Oh, you can't ascend this mountain anymore because it's raining and now the surface is slippery. The traversal mechanic also cleverly interacts with the robust weather, temperature and physics systems to both aid and undermine you. The stamina wheel gamifies the traversal process: Because stamina is a finite resource, the player is forced to plan a route and make decisions on the fly about how she is going to reach an interesting point she's staked out on the map. Traversal is the key gameplay mechanic in Breath of the Wild -– even more than the combat mechanic. Your map isn't a long Ubisoft-style to-do list instead, it's a record of where you've been and a reminder of places to return. After several hours of exploration, you've charted out a chunk of the world. So you mark the location with a "star" to come back to later. Instead, this is a game in which you discover an interesting geographical feature on your map and then have to find a way to get there, only to discover it leads to a puzzle you can't quite solve right now. This is not a game in which you chase a glowing chest icon. The seemingly minor decision to restrict what the map communicates - which at first feels like it's grating against common practice - was a fundamentally crucial one that puts the player into the exploratory mind-set. (I should note that I've chosen to turn off the mini map.)
The map is also, at first, blessedly free of icons aside from the odd waypoint, the only markings on it are the ones you choose to put there yourself. It's clear and functional, complete with useful topographic rings (contrast that against, say, Horizon Zero Dawn's colorful but unhelpful paint smear). So much of Breath of the Wild is, for me, finding a route up a cliff face, or stopping to watch the sunrise, or just listening to the whistle of the wind and the scurry of critters in the brush.īreath of the Wild sets the stage for this meditative experience first and foremost through its map. The location itself ends up becoming secondary: Whether you're in steampunk London or in GTA's funhouse version of Hollywood, you're basically chasing the same waypoints and obsessively collecting the same shiny thingies.īut Breath of the Wild dumps most of this typically calcified open world stuff, and replaces it with a different kind of video-game pleasure: the joy of exploration. The result is that they tend to blend together into a mélange of similar gameplay beats.
Over time, these open worlds have become increasingly cluttered with gameplay to-dos: waypoints, mini-games, races, collectibles, camps to clear and chunks of the map to color in.
It's a formula that's been refined over the past few iterations of Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls and Far Cry, among others of that ilk. There are two key hallmarks of the open-world genre: There is a big map to freely traverse, and there's a lot of stuff to do on that map. But Breath of the Wild deserves just as much credit for how it subverts and reaffirms the power of the open world. Much has been said about how it's a new take on the dusty old Zelda formula, or on how it represents a fresh direction for Nintendo in general, by buoying its new Switch console.
At this point, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has become a video-game phenomenon.