Hey, it's Mark.
New video is here - watch it on YouTube or Nebula, or read the script as an article below:
So, back in 2013, longtime Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma promised that the next big Zelda entry - coming soon to the Wii U - would completely reinvent the Zelda franchise. He said...
"Our mission ... is quite plainly to re-think the conventions of Zelda. I'm referring to the expectation that the player is supposed to complete dungeons in a certain order, or that you're supposed to play by yourself. The things we've come to take for granted recently. We want to set aside these conventions, get back to basics and create a newborn Zelda so that the players can best enjoy the real essence of the franchise."
And he wasn't lying. This next game wouldn't just shake up the formula - but it would fundamentally change how Zelda games would be designed, perhaps, forever.
Here's how it happened.
So, by 2013, Zelda had settled into a familiar and formulaic groove. In each game, hero Link visits dungeon number one, finds some handy new item, uses it to defeat the boss - and open up the next part of the world map.
Where he'll visit dungeon number two, find a handy new item, defeat a boss - and, well, you get the picture.
Sure, each Zelda game might have a unique world... tone... cast of characters... and clever mechanical gimmick - but this strictly linear structure had barely changed since Ocarina of Time back in 1998. It had become stale and a little bit stinky.
And it all culminated in the disappointing Skyward Sword - which adhered so closely to this formula that it felt like a pale paint-by-numbers parody of a Zelda game.
Something had to change, and Aonuma knew it - saying...
"We started to feel that fans may not continue playing this franchise unless they can think independently and try various things freely on their own, rather than following a set path".
So it was time to mix things up. For the next game - which, spoiler alert, would be Breath of the Wild - he gave his team a wildly ambitious mandate: to rethink every aspect of the Zelda franchise. To consider every convention that had become an essential staple of the series and ask if it truly had to be that way.
Aonuma says "I told the staff, "This time, let's build the game without shying away from anything. Let's stop thinking about what Zelda has been up until now."
Of course, the first ideas were pretty out there. Link fighting aliens in UFOs. Or dodging missile attacks from the sky. Or meeting Lovecraftian monsters. Or bombing around Hyrule on a motorbike. That was all a bit off.
Well, except for the motorbike.
But eventually the team came to look at the more fundamental, structural bones of the Zelda formula. That's ultimately what needed changing. The game's director, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, said...
"We wrote down all of the stress points, the things that make Zelda games less enjoyable, and we replaced them with new ideas."
And this led to five key changes to the Zelda formula.
So, as stated, Zelda was a series where you must do things in a strictly linear, and predetermined order. But for this new game, there would be no predetermined order.
The four divine beasts... and the 120-odd shrines could be tackled in literally any order you see fit. Or not at all, actually. The only mandatory bits in Breath of the Wild are the tutorial and the fight against Ganon. The rest is entirely optional.
This idea was trialled in A Link Between Worlds on 3DS. And it was part of the very first Zelda game on NES. But with Breath of the Wild, Zelda would finally see true freedom and complete non linearity.
But it wasn't just about linearity. Zelda was also a series made up of individual areas connected by doors, gates, and gaps in the clouds.
But for Breath of the Wild, the world would be a single contiguous space that can be explored in any direction.
And nothing can block your path as Link can swim across rivers, climb up virtually any vertical surface, and soar over the landscape with a paraglider.
Zelda was also a series that told you where to go and what to do, often with an overbearing companion character who would offer, uh, helpful hints and advice.
Breath of the Wild would be the opposite.
Outside of quest markers that show the location of the four divine beasts, players would be left to explore by themselves. And the developers would stay silent - choosing to guide the player through the design of the environment, or the placement of harder enemies, or with a breadcrumb trail of curiosities that lead you to the next important place.
Zelda was also a game with hand-crafted puzzles that would require you to find the designer's single, intended solution.
But for Breath of the Wild, that would be totally reversed.
Instead, the world is constructed from a set of interconnected physical and chemical properties like wind, fire, electricity, and gravity. And so players could exploit these relationships to discover their own way to solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and bypass obstacles.
