8 "Simple" Video Game Features That Took YEARS To Perfect

6. Climbing - Breath Of The Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild's entire mantra is focused around player choice. Right from the opening, the game puts the final level right in front of you, perfectly attainable should you want to prioritise it, while letting you roam in any direction and explore until your heart's content. What made it so liberating though is one tiny mechanic: the ability to climb any part of the environment.

Whether it's the highest mountains or smallest buildings, you can attempt to climb anything in BOTW, and the only things stopping you from reaching the top will be how much stamina you have, and whether or not it's raining.

Of course, while that's a great concept, allowing the player to climb anything and everything has the ability to completely break your open world. If you can reach anywhere, the sense of wonder of getting there is suddenly gone, and the developers at Nintendo had a lot of tinkering to do to make sure the freedom still felt satisfying and rewarding.

The previously-mentioned stamina system was the biggest way the team achieved this. This capped how far players could climb, but even this took a lot to balance. During production the devs had half-steps in place, such as a mechanic where you could drive a sword into the side of the rock and rest to regain some stamina before continuing, but eventually scrapped them.

In the end, they settled on the regular stamina system, as well as a set of climbing gear to help you out.