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.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/12/27/zelda-breath-of-the-wild-director-producer-discuss-speedruns-shrine-skips

How about removing all the pointless and stupid random road blocks so it's actual freedom? You know, like in actual Zelda games.

For the short term, I’d like this very much. If they could refine BotW, they have the potential of making my favorite game of all time. Maybe work on the story, music, enemy variety, and dungeons a bit, and we’d have a masterpiece on our hands. And of course, get the game to run at 60fps. I could overlook these issues in BotW due to how fresh the experience was, but keeping these issues around in future games would be pretty lame.

Please remove weapon durability.

I'm already excited to see what they'll come up with next.

I hope they keep weapon durability and stamina, but refines them. Also, the towers are a great idea, but I would like them to be giant puzzles in themselves, like dungeons in older Zelda games (I hope they keep shrines aswell). What they should do is to make the world like a globe, so that when you pass the nothern most part, you enter from the south and so on. The way the game is set up now, it feels kind of sad that I can´t continue overseas without suddently dying.

I hope the next Zelda will also have an open world but I also hope they change the battle system a little bit. I would welcome that there are more big dungeons with special items that can't break - like the mastersword. A mix of old Zelda games and BOTW would be perfect for me.

Nah, it wouldn't be fun without weapon durability. This would take away a lot of your freedom, since the game would decide which weapon you'd get at which time and place.

As long as they add an actual story, meningful side quests with good rewards, and improve the dungeons, Im more than fine with this!

Sad news. Open world is a fad I really hope games stop forcing in. Very few do it well.