Even if that means skipping the puzzle entirely.
Fujibayashi says "I really want players to relish those moments where you do something and think, oh my gosh, I'm a genius."
And Zelda was a game with a pretty limited moveset, and mostly contextual actions - down to having an automated jump when Link runs off the edge of a platform.
But in Breath of the Wild, Link would have a surprisingly extensive moveset.
That includes a dedicated jump button, the ability to throw weapons, climb up walls, surf on his shield, and more. This would give players way more control over Link's actions and let them travel through the world in a more freeform manner.
And look, there are even more ways that Breath of the Wild mixed things up. Like how you no longer get hearts from chopping down grass, but from hunting and cooking. Or how Link now wears a blue tunic rather than a green one.
But, it was those five key changes to the Zelda formula - a non-linear structure, a fully open world, laid-back hints, systems-driven problem-solving, and an expanded moveset - that really made Breath of the Wild feel so different.
But here's the thing. The result wasn't just a fun game, and a Game of the Year winner. The result was actually a fundamental shift in how the game relates to the player.
You see, Fujibayashi refers to the previous Zelda games, like Skyward Sword, as passive games. Games where players go through the content in a predetermined order, solve puzzles by finding the developer's intended solution, and play within the tight confines of walls and obstacles.
Games where the player merely follows the designer's lead in a docile, passive way.
But with these changes, Breath of the Wild became the opposite of a passive game: an active game.
Here, the player is very much in the driving seat. They choose what content to engage with and what order to do it. They choose where to go and how to get there. They figure out their own solutions to problems. And they have to think, plan, explore, and experiment in a much more active way.
In a passive game, the designer's job is to make hand crafted content for players to experience. But in an active game, the designer's job is to make a sandbox, give the player some toys, define a goal, and just let the player get on with it.
And I think this is quite an interesting lens through which to look at game design as you can plot almost every game on this spectrum. From very passive games - you know, linear, story-based games like Call of Duty and The Last of Us - to super active games - playful, sandbox sims like Minecraft and Factorio. As well as everything in between.
Now in order to get here, the developers had to rethink everything.
Art director Satoru Takizawa said "to create an appealing, never-before-seen world filled with new surprises, you need to break conventions. You need to be creatively reckless."
But there were some other important factors, too. Like having fresh eyes - Aonuma gives credit to the contributions of younger staff members who would come up with fresh ideas and weren't set in their ways from decades of working on the same franchise.
Fan feedback was important too - the producer says that Breath of the Wild's open world was made partly in response to players wanting to explore the areas in between the disconnected chunks of Skyward Sword.
And there were also outside influences - the team played games like Minecraft, Terraria, and Skyrim to get ideas. Historically it's rare for Nintendo to name check other games - especially ones made outside of Japan.
But, whatever the case, the result was a truly incredible game. And for the Zelda team - it would prove impossible to ever go back to that more passive style of game design.
Like, seriously - Aonuma was practically radicalised by what he saw in Breath of the Wild. It fundamentally changed his mind about how Zelda games should be designed.
For instance, he's said that he once thought it was a "sin" to let players get lost in a game - hence the overbearing helper characters and the linear level design of the older Zelda entries.
But with Breath of the Wild, he saw how it could be fun to let players wander off the beaten track and find their own adventure. He says...
"I wanted to basically have the players experience this 'getting lost' while getting to the next destination, because this journey leads to something they’ve created with a path they’ve chosen. I myself learned that getting lost wasn’t so bad after all, so I was able to reflect this idea to this game."
So for Aonuma, Breath of the Wild showed a new, and - to him - much better way to design games. In fact, when he replayed the Wind Waker, he thought it felt outdated. He's described set puzzles with single solutions as being an "old design". And as for future Zelda titles? Well, he says...
"I think for me ... the incredible freedom that this game offers you and how well that's been received…to me, it means that level of freedom is something that needs to be maintained in Zelda games going forward. My eyes have been opened to how important that is".
