Legend Of Zelda 2019: How Nintendo Can Beat Breath Of The Wild

Changing The Formula

The Legend of Zelda series’ basic formula can be summed up with 3 main ingredients:

- Recurring heroes and villains (Link, Zelda, Impa, Ganon)

- Varying environments (Hyrule Castle, Zora’s Domain, Gerudo Valley)

- Equipment used to solve puzzles, and utilised in boss fights (Hookshot, Fire Arrow, Magnesis)

Nintendo took this same basic formula and changed Zelda from a mostly linear story peppered with side quests into a massive open world where the side quests are easily more of a focus than the main one. In Breath of the Wild (BotW), you can technically go immediately from your starting point straight to the final boss, although this will be very difficult with no equipment and isn’t exactly recommended.

Players were free, for the first time in the series, to complete as much side content as they felt comfortable with before moving on to complete the game.

This modernisation and catering to the open-world genre currently dominating the gaming market contributed heavily to the game’s success, and many who had never been interested in the series were now scrambling to purchase a Nintendo console for the first time.

The craftsmanship of the Nintendo Switch system, for which BotW was a launch title, did factor in somewhat to the success of the game. Not only could be go anywhere we wanted around the world of Hyrule, but we could also take it with us anywhere we wanted in the real world, too.

Breath of the Wild introduced a solid physics engine that made solving puzzles an absolute joy, with often more than one way of tackling a problem, and a chemistry engine that introduced dynamic weather that made climbing walls in the rain slippery, and metal weapons conduct lightning.