Zelda Boss Teases A "Trick" For Handling Open-World Storytelling Issues

A constant struggle developers face with open-world games is dealing with player freedom. It can be a challenge to maintain any sense of flow in a story when players can mess around for hours before proceeding onto an ostensibly urgent task in the main campaign. For The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, producer Eiji Aonuma apparently has a trick up his sleeve for dealing with this.

Asked by Game Informer how Nintendo is handling this problem, Shigeru Miyamoto said with a smile, "He knows the secret of how to do it," referencing Aonuma.

Aonuma then explained: "There is a little bit of a trick that I implemented this time. This idea is something I've had since I started developing games 20-some odd years ago. So I really want you to look forward to playing the game and finding this something that I put in there."

Unfortunately, the duo didn't shed any further light on what that trick might be. When asked, Aonuma did say it would be possible for players to miss some of the story moments seen in recent trailers.

These comments came after the two shared their thoughts on the importance of story. Miyamoto addressed past comments that he doesn't believe story truly matters in games, saying those may have been "misconstrued."

"I might have said things like that, but it's not that I think that story is unnecessary," he explained. "When you're playing a game, the story is there to give the big world you're in some substance and meat. And because you're the protagonist in the game, that's what you should be doing. I think, also, when a story is set too strictly already, you can only follow a certain path. There's also times where it takes so much time to set up the story, that you just want to get into the gameplay, but you can't because there's so much setup."

He concluded by asking, "But that's not the case for Breath of the Wild, right?" As you might expect, Aonuma agreed.

You can watch Game Informer's full interview here.

Breath of the Wild launches for Switch and Wii U on March 3. We learned this week that it will receive multiple DLC packs, including one that adds an "original story" and a new dungeon.