Breath of the Wild’s early playtests were a disaster for Nintendo
While Breath of the Wild may be a modern classic now, its first playtests showed Nintendo’s vision for the open-world game had failed. The news comes from YouTube channel Game Maker’s Toolkit, which found and translated records from a Computer Entertainment Developers Conference in Japan shortly after Breath of the Wild released, where Nintendo gave a rare interview about designing the Zelda game and some of the challenges the team (thanks, GamesRadar).
One of the most significant issues Nintendo faced was getting players to actually explore the world. In the early versions of BotW’s Hyrule, players could see Shiekah Towers or other notable landmarks from their starting point. They look important, so naturally, the testers’ prioritized reaching them by the fastest, easiest road possible. 80 percent of them followed Hyrule’s actual roads without stopping to explore anywhere else.
Nintendo didn’t like that, so the design team followed what they called the triangles theory and blocked players’ line of sight with objects. Those hills and trees crowding the horizon aren’t just there to make Hyrule look natural. They’re meant to force you off the beaten path, into the wilds, so you eventually lose sight of that original objective and stumble on new secrets.
Such a struggle is hardly surprising. Breath of the Wild was Nintendo’s first in-house open-world game, after all. There were bound to be bugs in the process, and that may be why they enlisted Xenoblade developer Monolith Soft to help the team.
Whatever the case, Tears of the Kingdom certainly didn’t have a similar problem for reviewers. As of the day before the Breath of the Wild sequel launches, it has the highest rating of any game on OpenCritic.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF