Zelda series is a classic game launched by Nintendo, IP, which has gone through many years and many versions, but it was not until “Breath of the Wild” that it re-established a new benchmark for the design of modern games in the open world.
In fact, the main story of the game is not complicated, the player is playing an amnesia brave Link, to retrieve the memory, and finally defeated the devil Cannon, rescued Princess Zelda.
How popular is this game?
In just three years by the end of June 2020, the Breath of the Wild, which can only be sold on Nintendo’s own hardware platform, had sold 18.6 million copies of its Switch version alone without PS, Xbox and PC versions; including the Wii U version, it had sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
It has also won a number of heavyweight awards in the gaming industry, including the 2017 TGA Awards.
Why do people say it is the new benchmark for an open world?
What kind of new breakthrough has GTA5 made above its brilliant peak?
Japanese use small boxes, shallow pots with soil and sand built into the garden-style bonsai.
Nintendo, once the most famous game producer Shigeru Miyamoto, first introduced this concept to game design and put forward the “sandtray theory”.
He said that every SandBox world is like “a well-designed hamster cage”. The core is to make players feel a certain degree of freedom and rich exploration through careful design and arrangement in the limited space, and then constantly maintain a sense of difference and set off the interest of the game through the connection and transformation of different SandBox.
On the face of it, SandBox is irrelevant or even contradictory to the open world. SandBox emphasizes that designers have complete control over the player experience, which is more like a linear process game, while the open world emphasizes giving players more freedom, which is often beyond the control of designers, while “Breath of the Wild” happens to build an open world in the way of SandBox, and it succeeds. How does it do that?
Because the world of “Breath of the Wild” is more concerned with allowing players to experience rhythmic games under the imperceptible guidance of designers, rather than complete freedom.
In other open world games, because of the high degree of freedom of players’ behavior, the players’ exploration of the whole game world and the game experience they get are generally chaotic and disorderly, lacking the sense of rhythm in linear flow games, but the real entertainment pleasure often comes from the carefully arranged control of the rhythm of anxiety release.
How to control the rhythm and provide freedom?
Before “Breath of the Wild” used SandBox theory to come up with an excellent solution, no game had ever come up with a reliable solution!
In their sharing at the GDC conference, Nintendo officials introduced the source of their solution: to build a rhythmic and open world for players based on real-life maps of Kyoto.
The key elements here are:
Tall tower.
Since there are not many skyscrapers in Kyoto, people living in Kyoto are accustomed to using the surrounding mountains and tall buildings to locate their own directions. in the players’ games, the first things they see are the towers that glow no matter how far away they are. This allows designers to have a preliminary general direction and rhythmic guidance on the behavior of players.
The temple.
Every time players climb a tower, they can always see some glowing temples in the surrounding area. These temples and towers shine the same light, and players naturally have a desire to explore the sites where these temples are located.
More temples and interaction points.
When players are on their way to activate temples, they may find more hidden temples and interaction points.
Sense of distance, sense of density.
Designers visit the distance and frequency of post office mailboxes and convenience stores in daily life to determine the distribution of interactive elements in the game.
A sense of time.
By visiting many scenic spots, supermarkets, hotels and other places in Kyoto, combined with the size of the place and the time of the visit, to determine the time required for all kinds of puzzles in the game.
In addition, the game also skillfully through horses, post stations and other ways to implicitly guide and guide the actions of players.
Therefore, the open world of “Breath of the Wild” is carefully designed and built like SandBox.
Players think that they are acting according to their own will, but in fact, they are experiencing a reasonable game rhythm according to the full consideration of the designer.
This kind of design is much more difficult than a completely free open world, but it greatly reduces the workload of game development.
2. High-degree-of-freedom play brought by physical and chemical twin engines.
After talking about the seemingly open but actually guiding design of “Breath of the Wild”, we also want to take a look at the degree of freedom design that really exists in “Breath of the Wild”.
Although GTA5 has a high degree of simultaneity, the virtual world built by Breath of the Wild is not inferior in NPC AI, environmental details and other aspects, and even made some breakthroughs in building a “real” world!
One of the biggest breakthroughs is the physics + chemistry twin engine, in addition to the traditional physical engine effect, but also added some new mechanisms, such as:
The concept of weight is introduced.
The objects and people in the game have weight. On some organs that need to be pressed by heavy objects, players can stand on their own, or they can put 8 apples to hold down the machine.
It introduces more chemical reaction rules.
Water can water the fire, wind can spread the fire to the wider grass, with a metal weapon to hit the flint, if there is wood next to it, it will make a fire.
The concept of temperature is introduced.
The protagonist will be frozen in the snow, hold a torch or eat a chili dish to help keep out the cold. If you carry an ice weapon on your back when walking in a volcanic area, the ice will melt in high temperatures.
It introduces the rules of magnetism.
All metal objects and organs can be controlled through the magnet skill.
On the one hand, the introduction of these basic rules strengthens the fidelity of the game world, on the other hand, it provides more possibilities for players’ behavior.
For example, when a player wants to cross a cliff, he can glide over the cliff affixed to the opposite cliff with a paraglider, and then climb to the top, or he can cut down a big tree on the edge of the cliff as a single log bridge. you can also use time to still lock a slate and attack the stored momentum, then stand on it, and let the slate fly over it when time recovers, and you can also light a fire in the grass to create an updraft.
You glide straight to the other side…
This high-degree-of-freedom combination of “Breath of the Wild” is also known as “emerging design”.
It is not easy to achieve the effect of emergent design like Breath of the Wild. On the one hand, there is no formed theory or framework to guide designers on how to do emergent design.
On the other hand, the addition of any mechanism may have a subversive impact on all previous mechanisms, and even on the whole game, and the optimal solution that any designer did not think of may destroy the richness of the whole system. This is this deliberate out-of-control design, which may bring the risk of really damaging out of control.
No matter how experienced designers are, they may need a lot of trial and error in order to make an excellent emerging gameplay system.
Even the Nintendo team, when making “Breath of the Wild”, specifically made a 2D version to verify the game.
So, although both GTA5 and “Breath of the Wild” have ultra-high degrees of freedom, there is a big difference between them:
The freedom of GTA5 is more reflected in the freedom of game goals, that is, players have a lot of things they want to do, so there are relatively few ways to achieve goals; while the freedom of “Breath of the Wild” is more reflected in the ways that can be used to achieve a certain goal, that is, players have a variety of ways to achieve goals, and relatively speaking, the things they want to do are not as rich as GTA5.
To sum up, the ability of “Breath of the Wild” to design the whole open world as a macroscopically controllable level is amazing, and its innovation in the underlying mechanism and rules is also full of courage. It can be said that Breath of the Wild has made a breakthrough in building a virtual world and providing “free” interaction, providing new ideas and directions for later generations.