Throughout game development, features, characters, plots, and more get cut from the game. Sometimes someone comes up with a really cool idea on paper but the developers can't find a way to fully execute it in the game or feel it doesn't match well with the actual game.
It's no surprise when The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's director Hidemaro Fujibayashi admits that the game had a lot of features cut from the final game. After all, the game was in development for a VERY long time. Some of the things may surprise you though as the team was considering adding fan favorite features and even changing a bit of the Zelda formula.
“Hookshot was [one] we experimented with and tested, as well as [the] Beetle from Skyward Sword,” Fujibayashi said, referring to the flying mechanical insect that you could use to grab items and drop bombs on enemies. “After a lot of experimentation and testing, we weeded out all the ones that had potential to detract from the gameplay and enjoying the game. What’s left currently, the four items, were really what would draw out the fun of the game.”
The team wanted to change how health worked in the game by changing the way the hearts decrease as you take damage and even add the ability to regain health over time. Ultimately, this was scrapped due to the harder difficulty in Breath of the Wild that gives you a survivalist feel.
“We had talked about the idea of maybe — usually the heart gauge decreases from the right, having it decrease from the left,” Fujibayashi said. “Or have it naturally regain over time… We actually did that with a number of things in the game that don’t look like they changed in the final product. Actually, during our experimentation we tried to change them, and then realized, ‘Oh, this is actually really well thought out.’”
When originally announced, Breath of the Wild was only going to be on Wii U. Sadly, as time went on Nintendo began developing the Nintendo Switch and told the BotW team to also release it on Nintendo Switch. Due to this, the team had to scrap some Wii U features in order to make the game work on the Switch.
“We felt that the way the Sheikah Slate is represented in the game and how we use the GamePad in real life synced really well,” said Fujibayashi. “So when we had to remove it, I did feel like, ‘Oh, it’s too bad we had to do that.’ And because it was so tied into the scenario, we did have to go back and redesign and rethink the scenario, which was a little bit [of] hard work.”
Additionally, Kotaku's Jason Schrier talked about how he was able to cheat his way through a puzzle and Fujibayashi encouraged this kind of thinking. They want players to think in other ways as it adds to the fun and makes it so there isn't one set solution.
"So I want to tell you a story. I got to a puzzle shrine in the game and it was the one where it was a maze and then a ball dropping into the maze and you have to move your controller around to rotate the maze. So instead of doing that, I turned my controller around and used the back of the maze to skip the whole thing and drop the ball where it needed to go. Did you guys know you could do that? Does it feel like cheating? How do you feel about players breaking the game?"
"First of all, yes I did know you could do that, because I did that too. (laughter) What I realized when I did that was that cheating is really fun. And so for dungeons and puzzles that have multiple ways of solving it, we definitely intentionally left those, what seems like cheating ways of doing it. Because it’s fun."
The critically acclaimed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is out now on Wii U and Nintendo Switch.
[Kotaku]
