make Breath of the Wild even better. That's why I thought a sequel would be a good idea."
Longtime Zelda producer says "the hardware evolution" lifts "restrictions" but, more importantly, "greatly influences the game design"