And so Breath of the Wild has continued to influence future games in the franchise. And the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, doubled down on this active, player-led, problem-solving gameplay.
In fact, Nintendo was so inspired by how players used the Breath of the Wild sandbox to pull off wild and unexpected things that the sequel gives you even more radical toys - including the ability to glue physics objects together to build vehicles and machines.
And players are given even more opportunities to exploit the game and find their own solution. Take the ability "ascend", which lets you dig through the ceiling and pop out on the other side. It started as a debug option during development, to let the creators quickly skip past content, but it later became a defacto power in game. Technical director Takuhiro Dohta said...
"We've placed more importance on creating a game that enables players to do exactly what they think they can do, rather than how we want them to play the game".
And then there's the spin-off title, Echoes of Wisdom, which was made by outside studio Grezzo. The team pitched a clever copy-and-paste game mechanic and Aonuma was like "yeah, cool, whatever, great - just make sure the player has tonnes of freedom".
So the game lets players be mischievous and exploit all sorts of cheesy tricks to solve problems. And players are allowed to tackle challenges out of order, and are encouraged to find their own path through the story. Co-director Tomomi Sano says...
"We put effort into maintaining player freedom. Limiting mechanics makes development easier, but it frustrates players when things don’t work as expected. We wanted to avoid that."
So if you ask Aonuma - this is how every Zelda game will be, going forward. He says...
"Games where you need to follow a specific set of steps or complete tasks in a very set order are kind of the games of the past. The games of today are ones in which that can accept a player's own decisions and give them the freedom to flexibly proceed through the game, and the game will allow for that".
In fact, he went so far as to question why anyone would want a game that felt like the older Zelda titles. He said...
"Why do you want to go back to a type of game where you're more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?"
Well... sir, if you're asking, then, I have some thoughts.
Because here's the thing: as much as I love these three new games - and all of the advantages that this "active" design philosophy brings - I have to admit that these games don't always feel like Zelda titles.
And that's because the changes necessary to make an active game ended up removing some of the stuff that makes Zelda... well, Zelda.
For example, consider that old formula where you get a new item in each dungeon. This might be linear and restrictive but it does mean that each Zelda game has a wonderful sense of mechanical progression - where you get brand new toys at fairly even points throughout the adventure.
As the game goes on, Link becomes more powerful and adept - and the player is always left wondering what cool new ability is just around the corner.
But for Breath of the Wild - well, the team never wants you to reach a shrine or a dungeon that requires some ability that you don't have. And so the solution is to just dump all of the games mechanics on you, during the tutorial. Which means you'll see pretty much everything the game has to offer in the first couple hours.
And then only one of the dungeon rewards - Revali's Gale - adds a fun new wrinkle to Link's moveset.
Then there are the dungeons themselves. Zelda's old temples are beautiful puzzle box playgrounds. Clever spatial reasoning conundrums that you slowly unpick by finding keys and items. Or by changing the water level... moving back and forth in time... or flipping the entire temple on its head.
But that sort of level design requires heavy restrictions, a narrow lock and key structure, and hand-crafted puzzle solutions. That doesn't gel with Breath of the Wild's freewheeling movement system and puzzle design. But that leads to lax dungeon layouts that can be cheated and cheesed.
And so, the new dungeons often end up feeling messy and frankly unsatisfying. I didn't even bother doing a Boss Keys episode on Tears of the Kingdom's dungeons because what's the point if you can just phase through the floor and skip half the puzzles?
And more broadly, Nintendo's focus on player-driven solutions can sometimes lead to moments of surprise and delight - but just as often it can lead to repetitive solutions, cheesy exploits, and outright cheats.
There's also the storyline. I've never been too fussed by the narratives in Zelda games - but they do at least have a structure.
Breath of the Wild's plot, meanwhile, is essentially, a bunch of disparate memories told in a jumbled up order. There's no emotional escalation, no dramatic timing, no pace, no structure, no arcs.
And finally - the older Zelda games were full of beautiful, curated, and hand-crafted spaces that have resonated for decades. But the new Zelda worlds - by dint of needing to be utterly massive - can feel empty, soulless, and repetitive.
