Freedom isn’t a very common feature in games, not really. You may get told that a game has a map the size of Idaho and you have the freedom to wander over it and get up to all manner of shenanigans, but really you’ll find there are invisible and not so invisible barriers stopping you along the way. Either so you follow a story, or to avoid you dying in a stupidly hard bit right at the beginning or because allowing for every permutation of player behaviour is bloody hard.
Look at poor old Horizon Zero Dawn. Released the same week as Breath Of The Wild it featured a gorgeous game world, a compelling story and robot dinosaurs, and yet it was ruined because of Zelda. I played a bit of Horizon, then Zelda, then back to Horizon. Sadly, on return I just got frustrated. Aloy had limitations that Link didn’t. She couldn’t step over waist high boulders, she had to take the long way round, she lacked freedom.
At any other time, Horizon would have been a favourite game of mine, a glorious, polished AAA game, but Breath Of The Wild shone uncomfortable light on its restrictions and made me long for Aloy to have learned from Link.
In Breath Of The Wild you ‘have’ to do three things. Activate the tower on the Great Plateau, get your runes & paraglider, and beat Ganon. Everything else is optional.
There are plenty of things that will help make the game easier, or distract you, or make you smile, or grin, or yelp with delight. There are things that will make you gnash your teeth, run away, turn the console off and take deep breaths. There are plenty of things across a huge map that may be of comparable size to an American state.
But Breath Of The Wild doesn’t really care if you do them or not.
There’s few icons on the available map unless you want to pepper it with markers. It will fill in names of locations you visit and you’ll get fast travel points if you want to, but there are no clusters of icons showing different types of diversions. I played Mad Max after Breath Of The Wild, seeing its map fill up with missions and races and things just made me feep weary, not keen to explore.
In Breath Of The Wild you find things by going to look for things. You might not know what you’ll find, but you can be sure you’ll find something. There are routes, there are quests, there are signs to help you find stuff, but if you want to, you can ignore everything and just wander through nature.
Freedom comes with consequences of course. In the real world I have a pretty large degree of freedom, however it’s often in my best interest to stay within some guidelines. I could spend all of my money on Lego, not go to work and break the law. But I’d soon find myself without somewhere to live, massively in debt, quite hungry and eventually locked up. I could exercise free speech by being a twat to everyone, but then there’s a decent chance of becoming a social pariah or getting punched in the face.
In Breath Of The Wild, you could just run straight to Ganon after getting off the Great Plateau, but you’ll face the consequences of it being pretty difficult. Speed runners have been doing it and doing it well, but I’m much less skilled than them. So I exercised my freedom in the game to go and do almost everything else before heading to beat Ganon. The effect is much like every other game that funnels you through missions to power you up until you can take on the final challenge, except this time it was absolutely my choice as to how much I did or didn’t do. Although a consequence of this was finding the final battle to be ridiculously easy.
Additionally to this freedom of choice, Breath Of The Wild offers freedom of movement. Games have been progressing through the stage of “you see that mountain? You can go there” for some time now, but with Breath Of The Wild, they’ve stripped away the barriers between the player and getting there.
Link can climb on almost any surface, the places he can’t climb are so infrequent that you could say any surface and be mathematically correct within a fantastic degree of accuracy. This means if there’s something in the distance you like the look of, you can pretty much go in a straight line to see it.
It might not seem much, but it’s transformative. To free the player from the restrictions of navigating the scenery is revelatory. There’s one restriction in how much stamina Link has, but that can be expanded or worked around with potions or food, or just stopping halfway up for a breather.
Being able to climb up anything around you opens the game world up in the same way Super Mario 64 opened up the third dimension for Mario to wander in. No longer does Link have to move left to right through fixed paths from one dungeon to the next, instead he can climb over, under, around and through the world and Nintendo will have got there first and put something worth travelling for.
Of course, once you get up to the top of a mountain, there’s the tedious walk down again. I know this, I’ve been up Snowdon and Kilimanjaro. It’s a long trek back over stuff you’ve already seen when you want a bath. Link, the lucky sod, can just fling himself off the cliff and take the quick route down.
