How Nintendo Solved Zelda's Open World Problem

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To mark the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, let's look back at the making of Breath of the Wild's open world.
=== Sources ===
How the "Open Air" world was created... | Gamer.Ne
www.gamer.ne.jp/news/20170901...
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has become a game... | IGN Japan
jp.ign.com/cedec-2017/16928/n...
The Perfect Game World Born under Nintendo's New Development Approach... | GNN Gamer
gnn.gamer.com.tw/detail.php?s...
The perfect game world of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild... | 4Gamer
www.4gamer.net/games/341/G034...
Did the map for "Zelda" start in Kyoto!? | Game.Watch.Impress
game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs...
The Making of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Video - Open-Air Concept | Nintendo
• The Making of The Lege...
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s map is based on Kyoto | Polygon
www.theverge.com/2017/3/6/148...
=== Credits ===
Music provided by Epidemic Sound - www.epidemicsound.com/referra... (Referral Link)
=== Subtitles ===
Contribute translated subtitles - amara.org/videos/eB3GnQWpxx4M/

[@GMTK]

So what about the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom? Here's how Nintendo designed the incredible new mechanic, Ultrahand -

[@ineffabletryx6528]

One of my favorite memories was when I purposefully avoided going to any of the divine beasts, and instead decided to just wander around starting from Kakariko village. Eventually I stumbled upon a bridge, and Sidon popped out and said hi. I thought they were just another NPC for a side quest, and I went to follow them. After arriving at the Zora Kingdom, I realized that I had stumbled upon the main quest completely by accident.

[@H4MM-R]

The triangle rule is seriously blowing my mind right now. It might not seem like it at first but it really is a genius solution to such an obscure and difficult problem.

[@arbo6850]

It’ll be fun to see how/if the triangle paradigm is used in Tears of the Kingdom. Hard to hide a hundred floating islands behind a mountain

[@MecanicalEnd]

The Japanese make the best games

[@Platitudinous9000]

World design is so important to any type of game, and it can be hard to analyze when it's meant to be naturalistic like in Zelda, but no matter the setting, everything is there for a reason.

[@Default78334]

The big thing that stood out to me in BoTW was that exploring required you to actually...explore. It kinda blew my mind when they introduced the first tower and basically told you "Yes, you actually need to look around, find the thing yourself and mark it yourself" instead of just filling your map automatically with a bunch of points of interest.

[@weckar]

And this is where TOTK failed. The frequent aerial perspective shows too much at once.

[@LeoStaley]

Babe, drop everything, gmtk dropped a new video.

[@NakeyJakey]

mark you are an absolute treasure and such an amazing resource for all things game design. thank you for putting this together <3

[@kedo]

The triangle rule is seriously blowing my mind right now. It might not seem like it at first but it really is a genius solution to such an obscure and difficult problem.

[@SandisPsychGrind]

Also, having the endgoal of the entire game obviously in the center and almost always in sight, I think, helped mitigate concerns of "not knowing what to do." The point is to explore and power up so you can eventually go to the middle. Once I understood this, the game became more enjoyable. It's why I immediately jumped into the fun with totk.

[@k2cr]

You can definitely see how they've even, somehow, improved upon these concepts in TOTK:

[@PasCorrect]

I love how you can completely miss less important landmarks until you're hundreds of hours into the game. For example, I was astonished at how late I discovered the snowbowling minigame, the fairy fountain right next to Tarry Town, the horseback archery course, and lots of random little named locations (e.g. Shadow Hamlet Ruins) only found by scouring for Koroks.

[@KarlRock]

Epic! I wondered how this worked. I never take the roads. Sometimes I wondered if I should've. I'm playing Tears of the Kingdom right now and I feel like the level design has been improved even more because after finishing one point of interest, there's usually a next one nearby. It's hard to stop playing TOTK.

[@robdood2]

I think one of the things that also feels really rewarding about this kind of exploration is the fact that you really 'take in' the map into your memory. At times you spin the camera and spot somewhere you were 10 hours ago from a different angle and it's kinda nostalgic and awesome! <3

[@CalebCheek]

One of the coolest things about TOTK is how NPC dialogue naturally directs you to other locations,quests, items, lore etc. In other open world games, NPC’s usually just exist for a singular purpose but in this game, they might suggest checking out a village you may or may not have been to already and will give you details, even after finishing their quest line

[@catfish552]

I think something that really helps this style of exploration is the scope, pins, and stamps. You can mark interesting locations, and the scope and pins make it very easy to relate a spot in the game world to a spot on the map.

[@Nursesaids]

What I appreciated about Breath so much was discovery for its own sake.

[@confusedzebra3161]

I remember first starting this game thinking there were no friendly NPCs other than the old man. It took me far too long to come across anybody but when I did I was shocked to see someone walking down the road and right after that I found all sorts of people and it really opened up.