After working on such a gigantic, meticulously-designed game, we asked series producer Eiji Aonuma and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi how they feel seeing people find shortcuts and alternate solutions.
“That was definitely one of our goals. That's totally all according to plan,” Fujibayashi told IGN. “A big theme of this game was that there should be multiple answers, multiple methods, multiple ways of doing anything. All the dungeons, we wanted to make it so that the players would be able to solve problems in any way they wanted to without us even being able to know what they would do to solve it."
"It had to be an environment where they could do things we couldn't predict if it would work," he continued. So we have a lot of fun watching the videos and seeing people do things that we didn't actually predict and things that are totally unique. So yeah, it worked out.”
With so much freedom and so many potential solutions, we asked Aonuma if his experiences watching Breath of the Wild videos have impacted his thinking for future Zelda games, or if he’d rather return to a more linear design.
“You know, I can't speak to what other people, other companies will do in their own games, but I think for me, especially just in terms of the Zelda series, the incredible freedom that this game offers you and how well that's been received…to me, it means that freedom, that level of freedom is something that needs to be maintained in Zelda games going forward. My eyes have been opened to how important that is,” Aonuma said.
“So one of the things that we definitely consider is that we always wanted to make sure the player could understand what their challenges or what their hurdle is. We always wanted to make sure the challenge could be challenged. So we always wanted to make a linear way of [overcoming] a hurdle."
"So for example, if there was like, ‘you can't do this because you don't have the right tools' or 'you don't meet the certain requirements,’ players are going to not want to do that anymore. So we wanted to very much incorporate that."
"Going forward, I think we would definitely consider that way of thinking when we create something in the future," he added.