That essential item, the paraglider, perfectly complements his climbing. What goes up, must come down, so make it easy and fun to do so. You have the freedom to trudge down or to glide through the sky with a delirious rush of exhilaration. While you drift like a leaf on the wind, you’ll no doubt spot something interesting to glide over to and the game continues to push you to explore with tempting curiosities.
A lot of games give players different toys for use in their worlds, but often they’re things that you use in specific places when and where the game wants you to use them. It gives the player a feeling of having something useful but really you’re simply selecting “yes, I would like to pass this obstacle”. In Breath Of The Wild, things are a lot more freeform. In shrines there are a few points where you might have to freeze water to make a column of ice to open a gate, or use stasis to stop a spinning platform to cross it. But outside these specific puzzles it’s a very different story.
Using a few simple tools and a handful of rules to simulate real world physics, Breath Of The Wild can create amazing pieces of gameplay which might be a scripted set piece in other games but are just things that happen because you tried in this one.
Twitter has been great for seeing things like this. Nintendo added a share function for 30 seconds of video from the game. I’ve seen people surfing on tree trunks they’ve launched across the map, a huge enemie smacking a different huge enemie with a tree it had uprooted to attack Link, back flipping off a catapulted slab to one shot a Guardian, Cuccos (Zelda’s infamously irritable chickens) used offensively by luring enemies to attack them.
These unexpected events encourage the player to keep exploring, you can’t be certain what will happen when you get over the next hill, but you will have a good idea that it’ll be worth it.
Fortunately what happens in Breath Of The Wild is its own reward because unlike previous Zelda games you’re not going to be getting brilliant stuff in treasure chests that’ll open up new things to do. From the four initial shrines you will have the main tools for your adventure. You’ll pick up a lot of weapons along the way, but very few will stay with you and there are no dungeon specific items like you may be used to.
In Breath Of The Wild weapons degrade and break. I’ve seen a lot of people who don’t like this but personally I think it’s a great system. I think we’ve all played games before where we’ve stuck with a favoured weapon and ignored everything else picked up after. A lot of this is because you’ve had more practice with the earlier weapons you get and later on games get more difficult so it’s riskier to try to get the hang of something new.
By breaking your weapons, Breath Of The Wild forces you to adapt, often mid fight. You can switch quickly between weapons and if your weapon is about to break you can throw it and deal double damage as a last hurrah. If you’re not careful, you might end up with a selection poorly suited to what you’re up against, but there’s plenty of ways to avoid this. You can steal enemies’ weapons, store your favourites in your house, repair a select few, buy new ones, or just pick things up while wandering around.
Even these fragile weapons can be multi functional. There are puzzles that require connecting electrical circuits, if you can’t be bothered working out the solution, just whack a bunch of metal swords between the connections and it’ll work. You can use your magnetic rune to steer any metal weapon towards an enemy and attract lightning to it in a storm. Breath Of The Wild rewards experimentation within its systems.
I do wish some of the traditional Zelda items were in the game though. I would like a hookshot as it’d work superbly with the climbing and paraglider. I’d also quite like more convoluted dungeons. The shrines are nice mini dungeons (very mini) but the divine beasts don’t hold a candle to the best dungeons Zelda has had to offer. The lack of particularly complex dungeons is Breath Of The Wild’s biggest weakness. Incidentally, look on YouTube for Boss Keys, a series by Mark Brown about the dungeons in Zelda games. It’s a fascinating look about what does and doesn’t work in Zelda dungeons.
Breath Of The Wild is quite a radical departure from what has been a fairly predictable formula from Zelda games since Ocarina Of Time. But with its freedom of movement and amazing capacity for emergent gameplay, it offers the most expansive open world I’ve ever played. So many games promise a sandbox experience, but Breath Of The Wild is the first where I’ve really felt free to explore and do as I want.
I’m not sure where Nintendo will go next with Zelda, but the last time they had such a seismic shift in the game series it was Ocarina Of Time. If Breath Of The Wild can be followed up with an equivalent to Majora’s Mask then we will see something very special indeed.
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