These worlds even veer into the realm of feeling like they were generated by an algorithm.
So when Aonuma asks why anyone would want to return to the older style of Zelda - well this is why. There are hugely important aspects of those older titles that have simply been lost in the shuffle.
And ultimately, I'd argue that the active design philosophy of Breath of the Wild isn't inherently better than the passive design philosophy of Ocarina of Time - it's just different. In fact, both styles have their own pros and their own cons.
They offer different experiences that suit different players, or just different moods. 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.
But here's the question - does it have to be one way or the other? Because in the last year, I've played two games that had me thinking about how Zelda might reconcile its different eras.
The first is Resident Evil: Requiem. No spoilers, don't worry. So this game cleverly mashes up two very different parts of the franchise's history. When you play as Grace Ashcroft, the game is a first-person, haunted house spook 'em up, ala Resident Evil 7 and 8.
But when you play as Leon Kennedy, the game turns into a campy, third-person, action-packed romp, calling back to Resident Evil 4, 5, and 6.
This two-hander not only satisfies fans of both styles of game - but it works as a nifty little palette cleanser. Just when your anxiety is amped up to breaking point, the perspective shifts to Leon and you get to blow off some steam.
Could you do something similar for Zelda? A game that incorporates aspects of both eras? Maybe! I could imagine some future game more clearly delineate between the overworld - which would play like Breath of the Wild - and the dungeons - which would feel more like classic Zelda.
And, as for the other game?
Well, it's no secret that Breath of the Wild has inspired other Nintendo franchises, beyond just Zelda itself. Fans and critics have noticed its influence on games like Mario Odyssey, Bowser's Fury, Mario Kart World, and Pokemon Legends.
Plus, Metroid producer Kensuke Tanabe has specifically said that Breath of the Wild's open world design led to the inclusion of the desert hub in Prime 4.
But then there's the most Breath-pilled game of the bunch. Donkey Kong Bananza.
Now this is a very active game. This is a game where you don't just climb up and over any surface - but can actively smash right through it. It's a game with an ultra expansive move set. It's got heaps of optional content - did you know you can complete this whole game without ever picking up a single Banandium Gem? And there's a lot of freedom in how you go through the game.
Co-director Kazuya Takahashi says...
"There’s a lot of leeway in terms of progression in this game. For example, locations or parts of the story you can skip without suffering any consequences. Typically, in game development, restrictions are put in place to prevent [sequence breaks] from happening, but since this game is all about destruction, we wanted people to play freely."
But it's not total freedom. The animal transformations are doled out across the entire adventure, just like classic Zelda's items. And there's a storyline with an actual plot and, like, stuff that happens. I know, crazy right?
Now I don't think Zelda needs to copy Bananza's structure entirely. But it just goes to show that it's possible to balance player-driven freedom with designer-set progression. A mix of active and passive elements.
So, look - we don't know much about what Nintendo has planned for the next Zelda game.
We've got some clues.
We know it won't be a direct sequel to Tears of the Kingdom - "that would be a sequel to a sequel, which is getting a bit wild", says Aonuma. And it won't feature Ultrahand - that's a one-off mechanic, exclusively for Tears. Oh, and it may take some inspiration from the new Hyrule Warriors game. But it's very vague what that might mean.
And also I haven't played that game. Is it any good? I dunno. Lemme know.
But - here's what we do know: just like how the previous games worked off the formula set by Ocarina of Time, this next game will build upon the template set by Breath of the Wild.
But I don't think we've seen the final form of this new style yet. And I'm confident that we'll see Aonuma and his team tweak and experiment with this new design philosophy - inspired by both fan feedback, and competing games.
And, if we're lucky, they'll find a some mythical middle ground - halfway between the imaginative, freeform experimental fun of Breath of the Wild - and the beautifully handcrafted majesty of Ocarina of Time.
To be honest, I just don't know. But I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with. Happy 40th anniversary, Zelda. I can't wait to see where you go next.